The Lib Dems: from willing collaborators to neoliberal lemmings

My view on the Liberal Democrats is evolving with each party conference.

In 2010, I accused them of being spineless collaborators with the Tories.

In 2011, I amended that to saying they were willing collaborators with the Tories.

Now, I just think they've got a death wish and are incapable of independent thought.

How else do you explain the party's willingness to stick with the completely discredited Nick Clegg, thus virtually ensuring that their vote collapses to less than half of its 2010 level at the next election in 2015? On a uniform swing this would all but annihilate the Lib Dem parliamentary party. Of course the swing is unlikely to be uniform and some of the party's MPs may be able to survive on a strong local vote - particularly if they are seen as mavericks who opposed the general thrust of collaboration with the Tories. However, 2015 is likely to be a yellow bloodbath under Clegg however the local voting breaks down.

Many commentators had expected open revolt at this week's Lib Dem conference - and given the general quality of political commentary, that was almost a guarantee that such a revolt wouldn't happen. In the end the only people seriously agitating for a coup were: (a) people who've been critical of Clegg since 2010 - e.g. Lord Oakeshott and Lembit Opik, who can safely be locked in the box labelled "serial troublemakers"; and (b) the very worthy but in-the-wrong-party Liberal Left group (have a look at Labour Left and the Green Party guys, and then Make Your Choice.) A floor motion aiming to commit the Lib Dem leadership to a "Plan B" and an end to austerity failed abysmally when put to the vote. I'd argue that the weakness of the Lib Dem left is what statisticians call a "sample selection" effect - a large proportion of the left of the Lib Dem party walked out after  the decision to collaborate with the Tories, and what you're left with is the right-wingers. It's the same thing that's happened to the Lib Dems' share of the national vote.

In the end, Lib Dems must be hoping for a miracle - that somehow the economy will start growing quickly between now and 2015 and they will reap the rewards. I think this is highly unlikely - we may well escape "triple dip" recession, but growth will be sluggish at best. And the signs from the Eurozone crisis are that it is likely to get worse - perhaps much worse - before it gets better. Meanwhile, almost no-one left of centre in the British electorate (which is over half of the Lib Dems' former voters) will trust Nick Clegg with their vote again - ever. In short this is collective lemmingmania from the Lib Dem grassroots and MPs alike, for which they will surely pay a heavy price in 2015. And the main gainer will be Ed Miliband, who can't believe his luck; he's secured around a 10 point increase in vote share from 2010 to 2015 without having to do anything at all.

Clegg's contempt for everything his party used to campaign on was shocking in his speech yesterday. Opposition to tuition fees, for example, was dismissed as "protest politics". Now there are arguments for and against tuition fees, but just to dismiss the whole issue like that - coming from someone who relied on the policy to get elected! - is contemptible bollocks. And the old lies on taxation were wheeled out again - "we have taken x million people out of paying tax" whereas in fact the switch from income tax to VAT results in the poorest paying more, not less. It's straight-down-the-line lies like this, coming from someone who espoused the "new politics" in 2010, that have made many voters feel that, if this is "the new politics", give us back the old politics, please. At least Labour and the Tories never pretended to be anything other than cynical grab-yer-wallet bastards.

I've written about this shower for long enough now so this may well be the last post for them (in more ways than one) until the election campaign. Let 'em rot.

Nick Clegg - Labour secret agent?

(Note: this post is running a couple of weeks late because I was so busy that I only got it half-finished, but when I realised it was a month since we'd posted anything on the blog at all, I realised it had to go out, even as was. So "this week's announcement" actually means "the announcement a few weeks ago..." etc.

This week's announcement by Nick Clegg that the Lib Dems will vote against the boundary changes introduced by the Tories is further support for my view that Clegg has, in a strange way, done the country a huge service by uniting the left, and making Labour the natural party of government.

To explain this claim it's necessary to dig back into British electoral history. In the 1980s the great question in British politics was: how can the left vote be united in such a way as to stop permanent Tory government? The Labour/SDP split of 1981 led to a situation where the Tories were able to secure huge majorities with a little over 40% of the vote because the anti-Tory vote was badly split between Labour (on about 30%) and the SDP-Liberal Alliance (on about 25%).

At the time the Guardian was full of articles lamenting the problem of the split left (I know because I started reading the Guardian every day in 1987 and I used to read this stuff every day.) The Labour hope at the time was that the SDP/Liberal Alliance's electoral challenge would gradually fizzle out and we'd see a return to the 'normal' two-party politics of the post-war period. The Liberals and SDP tried their best to destroy themselves in 1988 with the formation of the Liberal Democrats, but the Lib Dems recovered to a vote share of 23% in the 1992 election - still large enough to ensure another split in the anti-Tory vote, and a 4th term for the Tories. 

