The end of one mess and the start of another

Here ends the addled election, the messiest since 1974, and here starts the constitutional mess of making sense of the result as the electorate decides not to decide and gives the problem back to the politicians who're so busy fighting each other they've no idea how to decide anything. Not even their salaries.

The campaign never came alight and certainly didn't grip the nation so instead of doing their job and telling the nation how they proposed to get it out of the mess, the politicians merely attacked each other and warned of dire consequences if the other lot got in while the minor party filled the sky with pie.

Ed Miliband grew in stature while David Cameron shrank and was forced desperately to pump himself up towards the end. Milo at least tried to protect a vision of a better society then spoiled it by proposing a gravestone of platitudes  such as "all teeth regularly brushed" and "babies bottoms regularly wiped" while Cameron concentrated on fear creation "murder, rape and higher taxes" if Labour wins and "Sporran stripping if the SNP supports Labour" if they don't quite make it. 

Cleggy preached sanctimony, damned the government with faint praise and kicked Labour at every opportunity, UKIP  blamed every problem on immigrants most of whom are part time rapists and the greens promised gluten free cheese for every cauliflower while the electorate turned away and went "Awwwwww" about the Royal baby. 

I see no sign of a last minute trend like the shy Tories who emerged in1992 though the Tory vote might strengthen a little if people decide to cling to nurse in uncertain times though it might not because nurse gives every symptom of being mad and plotting still more cuts. Media always exaggerate new trends so the SNP might not win as many Labour seats as predicted while the Libs who deserve to lose the lot will retain more than they should because Liberal MPs dig in so well. The Tories will also benefit from the incumbency factor which gives MPs a 2% advantage in their second election. 

But none of these trends should be strong enough to break the basic deadlock so though I shouldn't risk a call mine would be that Cam will have first shot at forming a government and fail because they've been such obnoxious bastards and then Miliband will make it with SNP support plus the diminished number of Lib Dems  who if they are to be a genuine centre party of government must be prepared to work with both majors and can't be seen to be turning Labour out.

Then we'll have the fun of weeks of negotiations while I and other failures and rejections walk up and down on College Green where huge studios have been erected for the know all to pontificate about what they can't understand and the new Clarions of the People prostrate themselves to get on telly and have their say,  hoping that's it will stand them in good stead in the run up to Election II and possibly III.  Should be fun

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I've already recorded my bit for the Jeremy Vine show on Monday holding up cards like Bob Dylan ("don't follow leaders.Watch your parking meters").What lessons would I give to new MPs?

1)Don't do it 

2 Be independently wealthy or increase pay 

3 Move parliament to York- so much more convenient for Grimsby 

4) Have three year parliaments- much better for keeping in touch with the people

5) Introduce proportional representation. It's the only way of working multi party politics.

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"dunno" is the best I can do  for a prediction.When you've got such a gulf between politicians and people,when the nation is so fed up and doesn't trust any of us and when the only response politicians  make is to blame everything on each other rather than offer guidance to the future you're going to get non elections which neither stimulate nor excite leading to no score draws which can't  produce a clear winner or a firm government. 

Britain has entered a new era of uncertainty, and the age of strong government is over. Leadership by dictat is no longer possible, coalition building and concessions are the only way forward. But will they work when the politicians have no clear idea of what to do except attack each other, the electorate has no respect for them and doesn't realise the scale of the problem and our malign media proclaims the myth  that Britain is still a world leader and a major power when it's a third rate minor power which hasn't the foggiest idea of what role it wants to play.Unhappy Daze.

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Don't worry about a long period of argument and indecision with no party in a position to form a government. New Zealand had six weeks of neutered government , Belgium's had a year and Denmark several months and it's done none of them any harm. 

The media will bang on about the collapse of sterling but that's good for exports.The rich won't leave en masse nor will the banks and if they do it will be easier to tax their British earnings. The multinationals will stay and manufacturing will expand because it's more competitive.

