• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Policies of a Cleggmania Government

Bolt451

Sometimes things that are expensive...are worse
Published by SLP
Location
Sandford, Gloucestershire
Pronouns
She/They
I found an old PMs list
2010-2024: David Cameron (Conservative-Liberal Democrats Coalition) (1)
Def 2010: Gordon Brown (Labour) Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) Caroline Lucas (Greens) Nigel Farage (UKIP )
2011: Alternative Vote Referendum: 51% Yes 49% No
2014: Scottish Independence Referendum: 51% Leave 49% Remain
2014-2015: George Osborne (Conservative-Liberal Democrats Coalition) (2)
2015-2016 George Osborne Conservative Minority

Def 2015: Andy Burnham (Labour) Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) Nigel Farage (UKIP) Natalie Bennet (Greens)
EU Membership Referendum: 53% Remain 47% Leave
2016-2024 George Osborne (Conservative-Liberal Democrats Coalition)
Def 2020: Tristram Hunt (Labour) Evan Harris (Liberal Democrats) Amelia Womack/David Lammy (Green-Left) John Rees-Evans (UKIP)
2024-Present: Priti Patel (Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition)


  1. Failed to secure a majority and formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who secured 144 seats following a popular performance by Nick Clegg in the Leaders debate. There was a big call for electoral reform after the election with the Liberal Democrats getting barely 0.5% less votes than the tories but half the seats and still 50 seats less than Labour, despite getting 10% more of the vote. This resulted in the referendum over a Switch to the Alternative Vote system
  2. Cameron and Miliband both resgned following Scotland’s independence


And this left me wondering. Lets say there was only one debate in 2010. It was the week before the election and Britain went into a high

Electoral Calculus *"Boo! boo! Rhubarb! Custard!"* puts the Lib Dems on around 130 seats on the one poll they were in the lead. Lets say the Lib Dems get the best possibly result and hit 130 seats. with the Tories on around 260 and Labour on around 230-240.

What would the subsequent government look like? What would happen regards any voting reform.? Is this literally something done before? If so, which TL was it?


(Said electoral calculus list has people like Chuka Umunna, Tristram Hunt, Andrew Lansley and Emily Thornbury losing their seats)
 
Last edited:
Hm.

First choice for the Lib Dems would be working with the Tories
  • Voting reform - AV for sure and a referendum on STV
  • Some sort of compromise on tuition fees - the political will wasn't there with the Lib Dem leaders for full scrapping but I think they'd be forced to do some work - we might be looking at an earlier Augur Report - so varying course costs for humanities and social science "cheap" subjects, maybe accelerated degrees at low costs? Subsidised STEM courses? It's an expensive and botched compromise, which sounds right for Clegg and students
  • Devo-Max being much more maximum and not being seen as *quite* as much as a desperate bribe to same the union - better results in Scotland for Remain.
  • An elected house of Lords is probably a given - likely with STV - likely not elected all in one go. Osborne thinks he's cleverer than he is, and annual HoL elections with big constituencies electing a small number of peers sounds like how I'd do it if I was him - it keeps the big parties powerful. It also means that the number of unelected Lords and Bishops who stay around could be decided year on year, which would be a nice bribe to keep the Lib Dems in line year on year
  • Given the mess May made as Home Secretary more Lib Dems arguing against the snooper's charter might help fix things in the Home Office before so many Windrush generation people got deported.
  • Much bigger push on regional devolution, with logical regions rather than devo-on-Osborne's-demand
  • Equal Marriage might be a way less fucked up bit of legislation - more controls against homophobic religions being able to dictate that their morality must be upheld in tax-payer owned chaplaincies, maybe equalising things with Civil Partnerships and opening them to The Straights. There's like a 5% chance that less terrified Libs might even have asked a trans person what they thought of the Spousal Veto.
 
  • An elected house of Lords is probably a given - likely with STV - likely not elected all in one go. Osborne thinks he's cleverer than he is, and annual HoL elections with big constituencies electing a small number of peers sounds like how I'd do it if I was him - it keeps the big parties powerful. It also means that the number of unelected Lords and Bishops who stay around could be decided year on year, which would be a nice bribe to keep the Lib Dems in line year on year

That seems plausible, and I wonder what it does to how Lords functions - harder to get them rebelling against government now & then when they're elected and job is on the line if the government does badly, which then leaves a rift between the elected and unelected. Bigger shift too if Lords get voted for at different times to Commons, then we could have a situation like America's midterms where the Lords vote is dominated by disgruntled 'protests' against whichever government is in power (but messier because ITTL there's coalition governments and you've got the Scottish, Welsh and metro governments!)
 
First choice for the Lib Dems would be working with the Tories
While I certainly would agree that the first choice would naturally be to go to the Tories- Clegg's pledge after all was to talk to the party "with the largest number of seats and votes"- as David Laws noted in his autobiographical-history Coalition the major barriers to coalition with Labour, something that the party as a whole favoured, were the numerical concerns of a working majority, which are eliminated in this scenario (a 80-70 seat majority would be achieved with a Lab-Lib Government), and Brown, who the Lib Dems did not want to prop up. A full coalition with either party would be sought after, as was Chris Huhne's recommendation on the morning of Cameron's Big Open Offer IoTL, and although Clegg would still talk to Cameron first with Gordon pleading on the phone for Nick to come over and be agreeable, Brown can make a stronger case for a Coalition than the desperate rainbow faff of OTL, and as much as Nick may prefer Cameron, he'd face internal opposition that would overwhelm him if he tried to go with the Tories.

The triple lock is what I think makes it impossible for the Lib Dems to go to the Blue in this scenario. As strong as Brown's case to go for a Lab-Lib Coalition would be, so would the case against the Con-Lib Coalition once Clegg's gets to talking to his MPs, as the problem of the Tories being the Liberals 'natural' enemy becomes more weighted once there is a viable alternative to them, and while the MPs of course also didn't want to prop up an unpopular second Brown administration, Brown was publicly willing to fall on his sword OTL just at the desperate grasps at such a Coalition, and there would be no question that once his Leadership became the biggest problem, he'd also sacrifice himself for the betterment of the Country, and if a proper Government could be wrangled, than the likes of Balls would take negotiations, as much as they strung, more seriously- or maybe he'd still act entitled- at the end of the day I think the only way forward, in such a position, would be for Labour and Liberal Democrats to meet in the proverbial and literal rose garden.
 
Back
Top