3 Jun 2009

A spectacle we have never seen before

A political crisis
This is a political spectacle none of us has ever seen before. The government is reshuffling itself.

Hazel Blears has just shuffled herself out of the Cabinet. She’d have been fired anyway over her second homery and non-payment of capital gains tax.

Two other ministers, one of them another woman, are expected to go today. There is talk that Alistair Darling may go. No-one can remember a time in British politics when ministers resigned on the eve of an election.

A constitution in crisis
And there is no constitutional mechanism for resolving the situation. The head of state cannot send for a prime minister whose power is disintegrating, and that’s a good thing. Our system sports a head of state who is anyway unaccountable – no-one can send for him or her either.

Thus we depend upon the holding of a general election, which can only be called by the person who is himself in such appalling trouble: the prime minister. We are, amid the personal failures of MPs within parliament, observing the vast crevasse in what is called our constitution.

The Sun newspaper suggests some kind of petition signed by Labour ministers and MPs that calls for resignation and rallies around an alternative leader – a kind of regicide.

A party in crisis
The dream and vision conjured by the founders of “new” Labour – Blair, Brown, and Mandelson – has come to this.

What is fascinating about this torrid and disturbing period is the absence of any call for the return of the once lionised Tony Blair. No-one mentions him. He came adorned in hope for profound change, then disappeared without much trace.

A country in crisis?
We have a country whose banking system is in turmoil; a parliament reduced to the dust of ages, where the swathes of women who arrived in 1997 appear to have had little impact; an army dispersed in foreign fields; a relationship with Europe unexplained and left to wither; and local communities, most of whose funding and resource is hostage to the spending whims of central government.

And now the electorate is being asked to vote in an election that does not immediately affect this crisis. Its outcome will stoke the pressure, but not necessarily resolve anything.

And yet
Yet amid all this, the country continues to defy the political crisis. For all the talk of knife crime, exam problems, controversy about immigration and the continuing deprivation of significant pockets of the country, Britain remains blessed with a decent, caring, and achieving people.

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