In some ways, the days following the 2010 election seem so much more than a decade ago. I have definitely cried more than 10 years’ worth of tears in that time. The long term effect of the coalition on our party has been profound. The decisions we made within it were still being used as a stick to beat us with in the most recent General Election.
We’ll be looking in more detail at the formation of the Coalition in the days to come. It was a process that many of us viewed nervously but that the Party backed overwhelmingly in a special conference in Birmingham.
But on this day, 10 years ago, then co-editor of LDV and now Party President Mark Pack set out what we could expect as Liberal Democrat leaders entered into talks firstly with the Conservatives:
The Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party and the Federal Executive are scheduled to meet again on Monday. If a firm proposal is coming out from the talks today, expect it to be put to them both tomorrow. The big question is what might be proposed…?
Right across the party, both from senior to grassroots levels and from social through to economic liberals, there is very strong feeling that significant movements on electoral reform are a must for any arrangement. Given the country’s current economic woes, there is widespread agreement that PR isn’t the only issue at stake, but – for example – I’ve not spoken to anyone in the party who thinks the budget deficit is such a dominating issue that PR can be put on the back-burner for a few years.
Despite the understandable disappointment at how the general election results panned out in the end, there is considerable goodwill in the party towards Nick Clegg and the negotiating team – willing to trust them to do their best and in the right cause in the necessarily private meetings and discussions.
Doubt over the Conservative Party’s willingness to make meaningful concessions on electoral systems is tempered by distrust of Labour’s record at making and breaking promises over changing the electoral system for the Commons. Certainly many of the Labour figures speaking out in the media do not seem to have grasped the fact that if they want to persuade Liberal Democrats they are sincere a little more humility about their previous broken promises and a little less of the “if you’re not really a Tory in disguise you MUST agree with us” would be wise. And as for why Gordon Brown thought it sensible to repeatedly get the party’s name wrong in his public comments…
Jonathan Calder has also picked up on another of these baffling attitudes from Labour:
An arrangement between Labour and the Liberal Democrats would have to be expanded to command a majority.
So how does Labour treat the smaller parties?
Earlier today Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP, called on the Lib Dems to join a “progressive alliance” involving Labour, his party and Plaid Cymru as an alternative to a deal with the Tories.
In reply, Labour issued a statement saying they were not in discussion with the SNP and describing the initiative as “a desperate attempt by Alex Salmond to make himself look relevant”.
As Peter Hoskin says: “Well, that may or may not be true. But given how the Labour leadership has all the cards stacked against it, it wouldn’t hurt them to be a little more circumspect over the next few days.”
I know it can be hard from people from one party to understand the nuances of the internal politics of another party (don’t ask me for an expert insight into what Liam Fox thought he was doing going on TV trashing the idea that electoral reform matters and then subsequently back-tracking), but it is all rather baffling.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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24 Comments
Caron, Apart from the one phrase”Doubt over the Conservative Party’s willingness to make meaningful concessions on electoral systems”..The rest was anti-Labour.
Sadly, this party got what it deserved from the leadership’s preference for Tory policies..In what parallel universe would this party support secret courts, a bedroom tax, the attack on the NHS, etc?
My comment is on the overwhelming majority at the special conference in Birmingham. I was one of those who voted for the coalition at the conference. I did not see any real choice.
However what I thought I was voting for was an opportunity to ensure that the country would never face the same problems again. Yes I was aware that there were global problems, but I was also aware that leading players had been financial institutions in our own country.
So I did think that solving our budgetary problems was the priority, although the actions to be taken were in my opinion not clearly explained.
I was a councillor at the time and felt nervous about how the electors would respond. In fact at first I found no hostility. As time went on it appeared to me that those leading the party had little in the way of an action plan, simply accepting that they need to cut services.
The hostility of the electorate became clear. OK the people in each street who came out of the houses to tear our Focus up when I was delivering tended to be Labour supporters, but it certainly had an impact and had not happened to me before or since.
My view is that if there was a real effort at the Birmingham Conference to explain thinking about the issues we faced and enable members to formulate their views, we would have made a substantial contribution to party and country.
So I do not believe that democracy consists of giving members no real choice and making decisions behind closed doors. It will stand or fall by the willingness to involve people in decision making.
This is an important to-if because there are the same attitudes governing the actions of our party now.
The Lib Dems participation in the Coalition is still be used as a stick to beat them with ten years on, quite true but we don’t help ourselves by continually bringing the subject up. The last ten years has seen a marked downward path in funding of the NHS and Social care and inequality culminating in the sorry state of these institutions at this moment in time, who is responsible for this the Conservative party and the people of this country gave Johnson and his cronies a massive majority at the last election, let’s use our anger to attack the people responsible.
I’m pleased to see LDV promoting a reappraisal of our period in coalition on its 10th anniversary. It is a period that, despite it being so recent, is massively misunderstood by so many Lib Dems – including many who were there at the time as well as so many of our newer members and supports.
