Nick Clegg has had a very disappointing 24 hours. After a successful performance in the first debate and weeks of Clegg-mania, some pundits before yesterday even went as far as imagining a LibDem majority. And yet, the support Clegg and his party gained in the pre-election opinion polls failed to translate into votes and seats. Ultimately, when they stood at the ballot box, British voters believed all the scare-mongering the two main parties and Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda machine have been feeding them over the last few weeks – the “Vote Clegg, get Brown/Vote Clegg, get Cameron/Oooh, the Markets won’t like a hung Parliament” litany we’ve been unable to escape since Clegg’s triumphant performance in the first debate.
And yet, the electorate did not exactly express confidence in either Labour or the Conservatives, and this morning Nick Clegg found himself in the position he has spent the entire campaign rejecting: the kingmaker. So, despite losing five seats and failing to capitalise on their pre-election popularity, the Liberal Democrats still have everything to play for. They are currently talking to the Conservatives about a fairly wide range of issues to understand where they can find common ground. They may still talk to Labour. Issues that have been mentioned by the various party leaders over the course of the day and the courtship include taxation, defence, the EU (the Tories’ “line in the sand”), education, tackling the deficit, low-carbon economy, the economic recovery and, of course, the elephant in the room that is electoral reform.
So on what criteria should Nick Clegg and the Parliamentary Liberal Democrats base a decision as to who to attempt to form a government with? There are practical issues for a start: Con/Lib would have an absolute majority, Lab/Lib wouldn’t. While chances are that a Lab/Lib government could work, there would be no guarantee that some of the smaller parties wouldn’t try to throw a spanner in the works, especially when it comes to, say, cuts in Scotland or Wales. Another question to consider would be what government positions they can get. Arguably having Vince Cable as Chancellor would do us all a world of good in the short to medium term. Though Lord Kalms has already explained (on PM) in no uncertain terms that no major cabinet positions would be given to the LibDems in the event of a Con/Lib coalition.
We then start looking at policies and manifesto issues, and it very quickly becomes clear that the only thing worth playing for – for the Liberal Democrats and the country both – is electoral reform. Changing Britain’s electoral system to a form of Proportional Representation would be something that would leave a legacy for generations. It would drastically change the political landscape and culture of this country – and for the better. Gone would be the days of tactical voting, the days when a Labour seat is worth 33k votes whereas a LibDem one is worth 126k and a seat for the Greens 200k. Michael “I am a banana” Gove may disagree with me, but any other system would be more democratic than the current one.
Realistically, there is no way for the Liberal Democrats to achieve true electoral reform in a coalition with the Tories. David Cameron’s overtures on the subject were extremely cagey, and it is doubtful whether he can carry the rest of his party with him even that far. A Con/Lib coalition therefore is unlikely to achieve anything significant. It would legitimise a largely Tory government, with largely Tory policies which would severely damage the country socially and economically. It would also get the Liberal Democrats implicated in the savage cuts which will need to come regardless of who’s in power and which are likely to make the party implementing them unelectable for a generation in Mervyn King’s assessment. And it could not achieve anything like true electoral reform.
A Lab/Lib coalition, personality clashes between Clegg and Brown notwithstanding, is a lot more likely to achieve good, lasting political reform. Labour are a lot more open to the idea than the Tories. In addition, Labour and the LibDems are far more natural allies in both economic and social policy. Even if they ended up implementing the necessary budget cuts to tackle the deficit, a Lab/Lib coalition is much more likely to protect the poorest and cushion the worst of the impact. And once PR is through, in about 18 months’ time, they could call a new election. The LibDems would have left a lasting legacy while also making it possible for them to play a meaningful, influential role in British politics for generations to come.
Therefore, the only item on the LibDem shopping list really should be serious, lasting electoral reform; and it should be non-negotiable.
Once we’ve crossed that bridge, of course, the question is how to best achieve the right kind of electoral reform through a referendum. The public is notoriously fickle and referenda are a risky business. Many a referendum has failed because of the way the question was worded. Had it not been for that, for instance, the Queen would in all likelihood no longer be Head of State of Australia.
