It's open season on "explaining" the U.K. election -- and figuring out what happens next

In the new cabinet Prime Minister Cameron announces in the morning, MP Priti Patel (right) is expected to be one of a group of women considerably expanding the current ranks, which include Education Secretary Nicky Morgan (left) and Home Secretary Theresa May (center). The Telegraph reports that the reshuffled cabinet will be a full third female, with higher-profile roles for some election "stars."


"Want to win from the left? Be left-wing. Offer a real alternative to neo-liberalism."

-- Ian Welsh, on the rout of the U.K.'s Labour Party,
in his Thursday night post on Thursday's election

by Ken

It's easy to ridicule the British election-prognisticating industry for having gotten everything wrong with regard to Thursday's election, and I don't see any reason to hold back on the ridicule. None of them seem to have imagined anything but the tiniest, most minimallly conclusive edge to either the Conservatives or Labour, with much confusion and gridlock ahead.

Still, in retrospect, one thing that may be easier to see now than it was before Thursday is that the U.K. is entering waters that are just about uncharted. Therefore botrh the pundits and the pols are left scrambling to explain what happened and to predict where it's all going to lead, in a situation for which the U.K. doesn't seem to have much applicable historical precedent.


AND THE WINNER IS . . . A CORRUPT SCHMUCK AND STOOGE

I've seen commentarial blurbs attributing a sudden outburst of charisma to Conservative Party leader and now returned Prime Minister David Cameron, and without denigrating his electoral achievement -- or at least not denigrating it too much -- I have to say, huh? Are we talking about the same person?

On Wednesday the guy was a totally corrupt schmuck and stooge, and I don't see that he's anything different now. In point of fact, the photo shows him at 10 Downing Street on Friday. Oh yeah, that's totally the same buttwipe.

What Cameron did, as far as I can tell, was to hold onto his voters, at least in terms of winning seats in Parliament, at least in part by scaring the dickens out of them, raising the specter of radical Scottish MPs in coalition with Labour. This is more than was managed by the leaders of Labour (the party that, after going on a century as one of the U.K.'s two major parties, all but disappeared Thursday), the Liberal Democrats (who, running somewhere to the left of the Tories and the right of Labour, for a while seemed poised to break into the Big Two, or at least have real third-party heft but all but disappeared Thursday), and UKIP, the UK Independence Party (whose vociferous anti-European stance seemed to be making them comers in recent non-parliamentary elections, until they all but disappeared Thursday). Again, this is in terms of winning parliamentary seats; it's not to say that those parties didn't get votes. But if you don't win seats, the votes don't count for much.


ANYBODY HEARD LATELY FROM EX-"DEPUTY PM" NICK CLEGG?

Deputy Nick's rout actually pretty comical. To begin with, when was the last time the schmo did or said anything deputy-prime-ministerial? I suppose he had some sort of voice at the Tory policy-making table, since in the Conservative-LDP coalition government, LDP votes were always needed. But Deputy Nick's status seems to have been reduced to something more Deputy Barney Fife-ish.

And it's not as if he wasn't warned. When Nick pushed the LDP into the coalition with the Conservatives, on the theory that it would give the party a share of power, and a base for goodness only knew what future bounty, there were plenty of people, both inside the party and out, who warned that he was giving the Conservatives what they wanted, power, in exchange for well, nothing -- that he was risking the very future existence of the LDP. In hindsight most everyone sees it now, but there were plenty of people who foresaw it when it was foresight.

It seems clear that in this election LDP candidates weren't offering anything that voters were buying, even -- or especially -- in constituencies they've held easily before.


BUT THEN, THIS IS TRUE OF LABOUR TOO, NO?

In a post written as the exit polls Thursday were forecasting "a likely bare majority government" for the Tories, Ian Welsh described himself as "torn between two reactions" -- on the one hand, a hearty you-asked-for-it to voters who voted Conservative even after five years of knowing what that means (he quoted Mencken: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard"); and on the other hand contempt for the "Tory Lite" Labour campaign of Ed Miliband, running as "the lesser evil," as "not quite as bad as the other bloke, but they’ll get in eventually and do what they were going to do anyway.” ("And that was his platform.")

I’m seeing a lot of despair from my British friends on the left. And my British friends on the sane, for that matter. Here’s what to do: Either take over the Labour Party, or, if you think that’s impossible, pile into the Greens. Or, heck, create a new party.

