Brian Barder's blog

This week I was going to vote for 1. Diane Abbott, 2. Ed Miliband,  3. David Miliband, 4. Andy Burnham, and 5. Ed Balls.  But I have been persuaded by an expert’s analysis of the voting system for the leadership election that this would be risky. I now plan to vote 1. Ed Miliband, 2. David Miliband, 3 Andy Burnham,. 4. Diane Abbott, 5  Ed Balls. Here’s why.

Of the two candidates for the Labour leadership with the basic qualities required in a party and national leader, Ed Miliband seems to me to have the edge over his brother on policy and values, and to look reasonably papabile.  But of all five candidates, only Diane Abbott’s views on almost all major issues chime with mine – on the UK nuclear deterrent, Iraq and Afghanistan, other foreign wars, prisons, terrorism, civil rights, taxation, the economy, and more.  Until recently I accordingly planned to give Diane my first preference, on the basis that if she gets a respectable number of votes that will oblige the new leader to take her and her supporters’ views seriously. But I don’t think that she has the personality or skills to be an effective party leader or a credible candidate for election as prime minister (sorry, Diane). Moreover, I don’t think she can win enough first or second preferences in the parliamentary or union sections of the electoral college to stand a realistic chance of winning the Labour party leadership election itself, however well she might do in the constituency section – although it’s never safe to base one’s votes on assumptions about how everyone else will vote .  All the same, it seemed reasonable to translate these views into votes by giving my first preference to Ms Abbott, in the confidence that at some stage she will be eliminated and that my second preference, for Ed Miliband, will thereupon be reallocated to him.  Mission accomplished!   But is it?  Now read on….

This plan seemed to be confirmed by the advice in a letter in the Guardian on 27 August which advocated exactly what I was proposing to do:

Seumas Milne is absolutely right that those who want to return the Labour party to its correct place within the political spectrum should ensure Ed Miliband beats David (Ed is the only Miliband who offers a genuine alternative, 26 August). However Ed Miliband is young and untested, and his leadership will not just be determined by his platform; it will be shaped by context. The first context will be the dynamic within the party following the result. A radical confident leadership from Ed will most likely emerge if the starting point is a strong Abbott vote that transfers to him. It is therefore imperative that Diane Abbott supporters hold firm in their first preferences, determined, as Milne describes, “to see a voice for the left in the country’s main party of reform”. Vote Abbott 1, Ed Miliband 2.
Daniel Blaney
Basildon, Essex

However, I had a nagging suspicion that I might be missing something here.  So I sought the advice of a Labour supporter who understands the electoral system better than I do.  Here is what she said in reply:

Let’s start with the simple case, in which your only interest is who gets elected (that is, ignore for a moment your desire to use your vote for the additional purpose of “sending a signal” as well).

Then it is all simple.  One of the principal merits of AV (some would say the only merit) is that it is simple for the voter to know what to do, even if it is not simple to explain how the system works.  The voter should simply number the candidates according to her ranking of them.   There is no way to vote tactically. Even if a voter knew exactly how everyone else was going to vote (which of course she doesn’t) there would not be a reason to do anything other than number the candidates in order.

To answer specific questions that have been raised:

- In an election with five candidates, putting preferences by four of them, and leaving the fifth blank is identical to ranking the last candidate fifth.  (Your last preference votes won’t ever be counted because it is not possible for four candidates to be eliminated and their second or lower preferences re-allocated in a five-candidate election.)

- If you want “anyone but Balls”, your best strategy is not to put a number next to Balls.  Putting a number next to a candidate can’t harm them. If it is the lowest possible number (ie 5 in a five-candidate election) it won’t help them either (see above).  If it is any number other than last, it might help them.  If you don’t want them, don’t vote for them.

- Your votes have to start with 1 and go down as far as you have preferences. In some elections a minority of voters put a “1″ next to the candidate they want and “5″ next to someone they detest, without putting the numbers 2, 3 and 4 in between.  Some electoral officers will count this first preference; most will just declare the paper spoiled.

