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The return of Tory Britain....brought to you courtesy of those ‘progressive’ Lib Dems. I have been in the habit of putting the word ‘progressive’ in inverted commas when writing about the Lib Dems, and I think I’ve been vindicated by yesterday’s events.

Throughout the campaign the Tory party and the media warned voters 'Vote Clegg, get Brown’. In fact it turned out to be 'Vote Clegg, Get Cameron'. Not that we should be all that surprised by two very posh Oxbridge graduates from wealthy elite backgrounds deciding to go into government with each other.

The writing was on the wall a long way back- I think it was our old friend Charlie Marks who first coined the term ‘David Cleggeron’ , back in December 2007.
(Charlie, take a bow, and please, please, return to blogging!)

One last thing- I bet the distinguished 'progressive' signatories to this letter feel like right wallies now.

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This piece of mine appears in The First Post

Neil Clark: Brown should have strung the bankers up from the lamp-posts – it’s what the public wanted

He's been called the worst Prime Minister ever - and that was by a politician from his own party. But was Gordon Brown, who announced that he was stepping down as Labour leader yesterday, really that bad?

The biggest charge made against Brown is that he has left Britain with a record budget deficit, expected to rise to 12 per cent of GDP later this year - the highest in the EU.

But his refusal to make swingeing cuts in public spending during the worst global recession since the Wall Street Crash meant that for millions of ordinary Britons the slump was nowhere near as painful as the recessions in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, when the Conservatives were running the country.

Despite dire predictions when Britain first went into recession, mortgage repossessions never hit the level of 1992, when 75,000 people lost their homes and interest rates hit 15 per cent. Part of that was due to the Prime Minister's refusal to let 'market forces' destroy people's lives. It has been estimated that around 330,000 families have benefited from the various initiatives that Brown introduced to help struggling home-owners.

The Prime Minister's policy - of waiting for economic recovery before wielding the axe on public spending - may have been slated by the opposition and the Tory media, but it undoubtedly has helped save jobs and kept a roof over many people's heads.

Under his premiership, Brown moved his party, ever so slightly, to a more social democratic position. The top rate of income tax was raised to 50 per cent - a significant move away from Blairism. Northern Rock and leading banks were nationalised. His foreign policy tone was softer than his predecessor's: contrast Brown's calls for an immediate ceasefire when Israel invaded Gaza with his predecessor's dismissals of such calls when Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006.

These moves were enough to make Rupert Murdoch's neo-conservative, Tony Blair-adoring media empire turn against him, but not enough to entice former Labour voters, who had grown disillusioned with the rightwards shift of the party under Tony Blair, back into the fold.

You can read the rest of the piece here.

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Confused about what's going on in British politics?

Perhaps this article and this one can shed some light on the situation.
Richard Littlejohn accuses the much maligned Gordon Brown of engineering ‘a cynical coup attempt’.

I think he’s got the wrong man.

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 It's a World Cup year, and England's chances look good. Chelsea's all-star team have made it to the FA Cup final. And the members of the Labour government, having survived some tough economic times, are hoping that the improved economic situation will help them win another term in office.

No, I'm not referring to Britain in the spring of 2010, but exactly 40 years earlier, in 1970. Back then, in one of the biggest British political upsets of the 20th century, Labour lost an election it should, by all rights, have won. Forty years on, could the reverse be about to happen? Might the party win an unexpected victory in an election it really ought to lose?

The impressive economic record of the 1966-70 Wilson government is one of the great under-reported stories in British postwar history. The country's success had much to do with the intelligent policies pursued by Labour between 1968 and 1970, and in particular the skill of Roy Jenkins, arguably the most successful chancellor since the Second World War.

After the devaluation of the pound in November 1967, Jenkins dampened down domestic demand -- raising taxes by a record £923m in his first Budget -- and channelled resources to the export sector. The revenue raised by the government's innovative Selective Employment Tax, a levy on service-sector employment introduced in 1966, went to subsidise export industries.

The result of Labour's pro-manufacturing polices was that in 1969/70 Britain recorded a record balance of payments surplus of £550m: "one of the strongest in the world", by Jenkins's own estimation.

The public finances were also in rude health -- a borrowing requirement of £1.96bn in 1967/68 had been transformed into a surplus of £600m by the end of 1969. And, fuelled by the export boom, GNP grew by over 6 per cent between the middle of 1967 and the end of 1969.


Shock and gloom

A strong economy, and the publication of a series of opinion polls showing a clear Labour lead, convinced Prime Minister Harold Wilson to call an early election for June 1970.

Victory appeared a formality. Wilson was at the top of his game: his easygoing, pipe-smoking, man-of-the-people persona contrasted sharply with the stiffness of his Conservative opponent, Edward Heath. In early June, the bookies were offering odds of 20-1 on that Labour would win.

Then it all went horribly wrong.

The first result of election night, at Guildford, in Surrey, showed a 5.35 per cent swing to the Tories. Wilson's biographer Philip Ziegler says those who were close to the Labour leader "attested to the deep shock and gloom into which he had been thrown".


The party that couldn't possibly lose did just that. Some blamed Wilson's overconfidence in calling an early poll. Others thought that the unexpectedly poor trade figures in May were significant. Still others -- rather unfairly -- criticised Roy Jenkins's 1970 Budget for being too cautious.
Some even speculated that England's dramatic exit from the 1970 World Cup -- surrendering a 2-0 lead against Germany to lose 3-2 in extra time -- played its part. After all, Wilson had associated himself with the England football team when it had won the World Cup in 1966.
But perhaps Labour lost simply because too many of their supporters thought victory was guaranteed and stayed at home.


