Update, a.m. Friday 26 March: We are back online earlier than expected. It turned out that Virgin Media cable broadband (and cable television) had gone down throughout almost the whole of south London, so we didn’t have to wait until Monday for them to realise that something needed to be done about it.
Business as usual!
BLB, 26 March 2010
____________________________
My internet connection has gone down (since mid-morning on Thursday 25 March) and is unlikely to be restored before Monday the 29th, if then. Until it is, J and I shall not be sending or reading emails, nor posting on Ephems, nor responding to comments.
I’ll update this blog post when we’re back online. Meanwhile we’ll just have to try to remember how to read books.
Brian
This is another collection of thoughts about a few of the events and controversies of the last few weeks, seen from the perspective of a committed supporter of the Labour Party who is also an unhappy critic of some of the things our governments have done since the glad confident morning of 2 May, 1997, as well as one who is proud to acknowledge their many successes.
* * * * *
It seems out of character for the prime minister to have tripped up so badly when he told the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry that under his Chancellorship defence spending had risen in real terms every year. His subsequent admission that this was a mistake (in four years of the period the defence budget had fallen in real terms) has naturally been seized on by the Tories and the generals, admirals, etc. as further evidence for the accusation that as Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown had starved our forces of the funds necessary for the equipment, vehicles and helicopters required to protect our servicemen as they have fought the various wars to which they have been committed. Two things need to be said about that:
(1) The “year on year” mistake has obscured the more relevant truth that over the period in question there was indeed a substantial 12% real terms increase in defence spending, in contrast with the equivalent period under the Tories, and even leaving aside the extra cost of Blair’s various wars; and –
(2) The defence budget overall is quite big enough for the purchase of almost unlimited quantities of body armour, helicopters, heavily armoured transport vehicles, night vision equipment and anything else needed for fighting wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the spending priorities of all three services are decided primarily by the generals, admirals and air marshals, not by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. If they choose to allocate so much of their budgets to fearsomely expensive toys such as Trident and the nuclear deterrent generally, to Euro-fighters and aircraft carriers and new generations of battle tanks designed to fight the Russians on the plains of central Europe, so that almost nothing is left for the unglamorous equipment needed for street fighting in Basra or Helmand, whose fault is that? The British commanders in the field must also take some responsibility for the shortcomings: if British troops lack the helicopters or other equipment needed to undertake specific operations with a reasonable degree of protection, their commanders shouldn’t undertake those operations.[1]
* * * * *
I fear that the BA strike has a wider significance than questions such as the right staffing levels of aircraft cabins and how much BA cabin stewards and stewardesses (if that female form is still permissible?) ought to be paid. At its heart is the proposition, apparently accepted unquestioningly by all three major parties, that most of the horrendous costs of recovery from the current economic and financial slump should be borne by ordinary middle and working class people through cuts in their wages and salaries (dressed up as wage ‘freezes’, part-time working, etc.), increases in taxes on even the lowest paid, such as VAT, and sharp cuts in public services on which the most vulnerable people in society depend most heavily. Meanwhile the investment bankers and hedge fund managers whose greed and perfidy got us into this mess are back in business with their huge bonuses and indecent salaries, largely at our expense. If the few working people who are still members of trade unions perceive this distribution of burden as unfair and unacceptable, and if their bosses, supported by Labour and the Tories alike, obstinately insist on exploiting the recession to impose it on them anyway, we may be in for many more strikes. Most of the media seem surprised and outraged by the spectacle of organised labour trying to protect itself with the only weapon it has got against a ferocious and unwarranted assault on their standard of living. Things can only get worse.
