We have basked in a warm glow of new glory for a few days now. Or at least if you get your news from TV and radio we have. The newspaper review has been a bit less enthusiastic – or downright hostile and biased, depending on your point of view.
The weekend papers showed the problem we face in the next two-and-a-bit weeks. The Mail on Sunday gave us a double spread. Headlines included “Is there ANYTHING British about Lib Dem leader?”. “Most would vote Orange … but they will get Brown” and “Billionaire convicted of fraud in France laid on banquet in honour of the Liberal Democrat leader”.
That might make us feel a bit sympathetic for Nick but at least it’s not us they’re slagging off. They saved us for the editorial: “The charming Mr Clegg leads a loopy army”. In fairness they called Mr Clegg “personable, articulate and well-briefed” while claiming that “behind him in the shadows stand dense ranks of beards and sandals”. I swear I did not see any sandals at party conference – and it was good sandal weather.
The Times went for “Voting Lib Dem is a vote for chaos”. Actually I am finding that chaos is quite popular in some places – lots of people are happy with the idea that government should somehow do less than it has. The case against us here rests significantly on the carefully considered view of those wise sages in the City. I think the point was that the money men would like things to go along as they have done before. Hhm.
The Sunday Times gave us “Has Clegg resolved the party’s contradictions or is it still at heart ungovernable?” pointing out that the party had small government liberals and social democrats, people form the North and people from the South. Well, the latter point is one of our greatest strengths. People support us in Cornwall and Yorkshire. Labour and Tories can barely claim the same. Will the “foreign” Mr Clegg be the one to give us back government in the national interest?
What to do?
Well TV and radio matter more and the main thing is not to blow it. Labour and – particularly – the Tories will probably feel that they have to come out swinging this week. Nick is in the fortunate position of not having to try too hard and hope that at least one of the duopoly looks edgy and aggressive when trying to rough him up. Apart from in seats the Conservative party already holds neither Brown nor Cameron has any personal support in England.
This problem of the press troubled Blair and Mandelson for years. How to turn entrenched and hostile press views. It can’t be done in 3 weeks. We can argue with them point by point. We can argue that they have got it wrong time and time again. Yet at best this just leads to a dispute we don’t want. The Faustian pact that Labour seems to have made with the Murdoch stable is not on the cards.
What to do? Enjoy it. It is a breakthrough moment, even if it largely dissipates. It is – along with Vince Cable’s performance over the last few years – a move to credibility with the wider electorate. A move to mattering, to undisputably being in the game. One poll shows that the Tories will not win a single Lib Dem – Tory marginal. That alone would be a great gain, keeping in place lots of good MPs. Holding out against a national swing.
And there is nothing to stop us hoping that it will be the beginning of much more than that.
* David Lawson is a Lib Dem member in Lewisham.
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10 Comments
David – thanks for your eminent good sense.
The mantra “Vote Clegg get Brown” might have some truth. I would definitely vote liberal if I knew that one of the conditions to join a coalition was that Brown would have to step down. I would be happy to see a Clegg/Millibrand type leadership, but could not stomach Brown still in charge.
Staying “Clegg-tastic” until the postal votes start to be returned early next week could alone significantly boost Lib Dem votes and seats.
Did somebody seriously write an anti-beard editorial?
Worry not. I’ve been checking … in particular the virulently hostile Daily Mail is getting a right dressing down from its readers.
Its leader making cheap swipes at Nick got a LOT of critical hard hitting comments pointing out its errors, or just briefly showing up its lack of objectivity.
Either there are a lot of signed up LibDems working away on the comment boxes or the public is a lot more savvy than the Mail assumes. I’d suggest both is true.
Keep plugging the boards with calm good sense – don’t get heated just point out the facts and faults.
As LIb Dems will do, Nick Clegg was arguing at lunchtime today on the World at One for STVM /”STV” in Multi-member Constituencies and against STVS / “AV” in Single member consitutencies . He said that STVS / “AV” did not make everyone’s vote count. But it does! I saw him in a new light, under political pressure to win the argument regardless of the truth. Pity about that!
And his wriggling on the EU and the Euro was painful to listen to. He and the Lib Dems would have taken us into the Euro and that would have been a disaster for our country during the present crisis. Thank goodness they were not in a position to do so. Long may that be the case!
Choose LIb Dem, lose the Pound! Choose Lib Dem, lose our country.