In any case no government at all will be better than the last lot slashing spending and benefits, paring back the state and imposing a painful and unnecessary austerity for  purely ideological reasons. No government is better than misgovernment. It may even end up with  making Boris leader of the Funservative party instead of the sour Neo-Libs and Conmen in charge today. That would be marvellous.

DESPERATE MEN IN DESPERATE PLEAS

24 hours to go and both Cleggy and Cameron seem to think they're going to lose. How else can one explain Clegg's claim that no government without the diminished band of Libs can be legitimate and even more amazingly Cameron claiming that if Labour come second in seats taking power with the backing of the SNP would not be a legitimate government.

Balls.Whether the Tories are first or second they will have more difficulties in forming a government than Labour because they've got fewer friends.They might get the Ulster Unionists (that they say would be legitimate however much the have to be given to reverse the settlement) and no doubt the Libs would be keen to carry on their affair however few their numbers and however loudly the Tory bank benchers object but if that doesn't give them some guarantee of the 323 they need to survive a motion of confidence they've had it

Then it's Labour's turn  and if it's numbers are enough with SNP support and possibly Liberals desperate for office with anyone, then they govern and that government is legitimate however loudly the Tories and their press supporters howl and attempt to undermine it. The assumption that only a Tory minority government is legitimate is typical Tory arrogance.The belief that they alone are born to rule. In 1911 Balfour defended the House of Lords on the ground that it had the duty "to ensure that whether in power or in opposition the Tory party shall control the destinies of this empire" Now it's the job of English electors to anyone elected by the Scots.

Put simply: whoever can come to an arrangement to secure 323 votes on confidence and supply is the government. If that's Labour, as it should be then whoever denies its elegantly is treasonous. That may not be Cam. If he can't get a majority he'll be thrown out by a party which has never liked him, but that's not for me to say. 

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One issue has not been discussed in this awful election even though it's the basic one and perhaps the only essential issue. Can we rebuild an economy strong enough to support the standard of living ,the quality of life and the public services an advanced educated society has a right to expect, and to pay the nation's way in the world? 

At present the British economy does neither with the result that everything is being cut or taxes will have to be increased, we're having to sell of every available asset from ccompanies to houses to sustain our credit overseas and everyone is in debt up to the hilt to sustain their standard of living.

Yet not a word is said by our leaders about this horrendous problem in case it frightens people  Instead the argue about paying off national debt, balancing the budget neither of which matters because governments have to borrow in recession and should borrow more to stimulate growth and put people back to work. It's daft to take a simplistic moralistic view of government borrowing as if it was the same as household borrowing. It isn't because government borrowing has a multiplier effect. It puts people back to work building houses. It boosts demand. It means there's more money about to stimulate the economy.  Yet all parties cackle on about borrowing as it if was a sin not a virtue and in so doing pledge themselves to depress the economy even more .

What have the parties to offer. The Tories speak of the March of the Makers but industrial production is now falling the pound is too high for exports and productivity is down. Labour will do more borrowing  for investment but shows no realisation that the pound is too high and that too many companies are  foreign owned to serve the national interest. But will either party tell the electorate the truth?

LET'S GET IT OVER WITH!

Only three days to go and it's clear this election should have been brought forward so we can get it over more quickly.The parties have run out of things to say.The newspapers have run out of abuse of Miliband (Edstones apart) and the horrors which will ensure from a Labour government, the electorate is bored and even the candidates have run out of the debating points. They've been deluged with endless repetition which damages the brain.

Yesterday I watched all the regional Question Time on BBC Parliament and was depressed by the quality of the candidates. On programme after programme Tory candidates were chanting the same mantra about the "long term economic plan" or "A strong health service needs a strong economy" 

(Meaning we're not likely to get either) while the Libs countered about"moderating the extremes" and the Greens (who had better candidates) poured out naive impossibilities and UKIP (whose candidates ranged from good to awful)

One thing was clear. They've all been well drilled and can parrot the policies. But they're all just giving the party line. No trace of original thought or their own ideas or any propensity to dissent. The opportunities for dissent will be enormous in a hung parliament but the new chums will be less likely to see them and more inclined to do as they're told by leaders who haven't much idea either.