Tony Blair took the different tack of moving Labour so far to the right that he hoovered up a good proportion of natural Tory voters, even though the Lib Dems still managed 18% in the 1997 election. But the split left remained a problem in the UK - masked by the Blairite centre-right thrusts in 1997 and 2001, but very obvious in 2005 where the collapse in the Labour vote to 35%, coupled with the Lib Dems increasing their share of the vote to 22% by Charles Kennedy's positioning of them to the left of Labour on many issues, meant that it was only a ludicrously unfair electoral system that gave Labour a working overall majority despite finishing only 2% ahead of the Tories. 

With the re-emergence of the Tories as an electoral force (of sorts) under Michael Howard and then David Cameron it seemed inevitable that the split in the UK's "progressive" electoral forces would help the Tories regain power - and this did indeed happen in 2010 (helped by the crapness of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and as election campaigner), but something weird was happening to the Liberal Democrats. Under Clegg's leadership since the end of 2007, they had begun to morph  - almost unnoticeably at first - into a second right-wing party. Although with a very different stance from the Tories on Europe, constitutional reform and some social issues (most notably support for marriage in the tax system), on most other issues - particularly economic policy and public service "reform" - there was very little to choose between the Lib Dems and the Tories by 2010. This made the Lib Dems potentially a more natural coalition partner with the Tories than with Labour for the first time in decades. The electoral arithmetic - which would have made a Labour-Lib Dem coalition very difficult - and the personal animosity between Clegg and Brown also helped drive the Lib Dems into the Tory camp.

In retrospect, May-June 2010 was the high point for centre-right wingers looking for "regressive realignment" of UK politics along the lines of permanent Tory/Lib Dem majority government. Some Tory cabinet ministers like Mickey Gove were seriously thinking about backing a Yes vote in the AV referendum, which had potential to deliver a right-wing parliamentary majority parliamentary presence even if Labour recovered to between 35 and 40% in the polls in subsequent elections - as well as marginalising the threat of UKIP to the Tories from the right. But this idea of permanent coalition fell apart within a few months. The AV referendum led to huge animosities surfacing between the Tories and Lib Dems; and, even more seriously for Clegg, the Lib Dems' popular support - collapsed from over 20% to less than 10 - while Clegg found himself as the most unpopular party leader since records began.

The reason for this was that millions of people who voted Lib Dem in good faith in 2010 - wanting a "new politics" and a more attractive centre-left alternative to the increasing authoritarianism of Labour - found that they had in fact voting in an enabling mechanism for a particularly nasty and reactionary strain of Tory government.

My feeling is that those people are going to be very hard to get back, and it's not clear where the new Lib Dem voters are coming from to replace them. Why would centre-right Tories abandon David Cameron to vote for Nick Clegg next time round? We can probably assume that the 8% or so of people still in the Lib Dem camp are the "orange bookers" who are pro-Europe and keen on civil liberties but basically Tories on the economy and public services. There doesn't seem to be any huge constituency of non-Tory centre-right wingers out there - if there were, the Lib Dems would have probably won the last election (at least on vote share).

So, with Clegg having permanently alienated the centre left, as long as Clegg  remains Lib Dem leader all Ed Miliband has to do to win the 2015 election is turn up, really. This is good news on the face of it, but also carries the huge danger that Labour could win next time without any coherently defined policies and be a disaster. More on this in another post (hopefully in less than 2 months time) shortly.

Reading back on this, I'm not sure it's saying anything I haven't done already, but I was just desperate to get something into the blog domain during August. And so here it is. 

One year on: what could the Lib Dems have done instead?

On the first anniversary of the formation of the "ConDem" coalition government I want to take the opportunity to address an argument which is used by Lib Dems on the left of the party as to why they shouldn't be criticised for going into coalition with the Tories. This is an extremely long post, for which I apologise... just to warn you.

I went to a meeting earlier in the week with Dr Evan Harris - Lib Dem MP for Oxford West and Abingdon until his very narrow defeat in May 2010 (for reasons brilliantly described by my friend Chris Brooke here.) Evan is probably about as left of centre as Lib Dem MPs get, and a very decent guy. His argument was that there was no alternative to going into coalition with the Tories in May 2010.