I will point to Alberta, where the left-most party in Canada won on a platform of, among other things, raising taxes.They came, essentially, from nowhere.   [And you owe it to yourself, if you haven't already read it, to read that May 6 post about the out-of-nowhere victory of "the most left-wing party in Canada" in "the most right-wing province in Canada" in the provincial election. "It would be," Ian wrote, "like an Elizabeth Warren-inspired party winning Texas."]

Want to win from the left? Be left-wing. Offer a real alternative to neo-liberalism.

Ian makes an awfully important point about the revolution wrought by the indomitable Margaret Thatcher. "The true magnitude of Thatcher’s victory," he writes, "was not her policies, it was that Labour became Tory Lite; she changed the acceptable policy matrix for not just the Conservatives, but for the main opposition party as well" (emphasis added).

Until that “acceptable policy window” changes, the trend will continue right -- it cannot do anything else. Each Labour interregnum will be just that, a period in which neo-liberal policies are pursued at a slower rate than during Conservative governments, but in which the trend is not reversed.

This is true in almost every country in the West of which I can think (Iceland and perhaps Finland being the lone exceptions).

Offer a real alternative, with real left wing policies. If you can’t capture an existing major party, pile into a minor party or create a new one. 

WILL CAMERON YET GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS THE
MAN WHO BUSTED THE UNITED KINGDOM APART?

None of which takes in the triumph of the Scottish National Party (SNP), which won 56 of the 59 Scottish seats in the Parliament in London. SNP candidates hoped the election results would have them negotiating with Labour to form a new government. Instead, Scotland will be at the mercy of a central government likely to be pursuing even more austerity and, as Ian Welsh puts it, the sweeping away of "most of the remains of the post-war welfare state."

Ian notes that "Scots may really be regretting not voting for independence" in the great separation referendum. "Most of the wonderful social policies Scots value more than the English," he says, "will now be taken away from them." The lesson? "Failure of courage when there is a real alternative will reap the expected results."

Now we remember the promises Prime Minister Cameron made to the Scots in the increasingly panicky weeks before the referendum when it looked as if they were really prepared to vote for independence, and he stood to go down in history as the man who presided over the busting up of the United Kingdom. Well, he got through that vote, and I don't imagine that any of those promises have been heard from again. You have to wonder about anyone who thought they would be.

One concession Cameron won was a pledge that the independence referendum wouldn't become a regular, recurring thing, that it would be a "once in a generation" deal. It remains to be seen, though, whether Scots will feel bound by a promise made to a man who did nothing but lie to them. Already the PM is insisting that there will no second Scottish independence referendum, even though, according to The Scotsman, "Downing Street sources at the weekend said Cameron is 'very concerned' about the election result, which has left just three pro-Union MPs out of 59 from Scotland." He insists, though, that the government will continue with all reforms and pledges already promised. He says he's "very confident" that he won't be the last prime minister of the United Kingdom.


THE "LET'S GET OUT OF EUROPE" ISSUE ISN'T DEAD

As far as I know, the electoral failure of UKIP was as unforeseen as those of Labour and the LDP. And given the general ugliness of the party's appeal, there's some comfort in this surprise, at least.

The nativist response to economic woes isn't likely to disappear that quickly, especially since Cameron, sensing that it could only be a losing issue for him, tried to skirt it. He's pretty much committed, though, to a vote by the end of 2017 on pulling the U.K. out of the European Union. But, report the Washington Post's XXXXX and Dan Balz, "some are pushing for the vote to come far sooner so that uncertainty doesn't hang over Britain's economic and political fortunes for the next 2½ years."

Polls suggest that if the vote were held today, Britain would choose to stay in the E.U. But the energized voices for “out” are gearing up for the fight, in the belief that the country could better manage itself without meddling from Brussels.

Opponents of an exit say it could be catastrophic, leading to an exodus of jobs and a muffling of Britain’s voice both in Europe and beyond.

Cameron has projected ambivalence on the issue, saying he wants the country to remain inside Europe, but only if he can win critical changes to the E.U. charter — changes his European allies have repeatedly said they are unwilling to grant.

The question will divide not only the country but also Cameron’s government, with some of his top lieutenants likely to push for an exit.

And it's not as if Cameron can expect clear sailing on, well, anything. At first blush, all those reports about the election which include the qualification about his "bare majority" seem kind of niggling. After all, he went from not having any kind of majority, having to rely on his coalition with the LDP, to having an actual majority of his party's own! But commentators point out that the bareness of that majority makes the prime minister significantly more dependent on every crackpot back-bencher than he has been in his first term, when he could usually expect enough LDP votes to cover any dissension in his ranks.

And as the U.K. political system veers ever closer to ours, the likelihood only grows that party leaders won't be able to count on party discipline to stifle such dissension.


