What If Proportional Representation Had Been Used in the May 2010 UK General Election?

Back in March 2008 I produced a posting about the differences in the British political scene if a form of proportional representation had been introduced in 1918 when it had been considered by the government of the day:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-if-proportional-representation.html

This showed that the UK would have had a three-party system for much of its history and that certain extreme and regional parties would have gained seats and that for most of the time there would have been coalitions.  Of course, the very fact that proportional representation was in place most likely would have led to different parties appearing or the greater fragmentation of the three main parties.  Now with a coalition government or a minority government the only two options for government at least for the next few months and possibly, the introduction of proportional representation as the price of Liberal Democrat support either for the Conservatives or Labour it is interesting to discuss how different things might have been if back in 1997, in line with what Tony Blair promised, proportional representation had been introduced and this 2010 election had been under that format.

The approach I adopt is quite crude, it equates the percentage of the vote to the percentage of seats in parliament that the party would win.  This is basically the goal of proportional representation systems, but there are different types that have slightly different outcomes in any given case and there remain factors such as the size of constituency; currently in the UK system Scotland has more seats at Westminster than it would be entitled to if the constituencies were allocated strictly on a population basis and a proportional representation system would not be immune to such distortiones either.  Anyway, it remains an interesting exercise and allow us to compare with the same analysis that I have applied to earlier elections.

In the following list the first number is what the party would have got under a proportional representation sustem and the number in brackets is the number of seats that the party actually achieved.  Voting in the Ryedale constituency in Yorkshire has been delayed until 27th May as the UKIP candidate, John Boakes died during the election, so this seat will retain its current MP until then.

2010: 649 seats [Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition]

• Conservatives: (36.1%); 235 seats  [306]
• Labour (29.0%); 189 seats  [258]
• Liberal Democrats (23.0%); 150 seats [57]
• UKIP (3.1%); 20 seats [0]
• BNP (1.7%); 12 seats [0]
• SNP (1.7%); 11 seats [6]
• Green (1%); 7 seats [1]
• Plaid Cymru (0.6%); 4 seats [3]
• English Democrats (0.2%); 1 seat [0]

Northern Irish Parties:

• DUP (0.6%); 5 seats [8]
• Sinn Fein (0.6%); 5 seats [5]
• SDLP (0.4%); 4 seats [3]
• Alliance (0.1%); 1 seat [1]
• Ulster Conservatives & Unionists - New Force (0.3%); 2 seats [0]

In Northern Ireland a form of proportional representation is used anyway, which is why the figures are not massively different.  The big gainers would be the Ulster Conservatives and Unionists - New Force (who must win the prize for the longest party name), probably at the expense of the DUP.

With proportional representation across the UK, the situation would not be massively different to what we have now, i.e. the Conservatives would be the largest party but lack an outright majority, there being 409 seats in the hands of other parties.  The key difference would be that the Liberal Democrats would have almost three times as many seats as they won in reality and together with Labour or with the Conservatives would make a strong coalition.  In fact, being only 39 seats behind Labour they would almost be equals in a coalition rather than a junior partner.  As would have been the case at all elections since the 1970s, the nationalist parties of SNP and Plaid Cymru would clearly benefit from proportional representation and the Green Party would now be of the size the Liberals were in UK politics in the 1950s and 1960s.  

Of course, if proportional representation had been in force since the late 1990s, let alone since 1918 they could have become an established party in the 1980s when they had an upswing of support and by now at least as important as the SNP or Plaid Cymru.  The far right in British politics represented by UKIP and the fascist BNP would have been returned with a sizeable bloc.  I doubt the Conservatives would have worked with BNP, but, given how Eurosceptic David Cameron was, he certainly could have come to an agreement with UKIP.  This result would have more accurately reflected UKIP support in the country in line with their European election result of 17 MEPs.  No wonder UKIP wanted a hung parliament and the chance of proportional representation.

If you look back at the analysis I did of previous elections, what is interesting is that for these smaller parties we see a maintenance or improvement in their number of seats.  For example with proportional representation in 2005 we would have seen 17 UKIP seats, 7 Green seats and 5 BNP.  The BNP getting 7 additional seats in 2010 under this system over what they would have won in 2005, shows us not to be complacent about their support.  The Greens might have been frustrated to remain on 7 seats.  However, given that they have managed to get 1 seat even on our current system, I think they would have been as credible for longer and, especially at this election, tactical voters may have turned to them rather than one of the larger parties.

What is interesting is the lack of any left-wing parties.  Both Socialist Labour and Socialist Alliance would have got 1 seat if proportional representation had been in place in 2005 but still would have received none in 2010.  I suppose this represents the meltdown of the Socialist Labour Party before the election was called and even the weakness of support for the Scottish Socialist Party who polled only 0.1% of the vote and would have got no seats in contrast to 2005 when under proportional representation they would have achieved 2 seats.  The Respect-Unity Party, led by radical Labourite George Galloway who returned 1 MP in 2005, himself, also fell away probably as charismatic George was not standing and in East London support for the mainstream Labour Party strengthened throughout.  It seems that for the moment Socialism is dormant as a party political creed in British politics. 

Despite the bankers portrayal of Brown as risking old-fashioned Labour principles, since the era of the Thatcher Consensus, in fact, at best his policies are old fashioned Beveridge-Keynes Liberalism rather than anything even approaching Socialism.  There is a quotation from the mid-20th century that Britian is a Conservative country that occasionally votes Labour, but now that does not seem to be the case as Labour of today is really just the Liberals of yesterday rebranded.  Of course, I would love to see some radical policies in this financial crisis to really seize back power from the bankers who exploit us and get us to foot the bill for their profitable (only for them) playing with the economy, but no-one dare off such policies these days.

So, proportional representation would not have delivered us a majority government and we would be having the same kind of negotiations now that we would be seeing at the moment, the major change being that the Liberal Democrats would be so much more powerful than they are with about a third of the seats they would expect under another system.  Certainly UKIP, SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens would be sensible to campaign for proportional representation as, once they had a foothold, the way the Liberals were able just to maintain for many years, from that standing they could grow to be real players in the political system.  Of course, BNP would benefit too, even if they found it difficult to tolerate such a 'foreign' system as proportional representation.  I would only hope that the left-wing parties could cobble together a sufficiently strong party to get such a foothold but that now seems more remote than it has been even in recent elections. 

The presence of parties especially on the fringes, does influence policy-making by the major parties as has been seen with anti-immigration approaches to try to recapture votes from the BNP.  What I would also hope to see would be other specific parties, hopefully a Socialist Party, no doubt a Countryside Alliance party, a Cornish Party, a Grey (i.e. elderly) Party, a Stop The War or Anti-Nuclear Weapons Party, perhaps a Women's Party (given that they are the majority in the population but a tiny minority of the MPs), perhaps an Islamic Party.  In recent years we have seen independents often focused on local or other single issues becoming MPs and proportional representation, most likely, would benefit them, though with larger constituencies would remove that local link necessary for some.  Countries with proportional representation allow a range of voices to be heard and despite the mainstream parties saying they represent the broad population, this is in fact not the case, despite the token MPs from ethnic minorities or women.  This would promote engagement with politics more regularly not just when a crisis seems to be imminent, and for true democracy, such continued engagement is necessary.

P.P. 23/04/2011: What If AV Had Been Used In The May 2010 UK General Election?
With the referendum on the adoption of the Alternative Vote (AV) system to replace the current First Past the Post (FPTP) system, I have been reading material on what impact having had AV for the May 2010 general election would have had.  AV is a very mild form of proportional representation so its impact would not have led to a vastly different outcome to the one achieved by FPTP, but there would have been some differences.  Research by the University of Essex suggests that 43 constituencies out of 649 would have returned a different MP to the one they did.  The greatest impact would have come in London, Scotland, Yorkshire, South Wales and South-West England.  Interestingly the two constituencies covering Oxford would have both returned Liberal Democrat MPs rather than one Labour and one Conservative.  Of course, with AV in place people may have voted differently to how they did using FPTP and it is likely that smaller parties not featured in this analysis would have received more support. 

Anyway, taking the broad brush approach of this posting, the following would have been how the results, most likely would have turned out for the three main parties, had AV been used.  Note that Northern Ireland already uses the more proportionally representative STV system anyway.  In addition, the university analysis does not reflect the changes for smaller parties such as the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens.  Thus, for this table, I have left all the parties, bar the three largest, unaltered.  However, the fact that changes would have impacted in Scotland and Wales in particular, there is a good chance that the votes for the SNP and Plaid Cymru would have been affected too. As before, the actual figures are shown in [ ]; I also bring down the figures if a greater proportional system was used, these are shown in { }.  The percentages are how much of the vote that the party actually received under FPTP:

2010: 649 seats [Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition]
Conservatives: (36.1%);  283 seats [306] {235}
Labour (29.0%); 249 seats [258] {189}
Liberal Democrats (23.0%); 88 seats [57] {150}
UKIP (3.1%); [0] {20}
BNP (1.7%); [0] {12}
SNP (1.7%); [6] {11}
Green (1%); [1] {7}
Plaid Cymru (0.6%); [3] {4}
English Democrats (0.2%); [0] {1}


Northern Irish Parties:
DUP (0.6%); [8] {5}
Sinn Fein (0.6%); [5] {5}
SDLP (0.4%); [3] {4}
Alliance (0.1%); [1] {1}
Ulster Conservatives & Unionists - New Force (0.3%); [0] {2}

Unsurprisingly, the Liberal Democrats would have benefited, gaining a total of 19 seats from the Conservatives and 12 from Labour.  Labour would have gained 11 seats from the Conservatives and lost 1 seat to them, but its gains would have been outweighed by the Liberal Democrat gains.  Ultimately, even with AV, the political situation in May 2010 would have been the same as we experienced with FPTP.  Neither the Conservatives nor Labour could have commanded a majority unless they worked with the Liberal Democrats.  Consequently, we most likely would still have ended up with the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that we saw for real in 2010, only with the Liberal Democrats slightly more numerous, but still with less than a third of the seats held by the Conservatives.
 
