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Conservative Campaign HQ would like to remind everyone of a few salient facts.
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Comments
That's the way forward, use the yellow and the blue to destroy a political fetus. :o)
Why? - well The Labour majority is quite dependent on Scotland, and I dont think it will come. The SNP have a "given" strong electoral campaign platform - "vote for us to ensure Westminster keep their promises", The lib dem vote will be much lower than 2010 for obvious reasons, but we dont see a gain to labour or conservative. we are seeing votes going to other parties like UKIP, and this could swing things around a lot. the tory party have issues with the constituency borders, introducing a heavy anti tory bias.
Now i would say at this point the conservative party are the most likely party to have a majority, but i am not sure its going to be a large enough one. Turnout as always be be an important factor, and I think that is the key here, its all about each party getting their supporters there in the first place (on in labours case, getting those postal votes to the old folks home)
Right now my money would go on another Hung parliament, will be interesting though to see if i am wrong.
I am fairly certain there is not going to be a Lib/Dem, Green, or UKIP government.
The worst possible result - even worse than a Miliband government - would be if the parliament is so badly "hung" that it takes more than two parties to create a majority.
I cannot see any combination of three or more of the Westminster parties which would not be utterly unstable and unworkable.
though I would agree that a hung parliament can cause other problems. A good example being the constituency borders, the Lib Dems went against it. Not because it was a bad idea, but simply to get a dig in at the conservatives for not getting reform of the house of lords.
Just after the last GE it was often said we could be looking at hung paliaments for a while, leaving Nick Clegg (or whomever else is lib dem leader) as the "king maker", but that is no longer the case, and i dont think that is a position in which we will see Nigel. I think its more likely to have 2 larger parties (labour and conservative) with a spread of lots of "others". I dont think there will be a 3rd party as such. UKIP appear to be enjoying some publicity at the moment, but it is that very publicity that could lead people to look into their policies, not find them and that leads to their downfall.
I dont think it likely that in the event of a hung parliament we will see another 2 party coalition, unless of course hell freezes over and we get a con/lab one (not likely).
for what its worth in the event of a hung parliament I would think we would be looking more at a conservative minority government, leading to an earlier GE than 2020. But then I may be wrong.
I've been Conservative Leader or Deputy Leader during more than one such arrangement, and my experience was that although reaching the necessary agreements with Labour on how to run a council was sometimes like having root canal work, once you reached an agreement it was ten to one that both sides would honour it.
Running a council with the Lib/Dems, however, was like root canal work without anaesthetic, because although agreements were easier to reach, as soon as it suited their local interests in one council ward to denounce the council policy they had previously agreed to support or sometimes even introduced themselves, the Lib/Dems would charge off in a new direction. In the process they made sensible planning and good management impossible.
Or as one senior Labour councillor in Cumbria, who was part of the previous Conservative/Labour/Ind administration and is not part of the present Labour/LibDem administration, put it to me earlier this year,
"Sometimes the only way to manage a hung council is for the grown-ups to work together. And that can mean Tories and Socialists."
Whether it could possibly happen at Westminister is an entirely different matter.
But I know this much. A Conservative/LibDem coalition has been more successful than I dared hope. A Conservative/UKIP coalition might possibly work, though I have my doubts about it - we could certainly reach an accomodation on an In-Out referendum and probably on a European negotiating stance, but God knows what UKIP policies on everything else would look like.
A combined Conservative plus Lib/Dem plus UKIP coalition, however, would never get off the ground. Nor would a coalition of Labour plus UKIP plus Lib/Dems or Greens.
The ancient Confucian curse, "May you live in interesting times" could be very appropriate
Labour + SNP + lib dem could also work, but again to me not an attractive option.
I know there have been a few Con/Lab councils, but i just cant imagine it working at a national level, unless of course there is an overwhelming national interest for it and to put party politics on hold. The classic example of course being the WW2 government. Lets defeat Hitler first and foremost, we can worry about party politics after we finish that job.
Following on from their coalition with the Conservatives, such a coalition would also probably destroy the Liberal Democrats by alienating the rest of their support. Part of me is tempted to think of that as a good thing, except that they would have been destroyed for utterly the wrong reasons - e.g. for trying to be responsible.