I don't believe that and I don't think it was in the best interests of the left of the Lib Dems to go into the coalition, but I want to explore in detail the options that were available to Nick Clegg in the wake of the 2010 result. This is usually skirted over in political discussion but I think it's really important to be clear - as, if it really is true that there was no alternative to this ConDem govt, it would be unfair to blame the Lib Dems for something they couldn't avoid doing. And I've been dishing out a lot of blame over the last 12 months, so I feel I owe it to any Lib Dems reading this blog to offer an explanation for why I feel they have let themselves and the country down.

There were three basic options available to Nick Clegg after the 2010 election results came through:

1. a coalition with Labour and minor parties (Greens, Plaid Cymru etc) - this has been called the 'rainbow' or 'traffic light' option.
2. Allowing the Tories to form a minority government.
3. coalition with the Tories.

Option 3 was followed. I want to look at the viability, and likely results, of option 1 and 2.

Option 1: rainbow coalition

At the time, I rapidly dismissed this as an option because the electoral arithmetic seemed not to work. The way I thought about it was that Labour had 258 MPs, plus 57 Lib Dems, making 315 - short of a majority. Adding in Caroline Lucas, plus 3 Plaid Cymru, plus 4 sympathetic Northern Ireland MPs (3 SDLP and 1 Alliance) made 323 - still short of a majority (just). On this basis, I dismissed the option as unworkable. However, it has since transpired that the 8 DUP MPs had indicated to Andrew Adonis, who was in charge of putting out 'feelers' for a Labour-led coalition, that they would abstain in the event that such a coalition was formed. This would mean that 323 would be a workable majority. It's possible that the 6 SNP MPs would have abstained as well. In the event, Adonis told Andrew Rawnsley in the updated edition of Rawnsley's book The End of the Party that a rainbow coalition could have "an effective majority of around 30" - bigger than John Major's actual majority in 1992.

That being the case, I no longer reject this option on the grounds of parliamentary arithmetic. Instead, I reject it on the grounds of Labour not wanting to do it. On the Monday after the election, when it was announced that the Lib Dems had opened formal negotiations with Labour as well as the Tories, several Labour 'big beasts' (e.g. John Reid, David Blunkett) got themselves onto the news to put the kybosh on the deal. With open mutiny of this sort going on, it's pretty clear that the Lib Dems couldn't commit themselves to any kind of deal with Labour (and in any case it looks in retrospect as if Clegg was using the Labour negotiations as a bargaining chip to get more concessions out of the Tories). So I think we have to concede that the rainbow coalition wasn't a viable option.

Option 2: Tory minority govt

Once the results started coming through, I was sure this was what would actually happen - because I severely underestimated the willingness of the Lib Dems to cut a deal with the Tories. I thought the sticking point would be electoral reform - which the Tories would not countenance in any circumstances. What I hadn't anticipated was that the Lib Dems would agree to a referendum on the Alternative Vote - not their preferred option, and not even proportional representation - so readily.

But was minority Tory government a viable option? Sure; indeed, if the coalition talks had broken down, it would have been the only option. There has to be a UK government, and if coalition talks fail, the convention is that the party leader with the most PMs gets invited by the monarch to form a government.

Minority governments in previous periods in UK history are normally allowed by the opposition parties (or at least those opposition parties that hold the balance of power) under 'confidence and supply' agreements, whereby the opposition agrees not to attempt to bring the government down on a motion of no confidence, and to allow budgets (i.e. the Finance Bill) to pass. However, this is a rather fuzzy area, and the exact shape of arrangements vary. For example, in the "Lib-Lab pact" of 1977-8, the Labour government negotiated a modified programme with David Steel and the Liberal MPs; the Liberals did not formally enter the government but this was a more wide-ranging arrangement than "confidence and supply". On the other hand, Budget measures were not passed through without amendment - basic rate income tax was cut from 35 percent to 33 percent in the 1978 Budget due to an amendment which the Lib Dems and Tories both supported. So in reality, there are a wide range of deals between a minority government and other parties which can be done, stopping short of full coalition while maintaining some influence on govt policy.

I'd argue that this was a viable option - and it's the one the Lib Dems should have taken. Agreeing to support the Tories - perhaps for a defined limited period, of (say) 2 years, rather than the whole 5 year term - on confidence motions, while retaining the right to vote down (with Labour and the other parties) legislation that they thought was not fit for purpose. A "Lib/Con Pact" in other words.

Such a deal would have allowed stable government whilst mitigating the worst excesses of the Tory government far better than what has in fact happened in formal coalition.

