No Coalition For The Lib Dems

They have effectively ruled out both Labour and the Tories today. As if either would ever have asked them, anyway. Half of the Labour Party hates the Lib Dems far more than it hates the Tories, with whom it has very little contact. Half of the Conservative Party hates the Lib Dems far more than it hates Labour, with which it has very little contact. In a hung Parliament, most MPs would come from those heartland seats in both parties, either of which would split organically and permanently if there were any deal with the real enemy.

Coalition between Labour and the Tories, usually for the specific purpose of keeping out the Lib Dems, is quite routine in local government. Germany was run on much that basis until fairly recently, for essentially the same reason. Clegg expected to be asked whom he would support in a hung Parliament. But in reality, no one was ever going to ask him, anyway. In which case, what is he for? What is his party for?

Merger between the Labour and Tory remnants is both inevitable and overdue. It will create the space for proper parties instead. The Lib Dems will not be one of them.

Instead, there will be one or more serious forces for civil liberties, local communitarian populism, indefatigable pursuit of single issues, the Nonconformist social conscience, the legacy of Keynes and Beveridge as corrected by a popular and Christian-based movement, traditional moral and social values, conservation rather than environmentalism, national sovereignty, a realistic foreign policy, the Commonwealth, the peace activism historically exemplified by Sir Herbert Samuel, redress of economic and political grievances in the countryside, and the needs and concerns of areas remote from the centres of power both in the United Kingdom and in each of its constituent parts.

And there will be one or more serious forces of those who were never hysterically hostile to the unions that exhibited the greatest need for a broad-based and sane opposition to Thatcherism, who never made themselves dependent on a single donor (as the Tories have now done) who was later made a Minister by Blair without the rate for the job, who never betrayed Gaitskellism over Europe, who never betrayed Christian Socialism and a section of High Toryism (and, lest we forget, Gaitskellism) over nuclear weapons, who never adopted the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins, who never adopted the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams, and who never shared her regret over past Labour action to control immigration.

The election of even one such voice this year would light the fire.