The Guardian has endorsed the Liberal Democrats:

If the Guardian had a vote it would be cast enthusiastically for the Liberal Democrats. But under our discredited electoral system some people may – hopefully for the last time – be forced to vote tactically

The first-past-the-post system is undemocratic.  But that’s not the only reason to vote Lib Dem.

It has been interesting watching both Labour and Tory alike warning of the dangers of a hung parliament, or a balanced parliament as those seeking influence in the post election fall out have taken to calling it.  Big majorities are good when things need radically changed but that doesn’t seem to be where we are.

All the major parties, and I’m including the Scottish and Welsh nationalists in that, have very little difference in policy terms between them.  If you don’t believe me look at how well the Scottish Parliament works with a minority government.  There is something grown up about having to convince other people that what you want to do is a good idea.  Governments shouldn’t have to rely on whips bullying people through the division lobby.

The Leader’s Debates have changed the face of British politics forever.  We will surely move ever closer to a presidential style election.

In many ways Nick Clegg’s rise has been a parallel of the USA’s Presidential elections where often being an unknown candidate can be a benefit.  People listen to the new guy.

I heard a commentator saying this morning that David Cameron has spent the last year encouraging people to vote for someone young and new… and then Clegg came along and Cameron has been left shouting “Not him!  I meant me!”.

Labour seems to have lost their way.  The Tories seem to have discovered their past.  But what of these Liberal Democrats?

They seem to inhabit the centre ground more comfortably than either the red or blue parties.  Perhaps a fundamental commitment to real representative democracy puts you in a place where listening, compromise and co-operation are natural ways to achieve consensus and move forward.  Clegg has even had the audacity to suggest that the next parliament work together to tackle the economic crisis.  (I wonder if secretly Brown and Cameron are quite excited about the prospect of Vince Cable being Chancellor?)

What has been missed in the razzle dazzle of the three TV debates is that there are 650 elections happening next week.  Every one of us has a choice to make and no-one will arrive at their polling station to find Brown, Cameron and Clegg on their ballot paper.  Oddly, the party leaders could lose their constituency votes.  It’s unlikely, but where would that put us?

You see the BBC, Sky and ITV don’t pick the Prime Minister.  The pollsters don’t pick the Prime Minister.  We, the voters, don’t pick the Prime Minister.  The party with the most MPs don’t even pick the Prime Minister.  The Queen can ask whoever she wants to try to form a government.  Wouldn’t it be fun if she picked George Galloway for  laugh?

Our electoral system is a joke.  In my constituency Labour will win.  They have a majority of 11,000.  Our bit of the electoral map will be staying red no matter who I choose to vote for.  And that’s the problem for the Lib Dems.  Opinion polls might not translate into votes.  Even if they do get 30% of the vote our system means that they could still end up with fewer seats than the other two big parties.

And don’t get me started on the House of Lords.

And while I’m talking about electoral reform, how long are we just going to ignore the ‘West Lothian Question’?  Surely the English are going to wake up at some point and realise that Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs are voting on education, health and law and order legislation which doesn’t apply in their countries!  Seriously England, are you ok with that?

So, whatever the election result next week, things are going to change.  Proportional Representation is coming, the House of Lords is changing and even Parliament itself might be smaller and differently formatted.

And that’s all good because it has come about because people are beginning to engage in politics again.  It was great to see a woman in the Question Time audience reminding the politicians that they work for us.  I hope that’s a sign of things to come… that we care enough to get involved.

You get the government you allow.  We have allowed people to lie and cheat us because doing something about it was too much effort.  Disengaging isn’t the answer.  We get government however few people vote.

So, on May 6th I’ll be voting.  Will you?

My vote will go to the Liberal Democrats.  It was going there before the election was called but the negativity of Labour and Conservative alike has just confirmed my choice.

But what about May 7th?  Or is an X in a box our contribution to society?  (I wonder if that’s a Big Society?)  Voting is the easy bit.  Not leaving the running of the country to someone else… well that’s a bit harder.  Fancy it?

