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The Recent UK Elections (by Protagoras, 5/7/07) The recent UK elections have been a watershed, not only for the UK, but perhaps for its role in the Atlantic alliance. They will affect the relations of the UK to the US, and they may well be the first step in a series of steps that will lead to the breakup of the UK and the independence of Scotland. These were local and regional elections. County and municipal councillors, as well as the Scottish and Welsh assembly members, were up for election. Not all councillors are elected at once. London did not figure in this round. There is also no English assembly - at least, not yet, though Westminster may yet metamorphose into it. In all 312 of the 388 local authorities held elections, and the Conservatives now hold 162, a gain of 38. There are some 89 local areas in which the Labour Party now holds no council seats at all. In the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish Nationalists now hold 27 seats, a rough doubling of their previous level, and Labour 26. It is probable that the Nationalists will form the next Scottish government. But whether they do or not, they are now the largest party in regional government in what has traditionally been a Labour stronghold, one that has furnished a disproportionate number of its MPs at Westminster, and also a very high percentage of its ministers and cabinet members. All this is interesting enough. Labour has been the largest party in Scotland for 50 years. But what is even more striking is the move in the popular vote. Labour gained 27%, the Conservatives 40%. The Labour Party, in this vote, is about the size of the traditional third party, the Liberal Democrats. In Wales, also a traditional trade union Labour stronghold, the Labour share of the popular vote is down to 32%, the lowest level since 1918. The party is over. A substantial proportion of the electorate has started to vote simply for the opposition, whether Nationalist, Conservative or Liberal. The question is why. The answer is simple. In the words of a Conservative shadow minister, we have had a government of incompetent authoritarians. They are generally perceived as having lied about the intelligence on Iraq to drag the country into a misguided US led war. They have mounted a prolonged and unprecendented attack on civil liberties. They have wasted unprecedented amounts of money in ill advised spending on 'public services' which have generally failed to benefit the users and sometimes postively degraded service levels. They have wrecked a private pension system that was the envy of Europe, by sudden and arbitrary changes in tax treatments of contributions. They have raised taxes by stealthy complication of the tax code. Education has been their priority, but we have a public school system that is unable or unwilling to teach children to read and write and add and subtract. We have, in the state health service, the largest computerization project in Europe failing to work and escalating in cost, while hospital induced infection rates also lead Europe and perhaps the whole of the OECD. In the face of these failures, they have resorted to news management rather than honesty and remedial action. The people who are voting Labour now, and who will at the General Election in a couple of years, are inching down to those who do so out of tribal loyalty. The Labour Party is at the same point now, and for similar reasons, as the Conservatives were before this government came to power. Both produced in different ways an overriding sense of weariness and contempt in the voting public. The difference is that this time, weariness and contempt has driven the Scottish opposition to the Nationalists, and has thus a fair chance of producing Scottish independence and the breakup of the UK. It seems increasingly likely that Scottish Independence, a resurgence of Conservatism, and a distancing of the UK from the US will be the final legacy of New Labour under Tony Blair. Not what he had in mind. No, not what we had in mind either. For more on a wide array of other topics, please visit the oftwominds.com weblog. 
HTML, format and art copyright © 2007 Charles Hugh Smith, copyright to text and all other content in the above work is held by the author of the essay as of the publication date listed above. All rights reserved in all media. The views of the contributor authors are their own, and do not reflect the views of Charles Hugh Smith. All errors and errors of omission in the above essay are the sole responsibility of the essay's author. The writer(s) would be honored if you linked this Readers Journal essay to your site, or printed a copy for your own use.
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