Caroline Lucas’ narrow victory over Labour in Brighton Pavilion will no doubt be lauded by the BBC far beyond it’s significance. With a majority of 1252 (2.4%) on an 8.4% swing from Labour this is fragile enough, but having sat up watching results come in last night, the impression that I got is that elsewhere their candidates rarely if ever managed to save their deposits (see comment #1 below). According to various reports, the Brighton result owes much to the Greens putting the same amount of effort into taking this single seat as might have gone into a national campaign. With 200 activists phoning possible supporters as many as three times yesterday to offer them a lift to their polling station – by rickshaw or on someones back presumably – they certainly weren’t taking any chances.
It will be interesting to see how the Greens’ share of the popular vote stacks up against the BNP and UKIP when these figures are available. Caroline Lucas is a very experienced and competent politician who had the good sense to fight her campaign on local issues rather than traditional green ones. Perhaps the best analogy to draw is with George Galloway’s far left Respect Party’s successes in Bethnal Green and Bow in recent elections, although at the time of writing it seems likely that they will now lose this seat.
I watched BBC coverage of the election until after five o’clock this morning, without much relish, then took a glass of whiskey outside to look at the dawn, listen to the birds, and enjoy the heavy scent of bluebells wafting from the wood. I enjoy election nights. Usually there is real life drama and you can feel the political pulse or the nation beating in a way that is impossible at any other time. Some candidates are jubilant and clamouring to get at the future, while others know that, for them, it is all over, and try to smile through their tears. It is about the only time that politicians seem human.
But last night, for hour after hour there seemed to be only confusion and disappointment wherever one looked. Not one party was prepared to show any sign of real jubilation, right down to Plaid Cymru, who were ‘disappointed’, and Alex Salmon of the SNP saying, with a broad grin, that they had done very well really, except that they hadn’t got anywhere near their target number of seats. But Alex is like that.
How can you have an election where everyone is a loser? Well the analysts will probably be explaining that for months to come.
All this was played out against a background of occasional references to a dramatic escalation in the sovereign debt crisis on world financial markets, which I have not been able to catch up with yet. Surely this is no time for there to be doubt about who is running Britain.
Supposing that, over the next few days, the Conservatives manage to form a government, it is worth looking at what they have to say about Climate Change and Energy on their website. Even a cursory glance at this reveals that compliance with the requirements of EU carbon reduction policy is the main driving force. There are several things that this brings to mind.
Firstly, the Conservatives are divided on Europe. Secondly, even David Shukman was prepared to admit in a BBC report the other evening that a lot of conservative MPs are sceptical about climate change. Thirdly, any incoming government that is doing the job properly will have to take a very careful, cool and objective look at energy policy, because at the moment we don’t really have one that is credible. Bits of paper bearing fantasy figures for the contribution that immensely expensive wind power can make to keeping the lights on until 2020 just will no longer do at a time when the economy is in ruins and the coffers are empty. Lastly, if David Cameron manages to form a government, its hold on power is likely to be very tenuous indeed until there is another election.
Welcome to the brave new post-Blair’n’Brown world!
You can see an overview from the BBC here of how many people voted for each party, and the percentages of the total these represent.
You’ll see from this that the Greens got 279,279 votes, or just 1% of the total. This puts them well behind UKIP (904,564), and even the BNP (556,945).
Also, to quote the Guardian (here)
Thanks Paul, it will be interesting to see how that compares with the Green’s performance in the EU elections when I get a chance. From what I can remember, it is not a comparison that they would welcome.
Update:
In the 2009 EU Elections, the comparable results were: Green Party 8.6%, BNP 6.2%, and UKIP 16.5%. In the 2005 General Election the Greens got 257,758 votes, not much difference there for a party that is looking for a break-through.
An interesting item from the BBC election page:
Carswell is an MP who seems to be able to think for himself and has the guts to say way what he thinks too. See here
Whisky and bluebells at dawn. What a refreshing change from the average election comment article in the mainstream media!
