A government excluding the Conservatives would only need to survive a few months to deliver PR for the next election

Nick Clegg is deciding whether to back a Conservative minority government or one of Labour and the smaller parties - he would get a better deal from the latter

The Conservative party are not offering the Lib Dems any solid pledge on a referendum on Proportional Representation. Cameron offering an all party commission on electoral reform does not specify who would appoint the members, nor give any guarantee that commission would recommend a referendum on PR, nor any guarantee that Cameron would accept it’s recommendations if it did

A minority government or coalition of all parties other than the Conservatives would represent around the same percentage of the electorate – at over 60%, that a Liberal-Conservative one would at 59.1%. The Conservatives got just 36.1% of the vote, merely the largest minority, so they have no unique right to form a government.

First past the post results in the votes of millions being binned unrepresented if they don't vote for the party that got the majority (or more often the largest minority) of the votes in that constituency. It also distorts how people vote as a result by encouraging them to vote for a party they see as bad in order to keep out one they see as worse. It results in 'safe' seats which result in big parties looking after the interests of big donors to party funds rather than those of voters.

P.R on the single transferrable vote or the additional member systems systems (the latter being the one used in Scottish Parliament elections) would allow people to vote positively for the candidate or party they agreed with most and would ensure that everyone's vote counted equally and was represented.

We need to scrap the backwards, undemocratic and archaic first past the post system now - and replace it with PR (STV) or PR (AMS).

A coalition or minority government of all parties except the Tories might well be unstable and find it difficult to agree on anything except a bill on PR and not making big public spending cuts until the economy recovers, but those two issues would be plenty – and they would disagree on them far less than Liberals and Conservatives would be likely to. Labour, with less seats, are also more likely to offer a solid pledge on a referendum on P.R than the Conservatives are.

Brown may need to pledge to step down as Labour leader within the next few months to get that deal. By doing so he would be remembered as a Prime Minister who put democracy and the good of both his party and the country before his own career. He might well even be made a Minister in the new government.

Clegg only needs a coalition or minority government which includes a pledge on a referendum on PR within months. It doesn’t need to survive long to do that – and then the next election would be under P.R. - with very different results, whether thye next election is months or years away.

If Clegg accepted a deal that does not deliver full PR (which excludes the 'Alternative Vote'), whether from the Conservatives or Labour, his party will split and most Lib Dem voters will abandon his party entirely.

Even if propping up the Conservatives or Labour lost the Lib Dems half the votes they got in the last election at the next one, they would still increase their number of seats under PR. Currently they have under 10% of the seats in parliament (57 seats) from 23% of the vote. Even if their vote halved in a future PR election (and it would be unlikely to as under PR more people would feel they could vote Lib Dem without letting Labour or the Conservatives in) they would get 12.5% of the seats, or 81 seats - a big increase.

Supporting any government without pledges on PR and delaying spending cuts would put the Lib Dems in the same position they were in in the Scottish Parliament in the past - as the junior partner in a coalition with little influence on most of government policy, but being held responsible for all government policy by the voters - and losing seats in future as a result.

Whether it's Labour or Conservatives we need to avoid big public sector job losses leading to another recession - and we need P.R

Well - in complete contradiction to my own guesses before the election Labour increased it's majority in my constituency due to fear of a Conservative government (full result here) After spending a week organising my campaign, election communication and website and three weeks knocking on doors and ringing doorbells I got well and truly gubbed with 670 votes, 1.4% of the total number cast. It is a 48% increase on my vote last time but still irrelevant to the result as a whole.

(Thanks very much though to everyone who voted for me and everyone who campaigned for me and all the people who were polite or friendly on the doorstep when i interrupted their tea or their TV programmes or their baths and showers, or getting the kids to bed.)

(I’m still considering standing on the second vote on the Scottish parliament’s regional list for the South of Scotland next year, but not decided yet. The additional member system is as favourable to small parties and independents as the first past the post system for Westminster elections is unfavourable, but the list has 500,000 voters on it across a vast area – and many voters don’t realise that voting for a big party twice in Scottish Parliament elections will usually result in no additional seats for that party.)

I can’t blame people here for being scared of a Conservative government and voting Labour out of fear of it as bad rather than much worse.