Now we make it more complicated, by acknowledging that some voters want to use the election not only to choose a winner but also for the secondary purpose of sending a signal.  In the normal case, the signal a voter wants to send is aligned with her preferences in the election (that is, if a voter wants to send the signal that she likes what Ed Balls has to say, she is also likely to think that Ed Balls would make the best leader).  In that case, we are back to the simple case – the voter should simply number the candidates according to her preferences.  It is more complicated for a voter who wants to send a signal that is not aligned with her actual preferences for leader.  So a voter prefers Ed Miliband to be leader, but wants to send the (false?) signal that he prefers Diane Abbott to Ed Miliband.  If the voter is trying to pursue these two objectives simultaneously, that reintroduces the possibility of tactical voting.  The optimum strategy for the voter in this special case depends on (a) the relative weight the voter attaches to these objectives; and (b) what the voter thinks other voters will do.

In the actual case at hand, in which the voter reasonably expects that Diane Abbott has almost no chance of winning, he might put Diane Abbott first and his actual preference for leader (in this case, Ed Miliband) second.  This would achieve the secondary objective (sending a signal) but there are two ways it might backfire on the first objective (choose Ed Miliband to be leader):

*      first, there is a possibility (probably small in this case) that Diane Abbott might actually win, which is not what the voter intends;

*       second, if enough people who want Ed Miliband put someone else first for the purpose of sending a signal, then there is chance that Ed Miliband could be eliminated early on. Suppose Andy Burnham goes out first, and most of his second preferences go to Diane Abbott.  Then Ed Miliband might conceivably still be below Diane Abbott in the next round, and he’d go out before she does.  She’d go out next, and then would be a straight race between David Miliband and Ed Balls.  So in this story, the voter who has put Diane Abbott ahead of Ed Miliband to send a signal would have inadvertently made it more likely that Ed Balls gets elected leader, even though the voter has correctly anticipated that Diane Abbott herself has no chance of success.

Whether the voter regards this as a risk worth taking depends on (a) the relative weight he attaches to the two objectives of electing the right leader and sending the signal; and (b) his view of the probability that Ed Miliband might be eliminated ahead of Diane Abbott.  (Note that this is not the same question as whether Diane Abbott might get more first preferences than Ed Miliband).

I have to say, my guess is that it is probably quite rare for a voter to prefer one candidate but want to send a (false) signal he prefers another.  So in general, the aphorism that there is no tactical voting in AV is correct.

So the conclusions are:

*       In the case where your objectives are limited to choosing a leader, you should number them in order of preference as far as you have preferences, and then stop. If you specifically don’t want a particular person, don’t put a number next to them.

*      In the case where you want to send a signal that is different from your preferences for leader, it is more complicated.  You should only vote for a “signal” candidate ahead of the candidate you really prefer if you are pretty confident that the signal candidate will be eliminated ahead of your true preference.

I am persuaded by this.  If the argument in Mr Blaney’s Guardian letter, no doubt also being advanced by others in Labour groups and forums up and down the country, influences enough voters to do what Mr Blaney recommends, which of course is also what I had been planning to do, it could conceivably cause Ed Miliband to be eliminated before Diane Abbott, who would then either be eliminated in her turn — or else even go on to win, if (for example) we have all guessed wrongly how the voting in the parliamentary and trade union sections is likely to go. The more first preferences go to Ed Miliband, the less the risk that he might be eliminated before a candidate who has received a significant number of purely gesture preferences.  If you think that of the five candidates Ed Miliband would make the best leader of the party, best leader of the opposition and potentially the best prime minister, you should give him your first preference, and resist the temptation to use your first preference to make a political statement in favour of a candidate whose views you like but who you know lacks the personality and other attributes to lead the party, the opposition or the country.  If  – out of loyalty, sentiment or bloody-mindedness – you insist on giving your first preference to, say, Diane Abbott or Andy Burnham, you can limit the damage, or at any rate the risk, by being careful to give your second preference to Ed Miliband.  Take care to number the rest of your remaining votes also in order of your assessment of their leadership qualities:  even your fourth preference may be counted and thus affect the outcome, if your first three are all eliminated.  Only your fifth preference will not in any circumstances be redistributed or counted: reserve that for the candidate whom you think a seriously unsuitable choice for leader. Either number him 5, or don’t give him a number at all – provided that you have numbered all the rest 1 to 4.

