AHC: Prime Minister Nick Clegg

I guess you could say the Lib Dems as a political vehicle are the possible repository of future choice, even if at the moment they are content to be a fairly pointless adjunct of Cameroonianism. That is distinctly optimistic though. Left-leaning voters in particular have long folk memories.

Their most reliable hope might be just to pray the Tories swing off the radar to the right at some stage, in which case people like me might give some consideration to voting for them, but that looks distinctly unlikely currently.

I am pretty torn personally whether I want them to collapse completely or not. My heart says yes but my head gives me pause.
 
Well, I, for one, will be voting for the Liberal Democrats in 2015. Why? Because I do not want Britain to end up like America, two big parties, no other real choice.

Because three parties and no choice is so much better? (And if Miliband loses, having been ludicrously painted as "Red Ed" for deviating just a little from the Thatcherite consensus, Labour will swing back into a Blairite comfort zone and there will be no choice for a long time to come.)

What Gregg said. The Lib Dems have shown that they will simply morph into whatever the electorate wants, or, in the event of a hung parliament, what the largest party wants. For all the 'Labour reserve tank' jokes, they've proved that they are in fact Britain's general reserve tank. Your position seems, with respect, somewhat mindless and fluffy. A meaningless third party does not prevent a duopoly, as 2010 showed.

You also identify as a Democratic Socialist. How on earth can you countenance voting for the opposite?
 
It's interesting reading these posts and the various perceptions of the Lib-Dems. Here in Australia we had a similar situation where the Greens party and a few Country Independents held the balance of power. Interestingly enough those members did not form a coalition and as a consequence the Greens haven't really suffered the backlash from the inevitable compromises hung parliaments have to make. Here it is mostly anger directed personally at the Prime Minister and the Greens have mostly escaped the damage. The country independents however have definately suffered a major backlash and will lose their seats next election.

I wonder what the situation would have been like in the UK if the Lib-Dems supported the Conservatives, but refused to form a coalition with them - only providing them the numbers in Parliament to prevent a Vote of a No Confidence. For individual pieces of legislation they would still be free to support it or not, and they would stay out of the formal executive decision making process. Would such an approach butterfly away the anti-Clegg perception?
 
To be honest, the Liberal Democrats offer the pretence of choice if anything. I know that there are many people who honestly feel that the Liberal Democrats are closest to them but I also see a lot of Labour and Conservative voters who just throw away their vote so they can claim they are supporting "two-party politics". We're already seeing this with the support for Tim "Don'r care for gays but hate the Tories so that's okay" Farron and Vince "I don't want to give up power or stick to the line" Cable.
 
It's interesting reading these posts and the various perceptions of the Lib-Dems. Here in Australia we had a similar situation where the Greens party and a few Country Independents held the balance of power. Interestingly enough those members did not form a coalition and as a consequence the Greens haven't really suffered the backlash from the inevitable compromises hung parliaments have to make. Here it is mostly anger directed personally at the Prime Minister and the Greens have mostly escaped the damage. The country independents however have definately suffered a major backlash and will lose their seats next election.

I wonder what the situation would have been like in the UK if the Lib-Dems supported the Conservatives, but refused to form a coalition with them - only providing them the numbers in Parliament to prevent a Vote of a No Confidence. For individual pieces of legislation they would still be free to support it or not, and they would stay out of the formal executive decision making process. Would such an approach butterfly away the anti-Clegg perception?

Confidence and supply (what we call that approach) is sort of the wistful 'road not taken' for left Lib Dems at the moment. There's two camps on AH.com about it - those who say it would have meant they avoided the hate and could have actually stopped the Tories from doing awful things (the VAT rise, for one, tuition fees for another), and those who say it would have been completely unworkable and led to an election and the Lib Dems being punished for causing instability and 'walking away from power'.

I'm of the opinion it was never feasible because the Lib Dem leadership didn't want any option that didn't involve ministerial posts for them.
 
I'm of the opinion it was never feasible because the Lib Dem leadership didn't want any option that didn't involve ministerial posts for them.

I think you're being too cynical here.

Can you honestly see Labour, the Labour-supporting press, the student protests, etc etc, failing to hammer the Lib Dems a jot less for propping up a purely Conservative Government?

The Tories, equally, will have no real reason to hold back from attacking the party, and the Conservative press will be baying for blood, in a way that even now I think is somewhat dampened by the fact that the Liberal Democrats are in Government. The Tories will be able to say at the autumn 2010 or spring 2011 election, quite reasonably, that the Liberal Democrats have no interest in power with anyone other than Labour, which will certainly not help them in the SW.

Finally, the Lib Dems don't get any of their policies in Government, when currently, iirc, about 75% of their manifesto pledges are being implemented by the Coalition.
 
I think you're being too cynical here.
Can you honestly see Labour, the Labour-supporting press, the student protests, etc etc, failing to hammer the Lib Dems a jot less for propping up a purely Conservative Government?

It's hardly just the groups you've named hammering the Lib Dems, though. Not just the Labour-supporting fraction, most of the press has hammered the LDs for abandoning the moral high-ground they've so studiously claimed for so long. And the hardest hammering has come from their own voters.

