Dangerous Days for British Politics?

Well, I finally got to look at the European election results. They are probably the worst guide to what will happen in a general election than any other results because the system used differs so far from the electoral system used in all other elections in Great Britain (though not Northern Ireland). However, it is a good indicator of trends and attitudes. To some extent it has not revealed any particular disgust with politicians as the turnout at 35% is the same as it always is for European elections and shows the extent to which most people in the UK see no connection to what goes on in the European Parliament to their everyday lives, though they will whinge about the limits on working hours and the nature of their fruit. Of course, it is the European Commission and the thorough application by all UK governments (whether Conservative, even under Thatcher or Labour) of all EU regulations.

The UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) now have 13 MEPs, the same as Labour. There have been abortive attempts at parties which plan to get the UK out of the EU, notably the Referendum Party, but UKIP for all its problems has been the only one which has managed to grow. They have no MPs and are unlikely to get them with the system we use in our general elections, so there will be a disjuncture between our national parliament even after the next election, and our European representation. It is weird that a party that wants nothing to do with Europe will now have its members heavily involved there. What alarms me, and was apparent from the UKIP publicity, which in the areas I visit exceeded that of all the other parties combined in terms of quantity, is that effectively they are an extreme right-wing, nationalist party and given their views on 'protecting UK borders' they are like a light version of the BNP (British National Party) which itself has moved on from referencing illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to more racialist viewpoints. UKIP's discriminatory policies have now added a bridge between the right-wing of the Conservative Party and the BNP and most dangerously are another party for whom spouting such bigotry is normal.

Of course, as Channel 4 News highlighted last night, the support for the BNP (British National Party), who got two MEPs (and importantly the money that brings), came from old traditional Labour voters. This is not a new phenomenon, you only have to look at early support for the Nazi Party in Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. This was an important constituency for them, and you have people moving between the Communists (KPD) and Nazis (NSDAP) quite often, sometimes depending on what social facilities each party could offer. The fact that extreme left and extreme right meet is something long known. If you reject democracy, it then simply comes down to emphasis on which groups you are going to attack. What is interesting to consider is where votes came from for UKIP. Some it is clear came from the BNP whose share of the vote actually fell. The only reason why Nick Griffin got in as an MEP is because support for Labour fell too. This is precisely what I said about each individuals vote counting far more when turnout is low (and in this case turnout from particular voters). I said this on the day and many Labour voters need to feel ashamed that they allowed the far right to get such a bridgehead because they did not get out and vote. As the turnout itself maintained, this suggests Labour voters were also replaced by extreme right-wing voters who in the past would not have voted at a European Parliament election. Interestingly, in contrast to France and Germany where the extreme left have done well, there is no sign of that in the UK. Perhaps we need something stronger on the left than Scargill's Socialist Labour Party or certainly have a different leader with more credibility.

We have always had people opposed to the EU. Personally I think it is a good idea which sometimes works imperfectly and the way to bring about change is not to turn your back on it, but engage more and get efficiency in how it works. On a purely selfish basis, myself and many members of my extended family have benefited directly from the EU (especially those of my family who are farmers) and we would all be worse off if the UK had stayed out. However, millions of UK citizens benefit from the EU and never notice. If the UK left the EU a lot of labour and social legislation we enjoy the benefits of would be under threat, the price of many goods would rise immediately, especially food items (the UK has long been a food importer) and actually UK farming would suffer immensely as it would be outside its largest market. Of course we could put up stronger barriers to Polish workers coming to the UK, but that is as much about employers tempting them here with low wages (though higher than in Poland) and using even illegal immigrants especially in the boom of 1994-2007. If employers had paid decent wages and not tried to squeeze out even more millions of profits then this issue would not have risen. British nationalists like the BNP and UKIP seem to believe that there is something inherently attractive about the UK compared to other countries. There is the element that we speak English which is commonly learnt in many countries, but if employers had not been drawing on immigrant workers then they would have gone somewhere that was. It is about economics, but of course for the far right they ignore all that and think it is some mystical force.

The real danger now is that the language of the far right has become legitimate. I heard Andrew Brons, the other BNP MEP, talking on Channel 4 News last night about the 'indigenous people' of the UK (which in fact are the Celts, but he meant anyone white) as if this was a legitimate term. He dismissed the word 'racist' as being invented by a Trotskyite in the 1930s, as if that made it invalid (and in fact he seems to be ignorant of where his own views originated from in the biological racialism that developed in the 1860s) and was not challenged on his statement. Now that the BNP has a platform I can only hope that people will see how foolish so many of their statements are. However, where they succeed is by making their extreme views seem 'normal'. Again in the interview, Brons said that expelling failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants was a given as if that had already been resolved. The UK expels many of these people anyway, but there is no sense that represents thousands of personal disasters and deaths that the UK government contributes to on a daily basis.