Thus whichever your preferred candidate and order of preference, a first or even second preference vote for a candidate who you know lacks the qualities required of a future leader but for whom you want to make a gesture of support, is not only a waste of your opportunity to influence the election’s outcome in favour of the candidate whom you really want to win:  it may actually damage the latter’s chances.    With First Past the Post there’s scope for tactical voting (e.g. if you’re a Labour supporter who used to think that the LibDems were the next best thing and the Tories the worst, and you vote in a constituency where Labour always comes a poor third, it’s sensible, or used to be, to vote LibDem).  With AV, you should always give your first preference vote to the candidate who you think will be the best leader, however good or bad you rate his or her realistic chance of winning, and your second to the second best choice, and so on down to no. 5.

Next year we shall all need to consider, in the light of all these ifs and buts, whether we really prefer this Alternative Vote system for electing our MPs to the existing system of First Past the Post – the choice which will confront us when we vote in the referendum promised as blood money for the LibDems by the Con-LibDem coalition in its founding document.  But that’s for another day and another post.

Meanwhile some of us will have the opportunity to vote this week for a new leader of the Labour Party. I conclude from the analysis above that those who share my view of the best (and worst) achievable outcome should vote 1. Ed Miliband, 2. David Miliband, 3. Andy Burnham, 4. Diane Abbott, 5. Ed Balls.

PS:  Don’t forget that if you’re a member of the Labour party and also a member of an affiliated trade union, and of the Fabian Society, and of the Society of Labour Lawyers, or any other affiliated organisation, you get a vote in respect of each.  MPs and MEPs don’t need to be told that they get another one too, and one that will carry far more weight than the vote of an ordinary party or union member.  Vote early, and vote often!

Any questions?

Brian

In the five hectic days between the election results on 6 May 2010 and the appointment of David Cameron as prime minister on the 11th, Labour never had a chance of a deal with the LibDems that would have kept Labour in office, even under a new leader. Some LibDems have suggested that they were forced into bed with the Tories by Labour’s failure to negotiate seriously with them or to offer a better deal than the Tories.  This is false, although it has a grain of truth in it.  The LibDems went through the motions of negotiating with Labour purely to maximise their leverage in the real negotiations they were conducting with the Tories.  It’s worth re-visiting those five days to see what lessons Labour might draw from them next time an election results in a hung parliament — something that now seems likely in most future elections while the state of the parties in the country remains broadly the way it is, even if the electoral system is not changed between now and the next election.  What really happened, and why?  In this third and final assessment of the lessons of the Five Days in May, I look at what Labour did and didn’t do in that frenetic period and what lessons Labour can learn from the experience.

An essential but widely neglected factor in these events is that the parties were seeking to conform to a new, or newly formulated, rule-book for a hung parliament, drawn up by the Cabinet Secretary and approved before the election by a parliamentary select committee and by the leaders of the principal parties.  (Before the election I wrote a more detailed analysis of the new rules, e.g.  here and here.) Briefly, they provided that (1) whatever the arithmetic of the election results,  the incumbent prime minister had not just a right but a positive duty to remain in office, and not to resign, until there was clearly and incontestably an alternative member of the new parliament able to form a government that would have the confidence of an overall majority of MPs;  (2) it was the duty of the party leaderships, not of the Queen, to negotiate with each other until there was clear, firm agreement on a government and a head of it able to command the confidence of the majority of the house of commons;  and (3) if inter-party negotiations failed to agree on such a new leader and government, it would be the duty of the incumbent prime minister, regardless of whether his or her party had the most seats in the new House, to present a programme of policies in a Queen’s Speech to the house of commons at the opening of the new parliament and to invite the House to vote to approve or reject it.  The purposes of these re-formulated rules were to protect the monarch from involvement in party politics and the need to make invidious and controversial decisions, and to ensure that government could be carried on, with a prime minister in place in No. 10, throughout the time needed for the negotiation of a new and durable government, so that in the event of a sudden crisis during that period, the ship would not be without a captain and crew.

