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United Kingdom

LIVE BLOG: 2017 UK election results

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The Houses of Parliament at sunset. British voters are taking part in their likely final election as a member of the European Union (sborisov / 123rf)

Throughout the night, Suffragio will be live-blogging the results of the United Kingdom’s general election to elect all 650 members of the House of Commons on a constituency-by-constituency basis.United Kingdom Flag Icon

BBC Exit Poll
10:00 pm BST, 5:00 pm ET

Conservative Party — 314 (down from 330)
Labour Party — 266 (up from 229)
Scottish National Party — 34 (down from 54)
Liberal Democrats — 14 (up from 9)
UKIP — Zero seats.

If these results are true, the Tories are in for an awful night. Theresa May called a snap election to boost her majority. She’s not only lost seats, but this result would mean a hung parliament and, more likely than not, make Jeremy Corbyn the next prime minister. With this result, however, it is very unlikely that we will know anything about the composition of the next government anytime soon.

10:36 pm BST, 5:36 pm ET

Note that the UK pound has dropped from $1.29 to $1.27 upon news of the exit poll showing that the Conservatives have lost their majority. Spectacular. Feels much like Brexit.

This is all still way too close to call anything.

A 10-seat swing could mean the difference between government and  opposition.

On these numbers, though, it’s possible that neither Conservatives nor Labour could gain a majority (even if it means , which means a more unstable minority government or even a fresh election later this year (and it seems unlikely that May will stick around to lead the Tories — instead, foreign secretary Boris Johnson or Brexit secretary David Davis. Of course, a second 2017 election would take place as the two-year clock continues to tick from May’s decision in March to invoke Article 50, depriving the United Kingdom of precious negotiation time vis-à-vis Brexit when it will be focused on internal domestic politics.

If you add the Labour projection to the Liberal Democratic, Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru and some of the republican MPs from Northern Ireland, it’s still difficult to see how Corbyn gets to a majority.

But it’s clear that some leading Tory figures, like home secretary Amber Rudd, could be in trouble. Though it was clear that May’s campaign stumbled, the final polls (save Survation) showed the Tories with anywhere from a 1% to 12% lead. This seems to indicate that youth turnout was higher, boosting Labour’s surge.

One question is how the Scottish National Party seems to have done so poorly — it’s set to lose 22 seats from the 56 seats it won in 2015. That’s even worse than the Tories. If that holds, I’ll be curious to see if the SNP lost to Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives or to a last-minute Labour surge. If the former, it means that Labour has done incredibly well in England.

* * * * *

Newcastle upon Tyre North
11:06 pm BST, 6:06 ET

The first seat to report — and not in Sunderland! Note that this a constituency that swung to Labour in 2015, and it’s a predictably safe Labour seat in the northeast. It’s also a constituency that held wide appeal for potential UKIP voters.  What’s interesting is that the UKIP (and even the Liberal Democrat and Green) vote has collapsed from two years ago. So while Labour won nearly 5,000 more votes than in 2015, the Tories have also won nearly 2,500 more votes from the last election.

Labour — 24,071 (19,301)
Conservative — 9,134 (6,628)
LibDem — 1,812 (2,218)
UKIP — 1,482 (5,214)
Green — 595 (1,724)

* * * * *

Houghton and Sunderland South
11:15 pm BST, 6:15 ET

Again, a reliable Labour seat, and Bridget Phillipson will hold onto this northeastern seat. But the Tory swing here is larger than the Labour swing. Not a great sign for Labour’s hopes tonight, because it seems to show that so many of those UKIP voters, some of which might have once voted Labour, have now switched over to the Conservative Party. In this constituency two years ago, UKIP placed second. Still too murky to know what, exactly, has happened today on a national (or even England-wide) basis.

Labour —24,665 (21,218)
Conservative —12,324 (7,105)
UKIP —2,379 (8,218)
LibDem — 908 (791)

* * * * *

Newcastle upon Tyne East
11:58 pm BST, 6:58 ET

Opposition chief whip Nick Brown holds this seat, with a much improved margin. Labour will take solace in this result, the Tories less.

