Vote Clegg Get Brown

SUNDAY, APRIL 18, 2010

Vote Clegg Get Brown

X Factor it ain't

Tyler again spent a chunk of his sunny weekend out canvassing.

Post the leadership debate the doorstep mood seems to have hardened against all politicians - they're all as bad as one another... I may not vote at all, etc. 

But there is also a view that given our dire straights, the politicos should stop bickering and come together for the good of Britain. Why can't we have a coalition like we had in the War?

The answer of course, is that we aren't at war. But in fairness, we have had coalition government in peacetime as well. And in circumstances not so very different to those we now face. 

The last time we tried full-blown peacetime coalition was in 1931, in response to the financial and economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash 2 years earlier. Then too, we faced the need to make big spending cuts, and then too, a Labour government was not up to the task.

So we got a National Government, comprising a coalition of Conservatives, Labour, and Liberals, under the leadership of Labour's Ramsay MacDonald (see slick party political above). It was very popular, and in the subsequent election it won 90% of the seats. But the bulk of the Labour party split away, and was pretty well wiped out, losing 80% of their seats. The Liberals also split and were rewarded with a similarly savage electoral mauling. Only the Tories came up smelling of roses, winning 55% of the vote and 76% of the seats: their man Baldwin later took over as PM.

Which tells us something. 

It tells us that although it was called the National Government, and although it pretended to be a coalition, it was in fact a Tory government. And as time went by, it came to be increasingly dominated by Tories.

Unfortunately, the coalition that's now hoving into view will not be a Tory government. It will be a LibLab lash-up. And does anyone seriously imagine such a lash-up will be capable of making spending cuts on the scale required? 

No, it won't.

It will deliver us that financial crisis that's been brewing. 

And our return visit from the IMF.

PS On Saturday I met my first certified BNP voter of this election. It was alarming. Not because he had a shaved head and a pitbull on a chain, but because he didn't. He looked perfectly respectable and was washing his BMW outside a neat 4 bed executive detached. That must be what happens when Westminster no longer represents the views of ordinary taxpaying law-abiding punters in 4 bed executive homes.