Brian Barder's blog

The LibDems are noisily declaring that if Labour wins fewer votes nationally than the Tories (and perhaps also than the LibDems) but emerges as the biggest single party in the House of Commons, Labour — or Gordon Brown (the LibDems are confused about which it is) — will have no right to continue in government.  This is absurd, and misunderstands the constitution which determines how the system works until and unless Parliament changes it.  As a contributor to LabourList has commented:

“This is not a popular vote contest. Many votes are tactical, and would deployed differently if the metric was ‘national share’. Suddenly invoking national pluralities in a party constituency vote is like changing 100 metre race into a 100 yard dash a few feet away from the finishing line.”

That is absolutely right.  If our elections are suddenly going to be decided by the national vote totals while we still have First Past the Post in a single-member constituency system, we are in a desperate muddle.  It would put paid to tactical voting — but how many Labour supporters who plan to vote LibDem where the LibDem is the main challenger to the Tory are going to wake up to this in time and vote Labour after all, probably letting the Tory win the seat as a result?  Anyway decisions in parliament are going to continue to be made in accordance with seats held by the parties, not how many votes the parties won at the election.  If Labour wins more seats than any other party, are Labour MPs going to be prevented from voting on legislation and the great issues of the day just because Labour got fewer votes than the Tories?  It’s a nonsense.  Clegg wants us to behave as if we already have PR — because his party benefits from moving the goal-posts at the last moment in his direction.

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One of the most revealing differences between Conservative and Labour policies for dealing with the national debtand the budget deficit is that the Tories‘ plan for rebalancing the national finances relies almost entirely on swingeing cuts in government spending on public services, which — even if you pretend, implausibly, that these can be made simply by “cutting waste” — means massive job losses and higher unemployment, a reduction in the services on which the poorest and most vulnerable most heavily depend, and the risk of killing the recovery from recession in its tracks.  There is no indication that the Tories will temper these blows by raising taxes on the rich, a partial alternative to spending cuts: indeed, they actually promise cuts in some taxes on the rich and on businesses, which will inevitably mean even more savage cuts in public services.  Labour promises a mixture of higher taxes on those well able to afford them and cuts in government spending targeted at lower priority public services, applied so as to protect the services on which the most vulnerable depend.  Where do the LibDems stand on this key issue?  They talk about ‘savage cuts’ in public spending (but don’t specify where they will fall), accompanied not by raising taxes but actually reducing them, promising a huge tax bribe — no income tax liability below a cut-off of £10,000 a year — which will put money in (almost) everybody’s pockets, except those who don’t pay income tax now,i.e. the poorest.  This will have to be paid for by yet more cuts in public services:  a strange position for an allegedly centre-left party to adopt.  No wonder Mr Clegg seems to be moving stealthily and steadily towards a deal with the Tories that would put Cameron into No. 10, even though on present form there may well be fewer Conservative MPs in the next parliament than Labour ones.

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Professor Robert Hazell, head of the University College London Constitution Unit and adviser to the Cabinet Secretary on his new rule-book for hung parliaments, has pointed out in a letter to the Guardian that, contrary to the assumption in a recent Guardian editorial, if there’s a hung parliament there won’t be any question of the Queen having to decide, once the results are in, whom to invite to form a new government:  the existing government, headed by Gordon Brown, remains in office until there’s a cast-iron, documented cross-party consensus that someone else has a better claim to enjoy the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons, or until Gordon Brown’s government is defeated in a vote of confidence in the House of Commons.  (This usefully confirmed the point I had made the day before in my own letter in the Guardian.) Although the Cabinet Secretary, in writing the new rule-book, is supposed to be doing no more than writing down hitherto unwritten conventions and principles of the existing constitution, some of his product is surely new, including the proposition that an incumbent prime minister has not just the right but also the duty to stay in No 10 until he can present a programme to the House of Commons for approval or rejection, even if on most criteria he has just lost an election: and also that it’s for the politicians, not the Queen and her advisers, to negotiate with each other until they reach agreement on who’s going to win the confidence of the House of Commons and thus be invited to form the new government.  It seems a rum sort of way to amend our constitution, but I suppose as long as all the party leaders agree with it….

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Another misconception that keeps popping up concerns the possible demand by the LibDems that as a condition for them ‘supporting’ a minority Labour government, Gordon Brown will have to step down as prime minister and be replaced by, for example, David Miliband.   This prompts indignant protests in some Labour quarters: who do these LibDems think they are,  telling us who our party leader should be?  Others point to the inordinate amount of time that it takes the Labour Party to get rid of one leader and elect a new one, with special party conferences and who knows what else:  how long could the country be expected to wait, they enquire, while all this is going on?  All this overlooks the potentially useful fact that in order to become prime minister, D Miliband (or Alan Johnson or, heaven help us, Ed Balls, or whoever) doesn’t need to become the leader of the Labour Party as well.  Gordon Brown can constitutionally continue as Labour Party leader while handing over No. 10 Downing Street to Miliband/Johnson/Balls. (Churchill was not leader of the Conservative Party when he became prime minister in 1940, and there are other precedents too for splitting the jobs.)  So much for David Cameron’s super wheeze of a rule that when a new prime minister takes over without having won an election as his party’s leader (could he be thinking of Gordon Brown? or John Major?), there must be an election within six months.  An election six months after Churchill became prime minister in 1940 would have been a trifle inconvenient.  According to the Tories, the country is in almost as deep a crisis now as it was in 1940, although to those few of us still around (just) who were alive in 1940 it doesn’t feel quite as alarming.  At least we don’t have to dive into air raid shelters night after night to avoid the bombs being rained down on us by the bond markets or the IMF.

