Countering the coalition: Understanding change and coalitions

The “Countering the coalition” column

By Hadleigh Roberts

After four Conservative governments followed by three Labour governments, a coalition seems very strange to us. It is a peculiar step away from the past, but it should show us that one odd coalition does not mean that the political structure of the UK has changed forever. In 1993 there was talk of conservative one-party hegemony, and that Labour would probably never govern again. We know now that was not the case. Then in 2006, it was thought that Labour had established permanent electoral advantage, which wasn’t true either. Since before 1945, it seemed impossible to believe the Liberal Democrats would ever be in government, but how wrong we were.

The coalition has a lot of new features and breaks several historical precedents but there is no reason, above all after just a few months, to assume it is here to stay forever. Despite this, it presents Labour with a very special window of opportunity to which it must learn to adapt quickly.

I consider myself to be in a unique position to observe the coalition; from June 2009 to January 2010 I worked for Labour’s sister party in France, the Parti Socialiste. From then until June 2010 I moved to Spain where I was a student and activist in our other sister party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol. Since then I have returned to Nice where we, that is to say the Socialists, are in a coalition government following a victory in the regional elections on March 2010.

Coalitions, with a few historical exceptions, are not the British way. The panic and confusion in the days preceding and succeeding the General Election over the spectre of a hung parliament demonstrated the lack of precedent in a constitutional blind spot. Such uncertainty rarely happens on the continent, where deal making and compromises are a regular component of politics.

This is why I have written a series of six articles under the theme “Countering the coalition”. Having discussed the issue with everyone from grassroots members to civil servants to parliamentarians, I hope that my proposals and conclusions we be of use to the Labour Party, as we learn to adjust to our new role in opposition against an unknown enemy.

In the series, I intend to discuss first what Labour’s aims and objectives should be and how the coalition might affect politics in general terms. In the second part, I will argue why the coalition will stay the course for the duration of the parliament, instead of breaking down as originally predicted. Next, I intend to show how a durable coalition is more beneficial to the Labour Party than one that breaks down. The fourth part will set out how we should react to the Lib Dems, while the fifth will discuss how we should act against them, as well as considering why their poll rating and publicity failed to translate into electoral success. Finally, I will make the case for how Labour should conduct itself in opposition in order to achieve the objectives described in the previous sections.

It will be to nobody’s surprise that the main goal of a political party in opposition is electoral success. I will discuss short-term strategy in part six, but in the long term it is clearly in Labour’s interest to steal permanent support from both of the government parties. The Lib Dems are an obvious target, particularly in the south of England.

Tactical voters do not tend to come home. An example of this is my own constituency party of Bath; a safe Liberal seat, but with the Tories posing some threat. It became that way in 1992, where the safe Tory seat of Chris Patten became the site of a famous decapitation by the Lib Dem Don Foster (who until recently was Culture/Media/Sport spokesman). His win was largely attributed to a large portion of the Labour vote voting tactically, which has never recovered. In 2010, the Labour vote was reduced by 7%, and Foster increased his majority.

The example should hopefully show that we can now use this period to bring back Labour tactical voters and soft Lib Dems (who ever heard of them?). A university lecturer of mine was a strong Labour activist in the 80s, but left the party because of New Labour and the Iraq War, he said something that will stay with me for a long time: “I didn’t feel like it was home anymore, in many ways, it was the Labour Party that left me.”

In wider terms, we have to accept that the next election is five years away, but it presents us with a new challenge. There is a lot of ground that needs to be recuperated in local councils, because it is only by showing people that we have a local dynamism we can be trusted with a local mandate. Time means that we should revive the Blairite “toehold strategy” of a Labour group in every council.

By increasing Labour representation as a whole, the party can grow permanently, which is desirable. This seems fairly evident, but it is worth considering on a more profound level. A good illustration is the fall and rise of the Liberal Party, which in the post war period had between 6 and 12 MPs. Instead of being consigned to the dustbin of history, they have slowly and steadily grown and their party has now returned to its status of “a party of government.” Parties, therefore have a certain status that give them credibility and consequently representation. In Europe, there are generally three types: the dominant kind, like the Labour Party in Britain and the PSOE in Spain, which can form governments and command majorities. Then there are opposition parties like the Parti Socialiste in France and the SPD in Germany, which are capable of governing, provided only that smaller parties give them a boost. The rest can usually be called influential parties, like the French Communist Party, that can only hope to participate in a minor capacity as part of a coalition, trying to extract the odd concession. Labour should therefore allow the coalition parties to be so tightly bound that they can be squeezed together and compressed, while Labour expands to fill the gap. The idea behind it is to try to “downgrade” the Tories from dominant to opposition while also weakening the Lib Dems. The ideal result will be to make them co-dependent without the capacity to form a permanent anti-Labour alliance.

The coalition is already showing signs that it is more cohesive than we might have originally anticipated. In part two, I will try to show why coalitions, in particular this one, stay together more often than they fall apart.

You can read Hadleigh Roberts’ blog here at hadleighroberts.co.uk