Most alarming they do not consider anyone who is non-white to be able to be British. I have not heard how they view the 700,000 mixed race people in the UK. Of course, supposedly liberal West Germany maintained the law that only those with two German parents could ever vote. They also tried deporting delinquent children (aged 14+) of second generation Turkish settlers to Turkey a country they had never visited (naturally Turkey refused to take them). Finally Germany was compelled to remove this racist law that dated back to 1913. However, it shows how easy it is for racist policies to exist even in the 2000s when all of us go on diversity training. I know people who lived in South Africa in the apartheid era and what people forget is in fact the regime affected everyone badly. Of course blacks got it worse, but everyone in South Africa of whatever ethnicity had to be classified and if suddenly you were reclassified you found yourself excluded from certain services. Such an approach as in Nazi Germany immediately leads to corruption of public services and inefficiency. Of course the identity card system envisaged for the UK will play right into the hands of the far right. One reason why it has not advanced is because of how difficult it is and how costly. An apartheid system will be far worse. Also people forget a key reason why South Africa ended apartheid was not political but economic, you cannot bring the best out of all your citizens if you put them into different boxes and enforce segregation. The UK transport system is in a dire situation, imagine if you had to have 'whites only' carriages. The UK is too inter-twined with Europe to be divorced and its population is too inter-twined to try to bring about some artificial segregation.

British society has always been full of bigots and racists. It also has people like my grandfather (a life-long Labour supporter) who grumbled about 'the darkies' but always complimented how hard working the Asian woman next door and the black men he worked with were and could never see the fact that these people made up the group he saw as the 'darkies'. Any group in society is made up of individuals that we know. Whereas last week bigots may have bitten their lip now they feel they can speak out and that is going to lead quickly to millions of individual tragedies as they feel heartened by the election result and the sense that the views of UKIP and BNP are held widely and legitimate. We cannot now avoid race riots in the coming months. The UK is going to become a very unpleasant place whatever colour you are, especially if you live in a city. We can only pray for a rainy summer rather than a hot one otherwise it will make 1981 look like a picnic in the park. All good people need to constantly contest racist behaviour and use the term 'racist' when we see it otherwise we are going to be living in a country of armed camps.

Clearly both UKIP and BNP have not thought anything about the economy. I have mentioned how employers have driven economic migration by their desire for cheap labour. However, if we even begin moving towards far-right policies then the economy will suffer immediately. People forget why West Indian and Asian immigration was encouraged in the 1950s (and the same applies to Turkish, Yugoslav and Italian immigration into Germany) it was to fill labour shortages especially in the service sector (which of course has become the dominant sector of our economy since 1974) and to start intimidating and removing people in those industries is going to send the UK economy rapidly back into the 1970s. Hospitals would close, shops in many towns would disappear, the transport sector would be cut back. The UK has had immigration for over 2000 years, to try and rip out certain people from UK society is going to be like cutting off an arm because it happens to be your right one.

The fight against racism now has to be stepped up a gear. We need to work to squeeze the bridgehead the bigots have established and challenge their behaviour so that it does not become 'normal', it is always abnormal and abhorrent. Of course, if the Conservatives win the next general election, their policies will be infected by the rhetoric of the hard right, partly because they have very few policies anyway; there is no indication of how they would have dealt with the credit crunch, the bank collapses or the MPs expenses scandals at all. Of course, disillusion with MPs is at its peak and this is a golden opportunity for extreme parties to play on that, as Hitler did in the early 1930s. The price for their success will be a very high one for the UK economy, British society and millions of individuals to pay.

Low Turnout? My Vote Counts For More

I have been keeping an eye on the BBC website but so far cannot see the outcomes of the European Parliament elections. They have the council votes, but very few councils had elections yesterday and none in my area. I suppose it has to do with just how many votes there are in any given constituency. The European Parliament constituencies in the UK vary between Northern Ireland with 1.7 million people (of course not all of whom are adults and/or eligible to vote) up to the South-East England region (London is its own region) with 8 million people. Around 80% of the population in the UK is over 18 (the figure is rising as the birth rate falls) so a constituency has potentially 1.3-6.4 million voters, but the turnout for European elections in the UK is often only 35%, but even so that means up to 450,000-2.2 million ballots to count.

You find out some strange facts, i.e. that Gibraltar (on the South coast of Spain) forms part of the South-West constituency of England. The UK has 78 MEPs like Italy and France; Germany, the most populous country in the EU, has 99; Spain and Poland are on the third tier with 54 seats.