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By what criteria will Nick Clegg decide which of Labour or the Conservatives he can live with in government?   “It’s not for me to second-guess the electorate.”   And if the election result is a hung parliament? “Whichever party has a mandate to govern.”   In terms of votes cast, or seats won? “Both.”   What if one party has more votes, and the other more seats? “Um: seats.  No, votes.  I mean it would be intolerable for a party which came third in terms of votes to form the government.”   So if Labour comes third in votes but first in seats, you won’t work with them? “I couldn’t work with Labour in that situation, no.”  But if Labour is offering a referendum on electoral reform, and the Tories remain strongly opposed? “We will work with whichever party has policies that coincide most closely with ours, especially our four top priorities: one, electoral reform–”   Yes, yes.  So if Labour offers electoral reform and the Conservatives don’t, you’ll work with Labour? “Not if they come third in votes.”   Then who will you work with? “Not with Labour if Labour is led by Gordon Brown.  I couldn’t work with him.”   But you could work with Labour if the prime minister was not Gordon Brown? “I’ll work with anyone, the man on the moon, anyone who has got the right policies.”   So your decision will be by reference to policies, not votes or seats won? “It would be obscene to work with Gordon Brown if he has come third in votes.”    But you just said – “It’s not for me to double-guess the electorate.  The people will decide.”    Thank you very much for being with us.  That was Nick Clegg.

Brian

Three days ago I spelled out in detail the implications as I see them of the constitution and the new rules promulgated by the Cabinet Secretary for the rights and duties of an incumbent prime minister after an election has resulted in a hung parliament.  The clear message of this analysis was that if there’s a hung parliament after 6 May, whatever the result in terms of votes or seats, Gordon Brown would have not only the right but also the duty not to resign before he had faced the new  parliament and submitted a programme for government in the Queen’s Speech, being careful to ensure that his programme was one which the LibDems would find it virtually impossible to vote against.  In other words, the decision that the LibDems will need to take is not (as the media pundits all seem to assume) “whether to support Labour or the Conservatives as the new government” but rather whether to defeat or support a Labour government’s Queen’s Speech that promises a referendum on electoral reform, tax reform to take the poorest out of tax, restructuring of the banks, a new approach to civil liberties, re-examination in the defence review of the decision to replace Trident, provision to bring illegal immigrants who have been here for 10 years into the legal economy and the tax system, and a cornucopia of other LibDem shibboleths.

I also summarised this argument in a letter to the Guardian which was published today (26 April) in only slightly truncated form (text here).   For the record, here’s the text of my letter as submitted on Saturday to the Guardian:

Some opinion polls suggest that on 6 May Labour may win fewer votes than the Conservatives (and possibly even than the LibDems) but still emerge as the party with the most seats in the House of Commons.  If that happens there’ll be demands from the right-wing press and the Tories for Gordon Brown to resign immediately, because he will have ‘lost the election’ in terms of votes.

However the new rules introduced by the Cabinet Secretary require the incumbent prime minister in a hung parliament to remain in office until there’s a broad consensus on a successor who will demonstrably command the confidence of a majority of MPs in his government and its programme;  and there are sound precedents for the party with the most seats to form a government, or to stay in office, even if it has won fewer votes than its opponent (elections in 1951 and twice in 1974).  As the incumbent prime minister Brown will have the right to continue in office and to meet parliament with a policy programme for the House to support or reject (Nick Clegg: the power balancer, 19 April).  As long as the LibDems have not declared whether they will vote to live with a minority Labour government or a minority Conservative one, it will not be certain that David Cameron would have a better prospect of securing majority support for his programme than Gordon Brown.

Even if Labour wins marginally fewer seats than the Tories, as well as fewer votes, Gordon Brown should exercise his right and duty to remain in office as required by the Cabinet Secretary’s code, offer a moderate policy programme including a referendum on electoral ‘reform’ and other items from the LibDems’ list of priorities, and challenge the LibDems to vote against it in the debate on the Queen’s Speech — in the knowledge that by rejecting it they will be installing a Cameron government in No. 10 which will be implacably opposed to any change in the electoral system.  The LibDems would then be in no position to use their balance-of-power votes to defeat — or even threaten to defeat — the new Conservative government which they had voted into office, having just chosen to eject a Labour one.  A premature resignation by Mr Brown would needlessly throw away all these possibilities.

I’m much heartened to see that a committed Conservative blogger has devoted a whole post to my earlier piece here, noting that it has also appeared in LabourList, and describing it as “A truly excellent, but entirely unnerving, article“, and sadly concluding that

Simply put, if my understanding of the piece is correct, should a hung parliament of one form or another be the outcome in which Nick Clegg held the balance of power, there would be no legal or even moral obligation for Brown to resign, so Clegg would be forced to bring down the Labour government by refusing to endorse the Queen’s Speech. This would trigger another general election which, you have to think, would hardly be in the Liberal Democrat’s best interest. The chances are, therefore, that Clegg would do a deal with Brown and Brown would continue as Prime Minister for the time being, despite having a smaller share of the vote than the Conservative Party.