ON ONE ISSUE, AT LEAST, WE CAN CREDIT
PM CAMERON WITH GENUINE COURAGE

In the immediate wake of the election results, the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart pointed out, in a "Post Partisan" blogpost, "David Cameron victory also a win for gay marriage," one marked contrast between "their" conservatives and ours.

Civil partnerships, the United Kingdom’s answer to civil unions, started in 2005. That’s the year Cameron became leader of the Conservative party. In 2010, he became prime minister. The following year, Cameron’s coalition started looking at ways to legalize same-sex marriage in the U.K. Using his conservative credentials to make the case, Cameron succeeded. In 2013, same-sex couples began to wed.

Cameron showed true leadership. Neither his nation nor his party supported Cameron on marriage equality. So, angry were Conservative leaders that they predicted the death of the Tories. The BBC reported in 2013 that Cameron’s move on marriage “is thought to have been one of the factors behind a mass defection of grassroots members to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in some parts of the country.” It added that a leading Conservative think tank “warned that the party is ‘dying’ and facing ‘an existential crisis’.” And, in a 2013 letter to Cameron, a Conservative leader wrote, “I am personally convinced that the Conservative Party has little chance of winning a majority at the general election unless you reach a sensible accommodation on this subject and draw people back who have gone to UKIP or have no intention of voting at all.”

"Man, were they wrong," Jonathan writes, and adds:

This ought to be a lesson for Republican politicians who always lambast liberal U.S. leadership in favor of our conservative cousins in the U.K. Just look at the GOP presidential candidates. They all oppose marriage equality. But when asked whether they would attend a same-sex wedding of a loved one or a friend, their responses ranged from humane to heartless. These folks need to move into the 21st century with the rest of the country — and Cameron.

"The Cameron victory," Jonathan writes, "is further proof of three things: marriage equality is not antithetical to conservatism, support for same-sex marriage is not a killer at the ballot box, and the electorate ultimately won’t care when they see that the sky hasn’t fallen because the nice gay couple next door can legally marry."

He concludes: "I can’t wait for the GOP to wake up to that reality."

#

Did Ed Miliband Save The World?

This morning I happened to hear a Southern drawl coming out of the TV in my bedroom when I was washing up in the bathroom. The drawl was making a lot of good sense on Syria, which surprised me. It walked over to see who it was: Lloyd Doggett, a progressive from the Austin area. Figures! He talked about how his constituents are adamantly opposed to an attack on Syria, particularly if it's just the U.S. alone holding Assad accountable. Thank you, Ed Miliband!

The UK's imperialist establishment has the knives out for Miliband, the leader of Britain's Labor Party-- even more than usual. Needless to say, Cameron and his Conservative Party have somehow blamed Miliband for the vote in Parliament against Cameron's proposal to bomb Syria. Unmentioned is that without Cameron's own Conservative backbenchers voting NO, it wouldn't have mattered what Miliband said-- the war would be rolling ahead and it is unlikely Obama-- and the U.S. imperialist establishment-- would have even decided to let Congress have a vote. Cameron's junior partner, the excruciatingly pathetic Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has jumped on the "It's Miliband's fault" bandwagon. And forget the national polling, of course.

About 60% of those questioned said that, given the level of evidence about the use of chemical weapons by the Bashar al-Assad regime, they were against British troops intervening, while 24% said they were in favour. Among Conservative supporters 34% were in favour and 50% against, while 24% of Labour backers were in favour and 59% against.

The Liberal Democrats are the most evenly split of the three main parties, with 50% in favour and 36% against. More men (27%) than women (22%) back intervention.

A BBC poll released yesterday found that 71% of Britons agreed with Parliament's decision to reject Cameron's call for war and two-thirds of them don't care if that damages U.S.-U.K. relations. Only 20% of those polled felt Parliament had made the wrong decision. That makes it pretty hard for Cameron to bring it up for another vote, despite the Ruling Class freak out in London.

I haven't been a big Miliband fan. He's seemed too tepid and vacillating to me, even if he would be an improvement over Cameron or the ridiculous Clegg. But he sure made the big difference when it really mattered. I am certain, we-- and not just Britain-- would be engaged in a war right now if not for Ed Miliband's courageous stand. I wish he would have asked Cameron if he would have advocated unleashing missiles on Russian or China if one of those powers (who can fight back) had used chemical weapons on their own people. I hope someone asks Obama.

