Pesda wrote:Two things.
First, you are mistaken when you say "Even with Nationalist support, a Lab/LibDem coalition would have been four seats short" What you mean to say is "even with Scottish nationalist support..." Lab/Libdem/SNP/PC/SDLP would have had 327 seats which is a majority. As was said in the previous thread; maybe a Lab/Lib/nat agreement would have been politically difficult (some might argue) but it was arithmetically possible. The Libdems
chose a coalition with the Tories, they didn't have to do that. It can be argued it was the best choice but it was still a choice.
Also, what many people are angry about is, not just that the Libdems couldn't implement everything in their own manifesto, but that they enabled the Conservatives to implement the unpopular things in the Tory manifesto, and even some unpopular things not in the Tory manifesto.
"We had to" is no excuse. "We stopped the Tories from being as bad as they would have been" is no excuse. The Libdems deliberately allowed the Tories to do things people don't like. That is why your party deserves a bad election tomorrow.
I was deliberately excluding Northern Ireland parties from the equation - and I note you left out Naomi Long
More seriously, while there was a choice of sorts, the fact remains that a coalition involving 363 seats and a majority for two parties was inherently more workable than a coalition involving a minority government of 315 seats propped up by informal support from two nationalist parties (each - rightly - with their own agenda) with 6 and 3 MPS respectively, 3 SDLP MPs, and 1 Alliance MP. I remain genuinely surprised that anyone thinks the latter would have proved viable in the political climate of May 2010, and in a period pre-dating the new fixed-term parliament dispensation.
Also, I'm not sure if it's widely realised the extent to which the Labour - LibDem negotiations were deliberately sabotaged by some senior figures Labour -
by Ed Balls in particular. Balls denies it (he would, wouldn't he?), but it's a genuine belief in LibDem circles that Labour were so divided over the desirability of a coalition - even if the numbers could be made to work - that several senior Labour figures went out of their way to make sure the negotiations failed. Other senior Labour figures might have been sympathetic to a deal, but genuinely believed that they had lost the election and therefore had no moral right to govern.
The views that Phil Woolas expressed in 2010 are instructive here as they combine both views in a single short quote from a single senior Labour figure:
"I am not going to join a terrible marriage or go into a government with Chris Huhne. We have not got a moral mandate to govern. We might have been able to run an arithmetical government, but it would not be a real government. The Liberal Democrats in my part of the world are surrogate Tories, and if you speak to the Labour MPs that is the view of two thirds of them."
So if there was a choice, the choice was far more circumscribed than your panglossian view of the only remotely viable alternative might suggest, at least in part because Labour were unsure about what they wanted. Pardon the cliche, but it takes two to tango.
And I repeat, in any coalition government in any normal European country, the junior coalition partner will find itself being forced to help pass policies it disagrees with. That doesn't remotely mean that the junior coalition partner should be absolved from responsibility for those policies - on the contrary, the coalition is collectively responsible for its programme in government, and the LibDems will indeed pay a price for that collective responsibility - but it does mean that the junior coalition partner shouldn't be held to be somehow uniquely or disproportionately culpable.