Talking Tory Blues
D.D. Guttenplan and Maria Margaronis
The Nation
May 7, 2011  
http://www.thenation.com/blog/160500/talking-tory-blues

It wasn't quite rearranging the deckchairs on the
Titanic, but the May 5th referendum on whether to change
Britain's voting system seemed, to many people, at best
an irrelevance and at worst a cheat. A vote on electoral
reform was the prize Liberal Democrat leader (and Former
Nation Intern TM) Nick Clegg waved at his party when he
signed his coalition pact with the Tories after last
year's election-a foothold, it was said, towards fairer
votes and truer representation in parliament for the Lib
Dems, who because of demographics and the UK's winner-
takes-all voting system have so far played the role of
the perpetual bridesmaid. The proposed Alternative Vote
(AV) system, which asks voters to rank candidates in
order and takes second preferences into account until a
winner emerges with more than 50%, wasn't even the one
most Liberal Democrats wanted: Clegg himself called it
"a miserable little compromise." 

Held on the same day as elections for local councils and
the Scottish and Welsh assemblies, the vote became
instead a referendum on Clegg and his party, who crashed
in spectacular flames, losing half their English council
seats and scuppering electoral reform for many years to
come. The Tories emerged from the wreckage startlingly
unscathed. Ever since they broke their promise to scrap
university tuition fees (voting instead for a Tory plan
for a 300% increase) the Lib Dems have become the
nation's punching bag, taking the rap for Tory cuts just
as Prime Minister David Cameron clearly hoped they
would: the words "human shield" have been all over the
airwaves, and not only with reference to the killing of
bin Laden. Labour picked up most of the Lib Dems's
dropped seats in England but made no dent in the Tory
vote-and suffered its own devastating defeat in
Scotland.

Disgust with the government in Westminster led to a
historic victory for the left-leaning Scottish National
Party, whose leader Alex Salmond promised "the rocks
would melt in the sun" before he made Scottish students
pay tuition fees. Salmond's party plans a referendum on
full independence for Scotland before the end of the
current Edinburgh parliament; if they win, and take
Scotland out of the union, the Tories will have a huge
majority in what's left of Britain. A vote that was
meant to lead to one kind of constitutional change-an
electoral system that would, in theory, empower
Britain's left-of-centre majority-may instead produce
another, which could shut the left out of Westminster
for decades.

Why didn't government spending cuts produce more of a
backlash at the polls against their Tory architects? In
politics, timing is everything. The school budget cuts,
the withdrawal of housing support and legal aid and
disability allowance, the closing down of day centres
and libraries, the planned gutting of the National
Health Service have barely begun to bite; this is the
last moment when that will be true. What's more, by
agreeing to hold the AV referendum at the same time as
local elections, Cameron allowed his party to launch an
all-out attack on its coalition partners. The "No to AV"
campaign, bankrolled almost entirely by Tories and Tory
donors, used every sleazy trick at its compendious
disposal, from suggesting that babies would die if
voting reform went through to promoting Clegg-the
coalition's deputy prime minister--as the scapegoat for
everything. "The AV means more coalitions and more
broken promises," proclaimed the Tory-funded posters.
"Under AV the only vote that counts is Nick Clegg's."

The Labour Party also bears some of the blame. Endlessly
worried about being seen as fiscally irresponsible, it
has still failed to articulate an alternative plan for
the economy. In depressing contrast to Cameron, whose
personal intervention against AV was greeted with rage
by his coalition partners and joy by his own back
benchers, Labour leader (and Former Nation Intern TM) Ed
Miliband couldn't unite his party behind the AV campaign
or make a convincing link with supposedly Labour values
like participation and democracy. Labour has long been
split on electoral reform, and on the whole question of
working with the Liberal Democrats. Indeed, many of the
New Labour dinosaurs whose emphatic lack of interest in
forming a coalition last May helped push the Liberal
Democrats into the arms of the Tories were outspoken in
support of the "No" campaign. Some of them come from
seats where the opposition is evenly split between
Tories and Lib Dems, and benefit from the current
system. Many more simply have a tribal hatred for the
Liberal Democrats and anyone who isn't Labour. With
Clegg humiliated and his party in disarray, their
argument goes, voters seeking an alternative to the Tory
program will simply have to vote Labour, which will then
return to office without any need to share power-or
patronage-with any outsiders. Scotland has changed all
that. Alex Salmond's triumph shows that disaffected
voters will, eventually, find another way. In Britain
they'll have to do it now under the old voting system,
which shuts out smaller parties and let the Tories sneak
into office despite being rejected by most of the voters
through much of the last century.

The voting reforms so comprehensively rejected may not
have been perfect, but they did offer a real chance to
break the logjam of British politics. Even if all they
achieved was a reduction in the number of safe seats-few
MPs now ever face the prospect of real opposition-that
would have been a gain for democracy. Instead the next
election will be fought in even fewer constituencies,
with the new boundaries drawn by the current government.
This is a Tory moment if ever there was one: the ease
with which Labour's former prime ministers, Tony Blair
and Gordon Brown, were left like wicked fairies off That
Wedding list reflects the new confidence of the old
ruling class, whose reunion party filled Britain's TV
screens last week. There may yet come a day when the
voting system here produces results that reflect the
views of the majority, who favor a well-funded,
universal NHS, redistributive taxation and high quality
public services. But it may not be in our lifetimes, or
even in Charles and Camilla's. Perhaps by the time
William and Kate come to the throne.

___________________________________________

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