Hopefully Nick Clegg has read his history: every time the Liberals have gone into coalition with another party, it has led to a split between those who accept the coalition and those who are refuseniks. The result was nearly a century in the wilderness. This may be why he’s playing a cagey game at the moment. Success at the election is one thing, but making something useful of it is quite another.

I think people are putting far too much importance on the raw percentages. Under FPTP the raw percentages will be completely unrepresentative of people’s real preferences anyway.

In the situation where they do hold the balance of power the Lib Dems should side with whichever of the big parties will allow them the most of their policies.

The Tories can’t have it both ways. Why should they assume that if they have a larger % of the vote, but end up with fewer seats than Labour, that they are more entitled to form a government, even if it IS a coalition with the LD’s?

If the LD’s hold the balance of power they should make it quite clear that they expect a commitment to a referendum on electoral reform to be held ASAP, the cancellation of Trident, and the repeal of illiberal legislation passed by New Labour. The Tories will of course never agree, so if they try to govern as a minority will soon end up losing a vote of confidence.

Labour are much more likely to go for the deal, which is probably why Brown has so conspicuously failed to attack Clegg and the LD’s since the debate, and why Hain has been floating trial balloons about a Labour/LD coalition even more desperately than before.

the Tories are a busted flush. They know it, Clegg knows it, and more importantly the voters know it. I wonder how long Dave will last after the election before the Tories knife him in the back? Roll on the hung parliament.

One scenario not mentioned in this article is the prospect of another election before the year is out. On current polling (usual caveats about there being 3 weeks and 2 debates to go apply) Lab would end up with the most seats but the lowest share of the vote – the Tories can hardly complain as they have never said anything about electoral reform; but the LDs might make the case. So perhaps emergancy legislation putting PR or AV+ on the statute books then a snap election in November.
Maybe

But I don’t believe Clegg would have a coalition with the Cons. Even though he personally maybe on the Right of his party (so-called Orange Book-er), the party at large (from what I can tell) is mostly anti-Tory.

Paul Sagar,

I don’t know how you can come to this conclusion:

Then again, the Tories have the upper hand in an important respect. They know they are still likely – once the Lib Dem bounce evens-out – to end up with the most votes on polling day, if not the most seats.

What you ought to have taken from the past week is that political opinion is incredibly volatile at the moment. Neither the Tories not Labour are exactly loved by the electorate and Nick Clegg’s huge advantage is what ought to have been his huge disadvantage, he was relatively unknown.

He also did rather well in the debate. He becomes credible. I would be astonished if an electorate that appears frankly more wound up about sleaze and expenses than I thought they were wouldn’t think to themselves, ‘well, here is an alternative’.

If he can keep it together and have two more good debates then the political landscape may be changed completely. Two more ‘bounces’ like that one and the Lib Dems could have an outright majority of seats!

May you live in interesting times.

I agree with #4
I think the time for electoral reform is nigh.

As much as I dislike Labour, if they win the majority of the seat while netting less votes than both the Tories and the LibDems, the cries for electoral reforms will be impossible to shun, even for the Tories. It would be unacceptable.

Galen is right.

The Tories can’t claim a victory based on vote share if they get fewer seats then Labour and continue to maintain that the electoral system is fine.

Government of national unity on the way –

PM – Nick Clegg
Treasury Team – Vince Cable, Ken Clarke, Alastair Darling (on a rotating 2 day basis, Sundays to be shared)
Home Office – David Davis
Justice – Dominic Grieve
Education – David Laws
Foreign Office – Chris Hune
Environment – Ed Milliband
Health – Yvette Cooper
Dept of Future Planning and General Wonkery – David Willets, David Milliband
Dept of Keepin’ It Real / Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves – Shaun Bailey, Harriet Harman
Dept of Culture, Media, Sport and Makeovers – Michael Gove
Tea Boys – George Osborne, Ed Balls

David Cameron to be hounded out of Britain by foaming at the mouth Colonel Blimp style Tories. Moves to California with Steve Hilton and campaigns for gay marriage.

Gordon Brown retires to Marthas Vineyard to spend his time rewriting history.

@6 claude

“….if they win the majority of the seat while netting less votes than both the Tories and the LibDems, the cries for electoral reforms will be impossible to shun, even for the Tories.”