The main difference that a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition would have had a clear majority without involving other parties, a situation which was not the case in our 2010.  Interestingly, UKIP perhaps is another party which would benefit from AV, especially given its good showing at the 2011 Barnsley by-election.  This may split the Conservative vote, or have potentially offered a different coalition partner for the Conservatives.  You can see why the Conservatives and even many Labour supporters are ambivalent towards AV as it will certainly shift seats from them to the Liberal Democrats.  Thus, looking simply at party interests it would be foolish approach.  However, for all of those people who have voted for the Liberal Democrats only to see their vote not even attempted to be represented in parliament, moving to a fairer system is a necessary step.  

In addition, it is clear from the relative popularity of the Greens, UKIP, SNP and Plaid Cymru that there are other broader interests receiving minimal or no representation despite the votes for them.  As I have noted before, FPTP discourages the appearance of political parties which actually speak to sizeable sections of the constituency.  Sitting to the left of the Labour Party, I certainly feel that no party even comes close to addressing the kind of concerns I have.  Having no chance of representation means parties focused on such voters do not appear, and, in turn, the other parties are not even prompted to address concerns of chunks of the electorate.

Lack of Political Maturity in the UK

Well, we had lots of certainties in the 2010 UK general election.  First it was that David Cameron would walk into office without even really having to think up any policies.  Then we had the idea that there would be a hung parliament and finally that somehow the Liberal Democrats would turn back the clock to 1906 and push Labour into third place.  As Norma Tebbit, a man I loathe, noted in 'The Guardian' today, in part David Cameron lost the election more than Gordon Brown did.  Brown was part of the party that had been in power for 13 years, he looks weary and is not charismatic, but still, Cameron could not defeat him outright.  Partly, it was because of the distorted electoral system in the UK so that despite gaining 2 million more votes than Labour and securing 36.5% of the vote compared to 29%, the Conservatives only managed to get 48 more seats than Labour.

One notable thing about this election is that in many heartland seats both Labour and Conservative more people turned out to support the existing MP or their successor from the same party, than they did in 2005.  It is good for democracy that more people voted, some constituencies were seeing a 73% turnout which is almost unheard of in Britain.  Of course, a lot of these extra votes were 'wasted' because in the UK you only need to win a single vote more than your opponent to win the seat.  Gaining an extra 5-10,000 votes in a constituency is not going to give you anything extra.  This trend was seen most in Scotland where the pattern of representation barely changed and the Conservatives still only have a single seat.  What the party leaders did well, certianly Cameron and Brown, was to alert their core supporters to the fact that if they did not get out and vote they risked having their opponents come to power.  This undermined the surge of the Liberal Democrats.  The tactical voters and their own smaller constituency still turned out, but they were now rather over-shadowed by an upswing in the number of traditional Labour and Conservative voters supporting their natural party.  Greater apathy, as is typical in British elections, ironically, would have benefited the Liberal Democrats.  Ironically, not getting as many seats as they 'deserved' might finally make at least some Conservatives see the benefits of a changed electoral system.

The hung parliament had been discussed and certainly was analysed by all the parties before Thursday's result.  However, the exact figures needed to be in to find out what needed to be done.  We could easily have seen a Conservative government brought to power by the 8 Ulster Unionists if Cameron had only fallen a little short of the figure he needed, hence his visit to Ulster last week.  In addition, with the Liberal Democrats having increased 10-20 seats as I thought they might, rather than drop 5 to 57, they would have been the real kingmakers as at present if all the 'Others' went over to the Conservatives, unlikely I know but still mathematically possible, they could out-vote even a Liberal-Labour combination.  On this basis I heard one Conservative ranting that Brown should not even be trying to form a government and should step aside, unaware that Plaid Cymru, the SNP, the Green MP, the SDLP MPs and the Alliance MP (a Northern Irish party closely aligned with the Liberal Democrats) would vote against the bulk of Conservative legislation, especially public sector cuts.

Britain is not familiar with coalitions, they are seen as something weak and even more damning, foreign.  It is ironic that Britain has had coalitions at the times of greatest challenge: during the First and Second World Wars and during the Depression.  The UK was ruled by a coalition for 21 years of the 20th century, in which time it managed to win two world wars.  I suppose the fact that the last coalition ended in 1945 and the last attempt at a 'pact' ended in 1978 means that because 'the past is a foreign country' even these aspects of British history are perceived by today's electorate as being alien.  Minority governments are weak and whilst people point to the example of 1974, there is also the steps towards a minority government that John Major faced as prime minister in the lead up to the 1994 election.  The Liberal Democrats had said they would not enter a coalition and would come to deals over particular policies.  However, the British, unfamiliar with coalitions as they are would be better served by a proper coalition rather than a limping minority government.

Where the lack of political maturity comes in, is how the public and the media cannot tolerate the deals that are being worked out at present.  In continental Europe and further afield, including in New Zealand, such negotiations are common.  There are benefits in a government which represents a wider range of opinion and it tempers the kind of extreme policies the 'elective dictatorship' of the UK has seen in the past.  The right-wing newspapers who insisted that Cameron had won and now insist that he should be in office, do not want this complication.  They have done all they can to sweep Brown away and despite their slurs and whining, they too were not able to convince the bulk of the population that he had to go.  In fact, those who will suffer most from the cutbacks the Conservatives are lining up, clung to him even tighter than before.  Whether Cameron or Brown is the next prime minister, the British public needs to grow up.  Politics is an adult game, and there is no place for stamping your feet and sulking because the simple picture too many Conservatives painted all along, has not become real.  Just because you are indignant and somehow expect Brown to disappear in a cloud of smoke, it will not happen.  Negotiations are not 'shabby deals' as I saw them described on the front of one right-wing newspaper.  Clearly they expect the Liberal Democrats to say 'yes, Mr. Cameron, you are entirely right, we are wrong, we support everything you want to do, without challenge'; that is never going to happen.

Now the work begins.  Even if Cameron becomes prime minister of a minority government any piece of legislation could be voted down, so I do not see the sharp cuts he has been lusting for coming into force any day soon, especially if, as seems likely there will be an election this Autumn.  The British public has thrown itself into this election in a way it has not done for many years, but the expectation that the outcome is going to be neat and tidy is deluded and betrays the immaturity of too much of the electorate.  To a great degree this is fostered by the constant portrayal of any other political system in Europe or further afield as 'weak' or 'unnatural'.  There is a real snobbery that the UK system is the best and no other is worth even considering, despite the fact that you have to get outside the EU before you can find a system less democratic than ours (remember half of our parliament is unelected; and the head of state is a hereditary position).  Grown up Britain and engage with the whole political process and do not sulk because it did not go the way you wanted the first time round.

There are a couple of other things I would note.  First is, as in 1992, when Labour was in with a chance of gaining power, there were electoral irregularities.  This time round people being turned away from voting, sometimes on discriminatory grounds (students in Sheffield were given their own longer line to queue to vote, whereas other voters were able to vote more quickly) and often insufficient ballot papers were printed.  This is because too many returning officers had become complacent that never more than 55%, perhaps 60% but never 73% of the electorate would turn out.  That is incredibly patronising.  Given that some majorities of both Labour and Conservative MPs are smaller than the numbers of people turned away from polling stations, I trust we will have some re-run ballots in some locations, though I imagine the issue will be fudged, again showing how rickety a democracy we live in.  Fortunately the civil liberties group, Liberty seems to be mounting legal challenges.  This is the kind of problem you expect in Third World countries where democracy is new, not a country like this which has had universal suffrage for over 80 years.

The one joyous piece of news is the failure of the BNP to gain any ground.  This is reported as weakening the party and I hope it is now terminally ill.  Saying this, if they are patient, proportional representation may let them get a path to some MPs, though UKIP will probably be in the queue ahead of them.  However much I loathe the thought of BNP MPs I know, as was proven the case very clearly in Barking at this election, such a threat gets parties, notably Labour, to raise their gain and tackle the issues that drive support to the BNP.

At the end of the day, the run on the stock exchange when Cameron did not win an outright majority shows how little we the electorate actually control our democracy.  Financiers are insisting on a government being assembled by Monday threatening to disrupt the economy even further if it is not formed.  Of course, historically there was always a 'run' on the pound whenever a Labour government was elected.  Blair had to win over the ultra-rich to stand any chance of coming into power in 1997.  Now we are being told that the financiers will not accept any government that will not cut public spending sharply and they are upset that Brown who supports a Keynesian rather than monetarist approach to the banking crisis even remains on the scene.  So, basically, even millions of us (30 million people voted on Thursday) have far less clout in terms of determining the next government that a couple of hundred bankers.

