This will be the last politics post on this blog for a while, since the Con/Lib coalition is now in place. I’ll be back to general geekery and moaning about Apple soon. In the meantime, Labour’s now spinning like crazy, blaming the Lib Dems for the fact we have Conservatives in power, albeit in coalition. They claim we’ve now seen Clegg’s true colours and spin spin spin spin spin.

From my point of view, here are the true colours seen over the past week:

Conservatives: Light blue. Despite what people think, the Tories did give a little to make the coalition happen. It might not be obvious, and you might think Clegg sold out for too little, but hardened Tories are absolutely spitting mad. The policies in place show that we’ll be getting ‘Tories lite’ for a while at least—extremely horrible, but not quite as bad as we’d feared a few months back.

Liberal Democrats: Grey. In coalition, they’ll mostly be Tory lapdogs, and whatever happens I suspect the Liberals will be smacked hard at the next election, returning maybe 30 seats and fading into obscurity. Unless they manage to do amazing things (without any senior Cabinet posts), they’ll simply fade into the background, hence grey.

Labour: Yellow. Labour could have done a deal with the Libs, but, as Alex Salmond said, there was a lack of political will. It’s disgusting that the idea of Lab/Lib was derailed by 40 or so greedy, spineless Labour MPs who said they’d prefer a Tory government to doing a deal with the Liberal Democrats—a deal that would have ensured electoral reform. Of course, that’s the problem: many in Labour are as against ditching first-past-the-post as the Tories, because it means they’d have to work for their seats.

The voters: Yellow. Say what you want about so-called ‘voting for a hung parliament’, the British public bottled it, returning the Tories with too many seats, even taking into account first-past-the-post. For whatever reason, the polls were way off, so presumably lots of people simply didn’t want to admit they’d be voting Tory.

The British media: Shit-brown. With very few exceptions, the media was a disgrace during the past two weeks, including the BBC. Nick Robinson in particular turned into a Tory shill, and almost everyone else was parroting stupid lines like “we can’t have Brown, because we’d have an unelected Prime Minister”. I’d accept such statements from a blog written by an ignorant or angry youngster, but it’s not acceptable for the BBC to turn into the Daily Mail and churn out garbage so readily.

The PR movement: Red. As in ‘on fire’ or ‘covered in blood after being knifed to death’. If there’s one thing that’s very obvious from this past week, the UK is not mature enough to (yet) have any kind of PR-based voting system.

Germany took 40 days to reach a government deal last time. Brits were already whining after a single weekend that things were taking too long, with senior politicians arguing that we can’t have such a ‘shambles’ after every election. Never mind that there was still a government in place, going about its work. Never mind that deals and compromises are good, because that means more of the electorate is being taken into account. No. What this election and its aftermath showed was not that the United Kingdom wants political and electoral reform—it just thinks it does, but really wants to stick with tried-and-tested, dated, laughable Victorian systems.

Given that someone at the BBC appears to have flicked the Universal Stupid Switch and engaged the Screw Impartiality Field, and with the right-wing press now in a total frenzy over the possible collapse of a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition, here are some handy helpful hints for anyone who thinks this is all so unfair:

1. The United Kingdom is not a presidential system. This country does not and has never elected a Prime Minister. We elect MPs, who form voting blocs, and those blocs then form the government. Typically, one of the senior members of the biggest party becomes Prime Minister. Sometimes this person is known before the election and sometimes not. Regarding Gordon Brown specifically, he was returned after the 2010 election with one of the biggest majorities in the UK, and so the only ‘election’ for him that mattered was not only sound but also extremely solid.
2. Our head of state is the Queen, not the Prime Minister. And she’s unelected, natch.
3. The Tories did not ‘win’ the election. The only way one could conceivably say a party ‘won’ a British election was if it got a majority of the vote and/or a majority of the seats in the Commons. The Tories got neither. They got the most votes (although by a smaller margin than people seem to think, because most people aren’t bothering to, you know, read the figures), but that’s all. That’s not, under the UK system, a ‘win’.
4. The Tories do not have a mandate to govern. The Tories seem to think it’s terribly unfair that they’re not already running the country, but the unwritten constitution of the UK deems that they should not even have first dibs in trying to form a government. As Prime Minister, it’s actually Brown who could have had first crack at forming a government, unless he’d resigned. That he didn’t was an astonishingly sly political manoeuvre from Brown. The Liberal Democrats were able to fulfil a campaign promise (talk first to whichever party got the most seats), and the Tories showed their hand, which Labour could then better.
5. Clegg isn’t two-faced. The Daily Mail today unsubtly calls Clegg two-faced due to him having the audacity to speak to Labour and the Tories. He only said he would talk to the Tories first (against tradition—see point 4), not that he’d definitely do a deal with them. In fact, it would be utterly irresponsible and undemocratic for the Liberal Democrats to not speak to Labour and weigh up the options. Also, ignore the Tory press’s chants of the Liberal Democrats being self-serving regarding the PR red-line. PR threatens the Tories, hence why the Murdoch machine is spooked. It would be far harder for the Tories to get into power under a PR system (although not impossible if the party modernised a little). From a UK standpoint, though, PR will return MPs more in line with what you voted for, which should be the aim of a modern democracy.
6. The Tories have not offered the Liberal Democrats anything worth a damn regarding electoral reform. It’s clear from news reports that until Brown said he’d quit later this year the Tories had offered the Liberal Democrats nothing on electoral reform. They’ve now offered a referendum on AV, a system that would change the balance of the Commons, but not by a great deal. It’s not proportional representation, and it can in some cases actually boost seat numbers for larger parties. To that end, this isn’t compromise by the Tories—it’s a gamble that the public will get angry at the Liberal Democrats for not accepting it, because the public doesn’t realise the offer is worthless.
7. Labour has offered the Liberal Democrats something worth a damn regarding electoral reform. Labour’s offered AV not as a referendum, but as a bill, which should get through the Commons with the help of other minority parties. They’re then offering a referendum on PR, which, presumably, would enable us to move from AV to AV+ or STV. I would expect any Lab/Lib ‘contract’ to ensure there’s no Labour-wide anti-PR campaign.
8. A Lab/Lib coalition wouldn’t necessarily fail. The numbers are such that a Con/Lib coalition would be strong if everyone followed the whip, but it’s clear that unless the Liberal Democrats were contractually obliged to follow all Tory policy, that wouldn’t happen. A Lab/Lib coalition would have the backing of ‘partner’ parties from Northern Ireland, and you can bet the SNP would back things it’s interested in and just ignore those it’s against, in order to ensure PR happens. Yes, the coalition would find it tougher to get things through, but it wouldn’t be impossible (see the SNP in Scotland, ruling as a minority, but still getting things done). And if PR happens, the coalition could call a snap election and be returned with a much more solid number of seats, even if its vote-share dropped. The pity here is that Labour’s apparently too arrogant and stupid to work with the SNP, which would ensure a larger working majority. The more things change…
9. A Lab/Lib coalition would have the backing of the majority of the electorate. 52% voted for these parties. It would therefore be the only recent government to govern with a majority backing. By contrast, the Labour party secured just 35% of the vote in 2005, and 41% in 2001. In fact, unless I’m mistaken, the last government with an electoral majority was the short-lived Lab/Lib coalition in 1974 (56%), and the last time any single party was elected with the backing of the majority of the electorate was in 1931, when the Conservatives grabbed a huge 55% on their own.
10. What’s happening now is what should be happening. We are talking about the future of our country. We shouldn’t be hoping things would be sorted over a weekend. Even in countries that have had coalitions for decades, it still takes days of negotiation after an election to figure out the way forward. With new coalitions, the process can take weeks, but that’s to ensure things will work and that they will be stable. This is important for the United Kingdom, so, please, the media and the moaners, just let our politicians get on with it. Better that they take a week to get things right than rush into an agreement and screw everything up.

UK ‘coalition’ deals are reportedly deadlocked over the issue of PR. For the Liberal Democrats, it’s a (near) red-line issue; for the Tories, it’s something they’re totally against, because they currently have the most to lose if the UK dropped a first-past-the-post voting system.