Option 3: the assessment

In terms of what has actually happened, for the most part, the Lib Dems have not really managed to make enough changes to Tory manifesto policies to make the last year much different from what a Tory government would look like. To see this, just look at the record:

• the announced spending cuts are pretty much in line with what the Tories said they were going to do in their manifesto.
• stealth privatisation of health and education has proceeded apace under Lansley and Gove respectively.
• Huge cuts to benefits for working age people and reductions in funding for welfare-to-work programmes.
• Royal Mail is being privatised.
• Delibaretely starving the BBC of cash to weaken it compared with Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB.
• The Lib Dems completely abandoned their pledge to eliminate tuition fees.
• VAT has gone up 2.5%, at the same time that corporation tax has been cut.

The only specifically Lib Dem policies one could point to, which wouldn't have happened under the Tories, are:

• The AV referendum (although this wasn't in the Lib Dem manifesto either - ironically it was in the Labour manifesto);
• (possibly) scrapping ID cards (although the Tories may well have done it anyway to save money);
• not implementing a few of the more bonkers Tory ideas (e.g. transferable tax allowances for married couples);
• the above-inflation increase in the personal allowance - although bear in mind that this was considered by the Tories just before the 2005 election and abandoned because it's an extremely badly targeted way of reducing the tax burden for poor people (because most of the gain goes to better off people). In the leader debates before the 2010 election Cameron said that the policy wasn't affordable. This implies that the policy has been funded at the expense of greater spending cuts elsewhere - i.e. the Lib Dems may have shifted coalition policy to the right of what the Tories would have done on their own(!)

This looks like an extremely feeble return for being in formal coalition. The Lib Dems' structural role within the government is also relatively weak. They have only 5 secretaries of state and all the 'big four' are Tory (PM, Chancellor, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary). The three main public sector reform departments - Health, Education and Work and Pensions are all held by Tories. Clegg's Deputy Prime Minister role is under-resourced and fuzzy in definition, as Andrew Rawnsley's Dispatches documentary this week pointed out. Progressive Lib Dems like Evan Harris point to the activities of the Lib Dems in the government as tempering the Tories' worst excesses, but have they really done this? Vince Cable - supposedly the grand old stager of the Lib Dem left - spends most of his time implementing an employment relations policy which seems to have been cooked up by the Institute of Directors. Danny Alexander sounds like a robot put together in the lab by George Osborne's special advisers. I'm not sure what Chris Huhne has actually done in policy terms. Michael Moore has a good, radical name but I don't believe I've ever seen him do anything, ever. And as for Clegg... he was talking sense on interns but that was about it.

All in all, I find it very hard to believe that a minority Tory government - with the Lib Dems combining with the opposition parties to vote down the most unpleasant Tory proposals - could have been more right-wing than the coalition has been. And the cost to the Lib Dems in terms of electoral prospects has been enormous. According to YouGov they are down to about one-third of their 2010 support levels, while even on ICM, where they poll higher, they've still lost almost half their support. Why? Because they're seen - slightly unfairly, but not completely unfairly - as spineless collaborators. This has been exacerbated by the fact that - until very recently - Lib Dems were deliberately tailoring their rhetoric to ape the Tories. So, for example, any Lib Dem politician making a speech on the economy sounded like the speech had been written by George Osborne. Given this assimilation of the Tory point of view, could anyone be blamed for thinking that the Lib Dems had lost the ability to think for themselves?

To summarise, next time a Lib Dem politician, activist or supporter tries to tell you that there was no alternative to the ConDem arrangement, give them the double whammy. (1) a Tory minority govt, with the worst excesses of the Tories voted down by the opposition parties, was probably a better option in terms of delivering less of the Tory agenda and more of what's sensible for the UK. (2) the coalition option has so far been disastrous for the Lib Dems, and could conceivably end up destroying them as a national party. Don't let them tell you that There Was No Alternative, as there was - and it would have been better for them, and for the country.

Finally, note that this post only really covers the first year of the coalition between May 2010 and May 2011. The second phase - which according to Nick Clegg, will find him carving out a clear and distinctive political position rather than operating as a Tory bag-carrier - is still too recent for reliable comment. But rest assured that I will be following up on that over the summer once the lay of the land is a little clearer.