The period of coalition and its consequences for the long term cause of Liberal Democracy were cataclysmic and need to be looked at, but not simply because it is important we know what happened. What is much more important is that we understand what went wrong and we learn from our mistakes so we don’t make then again – whether it is in campaigning in our local community, working with other parties in the council chamber or parliament, or making key decisions in general election campaigns.
We know many Lib Dems did good things in coalition and some like equal marriage are still there, but many things we achieved have been almost totally undermined be it the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, Vince’s work on Industrial strategy or the increased emphasis on mental health that Norman Lamb promoted so well. In addition, our party has gone from a position of being a clear major challenger to the two old parties, a voice for a new consensus and a better way of doing politics to a mere also ran.
Up to 2010 we were voted for by many so people who trusted us to stand up and fight for them, by 2015 we had lost a third of our members, half of our councillors and had gone from 57 MPs to 8 in a mere five years. We had collapsed to a poor fourth place in parliament and had lost the trust of many people in this country.
However, our so called coalition partners have prospered. The Conservatives have won two general elections, have poisoned political discourse in the UK and have dismantled so many things we stood for, culminating in Brexit. We have to address why they succeeded and why we failed and then decide what we need to learn from them, so we can better stop them in future. However, we will not do it by blaming them and reiterating how right and good we were in what we did.
We all have to accept the need for us all personally to change so we can win.
Otherwise we will be just like the Liberals in the late 1940s and early 50s – a nice people’s talking shop, but achieving little.
“The ‘C’ word” – if we won’t stand up for our time and successes in government, nobody will.
“We’re ashamed of our record in government, so vote for us” has never worked for any party and it evidently hasn’t worked for us.
David Evans highlights the consequent success of the Conservatives. He is right to do so. In many constituencies where we lost seats, more of our previous voters deserted us for the Conservatives than they did for Labour.
Most analyses here and elsewhere simply fail to acknowledge this. Possibly simply because we do not understand why. Aversion to the Coalition hardly explains why people would vote for our Coalition partners. I have to admit that I do not really understand why or rather how this happened and why it has persisted, even in the face of Johnson. There are convincing secondary causes: loss of Labour inclined voters and protest minded voters leading to a snowball effect in loss of support and more latterly revulsion towards the prospect of Corbyn in Downing Street. Perhaps these explanations are sufficient, but I am not sure.
However we look at it, I certainly do think that adopting the Corbynite faction’s critique of the Coalition does nothing but harm the Party. Unfortunately, I see rather too much of this kind of self-flagellation on these pages. I very much agree with Stephen Howse.
People are often incredibly quick to chastise the coalition. I find it a bizarre phenomenon that those on the left of politics seem to be willing to forget all that their parties do in government.
We see this with the labour left constantly criticising the last labour government and elements of the Lib Dems constantly undermining the good work of the coalition.
It is, to be blunt, a mentality that destines us to perpetual “loser status”
If we want to succeed, we need to celebrate what we did in government and use it as a blueprint for the future.
Fascinating. I joined the Party 3 days after the 2016 Referendum never having been a member of a political party in my life. I watched the LibDems being succoured into the Coalition. Quite simply it was a great tactical decision but a completely flawed strategic one. Time and the comments above have born this out. The decision was quite simply wrong, no ifs and no buts. The LibDems should have sat outside government BUT said they would support whoever formed a minority government once they had implemented our core strategic goal of electoral and constitutional reform. We should have voted in accordance with our manifesto on a case by case basis. We would have been absolutely bullet proof now and forever! Job done. KISS Keep it simple stupid.
The sadness repeated the delusion and lack of strategic thought in 2019 when the leadership committed the final suicide act of believing its own fantasies; this is squarely at the door of the then Leader, President and Federal Board. Capped off by a leadership void now facing Kier! Sometimes somebody needs to say it as it is!
I get the impression that there are a significant minority of more middle class members who don’t understand the realities that underpin people’s legitimate criticism of the coalition.
It’s the same mentality that allowed the mistakes to occur in the first place.
@Paul Fisher
It’s Keir.
Its confusing to have 2 articles on the same subject with 2 parallel comment threads, could we just take down one of them & amalgamate the comments ?
On Coalition, it was obviously a massive strategic mistake, a mistake we made because we lost sight of our purpose. Of course we all want to “Get Things Done” in Cleggs phrase but the first “Thing” is to break up The Labour/Tory Duopoly & Reform our Politics. That means Electoral Reform & Radical Devolution for a start.
Most of the Good Things we did in Coalition were “Interred with Our Bones.”
Here we go again – self flagellation with the Coalition stick. I remember the events of ten years ago. Our county’s finances were in a mess, Labour had had enough. In any case, with no party capable of ruling alone and the ‘generous offer’ from Cameron, that ‘love in’ in the Downing Street Rose Garden seemed to make sense.
It might be a case of ‘once bitten, twice shy” and it’s a long time to the next GE, after the opposition parties were suckered into the one last December. So, if the price of a new coalition is PR, be prepared for permanent coalitions, where compromise is the name of the game.
