Mandelson says Labour need to prepare for a coalition with the Lib Dems

Peter Mandelson, former Labour MP and now peer in the House of Lords, has warned that Labour should prepare for a potential coalition with the Lib Dems.

Mandelson, who also voiced criticism of Labour’s mansion tax proposals last week, stressed that he still thought it was possible for Labour to win an outright majority but that they should be prepared for all eventualities.

Mandelson was one of the leading figures who attempted to orchestrate a coalition with the Lib Dems in 2010, and he explained:

Labour “must not appear tribal or exclusive in its politics and it must not repeat its 2010 lack of preparation. It is not defeatist to consider the different scenarios in which we can get the Tories out. Ed Miliband is an intelligent and adaptable person. If Labour is ahead on seats I am sure he will want to give it his best shot.”

He said the Lib Dems would be the most likely party for Labour to partner up with – noting that some would find within the party would find a coalition with the SNP “even more difficult to stomach” than one with the Lib Dems. He outlined what Labour should be doing prior to May, if they are to prepare for this:

“The important areas to prepare are not the allocation of ministerial posts but the forging of a shared approach to policy. Achieving greater fairness and protecting those most in need would be relatively easy to agree between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, as would the position on Europe, while the harder issues would be reducing the financial deficit and long-term debt.

“We cannot achieve anything we want without economic growth and policies to achieve that will have to come first. Security against terrorism would also have to be hammered out.”

Mandelson also gave an in-depth analysis of what went wrong when senior figures in the party were trying to put together a Lab/Lib coalition five years ago:

“Some of us certainly contemplated beforehand what would happen if we lost our overall majority in 2010, but we did nothing about it, and during the weekend after polling day we had to make up in 48 hours what we had failed to do in the previous three months.

“No real attempt had been made to get on working terms with the Liberal Democrats. Gordon Brown had good personal relations with Menzies Campbell and Vince Cable, and he talked to them regularly – a relationship that continued in the weekend of talks in 2010. But he was not on the same terms with Nick Clegg.

“We were rapidly trying to make up for lost time. Gordon asked me to lead the Labour coalition talks [and] though I doubted the post-election arithmetic would add up I gave it all we had.

“But it was all too makeshift. If we had been serious the talking should have started long before, as I suspected it had informally between the Liberal Democrats and the Tories. For them, the chemistry fell into place quite quickly. We were fighting a losing battle.”

“The other problem that I hope is not repeated this time is that in 2010 there were some very senior Labour MPs that objected to a coalition in any circumstances. It was Gordon’s view that ultimately, faced with a choice between a Conservative-led coalition or a Labour-led coalition, the parliamentary Labour party would back him.

“There were some people who were tribal and would not have it in any circumstances, and then there were others like David Miliband who were opposed to it because the arithmetic did not add up, and it almost looked undignified. But on the other hand how does it look if you just walk away, arguing ‘the Tories have not won this election’?”