Across the pond

……..and they should resist the scare stories that the stock markets will crash if Britain does not have a new government by the end of the week. And I write as a callow working class youth, who has been watching the behaviour of the stock markets since I started my first job with the Financial Times group in 1955.

Clegg has now been offered by both governments what he campaigned for. Electoral reform and the removal of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and the leader of the Labour Party. He has got himself into this position, not be secret back room deals, although obviously he has had private talks  with Labour, even while he was negotiating with the Conservatives. He has got into this position, after consulting with his own supporters.

Not by steaming ahead and, forcing his party to fall into line.

To make his decision will take time.

And everyone in Britain, journalists, politicians and the general public need to remember is that Democracy takes time.

And particularly British democracy. Which is based not on the American Presidential system, when one man (and it has always been a man), as soon as he becomes President of the nation, the boss man who acts in the interest of the nation.

British democracy, by contrast is based on cabinet government. The Prime Minister is not the ‘chief executive’, he is the chairman of a cabinet. And he cannot do anything of an executive nature, unless his cabinet agrees with him. He is also responsible to his party. He is in post because his party elected him to represent their interests.

Unllike  the US President who is elected by popular vote. And then decides who shall be in his cabinet.

It was American democracy that got is into our present crisis.

George W Bush, who gained power thanks  to a few contested votes ( they may have been faked) went on, although he had the support of only one third of the US electorate, to give free reign to the big business bosses and to take his country, and the world, into the Iraq war. Both Blair and Brown supported these policies. So that New Labour became (which was not their intention) the party who helped the most unscrupulous and greedy bankers and company bosses, and waged war on an undoubted tyrant, on the pretext that he had weapons of mass destruction (which he did not) and he was harbouring the international terrorists, who had committed the atrocities of 9/11.

They not only ignored the evidence that Saadam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. They also ignored the fact that he was against the Muslim fundamentalists. He was put in power by the British oil company BP. He established a secular Iraq, where women did not around dressed like nuns. He was also a nasty dictatorial tyrant, who committed  many crimes.

But that is history.

The US 2010 has a  new kind of boss as President, a bloke called Barack Obama, who personifies the American dream. He is trying to bring US democracy up to date. And to deal with all the powerful rich lobbies, which tried to stop his election.

Including US citizen Rupert Murdoch, who ushered New Labour into power, but now supports  the Conservatives, and has  consistently branded the Lib Dems, as a bunch of woolly idealists, who don’t deserve serious coverage in his newspapers or on his television channels.

The  focus of attention is the last few days has been as if electoral  reform means replacing the present first past the post system with proportional represestation. But it is much wider than that.

It includes  the funding of elections, This one has seen the millions of Conservative supporters like Lord Ashcroft, and the  supporters of the very small minority party, UKIP, used  to get their posters in the front windows of houses across the country. The Lib Dems just does not have the money to compete.

By contrast New Labour has been richly funded by the trade union movement, even though both Brown and Blair before  him, have distanced themselves from their main funders. Trade unions have continued to fund the Labour Party, because the Conservatives would prefer they did not exist at all. And, because the Lib Dems are a party of the the educated middle class, who think in terms of individuals acting according to conscience, rather than class solidarity.

They want to treat the workers decently. And some of them, like Shirley Williams, are Lib Dem because of the atrocities of the union bully boys of the 1960s, who held the country to ransom. And was thought to be a power in the land, because they had tea and sandwiches at No 10  with Harold Wilson.

Under new Labour the trade union  movement, now mostly quietly doing its job in looking after the interests of workers, has  been ignored. The Downing Street of Blair and Brown has  welcomed the likes of Rupert Murdoch for cosy chats in Downing Street.