The Economist's round-up of the main political events of the British election campaign today
DURING the election campaign so far, the Liberal Democrats have been at pains to stress their equidistance from the Conservatives and Labour. The party claims it will cut less than the first and borrow less than the second, for example. Its triangulating slogan is: "Stronger Economy, Fairer Society". Nick Clegg has long said that he would speak to the largest party first after any election producing another hung parliament. He has seemed to be keeping his options open.
In an interview in today's Financial Times, however, Mr Clegg greatly constricts his room for manoeuvre. If current polls are borne out on May 7th, the only sort of government with a decent majority (even if the Conservatives emerge with the largest number of seats) will be one involving Labour, the Lib Dems and the Scottish National Party (SNP). Yet the Lib Dem leader rules out such an arrangement: "I would never recommend to the Liberal Democrats that we help establish a government which is basically on a life support system, where Alex Salmond [the former SNP leader] could pull the plug any time he wants. No, no, no." That means that if neither the SNP nor the Lib Dems can form a majority with Labour (and the handful of other left-wing MPs) without the other, Ed Miliband cannot become prime minister.
Mr Clegg put down another marker that could prove even more significant: he said that he feared that a government led by the second-largest party in the House of Commons could lack "legitimacy". This is curious: the Lib Dems are proudly pluralist. They want Britain to adopt proportional representation. They finger-wag at other parties for their tribal, majoritarian ways. They admire the political systems of countries like Norway and Sweden, where governments led by the second-largest party (when that party has more parliamentary support than does the largest) are not unusual. That Mr Clegg has apparently broken from this fundamental part of his party's identity confirms what many have long suspected: the Lib Dem leader would much prefer to do another deal with the Conservatives, who are probably still fractionally more likely than Labour to be the largest party. To be fair, it probably also reflects the fact that his party's most winnable seats are Tory-facing ones where Labour (and possibly the SNP too) is unpopular.
His comments have two further implications. The first, short-term one is that the election battle in Sheffield Hallam, Mr Clegg's own seat, will become even more intense. Labour has already poured resources into the seat on the off-chance that they can take it. The Lib Dem leader's comments will strengthen the sense that he would be the main barrier to any Lib-Lab deal after the election, and so prompt Labour to up its efforts to do so. The second implication is medium-term: it is now somewhat more likely that Britain will face new elections before the next five-year parliamentary term is out, in 2020. If Mr Clegg is serious about refusing a role in any SNP-supported government, it is entirely thinkable that no group of parties willing to work together (or at least, go the same way in votes of confidence) will be able to command a majority in parliament. Even under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011, which makes it harder to call early elections, that could see Britons return to the polls sooner than expected.
A pitch to the ethnic-minority vote There was a time, not so long ago, when Tory politics wasn't just about the hard-nosed stuff of deficits, immigration and leaving Europe. David Cameron originally won the Tory leadership ten years ago as a tree-hugging moderniser. His first election campaign attempted to give the Conservative party wider appeal, not least to black voters and other ethnic minorities who normally voted Labour. That old Cameron was on display again this morning, when he gave a speech in Croydon.
Mr Cameron argued that both the Tory party and the country could still do much better on the issue. To take his own party first, of the 306 MPs elected in 2010 only 11 were black or Asian, although this was still considerably more than before. In this campaign the Tories are fielding 56 black and Asian candidates, compared with Labour's 52, and Mr Cameron hoped that the numbers would only increase. He said that the first black or Asian prime minister could well be a Tory; after all, the party had already provided the first Jewish prime minister (Benjamin Disraeli) and the first woman prime minister (Margaret Thatcher). For Britain as a whole, Mr Cameron promised an "opportunity country", pledging 20% increases by 2020 in the numbers of jobs, apprenticeships and start-up business loans for people from ethnic minorities. It was a sudden, and welcome, change from a political debate that has sometimes been coloured by the gloom-mongering of Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party (UKIP).
On the ground Today Lord Ashcroft, a pollster and the Conservatives' former deputy chairman, released his latest batch of polls from marginal seats. It included two being defended by UKIP: Rochester and Strood in Kent, where Mark Reckless, a former Tory MP, defected in 2014 and won the ensuing by-election with 42% of the vote, and Thurrock, a ultra-marginal seat in Essex. Lord Ashcroft's poll suggests that the Conservatives will win back Mr Reckless's seat with a three-point lead, while UKIP will win Thurrock over Labour by a four-point lead. One of the fascinating aspects of the polling data is the picture they paint of the ground war. In Rochester and Strood, some 78% of those asked had been contacted by UKIP, while 76% had been contacted by the Tories. In Thurrock the picture is of an even tighter battle: 79% had been contacted by Labour, 74% by UKIP and 70% by the Conservatives.
Ed Miliband's not-so-secret weapon Labour's claims that the Tories will sell off the National Health Service (NHS) have been a major feature of its campaign so far. But today the party has taken its accusations up a notch. It has gathered new data suggesting that private companies have been awarded a greater share of NHS contracts under the coalition government than the 6% often quoted by ministers: the private sector won 36.8% of England's NHS deals last year, and clinical commissioning groups have awarded them 40% of contracts they put out to tender. The NHS has always relied on greater contributions from private companies than that 6% figure recognises (the private sector provides all its drugs, for example, and all equipment), but these revelations will probably damage the Tories. Recent polls show growing fears among voters over the spectre, widely if inaccurately propagated by Labour, of a privatised NHS.
Foot in his mouth: Cameron's sporting gaffe It was bound to happen sooner or later. British politicians of all hues profess an enthusiasm for football. Indeed, such claims serve as a sort of political shorthand for labels like "in-touch", "down-to-earth" and "normal" that everyone running for office craves. Not all are quite as keen as they let on. Today David Cameron was caught out: in his speech this morning he claimed to support West Ham. Yet on various other occasions the prime minister has spoken of his enthusiasm for Aston Villa. Only in February he told workers at a car factory: "I am hoping for a couple of Villa gains to lift us out of the danger zone" (though as the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror pointed out, "gains" are what politicians want at election time; football teams seek "wins").
It would not have happened to his predecessor, Gordon Brown, whose (not entirely undeserved) reputation for indecision and inconsistency as prime minister did not apply to the beautiful game: the former Labour leader was and is an obsessive Raith Rovers fan, even pulling strings at the club. As one of his former aides, Damien McBride, writes in his memoirs: "I rang him [Brown] in October 2006 and said I'd had a call from a Scottish journalist who'd heard the bizarre rumour that Gordon was seen in a pub car park in Kirkcaldy after midnight apparently negotiating contract terms with Trinidad international Marvin Andrew. Gordon was silent, then said: 'Have they got photos?’”
