The Election

Karen stood as a Green Party candidate in the council elections, and got nearly 600 votes, beating Labour.

It raises some questions for me, because, on the one hand, I believe the environment is the most important issue on the agenda, but on the other, as one of the other Green candidates said to me, they are the party nearest to socialism, with which I disagree. I regret the fact that concern for the environment has been yoked together with a left-wing stance.

Mind you, it depends what he means by socialism. Someone said to me that up until today we'd had a socialist government in this country, meaning New Labour. Most people I know who call themselves socialists would strongly disagree. NL didn't meet the letter of the technical definition, nor, some would say, the spirit of it. Has socialism now come to mean just having a welfare state? In that case, we lived in a socialist state under Mrs Thatcher.

The mainstream parties now seem barely distinguishable. They all believe in the system of capitalism: you can start a company, sell things, sell shares, employ people. Nobody proposes nationalisation. Nobody proposes deregulating business: nobody proposes to allow you to sell mouldy food or operate saws without safety guards or send children up chimneys. Nobody proposes to abolish state schools, or private schools, or state medicine, or private medicine. Nobody wants to say anything at all about the Euro. It's all come down to bickering about foxhunting, and the precise details of the shape of the income tax curve. I say I'm against socialism, but nobody out there is offering it anyway.

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It's been an odd election. We were faced with the prospect that if we voted Labour, we didn't know who'd be PM. And the "leader" figure still matters to people. There was a big groan from the audience on Any Questions this evening, when the Labour spokesperson said "we have plenty of suitable people, for example Harriet Harman".

I suspect David Cameron is deeply relieved that he didn't get a clear majority. A friend described the current situation as "passing the parcel with a live hand grenade" -- nobody wants power. As Mervyn King said, whoever gets in will have to reform the economy, and will become hugely unpopular as a result, "out of power for a generation". I think that would be especially true if it were the Conservatives -- it plays to the standard "wicked Tory cutters" storyline.

Maybe if we get a coalition government, they can do all the unpopular stuff, quickly, with everybody's hand on the steering wheel, no blame allocated, and then call a fresh election. Oink flap.