A Lib-Con coalition is best for Britain, best for me — and my free school in Ealing

15 May 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

Over the past five weeks I have often found myself cursing the British public. I cursed them when Labour’s support started climbing in the opinion polls, grumbling about how some people didn’t deserve to vote. I cursed them when they flocked to the Lib Dem banner following Nick Clegg’s performance in the first debate, complaining about the madness of crowds. And I cursed them on election night when it looked as though they’d granted Gordon Brown a stay of execution, leaving open the possibility that he could cobble together a ‘coalition of the losers’.

In the end, though, they’ve got the outcome they wanted and probably the one that’s best for the country. I know, a Lib-Con coalition wasn’t on the ballot paper, and when the pollsters asked people if they wanted a hung parliament a majority said no. But if you combine the people who voted Labour and Lib Dem it adds up to 60 per cent and if a Lib-Con coalition had been on the ballot paper I suspect it would have won a comparable share of the vote. Many people wanted to get rid of Brown and give David Cameron a chance, but he hadn’t convinced enough of them that the Tories had changed. From the sceptics’ point of view, a Lib-Con coalition is reassuring because it tethers a Cameron-led government to the centre ground.

Most Conservatives would have preferred an overall majority, but given the unpopular-ity of the austerity measures the government will have to introduce, it’s better that the responsibility for those decisions should be shared. A Conservative government, even one commanding a majority in the House, would still not have been elected by a majority of the electorate and, as a result, would have found it harder to inflict swingeing cuts and make them stick. Some sort of civil unrest is probably inevitable, but it will be less widespread under a Lib-Con coalition than under a Conservative government and, more importantly, easier to put down. A battle between the Tories and the public sector unions would have had a whiff of class war about it: the haves versus the have-nots. But if you add the Lib Dems to the Conservative ranks it looks more like the forces of reason versus the forces of unreason.

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