Clegg Sides with Labour in 2010

It, along with all other such speculation, skirts over the fundamental fact that there wasn't a clear anti-Conservative majority. To actually get a majority, as Rentoul briefly touches on, it would have had to have been Labour, the Lib Dems - and then pretty much every other party or political grouping in the parliament bar the Tories and the DUP. And then it would have been only a bare majority. It would have been unstable in the extreme - in fact it would have just been a government in office, not in power. On the back of the global financial crash, nobody at the time thought that kind of outcome was a good idea.

Clegg on principle favouring the party with most seats is not a sign of Tory bias as Adonis suggests, it simply underlines that Clegg, as a party leader, had a grasp of political reality, and Adonis, as a bureaucrat, does not.
 
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The article is an interesting take on what might have been - despite being written purely to reverse a referendum deal with which the author disagrees and to absolve Labour of any failings to produce a "progressive coalition" in 2010, despite Nick Clegg having said Labour had practically no negotiating strategy. He knew he could and did get a better deal with the Conservatives. Such a coalition would also have been a minority in itself, not the 361-seat coalition (35 more than the 326 needed) that Cameron and Clegg negotiated.

But suppose Labour took the initiative and the coalition survived for 4 years. With no austerity infrastructure investment remains at a high level but with a vastly depleted Treasury expect to see raised taxes (Vince Cable et al. would oppose business taxes, perhaps a land value tax or higher VAT as a compromise). Wrangling over a tuition-fee ceiling (£5,000/£6,000 rather than £9,000). Extra spending for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland may occur but again subject to government finances, probably at a lower level.

An altered Fixed-Term Parliament Act would certainly happen - the alt-May 2014 election would probably see a Conservative landslide after 17 years of New Labour and the Liberal Democrats suffering comparable losses to 2015, and a SNP surge dependent on the timing of the Independence Referendum. Such a referendum would still be lost, but with a sizeable minority - years of distrust against 'the Establishment', Westminster, all three parties campaigning for a 'No' vote, etc., would see a strong, but failing, 'Yes' vote.

David Miliband may very well have been the favourite to succeed Brown, but Alan Johnson has said he contemplated running in such an event, or else Harriet Harman as another continuity New Labour candidate. Expect a challenge from the left - Michael Meacher, Dianne Abbott, etc. After their 2014 loss expect Labour to lurch rapidly to the left, blaming their reliance on the Liberal Democrats as rendering them unable to enact further left-wing policies. Brown's successor would face challenges to their legitimacy, being over 40 seats behind the Conservatives and would be hammered repeatedly by the Opposition for being the largest party in the Commons.

Despite Cameron's status as a two-election leader expect him to face serious sniping for failing to unseat Brown. Either he remains leader of a party snapping at his heels - a certain verbally ambidextrous blonde-haired fellow will be one to watch - or else he will stand down; Osborne would be the continuity Cameronite, and (something this article does get right) either Fox (or Davis, he's stood the past two times), to be the challenger from the right. Again, the article is correct in that Fox would probably implode at some point over something minor.

As for foreign affairs - Miliband I can see backing airstrikes into Syria and leading the call for NATO intervention in Libya, Johnson, Harman, other Blairite/Brownites, not so much. Expect there to be some government embarrassment from TL's Chilcot Report. A more assertive response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is likely.

One trivial point will be how this neoliberal coalition treats the funeral of Margaret Thatcher - very much her ideological inheritors (in part), despite being the opposition to her politically. A smaller-scale funeral is more likely. Don't expect to see the Queen present. And on that subject, I can see the Succession to the Crown Bill being passed as OTL, if not with a few grumblings from republican Labour backbenches (assuming the firstborn is still male - something the POD doesn't affect but that a writer of a timeline could experiment with).

Beyond the 2014 election, all bets are off. Depending on whom is leading the Conservatives, I can still see an EU Referendum being called, and either passing or failing narrowly. UKIP will be around in this timeline, a little weaker at first since they have no Conservative Establishment to rally against, but certainly making inroads in Northern working-class Labour strongholds. Euroscepticism will certainly be a consistent trend, if a little neutered. Assuming that the EU referendum passes and the then-Conservative government does not repeal this timeline's Fixed-Term Parliament Act, the 2018 election would take place in the middle of Brexit negotiations, opening up a whole can of worms. The further you move away from 2010, the more butterflies emerge, the more scope there is for interesting change.
 
On a fundamental level the deal just wasn't going to happen. Labour had been in power for 13 years and had clearly lost the election. Brown was too stubborn, the rest of the Labour Party didn't have their heart in a coalition government, Clegg seemed to prefer a rightward move than a leftward one, and Cameron had the upper hand on account of his superior numbers in Parliament.

But if a deal had been worked out, Labour would've had little room to pass legislation given their tiny majority. By 2014 at the latest another general election would've been held and the Conservatives would sweep to power.
 
. . . On the back of the global financial crash, . . .
This source is saying that the Great Recession hit its trough June 2009 for the U.S. and probably the UK as well. And then I will say that the economy started to s-l-o-w-l-y improve, with the job recovery lagging big time.
https://www.nber.org/cycles/sept2010.html
(Massachusetts)

And please notice that this announcement was not made till Sept. 2010 (!) (!) (!) We do indeed live in a weird and wondrous world. :openedeyewink:
 
If Clegg did side with Labour it would be a blessing in disguise for the Conservatives. They would still be the largest party in Parliament facing off against a *minority* governing coalition, dominated by a party that did worse in terms of vote share than the Tories in 97. Conservative landslide at the next election is pretty much a formality. Cameron might stay on since his plan was always a 2-round spring to victory, though Fox, Johnson and others will probably make it a trial. Brexit is possibly butterflied away, possibly not.
 
You would need to see a slightly different electoral result for this to be practical, something that gives LD-Lab a majority together without anyone else. Then that would be interesting.
I think we'd still see a hollowing out of LD support as it now seems clear that this was happening already pre Coalition, however you probably wouldn't see the LD wipeouts in London in say the 2014 locals, which would make the likely substantial Conservative 2015 victory less painful to recover from.

London would be really interesting in such a 2014-16 - as we probably wouldn't see quite the Labour consolidation of the capital.
 
I am also not so sure we'd see the 2014 Indy Ref either as why would SNP win big in 2011 given such a radical change in 2010? It being commonly argued that the SNP took a lot of LD voters fleeing the party due to the Coalition years. The LDs lost 12 seats in 2011 - with the SNP admittedly gaining 23 - of which were 9 LD seats. So it is quite possible say that in a Labour coalition, the LDs only lose say half of that. Assuming Labour doesn't lose quite as badly as they did IOTL, then we end up with SNP not having 69/129 seats (although say 60+). So no majority for Indy Ref.
 
It was clear at that point that some kind of cutbacks in spending needed to happen, and I think Clegg knew that going with Labour meant that it was going to be a lot harder to do what was needed.

I also think there was far more personal antagonism between the Lib Dems and Labour by that point in time than with the Tories. Clegg and Cameron really didn't have too much interaction, while it was obvious that for Clegg to go into government with Labour, Gordon Brown had to go.
 
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