Genius in action

I voted yesterday. It was very exciting. Borough council, Parish council, referendum on the alternative vote. Democracy in action – at least, for the 41% of the electorate who could be arsed to show up. Perhaps a lot of people had to wash their hair yesterday, or spend a lot more time than usual sitting on the toilet reading Heat magazine. Sorry, people, if you can’t be bothered to get off your backsides to complete the incredibly arduous task of ticking a box on a piece of paper, you don’t get to gripe about the results, whatever they might be. For all of the interminable talk all over the news channels today about the electorate delivering a clear message to the coalition/Nick Clegg/Kerry Katona David Cameron, the biggest story, I think, is how few people took the trouble to show up, given the level of cuts that our current Coalition of the Damned is trying to push through parliament at the moment.

The vote itself, however, was more or less eclipsed for me by the comedy genius in charge of the grounds at my local polling station. My local polling station is a school – actually, the junior school I went to myself, once upon a time. And yes, the thought of Mrs. S*********** still gives me the creeps to the point where attempting to type her name makes me shudder… and, regarding Mrs. S***********, digressing for a moment and apropos of nothing, I can’t imagine how on earth you can do an effective job of teaching a class of 9-year-olds while wearing elaborate makeup, high-heeled boots and inch-long false nails. She presumably can’t either, because she didn’t. Do an effective job of teaching a class of 9-year-olds, I mean*. She did wear the makeup, the boots and the false nails. She still does, I think. I saw her at the supermarket a few weeks ago, which was a reminder that it’s not safe to go out around here without a wooden stake and a couple of heads of garlic in your pocket. Brrrrr.

ANYway.

The part of the building used as a polling station has an outside door that can be reached via two paths. One path – the shorter one -  has flat, step-free access from the street, and the other one has three steps down from the entrance (the building is on a slight slope). There is now  a fairly heavy-duty metal fence around the property (there wasn’t 30-odd years ago when I went there), with big, lockable gates at the pedestrian entrances. The gate to the path with the steps was open. The gate to the flat, step-free path to the polling station door was padlocked, with a disabled access sign hung on it with a notice underneath saying ‘FOR DISABLED ACCESS, ASK INSIDE’.

You know, after having manoeuvred your wheelchair/invalid carriage/zimmer frame down three big concrete steps first. If you had any kind of mobility impairment, and you turned up to vote alone, you were basically screwed until someone else either entered or exited the building.

I’m impressed. Really, really impressed. It takes a special kind of genius to do something that stupid. Presumably whoever locked the gate and wrote the sign imagined that any disabled people who showed up would somehow be able to levitate over a five foot high metal fence. It’s things like this that make you realize Darwin can’t have been entirely correct.

* Favourite Mrs. S*********** memory – she made us do silent reading for half an hour, and had previously issued me with a reading book that was several levels below the kind of stuff I was reading at home. I finished it in about ten minutes and took it back to her desk to ask for another book – and without looking up, she told me I couldn’t have finished it, and to go and read it again. Dreadful, dreadful woman.

Election II: The Misguided Revenge of Elwyn Watkins

This time it’s personal.

Oh, wait. It was personal the first time too, and that’s the problem.

It’s been all over the news all day. My MP, Phil Woolas, is apparently no longer my MP. I have no MP. Oldham East and Saddleworth is rudderless. My sakes, how on earth will we cope?

A specially-convened election court has found Mr. Woolas guilty of breaching the Representation of the People Act 1983. He’s been suspended from the Labour Party; there will apparently be a statement on Monday about his status as MP, but in the meantime his election has been declared void. He’s seeking a judicial review of the ruling, but the likelihood is that we’ll have to suffer another election. Apparently, one wasn’t enough. In the meantime, he’s barred from standing for parliament for three years. The odds are that his political career is effectively over.

He’s been found guilty of making false statements about the character and conduct of his Lib-Dem opponent, Elwyn Watkins. The charges were brought by Mr. Watkins, who was beaten in May by a margin of just 103. And, for all sorts of reasons, it’s troubling.

