Tony Kinsella

The cold waters of the River Foyle and their altogether warmer cousins in the Eastern Mediterranean now bear silent witness to distressingly similar historic state failures.

Every divided society develops combative rituals, broadly understood and generally respected by the protagonists, who perform in them against a background of declining interest.

Every so often their underpinning realities shift, and then those rituals transformationally explode to systemically alter the protagonists’ political realities.

In October 1968 less than five hundred protestors took part in the second protest march organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). Their route took them across a bridge over the River Foyle in Derry.

Northern Ireland’s sclerotic Unionist administration duly banned the march, and NICRA duly maintained it. Established ritual called for officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary to whack a few heads, the marchers to disperse, and for Nationalist politicians and media to complain.

Belfast failed to grasp new realities such as a changing world, a Labour government in London and the existence of Ireland’s national television station RTE. The march was led by Members of the Northern Irish and UK parliaments, including the widely respected Labour MP Paul Rose, dressed in their standard suits and ties.

Many will be familiar with the black-and-white TV footage of suit-wearing parliamentarians facing an RUC line when the police laid into them with their batons.

Northern Ireland’s BBC and UTV crews were unsighted, but an RTE cameraman shot the footage before rapidly heading for Dublin. By the time Labour backbenchers raised the question the world had seen UK policemen clubbing peaceful Members of the House of Commons.

Although the manner, cost and speed of its demise remained to be bloodily determined, the old Northern Ireland regime doomed itself on Sunday, October 5, 1968.

A similar, though altogether more dramatic, event took place in the international waters of the Eastern Mediterranean during the night of May 30, 2010 when poorly led, badly trained and inadequately equipped Israeli Shayetet 13 naval commandos made a complete mess out of boarding the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara.

Senior Israeli officers have been complaining for years that IDF troops spend far too much of their service time operating checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, and too little time training for military missions.

These inadequately prepared conscripts then become brutalised lords of their checkpoints. They operate with only two standard options, barking orders and opening fire.

As they arrived one-by-one down their ropes on to deck of the Mavi Marmara they encountered not the cowed Palestinians they are accustomed to dealing with, but determined international activists. They rapidly fell back on their default option, the use of lethal force.

The bloody debacle that ensued was as enormous a political victory for Hamas and it is a divisive reversal for the Israeli government, and a further challenge for Cairo’s creaking regime.

The world has been, once again, reminded of the horrific reality of the Israeli-Egyptian siege of Gaza and the image of the Israel’s invincible armed forces has been further tarnished.

A torrent of press criticism has been unleashed in Israel itself, with the Likud-led coalition government under attack for its political and military incompetence. Turkey, a vital friend of Israel, has been humiliated, its territorial integrity violated and Turkish citizens have been killed by a foreign army.

In 2005 Mario Vargas Llosa, the renowned Peruvian author who considers himself a friend of Israel, warned that the Israeli occupation was approaching its grotesque phase. Llosa who won the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in 1995, has now seen the grotesque spill over into absurd and incompetent barbarity.

Could this be the long awaited turning point in Israel’s approach to its own survival and security? The moment when enough Israelis begin to grasp that military power can never solve political problems? Can Jerusalem begin to grasp the new realities of world power, that regional players like Turkey have become at least important as the USA?

One can only hope so, in which case the tragic loss of life on the Mavi Marmara may yet serve some useful purpose.

Otherwise it will just add another bloody signpost on Israel’s road to nowhere.

As the UK’s first true coalition government in almost a century takes office, it opens up possibilities for the official assimilation of radical changes which have already taken place in British society and could, just, lay the basis for the transformation of British politics.

If London did unsurprisingly have a national unity government during WW2, you really have to go back to the beginning of the 20^th century to locate a coalitions-as-normal epoch. Labour was emerging to challenge the Liberals – and there were 100 or so troublesome Irish MPs to contend with.

If every electoral system has its foibles, the British First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) one has more than most. The most obvious one is that it has allowed parties to win handsome majorities in the House of Commons on the basis of minority vote as set out in the table below¹:

A second, but less often discussed, effect is that the system favours large “broad-church” parties such as Conservative or Labour. Both parties are in effect coalitions of different forces and tendencies held together by the most basic of human instincts – survival.

The Conservative Associations of England’s rural counties have little in common with those from the urban middle classes who provide much of the party’s English electorate. This distinction is particularly stark in questions of religious belief, human rights, and views of the world beyond Britain’s shores.

There is a similar chasm between those in the Labour party who cling almost nostalgically to those classic socialist slogans which once played well in areas dominated by mining and heavy industry and a current membership that is de facto middle class. Some Labour Members of Parliament are distinctly uncomfortable with the reality that teachers probably outnumber miners by over 100-to-1 in today’s party.

This list of what distinguishes different elements within both parties could be extended to include regional and other factors.

The figures always favoured a Lib Dem-Conservative deal, but a progressive Lib Dem-Labour deal with support from other parties was possibility, albeit an outside one. A possibility that was sabotaged when MPs from Labour’s more traditional wing made it clear they would not support  electoral reform legislation proposed by a Lib-Lab government.

Even those Liberal Democrats most attracted to cutting a deal with Labour then realised that such a government could neither survive nor deliver. The discussions between the David Cameron and Nick Clegg teams quickly became the only game in town.

Labour traditionalists like David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary, knew exactly what they were doing when they set out to torpedo the coalition talks which he decried as being “scandalous” in theYorkshire Post on May 11. Their core faith is that Labour, following a period of purification on the opposition benches, will sweep back into power in some future election.

The new coalition government is however committed to proposing electoral reform. While the favoured Alternative Vote system falls well short of being fully proportional, it does mean that a candidate has to have over 50% of the vote in their constituency in order to be elected.

Estimates suggest that had the recent election been fought on such a system the Liberal Democrats would have emerged with close to 100 seats. Such a result would certainly further empower the party and lend force to its arguments for an even more representative voting system.

Should the UK ever get there, such a system would dissolve the cement that holds the two mammoth parties together.  Labour traditionalists and modern social democrats would no longer be obliged to combine within a single party in order to survive. They could reasonably hope to win more seats separately than they ever could together.

Their negotiations would then take place between elected MPs in the process of forming a governing coalition rather than within their party structures as they do today.

The 43 year old David Cameron has helped pilot a remarkable coup in offering the Liberal Democrats a full coalition. This provides him with a useful counterbalancing force for use against the more Eurosceptic and deeply reactionary elements within his own party. As Prime Minister of a coalition he has far greater room to manoeuvre in terms of his own party than he would ever have had as a Prime Minister with a massive Tory majority.

Opinion polls suggest that British voters are open to electoral reform. The results of last week’s election where the Conservatives won 306 seats on 36% of the vote, Labour 258 for 29% and the Liberal Democrats 57 for 23% are unlikely to dissuade them.

Should the new government achieve electoral reform, the days of parties-that-are-coalitions will be numbered. Those who nostalgically long for a past where the UK was White and Christian, or one where miners marched solidly behind their union banners will be heartbroken.

But they will be a small minority.