Published on Facebook today..
I heard the latest rundown on the British local elections that occured earlier this past week straight from the mouth of the Beeb itself as I sped away from Camp Dodge on Friday towards West Des Moines and Trader Joe's for a quick stint of shopping before rushing home as quick as I could.
I winced. And then I gasped. Clegg and his home-peeps had been taken to the woodshed. More than that, it was as if the British electorate had picked up the Liberal Democrats by the scruff of the neck, dragged them into the garden and laid into them with a length of rubber hose. It wasn't your regular electoral drubbing, oh no- that they would have been happy with. This was the beatdown to end all beatdowns and the sad part about it is that they seem to have jumped directly out of the frying pan and right into the fire.
What a pity. I've always had a soft spot for third political parties that actually work and win seats and get somewhere, so the Liberal Democrats have always been a favorite of mine. How I wish America would get a third political party- it doesn't even have to be anything so exciting as the Liberal Democrats, Social Democrats, New Democrats (see Canada)- just one more party. It doesn't have to win everything, it just has to be there and have a voice in the debate so we all don't experience the joyful feeling of walking into the voting booth every couple of years and thinking 'damn, I need these two parties like I need a colonoscopy with no lube.' Yeah, it's that painful.
But I digress: it was interesting as the blessedly short British electoral cycle kicked into gear last year- in fact, I couldn't wait, because, for the first time ever, it was going to feature a live, televised debate between the leaders of all three major parties. I had a tickle in the back of my oxipital about this. The LibDems have had to fight for press attention and coverage every single electoral cycle and with the right leader saying the right things they could break the election wide open- it'd be Kennedy-Nixon all over again, only without the annoying family baggage and Marilyn Monroe floating around in the background.
And wouldn't you know it? I was right. Clegg-o was telegenic, talked sense and looked a helluva lot better than dear old dour Gordon Brown and slick Davey Cameron, he of the repackaged Old Boy's Club and for a couple of weeks it looked as though for one tantalizing moment that the LibDems might have something going. But then Labour and the Tories played catch-up in a big way. Cameron went out of his way to prove that he wasn't Margaret Thatcher in a man suit and when the dust cleared, no one had overall control.
Here's where I've got to give Clegg credit: the man has balls. Big, solid, steel balls. Because he took the biggest political risk any politician anywhere has ever taken in at least twenty years- and if it worked, it was going to reap his party benefits that they had spent nearly a century dreaming about and if it didn't- it was going to look like a four car pile-up on the Interstate at rush hour: not pretty. He had a hard choice. He could have let Labour back in, in which case, he would have been knifed by the electorate anyway. He could have done nothing and let Cameron sputter around with a minority government for awhile- which could have seen him knifed by the electorate if the economy would have gone south in a major way. Or he could swing for the fences.
And that's what he did. He sold his nominally left of center party on a coalition with the Conservatives, said it was right, responsible and demanded as a price what Liberal Democrats had been dreaming of: a vote on voting reform. The idea was, from what I could tell that Clegg and His Home Peeps would act as a calming influence on the rabid tendencies of the Conservatives. Don't want a return the lunatic eurosceptic Thatcherite right wing, he said, put us in there! And that's what they did.
Only it didn't really work out that way. The Conservatives made it clear that they were in charge and that the LibDems were the junior partner and hung their partners out to dry on the massive rise in UK Student Fees which would allow Universities to charge up to $18,000 a year- riots ensued, people were pissed off and it was a massive LibDem walk back as Clegg had promised to hold the line on student fees. People were pissed. People remembered and Clegg's gloriously insane gamble exploded in his face.
(As a side note: if there were riots in the United States everytime Universities raised tuition, there'd be no Universities left. They would all be smoking holes in the ground. Disaffected, apathetic college students take note: you're being hosed!)
But it's worse than that: the voting reform referendum got spanked. Hard. Clegg came closer than any Liberal leader ever had and was rebuffed. The Conservatives didn't help by pretty much running against their coalition partners on this one- Cameron's strategy apparently is to use the LibDems as a bomb shelter to cover his ass from all the budget cutting he's going to have to do in the name of economic austerity. If there's any comfort for the LibDems at the end of this godawful week, it's that Cameron's strategy seems to have blown up in his face as well. By not buttressing the LibDem vote even the slightest bit and just letting them swing, he wrought a whole new Constitutional problem in Scotland, where the LibDems collapsed in a heap (as they apparently did nationwide) and Labour still hasn't pulled it's head of its ass and the Scottish Nationalist Party came waltzing into sole control of the Scottish Parliament.
Ooops. Latest polls from over there show that maybe 1/3rd of Scots are in favor of independence- but SNP Leader Alex Salmond is playing it cool, pushing for a referendum not now, but in 2014 at the earliest, when he might have made enough of a case for independence to get a win.
Cameron and the Tories have made a hash of this, exposing the coalition for what it was all along, not a coalition, but a marriage of convinience- which has suddenly become quite inconvinient for the LibDems. It may not happen now, it may not happen two months from now, but I'm betting Britain will be heading for the polls by year's end if not sooner. The LibDems were hung out to dry by their supposed coalition partners and they need to get the knifings over with, get some distances from this mess and start picking up the pieces as soon as they possibly can.
Hard to blame Clegg though. I can't say I can think of any other LibDem leader that would have passed up the opportunity to get a shot at a referendum on voting reform- problem is though that if you sell people on the idea that you can control the crazy Tories, you've actually got to be able to do that. He didn't and the biggest political gamble of all time exploded as a result.
Again though, Cameron and the Tories reap what they sow. They hung the LibDems out to dry, perhaps operating under the assumption that the Conservative Party would somehow make inroads in Scotland- which was beyond foolish. The Labour Landslide of 1997 wiped them out and the Scots remember nearly two decades of right-wing foolishness in Britain. They're not going blue anytime soon, if ever. It might have seemed like good politics at the time, but standing by while the LibDems got knifed and left for dead means that Prime Minister Cameron and all his merry men now have the looming prospect of a Scottish Independence vote to deal with and all the Constitutional messiness that will entail.
In other words, they've jumped straight from the frying pan directly into the fire. If I was Clegg and the LibDems, I'd cut your losses and return the favor. Hang Cameron and the Boys out to dry and see how they tackle the new reality. If nothing else, Britain would then really know what kind of a government they've got.
And, after all, turnabout is fair play.
No comments:
Post a Comment