Labour needs a pre-election agreement with the Lib Dems – but not a coalition

Most LabourList readers presumably hope, like me, for an overall parliamentary majority for Labour at the next election.  But to achieve that after such a heavy defeat in 2010 would be almost unprecedented.  Realistically, Labour should win more seats than any other party but barring a near-miracle, probably not an overall majority. The increasingly pressing need is to plan for that outcome now.

The media assume that without a majority Labour would have to form a coalition government with the party likeliest to come third in the election, the LibDems.  But there are strong arguments against this, and a much preferable alternative.  As I have written elsewhere, the case against another 2010-type coalition is that voters can’t know what they’re voting for (or against) because coalition policy emerges from inter-party horse-trading only after polling day; and coalition implies that whichever main party wins, the Lib Dems are the king-makers and always in government.

The solution, failing an overall majority, is a Labour minority government with a “confidence and supply” arrangement with the Lib Dems, announced before the election. Labour could then implement its pre-election manifesto promises subject to its ability to get parliamentary approval for them, measure by measure.  Other parties responsible for blocking measures for which Labour had a manifesto mandate would have to face the consequences at any fresh election.

This would not preclude a published pre-election agreement with the Lib Dems on the main elements of a post-election reform programme that both parties would promise to support, with or without a Labour majority. Otherwise the electorate has to vote blindfolded for a pig in a poke.

The LibDems would take a huge risk in agreeing to participate in a coalition government with Labour, immediately after their junior partnership in a far-right Tory-led coalition.  By identifying itself so closely with an unpopular right-wing régime, thus associating itself with a frontal assault on the NHS and the welfare state and on the living standards of the least well-off in society, the Liberal Democratic party has sunk to a low point in the polls. It is threatened with near-extinction (like Liberal parties of old that rode on the back of the Tory tiger and finished up inside it).  Apparent willingness to contemplate a coalition with Labour after its catastrophic marriage to Cameron and Osborne would confirm the fatal impression that the LibDems have no core principles and will happily embrace any policies that will keep them in government, regardless of election results.

Many Labour people would rejoice at the electoral annihilation of the LibDems.  That would be very short-sighted.  If it happens, the party likeliest to come third is UKIP.  The prospect of a Labour minority government forced to depend on UKIP permission to carry out a progressive programme is deeply disturbing.  Worse, it might lead to a Tory-UKIP alliance or even coalition, able to outvote Labour and thus form another government of the extreme right, this time with the junior partner dragging the government even further to the Europhobic, xenophobic right, not gently pushing in a vaguely liberal direction as the LibDems have periodically tried to do.

The only hope of averting such a nightmare is a LibDem revival;  and the key to that is a pre-election understanding with Labour that whatever the outcome in 2015 Labour and the LibDems will both promise to support certain agreed objectives in a progressive reform programme after the election, although not in a formal coalition.  The LibDems would promise, publicly, that if Labour is the biggest parliamentary party but without an overall majority, they would enter into a “confidence and supply” agreement with Labour under which they would be free to oppose specific measures proposed by the minority Labour government but would normally support that government in votes of confidence and in measures to ensure the supply of funds to keep government going.  This would enable Labour to accept defeat on individual measures without being forced to resign and call fresh elections (although that would remain an option).  The LibDems would be able to preserve their freedom of political choice — their political purity — without having to identify themselves with every element of the minority Labour government’s programme.  Labour would benefit by not having to accept a LibDem monitor in every department quibbling over every detail and objecting to any radical reforms for fear of seeming to disown the baggage they have accumulated from the years of marriage to the Tories.

A corollary of this is that Labour must stop sniping at the LibDems, despite the understandable itch to do so.  However feebly they have behaved since being outsmarted by the Tories in 2010, the LibDems remain, with the Greens and some leftish nationalists, Labour’s only friends in the jungle.  The alternative to the LibDems could well be UKIP. We should be careful about what we wish for.

Not only the centre-left but the whole nation would benefit from a pre-election arrangement between Labour and the LibDems.  Instead of voting without any idea of what policies a future Lab-LibDem (or Tory-LibDem or Tory-UKIP) coalition might negotiate after the election, voters would know what a Labour government would try to do, with or without an overall majority, and also what basic reforms the LibDems would support.

It’s not defeatist but prudent to plan for such a contingency and to start now to discuss it with the progressive wing of the LibDems.  Failure to do it would amount to culpable negligence, at the expense of both Labour and the country.  Let’s get on with it.