Labour's victory?

The results are in, and everything went pretty much as expected, the major surprise being the slim majority of Labour: the party now has 355 seats, 31 over the 324 needed for a simple majority in the House of Commons. What does this mean for the UK and for British domestic and foreign policy?

It means that Blair will have to go one of two roads: he will either take measures to gain the support of the more leftist Labour backbench, or work on forming more ad hoc alliances with the Tories on some issues such as public service reform. The second option seems extremely unlikely, given Britain’s traditionally good party discipline, and the disagreement between Conservatives and Labour on the best methods to reform public service (Labour wanting more money and limited privatization, Conservatives basically wanting privatization). Therefore Blair will push ahead with topics such as his African agenda, which appeal to the more socially conscious Left within Labour yet don’t alienate his middle ground. Reform of the House of Lords would seem to be another topic for which he could gain more broad cross-party support.

As for that third party, the Liberal Democrats saw about a 4 percent rise in their share of the vote, winning an extra 10 seats, though they did not do well against the Conservatives, losing more seats than they picked up. The Lib Dem gains came at Labour’s expense alone. The question is what now for the Lib Dems: their policies are a strange mix of personal freedom, high taxation and policies that redistribute from the rich to the middle class, and their foreign policy appeals mostly to the moderate left (joining the euro, more integration, no intervention). Despite this Charles Kennedy has claimed that his party is an option in the middle. Lib Dems gained due to the protest vote, but their challenge now is to consolidate these gains while simultaneously generating a coherent set of policies that could actually guide a governing party. I had, as I said before, hoped that the Lib Dems would pull off a total surprise and, together with the Conservatives, force a hung parliament, but that having not happened, I must admit that Labour was and still is the best governing option at present.

Smaller parties that had hoped to gain seats did not; the only one to pick up a seat was ex-Labour MP George Galloway’s Respect, winning a London seat heavily populated by Muslims. The Euroskeptic UKIP and the nationalist BNP failed to pick up seats. The SDLP did not sustain the heavy losses predicted, maintaining three seats in Northern Ireland, although it lost one seat to Sinn Féin and picked up another due to Unionist divisions. It was the Ulster Unionist Party that was basically wiped out, as former First Minister David Trimble lost his seat and the party was reduced to one MP. The DUP meanwhile took nine seats at Westminster. NI Alliance failed to win any seats—the “middle of the road” is not a productive political strategy at present, especially in a single-member-district system.

As Blair heads into his third and final term, his agenda remains alive and well. His legacy of leading Labour to the political center is certainly mixed in people’s opinions, but succeeded grandly in bringing the party out of the political wilderness. The next question is whether either opposition party can formulate a better agenda for Britain. The Conservatives must redefine their core principles, as has been said several times before, and not try to be “Labour, just slightly differently”; the Lib Dems must discover what would tie all of their proposals together and reformulate them to make them more practical and coherent. The party to succeed first in doing this might well be the one that shares the political arena with Labour in the future. Whatever results, it will definitely be an interesting process of evolution.

An English parliament? Not anytime soon...

Quick note: the Republicans want to disqualify votes cast by felons in the Washington governor's race using the proportion of all votes cast in the constituency--at least according to statistical evidence they are presenting. Of course, figuring out exactly how many votes were cast by felons opens up its own can of worms... but given that the margin of this election was statistically insignificant, it doesn't seem particularly wise to rely on statistical probabilities to try to alter the result.

Another interesting question--why can't felons vote? I'll save that argument for later.

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Following the British devolution in the late 1990s (the establishment of the Welsh Assembly and, particularly, the Holyrood parliament), a lot of authority has been delegated to this regional bodies, including some fiscal policy in the Scottish case. England, on the other hand, has had proposals for regional assemblies rejected, but has no all-English body, and no referendum on estabilshing such a body. Therefore the decent question stands: why is there no English Parliament to deal with devolved affairs in England alone? Why do Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Westminster MPs vote on matters concerning England?

