I am fortunate enough to live in a Labour/Conservative marginal, so I can vote how I’d like to and know it will make an impact on who wins the seat. But if I lived in a seat where the choice was between the Tories and Liberal Democrats, I’ve always been absolutely clear in my mind that voting Lib Dem was, to quote Jack Aubrey, “the lesser of two weevils”…until now.
Nick Clegg’s been obstinantly oblique in telling us who he might or might not shack up with in the event of a hung parliament. This morning, he lifted his petticoats just a little more and flashed a bit of leg at the Tories – he wouldn’t, he said, support a Labour government that came third in terms of the popular vote, even if we got the most seats. Now, I think this is a foolish stance to take for a number of reasons – for one, Liberal Democrat policy, for all it’s oddities, is much closer to Labour than it is to the Tories. The Lib Dem base is overwhelmingly anti-Tory, and would, I suspect, be much happier as part of a progressive ‘Popular Front’ government than sharing the Ministry with a Tory party that is still deeply regressive.
The second point is more interesting though. As I said above, until this morning, Labour voters in seats where the fight is between Lib Dems and Conservatives could be expected to cast their votes for the Liberal Democrat in significant numbers. However, if Clegg’s going to put such an emphasis on the overall number of votes – and not seats, the measure by which every other government in this country has been formed – he runs the risk of scaring these voters back into a ‘wasted’ Labour vote.
Who knows whether ‘real’ people (ie, those of us not currently eating, breathing and sleeping the campaign and it’s associated ephemera) think about these things on this level, but this may still prove to be a mistake from Clegg…