On the one hand, yes, the election campaign in this constituency was brutally negative. This was a Lib-Dem target seat and Mr. Watkins and his team pulled out all the stops to claw it from Mr. Woolas. Indeed, the Lib-Dem pamphlets and mailings were the first to get personal in their attacks on their opponents (God help me, I read all this stuff when it came through the letterbox). The Lib-Dem campaign, in fact, went negative less than 24 hours after the election was called. Among other things, they more than implied that Mr. Woolas’s parliamentary expenses claims were fraudulent, and that he was, therefore, a criminal; there were certainly a couple of claims made in error, but they were more or less certainly genuine mistakes. As the campaign went on, the accusations from both sides became wilder and wilder (since the Tory candidate was never going to win this seat – he finished trailing a fairly distant third – he managed to remain mostly above the fray.)  Mr. Woolas – and this is inexcusable – cynically played the race card in a constituency in which there is a very real racial divide, and tried to play on white fear of Muslim extremism by presenting Mr. Watkins as a candidate who had allegedly tried to woo the extremist vote, whatever that is. Disgusting and distasteful, yes – and I didn’t vote for Mr. Woolas – but also no less vicious than the crap printed by Mr. Watkins’ own team.

Beyond that, I have a bigger issue with the way all of this has played out. We had an election campaign, and it got very nasty indeed. Both sides sailed too close to the wind. We cast our votes, the votes were counted and then recounted twice, and there was a result. And then the loser – who had, himself, behaved appallingly badly during the campaign – lodged £5000 with the court himself to trigger the challenge. If anybody else had put up the money, I’d have less of a problem with it. As it is, whatever the rights and wrongs of who said what about whom, more than anything else this smacks of a bad loser throwing a fit because he didn’t win the prize.

And, in the end, it’s hard not to feel at least a little sorry for Phil Woolas. He fought a dirty campaign – but he did so against an opponent who also played fast and loose with the rules. He sometimes seemed to be out of his depth as a minister – Joanna Lumley wiped the floor with him over the Ghurka issue (justifiably, the government’s position was wrong, and insupportable – if we’re prepared to send people into battle on our behalf, we should be prepared to let them live here afterwards) – but he’s been a good, committed and genuinely caring constituency MP, and it shouldn’t give anyone any pleasure to see his career end in humiliation. It’s been particularly nauseating to watch the Labour Party drop him like a hot potato, and it’s been just as nauseating to watch Simon Hughes, the deputy leader of the Lib-Dems, effectively gloating on national television, as if his party’s candidate’s behaviour during the campaign was above reproach.

The big question now, of course, is what’s going to happen next. Mr. Woolas is seeking a judicial review, yes, but it’s more or less certain that we’re going to have another election, a prospect which I’m sure absolutely nobody, apart from Mr. Watkins, views with anything even slightly resembling joy. The Tories will have to pay for another campaign they’ve no hope of winning. Labour will have to find another candidate, who will have to run in a seat where the last Labour MP’s personal reputation has been shot down in flames in the national press. The Lib-Dems will have to run a by-election campaign when they’re rating far, far lower in opinion polls than they were in April, and try and sell their platform to an electorate that, in the centre and on the left, is increasingly mistrustful of the coalition that they themselves engineered. Mr. Watkins lost in May, and it’s by no means certain that he’ll win the rematch, whenever it’s called. He certainly won’t be getting my vote – and, yes, this time it *is* personal. There’s a certain delicious irony in Mr. Watkins using his own money to lodge a complaint that will lead to a by-election in which it’s very likely that he’ll be far more roundly defeated than he was the first time. Whoever Labour puts in to stand in Mr. Woolas’s place is quite likely to be returned to Parliament with a substantially increased majority. Sometimes, in politics, it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.

Honestly Sincere

After the horse-trading comes the honeymoon. But first, the press conference. Obviously. What’s the use of having cameras if you can’t play to them?

We got a new government the other night. Conveniently, we got it in Prime Time, which is so much more user-friendly than calling the result of an election at 4am when nobody’s watching, unless you happen to be trying to watch EastEnders. Our long (or rather, long-weekend) national nightmare is over, at least for this week.

Certainly, the air is full of talk of optimism, cooperation and compromise. We have a coalition government for the first time in, ooh, yonks. The Tories and Lib-Dems have hammered out a coalition agreement that, essentially, smooths out the most controversial sections of each manifesto into a frothy milkshake of moderate policy goodness. Except it might be laced with arsenic. It’s a brave new world, apparently.

And yet… let’s flashback for a moment, to May 2nd 1997. Depending on whether your sympathies lay with Labour or the Tories, that morning marked either the beginning of an era or the end of one. It was the end of more or less exactly 17 years of Tory government. First-time voters had no memory of any other political party ever having been in power, That morning, whichever side of the fence you were on, it really was a brave new world. Change was in the air, and all over the newspapers, and on every TV channel (granted, for most of us, in 1997 there were only four or five of those, rather than the forty gazillion we have today). When I went out, I could feel it. We could all feel it. However much our perspective might have changed, however much history might now view Blair and his government as having been horribly flawed, that morning there was something new in the air.