This however isn’t entirely correct:  in my scenario, if the LibDems vote to defeat a Labour Queen’s speech despite its programme including electoral reform and most of the other things on the LibDem wish-list, the consequence would be a Conservative government which would neither offer nor need to offer the LibDems anything at all.  Only if they were foolish enough to vote that government down as well would there be another election immediately — in which the LibDems, having behaved so irrationally and irresponsibly in defeating both a Labour and a Conservative government in quick succession, could expect to be wiped out, with the Tories winning an overall majority in the second poll.  Surely even the LibDems would not commit electoral suicide in such a spectacular way?

All this, of course, is posited on there being a hung parliament after 6 May.  I remain unconvinced that this will happen.  But if it does, let’s hope that the prime minister will stick to his guns right up to the vote on his government’s Queen’s Speech.  If he does, he will maximise the chances, against all the odds, of emerging with a de facto alliance of convenience with the LibDems that will democratically reflect the overall majority in the election, both in votes and in seats, for the centre-left.  For a clear centre-left victory is the one thing it’s perfectly safe to forecast.

Brian

Much of the current speculation about what the LibDems will do if the election on 6 May returns a hung parliament is based on a misunderstanding of how the system now works.  There’s particular confusion over which party leader will “be invited to form a government” after the election if Labour winds up with more seats in the House of Commons than any other party, but has won a smaller share of the vote than the Conservatives, and possibly even than the LibDems.  It’s suggested that it would be utterly immoral, and likely to spark a major constitutional crisis, if Gordon Brown were to “form a government” after the election on the basis of having more seats than any other party but having come second or third in terms of votes cast.

The first thing that’s wrong about this scenario is that no-one will be asked to “form a government” after the election, whatever the result, until and unless Gordon Brown resigns as prime minister (which would automatically mean the rest of the present government also resigning).  Until he goes to the Palace to resign, he is constitutionally entitled to continue in office as prime minister; all other ministers similarly remain in office (unless sacked or reshuffled by Brown);  and neither Brown nor anyone else is “invited to form a government”.  This is the case even if the Conservatives have won more seats than Labour, as well as more votes.  There are only two circumstances in which Brown will be constitutionally obliged to resign:  if Labour loses the vote in the House of Commons to approve the Queen’s Speech at the opening of parliament, some time after the election;  or if the government is defeated in a vote of confidence, probably even later.  Of course Brown may choose to resign the premiership earlier, taking the rest of the government with him (for example if he sees no realistic possibility of being able to get his programme and budgets approved by parliament and if David Cameron has an obvious entitlement to the first go at forming a government):  but he is not constitutionally obliged to do so.  So long as there’s even the faint possibility that the LibDems may decide not to vote against the Queen’s Speech and not to vote No in a vote of confidence in his government, Gordon Brown is entitled to soldier on.

The second point most often overlooked is that Gordon Brown will be under no moral or political obligation to resign as prime minister, just because Labour may have won fewer votes than the Tories and/or the LibDems.  The precedents are quite clear.  Three elections since the second world war have produced this anomalous result. In 1951 Labour, elected in 1945 in a landslide and re-elected in 1950, won more votes than the Conservatives, indeed more votes than Labour had ever won before (even in 1945) and more than it has ever won since, yet won fewer seats than the Tories, so Attlee immediately resigned and Churchill, defeated in 1945, came back as Conservative prime minister.   No-one seems to have complained that this was unacceptable or immoral.   The same thing happened at both the elections of 1974, this time benefiting Labour, which won more seats than the Tories despite having won slightly fewer votes. After the first of these, Heath as incumbent prime minister tried to do a deal with the Liberals, remaining in office for four days while he haggled with Jeremy Thorpe, but when he failed, he resigned and Harold Wilson formed a minority Labour government. Eight months later Wilson asked for, and was granted, a dissolution and fresh elections, at which Labour narrowly secured an overall majority (319 seats out of 635!). Few if any complained at the time of the first 1974 election that Labour, as the biggest single party, occupied No. 10 Downing Street despite having won fewer votes than the Conservatives: and the narrow overall majority of Commons seats won by Labour eight months later was not regarded as invalid even though once again the Conservatives had actually won more votes.

There’s a third easily overlooked factor pointing to the likelihood of Labour continuing in office for some time after the election if there’s a hung parliament, regardless of the number of seats and votes won by Labour compared with the scores of the other two major parties.  The prospect of a hung parliament has for some time alarmed the City and the international markets because of the risk of a prolonged period of political uncertainty while the parties haggle over the deals or partnerships necessary for the formation of a stable and durable government able to tackle the huge problems of an unprecedented budget deficit and the mountain of national debt, as well as the task of nursing and accelerating recovery from the recession.  There is a fear that such uncertainty, if it lasts more than a very few days, will cause a run on sterling, turmoil in the bond markets and a possible need to raise interest rates, which would slow down and perhaps reverse Britain’s economic recovery.  To avert this potentially damaging fall-out from a hung parliament, the Cabinet Secretary, encouraged by the prime minister (and possibly with the agreement of the other party leaders), has written a new “rule book” — although No. 10 Downing Street has demurred at this description, asserting that it’s no more than a codification of existing and hitherto unwritten constitutional practice. The Cabinet Secretary’s code, apparently taking the form of a new chapter for the Civil Service Manual, provides, among other things, that if a hung parliament results from an election, the incumbent prime minister, regardless of the number of votes or seats his party has won, should not and must not resign as prime minister until it’s clear that there is a specific alternative MP likely to be able to form a government that will win the support of a majority of members of the House of Commons, expressed in majority support for that government’s  programme, as defined in the Queen’s Speech.  This formulation is designed to protect two fundamental constitutional principles:  the nation’s government must be able to be carried on without a significant hiatus; and the monarch must not be placed in a position of being forced to make a decision (such as having to choose whom to invite to try to form a government when there is no consensus on whom she or he should choose) that would entail, or seem to entail, political partisanship as between the parties, thus potentially damaging confidence in the monarchy’s position above party politics.

