one further comment

[winterbadger]

OK, I take it back.

I told the Globetrotter the other evening that I thought that even if Labour managed to get the LDP and some of the smaller parties into a coalition, they couldn't make it up to a majority.

I *think* that Labour + LDP + SDLP + SNP & Plaid Cymru would just barely squeak over the threshold. In the unlikely event they could all come together.

But I think that will be the only way that the LDP gets serious electoral reform; I think Clegg is having to decide at this point if accomplishing some of their other goals and a limited, Tory-flavoured version of ER is worth getting into bed with the Devil.

Frankly, I hope he doesn't. I think a Conservative government would be disastrous for the country right now.

On the other hand, whoever takes the country through the next couple of years will be about as popular as Harold Wilson. Maybe it's better to let the Conservatives have the poisoned chalice...

Comments

[silme.livejournal.com]

Yes, they'd have enough. Labour and the Lib Dems are only 11 short. (And remember, they could get Caroline Lucas also!) It was be the progressive coalition.

[winterbadger]

Just barely--I'm sure the DUP won't vote with them, and Sinn Fein never take their seats because they won't take the oath, so they'd need every one of the SNP, SDLP, and Plaid Cymru members to get over the bar. Yes, they can probably count on Caroline Lucas and Naomi Long, but that still means a majority of three seats. If someone's ill, or one of the nationalist parties feels it isn't being heard enough, and they could be in trouble...

[silme.livejournal.com]

The DUP would go with the Conservatives. Sinn Fein might also, but they wouldn't really count. And the Tories still wouldn't have enough.

Salmond's offered the SNP and PC to a Lib Dem-Labour coalition, calling it the progresive coalition. And the SDLP would go along. And maybe Caroline Lucas and the Greens. So it would be everyone but the Tories, the DUP and Sinn Fein.

And, now with Gordon Brown stepping down, there's more incentive for Clegg to move towards Labour.

[snolan.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the laugh about the popularity of Wilson, I was just a lad when I lived in Suffolk, England and Heath and Wilson kept trading the office between them... Neither was very popular with most people.

[winterbadger]

Neither was very popular with most people.

Yes, and probably unfairly--I think that was just a very difficult time in the UK--the heating up of the Troubles, the UK's struggles with race relations, the second round of decolonization, and on top of it all the bad economy as the UK began to see its slide, from being a strong manufacturing economy to...not, begin.

That period, especially the mid-to-late 70s, was when I first started learning about British politics; the library of the school where my dad taught had a subscription to Punch, which in those days was still at its glorious freewheeling, cynical, clever, sharp-eyed best.