The simple answer to this question is the nature of the United Kingdom. The UK has, first off, always been an England-centered state. England forms the geographic heart of the country; the ruling dynasty, though originally Scottish, ruled from London; and the vast majority of Britain's population lives in England. Delegating Westminster's power to an elected body representing the whole of England would severely undermine the Union Parliament. Essentially, this would be a first step toward confederation (which is exactly what many advocates of an English Parliament hope for).

No federal or quasi-federal state has such a large "primary" unit as England without at least one other to counterbalance it, for this very reason. This is why regional assemblies in England would not pose a threat to Westminster and to British unity, but an English parliament would clearly do so. A confederal structure to the United Kingdom, on the other hand, would clearly entail a change in attitude on the part of elites, who at this point would not accept such an arrangement; it is not advocated or supported by any of the three main parties.

For that reason, this discussion is mostly academic, at least for the present time; but it might be worthwhile for Britons to ponder exactly what kind of UK they want, especially if all its parts are to be integrated into an ever closer Europe anyway.

Supporting Jafaari

"Tony Blair, for all his flaws, remains the best centre-right option there is." --The Economist in its British election endorsement

I stand by my call to vote Lib Dem.

The new Jafaari government in Iraq certainly has its hands full, not least in finding appropriate Sunni members to represent that community. What Jafaari must do is combat corruption, ensure that all groups are represented and feel included in government, fight the insurrection militarily as well as psychologically, and write a new constitution (theoretically within six months). Easily done.

How can you not back the democratization process in Iraq? I understand that you may disagree with the way this process was begun--after initially being undecided, I wound up basically opposing the war in 2003, and I think this stance was justified by the lack of WMD. I don't think "regime change" was a good enough reason to invade Iraq. If we are going to start invading countries to change their regimes, we are biting off more than we can chew, and Iraq shouldn't necessarily have been our first stop.

That said, the Iraqi people today are enjoying the benefits of the "liberal" freedoms, freedom of speech, press, assembly, and so forth, and I think that we should fully support them as they exercise those freedoms for the first time in decades and not try to undercut it by supporting an illiberal, foreign-backed insurgency that opposes the U.S. solely because it is the U.S. and for no logical reason, certainly not for the benefit of the Iraqi people. Failure in Iraq today could have devastating consequences. Luckily, President Bush is in no mood to countenance such failure (I suppose that broadly I would agree with him on that). Really, though, I see no way in which any U.S. president (say, a President Kerry) could withdraw our troops before the "job is done"--the geopolitical consequences of such a move would be far worse than the casualties our troops are taking.

So the Iraqi government will struggle on, and it deserves our full (but not unquestioning) support. In fact, the major questions we should pose to the government are those of liberality: human rights and basic freedoms should be maintained in Iraq, and we should keep up the pressure. For if the regime is allowed to deteriorate into authoritarianism, of any type (Islamist or not), what then was fought for at all?

At least until oil prices get back below $30 a barrel. Then it doesn't matter.

Brits: Vote Lib Dem on May 5

The general election in Britain approaches on May 5 this year, and we can legitimately say for the first time in decades that it is a true three-party contest, with the Liberal Democrats putting up a good fight (they have been hovering around 20 percent in the polls, up to 23 percent in a new poll from today). And whatever you think about immigration, whatever you think about top-up fees, whatever you think about Iraq, there is one major reason to vote Lib Dem: electoral reform.

I will not rehash the entire argument for proportional representation here. We all know, I think, that Charles Kennedy will not be at 10 Downing St after the next election. But if the Lib Dems can be given the balance in a hung parliament, they can use electoral reform in their negotiations with Labour to support legislation; and the Lib Dems have a powerful incentive to maintain their commitment to electoral reform, unless they make the mistake of believing they are about to supplant Labour, which would be a risky gamble indeed.

Voting Lib Dem, once, for electoral reform; after that, voting your conscience, being able to vote for a party that truly represents your beliefs.

And no, I don't feel bad about telling British people who to vote for. After all, the Guardian did the same when it had readers send letters to voters in Ohio. And nobody's obliged to listen to me.

Here I am...

All right, I decided it was time to move on from livejournal to something a bit more sophisticated, yet something that still did not require me to do the whole bit myself. So hello blogspot. Let's see if I can keep up my motivation to write in this bad boy.