Tim Montgomerie on the possible Lib-Con coalition, so clearly no fantasies about a Cameron landslide there.
Lib Dems are mostly local communitarians and populists, and giving each of them the little thing that he or she wants on his or her patch would not necessarily be the worst way to shore up a majority, to say the least.
Individual Lib Dems also do sterling work on pet causes, and again a government could do a lot of good by striking the relevant deals in order to keep itself going; look forward to the opening up of the family courts, to a Coroner's Inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly, and so forth.
No one can deny the Lib Dems' prophetic voice against the lunatic foreign policy of the Blair years, a significant and most welcome break with their own record in the Nineties.
And dare we even hope for Vince Cable, if not as Chancellor, then certainly in a very senior position dealing with economic policy?
But the Lib Dems as a party are Eurofanatical, anti-family, pro-crime and pro-drugs. So yes, they are the perfect coalition partners for David Cameron.
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Yes, Uncle Monty's been war-gaming this unlovely scenario for years now. Unfortunately that's not to say it won't happen, particularly given the impressive coup by the old Liberal elements in the Liberal Democrat party against the Social Democrat crazies (with the mutilated corpses of Kennedy, Campbell, and a whole host of other gruesome cases positively flying across the nation's TV screens). There's now not a lot to distinguish the people in charge of the Lib Dems from the party David Cameron likes to refer to as "the Liberal Conservatives".
ReplyDeleteFour years down the line, of course, the Social Democrats may have scampered back to a resurgently hard-left Labour Party, and the Right will be out of power for yet another generation.
Ming was a Liberal, not an SDP man. That was why he wanted to support the Iraq War, like Ashdown, also an old Liberal. But Kennedy had more sense than to let him.
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