We have now moved over to the d'Hondt method which means that you vote for a party list rather than being able to rate all the parties on the ballot paper as used to be the case with the STV (Single Transferable Vote) system we used to have. For British people used to putting a single cross on a ballot paper this might seem more comfortable, but it does mean a lot of the more marginal parties and especially independents will no longer get support and given that South-East England had a Green MEP, this may change. In addition, not all candidates are the same even if they are on the same party list. Given that between 3-10 MEPs will be returned from your constituency, it seems a bit bad that we cannot express our opinion on different individuals from a party. I know that the more votes the party gets the more candidates off their list become MEPs, but you might want their 6th listed candidate in place of the 1st listed. Of course in the past you just got to rate the party, but in my mind we are still not yet there with the best system for these elections with multiple candidate constituencies. People complain that proportional representation systems are too complex for UK voters, but given how few of us vote now, that should be no worry as it is only the 'expert' voters who turn out and we are a pretty sophisticated bunch.

In the UK for local and national elections ballot papers are small, but for European elections, in my constituency having 22 parties listed they are a long roll of paper that is too large to fit into the average polling booth in the UK. At least in the polling station I visited they had modern ballot boxes not those black painted metal ones that seem to have been used for decades and have slots too narrow to fit European election ballot papers in. One polling station I visited in London in the 1990s had a specially designed plunger to get the papers in.

I am an unashamed pro-European. Though I am sympathetic to the Socialist Labour Party, I dislike their anti-European stance. Arthur Scargill's claim that the EU is a capitalist club is terribly out of date and entirely misses the good that EU social and labour legislation has done for the ordinary people of the UK in the face of harsh opposition from UK employers. Scargill should take a leaf out of Tony Benn's book and campaign for true democracy in the EU. Currently the European Parliament is pretty toothless. Policy is made by the Council of Ministers made up of the national prime ministers and policy is carried out and regulation is enforced by the European Commission, an unelected civil service body. This kind of structure if applied to an individual country with such a strong executive would be seen as less than semi-democratic. The Parliament should have more powers and certainly be moving the legislative agenda. It does occasionally bring the Commission to account but probably not often enough. We need European Parliament select committees on the basis of the UK model. The ironic thing about the Commission overseeing regulation (which generally stems from EU legislation) is that the British whine about these regulations more than any other nation in the EU and yet whereas France, Italy and Germany quite often ignore the regulations the British government (whether Conservative or Labour) has the strongest record of enforcing the regulations. They let the Commission take the blame for their own adherence to the enforcement!

Sorry, this posting is rambling all over the place. My main point which I always say to the polling station staff is that when turnout is poor then my vote is more powerful. If in the South-East constituency only 2.2 million people vote then my vote contributes a 2.2 millionth but if all the electorate showed it would be 3-4 times less powerful. In local elections this effect has a greater impact though can be neutralised by the first past the post issue, but not if I back the winning candidate. Most wards for UK council elections have about 5000 people in them, and again taking 80% as eligible to vote, this comes to 4000 potential voters. When I lived in East London the population density was so high you could see 3 ward polling stations along a single main street. Anyway, if, for example the winning candidate wins with 1000 votes then my vote is 1/1000th, but if s/he wins by only getting 300 votes or less, which often happens, then my vote counts as 1/300th of the outcome. It is a minor point, but what I am saying is, if you do not vote you put more power into the hands of those who do and these might be people whose view on the world jars with your own.

People often complain that their vote is only a grain in a sandpit, if they represent only 1/2.2 millionth, what is the point? Well, of course each of those who actually elect the winner are similarly only 1/2.2 millionth. Democracy is still a pretty rare commodity in the world, ask anyone from China. People should vote if for nothing else, for the people who fought to have democracy in the UK and stop it being suppressed by the Nazis. Not bothering snubs those people. If you do not like the candidates, stand yourself. You have no right to moan about the political system, and more importantly, the policies it puts into action, if you have exempted yourself from the process. I do not advocate moving to the Australian system in which you get fined if you do not vote, but I do say to people, do not so easily deliver power into the hands who want you to be disinterested. Remember, you might strongly disagree with my perspective on things and yet by not voting you are giving my vote far more power.

UK local elections - narrow crack in the window of change

Yesterday I scrolled through the blogs that exist beside mine and was pleasantly surprised that within a handful of clicks I had seen blogs in most of the world's major languages (including textspeak used on SMS and blogs, it seems). So, I am very conscious, that even though no-one is coming to my page it is hanging very much in a global context. Hence, I feel I have to apologise for its parochial nature. I suppose though, we are the parts that you can make a sum of, so if you are interested in picking up the fragments in English about the state of society and politics and one man's wellbeing, in the UK which has 1/70th of the world's population then read on.

