Cobbled Together

One more post on the general election outcome, to preserve some comments posted to Metafilter yesterday. Rather than paraphrase them I may as well just post them, along with some further words I didn’t get around to adding there.

[A MeFi commenter wrote:] The bulk of the core Lib Dem vote saw itself as certainly anti-Tory and broadly progressive. They’re in for a hiding at the polls for some years to come.

...unless they can demonstrate over the next few years that their coalition agreement has kept the most egregious side of the Tories at bay, in a way that mollifies some currently disgruntled voters and might even woo others; and they get the “completely useless variant on first past the post” [as another commenter put it] which brings them Labour preferences in seats where Labour runs a distant third and helps them win some marginal Tory seats, brings them Tory preferences that help them win some Labour marginals, and compensates overall for some loss in the primary (first preference) vote.

If the Lib Dems had a fairer voting system—and any system is fairer than first-past-the-post in a multi-party state—they could afford to piss off a fair chunk of their voters and still end up ahead of where they are now.

Sure, it’s a gamble. Which of the options on the table wasn’t?

I agree that the austerity measures are political poison, which is why nobody wanted to talk about them [in the election], but the next few months are going to bring revelation after revelation about exactly how economically screwed the UK is, and none of the surrounding ignomony is going to stick to the incoming government unless whatever they do in coming months demonstrably puts us deeper in the hole. People won’t like the cuts in services, but at the same time we’ll be watching the examples of places like Greece and seeing how it could have been worse—and half the country will be cursing the government that brought us to this point. Which won’t be seen as Cameron’s—not in 2010, 2011, or even 2012.

And where would the Labour party have been—never mind the Lib Dems—if the Lib Dems had let Labour continue as a minority government, given that a progressive coalition with a stable majority was unachievable? Labour would have stumbled on, having to build separate majorities for each and every piece of legislation before the House, winning a few but losing so many that they became further and further entrenched in the public eye as Losers, until the inevitable vote of no confidence, early election, landslide defeat and loss of office for a generation. Good grief, it’s not even idle speculation, it’s the story of the Callaghan government!

Labour supporters should be relieved not to be facing all that. The day for mourning the loss of power was Friday, not today—and in truth the days to mourn were from two years ago until about a month ago, when it looked like a Tory landslide in 2010 was the only realistic possibility.

I wrote all of that as someone who sees himself as essentially a lefty who would never vote Tory or equivalent. But I’m also an environmentalist and civil libertarian, and Labour has performed badly on both fronts, with a string of particularly bad policies and laws since 2005 alone. Any Tory-Lib Dem moves to address those won’t leave me furious—quite the opposite. As for the austerity measures coming our way, I’d love to be able to maintain the public services we have now, and the pensions and benefits and the rest. I can only imagine the pain awaiting universities, for example—actually, I have a pretty good idea, having lived through the same in Australia in the late 1990s. But the UK is borrowing £170 billion a year to pay for it all, which compared to this graph of UK expenditure is horrifying. It’s going to cost every British household thousands of pounds a year, whether in lost taxes or lost services, whichever way we slice it.

13 May 2010 · UK Culture