Election: Why LibDem 4 Tory is A Good Thing

Well, my predictions for the election last week were not so wide of the mark that I can't allow myself another quick stab at it. And here's my thought - A LibDem Tory coalition will be A Good Thing.

Bear with me. Let me remind you I'm a Labour voter traditionally, and a leftie at heart. I voted LibDem tactically in my rural South West constituency in the vain hope that we might unseat the uber-safe Tory Liam Fox (in the end he held his seat with a 7% pro-Tory swing, the bugger). So why would I want the hated Tory party to take power propped up by the LibDems whose more left wing policies (scrapping Trident for example) are the first things they'll drop?

Because the power they're about to seize is shit. It's Shit Power. It's Power, but to the power of shit. A more polite way of describing it is a Poisoned Chalice. The chalice from the palace has the brew that is shit.

The economic situation this Tory/LibDems will be taking over (NB I predict the Tories will insist on a less "street" pronunciation, LibThem) is rubbish and, if whatever's going on in Greece is anything to go by, it's not about to get better. The bankers who ripped us off and who get richer every time there is any transaction in the markets good or bad keep pretending that this uncertainty is A Bad Thing, hoping none of us will notice that bit about them getting richer every time there is a transaction, good or bad. So they love uncertainty, they love turbulence. Bankers love, more than anybody else, the complete collapse of the market, because they make money at every jolt, shake, slide, tremble, or other earthquake like metaphor that occurs.

So the economic situation is going to get worse and worse for quite a while and every attempt to make things better for normal people will be fought against by the rich people who make more money the worse it gets for normal people. It might even get so bad that a large enough number of normal people see through how bad the rich people are allowing it to get so that they can make more money off it that they revolt and start smashing things and rioting in the street. Which will be bad. (Unless you're a banker, etc etc see above).

And all this turmoil will be presided over by the Tory/LibThems, while the Labour party, still led by Gordon Brown, sits back and says "see, not as easy as you thought, is it?" They can do that in not so many words or, my preferred method, they could say it in those actual words. Every week at the start of Prime Minister's Questions. "See?" Gordon will say, "Not as easy as you thought, is it? Posh boy."

And the summer will rumble on. With something really bad and unexpected happening in August. Don't know why, but something always does. Either in August or September (by the 11th at the latest) something big, international and nasty will happen. You can set your watch by it most years.

And then will come the Party Conferences. At which point Gordon Brown, the Beloved Leader of increasingly fond memory, will be able to say, a fortnight before the conference, "Do you know what, sod this for a game of soldiers, I'm off." And he'll resign as leader of the Labour Party, leaving on a high, having not totally lost his General Election, and having proved himself categorically to have done the job better than his immediate successor, and Labour can devote their Conference to electing a new leader.

In the face of the new Labour leader, who will have all the popular support and moral authority that an Opposition who is right all the time has - and you can only be properly smug when you are the Opposition leader watching a Prime Minister in deep deep doo-doo - the Tory/LibThem alliance, which will by the autumn have more cracks in it than Clint Eastwood's arse, will delay and delay the inevitable new General Election, bickering about what method will be used for the voting, and probably ending up with the most complicated, least intelligible and inevitably more time-consumingly crap method, until finally they call an election possibly sometime like March 2011.

Then in the spring of 2011 the country will go to the polls again. This time their choice will be much clearer than in May 2010. Do they go for the Tories, who just spent 10 months cocking everything up? The LibDems who've spent 10 months as footstools and doormats to the hopeless Tories and now stand for nothing except occasionally to have a piece of bread clamped between their buttocks and stood in front of a fireplace so an old Etonian Tory can have some toast?

Or the Labour party? Who, after 10 months of saying "we told you so" can step forward proudly, confidently, majestically and say "Okay, now let us show you how it's really done."

Of course spring 2011 is when things start to turn around anyway. The recession will be into its 4th year and good times will be just around the corner.

(Oh, then there's the Big War. But shush. We'll worry about that when it happens).

Kev F