Labour — 28,127 (19,378)
Conservative — 8,866 (6,884)
LibDem —2,574 (4,332)
UKIP — 1,315 (4,910)

* * * * *

North Swindon
12:00 pm BST, 7:00 ET

Tories are swinging up 3%, Labour is swinging up 11%. Conservative Justin Tomlinson holds the seat, but another data point in favor of a strong night for Labour. This is the first seat announced from southwestern England, so it’s perhaps more meaningful than the previous Newcastle and Sunderland results.

Conservative — 29,431 (26,295)
Labour — 21,096 (14,509)
LibDem — 1,962 (1,704)
UKIP — 1,564 (8,011)

* * * * *

Washington and Sunderland West
12:10 pm BST, 7:10 ET

As in Sunderland Central and Newcastle Central, it’s a bigger swing to the Tories than to Labour.  Sharon Hodgson will still hold the seat with a strong majority, though. The regional picture seems to be showing that the Tories are taking more than their fair share of northeastern UKIP voters, even as Labour is improving on its 2015 showing. This is yet another seat where UKIP finished second (above the Tories) in the last election, and it’s still held onto nearly 7% of the constituency vote in 2017.

Labour — 24,639 (20,478)
Conservative — 11,699 (7,033)
UKIP — 2,761 (7,321)
LibDem — 961 (993)

* * * * *

Kettering
12:30 pm BST, 7:30 ET

In the center of the country, Northamptonshire, Philip Hollobone has held this seat since 2005. Hollobone is a very euroskeptic MP, and while there’s a 6% swing to the Tories, there’s an 11% swing to Labour. So far, all holds. No gains for any party — yet.

Conservative — 28,616 (24,467)
Labour — 18,054 (11,877)
LibDem — 1,618 (1,490)

* * * * *

Nuneaton
12:30 pm BST, 7:30 ET

UKIP is down 11%, now the Tories and Labour are both up 6%. Marcus Jones will hold this seat.

Conservative — 20,827 (23,755)
Labour — 19,016 (15,945)
UKIP — 1,619 (6,582)
LibDem — 914 (816)

* * * * *

Broxbourne

12:40 pm BST, 7:40 ET

This is the first seat in the southeast, and it’s a great story for Labour (as opposed to the story in the north). The Tories, and Charles Walker, will hold this seat, but Labour will have seen a double-digit swing. UKIP came in second place here in 2015, and their collapse has helped Labour far more than Conservatives.

Conservative — 29,515 (25,797)
Labour — 13,723 (8,470)
LibDem — 1,481 (1,467)
UKIP — 9,074 (848)

* * * * *

Darlington
12:57 BST, 7:57 ET

Well. Both the Tories and Labour are up 8%. This is a good result for the Tories, but not nearly the kind of result May needed for a landslide. UKIP, of course, is down 10%. Another seat in the North East in county Durham, and Jenny Chapman holds.

Conservative — 22,681 (17,637)
Labour — 19,401 (14,479)
UKIP — 1,180 (5,392)
LibDem — 1,031 (1,966)

* * * * *

Wrexham
1:08 BST, 8:08 ET

This is the first result from Wales, and Ian Lucas will hold this seat. The swing here is just as much to Labour as it was to the Tories. UKIP didn’t field a candidate, so its 5,072 votes from 2015 were up for grabs. Notably, the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru has lost some of its vote share from 2015, too. So that means that UKIP voters have split between the two major parties.

Labour — 17,153 (12,181)
Conservative — 15,321 (10,350)
PC — 1,753 (2,501)
LibDem — 865 (1,735)

* * * * *

Rutherglen & Hamilton West
1:18 BST, 8:18 ET

This is the first seat from Scotland, and it’s also the first Labour gain! Ged Killen here will take the seat from the Scottish National Party, in line with exit polling that shows it will be a very bad night for the SNP. Notably, though, while the SNP swing is down 16%, Labour swung up just 2%, while the Tories swung up 12%. That’s good news for both of the two unionist parties, perhaps, and it shows that the SNP is not only fighting a two-way race against unionists in Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives, but a four-way race with the Liberal Democrats and Labour as well.

