By-elections

[Workingman]

At least on the Continent most of the coalitions are made up of parties that are shades of one wing or the other of politics.... or have a shared agenda. Not all, but most.

There is no natural alliance between LibDem, Tories, UKIP, Labour. The nearest is probably LibDem/Labour.

If there is a realignment in UK politics the idea of five year fixed terms might go out of the window as toys are thrown out of the cot.

[Suff]

I'm sure there was no natural alliance in many of the countries. Look at Sweden with a grand coalition of 5 or more parties and the Sweden Democrats in position to be kingmaker as there are so many parties (up to 10), who have significant proportions of the vote.

Look at Greece with right, centre and left in a grand coalition to try and save the Euro. Most countries have non aligned coalitions which fall apart at regular intervals as you would expect a non aligned body to do when faced with hard decisions which impact hard held ideology.

The Lib Dems are the easy target for a coalition as they have very few hard held convictions and a lot of "wishful thinking".

I guess the good thing about the UK is that we are so used to single parties that we learn, or are told, how to use PR to gain a single result. Something I despaired for quite a while. I was sure we'd wind up with coalitions forever. I was forgetting that the UK voters can get heartily sick of the kind of pandering that goes on when two or more parties unite and wind up doing everything the people don't want. Witness Scotland. It took three elections but the Scots got the hang of it pretty quickly. Although it was a huge outpouring of "hate" against the last Labour government and a complete rejection of the Labour policies in Scotland. Scots probably want ID cards even less than the English do. I wonder how many people have already forgotten that one????