Posted by Dr Andrew Connell
Interesting to see today’s Guardian reporting Ed Balls- always seen as Gordon Brown’s ‘mini me’ – as saying that ‘coalition politics is not the British way of doing government’. True enough at Westminster, perhaps, but Scottish and Welsh politicians have come, over the last 12 years, to accept (if not always embrace) the politics of coalitions and minority government - and of course, it is Labour’s devolution settlement which has brought this about.
There are two ways in which this might affect the outcome of this election. The first relates to Labour’s electoral support. For many years Labour in Scotland and Wales presented itself, quite successfully, as the natural party of government. However, the 2007 elections to the devolved legislatures seriously challenged this, giving Scotland a minority SNP government and Wales a Labour-Plaid Cymru coalition. So Scottish and Welsh voters have seen nationalists making a reasonably successful job of exercising power in Edinburgh and Cardiff, and might as a result be more willing to return nationalist MPs to Westminster.
The second possible effect relates to how a hung Parliament might be resolved. Devolution has given all three main UK parties experience of working away from the traditional expectations of Westminster. Labour and the Lib Dems have worked together in government in both countries. In Scotland the Conservatives have become quite adept at using their position in a parliament with no overall majority to influence the minority government, while in Wales after the 2007 election they joined a serious and realistic attempt to construct a Plaid/Tory/Lib Dem coalition.
So coalition (and minority government) politics is not quite so alien to the British experience as Ed Balls might suggest. Both Labour and the Conservatives have people at Holyrood and Cardiff Bay who know how to make coalitions and minority governments work. But whether the London-based party machines will use them if the time comes is another question.
