Why are the Lib Dems duffing up the Tories? To ensure another coalition

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[/audioplayer]The last Liberal Democrat conference before the general election has been dominated by denunciations of the ‘nasty’ Tories. Lib Dems claim they are shocked to find George Osborne proposing a freeze in working age benefits. But can they really be so very surprised? Given that they themselves blocked the Tories from implementing this policy in the current parliament, they must have suspected that Osborne would want to do it in the next.

But through all the platform rhetoric, the outlines of a second Tory/Lib Dem coalition have become clear in the past fortnight. The parties now agree on raising the income tax threshold to £12,500, protecting the NHS budget and, as Vince Cable made clear in his conference speech, cracking down on EU benefit tourism.

There have been two negotiating red lines drawn at this conference by the Liberal Democrats. The first would stop the Tories from scrapping the Human Rights Act, but when Chris Grayling announced this policy he was careful to stress that it was only what a Tory majority government would do. In other words, it won’t be a deal breaker. The second red line, on mental health, is not something that one can imagine either of the main parties objecting to. So there is no impassable barrier to a second Tory/Lib Dem coalition if the numbers are there after the election.

Why, then, has there been so much Tory- bashing at this conference? Well, as senior Liberal Democrats admit, they need to fire up their activists. The party’s whole election strategy is dependent on getting its message out to 10,000 to 15,000 homes in its held seats and to do that it needs people out knocking on doors.