I’d disagree. The Tories are never going to accept electoral reform for this reason. It will have to be forced on them, most likely via a Lab/LD coalition bringing it in, or calling a referendum which brings it about.

The Tories (and Labour before their “deathbed” conversion recently) have always been adamantly opposed to electoral reform. Bear in mind that many in Labour are very hostile too, and would rather see us saddled with a Tory government than agree to electoral reform.

It may well be that the tide has turned 0 I certainly hope so. It would be unwise however to understimate the capacity of the elites in both the Conservative and Labour movements to try and stymie reform: they would both MUCH prefer to keep FPTP voting, and the shambolic system which has contributed so much to getting us in the current mess.

I can predict one thing fairly confidently, if the conservatives fail to get enough seats to form the next government (even if it’s in a coalition), they will knife Cameron in the back and put in place a new leader who will swing to the right to try and recapture the conservative voters who’ve deserted to UKIP.

Which would be all good and well for the progressive cause as that will just make the tories all the more unelectable to the majority of the public.

@8
I hope you’re wrong!!!

I agree with you about “the capacity of the elites in both the Conservative and Labour movements to try and stymie reform”. Sadly, it’s true. But hopefully this time it’ll be impossible to resist.

It strikes me when the defenders of FPTP can never actually explain why PPTP would be fairer or better. They superficially mention the mess of Israeli and Italian politics without looking at how perfectly stable the political system of 99.8% of non FPTP-countries is.

Even added together Labour and the Tories are expremely unrepresentative of the popular vote and have been so consistently since 2000.

FPTP made sense in the old days of two clearly majoritarian parties, but now now when millions and millions and millions of people are voting elsewhere, whether left or right.

It’s interesting to posit that, far from having the upper hand over the LD’s, the Tories (and many in New Labour), along with most of the deeply repugnant British “meedja”, may have TOTALLY missed the national “mood”.

Some of us probably remember the days of the SDP/Lib Alliance, their high poll numbers, and the heady whif of potential change in the air…. only to see it come crumbling down around our ears.

It somehow seems few commentators saw this coming. Maybe they have been behind the curve of popular sentiment all along?

A hung parliament has only seemed a realistic prospect in the past few weeks…. but perhaps the corrosive effects of the recession, parliamentary sleaze, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the sheer lumpen inability of either Labour or Tories to “do the vision thing” has finally done for our politically and morally bankrupt electoral system.

I’m not even saying people are starry eyed about the LD’s or Clegg per se… but, as I seem to recall the anthem of 1997 saying,

…”Things Can Only Get Better….” From D;ream’s lips, to God’s ears? Let’s just hope this time it’s for real.

I can predict one thing fairly confidently, if the conservatives fail to get enough seats to form the next government (even if it’s in a coalition), they will knife Cameron in the back and put in place a new leader who will swing to the right to try and recapture the conservative voters who’ve deserted to UKIP.

Which would be all good and well for the progressive cause as that will just make the tories all the more unelectable to the majority of the public.

IDS, Hague and Howard all ‘swung to the right’ or rather, followed Blair to the far right. As you say, never really worked. Cameron’s ace was keeping quiet, if he never took a position he couldn’t be outflanked and for a while it looked like a winner, the problem has been timing, he was given too long of a run up by CCHQ and Howard who should have spent at least two, maybe three years lame ducking it.

Over four years on and Cameron looks like Jimmy Clitheroe.

This election is not exciting, it is terrifying. Good old selfish, behind the curtains, public virtue, private vices little Britain. Good old credit card juggling, buy now pay later, split equity, property laddering, buy to letting, HP, BOGOF, AVC, CVA, Personal Bankrupt, Insolvent Trading UK.

Turn your face to the wall lest you end up watching the voting intentions coalesce around the party that can sell the lie of less pain and more of the same ruinous tax and spend and unsustainable personal spend. It is thoroughly depressing.

At the risk of being unbearably Eeyore, the nations finances are mashed. A hung parliament will be part of the ongoing problem rather than part of the solution. We are skirting the plughole of a double dip recession despite borrowing to the hilt (and then some) and a Keynesian splurge of heroic proportions. We dont have the manufacturing or cost base to export our way out and there is a limit to how many times we can ramp the comissions by changing energy suppliers and insurers, just as surely as there is a limit to how many lattes we can sell until we hit an Adamsian Coffee Event Horizon.