This (probably new) rule has important implications.  Newspaper editorials claiming that Brown will be morally and politically obliged to resign immediately as prime minister if Labour comes second or third in terms of votes cast, have got it wrong.  Brown and the Labour government would be obliged to continue in office for as long as there was any uncertainty about how the LibDems would vote on a Labour or Conservative government’s Queen’s Speech or on a vote of confidence in either government.

What’s more, the dilemma facing Nick Clegg will not be which of Labour or the Conservatives to ‘support’ in a hung parliament, but whether deliberately to bring down the existing Labour government in the vote on the Queen’s Speech or in a vote of confidence in the government.  But a decision by the LibDems to bring down a Labour Government could be taken only if they were prepared to commit themselves to acquiescing in a successor Conservative government under Cameron:  it would be indefensible for them to refuse to allow both Labour and the Conservatives to hold office, since to bring down both, one after the other, would certainly cause a prolonged period of uncertainty while fresh elections were held — and in a second election caused by such LibDem negativity, the result would almost certainly be a LibDem wipe-out and the election of a Conservative government with an overall majority.  Is that what the LibDems would want?  In other words, the LibDems’ ability to exact policy concessions in return for their ‘support’ for either Labour or the Conservatives is very limited:  if either of the other party leaders refuses to grant the concessions demanded, the LibDems’ only sanction is to bring down, or threaten to bring down, that party’s government — and if that precipitates a fresh election, the LibDems are likely to be the principal losers.  It will be like an insect that can use its sting only once, because it dies as a result of using it.

Nor will the LibDems have the luxury of choosing which of the other two parties to threaten to bring down if their policy demands are not met:  if Gordon Brown chooses to carry on as prime minister until Labour is defeated on the floor of the House — as indeed the Cabinet Secretary’s new ‘rule book’ requires him to do in the absence of a firm LibDem undertaking to allow a Cameron government to take and hold office instead — the LibDems will have to make their choice in relation to a Labour and only a Labour government.  Since by voting down a Labour government they would implicitly be demonstrating willingness to support, or acquiesce in, a Conservative government, Clegg would be risking a deep rift in his own party, most of whose members would prefer to allow a Labour government to continue in office rather than putting the Tories into No. 10 — this time without the option of turning them out, too, anyway for some time to come.

Thus the logic of the situation may virtually force Clegg to accept any offer from Brown either to join a Labour-LibDem coalition, with a few seats in the coalition Cabinet for Clegg, Cable and one or two others, giving them considerable influence on government policy, but with an inescapable obligation to support some Labour-inspired policies that the LibDems would prefer to oppose;  or alternatively to give a conditional promise not to vote against the (Labour) Queen’s Speech or against the Labour government in a vote of confidence provided that certain basic conditions were met by Brown.  If that happened, there would be no opening for Cameron to be invited to try to form a government since the Brown government would continue in office without interruption.  Of course this would mean the LibDems facing a storm of bitter invective for having kept an unpopular Brown administration in office despite Labour having ‘lost’ the election.  But the alternative — ejecting a broadly like-minded centre-left government from office and installing a potentially far-right Tory government in its place — might be even more unpalatable for grass-roots LibDem members and supporters.

The fifth and final point which seems to have escaped some commentators is that Clegg would be running a serious risk if he were to seek to offer to allow the Labour government to continue in office but only on condition that Brown stepped down, to be replaced by, say, David Miliband as the new prime minister (but not necessarily as leader of the Labour Party).  The moment Brown resigns as prime minister, the rest of the Labour government resigns also, right down to the most junior Assistant Whip.  Moreover, when Brown goes to the Palace to resign, he may or may not be invited by the Queen to advise her on whom she should appoint to succeed him (he is not entitled to volunteer such advice): but even if he is asked for and tenders that advice, the Queen is not constitutionally obliged to accept it.  There would therefore be no guarantee that the Queen would automatically invite David Miliband to form a new (Labour-LibDem) government even if Gordon Brown has advised her to do so: she might invite Cameron instead.   Unlikely, of course: but possible.

There’s an indispensable account of the constitutional position and the Cabinet Secretary’s ‘rule book’ in a Guardian article of 19 April 2010 by Professor Robert Hazell (‘Nick Clegg: the power balancer’).   Professor Hazell, director of the Constitution Unit and Professor of Government and the Constitution at University College London, is a formidable power behind (and sometimes in front of) the scene, having been a significant source of advice to the Cabinet Secretary in drawing up the ‘rule book’ and also maintaining contacts with the leaders of all three parties, among many others.  (In 2006 he was awarded the CBE for services to constitutional reform.)  If Gordon Brown justifies his refusal to resign as prime minister after winning fewer votes than the Conservatives (and perhaps than the LibDems) by reference to the Cabinet Secretary’s ‘rule book’, Professor Hazell will have earned a place in British constitutional history.  A significant constitutional amendment invented and brought into effect by diktat of the Cabinet Secretary should also be worth a footnote.  (There is also an excellent account of the relevant provisions of the constitution and their history in Chapter 3 of Peter Hennessy’s The Prime Minister, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2000.)