Speaking at a nursery in Hammersmith, west London, Clegg made clear his personal disappointment and strongly criticised Labour's "political point-scoring" for scuppering any prospect of British involvement in strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

There are growing calls for the coalition to consider holding a second vote on military action, despite the humiliating defeat for David Cameron on Thursday. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of the Commons intelligence and security committee and a former foreign secretary, led the push for a second vote, as the US said it had evidence that sarin gas was used.

However, Clegg slapped down this idea, saying parliament was "very clear" it did not want military action. "I cannot foresee any circumstances in which we would go back to parliament again on the same question and the same issue," he said. "We can't go back asking the same question over and over. So no, I can't foresee such circumstances."

Despite saying the coalition would respect parliament's wishes, the Liberal Democrat leader called into question Miliband's motives for rejecting coalition plan. He said no one could begrudge Labour "wrestling" with the issue but the party had not behaved in a way befitting the gravity of the situation.

"My own view is that the Labour party seemed to take this as an opportunity for party political point-scoring," he said.

...On Sunday, William Hague and George Osborne said parliament had spoken and Britain would offer only diplomatic support to its allies.

In his first big interview since the government's defeat in the Commons, Hague said he could only envisage a change in UK policy if Labour became "less partisan". His remarks were echoed by the chancellor, who told BBC1's Andrew Marr Show that Miliband looked less like a future prime minister after helping to defeat the government.

I disagree-- and I think the vast majority of Britons do as well, though probably not Tony Blair who still, out of tradition I assume, calls himself a member of the Labour Party. I'd say Peter Hain, writing in The Guardian got it right when he urged Cameron to stop spinning his humiliating defeat by questioning Miliband's motives.

David Cameron has a streak of petty, bullying arrogance which often reveals itself at prime minister's questions-- very un-prime ministerial. Now his henchmen have been trying to spin his humiliating defeat by parliament over military intervention in Syria into an unedifying character assassination of Ed Miliband. It wasn't Miliband who attempted to grandstand by bouncing parliament prematurely into attacking Syria. The Labour leader hasn't been responsible for perhaps the most monumentally misjudged British foreign policy in recent times. Cameron began two years ago demanding regime change-- which didn't work. Then he resourced the rebel forces-- which failed too. Then he tried to send arms to the rebels-- until cross-party opposition in parliament blocked that: perhaps he forgot the series of protests by MPs culminating in the vote opposing his policy by 114 to one on 11 July on a backbench motion moved by Tories?

...[B]ackbench and frontbench Labour MPs made it clear they were unwilling to go along with the PM. As did many Tories too-- though No 10 ignored them, in a way the Labour leader did not with his party. But the real problem is that Cameron gave absolutely no sense of where all this was going to lead. What would happen after a military strike-- "surgical" or not? What about collateral civilian casualties, retaliatory attacks, escalatory consequences? Although they do indeed cross a red line in warfare, chemical weapons actually account for just 1% of all the terrible casualties in Syria. What would parliament be asked to do next?

...The fundamental flaw in the position of the government, the US and its allies is to see Syria as a battle between a barbaric dictator and a repressed people. It's a civil war: a quagmire involving Sunni versus Shia, Saudi Arabia versus Iran, the US versus Russia, with al-Qaida fighters increasingly prominent among the rebel forces. Bashar al-Assad has the backing of 40% of the population who may fear his ruthless dictatorship, but fear much more becoming victims of genocide or Sunni extremism. Surely if western military strikes toppled Assad without a settlement in place, there could be even greater chaos and carnage in a powder keg of a region?

There can be no military victory by either side. The alternative is to drop a failed British policy and promote a negotiated settlement between Assad and his enemies. However impossible that looks today, it's the only way to solve this bloody and increasingly dangerous war.

I tried embedding this video but... well who knows how or why YouTube-- or whomever-- decides what can and can't be seen in which countries and at what times? But this one below can still be seen:

Meanwhile, Across The Pond, The Voters Have Tasted Austerity-- And Are Defeating The Politicians Who Are Force-Feeding It To Them

Tomorrow France is electing a president and things look pretty dire for conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy. France's Bling Bling president is the only politician on the planet who eats in fancier and more expensive French restaurants than Newt Gingrich and, other than perhaps Mitt Romney, there is no one more clearly identified with the aspirations of the one-percent. He's the most unpopular president since World War II and seems likely to be spending his final days at the Élysée Palace. After is stunning defeat in the first round of voting, he's moved abruptly right-- in the direction of the teabagger (or populist right)-- beyond the traditional concerns of the 1%. And then the accusations of how his first election was funded by Qaddafi has further roiled the waters and added to the mistrust most Frenchmen feel towards him. Yesterday was the final day of campaigning and the big headline is that former candidate, centrist Francois Bayrou, who took almost 10% in the first round, said he's voting for Hollande. Worse news for Sarkozy is that the far right candidate, Marine Le Pen, who came in third, called on her supporters to sit on their hands and not close ranks behind Sarkozy. That was pretty much the death knell for his chances at reelection. Sarkozy's desperate followers are reacting to the impending defeat the way right-wing thugs always react to adversity-- violently.

