The aftermath of an election: ConLib Coalition Government

So after thirty six years we have a hung parliament, with no party in the Commons winning an outright majority, and a coalition government with David Cameron, the leader of the party with the most seats in the house, as our new Prime Minister, and Nick Clegg as his deputy. The reaction from the press and public has bordered on hysterical, and at times absolutely nonsensical.

There are a couple of things about the British political system which people have either forgotten or never knew about in the first place. The first and most important is that in British politics we do not elect a Prime Minister. So all those crying out that they didn’t elect David Cameron as PM: you didn’t elect Gordon Brown or Tony Blair or John Major or Margaret Thatcher. But all of them held the top job and two of them did so for a considerable amount of time. And while the results of the election suggests that the electorate wanted neither of three parties enough to give them a majority, somebody has to be Prime Minister, and it makes sense that the one with the most seats forms a coalition with those who are willing to form a government.

It is refreshing to see, for a change, a politician who has stuck to his word: it would have been very easy for Nick Clegg to side with Labour as they cobbled together an alliance against the Conservatives but he had said that the party with the most seats and the higher percentage of the vote would be the one that he would be siding with, and that is indeed what he did. Labour’s unwillingness to deliver electoral reform having promised it in 1997 when they weren’t confident of the landslide result won’t so easily be forgotten by the Lib Dems. Nor, I would imagine, would be the attempt by Labour to try and turn Britain into a surveillance state.

This is not to say that the Conservatives and Lib Dems will make comfortable bedfellows. On the contrary, there will be compromises on both sides and some have begun already: the Lib Dems have abandoned their mansion tax and scrapping Trident policies, while the Tories have agreed on the abolition of tax for those earning less than £10,000. The fact that even the two parties together only have a wafer thin majority in parliament means that passing through unpopular legislation will become even more difficult, and bills will be drafted and debated much more thoroughly before being enshrined into law.

The question of electoral reform, which the Lib Dems have been pushing so strongly and apparently the reason why talks with Labour failed, would result in more and more coalitions: this government serves as a test case for whether the British politicians, and more importantly, the British public, are able to handle a government which does not have an outright majority and hence works through mutual cooperation, consultation and is actually representative of the people. Unlike in the past, where governments would be able to force through legislation due to huge majority despite only receiving a third of the vote, now the two parties who received almost 60% of the vote will cooperate and compromise to come to agreements in the national interest, or so they claim. If they are able to deliver on this claim; it would be democracy in action and the best advertisement that a proportional system could ever have.