That means less rebellion more concentration on grinding government down. It's going to be tough but worse for the Tories who'll have more trouble over Europe because they can't define what they want out of a renegotiation and their UKIPer majority won't be satisfied with the conjuring trick Harold Wilson did in 1975. They'll have trouble too over the cuts which are going to be painful if they get back.

A Labour government will be harder work conciliating the SNP, but a Tory one will be messier and more fun to watch as the promises poured out at this election come home to roost..

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Russell Brand calls for an emergency vote for a revolution. Surely it should be 

an emergency non vote for a non- revolution?

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The Editor of the Independent on Sunday hasn't yet accepted my bet that Melanie Onn will win Grimsby by over 2000, she has more faith in the dire prediction of her journalist.

An election which never reached the electorate

The 2015 election has been  such a sad disappointment because it never actually reached the people. It was about them. It will have a crucial effect on their future. Yet it never excited their interest and certainly didn't grip them in any way. They just got on with their straightened lives while the politicians played a game for themselves, like a football match where the teams assault each other and play dirty against each other but the public turn away in distaste.

Britain's small political class has become a small isolated elite who spend their time abusing each other but find difficulty in communicating with the rest of the population who've never been particularly interested in politics and are now repelled by the abusive brawl that politics have become  

Leaders have been well protected from any contact with real people and their problems and have spent their time speaking to specially selected hordes of party supporters. Even when the BBC dragged the leaders before a question time audience praised by the Daily Mail as real people they weren't because the audience was specially selected partisans all intent on abusing someone else's leader

Electors received more pamphlets than ever before but they came through the post not personal delivery and fewer people were canvassed because party membership is much smaller. They were regularly polled but always gave the reply that they had no idea which party they wanted because they didn't really want any.Mass meetings and heckling were a thing of the past.

 The country's in a mess. It can't pay its way in the world,public revenues are inadequate to support the services and structures an advanced society needs and unless we spend to stimulate growth we face a ,long term future of debt decline and squeezed living standards but all this was ignored and no politician gave us any explanation of what we can do to escape from the trap either because they didn't know or because they had no opportunity. All the people got were claims that it was all the fault of the other lot who were certain to make the situation worse.

It was hardly stimulating or exciting. .No wonder the people tell the pollsters that they've decided not to decide

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The parties are begining to worry about the prospect of a second election as in 1974 if no party wins a majority to govern. Which they won't. It will be expensive, after the ruinous costs of the present election .It will be boring because both television and the print media have gone overkill on coverage only to find that the electorate aren't particularly interested. 

I remember in 1974 we pulled out all the stops at Yorkshire TV to give an exciting coverage for the first election but covered the second in a much kore perfunctory fashion  because everyone was bored stiff then.

That will happen again but complicated  ow by the Five Year Term act which was passed to hold the coalition together but now creates an impossible situation .Then Parliament could be dissolved when the PM saw an opportunity as Harold Wilson did in October.Now it can only be dissolved by a two thirds majority which no government is likely to get. So a government can be defeated on a motion of confidence but then someone else has to form an alternative and that would have to be defeated too on the  same basis.

The only way out of this Tory created trap could be that the government has to defeat itself as Schroeder did in Germany by ordering its MPs to vote against it but after all thee money and effort they've put into getting elected in the first place it may be difficult to order turkeys to vote for Christmas.

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Just a thought. If Cleggie is being so punctilious as to set out the conditions on which he'll support a government with his shrunken little army why doesn't he have the guts to do what he should have done last time and say "We will only give support to a major party if it agrees to a referendum on proportional representation as the only way of handling multi-party politics"

I'm getting nervous about the result now

Less than a week to go and this addled election will be over with a muddied campaign producing a muddled result and the country saying to its despised politicians "we can't decide this. You clear up the mess" 

So, in a campaign which has confused the electorate, ignored the problems and promised then unattainable  the emphasis changes from an argument over ideas  to a simple issue of numbers. Who can stitch together the 323 votes necessary to sustain a government and which major party will come closest to the 290 seats it needs as the basic building block for a majority.