Meanwhile another Austerity advocate, British Prime Minister David Cameron, saw his party-- and his coalition-- decimated in local elections across the U.K. Cameron apologized to hundreds of Conservative councillors who lost their seats and his coalition partner, Nick Clegg, will be lucky to hold onto the Lib-Dem leadership. Looks like Labor took 823 new Council seats while the Conservatives lost 405 and the Lib-Dems lost 336. The Conservatives wound up with less than a third of the votes cast. The radical right faction within the Conservative Party are claiming that Cameron hasn't been far enough right, even though the BNP (a local Nazi-like party that resembles the GOP lost at least 75% of it's seats). Sound familiar? At the same time, the Lib-Dems feel trapped in a coalition many of them would like to get out of.

Lord Oakeshott, an irritant to the leadership and an adviser to the business secretary, Vince Cable, issued a blunt warning.

He said: "The facts are that two out of every five of our very hard working councillors last year and this year have lost their seats. We have got to face it, we have had another very substantial swath of our crucial activist base wiped away. We have had a few successful rearguard guerrilla actions, but what matters for me is whether we can fight the next election as a nationwide, powerful, independent force. If we have another year like this we will not be able to.

"Two years on from the election the economy is flat on its back, and if we cannot get the economy to grow we cannot get the deficit down. So unless there is a change, both coalition parties and our country are heading for the rocks."

He called for bold action, saying the banks including RBS had to be forced to lend.

He said all that was coming from the Treasury and David Cameron was pussyfooting about. "They talk about it, but they won't act."

The party president, Tim Farron, admitted the two parties believed wildly different things, but they had to co-operate like grownups. But he added "the party had to be a bit more spiky and a bit more independent."

Will American voters need to be further ripped off by the Lords of Austerity before they have the good sense to defeat every Republican and every Blue Dog Democrat running for Congress? That would send a clear message-- although I'm sure the Beltway media would find a way to muddle it.

Nick Clegg: "Wealth Inequality Is Very Much Greater Than Income Inequality And Widening"

Cameron & Clegg, match made in hell-- at least for the British people

Yesterday some of us may have been thinking about all the snot-nosed little Republican shits who are just like Conservative Parliament Member Aidan Burley. But by this morning my mind was back in the U.K. and back into the unpopular shaky coalition government David Cameron cobbled together with the help of the very much less than trustworthy Nick Clegg of the Liberal-Democrats.

Back in May we mentioned that Clegg was struggling to figure out what to do after his party lost more than 700 council seats in a national election, a staggering rejection of the party. Distancing the Lib-Dems from Cameron's Conservatives was what his party started demanding. He started talking about the Lib-Dems' role of protecting the country from a return to the unfairness of Thatcherism. Yesterday, perhaps not for the first time, Clegg was making sure voters know that, coalition of not, his party is still different from Cameron's Conservatives-- and his message is one Obama and the Beltway Democrats would be wise to take heed of.

Nick Clegg has signalled he will make a tax on wealth a Liberal Democrat priority between now and the next election, saying it will be one way to attack the glass ceilings that allow the children of the privileged elite to be protected.

In a speech to Demos on "the open society", he said he wanted "lower taxes on work and effort" and "a greater contribution from the wealthy."

Aides said he was targeting either a mansion tax, restriction of pension tax relief or action on capital gains tax. They added the government may well need new sources of income if it is to meet its priority pledge to remove the low paid from tax.

"Wealth inequality is very much greater than income inequality, and widening," Clegg said. "The bottom third of households hold just 3% of the nation's wealth. The top third hold three-quarters of it. This inequality of wealth then cascades down the generations, potentially widening the opportunity gap."

He said greater intergenerational social mobility is the principal objective of the coalition's social policy. He underscored his commitment to take action on executive pay by giving shareholders more power. He promised a response to a consultation on executive pay next month, but one aim will be to increase the influence of investors.

He said society was at a critical, and potentially dangerous, moment-- both in the world at large and in the UK. "History teaches that, at times of deep economic uncertainty, societies become more exposed to the forces of division-- populism, insularity, separatism, an 'us versus them' mentality," he said.