I have not attempted to deal here with every possible eventuality if there is a hung parliament.  One that is beginning to prompt a certain amount of speculation is what the Germans call a Grand Coalition, or what we sometimes call a government of national unity: a formal coalition of the two biggest parties, Labour and Conservative, with or without the participation of the LibDems also, usually only formed in the event of a national emergency.  The question whether the budget deficit and the size of the national debt amount to an emergency comparable with the threat of a German invasion and the imposition of government by the Gestapo and the SS may be endlessly and fruitlessly debated.  But Gordon Brown, who knows and understands the history of the Labour Party better than most, along with many other members or supporters of the Party, would be haunted and terrorised by the shade of Ramsay MacDonald if ever he had to decide whether to participate in a coalition government with the Conservatives.

Another possible eventuality that I have not discussed is a LibDem decision to abstain from voting on a Labour Queen’s Speech, leaving it to the arithmetic of the House of Commons (minus the LibDems) to decide the outcome, with the nationalist and any single-issue MPs, if sufficiently numerous, holding the government’s fate in their hands.  This alone would enable the LibDems to maintain their favourite position sitting on the fence, but it would lay them open to the charge of irresponsibility in throwing away their golden opportunity decisively to influence British politics and perhaps the UK constitution too.

And I have not discussed yet another scenario, in which Gordon Brown, having come second or third in the number of votes cast, or having failed to win more seats in the House of Commons than any other party, defies the Cabinet Secretary’s ‘rule book’, or judges that it doesn’t apply, by resigning as prime minister immediately after the election, in which case Cameron would almost certainly be invited to form a government.  This would present the LibDems with a different but very similar dilemma:  whether to bring down a Conservative administration under Cameron by voting against a Conservative Queen’s Speech, with the inescapable implication that they would vote in favour of a Queen’s Speech offered by a restored Gordon Brown (or his successor as leader of the Labour Party).

Perhaps only constitutional and political nerds actually enjoy splashing around in these murky waters.  We may be pretty sure that the leaders of the three parties principally concerned, mentored by Professor Hazell and the Cabinet Secretary, are fully familiar with them, even if a surprising number of our media pundits are not.  Anyway, it’s still far from certain that the election will result in a hung parliament: an overall majority for the Conservatives still looks to me a sound if highly unattractive bet. In which case all these speculative permutations will become academic fodder for Professor Hazell’s seminars, and nothing more — until we adopt Proportional Representation for elections to the House of Commons.

Afterthought:  I wish Nick Clegg and Paddy Ashdown would stop talking about the electorate not trusting either Labour or the Conservatives to govern on their own, if they vote for a hung parliament.  This is palpable nonsense.  The majority of those who vote Labour or Conservative (which means well over half of the electorate, even after the Clegg epiphany) want their party to win with an overall majority.  A few opinion polls claim to have detected growing enthusiasm for the idea of a hung parliament, but that result depends heavily on the way the question is framed, and even then there’s a clear majority opposed.  Even if you assume (without any evidence) that most — say two-thirds — of LibDem voters would welcome a hung parliament, and even in the unlikely event of the LibDems winning the same share of the votes cast on 6 May as the current polls would suggest, that would still amount to only around one voter in every five.  No single voter can vote for a hung parliament:  it’s not on the ballot paper, and the electorate comprises a few million single voters.

Brian

The inimitable Guido Fawkes, in a post-Clegg blog post today,  describes an election result scenario in which Labour, despite having won a smaller percentage of the national vote than either the Tories or the LibDems, still emerges with a few more seats in the House of Commons than any other single party, although well short of an overall majority.  Guido imagines that after a day of talks between David Cameron and Nick Clegg, a message goes to the Palace that the Tories and LibDems have agreed to form a ‘Change Coalition’ government which will command an overall majority in the House;  it will be led by Cameron (since the Tories have more Commons seats than the LibDems) and a number of LibDems will hold Cabinet posts in it, including, naturally, Clegg and Vincent Cable.   The Queen accordingly invites Cameron and Clegg to the Palace and invites them to form a Change Coalition government.

All nice and plausible so far?  A LibDem decision to join the Tories in a coalition in the circumstances imagined by Guido would be consistent with Clegg’s repeated pledge to “let the people decide” which of the bigger parties he should agree to support in a hung parliament, if, as in Guido’s scenario, the Tories had won a bigger share of the national vote than Labour.  But there would remain the problem of Labour, with a smaller share of the votes, having just a few more parliamentary seats than the Conservatives.  And under our constitution, it’s the seats that count when it comes to the right to have the first go at forming a government, as several clear precedents demonstrate.  I have accordingly posted the following awkward-squad Comment on Guido’s post:

Comment no. 108: Brian Barder says:  April 18, 2010 at 11:21 am

Pardon me for pointing it out, but there’s surely a gaping hole in this scenario. There is no need for Gordon Brown, as leader of the biggest single party in the house of commons, to resign as prime minister, and until he does, there is no vacancy at No. 10 that the Queen is at liberty to fill by inviting Cameron to form a coalition government with the LibDems. Brown would be free to form a minority government — perhaps inviting the LibDems to hold three or four Cabinet posts including Cable as Chancellor — and, when he has done so, to meet the House for the debate on the Queen’s Speech (written of course by Brown). The Queen’s Speech is full of LibDem-friendly goodies, including a mild form of PR. A frantic Dave Cameron pleads with the LibDems to come over to him and, together with the Tories, defeat Brown in the vote on the Queen’s Speech. Nick Clegg is tempted but Chris Huhne and Cable flatly refuse and make it clear that they are happier with Labour now that Labour is promising more concessions to their point of view than the Tories. The LibDems vote with Brown to defeat a Tory ‘no confidence’ motion and the newly vamped Brown government settles down to resume governing the country. The Queen is spared the agony of having to make difficult, loaded decisions. Everyone is happy — except the Tories. Oh, dear. How sad for the Tories.

http://order-order.com/2010/04/18/the-change-coalition/#comment-542607

Actually, despite the Clegg epiphany[1] on Thursday night, and the hysterical reactions to it by the opinion polls ever since, my money is still on an overall Tory majority on 6 May, meaning a single-party Tory majority government and no need for any concessions to the LibDems.  But I admit that my confidence in this forecast has been badly shaken by the post-Clegg polls, and also by Cameron’s distinctly below-par performance in the first debate.

Just suppose that:

• Clegg continues to do well enough in the next two debates to enable the LibDems to hold on to the seats which the Tories need to win from them if they are to form a majority government, or even to overtake Labour in the number of seats won:
• Gordon Brown repeats his well-informed, sober, unflashy, substantial performance in the two remaining debates, especially in the third debate on the economy, and confirms the suspicion aroused by the first debate that he is actually a much more solid and reliable prospect as prime minister than Cameron:  and
• the Tories’ attacks on Clegg and LibDem policies, prompted by the Clegg epiphany in the first debate, backfire badly with the swing voters and especially with younger voters, while Labour shrewdly continues its policy of highlighting its natural affinities with the LibDems and the glaring defects in the Tories’ platform, also offering some tasty bonbons to the LibDems (electoral ‘reform’, ditching Trident replacement and ID cards?):

– if all those possibilities materialise, the election outcome imagined by Guido Fawkes becomes a real possibility.  And if that happens, the consequences that might flow from it, as described in my comment on his post quoted above, look to me a whole lot more plausible than Guido’s Tory-LibDem Change Coalition.  Note that something like my scenario remains perfectly possible even if, as I would expect, Clegg and Cable were to decline Brown’s offer of seats in his new Cabinet, preferring instead to give a conditional promise of cautious support for a Brown minority government, with the emphasis on the ‘conditional’.

Perhaps all is not yet lost, after all?

[1]Epiphany: “A revelatory manifestation of a divine being” — http://www.thefreedictionary.com/

Brian

Instant reaction department:

This was a debate between three rival party leaders, not a triathlon.  The media insistence that there has to be a “winner” is fundamentally fatuous.   It’s not the Grand National nor even a general election.  All three (Brown, Cameron, Clegg) performed better than some obervers expected, although as experienced politicians they damn well should have done.  The media’s instant commentators were united this evening in awarding the palme d’or to Clegg, some even asserting that this LibDem triumph may have decisively changed the terms of the election campaign, although there seems to be no consensus as of tonight on which of the two serious parties will be the beneficiary, and no-one apart from Clegg (who insists on keeping an open mind on the question) is going so far as to predict that Clegg will be forming the next government.

The fact is that the debate did nothing to alter the relative strengths and weaknesses of the three contenders, nor the perception of them.  Clegg’s obvious strength is that whatever happens, he’s not going to have to carry out his pledges and policies:  he’s magnificently free to say what he likes in the certain knowledge that he’ll never be held to account, under the stresses of holding office in the real world, for the practicality of his prospectus.  Given that glorious freedom, he was bound to shine.  But there was what ought to have been a fatal flaw in his performance:  he couldn’t resist the temptation to represent the other two parties as being essentially indistinguishable, which they are not.  “A plague on both your houses” was a message that no doubt earned him easy approval, but in the end it’s a shallow and irresponsible stance for a serious politician to adopt.  Do the LibDems share more of Labour’s values and core principles than they do the Conservatives’?  Clegg declines to answer this basic question.  It’s a populist cop-out.  But it did the trick, anyway with the commentariat, and probably with many of those viewers who stuck it out for the full 90 minutes of the debate.  It has probably earned LibDem candidates some new votes, perhaps even a few more seats:  but that’s important only in terms of its impact on the fortunes of Labour and the Tories, and that’s extremely hard to assess.  Moreover, there are two more 90-minute debates still to come before polling day, and by the end of the series the glamour of the “plague on both their houses” trope may have begun to wear a little thin.

No more needs to be said about Mr Clegg.

Gordon Brown’s strength, which he exploited skilfully in the debate, was his obvious command of the issues and the fact that he alone of the contestants actually grapples with them every day as the man with the power and responsibility for taking action on them, not just talking about them. This gives him a gravitas and authority that were painfully lacking in the other two debaters.  Brown’s countervailing weaknesses are equally obvious.  He has been a senior member of a government that has been in power for 13 years, so on every policy initiative he is vulnerable to the question why he hadn’t done it before.  As the incumbent, he is automatically held to be responsible for the present state of the nation, which — in fact through no fault of his own — is in the depths of the worst recession for generations.  He lacks charisma and is plausibly believed to be a bad-tempered bully who terrorises his staff.  He’s seen as indecisive.  He’s a formidable intellectual who resorts to statistics and economic analyses that don’t fit easily into the sound-bite culture favoured by a debate in which each intervention is limited to just a few seconds.  He has, though, a certain granite-like quality and a depth of knowledge which some of us find impressive.  Others find it boring, which as we know is the ultimate PR sin.