With the main polls showing the two main parties neck and neck (meaning a slight advantage in seats for Labour ) everything depends on how well the minors do  Clegg, getting more prissy about deals as he loses the numbers necessary to make them  should be down to about 25 seats, making him a less attractive (but more demanding) partner than the SNP which may get as many as 40  while UKIP will end up with one (Clacton) and be no use to anyone.

Most of the pundits put Cameron ahead in these stakes. I still think Miliband can make it though In always fear a slight move to the incumbent government as a few electors opt to cling to nurse. This gives Labour a real advantage because an incumbent who can win a vote of confidence cant be thrown out under the Fixed Term Parliament act so Labour should use the opportunity to do popular things;repeal the bedroom tax, raise the minimum wage immediately and start a massive house building programme financed  by Quantitive easing while putting HS2 on hold. Then sit it out at least un til after the Scottish elections.

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In an election in which  the parties have changed roles, Labour to caution Tories to spendthrift, in which all have refused to answer questions like where Tory cuts are to fall or where their eight billion for the NHS is to come from the press has a serious responsibility to push them to answers to explain the problems to its readers and to excite their interest in an important election. 

It has singularly failed in that responsibility As a result a confusing election has been worse compounded. This failure has been worse on the part of the quality press, Beaverbrook told the Royal Commission on the press that he used his mighty Daily Express for "propaganda" Murdoch the Barclay Brothers and Rothermere have used their ownership to propagate their own nasty ideologies of neo-liberalism .

No one can quibbled with their right to do this in the editorial columns but such is their power it now permeates everything so that it colours all the news items .Even the columnists instead of offering independent thinking feel obliged to sing from the same hymn sheet. 

Thus Miliband can do no right, every Labour proposal points to disaster, capitalism will collapse and the Scots will use their power to tear the country  apart and independent thinking columnists to who one looks for new insights take every opportunity to knock Labour. The Conservatives of course can do no wrong,their tax cuts are wise if unfunded and the economy is booming.

You cant have an effective democracy with such a prostituted press. People who don't have enough confidence in the country to live and pay their taxes here should not be allowed to exercise so much influence. Particularly since the cues from the press are all followed up by the impartial electronic media who assume that the prejudices of the press  are the issues which concern the people. They aren't.They're the grumblings of greedy foreigners.

SIX DAYS TO THE BORGEN BALLET

As Britain's second hapless election stumbles to its close it looks as though the Great British Public has once again decided not to decide because it doesn't trust any one enough to give them unqualified power. Instead it's going to leave it to the politicians to sort out their own mess and having spent five weeks abusing each other, the parties are going to have to learn the art of courting each other. 

The Tory campaign has been the strongest and the cleverest but obsessively negative. It's been fought on three levels none of which have really worked. It's been fought on the past by blaming the recession and the consequent overspending and borrowing on Labour.This was largely untrue because the Tory opposition had backed Labour's spending plans up to and including 2008 and the extra boost then was required to save the banks from their own follies something which  had to be done to keep the economy going.

The second level was the recovery which the government claimed was due to their "long term economic plan"when in fact it was due to seven years of ultra low interest rates and printing money by the Bank of England. This was supposed to conceal the damage done by four years of austerity and cuts which meant that living standards and household incomes for most people were no higher in 2015 than they had been in 2009

Third leg of the argument was the prosperity and tax cuts to come on the assumption that growth continued at the 2014 rate, that the debt was paid off by having more people in work Stick with the plan and the Tories and don't let Labour ruin it became the slogan

Most of this is pure political balls but Labour has found real difficulty in dealing with it because while people don't believe it they don't  believe Labour"s answers either and are excessively fearful of debt and borrowing  and over inclined to see austerity, particularly for other people ,as the answer to economic problems.

