Tag Archives: labour

United Kingdom

Labour leads, as Clegg and the Lib Dems struggle during UK convention season

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As conference season gets underway in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party, under relatively new leader Ed Miliband, now leads the Conservative Party by a 41% to 31% advantage in the latest Guardian/ICM poll, with the Liberal Democrats trailing at 14%.

Labour, which performed generally better than expected in the last election in May 2010 (which was supposed to have been a complete landslide for the Tories), hold 254 seats in the House of Commons to 304 seats for the Tories and 57 seats for the Lib Dems.  Although the next election is not expected until 2015, and the current Tory-Lib Dem coalition shows no signs of fracturing, despite some strains, Labour would be set to return to government.  That’s the best poll performance for Labour since well before the era of former prime minister Gordon Brown.

The support comes largely from the drop in support for the Lib Dems, who won 22% in the 2010 election and have watched support crumble as the junior partner of UK prime minister David Cameron’s government.  Just last week, Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg (pictured above) recorded an apology for violating its 2010 pledge not to raise tuition fees — the Tory/Lib Dem coalition has voted to lift the cap on tuition fees to £9,000.

The move, which came in advance of this week’s annual Lib Dem conference, has dominated political discussion — Clegg’s video has even gone viral:

As we approach the expected 2015 election, if Lib Dem support remains subdued, the calls for a new leader will only become louder.  This week’s favorite is Vince Cable, who has been the business secretary in the coalition cabinet since 2010.  That’s perhaps ironic, given that Cable is just as pregnant with support for the central Tory program of budget cuts as Clegg.  Nonetheless, the Guardian/ICM poll showed that the Cable-led Lib Dems would increase their support to 19% from 14%.

Throughout the conference, Cable and Clegg have both emphasized that the Lib Dems will run in the next election as a separate party, not jointly with the Tories or in favor of any particular coalition.

All things considered, today’s polls are of limited utility nearly 30 months before the next election.  Furthermore, I still think — despite a strong performance by shadow chancellor Ed Balls and an increasingly sure footing for Ed Miliband — that the polls are a reflection less of Miliband’s stellar leadership than of the collapse of the Lib Dems under Clegg and the tepid reviews of Cameron’s Tories, given the austerity program that chancellor David Osborne is pushing forward with, even with the UK mired in a double-dip recession.  So there’s much time for the economy to turn around, and if so, Cameron and Clegg will both in better shape going into an election expected in 2015, and Miliband still seems like (and remains closer to) Neil Kinnock, the perennial loser of the 1980s and 1990s British politics than to Tony Blair, who delivered three consecutive Labour routs.

The left has savaged Clegg because he refused to apologize for the actual hike in tuition fees (and not just for breaking the pledge), but the more damning criticism is that by offering up such a mealy-mouthed apology and by refusing to stand up to the Tories on not just student fees, but the direction of the economy, Clegg sounds like just another politician.  Given that Clegg’s ascent into government came largely from his freshness and the appeal of a new approach to government (Cleggmania!), that is perhaps the most dangerous aspect for Clegg’s leadership.  Continue reading Labour leads, as Clegg and the Lib Dems struggle during UK convention season →

The Netherlands

Dutch talks over streamlined VVD,Labour ‘purple coalition’ progressing rapidly

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It appears that Dutch coalitions may be even easier to form now that the monarch isn’t in charge of the negotiations.

Both Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte of the free-market liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) and Diederik Samsom, leader of the social democratic Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA, Labour Party) are moving forward with talks for a coalition government, despite clear divides on some of the most important policy issues that will face the next Dutch government.

The VVD and Labour both emerged as winners by improving their existing standing in last Wednesday’s election — the VVD won 26.6% and 41 seats (an increase of 10 seats from the prior election in 2010) and Labour won 24.8% and 38 seats (an increase of eight) in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament.

The negotiations, for the first time, following a new 2010 law, will be organized by the Dutch parliment instead of by the monarch, reducing one of the key roles that the Dutch monarch has traditionally played in affairs of state.