Some of you don’t like compromise. You should try being a councillor for thirty years, the last four spent as part of a coalition running the Lincolnshire County Council. But then, I guess you would rather stay pure and on the sidelines of politics, both local and national. After all, there’s always ‘the campaign’ and motions to conference, if anyone is actually listening any more.
Had we refused a coalition, there would have been another election a few months later. There is no realistic narrative in which the Conservatives would not have increased their numbers of MPs and formed a majority – it would only have taken a very small increase in their vote.
Liberal Democrats would have been easy targets for blame by both Conservatives and Labour.
Although we would have suffered a collapse, it would not have been as bad as 2015, but like 2015, it would have been considered a devastating set back. We would have been castigated or passing up the opportunity to change the electoral system.
The big mistake was to have had anything to do with the offer of a referendum on a proposal that neither party had campaigned for. If the Tories were proposing a vote for a particular electoral reform, then it was incumbent on them to campaign for it themselves. This was never on offer.
I guess we were in a trap. The Tory offer looked generous, so refusing it would have been easily portrayed Liberal Democrats as irresponsible in the context of an economic crisis.
Martin 9th May ’20 – 11:13pm…………Had we refused a coalition, there would have been another election a few months later. There is no realistic narrative in which the Conservatives would not have increased their numbers of MPs and formed a majority – it would only have taken a very small increase in their vote……..
This is trotted out every time the coalition is mentioned. Prior to the election Labour’s and Brown’s standing had never been lower and yet Cameron failed to win a majority.
The idea that, within a few months, faced with making unpopular decisions ( with a constructive LibDem party offering support on a ‘policy by policy’ basis) the idea that Cameron would have risked his political career on ‘one throw of the dice’ is laughable.
The Coalition was the right thing to do, the love-in was not. It should have been done as a business arrangement. The Clegg leadership didn’t know how to operate as a coalition partner, and refused advice from those in the party who had such experience.
Expats:
No, Cameron would have gone to the country, probably by October, before making the unpopular decisions and with Labour still on the back foot. All he would have needed is the excuse and those to blame.
Ironically, your version displays the same kind of naivety towards the Conservatives as proved so damaging during the Coalition. Your narrative would have to find a convincing reason why the Liberal Democrat vote would have remained buoyant under such circumstances. Having refused what would generally have been seen as a generous offer (even though it was not) and having passed up the opportunity of being in government, of course the Lib Dem vote would have collapsed.
The reason this explanation is “trotted out every time” is because it is so obviously plausible.
@expats
‘the idea that Cameron would have risked his political career on ‘one throw of the dice’ is laughable.’
Isn’t that exactly what he did in 2016?
Martin 10th May ’20 – 9:25am….
Martin. How could the 2010 Tories have not put foreward plans between May and October?
A look at the YouGov polls for the year May2010-11 shows that, in October, Cons led Labour by a couple of points (average 40-38%) whilst this party had fallen to 11-12% and ‘the ‘writing was on the wall’ (18 months before the infamous NHS bill)…
We’ll just have to differ on reasons for the coalition; however, the results (even after the first few months), are indisputable.
Ian Sanderson (RM3) 10th May ’20 – 9:26am…
Ian, He had no choice; it was the implementation of a long term Tory promise.. Cameron just happened to be the PM..
Just try to imagine a post 2017 coalition lead by Corbyn armed with those non-obtained 2,227 votes his friends bang on about. Can you see any DUP teaming up with the IRA sympathisers? Marxists ( just like NAZIs – study Weimar in 1931 , and the E. European 1945 post war governments) are not trimmers, they are stranglers of smaller parties. Wd any LD conference back a Corbyn-lead coalition with these anti-democratic forces in it? At least the tories behaved with some outward decorum until the 2015 election came along.
Richard Malim 10th May ’20 – 11:36am……………..Just try to imagine a post 2017 coalition lead by Corbyn armed with those non-obtained 2,227 votes his friends bang on about. Can you see any DUP teaming up with the IRA sympathisers? Marxists ( just like NAZIs – study Weimar in 1931 , and the E. European 1945 post war governments)………….
The DUP leader, one Ian Paisley, seemed to have no problem with forming a partnership (and even a friendship) with Martin McGuinness …
As for the rest of your post comparing Corbyn to a 1930’s Nazi….Ah, well
The path to electoral reform is full of obstacles, detours and excuses. Perhaps the Covid pandemic will prove a catalyst as by creating uncertainty it provides a relief from the status quo obsession that paralyses so much political reform. We must keep our eyes open for opportunity that masks as just another issue to resolve.
I was always steadfast in opposition to coalition. I said it would end up as it has. I cannot believe the failure to really handle the student fees issue better. Sorry that you have stirred up my frustration and anger. People at the top need a lesson in reality. I cannot imagine Charles Kennedy taking us into such a disastrous arrangement.
Over and still in.
Caron Lindsay | Sat 9th May 2020 – 9:07 am
The problem was Gordon Brown,
can’t work with him (even if Labour)
can’t work without him
Charles Kennedy voted against coalition and I think backed Paul Fisher’s system of supporting a minority government where we agreed.