This election has really been a disaster for the Tories.   If they can’t win an election in the event of a financial meltdown and deep economic recession, a highly unpopular Prime Minister, the MPs’ expenses scandal, and a widespread feeling that New Labour had run out of steam, they never will.   Cameron should now be hung out to dry in his own party, and probably will be.

They needed 324 seats (since Sinn Fein won’t take up at Westminster the 4 seats they won) to gain an overall majority.   They got only 306, and with the 9 DUP they can must 315 – 9 short.   Of course the Tories will do their utmost to try to get a deal from the LibDems, but it is very difficult to see how they can manage it.

The difference between the two parties on fundamentals like the EU, immigration, Trident and early spending cuts are large, probably too large.   But the real clincher is that the LibDem conference at Southport in 1998 (when Blair was still toying with the idea of some kind of Lib-Lab agreement) passed a resolution that their leadership could not enter into a deal with another party without the agreement of at least 75% of the LibDem parliamentary party and at least 75% of their Federal Executive.   The chances of any deal now with the Tories that passes this very high democratic bar must be exceedingly small.   It was called the cyber lock, and like the 40% vote threshold regarding devolution imposed on the minority Labour Government in 1977 is a classic example of a blocking manoeuvre that was dismissed at the time, but as events conspired could, and did,  change the face of politics.

So what if the Con-Lib negotiations fail?   A progressive rainbow alliance of all the other parties – Labour 258, LibDems 57, SNP6, Plaid Cymru 3, SDLP3, Green 1 – adds up to 328 plus the Alliance party members in Northern Ireland.   This is obviously difficult too, considering the range of different interests and their conflicting demands, but not insurmountable.   In particular, whilst electoral reform may well turn out to be a deal breaker for the LibDems with the Tories who have only offered (because of intense internal Tory party opposition) an all-party committee of inquiry, which the LibDems must surey reject out of hand as inadequate, Brown has (rightly) offered a referendum and legislation to implement what the electorate choose.   Given the intense pressures to compromise in the current situation, this rainbow alliance seems more likely to succeed than to fail – and it might well actually make the Labour Party itself rather more progressive into the bargain!

Nor is the pressure to compromise to get such a coalition simply the smell of power.   It’s also the fact that if it fails, progressive politics in this country is looking into the abyss.   Cameron will then demand the right to form a minority government, a demand that can hardly be resisted, and the Wilson precedent of 1974 – an early further election to try to seal an overall Tory majority – will soon follow.   If we blow this, we have only ourselves to blame.

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