So instead of Queen Beatrix, VVD parliamentarian Henk Kamp has taken the lead in sorting which potential coalitions exist and now, as informateurs, Kamp and former Labour party leader Wouter Bos seem to have found enough common ground between Labour and the VVD for a potential coalition, and the camps are set to proceed with private negotiations out of the media spotlight.

Typically, it takes around three months for a coalition government to be formed — notwithstanding the new cabinet formation process that excludes the monarchy, however, it seems likely that a coalition may now be formed within weeks.  That’s because there are only a small number of viable coalitions, and because both Rutte (pictured above, right) and Samsom (pictured above, left) agree that forming a relatively stable coalition quickly is important, given the questions lingering over the 2013 Dutch budget and given the precarious state of European finances.

After the 2010 election, the VVD formed a minority coalition with the Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA, Christian Democratic Appeal), with an agreement with the right-wing, populist, anti-Muslim Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, the Party for Freedom) to provide support for the VVD agenda from outside the government.  That agreement held up only until April 2012, when the PVV balked at supporting further budget cuts to bring the 2013 budget deficit within 3% of GDP, thereby causing last week’s election — the fourth Dutch election in a decade.

After preliminary inquiry into potential coalitions that began last Thursday, just hours after the election result, a so-called ‘purple coalition’ of the VVD and Labour emerged as the most likely coalition, so named because it would bring together the ‘blue’ VVD and ‘red’ Labour.  The result would leave the two parties with a clear majority of 79 seats in the 150-seat chamber, but eight seats short of a majority in the upper house, the Eerste Kamer, where VVD holds 16 and Labour holds 14 of the 75 seats.

Such a coalition would be a throwback to the ‘purple coalitions’ of Labour prime minister Wim Kok from 1994 to 2002 among Labour, the CDA, the VVD and the progressive / centrist Democraten 66 (Democrats 66) (as well as a throwback to the coalitions of the 1980s between Labour and the CDA).  It’s similar to the ‘grand coalition’ that governed Germany from 2005 to 2009 between Angela Merkel’s Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, the Christian Democratic Union) and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party). Continue reading Dutch talks over streamlined VVD,Labour ‘purple coalition’ progressing rapidly →

The Netherlands

Rutte’s VVD edges out Samsom’s Labour as both gain in Dutch election

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Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte looked more likely than not to continue as prime minister of the Netherlands Tuesday night after his party, the free-market liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) won the largest share of the vote in the Dutch election, with 98% of the votes counted.

The VVD won 26.6% of the vote, entitling it to 41 seats in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament, an increase of 10 seats over the 2010 election.

It was followed very closely by the social democratic Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA, Labour Party), with 24.8%, which entitles it to 39 seats, a nine-seat increase from 2010 under the incredibly strong performance of Labour leader Diederik Samsom, a former Greenpeace activist who took over the party’s leadership only in March 2012 and spent much of the past year trailing the more staunchly leftist Socialistische Partij (SP, the Socialist Party) of Emile Roemer.

All things being equal, Rutte and Samsom are the clear winners of the election.  Rutte will now be able to attempt to form a government with a credible mandate for bringing the Dutch budget within 3% of Dutch GDP — his prior government fell in April of this year when Geert Wilders, the leader of the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, the Party for Freedom), refused to support further budget cuts.

Samsom is nearly as much a winner as Rutte, though.  His polished performance in the various Dutch leaders debates (in contrast to Roemer’s often bumbling performances)  convinced Dutch voters that he possesses sufficient poise to be prime minister.  Samsom, a more leftist leader of the Labour Party as compared to his predecessor, former Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen, offered essentially the same anti-austerity option as Roemer, but without the anti-Europe sentiment of a Roemer-led government.  Even if he remains in the opposition, he can become the chief voice against Rutte’s budget cuts during the next government and work to build upon his party’s gains from today’s election.

