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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Graham Brady is wrong: Dave never had the option of a minority government in May 2010
The 1922 Committee chair, Graham Grady was on the World at One this lunchtime repeating one of the great myths about the formation of the coalition in May 2010.
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The Queen's Speech would have fallen, and Cameron would have become PM.
Some posters on here would have preferred a Green Party government, or a UKIP government. Just because that wasn't possible given the election results doesn't mean their preference was (or is) wrong.
[Note: I didn't listen to WatO. If Brady claimed it was a possibility and should have been pursued, then fair enough. But as it's written up here the headline is bollocks].
The country would not have allowed him to chain himself to the Downing Street railings even with Clegg aiding and abetting him.
In any case, even if you can form a minority government, it doesn't follow that you can govern as though you had a majority. In fact, the Conservative-led coalition has been able to achieve a lot more than any minority government could have managed.
Constitutionally the Queen would have invited (as she did) Cameron to attempt to form an administration as it became clear Brown could not or would not be able to form a government. The Feb 74 precedent is clear.
I cannot see how the Tories in that scenario could have done any better than May 2010, which was Labour's nadir.
In short, Cameron would never had the chance to form a minority government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q9yDfJturtw
You are forgeting, in 1974, the Queen invited Harold Wilson only after Heath and Thorpe's negotiations broke down.
Given that Cameron will be in possession a similar result at the next election might produce a different outcome but in 2010 Cameron achieved the best he could have done.
Whether the Tories handled subsequent negotiations well, or the Orange Book Lib Dems badly, one thing is for sure. The Tories have enjoyed having the Lib Dems as cover for introducing more Rightwing, ideologically zealous policies than they would have ever dared with a slim majority.
Whether that speech survived or not depended on any arrangements with the LD, SNP, DUP etc. If only that vote was defeated could the Queen have invited Cameron to form a government.
In 2015, in a similar situation, Cameron would be in the box seat no matter who got most seats or most votes. The second one doesn't matter anyway.
Senior labour figures like David Blunkett had already publicly stated the party needed and deserved a period in opposition. I seriously doubt lib/lab et al would have survived a confidence motion.
O/T Et Al'
‘IF’ and it certainly was a big if at the time, Gordon Brown had formed his ‘Rainbow Coalition’ how long would it have lasted & would such a creature with 6 heads achieved what needed to be done?
It's probably emotional stress. He's seen his party disintegrate and his voters flock to UKIP since the coalition started.
Brown's position was untenable as was Home in 64. The numbers simply did not add up to the former PM being able to command a majority or viable minority government. Wilson of course had a very tiny majority.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-23759827
Miss Lucas told reporters that she had "tried to use the democratic processes... [but] the government isn't listening."
I guess what Lucas thinks is the "democratic process", is her trying to impose her decisions on the rest of the country.
The precedent is surely 1923 (which of course you'll recall vividly) when Baldwin and the Conservatives lost many seats and their majority, albeit remaining the largest party. He did not resign until his Queen's Speech was defeated allowing MacDonald to form a Labour minority govt with Liberal support.
So Brown was constitutionally within his rights to stay in office as he did. But the notion that a "coalition of the losers" - formal or informal - sustained in office by SNP and Welsh Nats would have survived more than a matter of weeks is risible and beggars belief. The markets would have collapsed, the pound in freefall, and would either Nationalist party, let alone the LibDems have voted for an even more austere emergency budget than the one introduced bu Osborne??
By June, Cameron would be PM of a minority administration and probably even better poised to win an outright majority, given the circumstances of his appointment, at a second election in the autumn...
....But he and Clegg chose the right option.
I loved this from Chris
chris g @chrisg0000
@PlatoSays @CarolineLucas
Lucas: Problems began about 1745
PC: Last night?
Lucas: No in 1745
PC: Oh...*reaches for overtime form*
Free the pbTory One!!
In theory Brown might have clung on until the Queens Speech but Clegg had already indicated his "winner" gets first option stand.
Miss Lucas told reporters that she had "tried to use the democratic processes... [but] the government isn't listening."
Do we know what chemicals are used in the democratic process?
I agree with Mr. Smithson. The only viable option for a stable government was a Con-Lib coalition.
F1: early discussion for Spa is up here:
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/belgium-early-discussion.html
Raikkonen's confirmed as not being the Red Bull driver, it's thought likely to be Ricciardo, though not yet officially announced.
I don't agree that fracking is insane, but I think what Lucas has done is probably the kind of thing the people who voted for her would have wanted.
So good on her..
The only insane thing is neglecting our energy security. If our energy security can be ensured using green power, all for the good. If not, we need to try to move towards it. Until that idyllic state is reached, fracking might well form a reasonable part of the energy-supply mix.
