Goodbye Liberals?

[theredbladder]

EVERYTHING is looking absolutely rosy in the all-new and brightly shining Conservative-Liberal coalition. Well at this early stage it would, wouldn’t it?
But judging from the dire warnings coming from everyone involved from the Prime Minister down to the man who sweeps out the Liberal Hall in Yeovil they are going to take the type of budgetary decisions that will make them as popular as a couple of cheap tarts in the royal enclosure at Ascot.
Taxes will rise, other things will have new taxes slapped on them and they might even be forced into the novel notion of placing a tax on taxes. None of this will play well with the voting public. No more will the types of cuts to public services that we are promised will as swinging as Herod’s slaughter of the first born.
Just a few months down the line the mere words Conservative and Liberal will become the sort that young children get their mouths washed out with soap and water for uttering in the presence of their maiden aunts. The polls will probably start to place them as coming closely behind the party that proposes declaring war on the Channel Islands.
The members of this hotchpotch of a partnership are going to face the prospect of being as unelectable as Nick Griffin would be in Zimbabwe.
Then a bright young man, and the party machines assure us that they both have more of them than an aggressive farmer could shake a stick at during a prolonged drought, will come up with a bright idea “Why” he will ask “are we spending money and expending energy on splitting the vote by standing against each other in the majority of constituencies?”
Since, by that time, the members of the coalition will have no friends other than each other, even their closest families will regard them as pariahs, they will all breath a sigh of utter relief and throw them selves into each others arms one more.
Of course this would only be an alliance and not a conjoining of the two parties. It may well sound familiar and it might just work.
It would start as a temporary electoral pact. “Why should the two members of a ‘successful’ coalition fight each other at the hour of the nation‘s greatest need?“ They will ask. And so, it might come to pass. And then?
They will be on a slope that is both steep and slippery. Is this the beginning of the end for the liberals?

[obvious dave]

i was flabbergasted that they took up rooms with the cons that is them condemned and us with it. All in the word of fairness a word you cannot decry its like saying only losers say no yet it mean lets curtain everything cleverly with fairness. oh what a wonderful world

[uncon]

in fairness they could have just sat back with less votes than they thought and the possibility of no influence whatsoever.

This is politics and no party in a democracy has ever been able to implement their entire manifesto....liberals get a lot of theirs through despite a lack of voters...hardly something to pine about I would say

[joethfc]

It's incredible! A government that is unpopular? Unbelievable. If you think this coalition will finish the LibDems then I suggest you stop listening to the party line which was being spouted about by Allistair Campbell. From my experiences with people I know, many people would like to vote LibDem but they worry because they have never seen them govern; on that front things can only improve, some policy will be divisive but I suspect in elections to come (even if the next election produces a reactionery dip) they will be taken more seriously by the media and the electorate.

[Pleasant]

I despair when I see Nick Clegg strutt his stuff around like he won the election. I think the coalition is a joke. How can a party with the least amount of votes share power? I never thought I'd say this but I'd rather the Conservative shared power with Labour!