* * * * *

Tooting
1:27 BST, 8:27 ET

Tooting is the first constituency from London, and wowza. Rosena Allin-Khan has retained the seat from the 2016 by-election that Sadiq Khan vacated when he became London’s mayor. A big swing to Labour, nonetheless, from the 2015 election in a constituency that the Tories thought they might steal at the beginning of the election. The Liberal Democrats are doing better here than in 2015, too.

Labour — 34,694 (25,263)
Conservative — 19,236 (22,421)
LibDem — 3,057 (2,107)
Green — 845 (2,201)

* * * * *

Mhairi Black, the 22-year-old MP from Scotland, has won reelection.

Paisley & Renfrewshire South
1:32 BST, 8:32 ET

Mhairi Black, the youngest MP at just 22, will hold this seat, finally some good news for the SNP tonight.

* * * * *

Vale of Clwyd
1:44 BST, 8:44 ET

Here’s the first Labour gain in Wales. Chris Ruane will take back the seat he lost to James Davies in 2015 by a health majority of nearly 2,500. Again, the Liberal Democrats are down, Plaid Cymru was down 3%, and UKIP was nonexistent (after winning 4,577 in the last election).

Labour — 19,423 (13,523)
Conservative — 17,044 (13,760)
PC — 1,551 (2,486)
LibDem — 666 (919)

* * * * *

Putney
1:49 BST, 8:49 ET

Justine Greening, the sitting education secretary, has won her seat in Putney, another London seat. But whereas she won by a margin of 53.8% to 30.0% in 2015, she’ll only win by a margin of 44.1% to 40.8%. Notably, as in Tooting, the Liberal Democrats are winning more of a very reliably pro-Remain vote, and they will have nearly doubled their support from the last election. Another good data point for Labour in London. The Greens are also down sharply from 2015.

Conservative — 20,679 (23,018)
Labour — 19,125 (12,838)
LibDem — 5,448 (2,717)
Green — 1,107 (2,067)

* * * * *

Angus Robertson, deputy SNP leader, has lost his seat. (Facebook)

Moray
2:21 BST, 9:21 ET

This is a huge win for the Tories. After winning Angus, they have now won Moray from Angus Robertson, the deputy SNP leader. And it wasn’t close, a 16% swing to the Tories and a 11% swing down for the SNP. With 48% of the vote, Douglas Ross nearly won an absolute majority. A great night so far for the Tories, who have taken two seats from the SNP (and won a swing of 12% from the SNP in the third seat that Labour won).

Conservative — 22,637 (22,637)
SNP — 15,319 (24,384)
Labour — 5,208 (4,898)
LibDem — 1,078 (1,395)

* * * * *

Battersea
2:21 BST, 9:21 ET

This is another London constituency, and it’s a 10% swing to Labour. Jane Ellison, who easily won in 2015, has lost to Labour’s Marsha de Cordova.

Labour — 25,292 (18,792)
Conservative — 22,876 (26,730)
LibDem — 4,401 (2,241)

Chile

Chilean parliamentary and presidential (first round) election results

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Chile’s general elections on Sunday went just about as much as expected. chile

Michelle Bachelet leads all over candidates by a margin of over 20%, but with just 46.68% support, she’ll narrowly miss the absolute majority that she needs to avoid a December 15 runoff.  Bachelet, who served as Chile’s president between 2006 and 2010, is the candidate of the Nueva Mayoria (New Majority) coalition, which is itself based on the broad center-left Concertación that’s won four out of the five past elections since the return of regular democracy in Chile in the late 1980s after the regime of Augusto Pinochet.

In second place, also as widely expected, is Evelyn Matthei with 25.01% — Matthei is a former senator and a former minister of labor in the administration of outgoing center-right president Sebastián Piñera, who is the candidate of the broad center-right coalition that’s comprised of Piñera’s Renovación Nacional (RN, National Renewal) and Matthei’s more conservative Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI, Independent Democratic Union).

But given how close Bachelet came to winning an outright majority, she is almost assured of victory against Matthei in the second round — so the next four weeks of campaigning will likely amount to somewhat of a victory lap for Bachelet, who hopes to become the first former Chilean president to return for a second, non-consecutive term in recent history.