Feel No Shame - Call Bigots What They Are: Bigoted

This election campaign seems to be moving into the realms of the surreal.  Some mornings I wake up and think I am in 1906 or at least 1922 with the election seeming to be about the Liberals versus the Conservatives with this marginal party, Labour, attracting minimal interest.  It is a fantasy, of course.  I agree the Liberal Democrats represent a progressive voice and I support a number of their policies, but, as I have noted before, even with a 6% swing to them against both Labour and the Conservatives they will at most receive ten or twenty new seats.  Yes, they may hold a balance in a hung parliament, but Nick Clegg as prime minister is only going to happen in some alternate reality, not this one.  Much of the media, want us to think something very different.  Even 'The Guardian' has defected from supporting Labour to backing the Liberal Democrats and in sharp contrast to 1997 no newspaper now supports Labour.  Of course, this is not surprising.  Newspapers have not, in reality, supported the Labour Party since the 1970s.  What they backed in 1997 was the Christian Democrat Blair Party.  Brown's problem is actually to bring the Labour Party back to being the Labour Party and there is no support among the elites for that and there has not been since the era of the Thatcherite/Washington consensus came into British politics from 1974/9 onwards.

More on this in future postings as I feel certain that if Cameron comes to power we will enter one of the darkest periods in British society since 1979, not only in terms of mass unemployment but also in discrimination and associated violence, ironically further fuelling the 'broken society' troubles continues to whine on about, plus a further step in the eroding of civil liberties.  For the moment, however, I will look at the incident which was portrayed as seriously damaging Brown's campaign.  However, at present much of the right-wing media are frustrated that Brown has battled on so well and that Cameron has not had the walk-over that was long predicted, so they light on anything Brown does to condemn him.  Brown, out on the campaign trail on Wednesday was brought a 65-year old woman called Gillian Duffy, who said she was a Labour supporter.  She went on about the immigration of East European people into the UK.  This is not unusual, there have always been Labour supporters who have been as opposed to immigration as right-wingers, often from a misguided view that they would lose their jobs to them, unaware that it is always business leaders who bring in the immigrants to keep wages low and to unpleasant work.  Anyway, Brown had been wired up for recording and was recorded complaining, quite accurately that Duffy was 'bigoted'.  In this he has suffered many politicians.  US President Ronald Reagan in similar circumstances was recorded as saying, in 1984:  'My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.'  President George Bush made many such gaffes.  Perhaps because US politics has always been so much more about television and recordings they have suffered more.

Anyway, unlike much of the media that saw Brown's comment as a mistake, I was very pleased he said it, I wish he had told her to her face that she was bigoted.  I have noted before how the racists in our society make their comments seem as 'common sense' and seem to think they are acceptable conversation.  Tax drivers constantly try to force feed me their racist views as if they were commenting on the weather.  This normalising of bigoted comments leads to the normalising of racism itself and means that people are insidiously led down the path to backing discriminatory policies.  Of course, many people support racist policies right out, but if we are going to have a healthy civil society there is a need to challenge the easy falling back on racist statements.  When there is a mindset that discrimination is somehow 'common sense' and 'acceptable' this allows day-to-day behaviour which prejudices people and leads to damage to their health and wellbeing.  The focus is currently on immigrants, but from that there is an easy extension into discrimination against British people of ethnic minorities.  The BNP is already seeking to define people who are not Caucasian as not being able to be British.  Though a majority of the population, attitudes to women's rights and opportunities also seem to be being eroded.  Portrayals of women now are that they should either be demure housewives (the current John Lewis advertisement is an example of this) or sexually available and whorishly dressed.  I have encountered social class discrimination in recent months, the assumption that someone from a non-middle class background should not even aspire to be a manager let alone hold a job of that status.  We open the door to bigotry at the risk of opening floodgates.  I believe at present a lot of what has been established in post-industrial Britain's civil society is now at risk.  There is a desire to rush us back to the policies of the 1950s in which most people, except the wealthiest elites who were white and male, had opportunity.

Whilst David Cameron is not outlining policies suggesting this explicitly, his emphasis on Distributist policies of Philip Bond, which have echoes of John Major's approach: i.e. small town and village, nostalgic Britain with social welfare run by volunteers and not the state.  This has no relevance to the bulk of British people who live in large cities and certainly not to those dependent on benefits.  It does fit nicely with Cameron's pandering to the owners of large businesses and of the banks, because such a small horizon Britain would not bother itself with how big business makes it money and would be stoic in the face of the damage their methods do to our shops, services and jobs.  What Cameron's vision does is promote exclusivity, whether from the small town community, from opportunities in education and careers or to challenge economic policies that damage us.  In the shadow of such an attitude comes bigotry: keep out the stranger and keep those of a particular background, whether it be from an ethnic minority, from lower social classes or a woman, let alone disabled people, from rising up the levels of work.

If we are to have a tolerable, let alone tolerant, society in the UK, we need to challenge bigotry whenever we encounter it.  Speak out when people start force-feeding you bigoted views, at least refuse to listen to them.  Indicate that you are unhappy with people saying such things, tell them that they are not 'common sense', they are, in fact, based on a distortion of reality and are damaging to the very society these people think they are trying to strengthen.  The UK is on the cusp of facing severe problems in terms of divisions in society.  As rioting in the 2000s showed, these already have violent outcomes and we need to stem this slide into bigotry and all the nasty consequences it brings in its wake.

I was proud of Gordon Brown this week.  When you witness bigotry: name it, shame it.

The Nick Clegg Factor

People said they have found the current UK parliamentary election campaign to be dull.  I suppose after the big changes that happened in the USA it must seem a little downbeat, not helped by the fact that people have been talking about the election for so long.  The Conservatives' haranguing of Prime Minister Gordon Brown to call the election may have backfired on all the parties as we feel we have been in the midst of the campaign already for six months if not longer.  To some degree, the mudanity of this campaign conceals how much of a crossroads we have reached in British politics.  Whichever party comes to power it is going to be tough for them as we attempt to clear up the mess in the economy left by the greedy bankers, who of course are already back to their old dangerous tricks, though it was nice to see Goldman Sachs, the leading investment bank in the USA being charged with fraud.  I do hope they suffer harsh penalties for their criminal behaviour, but as yet am not confident they will.  However, the key point in the UK is how we cope with the recession.  It is clear that both Labour and the Conservatives want to cut public expenditure, it is just an issue of in which areas and how fast.  What has become apparent from the speeches of David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader is that if he comes to power with a majority we will see economic policies of a harshness not witnessed in the UK since after the 1983 election. 

This will mean sustained high unemployment and a damage to British industry, let alone to those dependent on social welfare.  Such an approach will increase the divisions in society as people will look for easy scapegoats and will blame people from abroad or other parts of the UK.  This is already what many employers are looking for as they feel the 'whip' of unemployment to get long hours on insecure terms and bad conditions out of workers on frozen or depressed salaries has become too weak in recent years.  High unemployment, they feel, works in their behaviour.  Partly they are right, because given the UK has long been a low income economy and yet people have high levels of consumption based on credit, they can afford to reduce the domestic demand without impinging as heavily on domestic sales in the way you might expect to be the case.

Given the nature of the MPs who would come in with Cameron, we will see the House of Commons with an very elitist flavour with apparently 68 of these MPs coming straight from the banking sector that needs to be reined in.  Brown will have a challenge in restraining outrageous bank behaviour, but Cameron and his MPs will have no interest in even attempting to do this.  Like many people of my generation and even younger, we really fear a return to the 1980s which is not the big hair, cocktail glamour that it is portrayed as now, but millions of people suffering years of unemployment, low incomes and whole swathes of the UK simply being wastelands of boarded up shops and houses, as a result.  Thus, this is actually a very important election.  There is the other factor of preventing the rise of the racist BNP (British National Party) and their watered down equivalent UKIP (UK Independence Party), both of which seem perched on the edge of getting some representation and no doubt will locally in the areas with local elections on the same day as the general election.

Another factor which makes this election interesting is the possibility that it has suddenly become a three-party race.  That has not been the case, probably, since 1923 when the Conservatives had 234 seats, Labour 188 seats and the Liberals 183 seats.  The eclipsing of the Liberal Party by the Labour Party in the 1930s was very rapid.  The Liberals struggled with single figures of MPs in the 1950s.  Whilst holding the balance of power March 1977 - July 1978 when there was a minority Labour government in power (a minority government is one which does not have a majority of MPs over all the other parties combined in the House of Commons; it is usually still the largest party though).  The 1990s and 2000s saw a renaissance of the Liberal Democrats, the latest version of the Liberal Party, though Tony Blair's vast majority in 1997 meant that plans for having the Liberal Democrats in with Labour in the 'big tent' cabinet were shelved.  The Liberal Democrats rose from 20 MPs in 1992 to 46 in 1997 to 52 in 2001 to 62 in 2005.  This is more seats than any combination of Liberal parties has had since 1935.  Of course, they are still behind the Conservatives with 198 seats and Labour with 356 seats. 