"Rather than remaining open to the world and facing the future, societies can begin to turn inwards and lose confidence in progress.

"The danger in the UK is that the forces of reaction and retreat overwhelm our instinct for openness and optimism. That we succumb to fear-- the greatest enemy of openness-- in these dark economic times."

He said Britain's openness was hobbled by closed institutions and vested interests hoarding unaccountable power, wealth and influence. His targets were "media moguls, dodgy lobbyists corrupting our politics, irresponsible bankers taking us for a ride and then helping themselves to massive bonuses, boardrooms closed against the interests of shareholders and workers."

Other targets include the bar, the unelected House of Lords and party political funding. He said: "Closed societies-- opaque, hierarchical, insular-- are the sorts of society my party has opposed for over 150 years."

Austerity isn't the answer, not anywhere. I can never resist an opportunity to share this one:

U.K. Voters Reject Conservative's Dark, Dysfunctional Austerity Vision

Ed Miliband sounds almost good enough to come over and give a pep talk to American voters in Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan or any number of places that have been taken over by deranged right-wing fanatics in state legislatures and governors' mansions. The leader of Britain's Labour Party just won something like 800 additional seats in town halls all across the country. The local elections this week was very much a referendum on the Conservative Party austerity programs and their junior partner, the Liberal-Democrats, were practically wiped off the map.

As expected, the Scottish National Party made huge gains in Scotland, where they already held a plurality in the Holyrood (Scotland's parliament) and will now rule with an outright majority-- and will be able to force through a referendum on independence. The SNP bested the Conservatives and Labour and pretty much wiped out the Lib-Dems, who are viewed almost everywhere as untrustworthy appendages of the hated Conservatives.

The SNP's landslide was substantially due to a Scotland-wide collapse in Lib Dem support in protest at its coalition in London, with hundreds of thousands of voters switching to the SNP.

The Lib Dems lost former strongholds in North East Fife, the seat held at Westminster by former UK party leader Menzies Campbell, and in Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, where the previous UK leader, Charlie Kennedy, holds the equivalent Commons seat.

Polls have consistently shown that the economy and the austerity program (social safety cuts) were, far and away, the most important issue to voters. Results Thursday show that voters in Britain, like voters here in the U.S., believe there are viable alternatives to over reaching, reckless cuts that conservatives are rushing through while they are still able to maintain power. Voters understand that the cutbacks in the U.K. have caused economic stagnation and hard time for the vast majority of British families although, again like here, the top 2% are doing better than ever. And like here, Thursday's voters sent a message that tehy're not happy with the Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition robbing ordinary people to pay for a mess made by banksters, especially while those banksters-- and their political protectors-- are still benefiting from their malfeasance. And like the lame Democrats Inside the Beltway, Labour struggled to focus the message away from right-wing and corporatist framing and towards "investment is what will bring the economy back and make for a more equitable society."

Meanwhile Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg is struggling to figure out what to do next. His party lost more than 500 council seats across England alone, and more than 700 nationally. a staggering rejection of the party.

In the first sign that Clegg understands he needs to do more to distance his party from its coalition partners, he argued in a change of tone that one role for his party would be protect the country from a return to the unfairness of Thatcherism. He is implying that the ideology of an unalloyed majority Conservative administration would be well to the right.

The Lib Dem federal committee will meet shortly to set out the specific ways in which it expects the party to do more to differentiate itself from the Tories in line with a lengthy motion passed at the party's spring conference in Sheffield.

Senior party figures almost universally predicted the party was now entering "a transactional business relationship" with its coalition partners-- a phrase first urged on the deputy prime minister by Vince Cable, the business secretary, last autumn.

Many Lib Dem activists have been demanding distinctiveness and a willingness by their leadership to spell out what they have stopped, as well as what they have achieved, by being in coalition. Clegg will explain more about his approach to coalition politics in a speech next week.

I can't wait. May I suggest that Clegg watch the video below a few times between now and the time of his speech:

There's A Lesson For Obama In The Stunning Defeat The Conservative/Liberal Dem Coalition Suffered In England Yesterday

Rejected by U.K. voters

Wasn't President Obama absolutely wonderful Wednesday night in Tucson? That's the guy I voted for in 2008. I wish there were more important topics Wall Street didn't care enough about to allow him to say whatever he wants to! Obama's Conservative Consensus administration, though, seems to never go up against Wall Street and most of what's important, from preserving Social Security and looking out for working families to American trade policy and tax policy, Obama is more their spokesman than working America's. He would be perfectly happy presiding over the Conservative/Liberal Democratic coalition in the U.K., a coalition pushing forward hideous-- if less draconian than what the GOP envisions-- austerity measures that target ordinary working families and accrues very much to the benefit of the wealthy establishment and the upper management class.