* * * * *
I’ve been surprised by the number of my friends who have fervently agreed with a Times article of 9 March 2010 by David Aaronovitch denouncing the continued search for the truth about the Iraq disaster in the Chilcot Inquiry on the grounds that it’s all old hat, and that “it’s time to move on”. Well, Mr Aaronovitch would say that, wouldn’t he? He got the whole thing badly wrong back in 2003 and later, supporting the war and continuing to argue that it has all been worth-while, despite the mountain of evidence being expertly marshalled by the Chilcot Inquiry to the contrary. Those responsible for this act of criminal folly are still trying to persuade us, e.g. in their evidence to Chilcot, that they were right to abandon the UN diplomatic effort to resolve the crisis peacefully when they did because the French had made it clear that whatever happened in the future they would always veto any UN resolution authorising the use of force. In fact, in the famous TV interview on which this assertion depends, President Chirac had said exactly the opposite, as the transcript shows (and as demonstrated by the documentary evidence available for example in the comments on an earlier blog post of mine) — and as the French government made clear at the time in urgent messages to No. 10 and the FCO saying that their position was being misinterpreted. Did Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown, and the rest of their Cabinet colleagues, knowingly misinterpret the French position, as they continue to do? If not, why didn’t they or their officials read the interview transcript and the messages from Paris, and stop using the misinterpretation as the main justification for going to war prematurely and without UN authority? Perhaps Sir J Chilcot and his colleagues will discover and publish the answers to these rather fundamental questions, even if David Aaronovitch and others now find the whole thing boring.
* * * * *
Fortunately it’s unnecessary to say anything here about the crisis in the Roman Catholic Church over child abuse by priests, since everything that needs to be said about it has been said in an admirable article in the Independent by Johann Hari. It’s available on the Independent‘s website, here, and is well worth reading if you haven’t read it already.
* * * * *
According to the Guardian, the sainted Vincent Cable of the LibDems has assured the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury of his willingness to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer if there’s a hung parliament after the forthcoming election. This seems to make rather a lot of assumptions. I wonder what Nick Clegg, Cable’s less well known leader, thinks of it. It’s always rash to attempt predictions, especially of election results, but I still persist in my expectation that there won’t be a hung parliament, whatever the current polls might say, and that the Tories will have an adequate overall majority in the house of commons to enable them to govern on their own. That expectation is strengthened by the latest public humiliation of Messrs Byers and Hoon and Ms Hewitt — and by the timely (but undoubtedly fortuitous) pregnancy of the new media favourite, Mrs ‘SamCam’ Cameron. I also persist in predicting that a Tory overall majority will be a disaster for Britain, to be prevented if possible at almost any cost.
* * * * *
On a more personal note, I wonder how many people know what a lovely place Wells in Somerset turns out to be, and what a superb cathedral it has? The most dyed-in-the-wool and bigoted atheist (such as me) couldn’t fail to be moved by Choral Evensong in Wells Cathedral, sung gloriously every day of the year by its magnificent choir. There’s a fuller account, with pictures, of the splendid week that J and I have just spent in Wells here – but don’t all rush at the same time to the website of the Swan Hotel to book the Cathedral Suite there; there’s plenty of time for everyone. (Actually, not having converted such knowledge as I might have had of international affairs into cash when I retired, we couldn’t afford the Cathedral Suite, but our Standard Room was absolutely fine.)
[1] See Stephen Grey, Cracking on in Helmand, Prospect magazine, Issue 162, 27 August 2009:
In Whitehall, meanwhile, government officials seethed at what they regarded as General Dannatt’s opportunism in using recent casualties to spread the blame for three years of bloody stalemate. As seen from London or Washington, the story of Helmand was more often of commanders who pushed soldiers into harm’s way, sent back endlessly optimistic reports, and extended the conflict beyond the resources and political will available back home. Their complaint has merit. Politicians dispatched troops to Afghanistan, but Nato generals decided how to deploy them. Most of the crucial decisions—from sending troops to defend the platoon houses, to “mowing the lawn,” to Panther’s Claw—have been made by soldiers. If an operation was launched with insufficient troops (or helicopters) it should not have been launched at all.