The fact that UKIP got three time as many votes as the Greens has not been commented on in the articles I’ve seen. The main result of Lucas’s victory will surely be a higher profile for the Greens in the media, with possibly more questioning of their policies, surely a good thing from our point of view. Monbiot has a eulogy of Lucas in the Guardian (though I believe he did the same for Galloway last time round).
The biggest anti-government swing, at Redcar, is attributed by the Times to the closure of the steel plant, a direct result of government anti-carbon policies. Surely some journalist will make this connection?
A Cameron government dependent on LibDem support will be continually questioned on the issues which divide them – of which Europe and climate change / energy policy are two of the most prominent. We can look forward to interesting times.
Geoff:
As I expected, every BBC news bulletin is mentioning Caroline Lucas’ great victory. Not one of them has mentioned that the Green Party has failed to grow its share of the popular vote during the five years since the last election, a period during which political interest in AGW has gone from virtually nothing to hysteria.
Sorry to nitpick, Tony, but my inner Lynne Truss winces when I see ‘loose’ for ‘lose’.
[Fixed, TonyN]
Apart from that (and I realise you were knackered), a fair summary, and worth noting that UKIP, who are definitely sceptics, got plenty more votes than the greens, who could have been challenged on the subject by any journalist with a brain, but weren’t! (AFAIK)
Agreed, very little about AGW-sceptic UKIP, especially on the BBC, except for their “Speaker Bercow fends off Farage” line today and brief coverage of the air crash yesterday. Much amusement about that among the twitterati, by the way. It has been interesting to keep a Google search page open today and set to Updates with results for “#GE2010” continually scrolling – so many Twitter comments calling for urgent electoral reform, also comments (some by the same people no doubt) expressing joy that BNP (and to a lesser degree UKIP) were denied seats. The phrase “law of unintended consequences” springs to mind.
Re Caroline Lucas in Brighton, the BBC say this: “The party had had 200 people campaigning in the seat of Brighton Pavilion on Thursday to ensure those who had said they would vote Green did so, she said.” (I’m just wondering how they could ensure this exactly, given that it’s meant to be a secret ballot…)
I was going to put my next comment on the other election thread, as a kind of addition to what Peter Geany was saying, but might just as well say it here. There are a number of big issues, as we know, which have bearing on one another and some of which have been left mostly unarticulated during the election campaign. Climate change, (including the state of the science and the costs of CO2 reduction) is one. Another is energy (its rising costs and doubtful future availability). The issue that has not been much discussed previously but which is now in the open as never before, is of course government debt. This is beginning to concentrate minds over here now, however, helped along by the crisis in Greece.
My point is that the other issues, including the climate question and the cost of energy, have not gone away. But it seems that very broadly speaking, the people (or is it just the media?) have a limited attention span and can normally only focus on one thing at any one moment.
To use the well-worn cliché, there are several elephants lurking in the room but they’re probably going to have to be confronted and fought one at a time.
According to Ben Bradshaw this morning voting for the Lib Dems was the same as voting for Labour as they are all part of the ‘progressive’ movement and therefore the votes of the two parties should be aggregated. I have a name for the new movement ‘the bare faced cheek’ party.
Has anyone seen any figures as to what the vote would have translated into in terms of seats should we have has proportional representation?
I suspect if the greens should get one seat the BNP and UKIP would get many more which, as Alex says, would surely be the law of unintended consequences.
Tonyb
tonyb Ben Bradshaw as always tries to put a spin on everything that doesn’t go his way. It simply does not follow that if we had PR the vote would have gone as it did. People wanted change this election and they wanted Labour and especially Gordon out. They may not get that wish yet, we will have to see but it must be borne in mind that simple PR is as bad if not worse than first past the post as it skews everything in favour of minorities at the expense of the main stream. My home country New Zealand switched to PR in the 90’s I think, and now one of the promises of the current Government there is to have a referendum to back out of it in some way.
