Saturday 15 May 2010

The case against coalition condemnation

As the post-election dust begins to settle, the unrest among some Lib Dem supporters over the coalition agreement is becoming increasingly apparent. It formed the main focus of discussion on Thursday's Question Time, and I have found myself involved in several discussions over the relative merits of the various feasible outcomes of the poll. One such debate has been focussed on the contempt held by the person I was talking to for the principle of Con-Lib co-operation, and the legitimacy of holding this view whilst simultaneously advocating the benefits of proportional representation, which would inevitably lead to coalition governments forever after. (The argument for a proportional electoral system is a separate one, which must be dealt with on its own terms another time.) It seems to me as if this view is outrageously and selectively undemocratic, particularly in light of the fact that the Tories gained by far the highest share of the vote: to exclude them from any sort of power agreement would have been a misrepresentation of the people's verdict. My attention was drawn to an article on the LSE website which  presents the case for Lib Dem supporters having the right to feel betrayed by the new coalition (read the full text here). The point made in the article is that because an opinion poll has indicated that Labour and Lib Dem voters are more likely to switch between each other, the two parties can be viewed as being better ideologically matched than either is with the Tories, and therefore the decision of the Lib Dems to 'get into bed' with the Tories can legitimately be condemned because it does not reflect the ideology of the nation at large. The article's argument seems tenuous in a number of respects.


Firstly, on a fundamental level, it seems dangerous to make too many sweeping assumptions on the basis of opinion polls which at best come with a severe health warning and at worst are entirely misrepresentative. Particularly, I might add, when they are on a purely-speculative subject with no grounding: the opinion poll quoted in the article is based on the hypothetical situation that voters would have the option to specify more than one preference, and it is unclear whether this preference would be one of abstract ideology, or if the questions were intrinsically based on how subjects would have chosen to vote last Thursday. As the general trend of the coalescing of mid-term opinion polls towards a much closer pre-election result demonstrates, responses to hypothetical questions (e.g., 'If there were a General Election tomorrow, how would you vote?') do not necessarily equate to equivalent answers immediately before the vote takes place.


I find it hard to understand why Lib Dems can be angry about something which has given  their policy far more influence in government than they could ever have hoped to have in any other situation, and particularly given that, when asked during the course of the election campaign how they would react in the event of a hung parliament, every single Lib Dem spokesman said that they would seek first to talk to the party with the largest mandate to govern through a combination of largest numbers of votes and seats. We all knew that it was likely that the Tories would achieve such a mandate, so voters should have known before the election that such a deal was a realistic possibility (and therefore not voted for them if they objected in theory to a Tory-Lib Dem coalition so ferociously). Furthermore, according to Lib Dem MPs commenting on the deal (e.g., Simon Hughes on QT on Thursday), the Tories were not only the party with the biggest mandate, but they were also much more willing and prepared than the Labour Party to make compromises in order to ensure security. Is it simply that some Lib Dems don't like being associated with the Tories by name? In terms of policy, this was a far better outcome for the Lib Dems than a coalition with Labour ever would have been, and the fact that the Labour Party was by all accounts unwilling to reach a reasonable compromise by definition undermines the argument that they are ideologically closer to the Lib Dems than the Tories.


It's also important not to underestimate the increased responsibility the Lib Dems found themselves with in the event of the hung parliament. As advocates of PR, the Lib Dems would expect under a reformed system to gain more seats in the Commons, which would naturally give them more responsibility in decision-making of this nature. Of course, the best application of this responsibility depends on the given situation at the time, and at the moment everyone seems to be in broad agreement that the immediate priority was to form a stable government, thus reducing the likelihood of a quick second election and increasing the power of the new government to begin tackling the pressing and serious issue of the budget deficit immediately. The electorate should be admiring of the fact that the Lib Dems sought to do this constructively, without blindly professing hatred of the Tories on the basis of connotation before first considering the offers being made to them and setting aside their differences in a bid to steer the country through a difficult time. 


Notwithstanding any of that, the fact is that a Con-Lib coalition was the only way forward. The alternatives were either an unstable minority Tory administration which wouldn't have lasted any meaningful length of time, or a slapdash left-of-centre coalition involving all the minority parties (assuming that they would have agreed in the first instance), which still would only have just scraped a Commons majority and would have been likely to collapse in even less time. 


As advocates of a more 'democratic' system (I use inverted commas deliberately), surely the Lib Dems wouldn't suggest that it would be just or fair for the Tories, as the party with by far the largest share of the vote, to have been left out of government all together...