A poll last week suggested that, among the public, a Labour-Lib Dem coalition is regarded as more stable a prospect than a re-elected majority Tory government (at least when “don’t knows” are excluded). Quite so. Today’s supreme coalition of chaos is the Tory party, which is now in a state of constant strife verging on civil war.
Suella Braverman’s performance at this week’s spookily extremist National Conservatism Conference, condemning her own failure as home secretary to curb immigration, was surpassed only by Jacob Rees-Mogg announcing from the same podium that the introduction of photo ID for voting was a deliberate act of gerrymandering by the government of which he was recently a member.
Discipline has broken down, and so has pursuit of the centre ground. The Brexit diehards are in open revolt against the outbreak of realism which led Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch, Rees-Mogg’s successor as business secretary, to retreat from an immediate bonfire of virtually all EU-inspired regulation. Yet this is only one of many such changes which will be necessary in order to make Boris Johnson’s Brexit even basically workable in the period ahead.
Keir Starmer’s position is fundamentally stronger than Sunak’s. He not only won a party leadership election squarely, but he will come to power with a personal mandate, assuming Labour is the largest party after the general election next year. This is because Starmer has remade the party in his image. The Corbynite left wing is still there but mortally wounded. Starmer is firmly in charge.
The Lib Dems also have nowhere to go but to support him, should he just fall short of a Commons majority. (Labour could win 120 extra seats—a huge increase on its current 196—and still just fall short of a bare majority.) In an interview this week Ed Davey confirmed as much, dismissing any possibility that his party would repeat the searing 2010 experience of going into coalition with the Tories or otherwise keeping them in government.
Davey could hardly say anything else, after the last decade of Tory chaos. Hostility to the Conservatives is also the Lib Dems’ only route to winning the Tory seats they need, by means of Labour supporters voting tactically for the liberals wherever they are the strongest contenders. But in stating this so clearly Davey immensely strengthens Starmer’s hands in any negotiation either for a coalition or for support as a minority government. I suspect the Lib Dems might prefer the latter to the former, since they have all-too-recent experience of being a very junior partner in a coalition with minimal influence once they have signed up.
The only issues that seriously divide Starmer and Davey are Europe and electoral reform. On Europe, the activists and MPs of both parties are very much pro-European, so it shouldn’t be too hard to forge a pragmatic path towards radically closer co-operation with the EU, including a renegotiation of Johnson’s Brexit deal without re-opening—yet—the vexed issue of reversing the 2016 referendum on Brexit itself.
On electoral reform, I can’t see Starmer and his newly elected phalanx of Labour MPs going for an immediate change of the voting system for the Commons. Support for PR among Labour MPs will also wane if Labour does well in the election. But this issue is existential for the Lib Dems and they would need something from any agreement to sustain a Labour government.
Fortunately there is a half-way house. Or rather, upper house. For if the House of Lords is to be radically reformed, it will have to be directly or indirectly elected in some way. Either route opens the way to some form of PR, which would probably give the Lib Dems the balance of power in a stronger reformed second chamber.
After 13 years of frequently scandalous Tory peerages, the Conservatives now have more members in the House of Lords than Labour and the Lib Dems combined, so both centre-left parties have an interest in Lords reform. Labour’s interest does not necessarily extend beyond an incremental step—like the abolition of the remaining 92 hereditary peers—to reduce the Tory preponderance in the existing largely nominated Lords. But the fact that Starmer needs at least some reform of the second chamber gives Davey his opening to push for more radical change.
Starmer has been careful to keep the coalition door open to the Lib Dems but to shut it firmly to the SNP. Fortunately, the Scottish electorate looks set to cut the SNP’s representation, so this sounds credible. Also fortunate, it looks as if Starmer is heading towards an overall majority, so talk of hung parliaments need not loom too large over the next year.