Same as any other recession in history, we either pay down and save up or we buy wheelbarrows. It doesn’t matter who governs if the only mandate that can be elected is the wrong one. Ahh Democracy. Ahh Demos.

I think that the Lib Dems will want electoral reform.

That will be their priority.

A while back the Lib Dems produced a list of key items which they will bargain for in a hung parliament.

They can say that the Conservatives will not agree on any of them and so therefore a coalition government with them is simply unworkable.

The coalition with Labour will be on the agreement that there will be electoral reform and an election again, in maybe a year.

@13, you idiotic scum: the public finances are in a mess because we had to pay over a trillion pounds to bail out the banks. For some reason, we are cutting public sector pay to clean up the mess made by private sector gambling twats.

@13 Eeyore

“At the risk of being unbearably Eeyore, the nations finances are mashed. A hung parliament will be part of the ongoing problem rather than part of the solution”

Whilst I don’t disagree with some of your concerns…. what’s the alternative? Surely it’s the sterile 2 party tooing and froing of the past decades that is largely responsible for the mess we are in now?

We’ve never HAD a truly radical government, prepared to use it’s mandate to actually give the chaotic, 19th century political and constitutional system of the UK the kicking it so richly deserves. Tory, Labour, New Labour…. same difference.

The LD’s may not represent the New Jerusalem, but I’ll take my chances with a hung parliament, electoral reform and giving both the Tories and Labour the bloody nose they deserve.

@15: “For some reason, we are cutting public sector pay to clean up the mess made by private sector gambling twats.”

But you left out the telling bit about the Conservatives who have kept calling for more and more “Deregulation” throughout all this.

[13] Spot on. Watch what happens to the pound over the next few days. Dollar parity will be the rosy scenario. And in the final debate Cameron will be able to say: mine is the only Party the markets trust, either you elect a Tory government or else your savingsand your living standards are history. A gun to the voters’ heads? It’s the only language they understand.

@18: “Watch what happens to the pound over the next few days.”

A weaker Pound is just what we need now to boost exports and price out imports when public spending is being slashed, business investment is running well down on a year ago and since consumers are being urged to pay down debt and save more.

Where else is extra demand for home produced goods and services to come from except by exporting more and substituting for imports?

@blanco
Have you paused to consider why we needed to bail out the banks for all that money? It is because it was borrowed by errrrm us really and when they wanted and indeed needed it back we were not in any position to repay it. That holds true whether the collateral is an unsellable house in increasingly rural Detroit or a World of Leather sofa and chair combo that was worth landfill the moment it left the store or indeed the “equity” in the notional value of a dwelling in the UK.

It is not all the fault of “The Man.” Sure he offered us beads and blankets at very reasonable rates of interest but we took them and asked for more and by the power of our votes and our ability to sign further loan agreements, we said yes a lot. Now you blanco may not have taken any part in it. If so, well done you but a lot of folks from all classes and levels of the various societies involved are caught up in this global contraction and that trillion quid, that’s our collective bad debts.
Blame who you will for what happened (personally I blame us all for doing the easy thing every time). It is certainly very arguable that a more interventionist eye on the explosion in credit and lending would have mitigated the effects bit that’s not what the voters, bankers, governors or politicians wanted at the time so that is not what we got.

We are cutting public sector jobs because as a society we pissed a decades or mores worth of growth up the wall and no longer have the income to pay for all these public sector jobs. I am in a public sector job, so is my partner. I am worried that we will lose our jobs but I am not sure that stringing up a banker or two is any way out.

@Galen10
Whichever sort of government gets in we still have to pay off and settle the debts. The problem with a hung parliament is the probablility that UK Gilts will become less saleable, international borrowing will be more expensive, government will be weaker and it will be harder and more expensive to sort out the economy. Its a higher cost option and in blanco’s terms costs even more public sector jobs. Now of the options availiable, I cannot take the Cast Iron Spud (aka the Ham C3PO) at any price. Brown is part of the problem and together with Blair sold our mess of pottage for a third term and some wars of dubious legality. He also comes with overt cliquey bullying and chauvanism. Clegg? Who knows., I mean who really knows? All that being said, yes the additional pain of a hung parliament may be worth it IF it leads to electoral reform. The house has been rigged in favour of Labour for too long.

[19] That may be so, but it is not how the voters will see it. Some of them like their shopping trips to the Big Apple.

