coalition

Hit tip to Jonathan Calder for his heads up about Mark Oaten's article in The Times publicizing his new book, Coalition, which suggests that we must not be afraid to contemplate a coalition with whoever gets the most seats in a hung parliament, even if that means doing a deal with the Tories. He expands on the Times article over at Lib Dem Voice .

I'm afraid I don't share Mark's own suggestion that because the Tories have joined us in the lobbies against many of Tony Blair's civil liberties erosions it necessarily gives us common ground to work on. What with some of Cameron and Davis's pronouncements since the Rhys Jones murder and the Learco deportation debacle in particular, but over a much longer period in the background, over things like repealing the Human Rights Act, I don't believe personally that their commitment to civil liberties is anything other than opportunistic parliamentary oppositionalism. I don't believe the Tory core vote is any less authoritarian on civil liberties than this Labour government' and recent murmerings suggest that a shift to the right, whether that be called a lurch, which it isn't, yet, or a gentle drift to try to please their core vote, would be popular within the party come election time.

However, we are also Democrats. And we support proportional representation. And whilst we will not have the latter formally any time soon still it seems, we can stick to our democratic principles and try to gauge what signs might come out of any General Election as to the intention of the British electorate. I don't believe we can simplistically say that we would try to deal with whoever had the greatest number of seats. I think we can be more sophisticated than that and I think we could lay down certain guidelines that the public can understand when they vote for us:

We will not, out of "centre left loyalty" automatically gravitate toward shoring up a minority Labour administration whose vote is on the wane. If the people cannot give Labour the mandate they have had for the past decade we should recognize that they are drifting away from the public's affection, even if not by enough to give any other party the lead, and to perpetuate such a government automatically would be wrong.

That we should look at votes cast as more important than seats won. If either of the two behemoths could form a government with our support it ought to be the one for whom more of the population have voted, rather than the one who has benefitted the most from our broken electoral system. We have too long now suffered from government by a minority of the popular vote.

That we should use the "West Lothian Question" and not shore up a Labour government that's going to have to rely on votes from MPs from devolved administrative areas on matters that don't affect them. That doesn't mean discounting completely Scottish and Welsh MPs and the popular vote in those areas, but "weighting" our decision to try to negate any decisive influence they might have on votes on English only parliamentary decisions.

Policy is as important as the size of each party's parliamentary cohort. We should look to a period of no overall majority government to achieve more devolution from Westminster and a greater restriction on the power of the Westminster-Whitehall leviathan. So that next time there is an overall majority, especially if still with our broken electoral system, they can affect less of our lives than they do now.

And finally, that we do not automatically assume that we have to form a coalition government with either party. In this era of "ideology-free" politics, at least as far as the two bigger parties are concerned, we should not relegate ourselves to playing piggy in the middle. We have long said that both Labour and the Tories are increasingly occupying a grey area of vying for administrative and managerial competence rather than true political ideology-driven vision. I do not see why, therefore, a coalition combination shouldn't ought to be Tory-Labour, rather than Lib-Tory or Lib-Lab.

If we want to be the third force in British politics we should certainly aspire to be one of the players, not merely the ball, possession of which gives one or other of the bigger parties the advantage. Even if this is an unlikely proposition because of the inbuilt yah-boo politics between the bigger parties, seen as they are, albeit wrongly, as somehow polar opposites, we ought to make the case that if Labour and Tories have more in common with each other than either Labour and us or the Tories and us, it ought to be that combination of grey suits that should step up to the plate and take responsibility, with us offering a real opposition. We should go into the election promoting both Cameron and Brown as increasingly similar heirs to Blair and Thatcher and us as the genuinely liberal alternative.