I‘ve never voted for any party in an election other than the Liberal Democrats. Even when tactical voting might have been a more expedient proposition given that I have never voted in an election where the Liberal candidate could win, I still ended up voting Liberal Democrat. One the one hand, I’ve always found the Tories too socially illiberal and too unconcerned with equality, while I’ve always found the Labour contempt for civil liberties something I simply couldn’t bring myself to vote for. In this election, my hope was for a hung Parliament that could bring a Lib-Lab coalition to power. As a consequence, I’ve been more than a little pre-occupied by the election result of late.
My initial reaction to the election result was not an especially optimistic one. In a nutshell, I felt that while Clegg could enter into coalition with him but the idea of working with the Tories would be toxic to a lot of his supporters (and indeed to a lot of Tory supporters). The Labour party would portray it as a sell-out. I assumed that any coalition would be significantly hampered by the impossibility of agreeing on issues like proporitional representation. Conversely, the Labour party might have a more natural fit with the Liberals, but the combined blocs would still lack a sufficient majority to form a stable government (although as they would still have more than the Tories, it might not be impossible to attempt to cobble something together). However, if no-one won the election, Labour had certainly lost and a coalition with them could be accused of being ‘a coalition of the defeated.’ The Liberals would apparently only consider this if Gordon Brown were to resign – and while retaining Brown as Prime Minister would indeed not be sensible, they could be accused of being undemocratic in essentially anointing a new Prime Minister who didn’t stand for election and participate in the leader’s debates. As a result, I felt Clegg’s best plan might simply be to make some arrangements concerning the conditions under which he would not oppose a minority Tory administration.
As it stands, I had underestimated the extent to which Labour would be either unable or unwilling to offer the concessions needed to form a coalition (and indeed their willingness to negotiate at all) as well as the amount of compromise on offer from the Conservatives. Policies to introduce a referendum on AV, introduce fixed term parliaments, scrap IP cards, regulate CCTV, extend the Freedom of Information Act, give much greater powers to select committees, protect the right to protest, introduce the right of recall, extend regional devolution, curtail the current abuse of the DNA database, reform the libel laws, elect the House of Lords under proportional representation are all extremely welcome. Similarly, the fact that the Human Rights act or the Working Time Directive will not be revoked and that inheritance tax will not be cut have gone some way to addressing my concerns. In other areas, like their continuation of faith schools or the moratorium on transfer of EU powers, I am decidedly less enthused. The moratorim on EU power transfer seems like an obvious hostage to fortune at a time when the EU is likely to have to change the way the Euro is structured. Of course, a lot of my concerns almost certainly will prove valid; tactical voters who in the past have voted so succesfully in the past for the Liberals in order to prevent Tory wins will almost certainly not do so now. Much of the Liberal Democrat membership does tend towards the social democratic wing of the party rather than the liberal side, and many of them will find little cheer in this coalition. To put it mildly, this is not something I expect the Liberals to be able to extract electoral gain from.
Much of the objections to the coalition are predicated on the assumption that the Liberals were one aspect of the progressive strain in British politics, with the Labour party being the other. Liberals leader have long wished to see the two re-united but this does create the danger of marking the Liberals out as a subset of the Labour party when the two parties have diverged markedly from one another on key issues like civil liberties. Johann Hari makes a more reasoned form of this argument, noting that a YouGov poll just before the election found that Lib Dem voters identified as "left-wing" over "right-wing" by a ratio of 4:1. Only 9 per cent sided with the right (although if asked to rank myself on that rather meaningless scale I’d have opted for left-wing as well; the Liberals simply don’t fit neatly onto a spectrum defined by the Conservatives at one end and the Labour party at the other). The problem with this argument is that the British electoral system has no mechanism of counting preferences in this manner; if we already had an AV system instead of FPTP then that mechanism would clearly exist and the outcome of the election would probably have made a Lib-Lab coalition possible. Given that the Labour party had 13 years to introduce AV (and two disregarded manifesto commitments on referenda), it seems rather churlish for Labour supporters to blame the Liberals for attempting to make the best of a broken result produced by FPTP and for playing what was pretty much the one and only card it had dealt them.