Dane Nick’s comments with regard to AV are perfectly legitimate. Alternative vote, while meaning that the winner in a constituency has 51% of the vote, does not in any way count the 49% who voted for someone else. So conceivably under AV you could still get a party getting 51% of the vote and having 100% of the seats. Of course this is unlikely to happen but examples from Austraiia and models show that it is perfectly possible to have the % vote to % seats just as skewed as it is under our present system.
STV multi-member constituencies on the other hand is a wonderful system that produces very similar %vote %seat results while simultaneously allowing Tory/Labour/etc supporters to pick which candidates of their own they would prefer to be elected most and allows people to show that they REALLY wouldn’t like one party such as the BNP yet reward the greens for being close to everybody views. If you think AV is ok, why not go the full way and support multi-constituency STV
I vaguely recall we had this “Dane Clouston” persona and their made-up names for STV and IRV here before.
IRV (aka AV; it’s IRV in the rest of the world and all the research papers) is a degenerate form of STV, that operates on the same basic vote-transferring system: if your first preference is for a candidate who can’t win, and there are still at least three candidates left to consider, then your vote is transferred to your second preference. This process repeats until you have only two candidates left.
When you are down to two candidates, or one candidate has a clear majority, the votes of everybody who did not pick the winner are then discarded. These votes do not count and these voters are not represented.
So no, it does not “make everyone’s vote count” (what we call “proportional representation”). STV, on the other hand, delivers proportional representation to an impressively high degree of accuracy.
Joe Donnelly,
Nick’s comments with regard to AV are not in the least legitimate, but instead are slippery and dishonest.
In my Henley consituency now, whatever I vote, there will be a Conservative MP. If I vote Labour, UKIP or Green, all of which I prefer to either Conservative or Lib Dem, on conflicted grounds of a fairer independent UK, I can have no effect on the choice between two eventual front runners, the unfair Conservatives and the EU-fanatic Lib Dems. Under the present system my vote will not count.
But with STVS /”AV” in the existing single member Henley constituency, I could vote, for example, on those conflicted gounds, 1. Labour, 2. UKIP, 3. Green, 4. Conservative, 5. Lib Dem, and be sure that if the two eventual front runners are Conservative and Lib Dem, that my vote will count in the final result.
I would like an EU-sceptic Liberal MP but would rather keep the existing Conservative MP than have an extra EU-fanatic Liberal Democrat who would take us ever further into the Euro and a single country called Europe. Oh for the Liberal Democrats to come to their senses and be prepared to cooperate internationally with both European and North American countries without wishing to be ruled from Nick Clegg’s beloved Brussels!
The reason for nto going “the full way” to STVM / “STV” is multi-member constituencies. MPs would not like them – and they are the people who would have to vote for the STVM / “STV” system. I well know that because I was twice very nearly elected Liberal MP for Newbury in 1974 (Con 24,000, Lib 23,000, Lab 10,000 – and I would of course have been so elected under STVS / “AV”). As MP for Newbury I would have voted against any proposal to merge the Newbury Constituency, to which I was extremely attached, with three or four others. I would have been quite prepared to have been thrown out at the next election in what had previously been a safe Conservative seat. There would no longer be safe seats. All votes would count in the election of an MP in our representative democracy, notwithstanding your and Nick Clegg’s slippery dishonesty in saying that everyone’s votes would not count under STVS / “AV”.
Andrew Suffield,
The vagueness of your recall of “this ‘Dane Clouston’ persona” is striking! I strongly recall your style of argument. You may Google “Dane Clouston” if you are curious to know more.
You explain STVS /”AV” / IRV to me. I have been arguing for it, and against STVM / “STV” for Westminster for over 30 years because I thought that asking MPs to abolish their constituencies would delay electoral reform – as indeed it has – and also because under it I would twice have been elected Liberal MP for Newbury in 1974 (Conservative 24,000, Liberal 23,000, Labour 10,000 ).
Read my answer to Joe Donnelly, whose post was rather more polite than yours.
Yes, of course STVM / “STV” in Multi-member constituencies delivers “proportional representation”. That is its raison d’etre. But “making everyone’s vote count” is not the same thing as “proportional representation”. Contrary to your and Nick Clegg’s dishonest or politically slippery statement, under STVS / “AV” / IRV, in existing Single member constituencies. my vote counts because, between the eventual two front runners, it helps to determine who is my MP and everyone else’s vote counts because it helps, between the two eventual front runners, to determine who is her or his MP.
Is that clear enough? I think that both you and Nick Clegg ought to be ashamed of yourselves for the dishonest and slippery way in which you argue about this issue.