Charlie Mackle's Blog

What doesn’t seem to be mentioned in most analysis of this disastrous election aftermath is that the current mess is related to Nick Clegg not being in control of his party. You don’t have to read very carefully between the lines to realise that Clegg and his negotiating team put together a deal and it was rejected by the Lib Dem parliamentary party.

It’s obvious that for all Clegg’s high-blown talk of putting the country’s interests first, his MPs are a bunch of self-serving, deluded opportunists who are such a disgrace to democracy that they fail to appreciate the startling concessions on PR that they have already extracted from both main parties. Their dogmatism makes even Gordon Brown look a model of enlightened flexibility. They should have made it clear before the election that, in the case of a hung parliament, the likes of Paddy Ashdown would go round spreading poison designed to sabotage any deal with the Tories. Had they been honest about being so willing to enter a coalition with Labour even in the face of such dubious parliamentary arithmetic then they would surely never have won seats in places like Burnley — or Redcar where disgust at Labour’s lack of action in preserving local steel manufacturing jobs saw a massive swing to the Lib Dems.

It can now be seen that Clegg positioning himself as the new, honest face of politics was a cynical joke. In retrospect it seems obvious that he can’t deliver the support of his own party for one of the options he refused to rule out and, as the extract from my blog post two days before the election shows, he was absolutely disingenuous by implying he could deliver an agreement either way (or, as he implied, to the party with most seats and a larger share of the vote) .   What Charlie said two days before the election:

Charlie Mackle just had two tweets featured on the listener reaction page to Jeremy Vine’s interview this lunchtime with Nick Clegg: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/jeremy-vine/election-debates-2010/liberal-democrats/ (one is at 1203, the other at 1242).

Both are about Clegg’s failure to spell out what he would do in the event of a hung parliament…I think he’s making a huge rod for his back by effectively deceiving some people into voting for him…One thing that the Liberal Democrats trade on is that they tend to be all things to all people — and even more so this election…campaigning in some seats as the anti-Tory party and in others as the anti-Labour party depending on the incumbents…If Clegg does not explicitly say which party he’d support in a hung parliament then his only plausible course of action would be to support the party with the largest number of seats — that’s the only real democratic outcome…Virtually any scenario is such a complete mess that it makes the case for electoral reform where the parties would have to be far more explicit about working with opposing parties once elected.

I still think it’s potentially as likely as not that Clegg will form a coalition with the Tories as Labour but the point is still valid that he is a weak leader who has failed to take his party with him — there would certainly be dissent from both Lib Dems and far-right Tories to such a coalition. However, the reasonably comfortable majority they would achieve would mean this was tolerable. Clegg is having to balance splitting his party against acting in the national interest. Cynical, tribal politicians like Brown would have no trouble deciding which way they would move but Clegg put himself on a moral pedestal which would make him look a supreme hypocrite if he put party over the needs of a stable government.

If the Tories were acting out of pure self-interest in the long-term they ought not to regret their actions if the Liberal Democrats and Labour put together this desperate coalition. After all, whoever is in government is going to have to impose some monumentally unpopular decisions or risk the country being trashed by the markets Greek style. It would be more justified if Labour carried the consequences for its own ineptitude and the Lid Dems suffered for their contempt of the electorate’s decision. When the ramshackle coalition collapsed then the Tories would likely obliterate both of these unprincipled parties — and rightly so. The problem is that we’d all suffer economically in the fall out.

I don’t particularly welcome the prospect of a Tory minority government or Tory-Lib Dem coalition either BUT any other outcome is so violently contrary to a sense of democracy and natural justice.

And it wouldn’t help the Labour party in the long term as the likes of David Blunkett have argued (Lib Dems ‘acting like every harlot in history’). I really don’t understand what motivates them apart from the naked desire for power for its own sake and the privilege and patronage that filters down to the activist and crony levels. That may explain the deeply depressing, anti-democratic attitude of Labour and Liberal activists whose tweets and comments on phone-ins seem to revel in glee that they think this gives them an opportunity to show the electorate they were wrong. I heard one on Radio Five last night. To the question, ‘didn’t Labour lose the largest number of seats since 1931 and get the lowest share of the vote since 1983) the activist said ‘Yes. But look at the NHS and how much money they’ve spent on that — and made it better as well.’

The point about a progressive coalition that consists of anti-Tory votes is risible and contemptible — fair enough if all those parties had stood at the election on a ‘progressive coalition ticket’ BUT THEY DIDN’T.

I’m encouraged that Caroline Lucas has indicated she wouldn’t sign up to a coalition and would support other parties’ policies on a case-by-case basis. I would have voted Green in my constituency had they fielded a candidate but would be exceptionally disappointed if she ended up being the one MP who perpetuated this financially and morally bankrupt regime.