The Autumn Statement Makes a Tory-Lib Dem Electoral Pact More Likely

Amidst the economic doom and gloom (though all the forecasts are always wrong so who knows how things will look by 2015?), the politics of the coalition government remain interesting. So Danny Alexander’s performance on Newnight tonight was very interesting. The Chief Secretary of the Treasury told Jeremy Paxman that the Liberal Democrats were committed to the new spending and borrowing plans announced by George Osborne yesterday. Furthermore, the spending cuts announced for the first two years of the next parliament (though said plans can only be aspirational since they cannot, surely, bind the next parliament?) would be part of the next Liberal Democrat manifesto.

I doubt Tim Farron or Simon Hughes or even Vince Cable think this a good idea. Nevertheless, Alexander has committed his party to a further £30bn in cuts in the next parliament. This is brave, impressively loyal or foolhardy and, quite possibly, all three. I daresay Alexander can be disowned but the importance of the politics of all this should not be discounted.

At the Treasury and, I bet, in Downing Street they are preparing for some kind of non-agression pact with the Lib Dems at the next general election. That made sense even before the economy began to list; it becomes more important now. The Lib Dems, to continue the nautical talk, are lashed to the mast anyway and will have to take their chances. But for the Tories, the Lib Dems become a small political insurance policy. Perhaps they won’t be needed after the next election but it’s a rash Prime Minister who dismisses them now.

The economic outloook, then, will bind the coalition together. It was notable that Alexander would have nothing to do with Paxman’s tedious attempts to “score” the Autumn Statement by getting Danny Boy to reveal some dastardly bastardish Tory policy that the Lib Dems had managed to keep out of Osborne’s speech. That’s not how it works. Osborne is the government’s Chancellow of the Exchequer, not the Conservative party’s and that’s how it is going to stay. When he speaks he speaks for the coalition.

Of course there will be other areas in which the parties will at some point agree to disagree but the incentives for some kind of pact, whether official or not, at the next election remain. Alexander has only made this clear.

What’s more, when it comes to setting expectations for the next election the government parties should try and persuade everyone that Labour must win more seats than the Tories and Liberals combined if it’s to have the “moral” right to be asked to form a government. Just adding seats or being the largest single party is not enough. That might be a tough sell but it’s another insurance policy the government could do with.