A new Lib-Lab pact?

Students quite often give me quizzical looks when they see me ploughing through newspapers, scissors at the ready. Quite simply I am looking for those nuggets of information that will hopefully find their way into a new first past the post article, or one of the tutor2u revision guides. Here are details of one I filed this morning, which is a corker. Vernon Bogdanor, one of the most respected authorities on British politics penned an article in The Times last week postulating the idea of a new coalition between a Brown led Labour Party and Lib-Dem rump led by Nick Clegg. Fantasy politics?

It is not as far fetched as it seems. The same paper broke the story about clandestine negotiations between the then shadow opposiiton leader Tony Blair and leader of the Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown. Ashdown revealed in his diaries that he had had meetings with Blair as far back as 1993, well before Blair had become party leader. Without ploughing through a copy of the first volume of the diaries sitting on the shelf behind me I think Blair also agreed to commit his party to giving Ashdown what all Lib-Dems want. What, half price Muesli? Subsidies for sandals? No, proportional representation. Also on offer were a couple of Cabinet posts. And I recall that Ashdown rather magnanimously suggested they should go to two of his colleagues so that it didn’t look like he was doing it for himself. Ashdown fell out with Blair after the election since he didn’t think he was pushing hard enough on PR and their cross party agreements on constitutional reform were also disbanded.

Blair frequently talked about the 21st century being the progressive century, i.e. dominated by the centre left, in the same way that the centre right had dominated government for the majority of the 20th century. The thing was that although the UK had centre right government for about 2/3 of the last century, the public consistently voted for centre left parties in greater proportion - if we add together the two lots of votes for Labour and the Lib Dems (not to mention the nationalist votes in the Celtic fringes). Only by a realignment of the left would this have any chance. Therefore fundamental to this would be a shift away from first past the post.

Bogdanor suggests that “economic crises generate political upheavals” and with the current financial meltdown, the centre left parties would have an historic opportunity to create the first realignment in British politics since the inter-war years.

Read further here.