And there is the other half of the Tory strategy. Clegg admits to having slept with how may women – 20? 30? According to reports from Mike Smithson’s prep school dorm the intention is to play the man on the Sunday before polling day, presumably in the Murdoch press. If I were in Clegg’s shoes I wouldn’t be too confident that each and every last one of my past conquests couldn’t possibly be bribed and/or blackmailed into claiming that the sex wasn’t consensual and/or kinky as hell.

It would be worth having to pay out a small fortune in defamation damages if it won the election for Cameron.

The Lib Dems have always been torn between being true liberals and social democrats. Neither the core Lib Dem voters or the parliamentary party would ever get into bed with the Tories, and – like you said – any attempt to do so would ultimately tear them apart.

Could be interesting to watch, though. The Lib Dems / SDP were born out of discontent with the Labour Party, so it would be mighty ironic if discontent with the Lib Dems spawned yet another party that could join forces with the social democrats / Blairites in Labour and create a fourth genuinely powerful party.

What are the chances that the LD’s will try to bring back their heavy-weights such as Steele and Ashdown? Serious question, I have no idea, but Ashdown in particular could be an asset.

“The Lib Dems have always been torn between being true liberals and social democrats”

Who or what exactly are “true liberals”? I’m genuinely puzzled.

Do you mean that Hayekians and the Austrians are the standard bearers for “true liberalism” or the likes of JM Keynes, who was a member of the Liberal Party and explicitly repudiated socialism?

@ Outed 20

I’m not convinced by all the scare-mongering about a run on the pound, and economic chaos, and the sky falling down if there’s a hung parliament. Other countries manage, so will we. I suspect things will happen more quickly than people expect WRT the negotiations post election. I just hope Clegg and the LD’s hod their nerves and demand a high enough price for coalition.

Altho’ economics is important..it’s NOT the only thing that makes peoples mind up. I suspect this is even more the case now, despite the recession.

Mike
Do you agree or disagree with the policy the Tories will use against Clegg and you want them to win.
If you want to have the election decided by the markets, then you might as well have perpetual conservative government. The market always falls when a left of centre of party elected over a right wing party, from whatever country
Outed
Didn’t your Tories sell off the countries assets in the 80′s through privatisation. Now our gas and water supplies are owned by foreign corporations.
Also the North sea oil revenues wasted tax breaks for high earners or to pay off unemployed benefits brought about by a failed moneterist experiment

Also if the FPTP system is rigged against your Tories outed, why are they only party opposing any change in the system.
Could it be that the Tory party is 3 parties.
1. Libertarian economics (take us back to the free marketliberalism of Gladstone), liberal social policies (gays etc).
2. Paleoconservatives
3. Religious conservatives
A change in the system, the Tory party and Labour party will implode, hence their fear of a new system

An absolutely key factor in this election is the sheer number of non-partisan voters. The electorate is significantly less tribal than previously, and in the “normal” world, people are less well-informed and less interested in politics.

The LibDems have an opportunity to win either this or the next election, by replacing one of the main two parties (in lesser elections, Labour have already been knocked out of the top two on more than one occasion).

Their best hope would appear to be to target Labour, and Brown in particular. They’ll need to be more than just “not one of those two”, but Labour and the Conservatives aren’t substance-heavy either.

[26][27] I do occasionally write about what I want but I also try not to inflict my personal preferences on the rest of you at every twist and turn.

FWIW I believe that whichever of Tory or Labour finds itself on the opposition benches in a month or so’s time will do very well indeed not to fall apart.

@ galen10
Apologies if this is suck eggs. I can see that you are not convinced, but I’m not sure why. Run on the pound? No, not likley. Possible but not likely. Increased costs of borrowing? Yes indeed. It’s happening already and as a nation we need to keep borrowing even if only to refinance other debt. There’s lots of countries clamouring to borrow and we are just another country. A hung parliament is more likely to erode our ability to rebuild our economy. It is not certain to do so, but it starts in a worse place than a majority administration in terms of market sentiments and expectation as well as ability to pass unpoular measures in that no one group within the administration has a clear mandate.

If we want to afford good public services and continue the experiment of using the state as a major employer then we need a strong economy.

Most voters won’t make their choice based on economics and more is the pity.

@golden gordon
Although I am a classic floating voter (least harm principle) and have no particular insight into Tory thinking, I understand that they want to reduce the number of MP’s which is sort of a reform. Perhaps they cling to the notion of fixing FPTP in their own favour? Dunno. That’s probably it though isn’t it?
Three parties? Probably more than that.