It was clear from 6 May that although the Conservatives had failed to win an overall majority of seats in the house of commons (which would have required Brown to resign and Cameron to become prime minister immediately),  in every sense Labour had lost the election, having lost almost a hundred seats, with the Tories winning 48 seats more than Labour and more than 2 million more votes.  Unsurprisingly the Tory tabloids screamed for Gordon Brown’s instant resignation and vilified him for ‘hanging on in No. 10′, either not aware of the clear provisions of the rule book, or preferring to ignore it for a more newsworthy and politically exciting headline.  Clegg, who had repeatedly set out as his guiding principle before the election that the party with the most seats and the most votes should have the first opportunity to try to form a government, nevertheless invited both the Labour and Conservative leaderships to hold talks with him and the LibDems about the possibilities of a deal with one or the other.  (In an earlier and different age, the then Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe had advised with exemplary clarity and concision how his party should conduct itself if holding the balance of power: “Keep your distance but allow the largest party to govern.”  In the event Clegg acted on the second part of this advice, but ignored the first.)

The Conservative-leaning website TotalPolitics summarised what happened next according to the BBC programme “Five days that changed Britain”, made by its political editor Nick Robinson, in a review by Juliet Shardlow:

…But even as the bullish PM offered to step aside on the Monday, Robinson asserts that the Labour negotiating team just gave up. A key player in this loss was Ed Balls who even in his retelling of the frosty, unorganised talks with David Laws and co, seemed arrogant and bullish.  The programme sheds light on the future role of Vince Cable. His discomfort with the coalition was plain to see, having secret phone calls with Brown. Ming Campbell even claimed that the Liberal Democrats should avoid looking like a Tory “pet”.  William Hague could deny it all he liked, but the Conservatives obviously had a coalition back-up plan – putting an 11-point policy paper on the negotiating table for the Lib Dems. This slick attack broke any chance of a Lab-Lib deal.

According to the detailed and informative account of the five days in Lord Mandelson’s new book, The Third Man, well before the election Gordon Brown had begun to contemplate the implications of a possible hung parliament after the election and had been actively considering the potential for a deal with the LibDems that might enable Labour, if not Brown himself, to remain in office.  Throughout the five days, Brown clung to the hope that this might yet be achieved, frantically working the telephones to see what it might involve.  Recognising that the election result was in part a verdict on himself, he offered to step aside and allow a new Labour leader to head a Labour-LibDem coalition or a minority government with LibDem support, and indeed there was a long-lasting argument about how long, if at all, Brown could remain in office after the formation of the new government before formally stepping down.  (It seems not to have occurred to anyone that Brown could have remained Labour party leader while one of his Labour front-bench colleagues headed a new Labour-LibDem government.)  The question of Brown’s future so preoccupied the negotiators that discussion of the policy agreements and concessions which might have tempted the LibDems into a deal with Labour rather than with the Tories seems to have been rather a side-show.  Any pretence of seriousness was undermined by the harrumphing from the sidelines of a few has-beens such as John Reid and David Blunkett, unhelpfully trumpeting their opposition to any dilution of the fine wine of New Labour with the insipid water of the LibDems.   Only Brown apparently came prepared for a detailed negotiation: Labour had produced no collectively agreed plan ready to be presented to the LibDems in the way that the Tories had done, a fact which helped the LibDems to put all the blame on Labour for their eventually being ‘forced’ to sign up with the Tories.   Blaming Labour was something they needed and still need to do in order to try to pacify those on the left of the party who were and remain deeply unhappy at their party’s close partnership with a party of the political right.

In the end, the rule-book requiring the prime minister to stick it out in No. 10, humiliated by defeat, until the Tory-LibDem deal was signed and sealed and approved by the LibDem MPs and peers, proved to be unworkable.  Gordon Brown, his patience exhausted, and having been cannily advised by Mandelson to leave No 10 for the last time in daylight and dignity, not slinking away in the dark, telephoned Clegg to tell him he was going to the Palace to resign.  According to Mandelson’s account, Clegg was appalled:

“You can’t,” Nick replied.  He said he still couldn’t be sure a Tory coalition would work.  Gordon’s resignation could end up leading to a minority Cameron government.  Gordon was serene in his reply.  “The public has run out of patience. And so have I,” he said.  “I have served my country as best I can. I know the country’s mood.  They will not tolerate me waiting another night.  I have no option.  You are a good man and you have to make a decision.  I have made mine.  It is final.  I am going to the Palace.  Goodbye.”  [Mandelson, The Third Man, p. 554]