Cameron’s strengths are equally obvious:  he’s fluent, he can’t be held responsible for the current problems of the nation and the world, he’s quick and agile, he’s young and I’m told that some regard him as good looking.  In my view he’s shallow, easily blown off course by conflicting pressures and the desire to be everything to all men (and women), easily yielding to the temptation to use slick populist slogans that win the Daily Mail’s and The Sun’s knee-jerk approval:  putting increasingly ludicrous figures on the amounts of government ‘waste’ that he’s going to eradicate within weeks, pretending that eradicating waste is different in its effects from drastic cuts in government expenditure, adopting fake macho attitudes to crime and prisons, pretending that he’ll pay down the national debt while simultaneously reducing taxes on the mega-rich.  His debating style is to me, anyway, unpleasantly reminiscent of the Oxford Union or even the fourth form debating society in a mediocre school.  He has a habit of pursing his lips in prim disapproval that often reminds me of Hugh Gaitskell, whom I think Cameron resembles far more closely than he resembles the younger Tony Blair, with whom he is often compared.  I thought all these weaknesses came out strongly in the course of the debate.  He seemed to me no match for Brown’s authority or for Clegg’s freedom of manoeuvre.  He failed, above all, to sound or even look like a prime minister-designate.

Obviously these verdicts are very personal:  I freely acknowledge that they reflect my opinions of the three musketeers as I held them before a word of tonight’s debate had been uttered.  But then I think that this will be true of very many of the personal verdicts which will be confidently pronounced over the next few days.  The three debaters were not transformed by the television cameras and microphones into different people with hitherto unsuspected strengths or weaknesses.  By the same token, I suspect that few will change their voting intentions as a result of watching the programme, although rather more may be disproportionately influenced by the television, radio and newspaper coverage of the debate this evening and tomorrow, coverage that will in turn reflect the political predilections of the media organs that deliver their varying verdicts.  Those whose votes in the polls put Brown in third and last place probably disliked and scorned Brown beforehand, and were comfortably confirmed in their dislike and scorn by what they heard and saw.  The same was probably true of pre-existing opinions of Cameron.  Clegg will have surprised many by having shown himself the equal in competence of the other two, and even their superior in style and charisma: others won’t even have known who he was until well into the debate.  But he still won’t be forming a government on 7 May.

We can however afford to be generous on at least one point.  All did well, and all shall have prizes.  The key to No. 10 Downing Street will however be awarded to only one of them.   Unless there’s a political earthquake of heroic dimensions between now and 6 May, and regardless of how he performs in the remaining two debates, and notwithstanding the fatuities in his party’s election manifesto, and unless Labour can find a way of expressing complex and often counter-intuitive Keynesian truths in easily intelligible sound-bites which will be proof against malignant misrepresentation by the Daily Mail and the Murdoch media, it’s going to be this evening’s bronze medallist: David Cameron.  We had better get used to it.

Brian

This will be an old-fashioned, Old Labour tribal attack on the Conservative Party.  (Hell, it’s election time.)  If you can’t bear political tribalism, you don’t need to read any further.  You may feel happier with Conservative Home.  Others can safely read on.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to take the Tory election campaign seriously.  A new arrival from Mars would get the impression that the principal choice facing the voters is between a party that wants to increase National Insurance contributions by 1 per cent (1 per cent!) and a party that doesn’t.   The party that doesn’t, i.e. the Conservatives, claim that not increasing them is ‘a tax cut’, even though National Insurance contributions haven’t actually been increased and probably won’t be. I’m reminded of the whiskery joke about the communication cord  in old-time railway carriages which you pulled in an emergency to stop the train.  The sign above it said “Penalty for Improper Use: £5″, which was a lot of money in those days.  So on arrival at Paddington Station (or wherever), we congratulated ourselves on having saved £5 by not pulling the cord, and eagerly debated how to spend it.

Labour returns serve by demanding to know how the Tories propose to fund this ‘tax cut’.  Easy, say the Tories:  more ‘efficiency savings’ in the public sector.  The good plain anglo-saxon word ‘cut’ is now taboo.  Everyone is going to make efficiency savings instead — and they are to amount to billions of pounds in a single year.  This, it’s believed, will bring down the deficit and the national debt so that the rest of the world will go on lending us money at derisory rates of interest.

This is all pure Alice in Wonderland.  If the Tories, once elected next month, performed the miracle of finding and making ‘efficiency savings’ in public services on the colossal scale threatened, it would necessarily and unarguably entail vast numbers of job losses.  The private sector is struggling to get up off the floor after the collapse of bank credit and consumer demand, and will continue for some time to rely on the state to provide the stimulus required to keep going at all.  Reducing government spending by billions of pounds in such circumstances would pull the rug from under the current indispensable fiscal stimulus, deflating demand just as it begins to recover.  Without a revival in demand, firms are not going to resume investment spending, re-stock, start trading again, or hire labour.  Worse still, mass redundancies in the public sector with no private sector job vacancies to soak them up can only mean a huge addition to the bill for unemployment benefit and the many other social service costs of large-scale unemployment; at the same time, government loses the revenues previously raised from taxes paid by those now thrown out of work — the ‘automatic stabilisers’ combine in a double whammy  to increase unavoidable government spending and simultaneously reduce government revenue.  Thus the budget deficit widens further;  government borrowing necessarily increases.  The UK’s creditworthiness is called into question in the international bond markets:  interest rates are forced up, to persuade lenders to buy UK government bonds;  credit for domestic investment, already hard to get, becomes more expensive.  The recession worsens.  Unemployment rises still further.  Recovery and growth are choked off.

