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May 9, 2010
Neither David Cameron, Gordon Brown, nor Nick Clegg had a good election. The key question post the UK election and its hung parliament is whether the Lib Dems will hold firm on insisting on electoral reform (proportional representation) as a condition for supporting either of the two major parties? Will they play hard ball? And who with?
The grossly disproportionate mismatch between votes and seats needs to be addressed given this kind of breakdown:
Tories 36% of vote, 49% of the seats.
Labour 29%of vote, 42 % of the seats.
Lib Dem; 23% of vote, 9% of the seats
It is increasingly clear that a deal with the Conservatives to ensure a minority Tory Government will not deliver proportional representation---the Conservative's offer so very little on this. They would also use a coalition deal to ensure a Conservative victory in the next election in six months or so.
Martin Rowson
While there is no Conservative majority, there is only the most tenuous of anti-Conservative majorities - a prospective 'rainbow coalition' of Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, the SNP, the Alliance Party, the SDLP and the Greens. The money/bond market will not react kindly to a 'rainbow coalition'. The momentum is that the Lib Dems were edging ever closer to the Tories--- that's what the headlines have been saying.
Update
Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian observes that:
The Tories have the edge on the two criteria that mattered, promising both stability and legitimacy. Any Con-Lib coalition would not only have solid numbers in the Commons but could claim a moral right to govern, led by a Tory party which had passed Clegg's "most seats and votes" test..... Lib Dems believed Labour could not match the Tories on either count. .... Labour might feel like natural bedfellows to most Lib Dem supporters, but any progressive coalition they might cobble together would be perilously frail – reliant on assorted Irish and Welsh nationalists and a sole Green MP to march in lockstep with every last member of the Labour and Lib Dem parliamentary parties. What's more, feared Clegg, any coalition with Brown at its head would lack legitimacy, led by a prime minister rejected by the voters
With Brown gone Clegg will now have to decide which is the best offer, which partner is most likely to deliver it and prove most acceptable to the electorate.
So far Clegg failed to win enough concessions on electoral reform from the Conservatives to satisfy his 57 MPs, who called for formal talks with Labour to begin after informal soundings over the weekend. However, some Liberal Democrats still see a deal with the Tories as a more realistic prospect, not least because of the parliamentary arithmetic. These are the Orange Lib Dems --named after the David Laws, Vince Cable and Chris Huhne's Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism (2004), which advocated market solutions to a range of issues which Labour regards as the prerogative of the state.
A formal Lib-Con coalition, with Liberal Democrats sitting in a Cameron Cabinet, is now seen as the most likely method of co-operating if there is such a deal, rather than a commitment by Clegg's party to support a Tory minority government in key Commons votes.
In The Independent Sean O'Grady says that getting into bed with the Conservatives would mean:
A violent Liberal Democrat split – inevitable with a Lib-Con deal – suits the Tories fine. After that, they might be able to recruit the "Orange Book", market-oriented Liberal Democrats they've been wooing for years. The result would be to reduce the party to a rump. The last time the Liberal party joined the Tories in a coalition, in the 1930s, the party split three ways. It could easily happen again...For them [the Conservatives] the Liberal Democrats are not partners in power, but enemies to be destroyed – by stealth if necessary, as outright electoral assault has not worked. The last thing they will give the Liberal Democrats is a permanent lock on power.
So the Conservatives cannot be trusted on introducing substantive electoral reform--proportional representation for the House of Commons. Their best offer is committing the Conservative party to a referendum on a new, alternative vote (AV), system of electing MPs.
So the Lib Dems started talking to Labour, formally after Brown says he will go. Is Labour serious?
Update 2
The logjam has been cleared. The new government is a coalition of Cameron's modernizing Conservatives and the radical centre Liberal Democrats after the Lib Dem talks with a divided Labour foundered.
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The Tories claimed that a hung parliament would immediately result in an equity market collapse, a run on sterling, the end of the UK’s AAA credit rating and an eventual desperate resort to the IMF.
It didn't happen. The rhetoric was done to help usher in a Conservative majority through fear.