Entangled Alliances

In UK election news, the Liberal Democrats have a clever  new campaign that’s attacking both Labour and the Conservatives through the use of fake ads for a fake party, the “Labservatives”. From the Guardian: 

The Labservatives use the slogan “For more of the same”, and has a logo of a scribbled tree sitting on top of a rose stem.

The outdoor ads feature a number of different headlines placed on a purple background, which merges Labour’s red and Conservative’s blue.

Headlines include: “Scandal. Recession. War. There’s no substitute for experience,” “You might not trust us but at least you know us,” and “We’ve had 65 years to get it right. So what’s another five?”

This is quirky and inventive and it’s no surprise that the Ad agency behind it is claiming to have been inspired by the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that Barack Obama used in his campaign stateside. But is it effective? I don’t think so. It suffers from the one thing you don’t want in an election campaign: too many messages. Look at all the points it’s trying to get across: Labour are the same as the Conservatives… They are both rubbish… Together, they’ve been in power for ages… They have  a lot of experience, but since they’re rubbish this experience is actually a bad thing… They’ve had ages to get it right, but have only given us war and recession instead…

Great for a speech, not so good for a poster campaign. But to be fair, this isn’t really a creative fault. It’s a result of the ridiculously tricky situation that the Lib Dems, as the third party in a two-and-a-half party system, find themself in. On the one hand, they obviously need to attack the government, but they also have to make sure that those attacks don’t send voters into the arms of the Tories. In electoral terms, they are hindered by our brain-meltingly mental first-past-the-post voting system which means that while their candidates face mostly Labour opposition in the North of England, in the South they are mainly up against Tories. This means they are having to attack two flanks at the same time, and it makes electoral messaging very difficult.

Nice idea though!

photo credit: openDemocracy

On BBC’s Question Time this week the former editor of The Sun, Kalvin MacKenzie, made reference to a decision he didn’t like by the European Court of Human Rights, and noted that “if there wasn’t a good enough reason for leaving Europe, that was a good enough reason for me.”

All well and good, but as the Chairman David Dimbleby pointed out the ECHR is a completely separate entity from the European Union. The two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The European Court of Human Rights is the court that rules on the European Convention of Human Rights, which is a treaty that was signed by most European Countries in 1953, before the forerunner to the EU even existed. Norway, for example, is a signatory to the Convention, even though Norway is not and never has been in the EU.

Now most people in Britain would probably make the same mistake as Kalvin. And that’s not surprising; very few people in Britain know anything about the basic structure of the EU. We just don’t give a shit. But most people aren’t Kalvin MacKenzie. I find it pretty scary that the ex-editor of Britain’s biggest tabloid doesn’t know the difference between the the ECHR and the EU.  No wonder tabloid coverage of Europe sounds like it comes from a bizarre parallel dimension.

photo credit: Stewf

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that Iran has its own agenda in Afghanistan, but U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates seems to be cross about it anyway. From the Guardian:

It must have felt very uncomfortable for President Hamid Karzai to have his guest and “brother”, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, use a press conference in Kabul to attack Afghanistan’s main donor and ally, the United States. “They themselves created terrorists and now they’re saying that they are fighting terrorists,” said Ahmadinejad, accusing the US of playing a “double game” in Afghanistan.

Ahmadinejad was in fact returning a compliment by the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, who only hours earlier had accused Tehran of “playing a double game” of offering friendship to the Afghan government while at the same time giving “low-level support” and money to the Taliban.

Of course Iran is playing a double game, though as the article points out it’s not actually the Taliban that Iran are likely to be funding but instead anti-Taliban warlords. But in any event Iran shares a border with Afghanistan – a fact that someone should remind Robert Gates of – so obviously Iran are going to want to fund the various factions that might at some point take  control of the country, so that whatever the future holds for its government Iran has some influence over it. An even more obvious point is  that Iran are hardly going to ignore the fact that there are American soldiers prowling round the Iran-Afghahnistan border and since the relationship between Iran and America is not exactly tip-top, they’re probably going to want to make sure they have some connections in that area.

One lesson from this is that U.S. Defence Secretaries say silly things. The more  important point though is that so many of the clashes the U.S. has with Iran are a result of the deep fear and suspicion of what America has in store for it in terms of military intervention. If you’re going to sort out the relationship between the two countries, you’ve got to do something about that.

photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Glenn Beck  is a popular right-wing TV show host on America’s Fox News Network. Geert Wilders is an increasingly popular right-wing Dutch politician who’s been making waves in the UK recently. Beck should be praising Wilders, right? Wrong! Here’s what Beck said on his show the other day:

Also, you have far right Dutch M.P. Geert Wilders. Last year, he was banned from the U.K. They said his presence could threaten community  harmony and therefore public safety. Last week, not only was he allowed into England, he was at the House of Lords, where he screened a film on the Quran.

The right and left are growing again in Europe. The left — listen carefully — the left in Europe is communism. The right is fascism, in Europe.

What’s particularly strange about Beck attacking Wilders is that the controversy Beck is referring to has caused the Dutch M.P to become, in his eyes at least, a cause celebre for freedom of speech. And since part of Beck’s whole schtick is standing up for American freedom – government is bad etc – he should be all about free speech.

It would be easy to dismiss this as Beck being, well, Beck. This is after all a guy who boiled a frog alive on TV. But there’s a deeper point here, which is that American right-wing pundits like Beck really have a problem nailing down their belief system. Basially their dilemma is this: they hate  government, and so like to compare any government action to socialism. To make socialism even scarier it gets slandered with comparisons to the Nazis (National Socialism and all that). But the Nazis were also fascists. So, in Beck’s addled mind, any European who’s been labelled with the “fascist” title has to be criticised in order to support the whole “we don’t want America to become all scary socialist like Europe” theme.

Ideological incoherence at its very, very worst.

photo credit: martcatnoc

With the UK’s general election less than two months away, it’s looking pretty likely that the winning party won’t get an overall majority, which will result in a  “hung parliament”. Now the conventional wisdom on hung parliaments is that they lead to either a weak minority government or a weak coalition majority, which is bad for the country and leads to very scary things.

But putting aside the argument that Thatcher’s and Blair’s huge majorities haven’t exactly been a massive boon to the country, how do other nations with “weak”  government fare? The following are the some of the countries that are above the UK in terms of  GDP per capita, alongside the type of government they currently have:

• Denmark -  Three party coalition
• Sweden -  Four party coalition
• Norway – Three party coalition
• Canada- Minority government
• Austria – Two party coalition
• Ireland – Two party coalition
• Switzerland-  Four party coalition
• Netherlands – Three party coalition
• Belgium- Billion party coalition

Now, there are some problems with my use of “GDP per capita” as  a measurement of how well a country’s government is doing. But it does show that a hung parliament is not an inherently disastrous thing for a country. And the fact is that you can take almost any general measure of a country’s success – income equality, living standards, happiness levels, life expectancy – and almost all of the above countries would still give the UK a good thrashing.

But the conventional wisdom is that a hung parliament is a BAD thing, so, you know, whatever.