On top of that the Conservatives (pretty much the UK equivalent of the Republicans) have won the largest number of seats in parliament - and whether they or Labour win they've both said they'll make cuts in public spending bigger than Thatcher did - as Labour Chancellor Alastair Darling said before the election. They won't touch military spending, or private finance initiatives, or public subsidies to arms firms, or public subsidies to privatised rail firms - nor raise taxes on the highest earners, nor close down tax havens.

So that means lots of public sector workers sacked (the local councils have already started by sacking the lollipop ladies and men (road safety wardens) for road crossings at primary schools.

More people made unemployed would mean reduced demand in the economy, which will result in knock on job losses in the private sector. This would likely lead to a "double dip recession" like the one Japan suffered in the 1990s, with the job losses killing the recovery of the economy.

All in all it looks pretty grim unless the big parties’ leaders step back from the brink or the smaller parties and some back-bench Labour MPs on the left of the party can prevent it – which I hope they can.

We certainly will have to cut public spending and/or increase taxes to avoid the risk of ending up a bit like Greece (though our public spending and debt as percentages of GDP are lower than Greece’s and we can vary the interest rate as we have our own currency, so we’ll hopefully avoid that fate). The question is who to tax and what cuts to make. We can’t afford to make large numbers of public sector employees unemployed any more than we can afford to continue without any cuts our tax rises. The most important thing is not that we eliminate the debt rapidly but that we rebuild an economy that can pay off that debt rather than slash and burn into a vicious circle of rising unemployment.

I'm still hopeful that we might get proportional representation for future elections if the Lib Dems stick to their guns on demanding PR in return for any kind of support for a minority government. That would mean that in future elections people could vote for the candidate or party they agree with most instead of mostly voting negatively against the party they dislike most and for one they only see as slightly less bad.

Nick Clegg would be a fool to accept David Cameron's vague promises of an all party electoral commission to discuss reform - he needs to hold out for a solid commitment to bring in proportional representation - and would be more likely to get that from Labour, who have less seats and so are more desperate to make a deal - and who at least believe that public services should exist and be well funded, unlike most Conservatives, even if both parties (and the Lib Dems) have gone for the over-charging and service cuts resulting from PFI and PPP deals.

MPs accepting any money except their salary and work-related expenses should be a criminal offence

- and why we need public funding of all candidates in elections so we can make parties taking money from any other person, company or organisation a criminal offence too.

Smug, money grabbing, brass-necked, dishonest, chancer Stephen Byers MP (Labour), above, competes with smug, money grabbing, dishonest, brass-necked chancer John Butterfill MP (Conservative), below, for the title of smuggest, most grasping, dishonest and brass-necked chancer 2010 (oh and if either of you are going to sue me for saying that then i 'retract' it, never said it and 'deny all allegations of wrongdoing', just like you both do with the statements you made which are recorded on video).

Videos of MPs and former ministers including former transport minister Stephen Byers MP telling investigative journalists posing as lobbyists that they will hire out to private firms to get government policy changed for £3,000 to £5,000 a day make the expenses scandal look like chicken feed. (The Times newspaper has an article summarising the revelations here.)

What’s most shocking about it is that it may well not be illegal. It f***ing well should be.

These videos also show why we need to have modest public funding of all political candidates, so any of them accepting money other than that funding, their salaries and justified expenses relating to their job can be tried, fined or jailed and kicked out of their jobs as MPs or ministers – as well as being banned by law from working for 5 years. They may complain that that’s unfair. It’s not, it’s entirely justified for someone found involved in serious corruption. They can live on their pension for those 5 years, which will be much more generous than the unemployment benefit they give to millions of people often out of work for years through no fault of their own. The job of an MP is to represent all their constituents equally – not to represent their party or donors to their own or their party’s campaign funds, much less people agreeing to bribe them personally.

They should also be banned from standing for public office or being a director or lobbyist for any company or from being appointed to the House of Lords for a period of 10 years, or for life, depending on the amounts involved. Forcing them to stand down as MPs is not enough, because most of those involved are standing down at the next election anyway – and probably going on to Lordships (as Conservative MP John Butterfill – who from the video is butter-filled both by name and by nature - suggested he probably will when selling his services to people he thought were lobbyists).

All political parties and independent candidates should also be banned from accepting any private donations, but all should be given modest public funding of their election campaigns, so the ban on private donations does not turn politics into the preserve of the wealthiest. Any party found accepting private donations should also be banned from having candidates in elections for 10 years.