Go on Mike
What do you really want to occur in the election
As for tribalism.
What is wrong with that ?
I would love to change the system for party politics and use a system of registered party voters to pick leaders. Like the US
Also tribalism is always aimed at labour but safe tory seats never change. Once you become a conservative you always remain a conservative
Also voters tend to vote Labour when young and then become Tories, then they remain conservative for the rest of their lives. Very rarely do individuals become more left wing as they age. Yes we all know that tiresome Churchillian adage.
As for young Tories and Chas newkey burden their is always UKIP for old age

@30 Outed

You assume that a hung parliament ipso facto means less stability, therefore worse economic outomes. Granted it’s a relatively new thing in the UK (tho bear in mind around one third of the 20th century in the UK saw coalition government), but there is no simplistic direct correlation.

Even if the supposed instability has an impact, it is likely to be relatively short term… and can you honestly say that it would be worse than what we’ve seen from New Labour or the Tories before them?

Yes we need a strong economy: we also need a government that tells the truth, and faces reality. I can’t say either Labour or the Tories have convinced me they have or will. One of the reasons we are in this mess is the failure of Brown to regulate the financial sector closely enough – he’s even admitted as much.

I do accept however that “we” are all partially to blame, as is the voodoo economics of the previous Tory administrations.

I don’t see why you assume a coalition government would inevitably be less good at delivering decent public services AND a strong economy than Labour OR the Tories. It’s quite possible they might prove a good bit better.

Outed
The idea that a lib lab government will be less effective than a Tory administration. Why ?
Cable looks more likely to deal with the economics required than Osbourne. The tories will not increase tax and Labour not to reduce public spending. Cable is the only one willing to make those decisions.
Your tories will not have the courage to increase tax levels because they are beholden to tax exiles such as Ashcroft. that would be a brave decision.
As I said before if you want to pick a government because the markets want a conservative government, then get rid of democracy because they ALWAYS want a conservative government. Even the lame duck Major government. In fact as international finance caused the crisis I would defer from their insights and views.
Also I never met a floating voter. You know who exactly who your going to vote for.

@34: “Labour not to reduce public spending”

That’s not what Alistair Darling said:

“Alistair Darling admitted tonight that Labour’s planned cuts in public spending will be ‘deeper and tougher’ than Margaret Thatcher’s in the 1980s, as the country’s leading experts on tax and spending warned that Britain faces ‘two parliaments of pain’ to repair the black hole in the state’s finances.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/25/alistair-darling-cut-deeper-margaret-thatcher

What matters is the timing of the cuts, so as to avoid a double-dip recession, where the spending cuts fall and which taxes go up or down.

@golden gordon & galen10

I float. Really. I’m not voting for my incumbent because there are expenses problems combined with an authoritarian voting record and because they are seldom seen in our part of the world unless there is a vote in the offing. As for the rest, I still don’t know. Maybe I am funny about voting but I try to find out about my aspiring representatives and I try to vote for the one that I think will do the least bad job.

Now on the “your torys” thing I am not banner waving for Spam3PO. Cable may well turn out to be a better manager, Osbourne might be keeping a razor like mind and amazingly good plans well hidden. Heck even the current incumbent might be a decent bet if he gets out of the long shadow of his predecessor. We won’t know until we see what they can do and what they do depends politically on the strength of their mandate.

The tyranny or the international markets is the situation that we are in not some external condition that we can avoid with a wizard wheeze. We can vote for the kind of society that we want from the available pallette of choices but there are consequences.

For what it’s worth, I find the idea of scrapping Trident and doing away with strategic nukes very good. I don’t want to be in a country that thinks its good to prepare for a toe to toe with China.

Also for what it is worth I have a strong vested interest in well funded public services.

And the taxation arguments…well give people a good enough excuse to remove their wealth from your jurisdiction and they generally do just that. The key to high taxation revenues is not getting into a zero sum argument with the personally wealthy, it is building a strong economy with sufficient surplus for the taxation to be relatively painless yet enough to go round.

A lot is gonna be about strategic friendship to be sure but Gordon looks fucked.

What a bunch of idiots. Do something or do nothing and shut up.

