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United Kingdom

Despite by-election result, UKIP is still a bunch of ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’

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After placing second in a by-election in Rotherham last Thursday, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has vaunted to the center of British politics, with newsmakers wondering whether UKIP will, after two decades, finally emerge as a real force in British politics.

The by-election, which resulted after Denis MacShane, a Labour MP, resigned due to the ongoing expenses scandal (MacShane had submitted 19 invoices for reimbursement for non-covered expenses), should have been a non-event. One Labour MP was replaced by another Labour MP, Sarah Champion, who won over 46% of the vote, which was actually an improvement on Labour’s performance in the 2010 election, when MacShane won just 44.6%.

So why has the sleepy little constituency in South Yorkshire been treated like a political earthquake?

With 21.8% of the vote, UKIP’s second-place finish was its best-ever result in an election for the House of Commons.

UKIP was founded by Conservative Party rebels in 1993 in opposition to the Maastricht treaty (the European Union treaty that established the single currency).  Its primary characteristic as a party is its eurosceptic nature, but its ‘pro-British’ posture means that it has adopted harsher anti-immigration and anti-Muslim stances than any of the three major UK parties, notwithstanding a robust strain of euroscepticism within the governing Conservatives under prime minister David Cameron.

Cameron famously referred to UKIP as a bunch of ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ in 2006 shortly after winning the Conservative leadership.  It was probably not far from the truth in 2006, and it’s probably not far from the truth today.  Despite the hand-wringing across England, UKIP is not necessarily any stronger or weaker than it already was before last week’s by-election — and winning about one-fifth of the total vote is hardly dominant. Part of its ‘success’ comes from controversy surrounding the local Labour-dominated council removing three children from foster parents, apparently on the basis that the foster parents were UKIP members.

Nigel Farage, UKIP’s leader (pictured above) declared after the by-election that UKIP is ascendant:

“We have established ourselves now as the third force in British politics. We have beaten the Lib Dems in all forms of elections over the course of this year. We are clearly and consistently now above the Lib Dems in the opinion polls.

“There is an upward trend. And I think the UKIP message is resonating with voters and not just Tory voters. There are plenty of voters, particularly in the north of England, coming to us from Labour and the Lib Dems.”

Farage, who’s known less for statecraft than for his stunts at the European Parliament (he’s been an MEP since 1999), would certainly like to think so.

But despite clear signs that UKIP would indeed make gains if the 2014 European elections and the 2015 general election were held today, UKIP is unlikely to become a truly powerful force in UK politics anytime soon.

Here are five reasons why. Continue reading Despite by-election result, UKIP is still a bunch of ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ →

Canada

Trudeau will seek leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party

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For better or worse, Justin Trudeau is expected to announce next Tuesday that he will seek the leadership of the beleaguered Liberal Party in Canada.

Trudeau, the son of beloved former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, is the last, perhaps best, hope of an endangered party.  As John Ibbitson noted in The Globe and Mail yesterday, Trudeau’s assets make him an almost prohibitive favorite.

At age 40, however, the Montréal-area MP has been a member of the House of Commons since just 2008, and he will face doubts that he’s seasoned enough to become prime minister.

If he wins the leadership, he’ll first face the task of winning back supporters from the New Democratic Party, who made such incredible inroads in the 2011 election under the late Jack Layton that they far eclipsed the Liberals to become the Official Opposition and the main alternative to prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party.

Currently, polls show the NDP, under new leader Thomas Mulcair, within striking distance of the Tories and Liberals trailing in distant third place.  But a National Post poll today shows that the Trudeau-led Liberals would win 39% to just 32% for Harper and 20% for the NDP.  Those numbers, I believe, represent a best-case scenario for Trudeau — when he really represents nothing more than nostalgia for his father and before he’s had to contend through a long leadership fight and go head-to-head against not only Harper, but Mulcair as well.  Trudeau will have to sideline the NDP (or otherwise engineer a merger or alliance with the NDP) and then win not only a sizeable number of ridings in Quebéc, but also in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada.

There will be much more to say in the months leading up to the leadership race — it doesn’t start until November 14 and it won’t end until April 14, 2013.  Since the 2011 election that saw the Liberals reduced to just 34 seats, former (NDP) Ontario premier Bob Rae has served as interim leader.

There will a lot of rebuilding for whomever wins the leadership — and since Rae himself ruled out running for the leadership in a permanent capacity earlier in June, it’s seemed like the leadership is Trudeau’s for the taking, despite a number of candidates also expected to run — the most serious potential challengers to Trudeau include Dominic LeBlanc, a New Brunswick MP since 2000 and currently the party’s foreign affairs critic and, perhaps more intriguingly, Marc Garneau, a retired astronaut and former president of the Canadian Space Agency from 2001 to 2006, who has served as an MP since 2008, also from Montréal, and is the current Liberal House Leader.  Each candidate will pay a $75,000 entry fee — it’s thought the steep price will limit the number of contenders to just serious challengers, and campaign spending will be capped at $950,000.

It’s difficult to fathom just how far the Liberals have fallen in just little over a decade.

Continue reading Trudeau will seek leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party →

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 →

United Kingdom

Cameron reshuffle nudges UK government rightward

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UK prime minister David Cameron announced his first major cabinet reshuffle Tuesday since taking office in May 2010.

As predicted, justice minister Kenneth Clarke was demoted to ‘minister without portfolio,’ marking what will likely be the end of front-bench politics for the ‘big beast’ of Tory — and British — politics, and for his thoughtful take on prison reform.  He’ll be replaced by the far more right-wing (and non-lawyer) Chris Grayling, an up and coming figure on the Tory right, who had previously served as employment minister.  From The Guardian:

Grayling’s appointment also signals a determination by Cameron to take a tougher line on sentencing, the Human Rights Act, legal aid and community punishment, a nexus of policy issues that has left Conservative backbenchers frustrated by what they regarded as Clarke’s willingness to pander to Lib Dem opinion.

Lady Sayeeda Warsi, the only Muslim in the cabinet and a one-time rising Tory moderate star, was also demoted, from co-chair of the party to senior minister of state at the Foreign Office.

Cameron’s reshuffle among junior ministerial offices was much more thoroughgoing, and also marks a significant swing to the right — and a swing to a cabinet that is ‘more male, white, southern and Oxbrigdge’.  The net effect will be to isolate further deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats.  Chancellor George Osborne will keep his job, meaning that there’s no shift from the budget austerity upon which Cameron has staked his government’s legacy.

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 →

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

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 →