A snap election?

A final reference to the Sunday Business Post for this week, and there’s been so much going on its hard to know where to start. I’m glad Garibaldy discussed the UK situation because that’s almost beyond belief, from what is by any measure an outright attack on the fundamental basis of the welfare state in the form of universal provision.

Anyhow, briefly, the Backroom column last week had a piece which asserted that the day the banking bailout cost was ‘identified was a gamechanger’, because, and I think there’s some truth in this, ‘the prospect of seeing an economic recovery before the general election went out the window’. As the SBP says, the people who took ten years to get us to this point now say it will take at least seven years to get out. You know, that’s such a gulf of time and that – frankly – scares me. Think about it, where you were seven years ago and what might happen in the next seven years. It’s a fair old chunk of anyone’s lifetime. Which makes the blithe often indifferent commentary we hear about ‘pain’ particularly unbearable. At least to me anyhow.

They were assured that, by then, it would be evident that Fianna Fáil’s competence, experience and grit would rescue the country from a recession which was caused by international factors.

Black Thursday killed that narrative.

The good days will not be back in 2012.

At best, we will be halfway through the course of tough medicine.

The patient will still be in intensive care, another two years away from the recovery ward.

The public will have had four harsh budgets and a promise of another two to come.

Just two after 2012? They must be kidding. Even at best we’re looking at three or four beyond that, and if the ESRI is to be believed many more as growth remains tenaciously beyond our grasp and we enter a lost decade.

But from this the writer argues that:

There is now a compelling case for Fianna Fáil to engineer an election as soon as possible.

Losing in 2010 would be infinitely better for the party’s long-term future than losing in 2012.

A new Fine Gael/Labour government taking power at the end of 2010 would face having to bring in five hairshirt budgets.

Even savage cuts in the early years are unlikely to put the economy on an upward trend.

This sounds attractive. I’ll give it that. But I’m not so sure about it, or the following:

By the time the election after next comes around, a fickle public will have forgotten their current anger at the Soldiers of Destiny. Some of the existing ministers, including Cowen, will have moved on – and some of the younger guns, such as Dara Calleary, Thomas Byrne and Darragh O’Brien, will present a new younger face for the party.

The current presumption, that all governments must be an FG/Labour coalition or a coalition led by Fianna Fáil, will be redundant by 2015.

A refreshed, new-look Fianna Fáil could be an acceptable coalition partner with either Fine Gael or Labour in 2015, depending on how relations between the parties survive five years of slog in government and a difficult election. Black Thursday may also have changed the outlook of the electorate.

I think this seriously underestimates how long the aftershocks, in political terms, of this crisis will reverberate. The idea that Fianna Fáil caused this crisis will be deeply embedded, and new leadership or not the notion of Fianna Fáil economic competency must be entirely compromised at this point and for long after. That doesn’t mean FF will fade away, simply that it has lost lustre, and how.

And one wonders at how the bitterness engendered by the crisis both within FF and further afield will play. Sure, on paper the idea of an FF sufficiently scrubbed up – and presumably sufficiently weakened – that it could work with FG sounds just about plausible, but prod it to any extent and it seems to fall apart. Not least because it ignores cultural differentiations between the support bases and activists of both parties. These may not seem to the outside observer to be so very great, but those of us on the left know all to well the way differences often seem greater the more insignificant (or irrelevant to political activity) they may be.

And more generally, to pick up on something from yesterday, I would have serious concerns that the breach of trust all this constitutes may be of a nature unprecedented in this state and may see ultimate political expressions that are as unwelcome as they are unexpected. We’ve already seen a rhetorical ugliness across the last two years probably unmatched in the state since the height of the conflict in the North. The danger for any polity is when long-standing formations disintegrate whether at state level or below it.

In any case the anonymous writer of this piece argues that a snap election is just the ticket…

If Fianna Fáil and the Greens can publish a credible four-year plan in early November, they could seize the political initiative.

A plan that sets out a schedule for cuts in spending with precision about what is to be cut (capital projects, public services, public service pay and numbers) and what new taxes are to be raised (water charges, property tax, income tax rises) could allow them to claim the high ground for honesty and clarity.

They could shift the debate about how we got into this mess into how we can get out of it.

They would put it up to Fine Gael and Labour (especially the latter) to spell out their plan for pain. It’s unlikely it would prevent a kicking for Fianna Fáil in the election, but it might temper some of the damage.

And…

Of course, Fianna Fáil will have to engineer a scenario that paints them as being forced into an election.

A few wobbling independents and/or Fianna Fáil backbenchers will be needed to throw shapes, and help Cowen to realise that uncertainty must be ended and an election must be called.

Last week’s meetings with the party leaders on a possible budgetary consensus might even provide a useful backdrop.

In truth, there is little downside for Fianna Fáil.

Most of its ministers have had more than a good innings in office.

A spell in opposition, especially at a time when the government is constantly fire-fighting, would allow the party to re-invent itself.

For Fianna Fáil, like the economy, the sooner the medicine is taken, the quicker the recovery.

PS: a date for your diary: November 25,2010 – election day.

I find this highly unlikely, not so the prospect of an election – given the disposition of forces, though those watching closely will note that some of the more errant and vocal souls who have departed the orbit of the government seem to be on a tangent that brings them back home. Slowly, very slowly, and with no guarantee that such an outcome will occur, but sufficient that passing the Budget may not be the greatest problem for the government this Autumn/Winter.

No, what I find unlikely is the idea that the FF Ministers, and indeed Parliamentary Party, will simply say ‘Okay, it’s a fair cop’, pack their bags and head for the hills. Why on earth would they? They know they’re going to be out of power for quite some time to come, which makes being in power now all that much more valuable. And the psychology of power, and I don’t mean this to be a particularly cynical analysis, this is simply the way this operates, is such that it is relinquished voluntarily before it has to be relatively rarely.

This generation of FF leaders are unlikely to see its like again. And the next one? Well, it might be quite a while. And the difference between being in power and being in opposition is so great that none of them would mistake the one for the other.

They may intellectually know that their chances of making it past the Spring are limited, which they surely are, but there will remain a hope that they might make it to Summer 2011, perhaps even a little further on, perhaps a lot further on. And while that may sound absurd the truth is that if they could lash together a deal with the Noel Grealish’s of the world and see some of their errant colleagues return they’d just about be able to do it.

Do I think that is a likely outcome? How on earth would I know, but I’d think that in the heart of every FF minister, and indeed more than a few backbenchers that is a consideration. As is the thought that if time dulls the rage of the electorate then either just before a Budget or directly after it is about the worst possible time to go looking for their opinion. And remember, they can wrap themselves in the flag, the ‘national’ interest, whatever the hell takes their fancy. That’s more than justification for most.

They’ll keep going, at least as long as they possibly can, each finger of political power prised away one by one by events, because in truth from their perspective the alternative is no alternative at all.