I think the Tories should nonetheless embrace PR, and here’s why. This would secure, without doubt, Liberal Democrat backing (under contract), enabling a working majority for the following term. The Conservatives would get through the majority of what they want, with minor concessions to the Liberal Democrats regarding certain budgetary and taxation issues. If (and I realise this is a big ‘if’) everything worked well, Labour would be sidelined and the Tory vote-share would rise, because it would be seen to have not only been the party that put things right, but also a ‘progressive’ party regarding electoral reform.

Should the Con/Lib coalition survive until 2015, the Tories would grab a larger vote share, and may even have a small chance of a majority under PR. Worst-case scenario: by that point, the Con/Lib coalition is seen as a success, the Lib-Dems are largely happy, and the coalition continues, with the Conservative Party’s biggest opposition, Labour, sidelined.

With the BBC reporting that Nick Clegg is considering David Cameron’s offer to more or less implement Tory policy for no benefits, it’s depressing that some people in the UK still don’t fully understand what’s going on (typical response: “The Tories won so why aren’t they in power?”), why we need electoral reform, and why the Tories are so utterly desperate to retain our broken first-past-the-post system.

The reason is shown in the above image, available on my Flickr page, with this version being in big-o-vision. Because the UK’s 650 Commons seats are all ‘winner takes all’, bigger parties have more seats than they would under a proportional system. In fact, in an election where the Tories got 34% of every seat’s vote and Labour and the Lib-Dems got 33%, the Tories would have every single seat in the Commons, meaning 66% of votes would be entirely wasted.

That might sound crazy, but the election in 2005 wasn’t a million miles away from this, giving Labour a working majority with barely over a third of the vote. Today, we have a hung parliament, with the Tories narrowly missing out on a majority, despite only getting 36.1% of the vote. They claim this gives them a mandate to govern, due to being the biggest party. That entirely ignores the fact that 63.9% of voters clearly don’t want them in power, and that a majority of the UK would in theory accept a Lab/Lib coalition, since that takes into account 52% of the vote.

If we had a proportional system, the Tories would have as few as 235 seats, and Labour would be down 70. The Lib-Dems would jump from 57 to the 140s, and the SNP and Greens would also benefit. This would be a fairer system, since the Commons would represent the votes cast. However, this is also why the Tories won’t budge: they know they’d have almost no chance in the short-term of ever returning a majority.

The downside to the system? UKIP would grab 20 seats and the BNP 12. However, in a democracy should we deny representation to those we don’t consider desirable (or, for that matter, the likes of the BNP a chance to show how truly awful they are, meaning they’d likely get no seats next time round)? If so, why not stop beating around the bush and ban every British political party apart from the Conservatives and Labour?

Ah, Telegraph, you loveable bunch of xenophobic racists, you’ve outdone yourselves with your latest ‘evil foreigns’ rant. In ‘What has Iceland done for Britain?‘, Georgia Graham spits on suitability from a great height (along with accuracy and an ability to write something that’s actually funny, instead preferring ‘bitchy’), slagging off a nation suffering from a natural disaster, where the wellbeing of thousands of people is threatened by a volcano.

In case you missed it, I’ll mention that last bit again: Iceland is suffering from a natural disaster, where the wellbeing of thousands of people is threatened by a volcano. You might not have noticed this, because, clearly, the fact our planes can’t fly anywhere is far more important than the wellfare of people who actually live near an active (and currently very angry) volcano.

I fully admit to not reading the Telegraph often, but I’m pretty certain that after the earthquake in Haiti you didn’t decide to spew out 700 words of garbage, insults and inaccuracies about the country. Nor, as I recall, did you follow up any atrocities in Ireland by ripping into the Irish by rattling off ‘What have the Irish done for Britain?’ and making stupid jokes about potatoes. To that end, the fact you’ve seen fit to do this regarding Iceland is insulting and inappropriate, but, hey, at least I now know where your editorial standards lie: face-down in the gutter, throwing up last night’s Pimm’s.