Brian
The prime minister’s brave decision to give evidence at the Iraq Inquiry on 5 March provided the opportunity for the central question about the Iraq war to be put bluntly and persistently to the second most senior member of the Blair government that took us to war, enabling us all to judge the adequacy or lack of it of Mr Brown’s response. The question, put (predictably) by Sir Roderic Lyne, went like a bullet to the heart of the matter:
You [Gordon Brown] stressed right throughout this morning the importance to you of maintaining international order and international institutions in the world that we now live in. But we were in a situation, you as a Cabinet, were in a situation, of having to go to the House of Commons and ask them to support something for which we had not got the support of the United Nations Security Council? Wouldn’t it have been much better if we had been able to prolong the diplomacy until such time as we had got the support of the Security Council, thereby strengthening international institutions?
This followed a succession of replies by the prime minister in which he had repeatedly stressed that he, like the rest of the Cabinet in 2003 in the run-up to the war, had persisted right to the end in hoping that the problem of Iraqi defiance of the UN and of international law could be resolved by peaceful diplomacy (“the UN route”), thus averting the need for the use of force. Gordon Brown had insisted that it was only at the last minute that it had become clear that diplomacy and the UN route had definitively failed, making it inevitable that the UK and US would have to go to war.
At this point Lyne put his lethal question. The resulting exchange (in the format of the Inquiry’s website’s transcript, starting at page 57) is worth reading in full; indeed it’s worth saving to your hard disk, printing out, framing, and hanging above your desk:
17 SIR RODERIC LYNE: You stressed right throughout this
18 morning the importance to you of maintaining
19 international order and international institutions in
20 the world that we now live in. But we were in
21 a situation, you as a Cabinet, were in a situation, of
22 having to go to the House of Commons and ask them to
23 support something for which we had not got the support
24 of the United Nations Security Council?
25 Wouldn’t it have been much better if we had been58
1 able to prolong the diplomacy until such time as we had
2 got the support of the Security Council, thereby
3 strengthening international institutions?4 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: If there had been any chance that
5 the Security Council would have been prepared to come to
6 a decision based on its merits, within a few weeks’
7 time, I would have supported that, but countries had
8 made it clear that, irrespective of the merits, they
9 were determined not to enforce the will of the
10 international community.11 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Which countries?
12 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: A number of countries were making
13 it clear that, irrespective of what actually the results
14 of the investigation were, that although the 1441 had
15 said that they were prepared to consider all necessary
16 measures –17 SIR RODERIC LYNE: But which countries said that?
18 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: — they wouldn’t be prepared to do
19 so.20 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Which countries said that?
21 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: I think it was being made clear by
22 a number of countries in the region, and I think France
23 and Germany was making that clear also.24 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Germany wasn’t on the Security Council.
25 Are you really referring to France here?59
1 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: Statements were made by
2 President Chirac which were very clear that he was not
3 prepared to support military action.4 SIR RODERIC LYNE: At that time.
5 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: He was not prepared to support
6 military action and could give no indication that there
7 was a time when he would support military action.8 SIR RODERIC LYNE: After he made his statement, didn’t the
9 French Government immediately contact Number 10, the
10 Foreign Office, the British Embassy in Paris to say that
11 the British Government was not interpreting his
12 statement in an accurate way?13 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: That may have happened, but, you
14 know, I wasn’t the Foreign Secretary or the
15 Prime Minister. The contacts that would be had with the
16 French would be through them.
17 What I knew is that there was very little chance on
18 our assessment that the diplomatic route could lead to
19 success if a number of countries were not in themselves
20 willing to consider the action that would flow from
21 that.
22 Look, I think you have got to understand — and
23 I know the Committee will want to look at this — we are
24 at the beginning of a new phase of the world community.
25 We were in a post-Cold War phase, where the tensions60
1 between Russia and America are not the paradigm within
2 which people see what they should do as individual
3 states around the world.
