UK election results: People’s power, no dictator

Jun 10, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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There are plenty of reasons for the final shape of the British election results. But two factors are important – first-past-the-post is the most logical expression in an electoral system of making politicians pay respect and give recognition to the power of the voters. The second one is that voters punish politicians who lie to get into power. We begin with the second one first.
I was literally shocked when I read in 2010 that the Lib Dem Party formed a coalition with the Conservatives. These were two British parties that had no ideological similarities. The smaller one was bound to suffer. Nick Clegg, the leader of the Lib Dems became the Deputy Prime Minister. His party won 57 seats, a phenomenal achievement in the recent history of the Liberal Party. While in opposition, he promised gradual phasing out of university tuition. When he became Deputy Prime Minister, his parliamentarians voted for a whopping increase in fees.
Then came the 2015 election. A phenomenon became a humiliation. From 57 seats, the Lib Dems got a mere eight. That was a disastrous loss of 49 seats. Voters thrashed Nick Clegg because he broke his promise to them. Maybe he lied to get votes. Yesterday saw the ignominious end of Nick Clegg; he lost his seat. This is what politics should be about – people marking their ballot based on performance and issues, not on race. Sadly, and most tragically, this kind of civilization is absent in Guyana.
In 2015 in Guyana, a party that was in power for 23 years almost won the election. During the reign of that party, (the PPP), a corrupt cabal feasted on the Treasury, public infrastructure fell down, crime went up, education went down and Guyana became a drug-infested state, with illegal money dominating the economy. The PPP lost by four thousand votes (and change, as they say in common parlance). They barely lost or almost won because unlike the UK, we do not kick out unprincipled leaders who share the same ethnicity with us; we do not vote on issues.
The pattern is said to be repeated in 2020 with the current leadership – the APNU+AFC Coalition. Somewhere at the back of their minds, the ruling entity believes that ethnic voting by African Guyanese, with a percentage gained from the Amerindians, will return them to power. This assessment is popular among political pundits, social analysts and political observers for one reason and one reason only – the ruling APNU+AFC is making consistent mistakes of an unpopular nature that they cannot be that stupid not to know that these wrong pathways are alienating people, and that many have lost faith in them.
The other important factor to be considered when analyzing the 2017 British election result is the beauty of first-past-the-post (FPTP). This is constituency politics which only Guyana hasn’t got in the CARICOM family of nations. In FPTP, you vote for the candidate in your constituency. The candidate is still canopied under a party, but he/she has to accept what the constituents want. You cannot go to a constituency and echo the nonsense your leader believes in, if that nonsense people are angry with.
It is simple. If you campaign in your constituency which has a majority of very young people and tell them that a joint of marijuana is a bad thing to smoke, and your leader will not remove the punishment for such possession, and your opposing politician is someone who plans to change the sentence structure if he/she gets into power, then the young people will run you out of the constituency. FPTP allows for such accountability in politics. You may lie to them and win a seat, but the next time around they will chase you away.
The Conservative Party lost a majority in the elections yesterday because constituents rejected many of the local candidates’ embrace of their Prime Minister’s policies. One commentator pointed to Theresa May’s support for fox-hunting and a hard line on social welfare. One would like to think too that many constituencies rejected Conservative candidates because of the fear that accompanies the UK’s exit from the EU.
The election result shows that there is still sanity in politics. Despite Donald Trump’s macabre success, people want government to be caring and to help share the national pie. The fantastic resurgence of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the election, demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is an ongoing place in world politics for the politics and economics of socialism. Mr. Corbyn is an avowed left-wing politician within the socialist genre. One wishes he had become the Prime Minister.

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