Tomorrow is your final chance to register to vote in the General Election.

No registration = no vote.

I watched the first ever UK General Election Leader’s debate on TV last night.

I was struck by a number of things.

The first was that it was actually quite engaging.  There was always a fear that the huge list of rules and guideline that the Parties had come up with to minimise the possibility of exposing their man to a damaging attack would kill off any chance of a real discussion.  That didn’t happen.

Media friendly David Cameron didn’t do well.  That was a big surprise, especially as of the three he had the most to lose.

Nick Clegg did really well.

Gordon Brown didn’t suck.

Of course there are many arguments to be had about style v substance but the big winner was Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.  They were given equal billing and boy did they grasp it.

Which leaves us in an interesting place.  Has the debate changed the game?  Are the Lib Dems now a real possibility?  Or at least not just the other lot that will never win…

The dismissal of small parties has always puzzled me.  Tactical voting is odd.  It has often been said that if all the people who would want to vote LibDem but don’t see the point because they won’t get in actually voted for them then they would indeed be challengers.

In Scotland the SNP form the government.  That happened because people chose not to vote for the party they have always voted for.  And because we have a much fairer voting system.  We have a hung parliament… and it works.

For me the elephant in the room last night wasn’t the economy, it was devolution.  Most of the debate didn’t apply to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who all have devolved responsibility for health, education and policing.

When are the Westminster parties going to get a real grip on the fact that England doesn’t have the same rights as the rest of the UK and that this should make a difference to how we govern the UK as a whole?

The next few weeks will be very interesting…

So far the General Election campaign has been about choosing the least bad of who cares.

An argument about increasing VAT or National Insurance isn’t motivating me.

A thought struck me today about David Cameron’s ‘change’ mantra…

Why?

Why choose ‘change’ as the theme of the Conservative election campaign?

For a start, he’s not a change.  He’s fairly well off, well educated (in private education), Oxbridge graduate Tory leader.  There have been loads of them.

He doesn’t look different.  Obama could claim to be a change.  He’s a black man.  There hasn’t been a black president of the USA before.  That’s a change.  Cameron is a white, straight, middle aged Englishman.  We’ve had them as Prime Minister before.

All Cameron has succeeded in doing is creating a slogan he has to defend rather than something.  Of course the Conservatives would be a change if they were elected.  They’re not Labour.

Inspiring stuff.

That said, I don’t even know what Labour and the Liberal Democrat’s slogans are.  Probably ‘Hope’ and something else knicked from Obama’s campaign.

I want to care.  I do care.

I haven’t decided who to vote for yet.  So far the bar is somewhere around whoever has the best poster or whoever upsets me least.  I’m not sure anyone is even going to meet that meager mark.

When was the last time a politician made you sit up and take notice?  When was the last time you heard someone seeking public office lay out a vision of how society could be?  When was the last time you felt motivated to get involved?

I want to be inspired.  Please.  Is that too much to ask?

For the last two nights I’ve watched the Digital Economy Bill‘s passage through the House of Commons.

The Bill, one of the most controversial for years, was placed in ‘Wash Up’ following the calling of the General Election.  Wash Up truncates the legislative process.  Instead of 2 readings and a committee stage which can last up to 50 hours the DE Bill received 2 hours of discussion.

The Digital Economy bill deals with copyright, illegal downloading, TV and a whole range of other issues and is quite simply a bad piece of legislation.

Speaker after speaker exposed holes in the legislation.  Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, seemed to be one of just a handful of people who actually understood what they were talking about.

Part of the debate was around how people who infringe copyright in the digital arena would be dealt with.  If you have wi-fi and someone uses it to illegally download files then you will get a letter.  Obviously the government haven’t heard or proxy servers, changing IP addresses or hacking wi-fi.

Stephen Timms, the Labour Minister responsible for the bill, actually suggested that people could make their wi-fi completely secure by adding a password.

The level of ignorance was stunning.  Both Labour and Conservative front benches were painfully lacking in understanding of the real issues that this bill will impact.