Thanks Nick Clegg - you've united the left for the first time in 30 years

More left bloggers have been drinking the Kool Aid overnight over Labour's performance in the local elections - for example, Adam Lent at the RSA, and Polly Toynbee at the Guardian. It's weird how these memes take hold. Most of what we've been told for the last year from the left commentariat consists of repeated insistence that Dave Cameron is on probation within his own party after failing to secure an overall majority against Brown in 2010, how the government was in a weak position, and so on. Now - after the referendum and local elections - the same people are going around saying that Cameron is some sort of genius, the Tories will be in power forevermore, and the situation is hopeless.

Well I'm sorry people, but I'm just not buying it. Have a look at the voting patterns and a very different story emerges.

The Fib Dem vote collapse was quite amazing... a fall of about 10% from last year's elections, not quite as bad as the 13% fall which recent YouGov polling would suggest, but bad enough. (I'm using figures from Jeremy Vine's election commentary on the BBC yesterday, not the weird figures that came out of Tory central office and have been picked up by most of the press and run as neutral commentary(!?)) Meanwhile the Labour vote went up by about the same - 10%. The Tory share of the vote was more or less unchanged from last year.

So the gainers - in terms of vote share - are Labour. Not the Tories.

I'd argue that what's really happening here is that the Lib Dems have completely changed their electoral strategy and Labour is reaping the rewards. Ever since the formation of the SDP in 1981 (and possibly as far back as the Liberal upsurge of the early 1970s), the Left vote in the UK has been split, with a significant proportion going to a third party - the Alliance (and more recently, the Lib Dems). For sure, the third party took some votes from the Right as well. But not as many, which gives a very good explanation for why the Tories won majority governments in 1983, 1987 and 1992, despite declining vote shares each time - the Left vote was split, and that's fatal under First Past the Post. (I'll admit that if there had been a hung parliament in 1983 a Tory/Alliance coalition was probably more likely than a Labour/Alliance coalition due to Labour '83 being perceived as off-planet Marxists, but in later elections, this wasn't the case). In the 1980s and early 1990s political commentators spent much of their time lamenting the split in the British left.

It wasn't until Tony Blair came along in the mid-1990s that Tony Blair hit on an alternative strategy for victory, despite the split on the left; he made incursions into the Right's vote share by shifting policy so far to the right that by 2005, the Lib Dems were in many ways more left-wing than the Tories. This reaped electoral dividends in 1997 and 2001 (though less so in 2005), but at the expense of creating a political environment where it would be much easier for a future extreme right govt to come along and destroy much of our social fabric (which is what's happening right now). Thus, it wasn't a long-term sustainable strategy.

But following the election of Nick Clegg and the ConDem government deal of 2010, the "Fib Dems" have helpfully reunified the British Left - or started to, at any rate - by exiting stage Right. The Lib Dems, based on their official policy position, are now a right wing libertarian party, to the right of the Tories in some respects. Clegg has made it clear he's not interested in attracting left wing voters from Labour. Thus, he's thrown away a crucial part of the Lib Dem voter base and handed it on a plate to Labour.

And THAT, more than anything, explains yesterday's local election results. And it's good news for Labour. Because for the first time since 1966, there is the potential for a left-wing government in the UK with a substantial majority which doesn't have to pretend to be a Conservative government to get elected.

There is only the POTENTIAL for such a government, mind you, and no guarantees that Labour will actually get elected. That depends on a number of factors, e.g.:

• the economy getting stuck in a 'lost decade' as Osborne's growth projections fall apart completely (highly likely);
• Labour's policy review actually providing policy solutions relevant to people's lives in the post-crash world (I really don't know enough about who's involved in the policy review or what options are being considered to know if this is a realistic hope or not);
• the Labour Party getting behind Ed Miliband as a strong choice for Prime Minister (again, seems a no-brainer to me, but unfortunately a lot of people in the Labour party seem to have less than no brain);
• the Lib Dems not drastically reversing position - and this is a real worry because it's completely out of Labour's hands. In one way it would be fantastic to see someone like Tim Farron (or even Chris Huhne) wallop Clegg for the party leadership, dissolve the coalition, and go to the country as "the man who beat the Tories"; but that of course puts the Lib Dems squarely back on the Left and could leave the way open for a repeat of the election results of the 1980s, due to our daft electoral system.
• no alternative Left force emerging to drain votes from Labour. The Green Party could start to emerge in some areas as a serious drain on Labour's FPTP vote share in the same way that UKIP has for the Tories. More serious in the short run for Labour is the huge shift to the SNP in Scotland - it's not clear whether this would be repeated at a general election but if it is, it would make a majority Labour government very difficult.