It’s been a difficult year for Chilean conservatives — its center-right coalition, the Coalición por el Cambio (Coalition for Change),  widely known as the Alianza por Chile (Alliance for Chile), which saw its frontrunner for president, former energy minister Laurence Golborne withdraw from the race in the spring due to accusations of malfeasance stemming from his time in the private sector, and which saw its elected presidential nominee, former economy minister Pablo Longueira, withdraw promptly after winning the hard-fought nomination on account of clinical depression.

chilepresidential

Surprisingly far behind in third place were two relatively independent candidates.

Marco Enríquez-Ominami (popularly known as ‘MEO’), ran a stridently leftist campaign as the founder and leader of the Partido Progresista (Progressive Party), and he hoped to improve on his performance in the December 2009 first-round presidential election, when he won 20% of the vote.  Instead, he won just 10.96% of the vote, a disappointment for Enríquez-Ominami’s feisty campaign and the sign that the broad center-left electorate largely coalesced around Bachelet’s candidacy.

Perhaps even more disappointing was the performance of Franco Parisi, who won just 10.12% of the vote — an independent center-right candidate, Parisi was vying for second place in polls with Matthei a month ago before Matthei started attacking Parisi, a popular professor and economist, especially with regard to allegations that he withheld $200,000 of employee wages.

While Bachelet may have enjoyed winning the presidency outright, more important to her and the Nueva Mayoria coalition are the results of the parliamentary elections also held on Sunday — Chileans were electing all 120 members of the Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of Chile’s parliament, and a little over one-half of the 38-member Senado (Senate), the upper house.

With just over 95% of the vote counted for the Chamber of Deputies, the center-left Nueva Mayoria held 65 seats, the center-right Alianza held 47 seats, with four seats still undecided, and with one seat going to the Progressive Party and three seats going to independents, leaving Bachelet and the center-left on the cusp of winning the 69 seats necessary for a four-sevenths majority in the lower house, which is necessary to enact the kind of major educational and tax reforms that Bachelet hopes to pass in the next four years, but not the two-thirds majority necessary for constitutional revisions. Under Chile’s ‘binomial’ system, however, in which two deputies are elected from each of 60 districts, it’s difficult to achieve a lopsided victory in either direction in either house of parliament.

In the Senate, of the 20 seats up for election, the Nueva Mayoria has won 12, the Alianza just six, with one independent and one still to be determined.  Given that the other 18 Senate seats divided between nine for the center-left and nine for the center-right in the previous December 2009 election, that would give Nueva Mayoria at least 21 seats in the Senate and the Alianza 15 — enough for a clear majority, but again just on the cusp of winning a four-sevenths majority (22) in the upper house as well.

As Duke University professor Ariel Dorfman wrote in The Guardian over the weekend, the two were once childhood playmates when their fathers both served in the Chilean air force — Matthei’s father supported Pinochet in the September 1973 coup against president Salvador Allende, while Bachelet’s father opposed the coup and was subsequently imprisoned, tortured and died in prison in 1974:

Fernando Matthei was a military attache at the London embassy when the coup led by Augusto Pinochet destroyed Chilean democracy. He could do nothing to help the friend with whom he used to exchange classical records and talk into the night about sports, politics and literature. But his failure to act could no longer be justified, however, when he returned to Santiago at the end of 1973 and was named director of the aviation’s War Academy – the very building in which Alberto Bachelet was to die two months later. Though several judicial reviews and trials found that then Colonel Matthei had no penal culpability in the death of General Alberto Bachelet – the cellars where his comrade-in-arms were being tormented were off limits to anyone not working as an interrogator – the guilt still haunts him. In his 2009 book, he admitted: “Prudence outweighed courage.”

Not even the most delirious novelist could have imagined a more unusual history of differing destinies. One dies because he had the courage, though perhaps not the prudence, of accepting to head the distribution and food centre of Allende’s government, a post that had ministerial status. The other lives a life of excessive prudence and no courage and is ultimately named to the ruling junta. General Matthei also served as health minister in Pinochet’s cabinet – a portfolio that Michelle Bachelet held a generation later. As for Evelyn Matthei, she was a senator and then labour minister in Piñera’s government. A study in contrasts: the socialist who became Chile’s president and the conservative who aspires to that presidency.

Bachelet and her family sought exile in Australia and East Germany, and Bachelet returned to Chile only in 1979 as a pediatrician.

