A question about British politics

[womzilla]

Now that the Alternative Vote referendum has been held (and failed to reform voting), why are the Liberal Democrats still in coalition with the Conservatives? Couldn't they force a confidence vote, which would fail, and dictate terms to the Labour Party for a new coalition? The Libs can't possibly relish being part of the government which destroys the UK for a generation, can they?

(I assume that enough of the small parties would join Labour and the Lib Dems to form a majority--but maybe I'm completely misreading things and the Conservatives would have an easier time scraping together 20 votes from the small parties than the center-left would have scraping together 11.)

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The Liberal Democrats sold their souls to join the coalition just for the promise of having a referendum. The Conservatives didn't promise to support it, and they certainly didn't promise to enact AV if the referendum didn't win, so the Lib Dems have no moral cause to withdraw from the coalition.

There isn't enough unity in the opposition to form a government without the Conservatives - this was the reason the Lib Dems' freedom of action was limited after the election, because it wasn't effectively possible for them to run off and mate with Labour - so if the Lib Dems did violate their pledge and withdraw from the coalition, it'd probably mean a new election, if not immediately then as soon as the Conservatgives saw a chance to pick up seats. And the Lib Dem reputation is at a nadir right now, and wouldn't improve if they forced an election.

They have well and truly screwed themselves, and this has been known for some time, which is why many of my Lib Dem friends have resigned from the party.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

With 20/20 hindsight the most principled thing for them to do -- and the best -- would have been to refuse coalition with either major party on its own, and insist on either a minority government which they'd support or oppose on a bill-by-bill basis, or a government of national unity.

Either of those options would have left the Lib-Dems either clean, or at least smeared with no more shit than their coalition partners.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Minority governments don't govern particularly well or usually for very long unless the other parties involved have some sort of alignment with the largest minority. The natural alignment would seem to be Labour and Lib Dems but after the last election it was made clear by the Labour "management" that any coalition would involve the Lib Dems sitting down and shutting up and voting as their betters told them to. In part this was the remnants of doctrinaire Blairism, in part because after thirteen years of running the country and seeing the financial trainwreck up ahead the Labour leadership just didn't have the stomach to step up to the crease and fix what they had in part created and used the Lib Dems demands for an actual say in governing to shift the blame.

A vote-by-vote alliance would probably break with the first budget as it really needs to have a unitary structure and having item-by-item votes on each element would destroy it. After that you could expect a vote-of-confidence fuelled election every year or so or until one of the Big Two gets their God-ordained supermajority again. The Big Bad for Labour would be full Scottish Independence; losing 60-plus sure seats would put them into Lib-Dem minority status permanently.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately neither of those would have been feasible, either. A "government of national unity" would have foundered on the question that all previous peacetime attempts have done so on: what would its policy have been? That was the whole point of the election: all the parties had different policies. And a minority government is inherently unstable, and as previous attempts at conditional support have shown (notably the Callaghan-Steel pact of '78) give the junior partner the blame but none of the responsibility. What the Lib Dems were hoping to get out of full coalition was a greater formal influence on policy than conditional support of a minority government would have given them. Hah. This is the Tories they were dealing with.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

what would its policy have been? That was the whole point of the election: all the parties had different policies.

That's fairly obvious: the policy is the common subset of the policies of the participants. Stuff that a majority don't agree with gets ditched until after the next election. The stuff everyone agreed on was that cuts to government spending were necessary: Brown had already begun swinging the axe.

It is possible to run a country without the government instituting major controversial reforms or changes of course every year or two. See also Belgium.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Doesn't work that way, and "See also Belgium," probably presently the country with the most dysfunctional governmental system in western Europe, proves the point.

What you're thinking of is a caretaker government, one which keeps the lights on but doesn't attempt to initiate anything. As it has no policy in that sense, it doesn't much matter much who constitutes it, and countries which have caretaker regimes usually assign them to non-political technocrats, or leave the previous government in office pending working out a new one.

A true national government has a policy, and it has to have one because it's formed to deal with a crisis. The last national government in the UK was Churchill's in 1940, and he dealt with this point specifically: "You ask, what is our policy? I answer, to wage war ..." Everyone agreed on that, and everything else could go hang for the moment.

In 2010 (and today), Britain's crisis is budgetary. And there is no such thing as a common agreement on how to respond to that. One policy or another has to be taken.

This happened before, when a so-called "national government" was formed to deal with the economic and governmental crisis in 1931. They asked for what they called "a doctor's mandate," to do whatever would help. What that was turned out to be "whatever the Conservative Party wanted," and within a year everyone else in the government had either quit in disgust or been permanently absorbed into the Tory machine.

And that's what's happening now. A coalition was formed, but the Tories get their way.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I'm too solidly embedded in US politics, in which it is assumed that no party actually feels bound by any promise. But it seems to me that all the LibDems would have to say is, "We joined coalition with the Tories in the expectation that they would be interested in governing the country. In fact, they are solely interested in gutting it, and we will have no part in this continuing travesty."

This would encourage voters to flee the LibDems, but it would also encourage them to rally to the honest party. I have no idea what the balance would be, but it seems that if the LibDems stay with the Conservatives, they will only lose supports at a rate best described as "horrific".

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What I left out of the description is that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats made a formal agreement to run the coalition for the full five years of an expected parliamentary term, and then backed this up with legislation not to dissolve early. The reason for this was to prevent either party from blackmailing the other by threatening to withdraw and destroy the government. Exactly what legal compulsion enforces the continuation of the coalition I'm not sure, and I can't believe it's binding on individuals, but it does bear some weight. For one thing, the Lib Dems wouldn't be the "honest" party by violating a mutual-support agreement they voluntarily signed. And even without such an agreement, if the Lib Dems did withdraw, the Tories would accuse them of bad faith, and even if not true, that charge would muddy the waters considerably.