David Clark and his co-signatories in a letter to the Guardian last week have once again reignited the debate about a Lib-Lab pact. I believe they are profoundly misguided in at least three different respects.
First, the timing of this initiative is spectacularly misjudged. After a year in which the Lib Dems’ fortunes have sunk to an all-time low and we have established a clear, if soft, poll lead, it is perverse that we should be preparing the ground now for a future coalition with a toxic political party in order to revive their fortunes.
What we should be about is campaigning for a majority Labour government. How do you think hoisting the white flag now will go down in places like Redcar on Teesside, where Anna Turley is fighting a brilliant local campaign to win back the seat from the Liberals?
There simply is no electoral logic in such an approach at the midway point in this parliament. Can you imagine Sir Alex Ferguson’s half-time team talk in a similar situation? ‘Right lads, you’ve done a great job in the first half getting us a goal up, now go out there and play for a draw!’ We need to keep on attacking our opponents rather than throwing them a political lifeline.
Second, you might have thought that a cursory glance at the Lib Dems’ record in government would be enough to show that the Liberals do not share our progressive values. It is certainly clear enough to those of us who fight the Lib Dems street-by-street, up and down the land.
Here in Lambeth, their short-lived coalition with the Tories in the 2000s saw council tax rise by almost 40 per cent, social housing conditions deteriorate and severe cuts across the board in local, public services. Our response was not to enter into an electoral pact with the Lib Dems, but to attack them relentlessly, resulting in Lambeth being the only Labour gain anywhere in the country in the 2006 local elections and the Tory-Lib Dem coalition turfed out after a single term. It is a lesson we must learn from nationally.
Finally, there appears to be a basic misunderstanding of the likely parliamentary arithmetic and political power-play that will follow the next election. Of the various possible outcomes, the most interesting scenario, if not the most likely, sees Labour as the largest single party but without an overall majority, something which could be delivered with formal Lib Dem support. This reversal of the current situation is, I presume, what the signatories are focusing their attention on at the moment. But what should our position be in such a scenario?
No serious commentator is presently suggesting that the Liberals will have much more than half their current number of MPs, which means we will be tantalisingly close to an overall majority in any case, while the Lib Dems (and the Tories, for that matter) will have lost seats and be weak. The instincts of most party members would be to form a minority government and call an early second election with momentum on our side to establish a clear mandate. This was a strategy which David Cameron was extremely foolish not to follow in 2010 – just ask most Tory MPs!
By going quickly back to the electorate on the question of ‘who governs?’ we should be able to produce a more decisive outcome, as our predecessors have done before us. And on that basis we can legislate a progressive agenda that all of us in Labour want delivered without needing to compromise with a declining, marginal party.
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Pete Bowyer is a councillor in the London borough of Lambeth. He tweets @CllrPeteBowyer
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Pete
I think this analysis is right, although we should not rule out being able to work on an issue-by-issue basis with the other parties that are not part of the current Coalition if there was a hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party.
Given the likely loss of Lib Dem MPs their numbers will matter less in the Parliamentary arithmatic and it is unlikely any other party will have the numbers to make a formal coalition work. But the one thing that unites all the other parties (Green, SNP, Plaid, Respect and Northern Ireland parties) currently in Parliament is an opposition to the Con-Lib Dem anti-growth policies. Some members will be uncomfortable about some or all of these parties, but at least all of them have more clearly defined principles than the Lib Dems and so working with them on an issue-by-issue basis would probably be far more effective in delivering our policies than a Lab-Lib Coalition would.
I agree Richard. I’m not ideologically pure even about working with the Liberals (or at least some of them) or anyone else who shares our values. As progressives, I believe we need to be pragmatists too. My point is that whilst I would not rule anything out at this stage, I certainly do not think we should be ruling things in prematurely.
Cleggs Liberal Democrats are so discredited since they came to power they have become unsuitable partners of Labour and unelectable. Their only hope is to agree a pact with the failing Tories so they can stand as Liberal-Conservatives and hope they are not scuppered by UKIP.
It all of course depends on how much of a minority we are! In addition we’ve had these periods before (70s) where the electorate are not keen on labour or the tories (and probably rightly so as there is little really policy difference between the 3 parties despite what you say), so the arithmetic is inclined toward hung parliaments. In some ways I don’t mind hung parliament’s as it gives Parliament and the back benchers more power, and the Executive, party leaderships/machine politicians less. I certainly would not want to go back to the mindless, destructive and destablising internal ‘labour movement coalition’ days of Blair and Brown – that in-fighting puts this coalition to shame.
Sure, we need to see what the result actually is before acting. That is precisely my point. Talk of Lib-Labbery now is far too premature. But as far as I can see, the lib Dems are unlikely to end up with more than 30 seats, and if in that situation we are able to form a stable coalition govt with them, it must also necessarily mean that we would have gained a significant number of seats/votes & the Tories (as well as the Libs) will have lost seats & votes. We would also be very close to being able to form a govt in our own right. My view, and I’m sure the majority of members, would be to call an early 2nd election in such circumstances to exploit our momentum and the disarray of the other parties for whom another election will be the last thing on earth they would want. I would hope that may return us to what I consider our halcyon days of a large majority under Blair!