The Socialists finished far behind with 9.7% and 15 seats — unchanged from 2010, but a huge disappointment after polls showed a gain of potentially 35 seats just a few weeks ago.

The Socialists, in fact, finished just behind Wilders’s anti-immigration, anti-Europe PVV — with 10.1% and also just 15 seats, it’s a nine-seat drop from the 2010 election, a huge disappointment for Wilders and a success for those who favor an approach of integrating Muslims into Dutch culture rather than excluding them.  Essentially, voters seemed to blame Wilders for dragging them back to the polls just two years after the last election — and furthermore, the essentially pro-European Dutch did not seem to take to Wilders’s contrived and virulent campaign to bring the Dutch guilder back and pull the Netherlands out of the eurozone.  Wilders never found the same resonance over Europe in 2012 that he obvious found over Muslim immigration in 2010.

Rutte’s coalition partners, the once-dominant but now-atrophied Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA, Christian Democratic Appeal) won just 8.5% and 13 seats, a drop of eight seats from 2010.  The progressive / centrist Democraten 66 (Democrats 66) won 7.9% and 12 seats.

Also returning to the Tweede Kamer were the center-left, Christian Democratic ChristenUnie (CU, Christian Union) with 3.1% and five seats, the ecologist GroenLinks (GL, GreenLeft) with 2.3% and three seats, the Calvinist, ‘testimonial’ Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (SGP, the Reformed Political Party) with 2.1% and three seats, and finally, both of the newly-formed Labour spinoff 50PLUS and the animal welfare advocate Partij voor de Dieren (PvdD, Party for the Animals), each with 1.9% and two seats.

As soon as tomorrow, cabinet formation talks are expected to begin — and for the first time, the Dutch parliament will take the lead in exploring potential coalitions (instead of the Dutch monarch, Queen Beatrix).  Those talks typically take up to three months, but can take longer — the 2010 government was formed after four months of negotiations.

Given the result, it looks like three coalitions are possible: Continue reading Rutte’s VVD edges out Samsom’s Labour as both gain in Dutch election →

The Netherlands

On the eve of Dutch elections, a primer (and a prediction) on cabinet formation

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In most countries, an election is the decisive moment in forming a government.  After the election results are in, it’s usually immediately clear who will become the next president or prime minister or chancellor (or so on).  Even in countries with complex parliamentary systems, where coalitions still take time to negotiate, it’s typically pretty clear to spot which party will emerge to form the government.

In the Netherlands, however, the election is more prologue than main event: no single party has won a majority of seats in the Dutch parliament since 1900, so the main government-forming exercise is the complex negotiation that follows Dutch elections.  While not as tortured as recent Belgian political negotiations, Dutch cabinet negotiations typically take around three months to complete — and that’s only when the coalition formation process is fairly routine.

The last government, a minority coalition headed by Mark Rutte, was sworn in only in October 2010, following elections earlier in June.

This year, two thing augur a relatively longer (than shorter) period of cabinet negotiations:

  • First, poll volatility and the likelihood that a large number of parties are expected to win double-digit numbers of seats in the 150-member Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament, will make the arithmetic of forming a majority government even more difficult.
  • Second, MPs eliminated the role of the monarch from the cabinet formation process in 2010, which will now be headed by the chair of the Tweede Kamer, Gerdi Verbeet, instead of Queen Beatrix (pictured above), leaving the process more uncertain and less transparent than in years past.

In years past, the Dutch monarch (since 1980, Queen Beatrix) has typically initiated the process by meeting with each of the party leaders and appointing an informateur, typically a senior statesman, to explore the possibility of various governing coalitions.  Coalition negotiations can go through several stages of informateurs — for example, in 2010, the Queen ultimately appointed five different informateurs, including three who served in the role twice.  Thereupon, the monarch appoints the formateur — typically the leader of the largest party in parliament — to negotiate the details of the coalition agreement among the coalition partners, including the governing agenda for the coalition, appointments to the cabinet and other issues.

