Warning: This post is nearly pure UK politics.
I woke up this morning realising that Nick Clegg had been absolutely right, that nothing mattered as much as electoral reform, because what both the UK and USA need is a more representative system of elections so that moderate coalitions could steer through extremism and populism on both sides.
If Cameron had been an honest broker and allowed a later referendum on electoral reform like Clegg wanted, that might have passed, and Cameron might now be leading a coalition of smaller, saner parties, instead of having lost his party to an incursion on the right. The way he handled that incursion was of course insane too, but let's not forget where he started going wrong.
Note that I still also blame voters who chose to "punish" the LibDems for going back on one of their campaign promises when they had come in third in the election. They spent five years making the UK more sane, but they did not come up with a magic way to fund education other than charging some of it to the people who benefit the most from it. The idea of free tuition only makes sense for education 100% of the population has access to, though it was of course possible to achieve back when it was 5% of the population that went to university, but that mostly benefited people who were very affluent. Scholarships for the poorest 5% and the smartest 5% make sense, but having half the population pay for the other half's education makes very little sense.
As an American, it's sometimes hard to explain to Europeans the depth of our fundamentalist roots: that "unamerican" doesn't mean "foreign", it means "evil"; and that the constitution is seen as being more or less like the Ten Commandments. It's very frustrating to see that, after WWII, we (mostly Americans actually) helped Germany write a better constitution than we have ourselves, because we can't easily update ours. It's great that the world has more political stability now than it used to, to the extent that this means fewer wars, but it's a shame if it also means rooting successful countries in archaic solutions to government when better ones have been developed.
I woke up this morning realising that Nick Clegg had been absolutely right, that nothing mattered as much as electoral reform, because what both the UK and USA need is a more representative system of elections so that moderate coalitions could steer through extremism and populism on both sides.
If Cameron had been an honest broker and allowed a later referendum on electoral reform like Clegg wanted, that might have passed, and Cameron might now be leading a coalition of smaller, saner parties, instead of having lost his party to an incursion on the right. The way he handled that incursion was of course insane too, but let's not forget where he started going wrong.
Note that I still also blame voters who chose to "punish" the LibDems for going back on one of their campaign promises when they had come in third in the election. They spent five years making the UK more sane, but they did not come up with a magic way to fund education other than charging some of it to the people who benefit the most from it. The idea of free tuition only makes sense for education 100% of the population has access to, though it was of course possible to achieve back when it was 5% of the population that went to university, but that mostly benefited people who were very affluent. Scholarships for the poorest 5% and the smartest 5% make sense, but having half the population pay for the other half's education makes very little sense.
As an American, it's sometimes hard to explain to Europeans the depth of our fundamentalist roots: that "unamerican" doesn't mean "foreign", it means "evil"; and that the constitution is seen as being more or less like the Ten Commandments. It's very frustrating to see that, after WWII, we (mostly Americans actually) helped Germany write a better constitution than we have ourselves, because we can't easily update ours. It's great that the world has more political stability now than it used to, to the extent that this means fewer wars, but it's a shame if it also means rooting successful countries in archaic solutions to government when better ones have been developed.
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