So much for the ‘rules’, imposing a duty on Brown not to resign until a new administration was agreed and ready to take over immediately:  the LibDems in parliament still hadn’t voted to approve the proposed coalition and its newly negotiated programme.  But Brown, of course, was right to resign when he did.  Had he obeyed the rule book and sat it out for another night while the LibDems went through their tortuous procedures, the whole process of secret haggling and horsetrading between the party bosses, already obnoxious to much of an electorate accustomed to clear majorities and clean quick handovers, would have been seen as having descended into farce.

The fact was, anyway, that there were at least two  obstacles, one of which was absolutely insurmountable, to any deal that would have meant  Labour continuing to occupy No. 10 Downing Street:  the plain rejection of Labour by the electorate, and the parliamentary arithmetic.  The voters had shown that a sizeable majority of them were tired of Labour after its 13 years in office, and wanted a change — almost any change.  A deal that would enable a heavily defeated party, widely although unjustly blamed for presiding over a major national economic and financial crisis, to hold on to the reins of power would have been seen, rightly, as a constitutional outrage.  Labour’s negotiators knew this in their heart of hearts;  no doubt that was why in their ‘negotiations’ with the LibDems it was evident that their hearts weren’t really in it.  Moreover, the total of seats won by Labour and the LibDems added together still didn’t add up to an overall majority.  A minority Lab-LibDem government would have had to rely on the support of some at least of the 6 SNP, 3 Plaid Cymru, 3 SDLP, 1 Alliance, 1 Green, and even possibly some of the 8 DUP members to win a vote of confidence in the House and to get its legislation and policy proposals through parliament.  Most of these votes would probably have been forthcoming, at any rate when the alternative would have been either a minority Conservative government or a fresh election resulting, probably, in a majority Conservative government.  But the opportunity for policy blackmail by one or other of the fringe parties would have proved irresistible over time, and a minority Lab-LibDem government on that basis could not have lasted long.  In any case, it was really ruled out by the first obstacle:  it would have been a constitutional outrage for a manifestly defeated party to hold on to office.

So the lessons for Labour?  It’s unlikely that either of the two obstacles to a Lab-LibDem pact or coalition last May will apply in the situation following the next election, even if it again produces a hung parliament.  Depending on whether the present coalition’s slash-and-burn policies will have succeeded in reducing the budget deficit without too greatly impeding continued recovery from the recession, and if the level of unemployment, having initially risen sharply, has begun to fall, and if the sweeping changes to the NHS, the state education system and the structure of social benefits have resulted in perceptible improvements in these crucial public services despite the swingeing cuts in their budgets, then the electorate might well provide a mandate for the Tory-LibDem coalition to carry on — or even deliver a clear majority to the Tories.  But these are all huge ifs.  The likelier scenario is that coalition policies will have had only limited success, if any, and that widespread disillusionment will have set in.  The next election may even be precipitated by a split in the Liberal Democratic party or the eventual withdrawal of the LibDems from the coalition, out of nausea at their association with reactionary policies driven by an obnoxious ideology.  In that case another hung parliament will be very much on the cards, and Labour will need to be much better prepared for it next time.  With luck the problem of a deeply unpopular Labour leader won’t yet have arisen.  Before there can be another election, Labour will need to have worked out, published and campaigned vigorously  for a new and radically different programme for government, offering credible alternatives to reactionary Tory cuts and assaults on the welfare state, putting the restoration and protection of civil liberties at the heart of its agenda, and proposing realistic, hard-headed changes to such moth-eaten policies as those on the UK nuclear deterrent, intervention in foreign wars, the core functions of the armed forces, more realistic ways of tackling drugs, cutting the prison population to civilised levels, and so forth.  If Labour is ever to return to office, it must do so on the basis of a programme which the LibDems will be forced to recognise as hugely preferable to anything the Tories have to offer.  It must be manifestly realistic and progressive in its own right;  if it is, there should be no question of the LibDems even thinking about rejecting it.