I didn’t quite get that today. Now, possibly that’s because I was living in Canada for most of the Blair years, so I only viewed them from a distance, whereas I experienced the full horror of Thatcher and Major (I vividly remember the day Thatcher was forced out of office – I was home sick from school, and I watched the whole thing on TV). But still – same party in power for 13 years, first-time voters once again probably can’t remember anyone else ever having been in power, we have a coalition government for the first time in decades, and it’s supposedly a decisive shift away from the adversarial two-parties-and-a-runner-up system we’ve known and barely tolerated for as many elections as any of us can recall… if Britain on May 2nd 1997 felt like a newly-minted country that had undergone a decisive paradigm shift, surely that should also have been the case on May 12th 2010. But it wasn’t.

There was no theme tune by D:Ream this time around, for which relief much thanks, but there was no great sense of triumph anywhere either, as far as I can see. The brutal truth is that nobody won, so instead of a parade we got a carefully stage-managed spectacle designed to show us all that we’re all winners, even though we probably aren’t, in a press conference in the garden behind Number 10 that contained more fake bonhomie than every television programme Bruce Forsyth ever made rolled into a single nightmarish whole.

There’s something deeply peculiar about watching two people who a week ago had a death-grip on each other’s throats acting like they’re BFF in front of a garden full of journalists. Clegg and Cameron are both smooth TV performers, and we all know that relations between politicians from opposite sides of the house are rarely as frosty as they may seem during, say, micromanaged TV debates or Prime Minister’s Question Time; even so, the smiles seemed to be superglued in place. The overall effect was something like watching Siamese twins who don’t like each other much mugging their way through a rendition of Conrad Birdie’s biggest hit, only without the quiff and the fainting teenage girls. They even managed to laugh off a question about something evil Cameron said about Clegg during the campaign (Q: What’s your favourite joke? A: Nick Clegg. An oldie, not a goodie). They were each doing their best impression of being Honestly Sincere, and they very nearly got away with it. Neither of them pulled a knife, and the Modroc grins held firm.

Except, of course, what we were watching wasn’t quite what it seemed. The extended Cameron-Clegg PDA wasn’t simply about solidifying a coalition agreement in front of the cameras. Here were two men fighting for their political futures, in the full knowledge that those futures may be startlingly brief. Compromise politics are something we’re going to have to get used to, and that’s a good thing if we can get it right, but long-term  inter-party cooperation has not been a major recurring theme in Britain’s political history. When there’s an overall majority on one side of the house or the other, the first-past-the-post system means that our politicians rarely have to make nice to their opponents. The best-case scenario, in this instance, is probably the best possible outcome of this unwinnable election: a stable government, with the worst excesses of a Tory administration sanded down and counterbalanced by at least some parts of the Lib Dem reform package, a combination that, if it works, should be more palatable to the progressive majority than one-party Tory rule.

But it may not work, and if it fails there will be consequences for both Cameron and Clegg. Cameron should have been able to secure an outright majority, but he didn’t. Clegg has taken his party to bed with an opponent that his grassroots members do not trust. Labour, sidelined in the coalition negotiations, are regrouping and shopping for a new leader, and hopefully have the basic common sense to make it not be Ed Balls, although Prime Minister Balls would undoubtedly be a priceless comedy gift for the ages. Nobody wants another election, but Cameron will have to go to the country if the coalition fails. In that event, the likeliest outcome is that both the Tories and the Lib Dems will be punished at the polls; the likely result of that is that Cameron and Clegg would spend the duration of the next parliament in Siberia, or at least on the back benches. These are relatively young men, and their careers would recover from that kind of five-year blip; William Hague has managed to bounce back from his spectacular electoral crash-and-burn in 2001. But that can’t be the trajectory either man has mapped out for himself.

And, away from the grotesquely bucolic scene in the Downing Street garden, the cracks were already beginning to show. Clearly the acting coaches hadn’t quite managed to fit everybody in since the coalition negotiations were concluded the night before. When the BBC asked Vince Cable about his new job as a minister in the coalition cabinet, the pause before he answered was almost Pinteresque. The pause, indeed, was more eloquent than the stammered answer that followed, and there lies the problem. Cameron and Clegg are media-savvy political operators. They know how to tap-dance for the camera. Cable, for all his considerable skill, really is honestly sincere, and honest sincerity may not be the best quality when it comes to negotiating the delicately choreographed dance of mutual compromise that lies ahead.