So, we have a government. What’s more we have a new and different sort of government. Truly, we live in interesting times.
For those of you who may be interested, the text of the agreement between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is available here.
Many of my left wing friends were spitting blood on Twitter today, characterizing it as a total surrender on the part of the LibDems. I tend not to follow extreme right-wing people, but if I did I’m sure they’d be complaining about a complete surrender by Cameron. Delaying the inheritance tax cut, moving forward on PR, no rolling back on Europe, loads of stuff on climate change: Norman Tebbit will be fit to burst.
So, politics has happened. There has been give and take. You win some, you lose some. I’m very happy about the scrapping of the ID card scheme, and about the end to the detention of children in immigration camps. I may yet benefit from the tax cuts aimed at the less well off rather than the super-rich as the Tories originally planned. Then again, having Theresa May as minister for Women and Equality pretty much guarantees there there will be no progress on women’s rights or LGBT rights for a while. I am crossing my fingers that Clegg & co manage to avoid any retreat.
As for Labour, they go into the great outer darkness secure in the knowledge that they will be able to complain mightily about everything the government does. The Guardian quotes a very perceptive American commentator, Daniel Larison:
As perverse as it seems, kicking out Labour may be the biggest favor British voters have ever done for the party, as they will now have the luxury of opposition to engage in constant rejectionism and demagoguery over the spending cuts that their excesses while in government have made necessary. It will probably work and they might be back in government in five years…
While I don’t think Gordon Brown is anywhere near as culpable for the current mess as Dubya, he has certainly kept things looking rosy in the hope of winning an election and thereby left a rather worse mess for his successors to tidy up. Goodness knows what Gordon would have done had he won, but avoiding any cuts by squeezing the rich, which is what Labour will now claim they would have done, was not very likely.
Overall, however, I find myself agreeing with Nick Harkaway. He quotes several policy areas on which Labour negotiators reportedly refused to budge. These included keeping the ID card scheme, not being serious about PR, and refusing to fund additional renewable generation. I find that very depressing.
I must admit, I thought Theresa May being made minister of Women and Equality was some kind of sick joke considering her record of voting – on you know, equality – in parliament.
Thank you for the link. I’ve been dependent on radio all day and was not happy with the voting themselves 5 years, but the 55% for a dissolution removes that assumption.
I think it is pretty much impossible, given the way our non-constitution works, to prolong the life of a government that has seriously lost the confidence of Parliament. The way I saw it was that this was intended to put an end to allowing a sitting PM to pick the most auspicious occasion for an election, and perhaps to prevent a maverick with a casting vote from holding a PM to ransom.
You mentioned the fitness of Norman Tebit to bust ? Behold ….
” It has been a long hard struggle and I had hoped to see a Conservative government at the end of it. Sadly, that hope is unfulfilled. This did not come as any great surprise. The Conservative campaign was misconceived from its very beginnings. That is not a call, as it has often been represented, for an “extreme Right wing homophobic anti-European dogma,†but the hard fact is that the “heirs to Blair†simply did not have a message which resonated with Conservative voters. They simply did not understand the aspirant lower middle class and upper working class votes any more than NuLab understood their traditional working class voters. Well, with the exception of the master strategist of NuLab, Tony Blair, who understood them well enough, but loathed them for their deep attachment to their country.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/normantebbit/100039501/europe-will-split-david-cameron%E2%80%99s-coalition-apart-before-long/
I’m going to miss the election news coverage.
UK political/governmental technical query.
Who was head of government between Brown’s resignation and Cameron’s official acceptance of the Queen’s invite?
I know the Queen is head of State, and generally not considered part of government, but the question came up in Fb conversation, and it was suggested the Queen was also head of government during that time.
However brief the time is, there has to be someone technically in charge.
That’s an interesting question. Technically there is no government between the resignation of one Prime Minister and the appointment of another. In practice I’m guessing that the newcomer is in charge because the request by the Queen is a formality that would not happen if she wasn’t going to say “yes”.