Some may see this as handing politicians public money, but it would save us a fortune in the future by ending the mis-use of thousands of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money going to PFIs/PPPs (which result in both higher taxes and cuts in the number of hospital beds and fully trained nurses and teachers), privatised rail firms and arms companies selling arms to dictators and those committing genocide, which is the result of allowing political parties to accept private donations. When Saddam Hussein stopped paying for arms exported by BAE under British government licences after the 1991 Gulf War the taxpayer picked up the tab. There have been many similar instances since.

The corruption involves MPs from both main parties – Labour and the Conservatives, as Conservative MP John Butterfill was involved. He was caught on video boasting about his influence with David Cameron; So if anyone is still under the illusion that either major party is free of corruption, or that it’s just ‘a few bad apples’ think again – these are people close to Blair and close to Cameron.

Stephen Byers is perhaps the most sickening of all in the way he boasted about conning the public into believing the government was going to crack down on the private rail companies, while he was taking money from the same companies to ensure the government didn’t crack down on either the vast subsidies these firms get from taxpayers (while keeping all the profits for themselves) or the way they keep raising fares at several times the rate of inflation. Byers is the kind of smug spiv who has spent his career looking down on anyone with any principles as ‘an extremist’ or a ‘loony’. Most of the people this spiv looks down on are simply more honest than he will ever be and actually have some principles.

Byers took a hissy fit when Peter Hain MP suggested a 50% tax rate on the highest earners to help the poorest. He took another one when Brown put it into practice (though not permanently) after the credit crisis. I wonder if any of that ‘work’ was on the ‘cab for hire’ £3,000 to £5,000 a day rate Byers said he charged in the Dispatches video?

Another interesting fact is that both Byers and Butterfill are members of their parties’ respective ‘Friends of Israel’ groups, who refuse to make any criticism of Israeli war crimes and frequent killings of unarmed Palestinian children and teenagers (to be fair sometimes the children throw stones, which no doubt completely justifies Israeli soldiers in helmets and body armour shooting them in the head – or perhaps the fact that Hamas and Fatah have terrorist arms who kill Israeli civilians somehow makes it fine for the Israeli military to kill many times as many Palestinian civilians). In a recent case they claimed a boy they shot in the head while he and his brother were working on their family’s olive grove threatened troops with a knife. They also said they fired no live ammunition though – yet the bullet removed from the dead boy’s head was a metal bullet, not a rubber bullet – and even rubber bullets can kill at short range.

How much Byers’ and Butterfill’s uncritical support for the Israeli government and military’s actions is down to their principled beliefs and how much might be down to the millions donated by LFI to the Labour party’s campaign funds and the millions donated by CFI members to the Conservative party’s election campaign funds since 1997 (for instance £2 million from Lord Sainsbury – an LFI member and made a Lord and Cabinet Minister by Tony Blair), is a matter for speculation. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Byers, Butterfill and associates have now ‘retracted’ all the things they were caught saying on video, claiming there is ‘no truth’ in the allegations that they said these things. Since, unlike them, i’m not protected by parliamentary immunity from our country’s ridiculously unbalanced libel laws i can’t say they’re caught red handed, nor can i claim for instance that they’re guilty as hell.

I can however point out that if any ordinary person accused of fraud was caught admitting it on video and then ‘retracted’ their statement and said the evidence didn’t count because they ‘denied the allegations’ the court would laugh them all the way to jail.

Since what they’ve done probably isn’t illegal (yet) I can’t say they must be fined for every penny they have or put in jail. I can say it should be illegal though – and I can say that once a law making it illegal is passed any MP or minister or Lord caught doing the same and tried in court and found guilty should not have their feet touching the floor as their corrupt arses are kicked out of parliament or the Lords, their money is taken in fines, they are banned from any kind of employment for 5 years and from any directorship or public office permanently.

I can also say that if you want this kind of behaviour made illegal don’t bother looking to the leaders of the major parties or any MP who doesn’t routinely rebel against the party whips (on issues other than voting themselves higher expenses or a bigger pay rise) to get that law through parliament.

Ask party leaders to make manifesto commitments to banning vulture funds in the next parliament

With the Debt Relief (developing countries) Private Members' bill run out of time by a Conservative MP blocking it and the Labour government not providing it with more time in this parliament the only chance to prevent profiteering from third world debt by UK-based "vulture funds" now is after the General Election.