The big change in how the Liberal Democrats were perceived following the debate between the leaders of the three main parties on 14th April 2010.  This was the first televised debate between the party leaders in British history and mimics closely the model used on US television first in 1960 and then intermittently afterwards.  There have been regular jokes since 2007 when Nick Clegg became Liberal Democrat party leader than he was 'unknown'.  To some degree this is because in our very media-conscious age all the part leaders simply look like different varieties of bank manager.   However, appearing on a programme watched by more than 9 million people and which has generated a lot of general media coverage since, has helped massively. Labour and the Conservatives have been pretty successful marginalising the Liberal Democrats and in turn they seem to have shifted steadily from being more radical than New Labour in 1997 to seeming like a pale version of the Conservatives, only really marked out by a pro-European Union stance.  Now with the recession they seem to be ready to embrace more radical solutions and whilst not back left of the Labour Party do seem to have some radicalism about them once again.  After the lame duck leadership of Charles Kennedy (1999-2006) and Menzies Campbell (2006-7), in part Clegg, slowly, seems to be capturing a little of dynamism of Paddy Ashdown, leader 1988-99.

With the election of Tony Blair to being prime minister in 1997 just before his 44th birthday has made youth appear at a premium in British politics. Brown is 59; Cameron is 43 and Clegg is three months younger.  Cameron is very much old fashioned elitist Conservative, his long-term friendship with the moronic Mayor of London, Boris Johnston, does not help.  Brown seems to have aged a great deal while in office, though is much younger than some prime ministers of the past; Winston Churchill first came to power in 1940 at the age of 66 and was in office in 1955; Margaret Thatcher was 54 when she came to power in 1979 and was still there until late 1990.  So, Clegg appeared to be of that youthful style that is currently in demand.  As the two other parties have effectively kept him out of the spotlight, I believe has actually now helped, because Clegg's party's ideas now seem fresh.  He also presents them in a clear and logical way.  This morning the first poll to put a Liberal Democrat in the lead to become prime minister, came out.  There has not been anthing like that since probably 1918-20.

The issue for the Liberal Democrats has always been that the first-past-the-post system in the UK never distributes seats evenly depending on the percentage of the vote the party receives.  The classic example was in the 1951 election when the Labour Party received more votes than in 1950 but received fewer seats.  At the 2005 election the Liberal Democrats got 22.1% of the vote (but 9.6% of the seats; back in 1992 they got 17.9% of the vote but only 3.1% of the seats), the Conservatives got 32.3% and Labour 35.3% of the vote.  On vote percentage division the Liberal Democrats would have got 144 seats; Conservatives 210 seats and Labour 230 seats, making a minority government.  This means that the Liberal Democrats need more than twice as many votes as the other parties to get a seat; the Conservatives lose out a little, but it is far simpler for Labour to get seats these days with them securing 126 seats more than they would have get through the proportional distribution.  This is why the Conservatives want to redraw the electoral boundaries.  The fact that the Liberal Democrats need to struggle harder to get seats, as a lot of their constituencies are in large rural areas on the periphery of the UK, opens them up to the allegation that a vote for them is a 'wasted' vote.  If people believed they could get into power, more people would vote for them.  This is one reason why the Liberal Democrats do well in local elections.  They control 65 local councils, and a total of 4,200 local, 21% of the seats from 25% of the votes, ahead of Labour.

Of course, the political parties know they can no longer ignore or easily dismiss Clegg and you have immediately seen Cameron say that Clegg would simply usher in more years of Labour.  Of course, even if Clegg went into a pact with a minority Labour government it could not be the same Labour government that it would be if it won a majority.  The Liberal Democrats would bring far more pro-European and electoral reform policies into the mix, something Cameron could not stomach if he had to work with the Liberal Democrats to gain power, especially since the Conservatives in the European Parliament abandoned fellow conservatives for a right-wing extremist bloc.  The Liberal Democrats would not tolerate the kind of cuts Cameron is envisaging.  He has positioned his party almost as far as he can from the Liberal Democrats, overly cocky that he would not have to work at all hard to get into power, it would be gifted him.

Thus, even if the public now likes Clegg, there is still a long way for his party to go to get the votes, let alone the seats to form a government.  As was highlighted on the BBC news over the weekend, with our current electoral system, even to achieve additional seats in double figures, and, for example, lift the Liberal Democrats up to 80 seats would need a swing of 6% against both the Conservatives and Labour in marginal seats.  However, there are a number of seats where the non-Conservative support is split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats almost equally and a shift in such seats would certainly make David Cameron's job a lot harder.  This is in contrast to both a year or so ago and the day the election was announced when it was assumed that the Conservatives would 'walk' into power.  Now they not only face a battle with Labour by the Liberal Democrats too.  Whilst it seems unlikely that the Liberal Democrats can win, a loss of seats for Labour and a smaller than previously expected gain for the Conservatives was already being considered, with the Liberal Democrats as powerbrokers for government, even before Clegg's successful television performance.  Baroness Shirley Williams a Liberal Democrat peer who was Paymaster General and Secretary of State for Education and Science in the Labour government when the Lib-Lab pact was in force in 1977-8 (she left the Labour Party in 1981 and was in the SDP and then Liberal Democrats), has said the Liberal Democrats would work with a minority government on an issue-by-issue basis rather than forming a pact with one party or the other.  Calls for a government of national unity are likely to fall on deaf ears especially as the Conservatives have re-embraced Thatcherite economic policies once more.

The price for Liberal Democrat support of course will be proportional representation, a policy embraced by Labour until it won massively in 1997.  As I have highlighted on this blog before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-if-proportional-representation.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-has-it-taken-so-long-to-even-get.html  this would change the face of British politics forever.  Given the corruption among MPs we have seen this year that is probably necessary.  By potentially allowing in a far wider spectrum of parties more people would feel their voices were being heard.  Of course, it depends on the model as (West) Germany has had proportional representation since 1949 and yet only the SPD and CDU/CSU have dominated the governments for sixty years.  In Britain with a centre party almost already stronger than the FDP in Germany (93 out of 622 seats in the Bundestag) a three-party system under proportional representation would appear to become the norm.  Of course, extremist parties are likely to appear (though Germany has seen off extremists like the NPD and Republikaner parties through a minimum of 5% of the vote needed) but then that would challenge  the major parties to address the issues these parties raise; the same goes for the Green Party.

So, whilst we may already be weary of the election, 2010 is going to be a year in which we may see a more radical change than even the Conservatives are seeking and we finally see the face of British politics change for the first time in almost 90 years.

Conservative Policies - Thatcherite Bigotry & Pain Return

I know I have complained that the Conservative Party who have this conference this week have been lacking in policies, but this is because I feel that no party which see themselves as the heirs presumptive to control of the British state should be able to simply slip into place without offering something to the electorate. This is a charge that David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives has face for many months now. To some degree the continued assumption that he will win the next election has meant Cameron has felt little need to outline any policies. Partly this is because on the key issue facing the UK at present, the recession, the Conservative line since about 1974 is that no government can do anything about economic downturns and it will do more damage than good if it tries. Though few people seem to have picked up on it, the Conservative emphasis on cut-backs is really no different from the deflationary policy of the 1930s adotped by the UK when faced with the Great Depression and contrasts sharply with the post-Keynesian, stimulus approach of Obama and Brown.

Given that Gordon Brown seemed to rally flagging Labour supporters last week at the Labour Party conference, Cameron seems to feel under some pressure to come out with policies. However, as I suggested recently these are in the flavour of what the Johnson administration has been attempting in London: the mix of frightening Thatcherite-authoritarian policies and simply headline grabbing policies that mean very little in substance. Given that I do not read 'The Sun' newspaper (I do not want to give any more cash to Rupert Murdoch and no longer travel on London Underground where I would pick up a range of right-wing newspapers to monitor for free), I was glad Polly Toynbee repeated the list of 10 pledges that Cameron outlined in 'The Sun' last Friday. Now the covers are coming off we can see why Cameron has been quite quiet on his policies, which if the bulk of the population pay attention to, will make them worse off. These pledges are Bushite with a British flavour. Fortunately he has not made a pact with the fundamentalist Christians (to some extent Blair exhausted that avenue in his years in office), though he does seem to be seeking 'moral' behaviour through economic policies, but certainly he is clearly addressing the super-wealthy that George W. Bush portrayed as his core constituency.

The broadcast media have picked up on the policies aimed at those people on benefits. Of course, this group has been hammered constantly since the 1980s. Yet, all parties seem to think that there are millions of lazy people dodging work and simply claiming from the state. The view that these people notably on incapacity benefit (about 2.6 million people) but also single parents, are not trying hard enough to find work. Given that unemployment is at 2.4 million people, many of whom were in work until recently, does Cameron really believe that UK companies have the capacity to take on, say, 1 million more workers. For the past twenty years anyone signing on for benefit has had to go through rigorous checks and periodic reviews. People who have had tax credits overpaid are often compelled to pay them back. The Labour governments have kept on tightening the regulation and monitoring of people on benefits in the way Cameron says he wants to; of course to his partisans, Labour is still not strict enough. Cameron seems to assume, like many right-wingers, that the whole civil service and local government is filled with people who simply bung money and housing at the people right-wingers dislike, feckless single mothers and immigrants. Of course, most local councillors and many civil servants are conservative (many are Conservative) and are very hostile to just the groups that the Conservatives want to target.

What so many people forget is that the bulk of people on benefits want to work. We live in a highly consumerist society and you are not seen to exist if you are not consuming. Consumption can only really come when you have a regular, good income. Consequently most people want to work. Work also provides a social network and if Cameron actually spoke to some single mothers and some people on incapacity benefit they would find that isolation and loss of dignity are additional painful factors for people in those conditions, work can help resolve such situations. There are lazy people in the UK but from other countries and Britain's history I would reckon these number around 60,000 people of working age in the UK at present. The bulk of the others on benefits would rather not be.