Third-place candidate Enríquez-Ominami’s father, a revolutionary leftist who also opposed the coup, was also executed by the Pinochet regime, and the effect demonstrates just how much the ghosts of 1973 (and the ghosts of the Pinochet regime, which governed until 1989) haunt contemporary Chilean politics.

Continue reading Chilean parliamentary and presidential (first round) election results →

United States

How the US government shutdown looks to the rest of the world

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The People’s Republic of China doesn’t do government shutdowns. USflag

Neither does India, the world’s largest democracy.  Neither does Russia nor Japan nor the European Union.

The crisis that the United States faces over the next month — the nearly certain federal government shutdown set to begin on Tuesday and the US government’s potential sovereign default if the US Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling — is almost completely foreign to the rest of the world.

The vocabulary of the government budget crises that have sprung from divided government during the presidential administration of Barack Obama — from ‘sequester’ to ‘fiscal cliff’ to ‘supercommittee’ — is not only new to American politics, it’s a vocabulary that exists solely to describe phenomena exclusive to American politics.  As the Republican Party seems ready to force a budgetary crisis over the landmark health care reform law that was passed by Congress in 2010 and arguably endorsed by the American electorate when they reelected Obama last November over Republican candidate Mitt Romney, the rest of world has been left scrambling to understand the crisis, mostly because the concept of a government shutdown (or a debt ceiling — more on that below) is such an alien affair.

If, for example, British prime minister David Cameron loses a vote on the United Kingdom’s budget, it’s considered the defeat of a ‘supply bill’ (i.e., one that involves government spending), and a loss of supply would precipitate his government’s resignation.  If Italian prime minister Enrico Letta loses a vote of no confidence in the Italian parliament later this week, his government would also most likely resign.  In some cases, if cooler heads prevail, their governments might form anew (such as the Portuguese government’s reformation earlier this summer following its own crisis over budget austerity).  Otherwise, the country would hold new elections, as will happen later this month in Luxembourg after the government of longtime prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker fell over a secret service scandal.

So to the extent that a government falls, in most parliamentary systems, the voters then elect a government, or a group of parties that then must form a government, and that government must pass a budget and, well, govern.  Often, in European and other parliamentary systems, the typically ceremonial head of state plays a real role in pushing parties together to stable government.  Think of the role that Italian president Giorgio Napolitano played in bringing together both Letta’s government and the prior technocratic government headed by Mario Monti.  Or perhaps the role that the Dutch monarch played in appointing an informateur and a formateur in the Dutch cabinet formation process until the Dutch parliament stripped the monarchy of that role a few years ago.

But wait! Belgium went 535 days without a government a few years ago, you say!

That’s right — but even in the middle of that standoff, when leaders of the relatively more leftist, poorer Walloon north and the relatively conservative, richer Flemish south couldn’t pull together a governing coalition, Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme stayed on as prime minister to lead a caretaker government.  The Leterme government had ministers and policies and budgets, though Leterme ultimately pushed through budgets that reduced Belgium’s budget deficit.  No government workers were furloughed, as will happen starting Tuesday if congressional members don’t pass a continuing resolution to fund the US government.

To the north of the United States, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper caused a bit of a constitutional brouhaha when he prorogued the Canadian parliament in both 2008 and 2009 on the basis of potentially political considerations.  In Canadian parliamentary procedure, prorogation is something between a temporary recess and the dissolution of parliament — it’s the end of a parliamentary session, and the prime minister can prorogue parliament with the consent of Canada’s governor-general.  Harper raised eyebrows among constitutional scholars when he hastily prorogued the parliament in December 2008 after the center-left Liberal Party and the progressive New Democratic Party formed a coalition with the separatist Bloc Québécois in what turned out to be a failed attempt to enact a vote of no confidence against Harper’s then-minority government.

The governor-general at the time, Michaëlle Jean, took two hours to grant the prorogation — in part to send a message that the governor-general need not rubber-stamp any prime ministerial requests for proroguing parliament in the future.

