After the Public Hung Parliament, One Man Has Cut the Noose
Confused by the recent post-election chaos? No need to fear, Niall Cruickshank is here with an easy-to-digest summary of the past few days and some of his thoughts.
On Tuesday May 11 at 20:35 BST, David Cameron was appointed the new Prime Minister of Great Britain, bringing to an end of five days of uncertainty and speculation. Gordon Brown gave a very gracious resignation statement; when the moment came I felt a little sad inside.
Over the past few days the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives have been meeting to form a coalition government. The Liberal Democrats were the ‘kingmakers’ and the whole thing hinged on whether a deal could be done with the Conservatives. When the Liberal Democrats announced they were seeking formal negotiations with the Labour Party, most people were not pleased, accusing Nick Clegg of double dealing and playing both the Conservatives and Labour. The Liberal Democrats should have spoken to Labour only after talks with the Conservatives had broken down, this made me fearful that uncertainty would happen for a few more days, but it was ended last night.
What has undoubtedly made the speculation and uncertainty worse was the lack of hard information that we received, we only received short statements which were very vague, buzzwords such as ‘constructive’ were bound around leaving us to ponder what exactly was happening, secrecy was essential but in this new politics a little more transparency would have been useful.
A Labour-Liberal Democrat pact would have not worked. It would be rejected by the public, do damage to the Liberal Democrats and would still have been short of an overall majority.
To those who called Gordon Brown a squatter in No 10, would it have been preferable for Brown to go before negotiations between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have concluded? Who would have run the country then? Cameron waltzing into No 10 and forming a minority government straight away? Brown was being a caretaker for the time being.
Now that Cameron is PM there is still a little uncertainty. A coalition is not an easy thing to maintain, especially after such a bitter campaign. I wish the new Prime Minister and his Cabinet well in sorting out the problems of the country.
(picture courtesy of The Prime Minster's Office @Flickr)
Winning twelve seats in the European Parliament at the 2009 elections, coming second only to the Conservatives in England, was a breakthrough for the party. Naturally, after that boost, UKIP wants to be taken seriously as an electoral force, and a viable alternative to the status quo on all political issues, not just through the anti-European Union stance for which the party is best known.
This aspiration is reasonable enough. Many parties have started out as pressure groups, standing in elections to make a point, to bring a particular issue into the political spotlight. The Green movement in Europe, the Northern League in Italy and the Bloc Québécois in Canada have all successfully morphed from single issue campaign groups into parties with a comprehensive manifesto and a desire not just to influence government, but to be part of it. UKIP has clearly decided these are the examples it must follow.
The problem is that once UKIP has made that choice and resolved to become a party campaigning on all issues, it has to see it through, and start taking itself seriously on that basis. The paperwork is there; the party’s manifesto contains pledges on seventeen different policy areas, from the NHS to pensions to transport. And whatever you think of the policies themselves (you can read a summary of the manifesto here - http://www.ukip.org/content/ukip-policies/1567-ukip-manifesto), most of the bases are covered.
But politicians and activists within UKIP just aren’t communicating this new identity effectively. In this election season, the party is coming across as a ranting, raving, aggressively anti-European group, still obsessed with a single issue. We’ve already seen Nigel Farage’s bizarre tirade against the European Council President, Herman van Rompuy, in February. However outraged he is that an unelected politician is so influential in Europe, Farage’s outburst seemed unprofessional, hysterical, and against the politeness which UKIP identifies as “part of Britishness” in its own publications (http://www.ukip.org/media/pdf/Britishness.pdf).
Now Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who replaced Farage as leader of UKIP in December, has given on the BBC’s Campaign Show. Lord Pearson was completely unwilling to discuss much of his own party’s manifesto, such as their policy on crime, because he wanted to focus only on Europe, which is UKIP’s safer ground. When he was pressed on the manifesto, Lord Pearson implied that he hadn’t developed most of the policies himself, and though he did claim to have read the manifesto in full, his unwillingness to defend it made for a less than convincing party leader.
UKIP must stop playing games with the electorate. It is the party’s right to choose whether to be a protest group or an alternative government. But if they pretend to be something they’re not, UKIP politicians can expect voters to leave them out in the cold.
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