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There was an amusing lead story in the Independent today about the “Tories being wrong about the threat of a financial funding crisis if there is a hung parliament. It took three people to write it and the result is frankly a bit threadbare unless the “Indy” is now the “Voice of the LibDems which, it may well be. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tory-claims-that-hung-parliament-would-cause-meltdown-are-dismissed-1952954.html

The basic proposition behind the article is fundamentally flawed because it makes a number of untrue assumptions…

Crap Thinking

Whilst a “Coalition Government” is no reason of itself to cause any Country to have a Debt Funding crisis, it all rather depends on which Country you are talking about. For the “City Expectations” mentioned to be true and the consequences benign for the UK, there would have to be one Hell of a change in British politics and I’m not sure that is likely to happen.

I always smile when people write “…coalitions are common in other countries…” I wonder if it ever occurs to them that the UK is not “other countries”, it is the UK. We just don’t do coalitions very well and even the one during WWII was rather flaky for most of the time and it is important to understand this as we seem to be drifting towards a “hung parliament”.

The Reality

There won’t be a “Coalition Government”, our politicians don’t understand them, German, Israeli even Canadian politicians do and know how to play the game plus their electorates, know what to expect but we, don’t have a clue. What we will get is a Minority Government with another General Election within the year and between the two elections, an awful lot of ‘positioning’ for the second one. If Clegg does well, he would be mad to join any coalition and would instead opt for prividing “policy by policy” support, the LibDems will not support any tough policies that may damage their electoral prospects next time round and that is not attacking the LibDems, it would be the same if either of the other two was the “piggy in the middle”.

The best way to imagine what it will be like would be to look at this current election which basically kicked off in January. The Tories having tried to be ‘honest’ with the electorate, found out by doing so that their poll lead shrunk dramatically, the public weren’t in the mood to face that kind of reality. All the party strategists learned from this one so we have subsequently had an election campaign based upon “Not frightening Horses, waking children and dramatic cuts in Government purchases of paper clips as solutions to solving the Deficit”. Imagine a further 8-12 months of the same following May 6th and you have the picture.

Whoever formed the Minority Government would be too scared to introduce the required measures to get the Deficit under control because if they did, the public would punish them at the next election and the other two parties would rub their hands in glee because they could bring them down any time. I don’t know what would happen to the value of Sterling in this period or interest rates but I don’t think it would be very good for us, do you ?

Perhaps the best result would be for the public to vote one of the parties in with a working majority because that is what needs to happen and will happen on the second election, putting off the decision will only make us all poorer. I would add to this one further thought, whether Brown, Cameron or Clegg, a hung parliament would be a strategic nightmare in slightly different ways for each of their parties.

It is the Public Perception that Matters

There are two parts to this equation, the ‘Constitutional structure’ for want of a better phrase plus the ‘expectations’ of the public and ‘historically’ this latter is where the main problem lies.

In the past, the electorate have chosen to give one party the “Job” and expect them to get on with it. If they did okay, they could get re-elected, if not they would be booted out. The really ‘classic example’ of not understanding this came with Ted Heath post the Three Day Week, Scargill and despite having a reasonable majority, going to the Country on “Who Governs Britain ?” He lost because he had already been given the ‘job’ and clearly failed in terms of doing it.

So my point is that it is the “Public Perception” that matters most, not the willingness or not, of the ‘Politicos’ to work together.

This Election a Watershed ?

One might argue that this is the Election where ‘all that changes’ but frankly, I don’t think so, the public are just being cowardly and therefore, so too the politicians. The “Cleggo mania” seems to confirm this too, it is totally unrealistic, the LibDems have neither the people nor the policies to form a Government.

Am I being unkind ? Play a game and without cheating, write down on a piece of paper just how many major Government Departments or ‘Jobs’ there are starting with Prime Minister downwards. Then against any you like, put against the job a LibDem name you know – tough one, isn’t it ?

This is not a spurious exercise because the Labour Party too has a major ‘talent problem’ simply because the Blair-Brown Feud Years have “hollowed out” the whole party, because young Labour MPs were in effect forced to ‘choose sides’, a whole generation’s political growth has been totally stunted. Labour need their time in the “wilderness” to grow some ‘potential’ – no one in the current Cabinet has a prayer !

When Will it Change…

You may argue that the British electorate is now prepared to accept the idea of Coalition Governments but I would say that is wrong, in another 5 years or much more, perhaps but for now all the public is doing is “running away” from a reality they have long suspected existed. The very best result may well be that the LibDems stop being a Muddle Class Party that is a natural home for NIMBYS and prepare for ‘Government’ in their own right.

This will be a really big ‘Ask’ because they will need a ‘David Cameron’ type person who is prepared to both discipline and organise a party which in the case of the LibDems is totally lacking. The best and most ‘acessible’ in terms of public recognition as LibDem Leader was Charlie Kennedy who was driven to drink by being Leader, a job at best described as trying to herd cats. This will take a man or woman of some credibility and strength which Clegg totally lacks as did Paddy Ashdown before him.

Russian Dolls ? Yes politics is rather like that.