Minimum Moves

It must be 20 years since I tried to explain to Hilary Armstrong that the personal tax allowance ought to be reorganised around the proposed minimum wage.

In my time, I tried to explain a lot of things to Hilary Armstrong.

You would not pay income tax now if you worked 30 hours per week at minimum wage level. 40 hours, on the other hand.

Ah, how the years are rolling back. Not that that is necessarily a good thing from my point of view.

Still, that is the past. This seat has had an excellent MP for the last five years, and will have an excellent MP for the next 10 or 15 years, taking our very own Bill and Hillary to 48, if not to 53.

(Our very own Bill and Hillary. But which is which, and why? "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," indeed.)

But even the mere rhetoric from David Cameron today is a sign of how both parties are going to move to the left after this Election, although Labour rather more substantially than the Conservatives.

I do not mean the social, cultural, lifestyle Left. I mean the real thing.

A Conservative overall majority would be interpreted as a vindication of the Cameron Project, while a Conservative defeat would be interpreted as a failure to have beaten "Red Ed".

A Labour overall majority would be interpreted as a vindication of Ed Miliband, while a Labour defeat would be interpreted as first-time Conservative overall majorities have always been interpreted in and around the Labour Party.

And a hung Parliament?

It would be constitutionally objectionable for the balance of power in the House of Commons to be held by a party that had not contested at least the overall majority of seats in that House.

Arguably, it would be so for that balance to be held by a party that was opposed to the existence of the United Kingdom.

There is more to constitutionality than some Sixth Form or student union definition of democracy. There is more to democracy than some Sixth Form or student union definition of democracy.

Meanwhile, nothing about the Lib Dems makes them any better than the Conservatives, and many things make them worse.

They were the only party to have gone into the 2010 Election promising a real-terms reduction in NHS spending.

Unlike either Labour or the Conservatives, they had a manifesto commitment to the privatisation of the Royal Mail, which has been done by Vince Cable.

TTIP represents the realisation of something to which they have aspired ever since their party was founded.

They have enabled everything, and implemented much, that the Coalition has inflicted on the poorest and the most vulnerable. Within that context, who cares about tuition fees?

No one who had followed the Lib Dems' record in local government has been remotely surprised at anything about the Coalition.

Labour-Conservative coalitions and other arrangements have existed routinely in local government for 80 years, as have arrangements between Labour and the local Independent vehicles for at least broadly Tory opinion and sentiment.

Such a coalition, by no means for the first time, currently runs Germany, the most populous country in Europe, with by far the largest economy.

Gordon Brown, the distilled essence of the Labour Party in Scotland and in general, appointed then-sitting Conservative MPs as Government Advisers. One of them was the Marquess of Lothian and had previously sat for two constituencies in Scotland.

There were no fewer than three Republicans in Barack Obama's first Cabinet, including George Bush's Secretary of Defense, who had simply been kept on. Another Republican has since served in the same capacity under Obama.

Jim Webb, the only man who can stop the Clinton atrocity, is seeking to do so in no small measure by appealing to more-or-less paleoconservative tendencies across the aisle.

In fact, such an appeal, to the strong critique of neoconservative foreign policy and thus increasingly of neoliberal economics, might usefully be made by the Miliband Government over the heads of the Conservative front bench, in order to offset the irreconcilable Blairite rump within the Parliamentary Labour Party.

All in all, preciousness about these things is amateurish, adolescent, and the bad sort of undergraduate. But those things themselves would be far from ideal. There is only one way to preclude any need of them. Vote Labour.