The Jubilee Debt Campaign have a page where you can send messages to all the party leaders asking them to make manifesto commitments that they'll vote for the bill in the next parliament and that if they form the government they'll provide it with enough parliamentary time to pass (see the 'TAKE ACTION' links on the right of the page on this link).

Are the Conservatives the Vulture Party?

Conservative MPs including whips killed a bill to prevent profiteering from third world debt; If Cameron and Osborne didn’t want them to why haven’t they expelled them from the party?

Every time I think the Conservatives couldn’t be any worse than ‘New Labour’ they do something to prove me wrong. This time they pretended to back a bill to outlaw ‘vulture funds’ – funds that buy up the debts of third world countries when those debts are about to be written off, before suing the debtor governments for huge amounts of money. Then they blocked it at the last minute (according to the Guardian here and here, the Independent here and the Jubilee Debt Campaign here.).

This is not just a technical matter of finance law. People are dying in their millions every year from hunger and preventable diseases due to poverty. This is partly due to foreign debts which countries like Haiti, Liberia and the Congo have to pay interest on to private firms, banks, funds and governments in the wealthier countries (which, despite the credit crisis, still includes the UK). These debts are largely the result of unfair trade policies pushed by the US, the EU and other economic and political powers.

For instance Haiti was self-sufficient in rice, until US governments backed dictatorships there which agreed to abolish import tariffs on American (US government subsidised) rice imports. Even when there was a democratically elected government in Haiti (briefly, before two more US backed coups in 1994 and 2004) the US and EU made aid conditional on the continuation of these policies by the Haitian government and the privatisation of more of Haiti’s public services. As a result many Haitians often have to pay to eat mud mixed with salt because they can’t afford food.

So the Conservative party, if they continue to block this bill, will be condemning people to death in large numbers, possibly even so that those profiting from this suffering will donate money to party funds. I might be wrong – but if i’m wrong the party leadership’s failure to expel these MPs from the party is very difficult to explain.

David Cameron and his Shadow Chancellor George Osborne say the party leadership was not involved in blocking the Bill, despite two of the three Conservative MPs who were in parliament at the time being party whips appointed by David Cameron as party leader. The three MPs moved together on the benches and hid their hands with their mouths to try to prevent anyone knowing which of them had killed that reading of the bill by shouting ‘I object’ (see the Guardian here, Jubilee Debt campaign here and Osborne’s response to the Jubilee Debt Campaign here).

If Cameron is telling the truth why hasn’t he sacked both the whips and expelled all three MPs from the party to ensure such a shameful action is never carried out again by any Conservative MP? If they don’t, everyone will know they are liars who couldn’t care less about how many people die as a result of their actions.

If he refuses to expel these three from the party then perhaps this is the ‘transparency’ that David Cameron says he would ensure in government – transparent lies?

The think-tank Ekklesia has reported that a previous planned amendment to the bill (since dropped) which would have killed it came from Conservative MP Phillip Davies, who accepted campaign donations from a firm which the Times newspaper reported as being owned by the billionaire Lord Ashcroft (whose lordship derives from donations to party funds). Does Lord Ashcroft have investments in vulture funds?
; I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.

You can ask David Cameron whether he will prove he opposed killing the bill by expelling the three MPs responsible from the Conservative party on the Jubilee debt campaign’s site here.

You can email Shadow Chancellor George Osborne at osborneg@parliament.uk and David Cameron at david.cameron@conservatives.com

There’s a facebook group which you can join which includes the email of the Conservative MP identified by the Independent as responsible for blocking the bill – Christopher Chope MP. It’s chopec@parliament.uk It also has a link to his constituency party’s website.

You can ask Harriet Harman, the leader of the Commons, to give the bill more time here (it may be too late for this now, i’m not sure – only found it this evening unfortunately)

P.S. Christopher Chope claims his motive was to avoid a bill that might make it harder for poor countries' governments to get loans from private banks in future. Some people think this shows his intentions were good. Maybe they're right, but personally i greatly doubt it. Vulture funds buy claims to debt that is about to be written off and then use those claims to sue for debts that were written off. The cause of the 'developing' countries'' debts is not lack of loans, but unfair trade imposed on them by more powerful governments and companies(including banks and loans funds) lobbying those governments. So i suspect Christopher Chope's explanation is just an excuse or a cover story.