This year, the process is a bit more unsettled — it will be Verbeet and parliamentarians who can shape the agenda of the negotiations, which could result in delays as everyone navigates a new process, and which some critics believe could make the cabinet formation process less transparent.  Although Queen Beatrix was widely seen as steering the 2010 negotiations away from any PVV participation in government (and that bias was one of the reasons MPs voted to strip the monarchy of its role in cabinet formation), it is not necessarily the case that parliamentarians will have any less bias in choosing informateurs.

The final TNS Nipo poll forecasts the following results for tomorrow’s election (similar to results from other polls):

  • 35 seats for Rutte’s free-market liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy).
  • 34 seats for the social democratic Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA, Labour Party), which has seen its support rise with the success of its leader Diederik Samsom in the recent debates.
  • 21 seats for the anti-austerity, leftist Socialistische Partij (SP, the Socialist Party), a marked decline from a month ago, when it led polls, before its leader Emile Roemer made some anti-European comments and was seen as having stumbled in the debates.
  • 17 seats for the populist, anti-Europe, anti-immigrant Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, the Party for Freedom) of Geert Wilders, a sharp decline in seats.
  • 13 seats for the progressive/centrist Democraten 66 (Democrats 66).
  • 12 seats for the conservative Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA, Christian Democratic Appeal), a sharp decline.
  • 6 seats for ChristenUnie (CU, Christian Union), a smaller, vaguely center-left, Christian democratic party.
  • 4 seats for GroenLinks (GL, GreenLeft), the Dutch green party.
  • 4 seats for 50PLUS, a new party founded in 2009 by former Labour politicians.
  • 2 seats for Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (SGP, the Reformed Political Party), a Calvinist party that’s in electoral alliance with ChristenUnie, but is typically a ‘testimonial’ party uninterested in joining coalitions.
  • 2 seats for the Partij voor de Dieren (PvdD, Party for the Animals), another ‘testimonial’ party focused on animal rights and welfare.

If those polls are correct — and, I’ll caution, polls still show many undecided voters — I see three potential coalitions:

  • a centrist, pro-Europe ‘purple’ coalition, largely between the VVD and Labour,
  • a more leftist anti-austerity coalition, largely between Labour and the Socialists, and
  • an unlikelier VVD-led pro-austerity coalition without Labour.

It seems more likely than not, however, that Labour is headed back into government as either the leading party or a supporting coalition member of the next government. Continue reading On the eve of Dutch elections, a primer (and a prediction) on cabinet formation →

Ireland

Who is Michael Higgins? (And about that YouTube takedown…)

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So this clip of Irish president Michael D. Higgins from a call on conservative Michael Graham’s radio show taking down the “tea party” movement in the United States has gone viral in the last 24 hours.

The first thing to realize is that it’s from May 2010.  Three things follow from that:

  • It’s the height of the “tea party” movement in the United States.
  • It’s the height of the U.S. right’s opposition to the health care bill in the United States proposed by President Barack Obama, when many on the U.S. right were calling out every country from Ireland to Canada to Switzerland to Great Britain as having “socialist” health care schemes.
  • It’s before the October 2011 presidential election in Ireland, so it’s from before the time when Michael Higgins became the Irish head of state.

In his time as president, Higgins hasn’t picked any fights, in Ireland or abroad, however.  As head of state, he does not direct policy — that job falls to the taoiseach (Ireland’s prime minister) Enda Kenny.

In the clip, Higgins comes across as passionately defending a strong role for government, but seems a little unhinged (or passionate, depending on your viewpoint) when it comes to disparaging the tea party movement, the American right and former Alaska governor and former U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, in particular:

The tactic is to get a large crowd, to whip them up, try and discover what is the greatest fear, work on that and feed it right back and you get a frenzy.  This tea party ignorance that is being brought all around the United States is regularly insulting people who have been democratically elected.

Higgins proceeded to call Graham “just a wanker whipping up fear.”

Oh my!

