strange_complex | Is it officially OK to feel sorry for Gordon Brown now?

Well, this election aftermath story is certainly throwing up some surprises, isn't it? I was a bit downcast about it all on Friday afternoon. I didn't think the LibDems had a strong enough hand to make electoral reform a central tenet of a coalition with either of the other parties. And if that couldn't be achieved, I couldn't really see how any of the three most likely outcomes (Con-Lib coalition, Lab-Lib coalition or Tory minority government) would ultimately do anything much else other than damage the Liberal Democrats in the long term - and hence damage the prospects of them having any serious input into the formation of government policy in the future. Like a lot of people, too, my immediate instinctive reaction to the idea of a Con-Lib coalition was "ugh!".

But I clearly underestimated Nick Clegg and his negotiating team. As

nwhyte has pointed out, Clegg has personal experience of coalition negotiations. Meanwhile, obviously the Liberal Democrats as a party must have been preparing for this for decades. They must always have known that their golden opportunity would arise in a situation like this, and lo and behold here they are, ready to seize the moment. It seems very much to me as though they are leading the negotiating agenda not only in the obvious sense of being the party which gets to play the other two off against each other and make the final decision, but also in the procedural sense of showing the other two parties how it's done.

I also underestimated both of the other two parties. Just look at them both - being willing to make compromises and negotiate like adults; saying how keen they are to stabilise the country, solve the economic problems, listen to the will of the people, respect each other's decision, etc. OK, so fringe people in the media (Malcolm Rifkind, David Blunkett) are starting to say some pretty unpleasant things - but those actually doing the negotiating are a model of good behaviour. If this is the new politics, and indeed what we would get regularly under a more proportional voting system, then I like it! And now offer is following counter-offer, and it suddenly looks like at least some form of electoral reform is genuinely going to be on the agenda after all.

What will actually happen is still anyone's guess. Each day the landscape seems to change. And whatever either party is promising now, who's to say that they won't find a way to change the agenda and wriggle out of their commitments after the deal has been completed? But what's gradually sinking in for me is that I didn't need to be as disappointed about the outcome of Thursday's election as I originally thought. The Liberal Democrats may have lost seats, but thanks to the collective unwillingness of the voting public to elect either the Tories or Labour outright, and thanks to their own negotiating abilities, they suddenly have more power that ever before. Whatever happens, Liberal Democrat manifesto promises are now going make a real and meaningful contribution to government policy in the new parliament. For me, that's better than what we had before the election, and better than an outright Tory majority would have been as well. I've voted Liberal Democrat all my adult life without ever seeing that translated into direct political outcomes - and now suddenly I actually feel that my views are being represented by the political process that is going on. It's a novelty that is taking some getting used to.

Not everyone is happy with the outcome of this election, of course. Those who wanted an outright Tory majority will now be feeling annoyed because their party got the most votes and the most seats, but is still being held to 'ransom' by the party which came third. A Lab-Lib coalition will look to them like an unstable collaboration of losers, now to be headed by a prime minister whom the public hasn't (s)elected, and possibly propped up by Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish parties demanding localised protection from spending cuts as the price of their support. Those who would have preferred a Labour majority will also be feeling let down on the grounds that left-leaning voters were 'stolen' from Labour by the LibDems, thus splitting the progressive 'consensus'. A Con-Lib coalition will seem to them like a betrayal that lets a much-hated Tory party into office without an overall majority. And there's also a lot of talk about grass-roots LibDem activists reacting with horror and betrayal to a Con-Lib coalition in particular.

I've got to say that I'm not seeing any such horror and betrayal in my corner of the internet, though.

miss_s_b argues that a Con-Lib coalition is worth it for Single Transferable Vote (the main thing that most LibDem supporters really want) even if it means medium-term damage to the LibDems' public standing.

matgb shows that the LibDem leadership can't simply 'betray' their party. And the two of them together (see comment thread) suggest that the Tories are more likely than Labour to agree ultimately to the implementation of STV. (If anyone can tell me the right HTML for inserting proper links to people's Dreamwidth blogs in an LJ post, BTW, I'll gladly change the journal links here - I have scoured the LJ FAQ, but can't seem to find the information I need).

Personally, I'm pretty OK with Con-Lib if it's going to achieve the implementation of as many of the LibDems' key manifesto commitments as it looks like it might. It's not going to be 'Torygeddon' - that wasn't the outcome of the election, and it's not how the Tory party would be able to behave while held on a tight leash by the LibDems in the context of a formal coalition. I'm not sure Lab-Lib is as workable - but if it can be made to work, I'd be perfectly happy with that too on the same grounds. It's a pity that the particular type of electoral reform that's being talked about by both Labour and the Tories at the moment is alternative vote, when single transferable vote is a lot fairer - see

innerbrat's excellent discussion for details. But that any kind of electoral reform is being seriously offered at all is amazing - never mind all the other issues surrounding the economy, taxation and education which are all clearly going to end up being resolved in ways that are much more to my taste than either the Tories or Labour could have managed alone.

Everything could still fall apart, of course, without any of us really getting anything we want - no matter what we voted for. But one thing is for sure. Between the outcome of this election, the priorities of the Liberal Democrat party, and the activities of groups such as the Take Back Parliament coalition, the issue of electoral reform has become a central part of the political discourse. People are talking about it all over the internet, and yesterday evening the BBC News channel provided a detailed outline of the differences between FPTP voting, AV and STV. It feels to me as though this issue won't just fade away again now. And that is one of the main reasons why I voted LibDem in the first place.

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