Note the way Sir Rod Lyne ruthlessly forces the prime minister to admit that the crucial decision to abandon diplomacy, the UN route, and the UN weapons inspection, when the inspectors and the majority of members of the Security Council were asking for a few more weeks to enable the inspection to finish its work and reach a conclusion, the decision to give up on all that depended on the famous television interview given by Jacques Chirac, the then French President. British ministers chose perversely to misinterpret that interview as meaning that even if the inspectors reported that they had found WMD whose existence the Iraqis had denied, or that the Iraqis had definitively failed to cooperate with them, France would still use its veto to prevent any decision by the Security Council authorising the use of force. In fact, as even the most superificial scrutiny of the transcript of the Chirac interview confirms, Chirac said the opposite: that France was not a pacifist nation, and if Iraq was found at some point in the future to be in definite and irreversible further material breach of its obligations, France would accept the need for the use of force. Sir Roderic Lyne here injects the new and even more lethal information that when British ministers decided to blame their decision to abandon the UN process and go to war on their misreading of the Chirac interview, the French government had urgently sought to tell them, in Paris and in London, that they were misinterpreting the interview. Our ministers, however, ignored that crucial warning and have continued to this day — for example even in Gordon Brown’s testimony to Chilcot last week — to misinterpret the Chirac interview as in effect the sole justification for their disastrous, premature, reckless and criminal decision to go to war.
For a detailed analysis of what President Chirac actually said in his television interview, including key quotations from it, please see my exchange with Professor Geoffrey Warner in comments on an earlier post, at http://www.barder.com/2300#comment-91331. It’s reassuring to be able to see from Sir R Lyne’s questioning that the Chilcot Inquiry is fully familiar with the rights and wrongs of this issue: but it’s dismaying that our prime minister continues, at this late stage, to trot out this by now hopelessly discredited argument as the principal basis for the fatal decision of the government of which he was a senior member to abandon diplomacy and resort to force, a decision which Gordon Brown is obliged to say he supported and that even now he continues to think was right. But of course the reality is that he can’t say anything else.
One postscript: none of the copious media coverage that I have seen picked up the exchanges quoted above as central to the whole debate on the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war. No commentator that I’m aware of mentioned it as important or even interesting. One account even sneered at the Chilcot team for its lack of forensic clout as demonstrated by its failure to follow up the prime minister’s dodgier replies. The Guardian editorial on the following day said:
Mr Brown began with an unambiguous declaration that the Iraq war was the right policy, embarked on for the right reasons. He then produced an answer for every question that the panel asked, not least the potentially tricky ones about defence spending during Mr Brown’s Treasury years.
Did the Guardian really think that what Mr Brown said in reply to Sir Rod Lyne’s questions quoted earlier amounted to answers?
The Sun-style headline that should have preceded a full account of Sir Roderic’s butchery of our head of government in any self-respecting newspaper would have consisted of one word: “Gotcha!”
Brian
A BBC programme broadcast today, and the advance publicity for it, give the impression that a huge proportion of the famine relief aid given by the international community to Ethiopia in the 1980s was diverted from starving people to buy arms and ammunition for use in the civil war then raging in the northern parts of the country. This impression is false. Nothing of the sort occurred. But the erroneous impression given by the BBC risks doing great damage to future international disaster relief programmes by appearing to discredit the historic Ethiopian relief effort, to which thousands of people all over the world gave so generously.
The UK print and electronic media have understandably picked up and played back some dramatic allegations in a BBC World Service programme first broadcast today (4 March 2010). The World Service’s Africa editor has produced what appears to be persuasive evidence that during the 1980s civil war in Ethiopia much (or even most) of the famine relief aid channelled from Sudan across the border into the relatively tiny part of the country then controlled by the rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was diverted to buy arms and ammunition for the rebel fighters then at war with the Ethiopian central government in Addis Ababa.
Unfortunately the advance publicity for the programme, and alas!, the programme itself, give the erroneous impression that the allegations refer to the enormous international relief operation mounted in the incomparably larger area of Ethiopia under government control — the operation to which massive contributions were made by numerous western and other governments (including Britain’s), UN relief agencies, other non-governmental organisations such as Oxfam and Save the Children, and Bob Geldof’s Live Aid. Thousands of private citizens in Britain and around the world donated generously both by voluntary contributions to one or other of the relief agencies working in Ethiopia and also through their taxes. Many of them will be distressed and angry to get the strong impression, as a result of the BBC programme and the publicity for it, that a large part of the money they gave was secretly diverted to buy guns and bullets for the rebel fighters of the TPLF. In fact, though, nothing of the sort occurred.
