By Anthony Browne, who writes in a personal capacity
If this extraordinary situation were reversed – and a Tory prime minister who lost the election refused to move out of Downing Street – there would be one inevitable response: trade-union organised popular demonstrators outside Downing Street, collaborating with left-wing groups such as the Socialist Workers' Party. There would be a huge rolling non-stop demonstration, the permanent focus of television cameras, creating a visible national sense of crisis, and stoking up a tsunami of public anger at a politician trying to steal an election. After all, left wing demonstrators didn’t need a dubious electoral outcome to shout “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – Out, Out, Out!”
However, the Conservative Party has no such battalions of fellow travellers permanently on the brink of waving placards. But it would probably be useful for them if they did. Ukrainian style pro-democracy demonstrations outside Downing Street would grab the media attention, have huge popular support from across the political spectrum, put the pressure on Brown to leave, and make it easier for the Conservatives to negotiate good terms for entering government. Even Gordon Brown’s MPs, who declare publicly he has no mandate to stay in Number 10, might be tempted to join.
As a journalist who covered a few Eastern European pro-democracy movements, it often struck me that we have in Britain become very complacent about our democracy, whether it be from our fraud-prone election system to our apparent acceptance that a political leader who has just suffered humiliating electoral defeat can remain in power. In the former communist countries, the people wouldn’t still be sitting down if their leaders tried to ride roughshod over the wishes they expressed at the ballot box. Perhaps we have a lesson to learn from those we were recently trying to teach.
