Connective Visions

As I logged off from my home page last night, one of the last headlines to catch my eye via my Yahoo! feed was “Music Mogul Cowell Backs Tories.”

Well, there. That should solve everything, right? It was enough to send me to bed, I assure you.

Graph of the 2010 UK General Election Trend

My friends in Great Britain, you have my deepest sympathy. You have now picked up the (inevitable, in America) celebrity endorser to add to your woes as you face a difficult general election in a hugely challenging economic environment.

Be sure to ask him for a donation the next time you see him. After all, he earned enough while over here.

Simon Cowell aside (and he should be aside – are The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent on hiatus, that he’s feeling such a lack of attention? Sorry, mate, it is a general election!), I have followed the progress toward your momentous day tomorrow with the standard American combination of mixed feelings over the candidates and confusion over your system. I blame the latter on the fact that when I was living and studying in the UK, Margaret Thatcher was your prime minister. For an eternity, it seemed. So I never quite got the hang of what happens if one party doesn’t get those requisite seats in the House of Commons.

But by what I read, neither are you too sure what happens then. I find that oddly comforting.

Gordon Brown - Labour. Photo by ΠΑΣΟΚ / CC-BY-2.0 License.

Less comforting, perhaps, is the concern over how invested voters are in this election. Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal frets about the potential of a hung Parliament. He seems to believe that the average British voter has no sense of the problems the national economy faces. For his part, Henry Hunter at WorldNewsVine seems certain that the average British voter just doesn’t care.

But the impression I get from Nick Robinson at the BBC – who comes off to me as less partisan than the other two, and thereby more worth reading – is that this is a genuinely difficult decision for the British electorate. Perhaps what we are seeing is not apathy or cluelessness, but some truly hard thinking.

I hope that is the case.

For my U.S. (and perhaps some other) readers, perhaps I should point out that in a general election in the UK, voters do not, as such, elect the prime minister. They vote for a Member of Parliament in their own constituency, who is of one or another party, and it is the number of seats that party holds that usually determines who will be prime minister (that is, the leader of the now-326-seat-majority party).

The New York Times contributing columnist Ben Schott has a chart that helps explain this system (known as “First Past the Post”) and the party leaders in the running: Labour’s Gordon Brown (the current prime minister), the Conservative David Cameron, and Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg.

It would be highly unlikely to see Clegg as prime minister. Which is something of a shame, in my opinion. On the first-ever televised debates among the candidates, he was the one who impressed me the most. He impressed me because he was the one candidate who didn’t rely on fear to try to win the argument – fear of change (from Brown) or fear of the existing government (from Cameron).

David Cameron - Conservative. Photo by World Economic Forum / CC-BY-2.0 License.

It probably doesn’t help either that I have listened to a great many “Prime Minister’s Question Time” sessions on the BBC’s Today in Parliament, so I have heard rather a lot from Mr. Brown and Mr. Cameron. I didn’t find it edifying.

But in fact, this is a moot point. What Britons must decide is which candidate for MP will best serve them. And this is a significant decision. Just as our representatives to Congress are the ones to whom we, the electorate, have the most access, so will Britons’ MPs be the ones most responsible for seeing that the interests of their constituencies are addressed, and appropriate decisions made.

This pertains especially within a time of economic crisis. As Greece, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, the UK, and the United States all poignantly illustrate, the global economy is interconnected and has national ramifications. But the real felt impact is on the ground – in individuals’ pensions, in their earnings, in their schools, in local resources. And it is on the ground that we all have to address the problems.

So my friends, my best recommendation is when you vote, ask yourself about your MP. How has she or he represented you before? What are the other candidates for that position saying? You will want the person with whom you are going to be working – as constituents – for the next five years to be one who you believe will make carefully considered decisions on your behalf, and who will be receptive to your input.

It may not be as glamorous as voting directly for prime minister, but it can certainly be a useful partnership.

Nick Clegg - Liberal Democrat. Photo by Nick-Clegg, modified on Wikimedia Commons by Urpunkt / CC-BY-2.0 License.

I wish you all well throughout and beyond tomorrow’s election. Doubtless, we’ll have plenty to chat about. And I leave you with two of my favorite quotes, from one of your leaders and one of mine who faced extremely difficult times very successfully in the long run.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

– Sir Winston Churchill

… let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt

(Now, get out there and vote.)