The other point that Ben misses that most people don’t have a clue about most Lib Dem policies, and if the Media were to concentrate on challenging them we would see their policies on Climate change and energy simply don’t add up. A does of power may be just what we need so that it opens them up to reality.
Yesterday’s Newsnight had a very short interview with Hugh Hendry, a hedge fund manager with a colossal charm deficit, a razor sharp mind, and no illusions about the extent of the economic and political crisis that we now face. You can find it at 38:35 here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mk25
It ties in very well with Peter Geany’s overheard breakfast conversion here:
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=279#comment-56458
If one takes the view that CAGW has long been primarily a political and economic matter rather than a scientific one, then what he says is important. We are heading for an era in which every penny of both private and public expenditure is carefully counted twice. It will no longer be possible to gloss over the implications of carbon reduction in terms of both fiscal stability and competitiveness.
He rightly traces the cause of this new economic storm to the very heart of the European project and identifies the domestic political malaise that has led to the present situation in the UK.
TonyN
Thanks for the Newsnight link-the interviewee deserves to be Chancellor!
The electorate have shown they completely misunderstand the scale of our problems. The politicians have deliberately indulged them by refusing to talk even about the deficit-which of course is a side issue in itself, as it is only a measure to reduce the rate of increase in debt, not deal with debt itself.
When the Tories tried to do this last conference season their ratings dropped drastically-I’m not sure they ever recovered.
The idea that we can afford to be as self indulgent about carbon as we were previously is surely unrealistic. As a nation we (and consumers) need cheap reliable energy-as opposed to highly expensive and unreliable energy from other sources, with a big gap anyway before that comes on line.
That scenario isn’t gong to come by believing we can decarbonise our economy in the life spans of most of us reading this blog.
I wonder if Peter Geany knows the PR formula that would answer the question I posed in #8? That is how many MP’s would there have been this time round, with particular reference to the smaller parties.
Tonyb
TonyB
The calculation for numbers of MPs under PR is easily done. Count 6 MPs per percentage point of the total vote, and you’d have roughly 18 UKIP, 12 BNP, and 6 Greens. That’s assuming a system of “pure” PR, which exists in Israel and possibly nowhere else.
Most PR systems have a minimum cutoff point below which you gain no seats, and don’t get your election expenses reimbursed by the state. This, too, can have perverse results. In the last Italian election, none of the far left parties (communists, greens, etc) reached the 5% minimum required, so are unrepresented in parliament, while the far right allied themselves with Berlusconi and are well represented.
There’s a natural tendency for parties to form as soon as they feel they can reach the minimum required for representation, which is why here in France we had a choice of three Green Parties here in France at the last regional and European elections!
There are arguments for and against too off-topic to go into here, but it’s clearly naive to think that one system is automatically fairer than another.
Geoff
Thanks for this. So assuming the smaller parties meet the criteria, we would end up with a result that most of those on the ‘progressive left’ would find repugnant.
The ‘racist’ BNP would have twice as many MP’s as the ‘virtous’ Greens, whilst the AGW sceptical UKIP would hve three times as many! Talk about unintended consequences! I wonder if the BBC and Nick Clegg know about this…
Tonyb
I agree with TonyN’s statement in the article that Caroline Lucas is an experienced and competent politician, and that’s what we want in Parliament, isn’t it? Without getting into the off-topic subject of different voting systems, she has shown that she can win under the present one, by doing what our MPs have been supposed to do for centuries – represent her constituents. Clearly, she represents Brighton Pavilion in the same sense that Glenda Jackson represents Hampstead and Diane Abbott represents Hackney.
I’m heartened by her election, since it represents an official recognition of the unofficial (and until now, wholly illegitimate) influence of Green ideas on our politics. She’s no longer an underdog or outsider, and so can expect to have her ideas picked over by journalists with – we can hope – a new scepticism.
