I just wondered how the recent political events over here in the UK have been covered over there in the US. Have you had a lot of coverage? What kind of tone has it adopted? Have you been given enough information by your media to understand the weird constitutional situations? Does anybody actually care?

Just curious.

About the only broadcast media news I get is PBS/NPR and BBC World Service. (Oh, and the Daily Show.) For print my tastes are a bit more catholic: NYT, WSJ, Reuters, LA Times. The US news were mainly involved with describing an exotic system. Tone of the pieces tended from the neutral-prosaic to the ideological.

And are you aware of the structure of Government our "exotic" () system has left us with?

And are you aware of the structure of Government our "exotic" system has left us with?

I haven't been paying too much attention since the "ConDem Nation" was birthed, but I assumed it was similar to the French or German systems, where two or more parties form a coalition that starts off reforming the heck out of everything and ends up in mutual antagonism and eventual disintegration. I was sort of surprised that Clegg settled for Deputy Prime Minister instead of a cabinet post with some actual duties. (OK, maybe I shouldn't be surprised.)

You have elections? What happened to the Queen -- I believe her name is Helen Mirren?

I learned from The Daily Show that the UK has an unwritten constitution, that the outgoing PM had to walk out of 10 Downing Street with his family while crowds watched, and that UK TV used all sorts of Matrix-style hi tech graphics for their election coverage.

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Originally posted by goofy:
I learned from The Daily Show that the UK has an unwritten constitution, that the outgoing PM had to walk out of 10 Downing Street with his family while crowds watched, and that UK TV used all sorts of Matrix-style hi tech graphics for their election coverage.

Good to see such in depth coverage. Glad they haven't gone for a trivial approach.

Sorry, Bob, the Daily Show is a fake news broadcast which comedically seizes on the more ridiculous or outrageous aspects of events. That's not to say (unfortunately) it isn't more informative that the regular newscasts.

I've only followed what's been broadcast on NPR, and it seems you're in a power vacuum at present.

Well, heck. I just started another thread about this in Community. I'll go delete it and copy and paste it here:

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Bob had asked me what Americans were thinking about the recent political situation in England. While not a word post, it's of interest to Wordcraft, I think, because we have a great U.S./U.K. group here.

As I told Bob, it is a bit confusing to us. Everything I've read seems to indicate that Britain, and Europe, are leaning more to the right. Also, having two opposites in power must be interesting!

That the campaign was only 1 month and only cost $33 million makes Americans envious. This article points out that our campaigns typically last about 10 months and in 2008 it cost $1.7 billion, double that spent in 2004. As the author, lawyer Gerald Skoning, says in that article, we could learn a lot from the U.K.

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Does anybody actually care?

Well, no. We got no dog in that fight.

Well, I disagree. I think we are all watching Europe very closely these days because of the economy. What happened in Greece was very scary. England hasn't seemed as strong (perhaps not the right word?) because of the politics. Now at least it seems that it might stabilize a bit.

On the other hand, it bothers me to think that England and Europe are becoming more conservative. While one could argue that the U.S. has become more liberal (with our new Democratic president and our Democratic senate and house of representatives), there is a scary conservative element in our media (the Limbaughs of the world) here, and I predict in November we'll see many more conservatives in office.

It's a very bizarre situation. As I remarked last week, an alliance between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives is marginally more likely than one between the Labour and the Conservatives but still very unlikely indeed: it's a bit like Bin Laden and Bush opening a flower shop together.
A week ago I'd have said that they weren't just a long way apart on pretty much everything but that they were irreconcilably opposed. Now they have formed this alliance but it seems to me to be political expediency on the part of the Conservatives and the triumph of hope over expectation on the part of the LibDems.
For example a key part of the LibDem manifesto is constitutional reform to get a fairer voting system. The Conservatives have promised to have a referendum on a different and less satisfactory reform and to think later about changing things further.
Stephen Fry summed this up best on his blog. He said that every child knows that when you ask for ice cream and your mother says, "have a banana, we might get you an ice cream later", you can say goodbye to ever getting an ice cream.
On immigration, the LibDems were pragmatically suggesting that we have many illegal immigrants here who we cannot identify or trace and saying that if they came forward and had committed no other crime they could be given an amnesty and allowed to stay. This would get them visible, in the system and paying tax. The conservatives were saying that we should cap immigration and operate an Australian style points system. (This is a bit disingenuous. We can't cap immigration from European countries, which accounts for 80%, because of European laws we have already agreed to.)
Here too the Conservative policy has been adopted.

