A Confession – 2

Being of independent thought and liberal mind, one blog I read regularly and would recommend to others is Liberal Conspiracy. Here is a forum where folk from a wide range of views blog and comment.

So the news that Corporal Clegg and his motley platoon have gone in with Young Dave and his jolly good chaps has been debated with some vigour in LibCon over the last few days.

And here I find myself on the opposite side of the debate – something that does not happen often – from the routinely mischievous Sunny Hundal, on the subject of minority Governments.

My view is that it would have been perfectly reasonable for Clegg and the Lib Dems to leave the Tories to form a minority Government and deal with it on a “confidence and supply” basis. Then it would have been down to Cameron to behave sensibly and demonstrate that he really was behaving in the national interest (rather than emulating Stanley Baldwin).

Sunny is of the view that a minority Government would not be sufficiently stable, which is entirely possible, but then, Alex Salmond and the Scot Nats seem to be coping at Holyrood. On this issue I suspect we will not persuade each other of our case.

Where I do agree with Sunny is that Labour has not made it easy for the Lib Dems to deal with them, and that there is sufficient baggage from the thirteen years of the New Labour Project to turn off many who have favoured the Lib Dems at the ballot box from considering voting Labour.

So what can Labour do to demonstrate that they are worth the consideration of those voters, while retaining the support they have? This I’ll consider next.