Not one speaker supported copyright infringement.  What those opposing the bill recognised is that copyright law needs completely overhauled so that it protects the people and ideas and creations it should protect but doesn’t punish those who don’t need or deserve to be punished.

John Redwood asked a simple question about the point at which copyright is breached if for example he paid for content, printed it and gave it to his wife.  Would that be a breach?  Or if he gave it to a friend?  Or if he posted it on his blog?  Or if he sold it?

Stephen Timms didn’t understand the question!!!

As someone on Twitter said, “It’s like watching 5 year olds talking about qualtum mechanics”.

This is apparently the home of democracy.  What happened last night was nothing like democracy.  It was a joke.  A bad joke that Labour and the Tories stitched up between them.

So, make sure your router has a password or you could be getting a letter from Big Brother sometime soon.

This morning the Queen gave permission for Parliament to be dissolved and a General Election to be called for May 6.

The way in which Brown and Cameron launched their campaigns has been quite different and I think this campaign will be interesting in a whole range of ways:

the leadership debates

For the first time the 3 main party leaders will face each other directly in three debates live on prime time tv.

I have some very big reservations about the debates.

It doesn’t quite fit with the nature of UK politics.  We don’t elect a prime minister, we elect our local MP.  The party with the largest number of MPs  is asked by the Queen to form a government.  It’s highly unlikely, but the leader of any party could not be elected in their local constituency.  That said, we’ll hopefully hear some of the real policy differences between the parties.

My second reservation is that it paints the election as a straight choice between 3 parties.  Of course the political reality is that Labour or the Conservatives will form a government with the Liberal Democrats holding sway in the event of a hung parliament.  But why should it be that way?  Presenting the election in this light seems to deny that in each constituency there will be a huge range of candidates.  The very nature of these debates emphasises that a vote for anyone other that the big 3 parties is a wasted vote.  It’s not.

the Interweb

This is the first internet election.  So far it seems that the Tories are the only party to have embraced this reality but again the nature of British politics where each local contest is an election campaign in isolation in many ways means that a consistent party line might be almost impossible to maintain.  Viral posters like the Guardian’s “Outside Now Posh Boy” and Airbrushed For Change will play a part in reinforcing messages.

It will also be interesting to see if Twitter, Facebook and blogging will engage people in political debate.

My employer, The United Reformed Church, has given its full support of the ‘Robin Hood Tax’ campaign launched on 10 February by a broad coalition of domestic charities, aid agencies, unions, faith organisations and green groups.

I don’t like the name but I do support the idea.

The campaign is calling on the leaders of the UK’s main political parties to support a global financial transaction tax on banks – of around 0.05% – to help repair damage caused by the global economic crisis, to protect public services at home, fight poverty abroad and help foot the bill for climate change environmental measures.

Financial transactions are one of the few transactions that aren’t taxed.  You pay tax on the interest you earn on your bank account and on almost everything you buy.

Commenting on the moral imperative for such a tax, the Revd John Marsh, Moderator of the General Assembly of the United Reformed Church said: “The human suffering caused by the global financial crisis has been immense and the impact on vulnerable households in the UK and abroad devastating.  Whilst it cannot restore lost jobs and livelihoods, this global financial transaction tax will go a long way to restoring public trust in financial institutions by raising up to £250 billion a year to fund critical development programmes here and abroad.”

Mr Marsh concluded: “Implementation of the global financial transaction tax would also serve to shift the public discourse from blame and retribution to hope: a governmental commitment to the common good is desperately needed in these stark times.”

In November 2009 the United Reformed Church adopted a motion in support of the financial transaction levy (the forerunner of the proposed global financial transaction tax).  The adopted motion highlighted the United Reformed Church’s concern over the impact of the economic recession on the poor and vulnerable; the possibility of cuts to social benefits and public services being advocated by political parties in the lead-up to the General Election; and the likely impact the enormous deficit in public finances will have on the UK’s commitments to international development and climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Why not sign the petition and show your support for the Robin Hood Tax.