Of course, like so many governments, the Conservatives simply focus on the supply side of the labour market without looking at all at intervening in the demand side, i.e. the employers. I worked in a job centre in the mid-1990s when unemployment was much lower than now and saw how the disability officers struggled to place even a handful of disabled people in employment. Employers turned up their noses at such people and still do despite all the legislation. I had an employer in recent years moaning on about how terrible it was when people 'concealed' their disabilities. I have an 'unseen disability' diabetes and used never to mention it to anyone in any job. Even working for a liberal employer which worked with a lot of disabled people as consumers I found my managers made no efforts to address disabilities in our workplace and I was criticised for literally hours (I had to share a car with my boss one day) about how my disability had impinged on a meeting when my blood sugar went low because the meeting dragged on so long. Eventually I spoke out and found there were other concealed people with conditions among the workforce who had been suffering. This was at a supposedly liberal employer with quite an involvement with disabled people so imagine what it is like trying to get work with the average hard-nosed company especially in this period of economic difficulties.

The same applies to single parents. Of course, the default assumption is that these are all teenaged mothers. In the 2001 census it showed that of the 11.7 million children in the UK 22.7% lived in lone parent familes, around 10% lived in step families and 45,000 children were in care or other communal establishments; of the lone parent families 91% are headed by a mother. This means 65% of children in the UK live with their two natural parents and in fact 75% live in two-parent families. The latest figures I can find for teenaged mothers is that they had 41,700 in 1998, this compares to 2.65 million children in lone parent families three years later. It is clear that teenaged mothers do not make up the majority of single parents. Of course, by definition and teenaged mother soon ages into a non-teenaged mother. However, my point stands that a lot of single parents are older women left alone due to separation, divorce and death. As seen from the step family figures, probably half will not remain in this state forever. In addition, new family models such as two single mothers living together is becoming more common. Will that be counted as a step family in the future or two lone parents?

As the recent case with the two female police officers banned from taking care of each other's children shows, the laws at present seem to weigh against lone parents working to provide a more developed family structure for their children, and, vitally for Cameron's policies, attempting to create structures that allow the women to work. Child care is costly for even middle class parents let alone working class ones. Family structures are fragmented because people have been compelled and are facing even more pressure at present, to move to find work in other areas. Yet, the alternative of informal child care arrangements between friends is being ruled out. I can see that this may be a back handed policy to try to encourage contraception, but that will happen only long term and does not deal with the current issues of raising children. Mothers last week were told that their children will be less healthy and less intelligent if they work full-time but Cameron wants them all to go out to work. Presumably this is because it is felt the lower classes are getting too uppity and keeping them overweight and ill-educated will stop them challenging their superiors! Of course, this contradiction between supporting families in the shapes they come in today and yet getting more women into work has been one that plagued Blair as much as it will Cameron.

No government in the past thirty years has really attempted to address it, instead they put pressure on the parents to solve it for themselves. What they fail to realise too, is that it is not simply about lone parents, but two-parent families too. If you see a school or a childminder's at collection time, you will see that fathers as well as mothers come and collect. This is because with two working parents you are not better off than with a working lone parent. You could have four parents per child and if they all worked, as Cameron wants them too, then they would still need someone to sort out the child care. Having two parents does not make the child care issue go away as some assume. Since the late 1960s it has been basically impossible for a two-parent family to survive financially without both parents working. Yet, the lazy assumption of politicians is somehow is that Daddy goes to work and Mummy raises the children and this falls down when there is only Mummy. However, for forty years it has been falling down even when both parents are around, but Cameron's mind, like that of many politicians, is stuck in 1957.

This is much the same thinking behind Cameron's plan to 'reward marriage'. There are already tax breaks for married couples anyway. Marriage in itself is neither good or bad, it is simply a legal state. What is 'good' or 'bad', even moral/immoral is the behaviour of the people in that relationship and how they treat each other. Men taking responsibility is declining and more could be gained in education on what it really means to be a man, not in the macho sense which is all that seems to be emphasised these days, but in a sense of being a human capable of being in partnership with others. We certainly need education in what it means to be a father as many men seem to have no clue. In addition, with the Thatcherite consensus feminism seems to have become a dirty word and with the rush to return to Jane Austen behaviour combined weirdly with the widespread sexualisation of society, women are being clobbered from both sides and men feel themselves freed from any responsibility either because they are like some late 18th century gentleman or they are something resembling a Los Angeles pimp handling his 'ho's (whores). This is no basis for any marriage. A marriage in name only is no marriage and does not deserve reward. Will Cameron reward civil partnerships? It could be argued that they reduce promiscuity among gay men and decrease bullying in lesbian relationships, so surely they should be rewarded? Of course, you can have a 'bad' civil partnership as much as you can have a bad marriage, but somehow to Cameron stability comes with marriage, and, no doubt because of his 1957 perception of the world, that leads to economic stability and that, he believes, reduces expensive dependence on the benefit system.

The key problem with so much about benefit 'reform' it simply believes that if you hammer lone parents and the disabled with so many financial penalties they will be compelled to get the work that they are believed to be shirking. You need to compel employers to be fairer in their recruitment and stop being prejudiced against disabled people and working mothers. We also need a lot more free, state-provided childcare. This is the only way you will get most lone parents into work. By pressing child carers to become pre-school teachers and by legislating against informal child care arrangements you are exacerbating the problem. Of course, in the Thatcherite-Blarite-Cameronite mindset, none of this is the concern of the state and people must sort out their own lives. People can be as moral as you like, marry before they have children, not divorce and have the father stay around, but they cannot buck the pattern established by employers and the cost of living in the UK.

I will now turn to the other elements of Cameron's pledges. I think the same morality angle is behind the policy to increase magistrates' sentencing powers from 6 months to 1 year as magistrates' courts are seen as the point at which the low level crime which exercises voters the most is dealt with. The point about people using knives to kill should expect a prison sentence seems fine too. I would add to that, that people who use cars to kill should also expect a prison sentence, but naturally that would upset too many of Cameron's speeding, 4x4 drivers for him to accept it. The key issue is where all these prisoners will go. Labour has failed to build more prisons, no-one wants them in their district and yet the public want more prisons. They do not want crematoria or wind farms either but we need them all. Cameron will find it even tougher to force through the building of more prisons because he will be more sensitive to the opinion of rural voters in the areas where such prisons will be built. I anticipate that magistrates, as a result, will be compelled effectively to use house arrest and more electronic tagging, either that or we will have to have the prison hulks of the past or form criminal ghettos in certain cities ('Escape from Moss Side' anyone?).

One is to reduce the number of MPs by 10%, which Toynbee sees as gerrymandering as the reductions will not come in large, low populated rural constituencies where the Conservatives are strong but in areas that back Labour. This seems to be a step to avoid the repeat of the 1997 landslide. I am sure that by the mid-2010s Labour will bitterly regret that Blair abandoned any steps towards proportional representation. Ironically the landslide of 1997 might prove to have been one of the most damaging things to happen to Labour's long-term future. Of course, Conservatives have adopted such tactics before notably the regime of Dame Shirley Porter on Westminster Council in the late 1980s. Given that she fled to Israel and was compelled to pay a £12 million 'surcharge', i.e. fine for her part in that scandal (reduced from the original £27 million originally imposed), I believe she should have had the 'dame' title stripped from her. She claimed she had only £300,000 in assets, but was clearly a multi-millionaire. Kit Malthouse, one of Boris Johnson's deputy mayors who has taken political control of the Metropolitan Police, only joined Westminster Council in 1998. However, it is not difficult to argue that such attitudes that rewarded a leading Conservative who had adopted a policy now clearly seen by the House of Lords as having been gerrymandering, persist in the Conservative Party. Someone should track down where Westminster Conservative councillors from that era have gone now, I would bet some are advising Cameron whether directly or indirectly.

It is not surprising given that contempt of the electorate that Cameron wants to replace the Human Rights Act. Of course, this is seen by the right-wing as a law which only favours criminals and terrorists but in fact protects the average Conservative voter as it does everyone else. This is the false assumption of so much Conservative policy that if you are doing things correctly or morally then you have nothing to fear, so there is no need for legislation to protect you. As the murder by police of Ian Tomlinson a passerby of the G20 protest and of Jean Charles de Menezes shows, you can be anyone and yet be caught up by and killed by the state machine, however law abiding you might be. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is over 65 years old and yet the UK Human Rights Act is only 11 years old. The reason why Bush had prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay rather than on US soil is because the establishment of the republic that became the USA had a Bill of Rights which the regime's policy was violating. Anti-terrorist legislation has been used in the UK to put people against which no evidence has been brought, under house arrest. Scrapping the Human Rights Act will simply make such approaches easier and strip away a lot of defence we have against and increasingly authoritarian UK state.

Economically Cameron's pledges are aimed at benefiting his 'core constituency' of the very wealthy. The Thatcher years locked all parties but particularly the Conservatives into always being seen to cut taxation or rather find it from no direct sources which usually dent consumption further. Cameron will cut corporation tax from 28p to 25p in the £ which will clearly benefit companies who are back awarding their leading lights millions of pounds in bonuses. What such a cut needs to be accompanied by is a compulsion on the percentage of profits that need to be reinvested in the company and a restriction on how much profit can be sent overseas, but of course the Conservatives would never limit their greedy friends in that way. He wants to raise the inheritance tax threshold on money and property left from £325,000 to £1 million. Even at £325,000 only 6% of the population pays inheritance tax. Apparently the rise will, however, cut tax receipts by £1 billion in favour of the very richest people in the UK.