The confusion arises from the failure of the World Service programme, and of its advance publicity, to make a clear distinction between (1) the vast international aid programme in Ethiopia proper, and (2) the much smaller, semi-clandestine programme of aid smuggled across the Ethiopian border from Sudan into the limited area controlled by the TPLF rebels. The two programmes were completely separate. Very few western governments risked the future of their aid programmes in Ethiopia proper, which could not have continued without Ethiopian government approval and cooperation, by trying also to channel aid to the TPLF rebels in the limited area they controlled. A few ngo’s, mostly Catholic, did contrive to maintain programmes in both the TPLF area and Ethiopia proper; some chose to concentrate on helping the TPLF-controlled areas only; the vast majority opted to concentrate their programmes on Ethiopia proper where many more people faced the prospect of death by starvation. At the time, and occasionally in the 25 years since, allegations have been made that some aid in the international operation was misused — not of course to buy arms for the TPLF, which by definition had no presence in Ethiopia proper, but by diverting aid from hungry civilians to the government’s soldiers, or by putting money into private pockets by selling on the markets food aid sent to be distributed free to starving people. All such allegations were rigorously investigated at the time by the intensely scrupulous UN Assistant Secretary-General who co-ordinated and supervised the international relief effort, and virtually all of the specific allegations of diversion or misuse of aid were found to be without foundation. I was the British ambassador to Ethiopia at the time (1982-86) and personally conducted some of the investigations on the UN Co-ordinator’s behalf, in collaboration with the then Canadian ambassador. We were able on each occasion to identify the misunderstandings that had led to the unfounded allegations that had been made. On the rare occasions when genuine abuse was detected, it was immediately stopped.
So the allegations unearthed by the World Service programme of diversion of relief aid to buy arms for the TPLF in fact refer only to the separate programme of relief aid sent to the TPLF rebels by a handful of government and non-government agencies for the relief of starvation in the area controlled by the TPLF. What a pity, then, that the BBC World Service programme and its advance publicity give the strong impression that the allegations referred to the (almost wholly blameless) international relief programme in Ethiopia proper, when in fact they did not. For example, the summary of the allegations at the very start of a BBC article about the allegations reads:
The BBC has uncovered evidence that the millions of dollars donated to the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine relief effort, went to buy weapons.
(Note that killer “the millions” – the word ‘the’ later deleted after I had complained of its false implication.)
Also:
BBC investigation reveals aid for Ethiopia’s famine was used to buy arms.
(World Service Africa home page)
The introduction to the recording of the whole programme on the BBC World Service website is even worse:
It was a charity appeal on a global scale. In 1985, an unprecedented array of performers took part in two marathon, televised concerts in Britain and the United States – all to raise money for a terrible famine in Ethiopia. And it worked. It’s thought the concerts eventually generated about two hundred and fifty million dollars in donations from the public. But now, evidence has emerged that the aid agencies charged with distributing that money, were hoodwinked: that millions of dollars were diverted to buy weapons for rebels in Ethiopia – and that the United States knew this was going on.
But it was not “that money” that is now alleged to have been diverted.
Similarly, an article by the maker of the programme started off:
Millions of dollars earmarked for victims of the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 was siphoned off by rebels to buy weapons, a BBC investigation finds
which did at least make it clear that it was the rebels doing the siphoning-off, but seemed to imply that it was aid given to Ethiopia proper under the international famine relief programme that was being diverted, whereas in fact it was purely aid channelled to the TPLF through Sudan that was the subject of the allegations. And, finally, the programme itself begins with a long introduction recalling the genesis of the big international famine relief effort (Michael Buerk’s famously evocative reports, Geldof and LiveAid, etc.), although all this is totally irrelevant to the allegations which formed the centre-piece of the programme that followed. But the false association between the two separate relief programmes has been set up from the beginning, and you would have to listen very carefully indeed to realise by the end of the programme that there is actually no association at all between them.