In fairness to Hari, he has always supported proportional representation (which might address the preference issue in some of its manifestations), but much of his and Labour’s conversion to proportional representation seemed predicated on the idea of it leading to a series of perpetual Lib-Lab coalitions that excluded the Conservative party, presumably in the same way that Japan’s Liberal party has only ever found itself in opposition twice in the last half century. That was never a very realistic notion and was arguably the best possible argument against proportional representation. As an aside, one thing that has struck me in the last few days and weeks is that even as politics has become more post-ideological and managerial it doesn’t seem to have become any less tribal. Labour supporters who initially fervently hoped for a Lib-Lab coalition now denounce a Con-Lib coalition as an act of betrayal at best, an undemocratic coup at worst.
For me, I ultimately believe that if you do happen to believe in proportional representation, then that does imply an acceptance of coalitions as an outcome and a belief in the merits of coalitions as a means of creating a more consensual form of government. Given that, it would be rather hypocritical of me to oppose this coalition in principle. That inevitably has to entail a belief that it may be necessary to form an unpalatable alliance (particularly given that Nick Clegg had specifically not ruled out a coalition with either party after the election) if the preferred partner is not a feasible option. It certainly seems to have been very difficult for people like Vince Cable or Paddy Ashdown to accept that a Lib-Lab coalition was not viable. Certainly when I think about the election result, which was in essence a rejection of the Labour party matched by suspicion of the extent to which the Conservative party had reconstructed itself, a Liberal Democrat coalition does seem to create a government better tailored to the majority view (even if I happen to disagree with a great many of the remaining Conservative proposals).
Putting aside the question of whether the coalition was the right thing for Clegg to have done, as well as the question of whether the coalition will last, the real question is what sort of politics it will actually create. From the Tory side, the coalition is being referred to as a Clause Four moment (or even being compared to the way Peel took on Tory vested interests by repealing the corn laws or the way Disraeli outflanked Gladstone by first opposing political reform, then embracing it and going much further than either he or his opponent had planned) for David Cameron i.e. an opportunity to displace the social conservatives of his own party. There’s certainly a good argument that Cameron will gain extensively by being seen to lead a liberal government, while the Liberals are more likely to be tarnished by association in the eyes of the electorate – I’m rather left reminded of how Angela Merkel was at the height of her popularity and effectiveness as leader of a CDU/SDP grand coalition (i.e. their Conservative and Labour party equivalents), which all went wrong after she was elected with a mandate to form a coalition with her preferred Free Democrat partners.
The danger on the Liberal side is the inverse; that the coalition will end up accentuating their economic liberal heritage at the expense of their social democratic one. In other words, that the Liberal Democrats will end up as the Neo-Liberal Democrats, to use the parlance that seems to be becoming popular in the Labour party. One possible illustration of this lies with The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism. Published in 2004, it featured contributions from three then unknowns, who now occupy the posts of Deputy Prime Minister, Business Secretary and Chief Secretary to the Treasury. With David Laws as its guiding light, it argued the case for economic liberalism to be reclaimed from the conservatives. As such, Laws argued for the replacement of the National Health Service by a national health insurance scheme as in many European countries. It’s not difficult to see why many conservatives might find themselves nodding in agreement, but while considerably better than what would originally have been on offer from the conservatives, it’s still a dismal prospect. Social equality and mobility both declined under Labour and there is very little in the coalition’s proposals that will do anything to address this, with the more redistributive aspects of the Liberal manifesto neatly removed (Cable’s mansion tax or the upper rate tax increases spring to mind). Equally, a political context that had seen the free market cannibalise and destroy itself inevitably calls for a more regulated (and dare I say, it, planned) form of capitalism. A centre-right coalition will now govern a country that in many respects is in a left-of centre mood, hostile towards the bankers it blames for the financial crisis and resentful of the austerity that must ensue. One of the reason’s why I had felt particularly inspired by the Liberal campaign in this election was that Clegg and Cable had appeared to recognise that the third way in politics had failed and that the market would need regulating and managing to a much greater extent. Even if measures like the bank levy and breaking up the banks go ahead, that side of their policies has now substantially diluted. The manageralism and post-ideological aspects of the politics from the peak of Labour rule had receded as the market had destroyed itself and the political spectrum had seemed to be beginning to open up again. Now, it may be about to close down again. The main hope I have is that if we see AV being introduced, then it may yet be possible to open it back up again.