I was hoping for something a bit more principled than fare evasion as a result of going 200 miles too far on the train home...
Jennifer Hepler wrote Dragon Age 2 (good game but not as well-received as the predecessor, Origins) and has left Bioware. Some are reporting this is due to harassment (some morons threatened to find her children on the way to school and murder them), but apparently that's not the case.
However, this behaviour is not limited to women involved in videogames. As I mentioned some time ago, the chap we modified Call of Duty so that certain guns reloaded a tenth of a second or so more slowly also received death threats, aimed at himself and his family.
*sighs*
I'm mildly surprised this hasn't got even a slight mention given the recent media coverage of misogynist abuse. The above examples aren't sexist, but the threats are just as bad.
Josias you need to take into account the mentality of a left winger. Dogma comes before all. Their consciences MUST be satisfied, even if its at the cost of the UK being turned into some sort of third world basket case through power cuts.
Some people might start with the assumption that the UK needs power and then see how green we could reasonably make the supply we need.
People like Carl start with the assumption the UK must have green power, and then see how much there is to go around.
Dogma comes before ALL - even if hundreds of thousands freeze to death, can't get to work, see their operations cancelled, see their employer move to a country where there is energy.
He did have a valid ticket however; it was just in the opposite direction and 100 miles closer.
It sounds like your eldest would get on famously with our JohnO. I just hope he doesnt develop some of JohnO's other bad habits. Like becoming a Tory Cllr
I mean, wouldn't it make more sense to get arrested over the fact that we have ships containing 125,000 cubic metres of LNG floating about the place (including, soon, ships that will be bringing us gas from fracking in the US)? Why on earth pick on harmless Balcombe?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_carrier
http://gcaptain.com/energy-firm-signs-20-year-import/
Yet three years later we have a Conservative government run on Cameron and Osborne's terms, with no more than the very occasional bone being thrown to the LD poodle. Where did it all go wrong for Clegg?
Given the tiny amounts of our needs renewables can furnish right now, how do you propose to make up the massive energy short falls this policy would result in????
Cameron and his team must've been really worried about this scenario in that it probably would've have finished Cameron.
I doubt Clegg would've gone for a Labour coalition even if Brown had stepped aside. He knew the GE result and Labour's derisory 29% meant they had to leave office. But he had a little time to horse-trade, to improve the Tory offer, and he used it well. Clegg too had to be careful not to spite himself - despite an underwhelming election result for him, he had the opportunity of a lifetime within his grasp. If he spent too long wooing Labour it could've finished him too.
I suppose it is possible that if Cameron had become annoyed with the Lib Dems, sat tight, watched them try to put together a rainbow coalition without Brown, and then watched that fall through within a short time, then he could've formed a minority government. But that's a lot of ifs, and would've been an enormously risky route fior Cameron to take, and Cameron is sensible enough to have taken the correct and best option, regardless of what the right-wingers on his backbenches think.
But in terms of the constitutional what if's and the possible scenarios, it was a really interesting election result and in the end, I believe the country ended up with the government which best reflected the result.
It is wrong for us to develop our own energy resources because then we might be tempted to use them to make things. If this means supporting despotic regimes that murder their people to keep warm well, at least Balcombe is saved.
I don't think it is going too far to say that how the Coalition stands up to these
nutterspeople of a different view is going to be one of the most important economic decisions this government will make.Pillock.
The Parish Council have agreed to address this dilemma at its next meeting. The matter will be discussed after a local resident's application to cut back excessive foliage on a neighbour's Leyland Cypress is determined by the Council.
A post so far away from the real world it utterly takes the breath away.
Until you have an answer for these questions, then throwing 'insane' around is rather, well, insane.
As a starter, I point you towards David MacKay's excellent website. Peruse it and see that there are no easy answers ...
http://www.withouthotair.com/
(*) If going for solar and some other advanced technologies, factor in availability of rare-earth and other raw materials.
I don't believe for one moment that Brown would have negotiated himself out of office, and a DMill lead coalition as a minority would never have happened. Labour would have been damaged for a long time if they had been seen to be hanging on in some such form, and rightly so because the money markets would have kicked us hard.
In all the resulting chaos the LDs would almost certainly have found a way to get PR enacted. I wonder if their strategists discussed that?
Try for example here for starters. We have choices.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/insecurity-zero-hours-contracts
It's just making profitable coal mining which they object to. As long as the taxpayers subsidise it, it's a public good.
I asked you what you envisaged. As this is obviously an important matter for you, I was wondering if you'd done any in-depth analysis of the problem. Producing your own energy budget is an excellent way of doing this, and leads into a great deal of other interesting areas.