Re PR, just found this analysis on another blog, which has similar numbers to Geoff’s. This blogger has also worked out that we’d still have a hung parliament under PR, though he does also state that his is a very simplified system.
Re the Greens, I’ve probably said this before, but on a local level I think they’re capable of doing much good, being generally committed to preserving parks and green spaces, and campaigning on traditional environmental issues. It’s on the national level (energy matters, especially) and of course re AGW that I emphatically don’t agree with them. Will be interesting to see how this develops. Caroline Lucas comes across as charismatic and personable, anyway.
I note that David Cameron lists “building a low-carbon economy” among the areas of common ground between the Conservatives and LibDems. On this topic, it looks like some of our ageing power stations threatened by closure by the EU’s Large Combustion Plant Directive have just been given a reprieve until 2019, as reported by the Guardian here. Even DECC seems to have woken up to the “energy crunch” scenario, having been “lobbying hard”, allegedly. However:
“Extending the life of these coal plants will slow down investment in the low-carbon economy, and set us back in the clean technology race,” said Ruth Davis, chief policy adviser at Greenpeace UK.
“Europe should take its lead from Spain, which is already generating half its electricity from wind power – not cling onto outdated technologies like dirty coal.”
Looking at “green jobs” and the wider financial situation in Spain, I have a proposal for Cameron/Clegg – perhaps let’s not take our lead from Spain, okay?
Tonyb There are many and varied PR systems around. In the NZ system you vote for an electorate as here for 70 of the 122 seats. The remaining seats are divided up to ensure the proportion of the seats held approximates the proportion of the popular vote received. It would not work in the uk as there are huge regional variations. The Lib Dems are the only party that would benefit from PR and they often over simplify how it would work and make it sound wonderful, but in reality it is hugely complicated and contentious.
Alex #15 In the Guardian article they quote Greenpeace UK as saying “Europe should take its lead from Spain, which is already generating half its electricity from wind power” I’m fairly sure that is not a true statement.
But this reprieve for Large Combustion Plants is just the start of a large unwinding process that will be spun on a spinning top until the public can’t remember what todays targets are and in 5 years time we will be told that we are still on target for our carbon free economy.
Alex
I agree with your statement here;
“Re the Greens, I’ve probably said this before, but on a local level I think they’re capable of doing much good, being generally committed to preserving parks and green spaces, and campaigning on traditional environmental issues. It’s on the national level (energy matters, especially) and of course re AGW that I emphatically don’t agree with them. Will be interesting to see how this develops. Caroline Lucas comes across as charismatic and personable, anyway.”
To this potential to do good on a local level I would add Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. It is their dabbling in international politics I dislike and in this I would include the climate advocacy charities such as Oxfam, to whom I will no longer donate.
It is this local reconnection I think needs building on. As I have said here before I do like the idea of domestic micro renewables as I am very concerned about energy costs and security. It is however being sold like double glazing and the net result are highly expensive and inefficient systems, often installed by cowboys, which need propping up with public funds to work.
If Local greens could offer a low profit micro renwables installation service on an altruistic basis it would benefit everyone and meet their environmental objectives.
Tonyb
The Independent on Sunday has managed to work climate change into the post election crisis story here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/cameron-faces-struggle-to-keep-backbench-rebels-in-line-1969468.html
saying:
“A David Cameron government would face being held to ransom by a series of “eccentrics” … “slightly potty” MPs with unconventional views on issues ranging from climate change to gay rights and immigration… voluble right-wingers, Eurosceptics, backwoodsmen and climate-change deniers…”
Most of the detail in the article is about the Conservatives’ Euro-associates, who are accused of homophobia and anti-semitism. The Guardian has already used ths smear, energetically associating us sceptics with Nick Griffin.
Having won Brighton Pavilion by campaigning on local issues, I wonder how much time Caroline Lucas will be prepared to spend saving swimming pools from closure, sorting out local housing problems and helping people with the usual bread and butter issues of a constituency MP? There won’t be much time left for saving the planet if she is going to meet the expectations of her electors. And she’s a Euro MP too, isn’t she.
