- One Tory Cabinet minister told The Independent yesterday: "One scenario is an informal pact in which the two Coalition partners would help each other where they could. Voters aren't stupid. They can work out who is best placed to win in their constituency – as they did in Oldham. It wouldn't have to be a formal, top-down pact, which would be very difficult to impose on local associations in any case."
Coalition politics are the right way to go but it has a lot of learning to do. Not just at the point of the coalition, but by the voters and by the parties in other tiers of government that are not in coalition. It works well in many countries, but fundementally parties must make sure they know who they are aligning themselves with.It came as no surprise to me that the Lib Dems saw themselves more right wing than left, but it may have come as a surprise to Lib Dem voters in Kent after year's of rhetoric trying to position the LDs as the opposition to the Tories.
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Agree entirely - the Lib Dems cosying up to the Tories has been on the cards ever since Clegg and Laws (and Huhne) wrote their "Orange Book" back in the early 2000s. And interesting to see how after their misguided interpretation of the Oldham result being one to offer succour to them, even the pseudo-rebels like Simon Highes started backsliding on their worries about the damage the Coalition's policies are doing and will do to ordinary people.
For many LD activists and voters, who are genuinely to the left, though, the Green Party should be a more than obvious alternative and hopefully over the next couple of years this will become more evident to them.
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