This is the essence of Labour's problem. No use bogging down in history ,demonstrating that we had to save the banks and showing that Gordon Brown was  doing the right thing in stimulating the economy No time to give an economics lecture,show the importance of Keynesian stimulus and the virtues of borrowing to stimulate and boost demand.;elections are a mobilisation of prejudices not an economics seminar.

Therefore the need is to demonstrate that this is not a real recovery, that it cant be prolonged into good times ahead and will be damaged by massive and unnecessary cuts to eliminate a borrowing level which is inevitable in recession. None of the basic problems have been solved.The manufacturing economy is still declining,we cant pay our way in the world  ,the productivity gap is widening .people are mired in debt and firms aren't investing  and wages are too low and employment too casual and uncertain for people to get mortgages on the houses that aren't being built in the first place and willbe far too dear for real people in the second. 

In other words we're in a mess, recovery is shallow and shabby and will neither boost the tax take nor lead to an age of prosperity by 2018. There's still a huge job to be done and a party whose only economic policy is to enrich the rich and hope that the benefits will trickle down to the people cant do it.

The only answers are Labour's traditional politics of hope and growth. But six days to get that across may be  a bit of a difficulty. Particularly if a Royal Baby hogs the headlines making speculation about its name more obsessive than the choice of a government 

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David Cameron is the best salesman we've ever had in politics. Better than Blair because Tony only sold his own soft policies where David can sell any policy his party

pushes him into. The troubled is that to vote Cam is to get Osborne perhaps the worst and certainly the most prejudiced Chancellor we've had. 

Ed may be a bit of a geek because he's interested in policies and ideas which most politicians aren't but vote Ed and you do get Ed Balls the best economist in politics today

Cameron defeats Miliband with dirty tricks

Last night's leader question time made for thrilling television and was certainly the best thing TV could do once Cameron had chickened out of  a leader debate because that would have got him rattled and once rattled he lies and blusters. Last night's lies were smooth and untroubled.

Yet then audience was heavily and unfairly weighted against Miliband and he stumbled into two well prepared Tory traps. Clearly the Tories in the audience had been better briefed and prepared with their trick questions than the Labour people who just relied on their horror at then treatment of the poor and disabled ,something which doesn't trouble the Tories or apparently the Libs in the audience.

The first trap was  on overspending by the last Labour government. Labour governments do spend more than Tories and they should be proud of it because of the schools, childrens centres, health practices hospitals and infrastructure this creates but  the last Labour government spent more because it had to borrow to save the banks. N ot Labour's fault. The banks had created their own crisis by speculation. They had to be saved to avoid collapse. 

Yet borrowing went up because of it and Cameron carefully prepared the trap by waving the note from Liam Byrne about no money left- something he just happened to have with him from five years ago. This was then followed by a carefully arranged question from the audience which pushed Ed Milliband into the trap and had him wallowing in the past as if he'd been responsible for turning Britain  into Greece. Clever stuff  because bogging down in the past meant less talk about the future which is what this election is really about 

The second trap was to heighten the tory smear that Labour will be a puppet government with the strings pulled by the SNP. This assumes that Scottish MPs have no right to participate in government  and appeals to English prejudices and  conceals the fact that the Tories will be making concessions to the Ulster Unionists disturbing nthe carefully constructed balance in Northern Ireland to get their support.

But Ed blundered in disavowing any coalition  with the SNP but also any working relationship and even seeming to say that he'd sooner not have a Labour government than have it with SNP support.That's barmy. If Labour needs an arrangement of any kind with the  SNP then som be it. Then crucial issue is that government must be carried on and that that government should be Labour not Tory.

The Tories would do a deal with the devil, or even Cleggie the Clogg dancer and though the SNP will Take fewer Labour seats in Scotland than the wipe out proclaimers say they will take some and those replacements will be to the left of Labour and won't want an early election. Does it matter all that much whether Scottish MPs wear a Labour or an SNP shirt as long as they keep Labour in power? Mc Labour can avoid the Tory horrors that are to come if we go all prissy over a sporran or two.