Yesterday, 5th May 2007, was a day for local elections in the UK. Not every seat on every council is elected each three year period, so you only get a patchy voting picture across the country. However, these elections are usually taken to be a vote of confidence or no confidence on the party in power. Though Labour lost 460 seats across the country, and the Conservatives have the largest number since 1978, that kind of thing is typical for a party coming to the end of its third term in office. There were the 'national' elections for Wales and Scotland too and for the first time, the SNP (the Scottish party wanting independence for Scotland from the UK) became the largest party with 47 seats to 46 Labour seats in the Scottish Parliament. They may form a coalition or be a minority government or in theory a Labour-Liberal Democrat (the Liberal Democrats got 16 seats, the Conservatives 17) coalition could rule. The UN said many years ago it would give Scotland a seat in the general assembly if a pro-independence party won more than 50% of the vote in Scotland and that day might not be far off. The rise from having less than 10 MPs in London in the 1970s has been swift(ish) and strong, partly helped by New Labour becoming a Christian Democrat party leaving the SNP on its left and many of the most radical left-wing politicians, agitators, etc. in the UK have always come from Scotland and public housing has always been more common, so Labour has left the SNP a lot of popular ground there to seize.

The Liberal Democrats did the worst really through gaining very little and losing quite a bit. As the smaller of the major UK-wide parties they have always been strong locally and people who would not vote for them for government would often support them for their town council, not now it seems. Such people have gone to the Conservatives who seem to have shed their Thatcherite clothes and the blandness of the 'small, quite man' era of John Major, William Hague and Ian Duncan-Smith and David Cameron looks terribly like Tony Blair did 10-12 years ago and he has been clever in portraying himself as being green too. I hate the Conservatives for what they did to the UK in the 1980s and 1990s and making my life and that of millions filled with fear and uncertainty. Many millions clearly disagreed with my view of the period or have forgotten it. Whilst I do not see the Conservatives winning the next general election, expected in 2009, the one in 2013/4 might be theirs.

Back to the Liberal Democrats. The inter-relation of national and local politics is always hard to disentangle, but it seems that public image is playing as big a part as ever and after losing their previous leader Charles Kennedy due to alcoholism, his successor Sir Menzies Campbell seems too aged and staid to catch the interest of the electorate, though ironically, voting among the under-25s is at an all-time low, so he must be near to the age of the majority of the people who actually vote, but clearly they prefer someone who looks like their son-in-law rather than the leader of the residents' association. It is interesting what phases we go through, in the early 1990s there was a fad for leaders who looked like bank managers, John Major as prime minister, had actually been one, and John Smith leader of the Labour party at the time resembled one. Now the fad is for men who look like young lawyers, Tony Blair was one and David Cameron looks like one; even Alex Salmond, leader of the SNP could be said to fall into that category.

Locally I have had a run in with the Liberal Democrats after they sent round patronising leaflets telling me my hedge should be cut back and the refuse bin lids must be closed (where they think we should keep all the rubbish that we cannot fit into the bin each week, I do not know) and the Conservatives and Labour have similarly treated us no better. An Independent had posters out but strangely did not appear on the ballot paper. Torn between this choice of very similar candidates all trying to treat me like a child, I spoilt my paper. It hurts me to do that because I know how long people fought for the vote and how few people in the world have a vote at all, but I could not offer to support to any of the arrogant incompetents laying before me. In my town, the Conservatives took every seat from the Liberal Democrats on offer this year, so clearly I was not the only one upset by their publicity. I used to prefer it when I lived in London and you had about 20 different parties to choose from and had to roll up the ballot paper. I do not like anarchy, but neither do I like stagnant politics with parties all offering the same and sneering at me because I have no other choice. At least this election seems to have opened up the field by a chink and Scotland will be interesting to watch.

One thing that did hearten me is the minimal progress of the BNP (British National Party) the main fascist party in the UK. They gained 10 seats but lost 8 seats across the whole country. That is 10 seats too many, but at least their progress is slow. They certainly cause trouble wherever they make progress and it is for the peace of the country that it is good that they remain marginalised. Fortunately, it seems that all of those who spout racist statements unapologetically (usually started with 'I'm not a racist, but these immigrants/asylum seekers/etc....') cannot be bothered to vote. Turn out was 30-40% depending on the area of the country which suggests about 2 out of 3 voters do not care who runs their council, though you can guarantee they will moan when the town moves to fortnightly waste collections (as many are doing) or increases parking fees or closes a school.