To the extent Higgins seems frustrated and perplexed by the tea party movement and the American right generally, in the clip above, it’s because that strain of particularly American laissez-faire, anti-government politics is so foreign to his own social democratic tradition.

Higgins comes from the Labour Party in Ireland, which is the major leftist force in Irish politics and which has a strong social democratic tradition (in terms of comparison, it would be closer to the New Democratic Party in Canada than to the Liberal Party).

Ireland’s two main parties, historically, have been centrist (Fianna Fáil) and center-right / vaguely Christian democratic (Fine Gail).

Before his presidential election, Higgins had long served in the Dáil (Ireland’s parliament) for the Labour Party, and during the Fine Gail-led government of 1994 to 1997, Higgins served as minister for arts, culture and the Gaeltacht (i.e., the predominantly Irish-speaking regions of Ireland), where he established an Irish-language television station and notably, scrapped Section 31 of Ireland’s Broadcasting Authority Act, which actually forbade the Irish media from broadcasting the voice of any Sinn Féin member.

The 2011 election was a bit odd, given that Fine Gail’s candidate never really connected with voters and Fianna Fáil didn’t really offer up a candidate.  The election followed a period of “two Marys” — Mary McAleese, who served from 1997 to 2011 and Mary Robinson before her, who served from 1990 to 1997, both of whom were independent candidates and both of whom changed the Irish presidential concept into something even more abstract and apolitical than the line of Fianna Fáil politicians who preceded them.

For much of the campaign leading up to the election, another independent, Irish senator David Norris (and a Joyce scholar!) was the frontrunner for the presidency, and would have become the world’s first openly gay head of state, but fell behind after being implicated in a scandal.

Accordingly, the race came down to Higgins, independent Seán Gallagher (essentially a placeholder for Fianna Fáil-minded voters) and Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Féin candidate.  Higgins ultimately defeated Gallagher by 39.6% to 28.5%, although the race seemed a lot closer than the final tally indicates — Gallagher’s last-minute admission of collecting campaign funds from a Fianna Fáil fundraiser led to a fall-off in his support.

United Kingdom

Tensions start to appear in Tory-Lib Dem coalition in the UK

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There might be no more yawn-inducing issue in UK politics than House of Lords reform.

But that issue has led to the greatest moment of crisis between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democratic Party, which together govern the United Kingdom in a first-of-its-kind Tory-Lib Dem coalition government.

The importance of the week’s jousting is not about electoral reform, to save the suspense.

It’s about the that it marked the first major tear in the Coalition: a Tory bid to stymie Lords reform led Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg (pictured above, right) to declare that he would direct his party to vote against another electoral reform measure supported by the Tories.  It’s the first time Clegg has so aggressively and directly fought back against his Coalition partner.

Right-wing newspapers are already savaging Clegg.  But for its faults, the two-party Coalition still remains more united and disciplined than the Tories were (when they were governing by themselves!) in the last years of John Major’s government in the mid-1990s, when Europe and scandal hopelessly split an undisciplined party.  It’s probably more united than the New Labour government in its last years, hopelessly split between Blairites and Brownites on the basis of no true underlying policy differences.

The most alarmist talk about the danger to Cameron’s government is overstated — more most surprising, perhaps, is that the Coalition made it nearly halfway through the natural term of the parliament with so much unity.  Clegg has not yet flinched in giving his party’s support to Tory leader and prime minister David Cameron (pictured above, left), even as the budget cuts of a severe austerity program implemented by Tory chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne seem to be dragging the UK economy back into a double-dip recession, to say nothing of student fees or other policies that are less than satisfying to the Lib Dem rank-and-file, which has typically been more of the left than of the right.

As The Guardian notes, Clegg can claim a moderating influence on the current government:

Most of the cases that [Clegg] can demonstrate are negative ones. The Lib Dems have played a vital role in making Tory legislation less extreme, less red meat. The health reforms could have been worse; Europe policy would have been more barking; welfare changes would have hurt the vulnerable even more.