@norightturnnz over on Twitter pointed me in the direction of the New Zealand electoral reform this morning. A two-stage approach seems like the best way to go about it, as it separates the question of whether we should scrap First Past the Post from the question of what we should replace it with, and thus doesn’t split the pro-reform vote.
I’m getting carried away of course. First we need a government – any government. Ideally, though, it should be one fully committed to comprehensive electoral reform and moving away from FPTP. And just because I haven’t quoted this stat enough today, here it is again:
Number of votes needed to gain one seat in Parliament under the current UK electoral system: Lab: 33k, Con: 35k, LibDem: 126k, Greens: 200k
If that is democracy, Michael Gove is a banana.

I’ve been twittering away on some of these issues and a few others overnight/early this morning. Longer post is coming, but will probably focus on electoral reform to start with. However, a friend over on LJ asked some interesting questions and I thought I’d cross-post my answers.
Does failing to crush a government as unpopular as Gordon Brown’s bode badly for David Cameron in terms of public support for Conservatives and their policies?
I think so, and I hope so. I also suspect that if the Conservatives do manage to form a government, it will become very clear very quickly that Big Society doesn’t work and Compassionate Conservatism doesn’t exist. That combined with the harsh public spending cuts they’ll need to make may well prove Mervyn King right and make them unlectable for a generation, which would be a good result in my books. Of course the question remains of how much damage they’ll do to the country before they’re kicked out. I’m still hoping for Lib/Lab deal with a main priority of bringing about electoral reform in the next 18 months.
Does the fact that Liberal Democrat popular support in polls failed to translate to votes depress you, or give you hope for the electorate that a few television appearances were not enough to swing the election?
I think there are three significant factors here.
1. First Past the Post is an appalling electoral system. Here are the numbers as of 7am today: Lib Dem: 6202692 votes = 50 seats, Lab: 7803647 votes = 234 seats. Labour have 1.26 times the number of votes of the Lib Dems but 4.68 times the number of seats.
2. And this plays in with (1): Because FPTP is so incredibly bad, the scaremongering that both Labour and the Tories, as well as Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda machine, threw at the electorate (Vote Clegg, get Brown/Vote Clegg, get Cameron) clearly worked. I’ve not looked at the seat-by-seat numbers (and probably won’t – not feeling quite geeky enough), but I suspect that the LibDems got smeared between Labour and the Tories in marginals both ways.
3. Personally I think Nick Clegg didn’t play his cards right. He tried to have his cake and eat it. Declaring that he couldn’t work with Gordon Brown, cozying up a little too much with David Cameron, and at the same time trying to stay on the fence and position himself as the outsider is a bit too much of a contortionist’s act and he lost credibility over it.
For me the bigger story this morning is actually the failure of the infrastructure to cope with the turnout and the resulting disenfranchisement of thousands of people who turned up and were not allowed to vote. We had polling stations running out of ballot papers, as well as turning away people who in some cases had been queuing for hours from 9.30 pm onwards, and in one place 600 people who were registered to vote weren’t on the electoral roll. Two points about this:
1. The Electoral Commission appears to be most concerned with rule book thumping and thus with the handful of people who did get to vote after 10 pm, rather than with the thousands turned away. I am unimpressed.
2. (This came across a lot more strongly on Twitter than it did in mainstream media.) In a number of constituencies students (a lot of whom would be first-time voters!) seem to have been disproportionately affected by this failure of infrastructure. One returning officer fed us the line of “They turned up without polling cards and therefore took longer to process”, but eyewitness accounts talk of students being put in separate queues to “residents” regardless of whether they had a polling card or not, and disproportionately it was the students who didn’t get to vote.
This casts a very dark shadow over this election, and unless it is addressed quickly and decisively, the risk is that an entire generation get alienated from the political process because this was their first brush with it.