Despite this £1 billion windfall, Cameron wants to reduce the budget deficit currently at £175 billion. Of course, believing in a Keynesian approach I see nothing wrong with that, but it seems to be anathema to all political parties who now seek to reduce it. I would certainly argue that without that deficit unemployment would already be over 3 million and the burden on the UK of that greater slowdown in the economy, i.e. lower tax returns and consumption would mean we would be in a worse state. A limit on bankers' bonuses and a windfall tax on utilities could do a lot too, but seems to have been ruled out by those who have the real power in the UK. Cameron will have to introduce cuts across public spending and in this we leap right back into the 1980s. Thatcher cut the civil service staff by one third in the 1980s and it has never returned to those levels. Part of the problems for schools, social workers and hospitals stems from the cuts imposed in the 1980s especially in terms of hospital cleaners, and we are reaping the results even twenty years later. Cameron says he will not cut back the National Health Service, but as it seems apparent he will not cut back on defence (the Trident nuclear weapons programme currently costs £76 billion with which you could punch a huge hole in the deficit) and in fact promises the so-called Military Covenant (which sounds terribly Cromwellian) and arguing soldiers should be properly equipped to do their jobs. I accept the latter point about proper equipment and this is one point that Labour should be very embarrassed upon. However, the UK should not still be involved in Afghanistan 8 years on and Iraq 6 years on in wars that were started on false bases and mainly for US profit. Cameron will not reduce military involvement in these countries and by saying he will equip them better is indicating the defence budget will rise, suggesting that he will need to make cuts elsewhere to pay for this as well as reduce the deficit. If the Armed Forces expand they will absorb more of the unemployed, but of course, single mothers and the disabled are precisely the type of people they do not want to employ. This show that there is so little linkage between one policy and another, so much policy from all parties is handled in a vacuum.

Cuts will come somewhere and if not ameliorated by tax rises which have been ruled out nor in health and defence will have to come in other areas. It is unlikely he will squeeze the Revenue & Customs or the Borders Agency in which so much faith to 'protect full up Britain' is being place. As has been shown recently social welfare, the poor cousin of health care needs more funding. Yet, Cameron will freeze council tax for 2 years. This is returning to the Thatcher approach of the poll tax, in believing that local people would favour low tax charging Conservative councils over high-spending Labour ones. It always forgot that in any town the majority of the electorate actually benefits from high council spending. In addition, this will have to be balanced against high profile cases such as the killing of Baby P and the shortage of social workers. Council spending has been pared down and pared down to a situation in which many cannot afford the upkeep of leisure facilities and have had to reduce refuse collection to an unhealthy frequency. Yet the mantra that somewhere there is massive 'waste' is still chanted. Cameron will apparently find this waste and cut it as if the Labour governments never even thought of this. Ironically cutting back on social welfare and local authority activity cuts into the kind of employment disabled people and single mothers are very likely to go into, certainly if they want something better for their futures (rather than the futures of the wealthy) than working in a call centre.

This brings me back to my point recently about 'adult' movies and call centres being the only places locally with work that does not need you to have followed a lengthy path of specific qualifications. Women performing naked in front of webcams is rocketing, generating £1.1 billion in 2008 (up from £730 million in 2006) with companies saying they have 40-150 UK women signing up each month; the largest has 27,000 women on its books. So is this the kind of moral Britain that Cameron is driving for, especially in targeting single mothers?

So, overall, when pressed for policies, Cameron has really simply returned to Thatcherism with all its benefits for a small elite in British society and new sticks to beat the marginalised, those seen as the 'undeserving' so much harder. Despite his lip service to morality, in fact, by simply squeezing the supply side of the labour market he will make it harder, with more children left 'home alone' and more women pushed into dubious work. Cutbacks will lead to the deaths of more children and elderly people. Those unfortunate not to get work let alone work paying a wage you can live on, will again be demonised and as in the 1980s will breed a generation of young people resentful of the society which seems to mark them from birth as useless. There is a basic lack of understanding of how the UK economy and society works because too many politicians care only about wooing the super-rich (not even the middle class) and have assumptions about society that were outdated fifty years ago. I know it is hackneyed now, but in 2009 it seems as relevant as it did at the time: “I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.”

P.P. In fact remembering those words from 1983 sent me to dig out the whole quotation from Neil Kinnock and it seems eerily appropriate even 26 years later:

"I warn you. I warn you that you will have pain – when healing and relief depend upon payment. I warn you that you will have ignorance – when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right. I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can't pay. I warn you that you will be cold – when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don't notice and the poor can't afford.

I warn you that you must not expect work – when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don't earn, they don't spend. When they don't spend, work dies. I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light. I warn you that you will be quiet – when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient. I warn you that you will have defence of a sort – with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding. I warn you that you will be home-bound – when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up. I warn you that you will borrow less – when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income."

Some of this will be my epitaph.

How 'They' Have Been Killing the Government

Following what seems to have been a very successful speech by prime minister Gordon Brown at the Labour Party conference this week it is interesting to note that the incessant campaign in the media which has dogged him since he became prime minister in June 2007 has slowed a little. I lived through the last days of the John Major governments especially the period 1996-7 when his slim majority was slipping away from him. Major, of course, had replaced Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in November 1990, as Brown did Tony Blair, without a general election until April 1992, more than 16 months after he attained office (Brown has been prime minister for 27 months). This time Brown retains a majority and though there have been some divisions among his MPs he is not as under siege as Major was; he seems to have ridden the scandals over MPs' expenses far better than Major handled the 'sleaze' cases of his terms of office. Brown has come out of the recession pretty well too, being a leading light in the international response and overseeing a stimulus package which may not have achieved all that was hoped for but is certainly immensely better for the average person than the Conservatives 'we can do nothing; it's global economics' approach.

Despite these aspects, there has been an assumption in the media from the moment Brown came into office that he would not remain there long. This is one reason why David Cameron shrieked repeatedly for a general election, even though the example from his own party's history (aside from Thatcher/Major, Harold Macmillan took over after Sir Anthony Eden resigned as prime minister in January 1957 and there was no election until October 1959) showed such an election was 'constitutionally' not necessary, no matter what Conservative supporters argued. Brown had been commended throughout his period as Chancellor of the Exchequer 1997-2007, the longest person in that role since the 1820s, yet he was seen as reined in by Tony Blair so 'safe'. The change when Brown (and he is in fact Dr. Brown, having a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, but unlike in Germany it is seen as bad for politicians to have doctorates and as distancing them from the public) came to power was that the super-rich got nervous.

The very wealthy realised that whilst Blair was Christian Democrat in outlook, with authoritarian tendencies and in fact I have argued nothing more than a Blairist (in the Peronist and Gaullist styles), Brown was a Social Democrat and that seemed to spell an end (or least greater restriction) for their freedom to exploit the British public. Consequently, in their eyes, he had to go. This attitude is summed up by the coverage of the Rupert Murdoch-run, 'The Sun' newspaper saying it had stopped backing Brown, as if it ever really had. The power of 'The Sun' is taken as a given as its campaign against Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party during the 1992 election is seen as being instrumental in leading to their defeat just when it seemed they would be victorious, something they achieved by making repeated spurious claims about Labour's taxation plans that began to be accepted as true even by traditionally Labour supporters.

This time, it has not simply been the tabloid press, but also quality newspapers that have been speaking constantly as if it is fixed that Brown will lose the next election. In fact this easy assumption has done the Conservatives a disfavour because it has meant they have not had to put forward a raft of policies and months after I noted that they seemed to lack any clear policies very few seem to have appeared. It is clear that head of the Conservatives, David Cameron, assumes he will simply win by default and so has no need really to come up with anything distinctive.

Particularly critical is the lack of any policy on how a Conservative government will respond to the recession. This is partly because the Conservative policy going back to the 1920s is simply to do nothing in such circumstances. We may lack the tools for true Keynesian economics but at least Brown as offered things that will stimulate the economy and keep up demand and production and there are local initiatives as I have noted such as in Wales. The Conservatives have paid some lip service to reining in the bankers, but given that a lot of their support and funds come from that sector they are not going to properly restrain those people. Brown has found it near impossible to rein in the utility companies and bankers can we expect the Conservatives for whom these people are lead supporters to even try to be strict?

What policies could we expect from a Conservative government? Well, as I observed, some of them are being acted out in London where Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson has sought to politicise the police force. Aside from that we have seen him lose deputy mayor after deputy mayor due to allegations of corruption and we have seen moronic policies such as scrapping of 'bendy' buses which do nothing for the public but attract media attention. So, with Cameron in Number 10 we are likely to see a focus on headline grabbing policies which do nothing substantial (very similar to many of John Major's policies, remember the Patients' Charter and the Traffic Cones Hotline?) but which cover up some more serious political manoeuvring which takes Blair's steps towards authoritarianism to a further level and will see the police service become increasingly less independent and more directly under party political control.