Forty years on, the current Labour government is an outsider to win the election. But could the odds be upset again? On the basis of its record over the past 13 years, you could argue that Labour doesn't really deserve to be re-elected. Credit is due for having the wisdom not to introduce swingeing public spending cuts at the height of a global recession, but New Labour's overall record on the economy since 1997 has been disappointing, to say the least.


While Harold Wilson's Labour Party put manufacturing and exports first, New Labour has shamelessly courted the City of London. Almost 1.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost and the trade deficit has reached £3.8bn.


But then again, in 1970 Labour didn't really deserve to lose. If the party does pull off a surprise victory on Thursday, it will have far less to do with its record in office than a general lack of enthusiasm for the opposition. Elections, as we saw in 1970, don't always go to the party that deserves to win. And knowledge of the completely unexpected events of 40 years ago must give Labour hope that, even at this late hour, all is not yet lost.

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This piece of mine appears in The First Post.

It'll be the end of the world as we know it. Britain will be plunged into severe economic crisis. There'll be a run on the pound and we will suffer the same ignominious fate as Greece.

So go the dire warnings propagated by the Tory media of what will happen if Britain's voters fail to fulfill their patriotic duty and give David Cameron an overall majority in Thursday's general election.

But like other right-wing tactics down the years, it's a claim that doesn’t bear close scrutiny. The notorious 1924 'Zinoviev letter', threatening Communist agitation, turned out to be a forgery. The warnings in 1983 that a nuclear-disarmed Britain would leave us defenceless against a Soviet invasion, and the Sun’s front-page headline in 1992 - "If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights" - were scaremongering ploys of the lowest order.

Far from being a national disaster, there's a strong case for arguing that a hung parliament - which on the eve of the election is an odds-on bet at some bookmakers - would actually be very good news for Britain. Let's take a look at the historical precedents.

It's simply not true to say that the last time we had a minority government propped up by the Liberals - in the 1970s - it was an abject failure which led to 'paralysis', as Dominic Sandbrook maintains in Wednesday's Daily Mail.
The 1977/8 Lib-Lab pact, which sustained James Callaghan's Labour administration in power, was in fact extraordinarily successful: during that time both inflation and unemployment fell and the general economic outlook improved considerably.

And what on earth was wrong with Britain's wartime coalition governments? Did they lead to weakness and instability? Those who argue that 'strong' single-party governments always out-perform 'weak' coalitions really ought to get out more - at least across the English Channel.

Can anyone seriously maintain that Britain, with its 'strong' governments over the past 30 years, has been better governed than the likes of Germany, Austria and The Netherlands, where coalitions have been the norm? The Cameron-backing press conveniently neglects to mention that the Hellenic Republic doesn't have a 'weak' coalition ruling the country, but a supposedly 'strong' one-party government.


You can read the rest of the piece here:

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If you agree that the banks and financial institutions should always be bailed out by the government then do not vote for the SLP.

If you agree that the bankers, speculators and hedge fund operators should continue to heap lavish bonuses upon themselves then do not vote for the SLP.

If you believe that the NHS should continue to be sliced up and hawked off to private enterprise where profit comes first then do not vote for the SLP.

If you believe that the gap in wealth between a tiny financial elite and the rest of the population should continue to increase then do not vote for the SLP.

If you agree that British soldiers and innocent civilians should continue to die in foreign wars fought for control of energy supplies, when Britain as an island stands on hundreds of years of coal then do not vote for the SLP.

If you believe that Britain should have no manufacturing industry of its own and should rely on imports of essential supplies from the most unstable regions of the world then do not vote for the SLP.

I might also add, if you believe that the wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq were good things, do not vote for the SLP.

And if you believe that Britain’s railways, public transport, energy and water companies are better off in the private sector, do not vote for the SLP.

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This article of mine appears in today's First Post.

Neil Clark: If the Lib Dems force a coalition, every party could fragment- including Nick Clegg's.

Imagine a British political landscape without a Labour or Conservative Party. Where there are several political parties, all with a realistic chance of making it into government. Where single-party administrations are a thing of the past and multi-party coalitions are the norm.

Sounds far-fetched? It could happen much sooner than you think.

If the Liberal Democrats do hold the balance of power in next week's general election, as the opinion polls predict, then Britain's antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system will be kicked into touch.

But the adoption of proportional representation - the price the Lib Dems will demand for propping up a Tory or Labour government, whichever it turns out to be - won't only mean fairer elections in the future, it is also likely to lead to the radical transformation of our party system. And I mean radical.

While supporters of first-past-the-post denounce the idea of peacetime coalition government as being horribly 'un-British', in one sense we've had coalitions for years. Both the Labour and Conservative parties are coalitions, made up of people holding a wide range of opinions, who only stay together due to electoral convenience.

The Conservative Party includes socially liberal Europhiles such as Ken Clarke, and socially conservative EU-haters like Lord Tebbit. In today's Parliamentary Labour Party you can find the unequivocally anti-war socialist John McDonnell, and the darling of the right-wing media, Frank Field, a man who sits on the advisory board of the free market think-tank, Reform.

What keeps our two 'broad church' main parties together is the knowledge that under first-past-the-post any breakaway party has little chance of getting into government, even if, like the SDP in the early 1980s, it is led by well-known political figures and attracts plenty of positive media coverage.

But under PR all that will change. Political marriages of convenience will no longer be quite so convenient and, for some divorce will look a far more attractive option.

You can read the rest of the article here.

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