Harper again advised to prorogue the parliament from the end of December 2009 through February 2010, ostensibly to keep parliament in recess through the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, though critics argued he did so to avoid investigation into his government’s knowledge of abusive treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.  Again, however, proroguing parliament didn’t shutter Canadian government offices like the US government shutdown threatens to do.

Moreover, in parliamentary systems, it’s not uncommon for a government to survive a difficult vote with the support of the loyal opposition.  But in the United States, House speaker John Boehner has typically (though not always) applied the ‘majority of the majority’ rule — or the ‘Hastert’ rule, named after the Bush-era House speaker Denny Hastert.  In essence, the rule provides that Boehner will bring for a vote only legislation that’s supported by a majority of the 233 Republicans in the 435-member House of Representatives, the lower congressional house (Democrats hold just 200 seats).  So while there may be a majority within the House willing to avoid a shutdown, it can’t materialize without the support of a majority of the Republican caucus.  That means that 117 Republicans may be able to hold the House hostage, even if 116 Republicans and all 200 Democrats want to avoid a shutdown.

Realistically, that means that anything that Boehner can pass in the House is dead on arrival in the US Senate, the upper congressional house, where Democrats hold a 54-46 advantage.

There’s simply no real analog in the world of comparative politics.  Even the concept of a debt ceiling is a bit head-scratching to foreign observers — US treasury officials say that the government will face difficulties borrowing enough money to achieve the government’s obligations if it fails to lift the debt ceiling of $16.7 trillion on or before October 17.

Denmark stands virtually alone alongside the United States in having a statutory debt ceiling that requires parliamentary assent to raise the total cumulative amount of borrowing, but it hasn’t played a significant role in Danish budget politics since its enactment in 1993:

The Danish fixed nominal debt limit—legislatively outside the annual budget process—was created solely in response to an administrative reorganization among the institutions of government in Denmark and the requirements of the Danish Constitution. It was never intended to play any role in day-to-day politics.

So far, at least, raising Denmark’s debt ceiling has always been a parliamentary formality, and it was lifted from 950 billion Danish kroner to 2 trillion Danish kroner in 2010 with support from all of Denmark’s major political parties.

Contrast that to the United States, where a fight over raising the debt ceiling in summer 2011 caused a major political crisis and major economic turmoil, leading Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the US credit rating from ‘AAA’ to ‘AA+.’  The Budget Control Act, passed in early August 2011, provided that the United States would raise its debt ceiling, but institute a congressional ‘supercommittee’ to search out budget cuts.  When the supercommittee failed to identify budget savings before January 2013, it triggered $1.2 trillion in ‘sequestration’ — harsh across-the-board budget cuts to both Democratic and Republican priorities that took effect earlier this year, though they were originally designed to be so severe so that they would serve as an incentive for more targeted budget adjustments.

Despite the fact of the dual crises facing the US government in October, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note has actually declined in recent weeks, indicating that while US political turmoil may spook global investors, they still (ironically) invest in Treasury notes as a safe haven:

Screen Shot 2013-09-30 at 1.42.25 AM

Continue reading How the US government shutdown looks to the rest of the world →

United Kingdom

Is Kenneth Clarke — and his experiment with prison reform — finished in British politics?

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Longtime observers of British politics will note with some alarm recent reports that justice minister Kenneth Clarke may be headed out of UK prime minister David Cameron’s cabinet, pursuant to a widely expected cabinet reshuffle in early September.

To contemplate this is to see the final curtain drawn on one of the ‘big beasts’ of British politics in the past three decades — as has been noted, Clarke won his first ministerial role when UK chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne was just one year old.

The Telegraph reports that Cameron is considering replacing Clarke with Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary (and the ill-fated former leader of the Tories from 2003 to 2005), or Nick Herbert, a junior justice minister.  Even more odd is the way in which Clarke has issued a statement on the potential reshuffle:

“I have never had any conversations of any kind with the Prime Minister or anyone acting on his behalf about a reshuffle. I am totally laid back about a reshuffle and am waiting to see whether or not it affects me,” he said.

Clarke is, simply put, one of a kind: a bloke in a party of toffs.

Second to Boris Johnson, perhaps, Clarke connects with the British people in a way that few Tories have managed in recent times. Continue reading Is Kenneth Clarke — and his experiment with prison reform — finished in British politics? →

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 →