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

[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.