But voters don’t seem to be giving Clegg much credit.  The center-left Labour now has a five-point lead over the Tories (39% to 34%) in the latest Guardian/ICM poll from late June, but the Lib Dems have taken the greatest electoral brunt with just 14% support, a sharp fall from its 23% vote in May 2010.

Luckily for Clegg and Cameron, most of the UK was too busy on holiday or watching the Olympic Games in London to notice (although Cameron must not be thrilled that his semi-rival, London mayor Boris Johnson, has received such fawning attention).

So what happened? Continue reading Tensions start to appear in Tory-Lib Dem coalition in the UK →

United Kingdom

Boris Johnson: the real mascot of the 2012 Summer Olympics

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Hilarious. This is why Boris Johnson won the mayoral election of London initially in 2008 as a Conservative and was reelected in May 2012, despite a strong Labour wind, defeating former London mayor Ken Livingstone by a 3% margin.

Also, forget the goofy one-eyed blobs, Boris is the true mascot of the 2012 Summer Olympics.  From the minute we saw him waving the Olympic flag at the end of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, with his jacket opened, signalling London’s much looser approach to the Games (compared to the tightly synchronized Beijing Games), you just knew there would be no other way:

He’s rarely on-message (although he can show discipline when he wants).

He’s a bit of a goofy Etonian toff, floppy hair and all, but he’s probably the UK’s most popular politician today, with the possible exception of Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond.

As I’ve noted, he may one day be a British prime minister, as he certainly has more personality than the entire front bench of the current Tory (well, Coalition) government combined.  It’s thought that David Cameron, then just newly enshrined as the new Tory leader, sent Boris off to run for London mayor to get him out of his hair as he plotted the Tories’ own return to Westminster.  But given the current trajectory of Cameron’s government (with many blaming George Osborne’s* austerity policies as the main cause of the UK’s double-dip recession), it is not unthinkable that Boris may well lead the Tories in the next general election cycle or two.

Certainly, the exposure from hosting the 2012 Games will do him no harm (especially given that businessman Mitt Romney transformed his leadership of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City into a stint as Massachusetts governor and into the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2012).

H/T to Andrew Sullivan, who calls Boris the “un-Romney”.

* George Osborne serves as chancellor of the exchequer — essentially, the UK’s finance minister.

European Union, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom

Three elections — and three defeats — for EU-wide austerity

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The concept of a ‘democratic deficit’ has long plagued the European Union — the EU’s history is littered with grand, transformative schemes planned by EU leaders that voters have ultimately rejected as too sweeping.  As recently as 2005, French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed EU constitution, smacking the EU elite for getting out too far in front of an electorate that clearly did not approve.

Sure enough, the story of the last three days — in the UK, in France and in Greece — will go down in EU history as a similar pivot point against German chancellor Angela Merkel’s attempt to impose strict fiscal discipline across the continent, even as additional electoral hiccups await in the North-Rhine Westphalia state elections later this week, the Irish referendum on the fiscal compact later this month and French and Dutch parliamentary elections due later this summer.

French president-elect François Hollande will now immediately become the face of the EU-wide opposition to austerity and is expected to challenge Merkel with a view that advocates more aggressive spending in a bid to balance fiscal responsibility with the promotion of economic growth — a distinct change in Franco-German relations after the ‘Merkozy’ years.  In his victory speech, Hollande called for a ‘fresh start for Europe’ and laid down his gauntlet: ‘austerity need not be Europe’s fate.’

It is an incredible turnaround from December, when Merkel and deposed French president Nicolas Sarkozy single-handedly pushed through the fiscal compact adopted by each of the EU member states (minus the UK and the Czech Republic), which would bind each member state to a budget deficit of no more than just 0.5% of GDP.  The treaty followed in the wake of the latest eurozone financial crisis last November, during which both the governments of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Georgios Papandreou in Greece fell, to be replaced by Berlin-approved technocratic governments, each tasked with the express purpose of making reforms to cut their governments’ respective budgets.