But not only must Labour produce, very soon indeed after it has at last elected its new leader, a progressive, changed, radical and LibDem-friendly programme for government:  Labour must also get over its bitterness at what its tribalists (and others) see as the LibDem betrayal of the centre-left by climbing into bed with the Tories — and even worse, giving every impression of thoroughly enjoying the experience (always excepting the ever gloomy St Vincent Cable, of course).  Whatever the provocation, Labour must learn to treat the LibDems as likely future friends and partners, respecting the decision they felt they had to make in May, but resolved to make them a better offer next time and to welcome them as allies if they accept it.  Self-indulgently attacking the LibDems can only achieve what their critics accuse the LibDems themselves of having done: splitting the underlying centre-left majority and wrecking all hopes of a semi-permanent government of the left for the future.   Ed Miliband camp, please note.

[This is the last of three articles about the events of the five days immediately following the election in May leading to the formation of the Conservative-LibDem coalition government, and the lessons of those events for the Labour party.  The first two articles are here (also here) and here (also here).]

Brian

The LibDems made the wrong choice in May, not in going into coalition with the Tories instead of with Labour, but in going into coalition at all.  With the experience of 100 days of coalition government, and with hindsight, we can now see that the LibDems were wrong to go into coalition with the Conservatives:  they could and should have let David Cameron form a minority government, promising to support it, perhaps for a year, in votes of confidence and on the budget, but keeping their options open on everything else.  This would have maximised LibDem influence on Tory government policies: the government would have faced the discipline of needing LibDem votes to get its policies through parliament, issue by issue, instead of having the whip hand over a junior coalition partner which can if necessary be ignored on all but the greatest issues.  From outside the government, LibDem deputy leader Simon Hughes has been plaintively but implausibly pleading for a LibDem veto over every Tory policy not sanctioned in the coalition’s founding agreement.  With LibDem freedom of manoeuvre outside any coalition, LibDem MPs would have had precisely such a veto  This would have been good for the LibDems, who would not have been tarnished by such close association with illiberal partners and illiberal policies, nor subjected to such strains on party unity; and good for the country, because parliamentary control over government would have been re-established at last, with the Tories forced to curb their right-wing excesses in order to get their legislation through.   The only losers would have been the Tories, whose freedom of manoeuvre would have been much more limited and who would have been forced into a more consensual and less divisive mode of governing: and the current crop of LibDem ministers and their advisers, who would not have enjoyed the perks and baubles of government office or the opportunity to demonstrate that they were after all leading a party capable of governing.  Yet in those five crucial days after the election on 6 May, coalition seemed to most of us inevitable, the only question seemingly whether it would be coalition with the Tories or with Labour.  How could we have been so wrong?

Coalition so far remains popular with the public.  But the Guardian’s ICM poll, reported on 18 August, was startling.  It showed the Tories and Labour level pegging at 37 per cent each, and the LibDems trailing at 18 (compared with their percentage scores at the general election of:  Conservatives 36.1%, Labour 29% and LibDems 23%).  Tom Clark’s Guardian article drew a conclusion from Labour’s drawing level with the Tories which was at best counter-intuitive, at worst absurd:

The Conservatives have mislaid their lead but it is Labour, and more especially the Liberal Democrats, that ought to worry. That is the paradoxical message of today’s Guardian/ICM poll, which shows a leaderless Labour party drawing level with the Tories for the first time since Gordon Brown’s disastrous dalliance with a snap poll in the autumn of 2007.  Buoyed by strong personal ratings, David Cameron need not be fazed by news that the two main parties are each on 37%, with the Lib Dems on 18%. In the novel settings of coalition, the opposition party can catch up with the principal party of government without threatening the prime minister. And after 100 days at the helm, he remains secure – in charge of a government that most voters believe is doing a good job. Consequently, Labour should draw little comfort from the results.

