Across the pond

This has been the most extraordinary few days of my life in British politics. Once it became clear in the small hours of Friday morning that the country was not only get a hung parliament, but the party which had caused this result, had ended up with fewer seats and, even more importantly, had come third in the popular vote, nearly all the political commentators, not just the right-wing press, have saying arguing that we shall have another election in a year or two. I agreed with them.

My gut feeling this Sunday morning is that we were all wrong. And that 2010 will go down in the history books as the biggest change since 1945, when Clement Attlee won a totally unexpected  thumping great vote which gave the Labour Party its first majority government.

My gut feeling is based on what I have heard from people I have talked with, seen on the television, heard on the radio and read in the newspapers and on the internet. And it is also based on many years of cogitation about how change happens, in which I have been influenced by many thinkers, including Thomas Kuhn, whose seminal work was on The Structure af Scientific Revolutions.

Kuhn argued major change  happened suddenly. It required a paradigm shift. Almost overnight, there was a change in the basic assumptions on which scientific thought was based.

When you translate this kind of thinking to the present political situation, what is immediately apparent that the reason why the commentators, including mysnelf have got it wrong, is that we have been focussing on whether this election means a change from two party British politics to three party British politics.

But, in fact, the election result reflects several other major changes in basic assumptions which have dominated political thinking.

First, Britain’s shift towards Presidential style US politics. Thanks particularly to the enormous success of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, who have used television to speak directly to the nation, both the cabinet and parliament has lost effective power. Indeed, many of the failures of Gordon Brown arise from the fact that he was not very good at addressing the nation  via television. He lacked the charisma of Thatcher and Brown.

Yesterday, Clegg and his aides, were having to listen, to their party leaders and MPs to decide what they could or could not offer the Cameron. No doubt Cameron was doing the same thing. And on Monday evening Cameron will have to get the support of his MPs for a deal with the Lib Dems, if one has been agreed with Clegg.

Second, the reality of Europe. Though this election has taken place when the Euro is under immense strain thanks to collapse of Greece, Europe is not going to collapse. Both legally and practically, the next British government will have to co-operate with Europe. This weekend the most Eurosceptic party, which at present is allied to the extreme rightwing and powerless  minority is considering a coalition with the most emphatically pro-European party.

Third, everyone agrees that the priority for our next government is dealing with the financial crisis. But most of the commentators have forgotten that this particular financial crisis  has been caused by the behaviour of big business in general and the banks in particular. American consumer capitalism has to change, and is already changing, with President Obama, working doggedly on changes that are quite as far reaching as Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.

There are other major changes I could mention but that is enough for one blog.

My head still thinks that a Tory Lib Dem pact is extremely unlikely. And if it is proposed I shall be using my head to assess how long it will last. But my gut feeling is that it is happening, even as I write. And that we might all wake up on Monday morning, with a new government which is strong enough to last four or five years.