I can’t believe that the BBC World Service, renowned world-wide for its independence and reliability, has deliberately set out to convey the impression that almost the whole international relief effort in Ethiopia in the 1980s was shown by the programme’s allegations to have been corrupted by the wholesale diversion of aid to buy arms and ammunition, when in fact no such thing occurred. At least one of those making the allegations (and perhaps exaggerating them) was a former TPLF leader who had later fallen out with the TPLF and who may now have a personal motive for seeking to discredit it, especially as one of the principal TPLF rebel leaders of the 1980s is now the Ethiopian prime minister, still a controversial figure. (That’s not to say that there can’t be any truth in the allegations: only that there could be a political and personal motive for making them.) A few doctrinaire journalists and others over the years have sought to show that the Ethiopian famine relief operation somehow did more harm than good and that all food aid is intrinsically harmful, even in situations where millions would starve without it; but I know of no suggestion that any of these had any influence on this particular BBC programme. Perhaps the programme’s makers simply thought that it would arouse greater publicity and interest if it could be linked with the historic relief programme in Ethiopia in the ’80s which dominated the world’s headlines for so long and which stirred such strong emotions of compassion and concern: so it would make it a bigger story. Anyway, whatever the reasons and motives, it seems deeply regrettable that such a damaging and misleading impression should have been created by a much respected arm of the BBC, especially at a time when the whole concept of a large-scale public broadcaster is under ruthless and mercenary attack.
Full disclosure: I was interviewed at some length for this programme but no part of the interview was used in it. I have no complaint about that: I have no personal or first-hand knowledge of what went on in the TPLF-controlled area when I was in Ethiopia, for the simple reason that it was obviously impossible for diplomats accredited to the Ethiopian government to go into rebel-controlled areas. So I had nothing to contribute that would have added to or subtracted from the allegations which the programme was about. I pointed this out when I agreed to do the interview.
Brian
With the opinion polls momentarily suggesting a narrow gap between the Conservatives and Labour, the chattering classes’ newspapers and current affairs programmes on television are full of pundits agonising about the dangerous implications of a hung parliament after the impending general election — i.e. a result in which no single party has an overall majority in the house of commons.
The main anxiety arises from the uncertainties implicit in a hung parliament and a minority government dependent on other parties for its survival. There could be no certainty that such a government could survive for more than a few months or even weeks, although it might — Alex Salmond’s minority Scottish National Party government in Edinburgh, elected by PR (proportional representation), has proved remarkably durable; but there are few party leaders on the political scene at the moment who can match Salmond in agility. Many commentators fear the effects of uncertainties like these on the markets, and especially on the willingness of investors to continue to lend money to the government (essentially by buying government bonds). It’s even suggested that the uncertainty implicit in a hung parliament could cause a collapse in the value of sterling against other currencies, with no-one able to predict with any confidence what kind of government would be in power in Britain in a year’s time, or less, or what kind of fiscal and economic policies to deal with the national debt would be in place in a few months’ time, or whether those policies would be continued over even the medium term. The devaluation of sterling (by the markets, not by any specific action of government) since the banking crisis and the recession has of course been good for Britain, making us more competitive and restoring sterling to a more realistic exchange rate — at the expense, be it said, of our trading partners. Beggar-your-neighbour is a game that more than one can play. But a real collapse of sterling’s value could be catastrophic. Markets don’t like uncertainty, and uncertainty is the inevitable companion of a hung parliament, at any rate in our system (not necessarily in other countries’ systems, however, for various historical and other reasons, especially in places where power-sharing is a political requirement).
There’s also much speculation about the procedural and political intricacies of a hung parliament. Could Gordon Brown hang on as prime minister even if the Conservatives had won more seats than Labour, relying on smaller left-of-centre minority parties to support him in a vote of confidence? (In principle, yes: there’d be no need for a formal coalition and unless Brown were to go to the Palace and resign, no need or even opportunity for any decision by the Queen to appoint a new prime minister.)
One recent commentator speculated that in such a situation, Brown would have to resign and would advise the Queen to invite David Cameron, as leader of the biggest party in parliament, to try to form the new government. (Wrong: this is one situation in which an outgoing prime minister is not required to tender advice on who should succeed him, and even if he or she does offer such advice, the Queen is not obliged to act on it. It’s entirely up to her to decide whom to invite to try to form a government, although in real life she would almost certainly call on the leader of the biggest party in parliament to have the first go.)