I hope that the electorate can see through the constant grumbling in the media about Brown and note that Cameron offers nothing which will help people facing unemployment and repossessions. The media that have been peddling the line that Brown is ineffectual can offer no real alternative; many are just toeing the line of their millionaire owners rather than addressing general concerns of the public. Some in the media seem to have worked themselves up into witch hunt mode against 'the others'. I noted the 'Daily Express' headline last week claiming that no more immigrants could enter Britain because it was 'full up'. On that basis we should be compelling property owners to rent out the thousands of empty properties in the UK and stop families from assuming that 'three [children] is the new two' as is constantly stated. Lies about immigrants are now so widespread that it could almost be funny.

A taxi driver in Manchester the other day talking to me about housing started with 'Well, of course, all council housing goes to immigrants and then students...' before he even begun on his racist diatribe. The assumptions of these people is somehow that all councils are filled with liberal people prejudiced in favour of people from abroad and from outside the town, whereas in fact almost every council in the UK is full of conservative (and often Conservative) business people, as bigoted as the average taxi driver. Students are becoming the new pariahs in many towns, but immigrants remain the favourite. No student will get council housing unless they are a person already in a council house going back into study. The waiting lists are so long no student would be processed in the time it takes to study the average degree. The council 'housing' given to asylum seekers is often a detention centre and that to immigrants is usually a dingy bed & breakfast hotel room for a whole family, not a house. However, these assumptions run so deep that even council data will not shake these attitudes.

I honestly hope that the sustained, petty whining campaign against Brown fails. He is not superhuman but I can see that the alternative would be a lot worse. People make an assumption that a Cameron government would be much the same as Brown's, simply a little more glamorous. There is an argument that even if Tony Blair was standing as Labour leader now he would score few votes as at 56 (two years younger than Brown) in 2009 he would not have the appeal he had at 44 in 1997. Reference is made to Brown only having one eye as if that somehow makes him a poor leader. Yet, Winston Churchill, who suffered severe depression throughout his life has never been challenged for his fitness to be prime minister; Lord Halifax who almost became prime minister in 1940 had one hand and Franklin Roosevelt, US President 1933-45 could not stand or walk. In our jobs we cannot be prejudiced against any disability but it seems it is alright to be so in our political choices. I would rather have a leader who has suffered and triumphed than one like Cameron who has been privileged throughout his life. Most of us have never been privileged but so many feel we should have the people running our state to be from very privileged backgrounds. They are not born with any particular ability because of their social status and in fact it distances them from what the bulk of us experience in our lives.

I hope that when we look back on the period 2007-10 we do not see it as the protracted killing of a reforming government simply to install one which is far friendlier to the very rich. I make no predictions for the outcome of the next general election, as anyone who has looked at the 1970, the two 1974 and the 1992 elections will know, those who are confident of victory in British general elections are usually disappointed. However, I believe this media sapping of the Brown administration simply because his political slant is not entirely in line with the super-rich and because he looks the age he is, damages British democracy and quite possibly be leading us into a much more unpleasant civil society.

Harry Perkins for Prime Minister

This title of this posting comes from a piece of graffitti I saw on a wall in Coventry in 1988. I took a photo of it but that was lost when I was living in West Germany the following year. It refers to a character in a television series, 'A Very British Coup' written by Alan Plater (1988) which was shown on Channel 4. It is based on a novel by Chris Mullin written in 1982.

In the series, set, it was assumed, in 1991 (when the next election was due) features an old fashioned Labour prime minister, Harry Perkins (played by Ray McAnally (1926-89)) coming to power and following policies that seemed to be both modern (his government borrows money from the Russians who at the time were opening up to capitalism) and yet traditional Labour policies (when asked if he will scrap first class travel on trains [Perkins favours train travel over official cars] he says 'No, I will abolish second class: aren't we all first class?'). Some of the policies which at the time seemed to be a Labour dream, such as a minimum wage, of course, have become actual policy in the UK subsequently. Crucially for the fate of his government, Perkins moves the UK away from the special relationship with the USA, including scheduling all US military bases to be removed within two years.  The Americans threaten to overthrow him unless he adopts policies which are more sympathetic to the American New Right attitudes of the time. Perkins promises to do this, but sticks to his own line and the end of the series sees the US military invading the UK to overthrow the Perkins government.

Interestingly, there is a king on the British throne in the story, suggesting that Queen Elizabeth II has stepped down, perhaps in 1986 when she turned 60 (the retirement age permitted for women in the UK at the time) or in 1991 at the age of 65, the standard retirement age, and her son Prince Charles has come to the throne. Of course, in fact she is still ruling at the age of 83 and looks set to beat the length of Queen Victoria's reign of 64 years, which she will do if she is still on the throne in 2017. Given that her mother lived to 101, it seems quite possible Elizabeth can remain on the throne until she is 90 or even longer. As Charles is already 60 there is a chance he will die before his mother and will never become king or will feel he is too old to take the job by then and it will go to his son, Prince William.

Some of the elements echo back to the pressure that faced even Harold Wilson, who, these days with hindsight, hardly looks a radical. The pressure from the IMF (International Monetary Fund) in 1976 on the Labour government to introduce public spending cut-backs in order to secure loans happened for real and appears again in 'A Very British Coup'. Wilson, and especially Callaghan who followed, effectively ended Keynesian economic approaches for Britain primarily because of what the IMF had compelled. Back in the mid-1960s when Wilson have headed two governments running 1964-70, many of his plans for modernising the British economy were scuppered by financial pressures, notably on the value of the pound, which, at the time, was seen as a serious issue. Someone has written into Wikipedia entry on Wilson conspiracy theories, that 'A Very British Coup' was based on the actual attempts to overthrow Wilson and that simply the names have been changed. In fact, the series owes far more to the sensibilities of the 1980s than those of the 1970s, not surprising really.

Though clearly rooted in aspects of the 1980s, some elements seem painfully appropriate today. Perkins manages to win a landslide election in 1991 through exposing scandal among 'fat cat' bosses especially in the City of London (i.e. the UK financial sector) in 1988. Many of his policies are about reining in the greed of such employers who he sees as having bankrolled the Conservatives and benefited while industry has declined, raising unemployment. Such rhetoric could be easily used today. The problem has not gone away at all, though perhaps Labour has lacked the courage to go after these leeches on the British economy, truly growing fat (still) while others become unemployed. Of course, when scandals are revealed whether around the Guinness family, the Maxwells or half-a-dozen others, it seems to make very little difference to how the British economy is allowed to be run. While all the specific paranoia of the Cold War might now seem history, greedy corrupt big business is alive and well.

Another interesting policy is one that no politician would have the courage to put forward but is featured in the series is 'one man, one newspaper'. This particularly galls with Sir George Fison, played by Philip Madoc, who owns a newspaper consortium and is probably modelled on Rupert Murdoch and/or Robert Maxwell. Of course, we know how powerful Murdoch has become in shaping the choices of the British electorate and that Tony Blair had to effectively pay court to him before he was able to become prime minister. Murdoch, his family and agents have not had to face down a one person - one newspaper restriction but James Murdoch complained that the BBC was 'land grabbing'. Despite that view, Sky, owned by his father, has a near monopoly on satellite broadcasting in the UK, yet the Murdochs clearly feel there is too much competititon to their control of UK media. While no-one will come forward with a policy which will control Murdoch's ever-increasing power because they know they will lose an election if they try, this issue remains one that is current. The extreme, of course, is the situation in Italy where Silvio Berlusconi has a strong grasp over television media, reinforced once he became prime minister and privatised part of the state company RAI in 2004.

Contemporarily-set or near-future series were very popular in the UK in the mid-late 1980s. Examples include 'Defence of the Realm' (1985) and especially 'Edge of Darkness' (1986; fascinatingly to be remade as a Hollywood movie starring Mel Gibson; the star of which, Bob Peck (1945-99) had a run of roles in such series about conspiracies including 'Centrepoint' (1990) and 'Natural Lies' (1992; about infected beef). Partly, I think they were popular then because they appeared credible given what we were hearing in the news. In that way we have recently had a few similarly driven dramas since the 'War on Terror', notably 'The Grid' (2004) and 'Britz' (2007). In line with the current news, these have often focused on UK relations with the Middle East/South Asia rather than simply domestic oppression.

In the Thatcher years there was a sense that the state was flexing its muscles, particularly following the Miners' Strike 1984-5 and the stopping of free movement of people connected with that; the shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and attacks on the anti-nuclear weapons movement throughout the 1980s. The USA appeared (as it has done again since 2001) as the country with a forceful agenda against the people it did not like, whether they were Communists (now read al-Qaeda) or not and through that approach was shaping, or even forcing, British policy in a more authoritarian direction. In addition, there appeared to be not only state suppression but that concealment of the truth by big business too. Many of these stories feature sinister businessmen seeking to suppress information on things in the public interest such as about BSE ('mad cow' disease) in beef (another I remember in that ilk was 'Jute City' (1991) partly due to its haunting sound track).