I don’t get how, if the situation is as it is currently and the seats are a complete fuck up through FPTP, Tories could continue their argument of “FPTP is the fairest system” and be taken seriously by the public. The Sun of all papers has just come out and said the system is out dated! I don’t see any party now being able to go in to government, if it’s this close, and not have to put the referendum on the table ASAP, Labour, Tory or Lib Dem.

I very much like the sound of the oft repeated refrain of tories that if the “socialists” win the election they’ll emigrate. I like this for two reasons, one it means less work for us in the future if all the right wingers have left and two the thought of all these xenophobes trying to find their way through another country’s immigration system amuses me.

“Alistair Darling admitted tonight that Labour’s planned cuts in public spending will be ‘deeper and tougher’ than Margaret Thatcher’s in the 1980s, as the country’s leading experts on tax and spending warned that Britain faces ‘two parliaments of pain’ to repair the black hole in the state’s finances.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/25/alistair-darling-cut-deeper-margaret-thatcher

Where does this idea that the Tories cut spending during the Thatcher/Major years actually come from? The same swamp that that ‘Reagan tax cuts’ crawled from perhaps (yeah I know he cut taxes initially, he then quickly rose them when it turned out that cuts actually didn’t pay for themselves).

Some linguist chap -

“Thatcher’s Britain” is another good choice to illustrate “free market gospel.” Just to keep to a few revelations of early 1997, “during the period of maximum pressure to make arms sales to Turkey,” the London Observer reported, Prime Minister Thatcher “personally intervened to ensure a payment of 22 million pounds was made out of Britain’s overseas aid budget, to help build a metro in the Turkish capital of Ankara. The project was uneconomical, and in 1995 it was admitted” by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd that it was “unlawful.” The incident was particularly noteworthy in the aftermath of the Pergau Dam scandal, which revealed illegal Thatcherite subsidies “to ‘sweeten’ arms deals with the Malaysian regime,” with a High Court judgment against Hurd. That’s aside from government credit guarantees and financing arrangements, and the rest of the panoply of devices to transfer public funds to “defense industry,” yielding a familiar range of benefits to advanced industry generally.

A few days before, the same journal reported that “up to 2 million British children are suffering ill-health and stunted growth because of malnutrition” as a result of “poverty on a scale not seen since the 1930s.” The trend to increasing child health has reversed and childhood diseases that had been controlled are now on the upswing thanks to the (highly selective) “free market gospel” that is much admired by the beneficiaries.

A few months earlier, a lead headline reported “One in three British babies born in poverty,” as “child poverty has increased as much as three-fold since Margaret Thatcher was elected.” “Dickensian diseases return to haunt today’s Britain,” another headline reads, reporting studies concluding that “social conditions in Britain are returning to those of a century ago.” Particularly grim are the effects of cutting off gas, electricity, water, and telephones to “a high number of households” as privatization takes its natural course, with a variety of devices that favor “more affluent customers” and amount to a “surcharge on the poor,” leading to a “growing gulf in energy between rich and poor,” also in water supply and other services. The “savage cuts” in social programs are placing the nation “in the grip of panic about imminent social collapse.” But industry and finance are benefiting very nicely from the same policy choices. To top it all off, public spending after 17 years of Thatcherite gospel was the same 42 1/4 percent of GDP that it was when she took over.

DoTW @41:

It comes from very loose useage of words by a lot of people, really. “Public spending” in people’s minds can mean a range of things between “Money spent by the government” and “Money spent on the public by the government”. Thatcher absolutely cut “public spending”: money spent by UKGov that directly and tangibly benefited the 90% of the public who needed the help. As you rightly point out, Thatcher most certainly did not cut “public spending” as a percentage of GDP: she took the money from North Sea oil & gas and spent it to break the unions, close the middle class and make millions for Dame Shirly Porter and company.

Conservative government rarely cut the second-type of public spending, but all campaign as if that’s what they meant. What they actually mean is that they intend to cut the first type of public spending and use the money for other things.

The liberal argument has always been that the second type of “public spending” should be as close to parity with the first as can possibly be arranged.

After the last TV debate, YouGov asked: “How would you vote on May 6 if you thought the Liberal Democrats had a significant chance of winning the election”. The responses: Lib Dem 49%, Conservative 25%, Labour 19%. If this actually happened there would be 548 Lib Dem MPs, 41 Labour MPs and just 25 Tories.

The message here seems to be, vote for what you really want to happen, and it will.