Hurrah! and trebles all round for Clegg's "no coalition" plan!
I was very encouraged to read the headline on today’s Guardian: “Lib Dem rules out coalition government“:
The Liberal Democrats are planning to rule out forming a coalition government with either the Conservatives or Labour if Nick Clegg holds the balance of power in a hung parliament after the general election.
As Whitehall’s most senior civil servants and Buckingham Palace make detailed preparations to clarify the Queen’s role in the event of a hung parliament, senior Lib Dems are making clear that Clegg has no interest in taking cabinet posts and would focus instead on winning support for four key Lib Dem demands.
Clegg would be prepared to throw a lifeline to the Conservatives or Labour by allowing either party to pass a Queen’s speech if the aspiring government makes concessions in the four areas, described as the Lib Dem “shopping list”:
• Investing extra funds in education through a pupil premium for disadvantaged children.
• Tax reform, taking 4 million out of tax and raising taxes on the rich by requiring capital gains and income to be taxed at the same rate.
• Rebalancing of the economy to put less emphasis on centralised banking and more on a new greener economy.
• Political reforms, including changes to the voting system and a democratically elected Lords, that go further than proposed by Labour.
Now, the BBC report on the subject is less definite, headlined “LibDem leader Nick Clegg ‘undecided about coalitions’“, suggesting, perhaps, some rowing back during the day – goodness knows. I prefer to go with the Guardian story for a number of reasons:
- Nothing makes my stomach turn more than people accusing the LibDems of preparing to make sordid deals in smoke-filled rooms behind close doors (insert your own cliches here) to get their bums on cabinet seats and in ministerial limousines. I don’t deliver Focus leaflets for that sort of merde. We have our policies clearly laid out and we should stick with those and take the situation vote-by-vote.
- The strategy suggested by the Guardian neatly extracts the Liberal Democrats, for the first time in several generations, from being mired during the election campaign with questions about coalitions which we do not and cannot answer clearly. The plan outlined in the Guardian is perfectly clear and honourable (and indeed not unakin to the LibLab pact of the 70s with the crucial exception that it would work from the beginning of a parliament with a party with some sort of mandate, as opposed to at the end of a parliament, keeping alive what is perceived to be a “lame duck” government).
I was amused by this bit of the Guardian article:
This could allow for what some No 10 officials are dubbing the “Miliband option”, in which the Queen asks the foreign secretary to form a government if he is more acceptable as Labour leader to the Lib Dems. This is, however, seen as highly unlikely.
This sort of “Miliband option” has precedent. Queen Victoria used to fish around quite a lot, calling, at times, a succession of political notables to the Palace to see if they would form a government. She certainly “thought outside the box”.
One Response to “Hurrah! and trebles all round for Clegg's "no coalition" plan!”
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The problem with this line is the same as all other “what would you do?” answers – it throws away our bargaining power should we be in that situation. What we would do depends on what the others would do. Perhaps Clegg should just answer the question with “I’ll answer it when you ask Cameron and Brown the same question as many times as you ask me”.
As ever, answering the question becomes much more difficult because of the childish way politics is discussed in this country. We have all these silly “throwing a lifeline”, “jumping into bed” and so on comments which dramatise it but trivialise it.
The reality is that quite subtle differences in the electoral outcome will change what is the best option, and whatever we do really would depend to a large extent on the other parties.
Michael Meadowcroft gives a counter-argument in a letter in today’s Guardian, but though I take his point I tend to feel being a junior coalition partner is not a happy position, and it is not one we should accept lightly. I’ve seen what it means in local government – you get all the blame if things go wrong and none of the credit if they go right. It does not seem to have helped small continental liberal parties – being a regular junior coalition partner means they tend to lose identity and become just a vehicle for a few top people in the party to have comfy jobs. Perhaps the biggest issue, however, is that if we accept being a junior coalition partner we are likely to be accepting the reduced weight in that coalition caused by our electoral system. Having a quarter of the number of MPs to the senior partner is not going to give us the influence that having two-thirds of the number of MPs of theirs would, and if the national vote is such that a proportional system should give that balance we may have to say that we can’t accept a deal where we feel we don’t have the weight we should have.
So, the “don’t vote down a minority government of the largest party” is a reasonable option, we should talk about it as a possibility, even a strong possibility, but not absolutely commit to it.
I think we should also be pushing strongly the “them v. us” line, where we emphasise the closeness of the Conservative and Labour parties, and suggest this means the natural outcome, should there not be a Liberal Democrat majority in the House, is a Conservative-Labour coalition. It seems to me to be right, because Tony Blair pushed the Labour Party so far into being just a moderate version of the Conservative Party. The mess this country is in now comes about because of that – the Blair-Brown governments continued with the policy for our country that was laid down by Thatcher and carried on by Major, one which involved an over-emphasis on the finance industry, a belief that real wealth was being created by people selling houses to each other, and a belief in some mystical “private sector know-how” which meant that services were best run by private companies (even if they were bought up by state-owned companies but not the UK state), and if that was not possible should incorporate private sector practices, such as boss-knows-best and rule-employees-by-fear. Now if our line could be that the electorate could either keep Britain the same by voting Labour/Conservative, or change it by voting Liberal Democrat, I think that could go down well.