Yesterday British voters had their first opportunity to pass judgment on how that coalition has been doing since they were elected last year. Labour won a big victory. Keep in mind that during the last general election Labour won 14,186 votes (31.9%), the Lib Dems took 14,083 votes (31.6%) and the Conservatives lagged with 11,773 votes (26.4%). This time Labour's candidate, Debbie Abrahams, walked away with a far greater margin, 3,558 votes for a total of 14,718 (42.1%), while the LibDems held pretty steady with 11,160 votes (31.9%) and the Conservatives just collapsed entirely-- 4,481 votes (12.8%). [A candidate calling himself the Flying Brick, running on the Loony Party, came in 7th out of 10 candidates with 145 votes and the Pirate Party candidate made off with 96 votes.]

The by-election in northwest England yesterday is worth looking at for two reasons, one procedural and one substantive. Procedurally, the very reason for the election is nearly unfathomable for Americans. In last year's general, one candidate lied about another candidate and a court threw out the results and forced a new election! The GOP would be out of business entirely if this logic ever took root in the U.S.!

Having lost at last year's general election by only 103 votes, the Liberal Democrats' candidate accused the ex-Labour minister Phil Woolas of falsely associating him with Islamist extremists, and took his case to a specially convened election court, which found Woolas guilty. Protesting his innocence, the latter was duly thrown out of parliament, and the contest began...

But that's where the substantive kicks in. Nationally, the LibDems are in a coalition with the dominant Conservatives and are helping them implement a much hated austerity program that favors the wealthy over working families. Anyone who imagined the calumny the Lib Dems suffered at the hands of Labour might have seemed likely to hand them an easy win has been in for a surprise as voters decided to cast their ballots based on the political developments nationally instead. Going into Thursday's voting, "one poll put Labour on 46%, 17 points ahead of the Lib Dems, and apparently coasting to victory." The latest YouGov GB polling had Labour up 13 points since the General election, the Conservatives (at 36%) down 1% and the LibDems just disintegrating with 9%, down by 15%! Approval for the Conservative/LibDem government and their version of the Conservative Consensus has plummeted, down 24%. And the LibDems look to have abandoned their base and destroyed themselves by hooking up with the Conservatives. Nick Clegg, their leader is now a loathed figure.

The fleeting burst of Cleggmania during the general election campaign now looks like something from another age. Today, an opinion poll put support for the Lib Dems at just 7%. In a survey released just before Christmas, Mori found that in some regions of the UK, it was as low as 4%. To hear some people talk, the party's broken promise on tuition fees will haunt them just as much as Iraq haunted Labour, and there will be no decisive recovery for years.

And now they face what could be a very grim 2011. In May, there will be elections for local councils, as well as the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly-- and the most positive prediction you can extract from senior Lib Dems is that things will be "difficult." The referendum on changing our voting system has hardly fired the public's imagination, and is widely predicted to be lost-- which will lead plenty of Lib Dems to wonder what the point of partnership with the Tories actually is. Meanwhile, as the cuts finally bite, senior Lib Dems worry that their support could well plunge even lower, and the message to their activists boils down to that most hackneyed of instructions: keep calm, and carry on.

A great deal of political comment tends to fixate on the most dramatic possibilities-- how the coalition might fail or whether the Lib Dems could split. If support remains low, they will obviously stay put, for fear of sparking an election and being wiped out.

In the U.S. midterms, disappointed Democrats and left-leaning independents did not turn out to vote. Conservative Democrats were devastated, although some normal Democrats wound up losing their seats in the tidal wave as well. Republicans did turn out at the polls. In district after district, Democratic turnout cratered while GOP turnout held steady from 2006 and 2008. If Obama continues to pursue conservative policies that devastate his base, the same thing will happen in 2012 and we'll win up with Mitt Romney as president and with a stronger Republican House and, very likely, a Republican Senate as well.

Obama's Kagan Choice Is As Ugly As Nick Clegg's Abandonment Of UK Electoral Reform-- The Reality Of Politicians Never Lives Up To The Hype

I'd much rather think about the drama around the hung Parliament in the U.K. than about Obama's predictable but disappointing nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. I think I'll sit that one out and see if fellow moderate Democrats like Ben Nelson and Arlen Specter can defend the vicious and baseless attacks the right will use to go after a nominee who should make them a lot happier than she makes progressives. They don't know how to accept surrender gracefully.