But isn’t it rather striking that with weeks still to go before Labour elects its new leader, with the five candidates locked in introspective debate about the party’s future, with little or no coherent opposition assault on an increasingly vulnerable government, with the LibDems increasingly obviously split between critics and supporters of the coalition, and above all with nobody yet feeling any pain from the threatened swingeing cuts in basic public services or from the concentration of government fire on the poorest and most vulnerable — despite all these handicaps for the Labour opposition, Labour has already drawn level with the Tories in at least one reputable opinion poll?  Yet according to Mr Clark, it’s Labour that ought to worry — because the Tories have a secure parliamentary majority due to their coalition with the LibDems.  This seems to confuse the fluctuating results of the opinion polls, which can never in themselves “threaten the prime minister”, with the parliamentary arithmetic, which remains more or less static between elections, give or take a few by-election losses and the odd defection.  And the parliamentary arithmetic is plain:  Tories plus LibDems equals an overall majority;  Labour plus LibDems does not:  a centre-left coalition would have had to rely on the support of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish left-of-centre nationalists and the single Green for a majority.  It will take a mass defection from support for the coalition of around a half of the 57 LibDems to deprive Cameron, or Cameron-Clegg, of his or their secure overall majority, and since the LibDems overwhelmingly supported their leaders’ proposal to enter the coalition and the joint programme on which they proposed to enter it, a defection on that scale seems unlikely, at any rate for a time.  Mr Cameron is safe;  but those poll figures ought to keep him awake at night.  If Labour is already neck and neck, what will the poll figures look like in a year’s time, with the savage cuts biting hard, the recovery in obvious peril, and a new, young, confident Labour leader exposing Tory recklessness daily across the despatch boxes and in the media?

Thus it’s not the case that the LibDems took the only viable decision open to them after the end of polling on 6 May, as it seemed at the time.  Often what actually happened seems in retrospect to have been inevitable.  But what happened on the afternoon of Tuesday 11 May was not inevitable.  The usually reliable Jonathan Freedland made a remarkable claim in his verdict on the first 100 days in Guardian2 on 18 August 2010:

Indeed in those first evening hours Cameron’s fate lay in the hands of Liberal Democrat MPs and peers: without their votes he could not become prime minister.

But on the contrary: Cameron was in fact going to become prime minister regardless of which decision the LibDems were about to take.  Supposing that the LibDem MPs and peers had voted down Clegg’s proposed programme for coalition with the Tories, produced after those feverish days of negotiation between the LibDems on the one hand and both the Tories and Labour on the other:  Gordon Brown’s patience had run out and he had driven to the Palace to resign, to Nick Clegg’s consternation (he was by no means ready to sign up with Cameron because his coalition plan still had to be put to the votes of the parliamentary LibDems).  Brown had already recommended to the Queen, however, that Cameron should be invited to try to form a government.  By constitutional convention, this is one of the few occasions on which the monarch is not bound to act on the advice of the outgoing prime minister:  but that advice is bound to carry great weight, and indeed the Queen predictably acted on it at once, inviting Cameron to the Palace, whereupon, equally predictably, he accepted the commission to try to form a government, even though he could not have been sure at the time that his gamble on a coalition with the LibDems would come off.

If Clegg had at that point been prevented from going into a coalition with the Tories through lack of support for the coalition in his own party, Cameron would have had two alternatives:  he could have formed a minority government, with or without an understanding with the LibDems that they would not vote against the government in a vote of confidence or in votes on the budget, remaining however free to vote either way on everything else;  or he could have returned to the Palace to tell the Queen that he had been unable to form a government which would enjoy the confidence of a majority in the house of commons, and recommended accordingly that the Queen should dissolve parliament forthwith to enable another election to be held within a few weeks.  Given that a fresh election so soon after the previous one would not necessarily have delivered an overall majority to any one party this time, either, and anyway would have been extremely unpopular, this was hardly an option, especially in the depths of a major economic and financial crisis.  It’s clear that Cameron would if necessary have formed a minority Conservative government, presented the house of commons when it assembled with a moderate programme clearly designed to make it difficult for the LibDems to oppose it, and dared the LibDems to defeat him in a vote of confidence.  Cameron, Clegg and the Cleggmen (and Cleggwomen) would all have known that to bring down a fledgling Tory government on a vote of confidence only days after the election could only result in fresh elections:  and that these would have been dangerous to the nation’s financial health at a time of fiscal crisis and international market mistrust, and hugely unpopular with the voters, who might well have held the LibDems responsible for the deadlock and punished them accordingly at the polls.  The LibDems would not have dared to take such a risk.  A Cameron minority government would have survived that first key vote of confidence and proceeded with the business of government, although severely constrained by its lack of a majority in parliament — a constraint that it has avoided by successfully luring the LibDems into coalition.