I'm not trying to be specifically anti-conservative here, but to me the deal certainly seems to have gone their way.

Still, if the Conservative voters are saying too much has been given away to the LibDems and the LibDem voters are saying too much has been given away to the Conservatives, they probably got it about as balanced as possible in the circumstances.

The worst proposed change has already caused a storm of protest. I won't go into the convoluted detail but it's a procedural change that would have two very bad effects: it would make it very difficult, whatever the circumstances, to get rid of the Government before the full term was up (we don't have fixed terms of office here) and, more seriously if the alliance failed it would allow potentially a different ad-hoc alliance to form a Government without an election.

I give this marriage a year before the divorce. It's the kids I feel sorry for.

Incidentally the reason I was taken in by the Daily Show post was that it isn't actually wrong except in interpretation.

We don't have a written constitution like the U.S.
Gordon Brown did leave Downing Street in the full glare of the press with his kids but he didn't have to. It was a photo opportunity.
And calling the graphics "Matrix-style" is a bit of an exaggeration but it's certainly true that in elections they do like to go in for increasingly ludicrous graphical illustration. I can't find it in YouTube but my favourite had the presenter walking along a computer generated representation of Downing Street with the paving stones lighting up in different colurs with the names of constituencies on them to show where the parties hoped to win.

You should try to watch some of the Daily Show online, Bob. It is often funny, and it is likewise sad that it's one of the better news programs on US TV.

[Addendum: the senior British correspondent on the Daily Show is John Oliver a British comedian who now lives in the States.]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

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Originally posted by BobHale:
I can't find it in YouTube but my favourite had the presenter walking along a computer generated representation of Downing Street with the paving stones lighting up in different colurs with the names of constituencies on them to show where the parties hoped to win.

They showed that on The Daily Show. It was AWESOME.

US right-wing columnist David Brooks seems to think that Cameron has put together a viable coalition, clipping the wings of both right and left extremes, and leaving pragmatists to go about making the hard choices. Is that how it is in reality?

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It's a very bizarre situation. As I remarked last week, an alliance between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives is marginally more likely than one between the Labour and the Conservatives but still very unlikely indeed

Bob, can you (or arnie?) briefly summarize for us the major differences between the 3 parties. Does your "liberal" mean the same as ours, if you understand ours? Are the conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the like? What about Labor? I was thinking, for example, that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are like our Republicans (conservative) because they Blair seemed so onboard with Bush.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is shown here, on a satellite/cable channel, More4, at 9PM. I've watched snatches of it a couple of times, but they were only dealing with US-centric matters which meant nothing to me so I soon changed channels.

Very roughly, the Conservative Party are the equivalent of your Republicans, although I think they'd be considered dangerously to the left over there. They are looked upon by most as the party of the well-off and big business.

The Labour Party would be considered very far to the left in the US, and although they haven't had a true socialist manifesto for over 15 years, they still are felt to be the party of the common man, and are largely funded by the unions.

The Liberal Democrats are probably (again very roughly) the equivalent of the US Democrats. They are roughly partway between the Conservatives and Labour.

When one of the fellows in Beyond the Fringe tells his mates that he's going to the USA, they explain American politics to him: "They have a bipartite system in America. They have a Republican party which is the equivalent of our Conservative party, and a Democratic party which is the equivalent of our Conservative party." Or words to that effect.

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The Labour Party would be considered very far to the left in the US, and although they haven't had a true socialist manifesto for over 15 years, they still are felt to be the party of the common man, and are largely funded by the unions.

It seemed to me, as I said above, that the Labour party was more aligned with our Republicans than our Democrats.