Chris Mullin, a former journalist and since 1987, a Labour MP, published the book, 'A Very British Coup' in 1982. He had edited work by leading Labour MP and former minister, Tony Benn. He campaigned for the release of the wrongly-imprisoned Birmingham 6 and was editor of Labour journal 'Tribune' 1982-4. His was on the Home Affairs Select Committee 1992-9 and chaired it from 1997. He was a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions 1999-2001, at Department for International Development 2001-3 (ironically being transferred before Hilary Benn, Tony Benn's son, took up the post of Secretary of State there) and the Foreign Office 2003-5. He is not standing at the next election. He is one of the MPs who has claimed the least in expenses and it was revealed that he has only a black and white television in his second home.

 wonder if Mullin wrote 'A Very British Coup' as a bit of a counter to Anthony Burgess's '1985' (1978) which portrayed an authoritarian state run by trade unions or the television series '1990' (1977-8) by Wilfred Greatorex (1922-2002) which showed a left-wing dictatorship of Britain in the 1980s following an economic collapse. Certainly in the television series, Perkins emphasises that he only seeks to carry out the policies he does because he has a clear electoral mandate and so the policies are the 'will of the people'. To some degree, unfortunately, I think Mullin has a charitable view of the British electorate and I fear that their 'will' if it was ever enforced in its entirety would lead to a bigoted, isolationist state with public capital punishment.

Anyway, so we have to see 'A Very British Coup' in that background. Why then do I come back to it today? Well, I wonder if, now that they are set to remake 'Edge of Darkness' no doubt updated for the technology of the late 2000s, we are not going to see another 'A Very British Coup' for real in the UK. Gordon Brown is not Harry Perkins, this is not the early 1990s. Even a Conservative government in 1991 would have found it hard to stomach 28 days' detention without charge (let alone 42 days or 90 days) and the amount of CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) - there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK, higher than any other country in Europe we have. However, Brown is probably the last Labour leader who can probably claim any right to the title 'Labour' in his job description.

It was interesting to hear today that Tony Blair is giving advice to Brown on how to stay in office. Apparently Blair would have stepped down sooner, his wife said, if Brown had demonstrated a commitment to city academies (business-run schools which are in fact not thriving), foundation hospitals (again, another step towards privatisation) and pension reforms (which are depriving so many workers of any secure future). It is to Brown's credit that he contested all of those things. However, in doing so, he has demonstrated himself to those who really hold the reins of power that he is not Blair's heir and in fact is trying to move Labour more back to what it once stood for which is equality and social justice. Blair, in fact, with all the schemes for (faith) schools and different hospitals was promoting a more divided society and his lying to Parliament and his forcing of the UK to fight in Iraq showed he was no different towards the Americans than Margaret Thatcher had been. As I have said before, Blair was simply head of the Blairite Party and now its power has waned those with power are seeking someone else.

So, in the next two years you will see a series in front of your eyes. The 'Very British Coup 2008-10' has begun with the over-exaggerated pressure on Brown following the local elections and if he manages to hold on in 2010 you will see the stepping up of policies to remove him. There are various methods, notably a few terrorist attacks or even just threats, engineered to undermine him and all this sustained bad mouthing of him in the press. They can also resort to the electoral fraud of the kind which was practised in a number of constituencies, especially in South-West England in the 1992 election. Of course, if the wheels of democracy do keep in place, then we may see, come 2010, something resembling the final scenes of 'A Very British Coup'; look out for the markings on that passing Chinook helicopter it might not be Prince William but the US Marine Corps.

P.P. 12/10/2009: For those of us lucky enough to get the Yesterday channel on our Freeview boxes, currently we can watch a repeat of 'A Very British Coup' being shown at 10.00 and 15.00 across this week and I highly recommend everyone whether you have seen it or not seen before to go and record/watch it. Of course, twenty-one years on, the actors, many of whom are still familiar faces today, look incredibly young. The technology, notably the computers of 1988 projected forward into 1992, look very primitive and no-one has a mobile phone. This applies to any programme made in the era, but perhaps it is because we associate a certain politics with a certain time period that the technology signalling that period seems so important.

Interestingly, aside from Perkins using 'comrade' which probably was abandoned by anyone in Labour circles even before Blair took over the party, the kind of people portrayed as sitting in his Cabinet could easily have been in Blair's or Brown's Cabinet. Interestingly having a woman as Home Secretary and, in this story, de facto deputy to the prime minister, seemed radical at the time, but now with Jacqui Smith as home secretary 2007-9 it seems not that exceptional. On reflection, though, it is probably to the UK's embarrassment it took 19 years after the portrayal of a women home secretary for the country to get one, and she is only the third woman after Margaret Thatcher as prime minister (1979-90) and Margaret Beckett as foreign secretary (2006-7) to hold one of the four main ministerial ranks (the other being the Chancellor of the Exchequer). It took the USA less time between portrayal and actuality to get a black President (seen in 'Armageddon' (1998) and '24' broadcast 2002-3 to Obama becoming president in 2009).

It might have been more apt to show the series when George Bush was still US President, perhaps Yesterday did, but I was unaware of it it. Bush's foreign policy and certainly his bullying of European countries to comply with that policy especially over the Middle East, but also over Russia, was just like the way the USA's approach to Britain on its foreign policy choices is portrayed in the series. I certainly could envisage Bush ordering an invasion of the UK if it had diverged too far from his view on the 'War on Terror'.

The one thing that struck me in the credits was the list of advisors. Of course, Duncan Campbell is there, the investigative journalist who has exposed deficiencies in British public life especially in the use of surveillance. He was notable for having been sacked from the BBC in 1987 for his series 'Secret Society' on the instigation of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, so was a hero of the liberal left at the time 'A Very British Coup' was produced. Even more fascinating is the name which is listed above Duncan Campbell, Alastair Campbell. This Campbell was an advisor to Neil Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party 1983-92, the man who came closest to being like Perkins in reality. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party in 1994 he already had connections to Alastair Campbell and became Chief Press Secretary 1997-2000 and Director of Communications 2000-3 before resigning during the Hutton Inquiry into the murder of Dr. David Kelly.

Campbell was very involved in Labour's publicity during the elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005. The commentary about Campbell you tend to find on the internet these days is pretty mild, but he was seen by the 'spin doctor supreme' of New Labour under Blair and his role in 'sexing up' intelligence reports about what the regime of Saddam Hussain was doing in Iraq to encourage the British to back the US invasion led to harsh criticism. As with Lord Mandelson, a man he worked with closely especially in 1997, his smug, self-satisfied and patronising manner has done nothing to endear him to the British electorate, though George W. Bush seems to have liked him.

I wonder what Alastair Campbell's input was into 'A Very British Coup' and what lessons he took from the series. Maybe he genuinely believed any Labour government had to toe the US line precisely or face an invasion. Perhaps that was why he worked so hard to weld the UK to all US policy no matter how insane it was. Maybe Campbell had had dreams of some Perkins-like government only to have this dashed in 1991 when Kinnock seemingly had victory snatched from him. Perhaps Campbell had under-estimated the powerful conservative forces in the UK that had no need for US assistance to bring about what they wanted. The fall of Perkins in 'A Very British Coup' could easily have been portrayed as happening in the way Salvador Allende was overthrown in Chile in 1973 with local pressure financially backed by the USA, rather than a military invasion. However, that element was shown as less important than the US direct action, perhaps because that would raise the ire of British nationalists of the right as well as left-wingers in a way that an Establishment coup, as was regularly dreamed up in opposition to Harold Wilson 1974-6, would not have done.


I wonder if Alastair Campbell foresaw his future in the character of Frederick Thompson played by Keith Allen. Thompson has been imprisoned for exposing scandals in the Ministry of Defence but on his release becomes Perkins's press secretary and, interestingly, also his monitor of both Cabinet members and the upper echelons of the civil service. This kind of defender of the prime ministerial role portrayed by Allen is very similar to how Campbell acted when in post under Blair. I think, at the end of the day, Alastair Campbell simply loves bathing in the reflected light of 'great' men or men he thinks will be great, as he was not only associated with Kinnock but also larger-than-life proprietor of the 'Daily Mirror' Robert Maxwell. By working with these men, most notably Blair and making their glory all the greater it clearly casts more light on himself. These days he seems to relish light shining more directly on him: he is an active blogger!


P.P. Interestingly, the version of 'A Very British Coup' shown on Yesterday seemed to have been edited by a few seconds so rather than seeing the US uniform the screen faded to black, though the voices on the military radio heard in the background had American accents. It was a subtle change but meant that you are left with the impression that their has been a coup by the British military, perhaps backed by US forces, rather than an all-out US invasion of the UK.

P.P. 25/01/2010: I see the movie of 'Edge of Darkness' has now been released in the UK.  I hope it prompts a re-run of the series.  I have not read anything yet about this version.  The trailer with Mel Gibson's character accusing someone of killing his daughter seemed in step with the original.  However, but was immediately put out by the poster which shows Gibson's character as pointing a gun at someone.  He has a US police badge on his belt too.  I have less problem with him being a police officer than using the gun, because one thing about Peck's roles in all of the conspiracy dramas he was in was that he came across as an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances; the prime weapon he used in the series was two pieces of radioactive material that he struck together in front of the main 'bad guy'.  I guess one factor is that the UK police generally do not carry guns and the ones that did were smaller in number back in 1986 than they are now. 

Showing Gibson's character as an American seems to undermine an important strand of the original story, that a lot of the conspiracy was driven by Americans influencing the British Establishment to behave in a particular way. This seemed very sinister in the Reagan years when the series came out and perhaps this latest version will be set during the George W. Bush presidencies when the Americans bullying other states to follow the particular US line became common again.  It would have been better to transpose the latest movie, say, to Canada (or even back in Gibson's home country of Australia) rather than have it in the USA so allowing that aspect of an external force on a government to remain in the story.  It might not be a good movie but I am interested to see how the plot has been altered for 2010s USA.