The end result is always simple: we cannot produce enough power within the UK. That introduces an international component, more difficulties, and less security.
Many schemes also rely on hardware and technology that does not yet exist.
Energy usage reduction can only take us so far. I always laugh when I see green activists using Apple products ...
@RichardNabavi "Everyone knows that the left is very keen on coal mining,"
Then why were more coal mines closed under the Labour Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan than Thatcher?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Cameron's ok though isn't he? I don't think you're being at all fair if you describe him as you did. He may be entirely wrong, but his background is irrelevant to that. I suspect you'd struggle to find comments referring to 'whining peasants' in relation to those of like mind to yourself. Politics really did move on from the rich vs poor battleground a while back, admittedly the separation has been somewhat experimental.
Experts have been looking at this problem for some time, and it would be a waste of time for me to replicate their work.
They have all concluded that we can massively cut our reliance on fossil fuels by widespread deployment of renewable technologies, and that we would make life easier for ourselves if we include nuclear in the mix and get a move on with carbon capture and storage.
The government response - of whichever colour rosette - has been distinctly underwhelming, despite the fact that we have known this is the situation for more than a decade, very little has been done, or attempted to be done.
We seem to be drifting into an energy policy that relies on gas out of inertia, rather than choice.
It would just be nice to see a Government set out a direction of travel that reduces our CO2 emissions, rather than encouraging more as this Government is doing (and, sadly, the next Government probably will too).
Then why were more coal mines closed under the Labour Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan than Thatcher?
In order to show the Labour Party's green credentials, perchance?
I remember we discussed here before the abuse that a woman designer got for suggesting a fast-forward OPTION for combat to balance the option to skip dialogue. Some people couldn't bear the idea that anyone might play their games differently from the One True Way.
Come on. Some random website somewhere-or-other is hardly worth quoting.
There are some stubbornly persistent and rather backwards views in the games industry. Naughty Dog deserve credit for ignoring the marketing men who wanted to axe Ellie from the cover of the excellent The Last Of Us, and insisting on some female gamers to playtest it.
'Achievable' is mainly a scientific and engineering problem, with political and business issues decidedly secondary.
Take wave or tidal power: we have oodles of wave power off our coasts (although perhaps not as much as expected), yet we have no large-scale tidal or wave scheme in the UK, despite millions having been pumped in.
The reason is that it's a bloody difficult bit of engineering. Perhaps the problems will be solved; whether they will be solved at a reasonable cost is another matter.
For example, the coalition deal could have fallen apart after Brown left with Cameron already in no10.
Equally, if presented with a supply deal pending full coalition negotiations, I suspect the LDs would have taken it. The one thing Labour could not offer was a Lab-LD coalition. The maths did not add up.
Brown had been told by the voter very clearly to **** off, so I'm afraid the idea that he could have clung on indefinitely is pie in the sky nonsense.
If the lib dems could have cobbled something together with Brown and other parties then that was a very small outside chance. The fact is they couldn't, they didn't want to and it soon became clear that Clegg never had any real intention to do a deal with anyone other than Cammie. Clegg's posturing to Brown and labour was primarily to try and put pressure on Cammie for a better deal. Clegg's complete lack of enthusiasm for a lib lab deal was replicated by quite a few labour 'big beasts' who just wanted to dump Brown and get on with the labour leadership battle as soon as possible since they finally had their chance.
The obvious and real reason that Cameron didn't go for a minority administration or some type of confidence and supply with the lib dems is that he might well have soon found himself out on his arse as the tory party was none too happy with Cammie and Osbrowne failing to win a majority. The knives were being sharpened with tories like Ashcroft and others all struggling to distance themselves from the lamentable tory campaign "the Big Society" etc. Nor was Cameron alone as Clegg hardly covered himself in glory winning less seats than Kennedy when the lib dem balloon deflated on election night.
Brown was done but Cammie and Clegg were in real trouble and the only thing guaranteed to save both their skins was a coalition so that's what we got.
Had a coalition deal fallen through Cameron and Clegg would have tried for confidence and supply and you can be 100% certain that would have been spun as 'the only way forward' 'a brave principled decision' and great deal more bollocks of the same sort in the same way the actual coalition is spun.
The coalition was a choice. It was the choice of Cameron and Clegg and they own it.
They are the coalition.
paulrudolph 19 August 2013 3:26pm
And this is the person tipped by many as a future leader of the Labour Party?,
Good grief,my grandparents would be spinning if we'd buried them.
Also, it is my view that if Labour had gone to the country in 2007, we would have a Tory majority now. 2011/2 would have been a horrible time to go to the polls.
Brown made the right call.