What if the Liberal Democrats, likely to have the next largest representation in the house of commons after the Conservatives and Labour, were to announce — as strongly hinted by their leader, Nick Clegg — that as the Tories had won more votes nationally (or more seats in the house of commons, or both) than any other party, the LibDems would give conditional support to a Tory government under Cameron but not to a continuing minority Labour government under Brown? Would that force Brown to resign and the Queen to call on Cameron to succeed him? (Probably not; Brown might hope to survive in No. 10 Downing Street with the support of other small parties and dare the Lib Dems to bring him down in favour of the Tories.)
What if the LibDems offered to support a minority Labour government on condition that Brown stepped down and was replaced by a new Labour leader and therefore as the new prime minister? (Very risky. Brown would have no way of ensuring that once he resigned, the Queen would automatically invite the new Labour leader to form a government, however strongly Brown might have advised her to do so. Depending on the relative strengths of the parties in parliament, the Queen might well accept Brown’s resignation but then invite Cameron to form a government.)
More uncertainties, then. Grist for the mills of the political and constitutional pundits, but not for many of the rest of us. The general view is that such uncertainties and their consequences for sterling, the government’s ability to borrow, and the whole political system, would not be tolerable for more than a few months, and that sooner rather than later the leader of the minority government (whether Brown, Cameron, or, say, David Miliband) would be virtually forced to resign — even if still not defeated in a vote of confidence — and ask the Queen to dissolve parliament and call a fresh election, in the hope that this time the result would give one party or the other an overall majority, thus ending the uncertainties. (It’s worth remembering however that this is another situation where the Queen is under no constitutional obligation to grant a prime minister’s request for a dissolution and fresh elections: she would be perfectly entitled to invite someone else to try to form a government capable of winning the support of a majority of MPs if she judged that another election so soon after the last would not be in the national interest. Unlikely, of course: but not inconceivable. Another potential uncertainty.)
There’s one important but rather neglected lesson to be learned from all these anxieties and uncertainties arising from the prospect of a hung parliament. If, as the Liberal Democrats have long demanded (for pretty obvious reasons) and as increasing numbers of other left-of-centre activists and commentators are apparently beginning to agree, Britain were to adopt a system of proportional representation for elections to the house of commons, a certain and necessary consequence would be that there would be a hung parliament after every single election, and not just very occasionally as is the case under our present system of First Past the Post. We would have to endure these dangers and unavoidable adverse consequences after every election — and there would be no available escape route, as we have now, via the holding of a fresh election in the hope of getting a party with an overall majority out of it, for PR would make such a result impossible. No UK political party since the 1930s has ever won as much as 50 per cent of the votes cast, so in a proportional system no party could win an overall majority in the house of commons.
It’s a point that the zealous advocates of PR ought perhaps to ponder. There are plenty of other objections to PR — I have tried to set out some of the more cogent ones in the past, for example here, here and (especially) here (including in my responses to many comments on them). But the uncertainties surrounding minority government in a hung parliament constitute a significant objection to PR that the current state of the opinion polls should force us to confront honestly and frankly. Another ritual recitation of the unfairness of First Past the Post is not an acceptable or adequate response: no electoral system is without its drawbacks and injustices, and those advocating PR have an obligation to show that an endless succession of hung parliaments has fewer bad consequences for sound and predictable government than continuing to live with FPTP, warts and all. Myself, I think they’ll have their work cut out.
Having said all this, I continue to believe that the Tories will win the forthcoming election with a reasonably workable overall majority, and that all the current fever and panic over a hung parliament will turn out to have been strictly for the media birds — at least until and unless we adopt PR. But that’s just my very tentative forecast for this week. I may well change my mind twenty times or more between now and the election, so please don’t hold me to it. Anyway, predicting the future is a mug’s game, especially when you can’t begin to know how long an unpopular, even if not a minority, government and its policies are going to be able to survive.
Brian