So, big challenges here for Labour to be sure - but commentators who are arguing that we are looking at a rerun of the 1980s, or even the 1930s, need to cease and desist. The current situation isn't really that much like either of those eras - although it could become so. But only if Labour is especially unlucky, or makes big mistakes. For now, the 2011 local election results represent a real comeback for Labour, and, combined with Nick Clegg's big favour in reunifying the Left, should be a cause for modest celebration rather than despondency.

Why Nick Clegg WANTS to lose the AV referendum

With polls now pointing to either a fairly big or a very big win for No in Thursday's AV referendum, it's a huge pity that Nick Clegg didn't heed the Yes campaign's advice to seal himself inside a box for six weeks during the run-up to polling.

I'm not saying that everything would have been free and easy for the Yes people if Clegg had kept shtum. As explained in a recent post, their campaign has been largely crap. But continual speeches and media appearances on the Yes to AV theme from the UK's least popular frontline politician are, to borrow a vivid expression from US-based conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, a "turd in the punchbowl"... no-one is going to want to drink a fresh cup of AV after Clegg has just taken a dump in it.

Ed Miliband, to his credit, realised this, and has only appeared on stage with members of the Lib Dems who he believes have some public credibility left: e.g. Charles Kennedy, Shirley Williams, and more questionably, Vince Cable. But the Yes campaign have been powerless to stop Clegg from getting out there and pulling the vote down.

Which raises an interesting political question. Clegg must know that everytime he appears in public to endorse AV, the Yes vote takes another dive. And he's not obviously stupid. A liar and a closet Tory, yes, but not stupid. So why the hell is he out there for the Yes campaign?

It could just be vanity (not in short supply among several senior Lib Dems, to be sure). On the other hand, it could be that Clegg actually wants Yes to lose. On the face of it this would seem somewhat bizarre, but if you think about it some more, it starts to make sense:

• Clegg described AV as a "miserable little compromise" last year when it was in the Labour 2010 manifesto. He showed no particular enthusiasm for the system at any point before the coalition negotiations. We can conclude, therefore, that he probably thinks it's a fairly poor system.
• Although much of the research that has been done on AV suggests that it would increase the proportion of Lib Dem MPs (John Curtice at Strathclyde University, Nic Marks at the new economics foundation, the simulations run for the Jenkins Commission in the late 1990s) this is not a universally held view. Peter Kellner of YouGov, for instance, argues that the simulation research is flawed because it doesn't tell you how voters would modify their behaviour if the system changed - and if they did modify their behaviour, the Lib Dems could actually end up worse off. (the link to the Kellner piece is here - kind of: Prospect magazine haven't even managed to provide unique URLs for their election blog posts...) It could well be that Clegg and his advisers also believe that AV won't actually help the Lib Dems, so Clegg is actually deliberately damaging the campaign.
• It's possible that if the Lib Dems lose AV then Dave Cameron may offer them additional concessions on other policies as a consolation prize - maybe an elected House of Lords, further changes on the NHS bill, etc. So the Lib Dems may get more of an influence on the direction of the govt by losing the AV vote. Conversely, if there is a Yes vote it would result in the Tory right being mightily pissed off and Cameron might well have to legislate for other things that the Lib Dems don't want - tax breaks for marriage, for example - to keep his right wing sweet.

So in short, the arguments for a Yes vote from the Lib Dems' (or at least Clegg's) point of view are far weaker than they seem. Another factor is that defeat on electoral reform is another way of Clegg distancing himself from the old liberal reformist tendencies of the Liberal Democrat rank and file. Clegg has already spent somewhat less time than his predecessors as Lib Dem leader extolling the virtues of electoral reform; it's taken a back seat to extreme right wing 'Orange Book' policies such as public sector privatisation (in the guise of "reform") and "fairer taxes" (meaning that we'll raise the income tax personal allowance while also increasing VAT so that poorer households pay more tax). This could be yet another part of Clegg saying to people he regards as middle class soft-left handwringers: This Is Not The Party For You. Bugger off to Labour or the Greens. We want the right wing libertarians.

The ConDem govt so far has been about as Orange Book in outlook as Clegg could have hoped for: although it has failed to do anything about any of the excesses of the Nu Labor police state (for example, see pre-emptive arrests of "protesters" before the Royal Wedding took place). But then, civil liberties tend to be one of those issues which the opposition gets excited about but then drops as soon as they get into govt. Like electoral reform. On economic policy, this is an Orange Book right-wing Lib-Con administration with hints of Sarkozy-esque populism thrown in (e.g. North sea oil tax grab), thanks to the opportunism of the Osborne/Alexander team. That's where Nick Clegg wants to be, with a transfer to a safe Tory seat at the end of his 5 years if the Fib Dems stay at rock-bottom in the polls. And it's why he's deliberately undermining the Yes vote - because why Rock The Boat when it's moving in the direction you want already?