And yes, there would be a lot less hammering, from practically everyone. Giving confidence and supply to a minority government gives the LDs complete freedom to pick which things they support and which things they oppose. There aren't going to be any student protests, for instance, because a minority Conservative government just wouldn't have the votes to raise tuition fees (it isn't even going to take the risk of alienating so many middle-class parents when it could be brought down at any moment by a simple censure motion). The LDs would take each issue on its merit - and the fact that they're doing that means the Tories would have to make a more convincing case and more compromises to win support, which mean some of the things that are sharply unpopular in OTL would be more widely tolerated.

The Tories, equally, will have no real reason to hold back from attacking the party, and the Conservative press will be baying for blood, in a way that even now I think is somewhat dampened by the fact that the Liberal Democrats are in Government. The Tories will be able to say at the autumn 2010 or spring 2011 election, quite reasonably, that the Liberal Democrats have no interest in power with anyone other than Labour, which will certainly not help them in the SW.

If they're a minority government being propped-up by the LDs, the Tories certainly aren't going to say any of that very loudly. From the LD perspective, the same fundamental argument applies to confidence as to coalition ("we're being responsible, ensuring government goes on") but they don't get trapped into supporting legislation they don't want to support. Now that's not without consequence. Yes, the Tories can say "if only we had a majority, or a coalition supporting our legislation, this would all be going much better", and some people would believe them; and Labour can win back some of the disaffected Labour voters who switched to the LDs simply because the LDs are supporting a brand that is toxic with those voters (but nowhere near as many as they are going to in OTL). So the LDs wouldn't be doing quite as well in the polls as they did in 2010; but they'd be doing much, much better than they are now - the LDs would not have become so toxic, especially not with so many people who have voted for them in the past.

Finally, the Lib Dems don't get any of their policies in Government, when currently, iirc, about 75% of their manifesto pledges are being implemented by the Coalition.

No, that's a fudge - most of that is accounted for by the things the three main parties have in common (much of which is already fudged: "we will protect the NHS", "we will put Britain at the heart of Europe", "we will invest in these things that everyone likes"), or things that they at least had in common with the Tories (scrapping the planned voluntary ID cards system). So yes, they would get some of their policies in government under a confidence arrangement - or even just in opposition, as all three parties do after every election. Hell, I'd wager the majority of Lib Dem manifesto pledges would have been implemented even if every Lib Dem MP had spontaneously combusted the day after the last election, and their seats left empty in memoriam.

For the things the parties don't have in common, they could easily horse-trade with the Tories - as they did in the coalition agreement, but in a more targeted way and without giving hostages to fortune. Indeed, the fact that a minority government is so vulnerable to censure motions gives a party or parties propping it up more power than if everyone is formally committed to a coalition (that's how the SNP were able to ram through a referendum on devolution in the 70s, much sooner than Labour wanted or anyone imagined).

To underline how different things could have been: If the Lib Dems had gone for confidence rather than coalition, then we'd still have had an AV referendum but it would have passed. The electorate rejected AV to punish Nick Clegg, because he has come to be seen as the most self-serving liar in British politics (and that's not a fair view, not least given some of the competition mentioned in this thread, but it is a popular one). Confidence rather than coalition, not voting for tuition fees or supporting Lansley's NHS "reforms" etc, would have delivered AV - and, to get back to the topic, that would make "Prime Minister Nick Clegg" a distinct possibility for the future.
 
I disagree, many LibDem voters who defected did it for two reasons. The first was that many protest voters found that the LibDems couldn't pass whatever they wanted and spread to many parties before deciding on UKIP, the second are the Labour voters who left over Iraq and New Labour reforms but would rather the LibDems not back a Tory government.

To the average member of the public, they are just going to ask why the LibDems are propping up the government if they disagree with them on so many issues and why they keep on causing legislation to take forever to pass. The Conservatives are also not going to say yes to that because then they have to negotiate on every damn policy and may still face no since the LibDems can ignore collective responsibility if they want instead of every other week.

Clegg went for coalition because he knew that the Conservatives could just say "well fine, have fun with this election" and win since Labour and the LibDems were unable to afford another election at the same size as before while the Tories could. All that's going to happen is that the LibDems will look like they've put party ahead of country and are going to lose their voters to the Tories or Labour since the former will think that only voting Tory will get Labour out and the former will try and bolster the party position, though if Brown has already resigned then they have Harperson to look at as a leader.
 
To underline how different things could have been: If the Lib Dems had gone for confidence rather than coalition, then we'd still have had an AV referendum but it would have passed. The electorate rejected AV to punish Nick Clegg,

Fair old bit of a sweeping assumption there.

I agree with the general thrust of the notion that in hard party interest terms the coalition was a serious mistake for the Lib Dems though.
 
Clegg is perceived as a liar by those who seem to think that the coalition would adopt the Lib Dem manifesto en bloc as the price for the coalition with the Tories.

it just demonstrates the unbelievable naiveity of some people ...
 
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