Keynes is generally (if wrongly) believed to have recommended that in a recession people should  if necessary be paid to dig holes in the ground and fill them in again, so that the spending of their incomes from this meaningless employment helps to revive demand in the economy and thus trigger fresh economic activity, recovery, and growth.  The Tories see public servants apparently digging holes and filling them in again, cry “Waste!”, and sack them.  (In fact it almost certainly turns out that the holes had an invaluable purpose: laying fibre-optic cable to expand the availability of broadband, perhaps, or repairing and modernising the sewers;  but in the desperate search for WASTE!, any old state activity will do for cutting to reduce the wage bill.  It’s called efficiency savings.)

There’s even more of this topsy-turvy economics on the Conservative Party’s stall.  For months they have been obsessing all over the airwaves, the public prints and the blogosphere about the absolute priority to be given to paying off the national debt — not waiting until recovery from the recession is firmly established, but starting the day after the election.  Never mind the threat of still higher unemployment, ordinary blameless people’s jobs and self-respect and often health wrecked, homes repossessed, families humiliated: all that matters is paying down the debt.  Every other objective, we were told, must be subordinated to this supreme national goal.  To achieve it, the war leaders Cameron and Osborne had nothing to offer us but blood, toil, tears and the pain of savagely slashed public services.  All — well, most — must suffer in this noble cause.

But wait!  The captains of industry and business need have no fear after all.  Did it look as if taxes would have to rise as well as public services being slashed if the debt was to be paid off?  Not a bit of it!  Taxes would actually be reduced under Chancellor Osborne:  reductions in inheritance tax for the better-off, tax concessions to encourage people to get and stay married, no increase in National Insurance contributions (a ‘tax on jobs’!), strong hints that there’ll be no increase in VAT either, promises to abolish the new 50% top rate of income tax on the hyper-rich.  At the same time spending on the National Health Service is to rise under the Tories year on year in real terms, front-line services in education are to be protected, parents given the ‘right’ to set up new state-funded schools outside local authority control whenever they wish, cancer patients to be given whatever drugs their specialists recommend, overseas development aid  to go on rising.   So that painful austerity decade that we heard so much about isn’t going to be so painful after all?  But where’s the money coming from?   All together, now:  “Efficiency savings!”   Efficiency savings will pay for all these rosy promises of delectable goodies handed out by Dave and George.

But what about the national debt?  Will the famous efficiency savings be used to pay that off as well?  Those five loaves and two small fishes will have to go an awfully long way.

Another small mystery:  rich, successful businessmen are queueing up to endorse the Tories’ frenetic objections to that 1 per cent on National Insurance contributions — the single issue on which the whole election is apparently being fought.  Cameron and Osborne, in their infinite wisdom, boast of this utterly predictable and shamelessly self-interested support by business  as irrefutable evidence that they are right, and Labour is wrong.  It’s a stealth tax!  (Although rarely can stealth have been so public.)  It’s a tax on jobs!  (But all taxes paid by rich employers and financiers are taxes on jobs:  it’s just that some are fairer, and bear less heavily on the poorest and most vulnerable, than others.)  And if these business leaders are so concerned about jobs, why don’t they put on hold for a decade or two those colossal salaries, bonuses and share issues that they pay each other, and divert some of the money thus saved into job-creating new investment?  Grotesque pay deals for the bosses are the most destructive possible tax on other people’s jobs.  The mystery is that the media should report businessmen objecting to a minuscule tax increase as if it was news, and that Cameron and Osborne should think that it helps their case to exult about it, when in fact it simply confirms what we all already knew or suspected:  nothing has changed.  The Tories continue to represent the interests of the employers against the employed and the unemployed, the rich against the poor or less rich, the Institute of Directors against the trade unions, what’s left of them.  What else is new?  ‘Dog bites man’ is no story.  Is the Pope a Roman Catholic?

Now we have Chris Grayling, the Tory shadow home secretary, defending discrimination against gays — the man who within a matter of weeks may well be the home secretary!;  we have a Tory commitment to repeal the Human Rights Act;  we have the surrender of the intelligent minority in the party to the Tory Europhobes with the desertion of the Conservatives in the European parliament from the mainstream centre-right grouping, defying the pleas of our principal partners in Europe;  and now we have Cameron advocating — in an interview in the Catholic Herald! — a reduction in the period of pregnancy in which abortion is legal, a cowardly surrender to Roman Catholic and other obscurantism.  And, worst of all, in the middle of the worst economic crisis the country has faced for generations, they don’t understand elementary economics.  Cameron’s much vaunted claim to have changed the face of Toryism already lies in ruins, even before he has set foot insiode No. 10.  At the first sign of pressure from the old familiar far-right interest groups who finance and control the Conservative Party, Dave caves in.

If these people do form the next government, as seems far more likely than not, it’s going to be a rough ride — for some of us.  For most of us, actually.  Say what you like about Labour….

Brian