The last rites for AV?

Worth considering the seismic shift in intentions revealed by the recent ICM poll showing a 16% lead for the 'No' campaign in the referendum for a change in the voting system. Never mind the merits of the various polling orgnisations. Lest we forget according to even the most generous poll, Major was obliterated in 1992 by Kinnock, by at least 50 seats, except we all know that did not happen. And mercifully Britain didn't go into the Euro under Kinnock/Smith. Then I think the anti-cuts lobby would really have something to go crazy about. Look at Greece and Ireland.

Perhaps one of the main reasons why I think the opponents of change (almost always derided as reactionary) have the upper hand is that proponents of PR are never really able to define what PR actually is Just a brief summary from the web's most readily consultable reference source reveals about 15 different systems.

I am assuming Giroscoper would like STV rather than AV, although he may perhaps prefer LD or MMS. Just going through the bewildering array of acronyms perhaps makes one nostalgic for a taste of LSD to induce hallucination.

STV, regardless of what proponents say is significantly more complex to understand than FPTP. It seems designed for two purposes: 1/ to eliminate representation for the BNP, whose second place votes are likely to be negligible (I know almost no UKIP or ED supporters who would vote BNP - most would rather abstain than tar themselves with such a brush) 2/ to maximise support for the equally dangerous Green party, whose second preferences (as revealed by the London assembly) elections are usually very high. Perhaps a function of how effective their propaganda is, this fundamentally misanthropic, basically almost stalinist organisation has persuaded a number of otherwise intelligent people of its relative harmlessness. However, scratch beneath the green veneer and you find a vein of the deepest red, true heirs to the spirit of Beria .

Ironically, as revealed by the european elections, the much derided UKIP would probably be the main beneficiary.Despite being dismissed by the BBC (who cost every household more than £100)as a 'minor party', they actually outpolled the Greens by more than 3 to 1 at the last general election nationwide. Anyhow, it looks like a combination of misinformation, the presence of Nick Clegg in the pro AV lobby, and a lack of clarity about just what people are saying 'Yes' to has scuppered PR for now. Rest assured, though, its proponents won't give up after this setback.

I can't think of a deep and meaningful post so let's slag off Nick Clegg

Just posted this on Comment Is Free and I think it bears repeating:

Like millions of others, I was taken in by Nick Clegg in the first TV debate. It's easy to see why in retrospect: Cameron was just awful, and Brown was trying hard but not to much effect. Clegg seemed to be offering something different - a politician who wouldn't lie to you and wouldn't let you down.

And so, five days after polling day, what does he do? He sells out his party and his voters and inaugurates the Fib Dems. By doing so, he ends up REINFORCING the British electorate's belief that our politicians are a generation of swine who will sell them down the river, first chance they get.

EVERYTHING Nick Clegg has said since May 12th, 2010 is a lie - both the broken manifesto promises and the few policies they have managed to persuade the Tories to implement. For example: "we are taking poor people out of tax." RUBBISH! VAT has gone up. They are giving with one hand and taking away with the other. And the AV referendum? Not in either the Tory OR the Lib Dem manifesto, a "miserable compromise" - as you said yourself, Mr Clegg.

Add to that the destruction of state schooling, the NHS and the social security system, and it's probably the worst British govt since the 1930s. I think the Lib Dems will be reduced to about 10 seats at the next election - and people will be very, very wary before giving them another shot at power. A total, complete disaster. And Clegg - a dirty liar.

Lib Dems striding effortlessly towards majority government?

Well, YouGov have results from a poll conducted just after the debate and it's pretty extraordinary stuff: Tory 33%, Lib Dems 30%, Labour 28%. Yep, if this is right, the Lib Dems are now in second place. A much bigger shift than I'd have thought, and they will probably drop back a bit, but I guess this just underlines that everyone's support is, as someone once said of Lyndon Johnson "a mile wide and an inch deep".

Just for fun, I fed the swings into the Guardian swingometer again. The Lib Dem gain - which would be up 9% on the 2005 result - was almost off the scale. Effectively an 8 or 9 percent swing from Labour to the Libs with the Tories stuck at their 2005 level of support. For the record, this produced:

Labour - 278 seats
Tories - 244
Lib Dems - 96

Once again this brings home the insanity of the electoral system - Labour with least votes but most seats?! Mental.