What is the lesson of all this for Labour?  First, Labour’s new leader must have in mind at all times the real possibility that the coalition may come a cropper well before its vaunted ‘fixed’ five-year term is up, with another general election the almost certain consequence.  The increased unemployment likely to result from the almost unprecedented reductions in government spending to which Osborne has committed the government will both add to the unemployment and other benefits bill to be paid by the Exchequer and reduce its tax receipts, thus widening the budget deficit yet further.  There is no obvious indication that the private sector will move in to fill the public sector gap, as Tory ideology recklessly assumes.  Even if the dreaded double dip recession can somehow be avoided, it seems overwhelmingly likely that the recovery from recession will be drastically slowed down, perhaps to a stagnant halt.  Meanwhile the dire effects of the cuts on the unemployed, the poor and the vulnerable will increase back-bench LibDem restiveness:  further damage to the LibDems’ standing in the polls may further frighten them.  If Labour moves convincingly into the lead in the opinion polls, the attraction for the LibDems of a switch from support for the Tories to a loose — or formal — alliance with Labour might well prove irresistible.  The consequence might be a split in the Liberal Democratic party, the loss of the coalition’s majority in parliament, and fresh elections in a year or 18 months.  Labour had better be prepared for that, and be ready to encourage, not maul, those LibDems whose defection alone could bring it about:  not by overtly trying to exploit dissension within the government or among the LibDems, but by patiently developing policies which are both right on their own merits, but also likely to appeal to the socially liberal wing of the LibDems and patently preferable to the ideology-driven axe-swinging excesses of the Tories.  Labour can afford to be progressive again, and can’t afford not to be.

The formation of the Con-LibDem coalition has another lesson for Labour.  If a fresh election within the next two years or so produces another hung parliament, but with Labour this time the largest party in the house of commons, Labour would actually benefit from forming a formal coalition with the LibDems (or with their left-leaning faction), exactly as Cameron has benefited from his coalition.  A minority Labour government dependent on ad hoc LibDem (and other small parties’) support, issue by issue, would create great difficulties for Labour and damaging uncertainties for the country.  It follows that (as I argued in an earlier post about the lessons of the five days in May) Labour should already be wooing the LibDems, not succumbing to a natural temptation to assail them as traitors to the left who have been suckered by the wily Tories (even though some of them are, and have been).  Jack Straw’s recent expression of relief that negotiations after the election for a Labour-LibDem coalition failed, because it would have been so tedious to have to consult the LibDems on government policy all the time, was absolutely contrary to both the Labour party’s and the country’s interests.  Similarly, John Reid’s and David Blunkett’s interventions immediately after the election with denunciations of any kind of Lab-Lib pact were  spectacularly wrong-headed.  Such a pact or coalition was not in fact on the cards, for several reasons which I shall discuss shortly in the third and last of these reflections on the lessons of the Five Days in May.  But open hostility to the idea of a centre-left deal, however formal or informal, was and still is seriously mistaken.  In the new era of hung parliaments (which will become even more likely if AV is approved at the forthcoming referendum and introduced before the next election), it behoves Labour to treat the LibDems as a possible fiançée, not as a discarded girl-friend whose one-time affections have been alienated in a bitter quarrel.  Like it or hate it, we’re going to need them sooner or later; and we might yet be surprised to find that an engagement is actually beneficial to them, to us, and to the country.

Up-date, 21 Aug 2010:  According to a report in today’s Guardian, Ed Miliband, one of the two serious contenders for the Labour leadership, has (a) threatened to make the LibDems an extinct species if he wins the Labour leadership, and (b) stipulated that if Labour has to negotiate a pact with the LibDems in a hung parliament after the next election, a condition of any agreement would be that Nick Clegg should no longer be the LibDem leader.   Does Ed Miliband, who’s not stupid, not see any contradiction between those two propositions?

Up-date, 23 Aug 2010:  I’m very glad to see Jackie Ashley, whose finger is generally pretty firmly placed on the Labour party’s pulse, making much the same point as this post in her Guardian column today — see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/22/labour-playing-nasty-bad-politics.

Brian