Election thoughts
It’s been a hectic couple of days; I voted on the way to a job which came up late; another job came up for today in the middle of that job which itself finished well after 11pm last night. So there was no question of staying up all night to see the results come in. I’m pleased the Tories didn’t win; I’m not surprised that Labour did win, although I’m disappointed that they lost so much to the Tories and that the Lib Dems didn’t gain much. This post will, I expect, be written briefly as I really want to go to bed.
(1) Nobody should be surprised that Michael Howard is stepping down. That is standard practice for a Tory leader after he (or she, although no woman has ever actually been in this position) loses an election. This is what happened to John Major and William Hague, and I have heard that Edward Heath made enemies by not standing down immediately after losing the 1974 election.
(2) I’m so glad Howard is all but history. “I want the next Conservative leader to have much more time than I had to prepare our party for government,” the BBC reports him as saying. Fact is, Howard lost because he (particularly) and his party are so unattractive. If the Tories had presented a viable alternative to Bliar and the gang, he could easily have won. As it is, their main thrust was immigration, and to push this issue they hired Lynton Crosby, whose main tactics are called the “wedge” (pushing divisive issues) and the “dog whistle”, addressing slogans to different groups in their “own language”. Are people going to vote for a party which calls them dogs? ‘Nuff said. Michael Howard sucks. He sucked as Home Secretary, and he would still suck as PM. They should get him out of the Parliamentary party sharpish.
And by the way, how long are they going to recycle people who were ministers under Thatcher? I’ve heard the name Malcolm Rifkind mentioned as a potential leadership candidate. How long is it going to be before the Tory party starts to look like it came out of the Eastern bloc?
(3) The Northern Ireland results are depressing to say the least. The “moderate” parties (Ulster Unionist Party and Social Democratic & Labour Party) have been reduced to the benefit of the extremist Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein. Gerry Adams promises to represent not just the Republicans of West Belfast but everyone there, including those who didn’t vote for him. How can he represent them if he refuses to take his seat in Parliament? (Sinn Fein MPs do this because to take their seats would require an oath of allegiance to the Queen. For some reason they don’t like the Tony Benn approach.) As for the DUP, I saw Ian Paisley on the news shouting (Paisley always shouts) that there won’t be a united Ireland today, tomorrow or any other day. Given the huge proportion of northern Ireland’s population who voted Sinn Fein, I’d say he shouldn’t count his chickens before they hatch (even though these days there’s not much to choose between the two countries).
By the way, Trimble is actually not much of a moderate. I remember the 1996 Orange march crisis in which Trimble (a member of the Orange order himself) was directly involved with the campaign to allow Orangemen to march through places where the residents did not want it. They pretty much beseiged one Catholic neighbourhood in 1996 until the state gave in.
(4) Galloway. I am actually surprised that he won and that none of the other Muslim campaigns against high-profile Labour MPs succeeded. Harry at Harry’s Place writes, “it was truly a horrible feeling to walk from Cable Street, with all that resonates from that address, to a polling station where people were voting on communal lines”. But all that has happened here is that the Muslim community often has different issues from other working-class people (indeed, not all of them are working class), and that is particularly so here. This result demonstrates to all the parties that they cannot simply take any community’s vote for granted even if most of them traditionally vote for them. It also demonstrates how concerned Muslims are for our fellow believes in other parts of the world; we certainly don’t want our taxes spent on bombing Muslim countries.
Even if this was a “communal” campaign, at the end of the day there are more than a million Muslims in the UK and I fail to see why we are not entitled to a representative. After all, what was the Labour party founded for other than to represent the Labour movement? That’s a community, isn’t it? And once it found it couldn’t represent average working people, it moved on. As I said before, I don’t think Galloway is a good representative – apart from not being Muslim, he’s not even local. Then again, plenty of Labour MPs (and Tories) are not local to the seats they represent. Geraint Davies, former Labour MP for Croydon Central, is from Ceredigion county in Wales. Tony Blair has no hint of a north-eastern accent, and Margaret Thatcher (whose Parliamentary seat was for Finchley in north London) was from Lincolnshire. The bitterness which followed the “parachuting” of Shaun Woodward (who defected from the Tory party) into a working-class constituency in the north-west is well-known. I strongly suspect that the massive reduction in the Labour vote has a lot to do with the war in Iraq, but the Galloway result shows what happens when you take a community’s support for granted.