But the key thing is that - in contrast to the 1983 election where virtually all the votes the Lib Dems (or Lib-SDP Alliance as was) were gained from Labour, Clegg is drawing support pretty much equally from both parties. Intriguingly, a result with the Lib Dems getting 30% could mean that they could form a majority coalition with EITHER Labour or the Tories. Which way would Clegg jump? My guess is that Gordon would cave into a demand for full proportional representation with STV and we'd have a Lib Dem-Labour coalition. Only because Cameron looks least likely to compromise on voting reform - but I may be underestimating his guile.

This one really is up in the air now - I don't think the swingometers are at all reliable with swings of this magnitude, and there could be any result at all. Shit, if the Lib Dems keep trending up they could be looking at 40% support and a majority of about 300 or so. Well it would be an interesting result...

I agree with Red Two's comment on the last post that the acclaim for Clegg's performance seems to have ballooned out of proportion to how good he actually was. Maybe it's just that against the cheesiness of Cameron and the stiltedness of Brown, anyone - even the walking abomination that is Tony Blair - would have performed well. I'd love to have seen what would have happened to voting figures for UKIP or the Greens if they'd have been let into the debate.

Hey, Nick Clegg nicked my idea!

Nick Clegg, short on ideas of his own, had to borrow one from giroscope:

In an interview with the Observer, the Liberal Democrat leader says he fears "serious social strife" would break out on the streets if a government with limited support at the election on 6 May then raised taxes, laid off public-sector workers and froze wages.

Right on, bro. It's a very good point. In fact to be fair to Clegg, it's one of the best interviews I've seen with him since he took over as leader. Strip away the Thatcherite crap about "militant trade unions" and you've got a reasonably progressive policy stance.

But I still worry that - like Tony Blair, his obvious role model (or is it Dave Cameron?) he's better at finding the right soundbite than assembling coherent policy.

Still, the social unrest point is well made. It makes me laugh that Dave and the other defenders of FPTP say that a hung parliament could create social unrest. In fact, an unrepresentative Labour majority could be much worse for that. (The same would be true of an unrepresentative Tory majority, but that's more or less impossible given the current bias in the electoral system - if you take "representative" as winning 40% or more of the vote, the Tories will pretty much HAVE to do that to get a working majority - whereas Labour could get a majority on less than 35%.)

The lesson? A big tactical vote for the Lib Dems will be A Very Good Thing at this election.

Personally I'm voting for the Greens because the new Witham constituency is such a stitch-up that Robert Mugabe could probably get elected as long as he was wearing a blue rosette. (and it might yet come to that). But I would be voting Labour or Lib Dem if I were in a constituency where either of them had a cat in hell's chance of winning the seat.

Good initial signs from "The Clegg"... sort of

Well, Nick Clegg won the Lib Dems leadership election - by a much narrower margin than the pundits expected - but as very few of the pundits are (I imagine) Liberal Democrat party members, what the hell would they know?

Clegg has the obvious drawback of looking like of a Dave Cameron clone, but having met him in person (something I can't say for Dave) he seems a reasonably nice guy. Early omens were good this morning when, on the ludicrously named "Radio 5 Live"(what, so no other radio station has live shows, then?) Clegg said he didn't believe in God. Finally a sane man at the top... pass the copy of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion many of you probably received for Christmas last year (oh, the irony).

(Clegg then balanced his ticket somewhat by pointing out his wife was Catholic and his kids were being brought up Catholic. See, this is how the virus perpetuates itself... the Church insists on indoctrinating the kids before they are too old to know better. I'm sure we'd still get some religious nutters even if faith schools were abolished - but probably a lot less of them.)

Clegg has also brought in Brian Eno, of all people, as an adviser on "how to reach out beyond Westminster to people who don't get a say in politics." This could lead to some very interesting possibilities, e.g.:

• keynote speeches at the next Lib Dem conference being filtered through Eno's synthesiser array to give the general effect of whalesong, or insects walking on formica.
• policy being chosen on the basis of the 'Oblique Strategies' card deck.
  

All in all, then, some positive potential for 'Cleggie' and maybe there is also the opportunity for a remake of Last of the Summer Wine (maybe with Ming Campbell as 'Foggy')... but an ominous note was struck when Clegg's first policy idea on education - raising state school expenditure per pupil to the level of private schools - is a direct rip from Gordon Brown. We'll have to watch this space to see how it develops.