I don't know an awful lot about Nick Clegg. But I'm not very inspired by what I've learned watching the election campaign in the U.K. and the bargaining in its aftermath. Perhaps he'll come through in the end. What's at stake though? Well, that's the question. Everybody wants to rule the world, of course. And they're worried about ruling the world after the next elections which are certainly going to come sooner than most people would prefer. And, then, there is that one little principle we talked about yesterday, proportional representation, the principle the Liberals, and then the Lib-Dems, have been fighting for for just short of a century. And now they have it within their grasp. But they also have Nick Clegg as their team captain. He doesn't seem to have the intestinal fortitude to go for it.

His party grassroots certainly supports him going all the way to get it. Polling of Lib-Dem supporters show that an astounding 90% support Clegg’s decision to enter into discussions with the Conservative party based on the fact that they had the most votes (36%). More important, however, is that 80% say that without "significant progress on electoral reform" the Lib-Dems should dump the Tories entirely. I'm sure Obama would take the same weak, middle of the road position Clegg seems to be taking. If he walks into government with anything less than proportional representation in the bag, he will have failed dismally and spectacularly and go down in history as a worthless shill. Some on the left, in fact, feel that the best thing that could happen for Labour right now-- other than Gordon Brown's departure from leadership-- would be an unprincipled Lib-Con coalition.

A briefing paper published today by the Fabian Society shows that a decision by Nick Clegg to join forces with David Cameron would provide an opportunity for a major electoral revival by Labour at a second election in 2010. It would also place many Lib Dem MPs in danger of being unseated.

If the Lib Dems team up with the Tories it would be a betrayal of the expectations of many progressive voters who voted Lib Dem last Thursday. Many supported the Lib Dems in the belief that they were a progressive, liberal party of the centre-left. Many more will have voted Lib Dem as a way to keep the Tories out.

For example, a YouGov poll just before the election showed:

• 43% of Lib Dem voters described themselves as centre-left or left, compared to 29% who described themselves as centrist and just 9% who described themselves as centre-right or right.

• 39% of Lib Dem voters described the Liberal Democrat party as being centre-left or left, compared to 33% of Lib Dem voters who described the party as being centrist and just 5% who described the party as being centre-right or right

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This suggests that somewhere between a third and a half of Lib Dem voters could find themselves alienated if Clegg teams up with the Tories. Our analysis shows that this alienation of progressive Liberal Democrat voters from a Liberal-Tory pact would suddenly put scores of seats into play for the Labour Party at a second election in 2010.

...At a national level, the Lib Dems have positioned themselves as opponents of the Tories for the last two decades. A Lib-Tory pact would make Labour the sole source of opposition to the Conservatives in many seats, allowing Labour to persuade many former Lib Dem voters to switch to them.

There are 25 seats that would swing back from the Conservatives to Labour if just one-in-five Lib Dem voters in these seats switches to Labour. These would include many seats in the South and the Midlands that Labour lost at the General Election, such as Hendon, Thurrock, Broxtowe, Bedford and Hove, as well as the Tories’ prized gain in the North East, Stockton South.

Fifty-five seats would swing back to Labour if one-in-two Lib Dem voters in these seats switched to Labour. Though a tall order, along with seats taken off the Lib Dems, this could be enough for Labour to regain a majority at a possible second election in 2010.

Tories Feel Power Slipping Away, Blink... Then Panic

Petrified that their chance to run the show could go by the wayside-- perhaps forever-- David Cameron and the Conservatives reacted to Gordon Brown's resignation and the opening of formal talks between Labour and the Lib-Dems by caving in to the Lib-Dem demand for electoral reform, or did they? William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, says he's made Clegg a "final offer," which amounts to a national referendum on some kind of proportional representation scheme. Labour has offered to make it law and then go to the voters for approval. So which party will the Lib-Dems choose?

Speaking outside the House of Commons, Mr Hague urged the Lib Dems to accept the Tory deal, arguing that to join with Labour would mean "a second unelected prime minister in a row" and the imposition of voting reform without first consulting the public in a referendum.

This was later denied by Labour sources, who said they would pass a law on AV [Alternative Vote] immediately, but then hold a referendum to allow voters to approve or reject it. There were also unconfirmed reports Labour was offering the prospect of full proportional representation at a later stage.

Mr Hague said a deal with the Tories was the only way to guarantee the "strong, stable government" the Lib Dems say they want, as it would give the two parties a "secure Parliamentary majority of 76."... Mr Hague said that in a possible referendum, Conservative MPs opposed to change in the voting system would be "at liberty" to campaign against it.