One of the advantages that the first past the post system has over PR is that it ties MP’s very closely to their constituents, who can hold them to account if they fail to come up to expectations.
Geoff – commentators at the Graun/Beeb/Indy never cease to irritate by equating AGW scepticism with bigotry/Nazism/mental illness. I find their consistent lack of nuanced argument rather pathetic.
Tonyb, a good current example of Greenpeace and FoE dabbling in politics is their involvement in the Take Back Parliament campaign. Here’s Greenpeace’s Jamie Woolley on the subject: “… making the voting system fairer is a key part of the wide-ranging political reforms needed to reduce the influence of vested interests which are hampering the move to a low-carbon economy and lower emissions.” (Hat tip to commentator Dreadnought on the Bishop Hill blog. As he says: “My usual question – who voted for Greenpeace?”)
It’s interesting to look at who is backing Take Back Parliament – the list includes Greenpeace, FoE, Avaaz, Ekklesia (warmists, anti-UKIP), Power 2010 (climate change is one of “the serious challenges we face today”), enoughisenough.org (“Climate threat – real and present”), Compass (“As the planet gets hotter and the poor get poorer…”), bassac (“Tackling climate change, reducing poverty”) and the NUS (affliated to Stop Climate Chaos.)
Ostensibly pro-democracy organisations, but most are pushing for action on climate change when a majority of voters are either sceptical or do not place climate issues high on the list of priorities. They claim that the politicians are not listening to the people, but are they doing so themselves?
Alex
“As he says: “My usual question – who voted for Greenpeace?”)
Excellent point. It is irritating when they get involved in politics but are not accountable. As TonyN says it will be interesting to see how much time Caroline Lucas spends doing her proper job rather than using it as an international platform.
Tonyb
I have noted today one change that is for the better. There are no officials running around briefing the press on the progress of the talks between the Tories and the Lib Dem’s. Perhaps our press will have to do some thinking for themselves. Will this translate in having to work out for themselves what to say on such issues as energy security and AGW?? I can but hope.
PeterGeany and TonyN,
You say PR is “in reality …is hugely complicated and contentious” and “One of the advantages that the first past the post system has over PR is that it ties MP’s very closely to their constituents”.
Whether the UK chooses to change the electoral system is its own business but I suggest you might want to take a look at the Australian system which is, I believe, also used to some extent in the UK too, (NI Assembly?) and is what is usually referred to in the UK as “PR” even though that is an arguable point. However it is much less disproportionate than a crude FPTP approach.
Yes, we still have the same sized constituencies with a single MP. At election time, all the voters need do is number their candidates in order of preference. I can imagine that some climate sceptics might find this to be “hugely complicated” ! So you may have a point after all.
However, as I’ve said before in discussions on climate science, you either don’t know what you are talking about or you are deliberately misrepresenting the arguments to suit your motivations.
PeterM
You wrote to Peter Geany and TonyN
In general, the public becomes more knowledgeable of major issues as time passes and all sides of the story are presented, rather than less knowledgeable.
That is what has been happening over the past few years with AGW.
The general public (in the UK, continental Europe or North America) are arguably more aware of the issues surrounding the AGW debate (scientific, political, economic) today than they were two years ago.
The polls show that, as the public has become more knowledgeable, it has also become more skeptical of the so-called “mainstream” story being “pitched” by IPCC.
This probably also has to do with the fact that the “mainstream” proponents have become more desperate to sell their story (and that their doomsday predictions have become shriller and, hence, less believable), at the same time that our planet has been cooling and several examples of sloppy or skewed “science” by the IPCC crowd have been exposed.
But, whatever the reasons, it is clear that the general public today is better informed (and hence more skeptical) than they were one or two years ago.
Confirms the wisdom in the saying of Abraham Lincoln about fooling all the people all of the time.
Max