Continue reading Three elections — and three defeats — for EU-wide austerity →

United Kingdom

Johnson defeats Livingstone for mayor of London

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Incumbent London mayor Boris Johnson has defeated former london mayor Ken Livingstone in Thursday’s election.

After leading first preference votes 44% to Livingstone’s 40%, Johnson defeated Livingstone on the count of second preference votes by a margin of 51.5% to 48.5%.

It is a striking win for Johnson and one of the few bright spots for a Conservative Party that lost nearly 800 council seats in Thursday’s local elections, which have already set tongues wagging about a potentially bright future for Johnson in national politics if he tires of London politics — a possibility that even Livingstone noted in his graceful concession speech Friday night.

 

 

United Kingdom

There’s something about Boris

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At a time when the United Kingdom is falling back into double-dip recession and the Conservative Party is falling to a nearly double-digit gap in opinion polls against Labour Party (under the leadership of the rather inexperienced Ed Miliband, at that), why is Boris Johnson so seemingly poised to swamp today’s London mayoral election against former mayor Ken Livingstone?

Johnson has led, however narrowly, throughout the mayoral campaign, and in late April opened up a significant polling lead on Livingstone.  Indeed, he seems to be widening his vote even as Livingstone tries to nationalize the election into a choice between Labour values and Conservative values (ironically, given his spotty history with the party).

You could probably count any number of reasons why this should not be the case.  Johnson’s record as mayor is not incredibly accomplished.  He’s presiding over a London that has watched its status as a global financial capital take quite a hit.  And he’s just as much of a pampered old Etonian as the current Tory leadership of prime minister David Cameron and chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, who are under fire nationally for their budget cuts program at a time when UK growth is slipping and unemployment is rising.

Livingstone, the first mayor of London, can point to significant success in his time in office from 2000 to 2008.  He revamped London’s public transport system, even if his proposed congestion charge proved controversial.  He led the way on registry of same-sex couples way back in 2001, long before the UK Civil Partnerships Act in 2004.  Livingstone led the campaign to win the Summer Olympics to London, which will be held later this year.  He also led the city with calm and dignity in the face of the July 2005 terrorist bombings, while giving voice to many of the anti-war concerns than neither mainstream Labour nor the Tories voiced over the war on terror.

A maverick willing to stand on principle against his own party, Livingstone even found himself kicked out of Tony Blair’s Labour Party for a while for having the audacity to win the 2000 mayoral election without Blair’s blessing (Blair grudgingly readmitted Livingstone after his landslide win in the 2004 mayoral election).  There’s a strong case to be made that Livingstone offers better policies, while Boris offers only glib personality.  Boris represents a party that now owns the UK’s sluggish economy, but voters trust him nearly 2-to-1 as better for London’s economy.  Livingstone has pledged to cut transport costs by 7%, but Johnson still leads on transport issues.

So what gives? Continue reading There’s something about Boris →

United Kingdom

Miliband v. Miliband

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If you’re like me, you find the inherent fratricide of the UK Labour Party a deliciously fascinating element of UK politics, with a weak Ed Miliband in office and his older and more experienced brother David Miliband waiting in the wings.

So imagine my delight to see this article by big brother David in the New Statesman earlier this week. As The Guardian‘s Nicholas Watt notes, it’s really a slap at Neil Kinnoch, the Labour party leader from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Labour was out of office.

David’s article even coins a term — “Reassurance Labour” — as a mocking retort against the trade unionists and other more stridently leftist voices who argue that Labour should return to its traditional roots, voices to whom little brother Ed owes his election as leader.  It’s hard not to read the New Statesman article as David laying down his marker for a leadership campaign after the failure of his brother’s Labour leadership. (Don’t forget that last year, David’s camp actually leaked the speech he would have given had he won the leadership).  Notwithstanding that the article praises little brother Ed four times, it’s hard not to read between the lines. Continue reading Miliband v. Miliband →