Coalition Government: Constitution Committee Report

Lord Donoughue Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Donoughue (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the House for allowing me to speak briefly in the gap. This is an excellent and timely report, beautifully introduced by my noble friend Lady Jay.

With the decline in support for the two main parties, hung Parliaments—despite the optimism of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that they should be rare—sadly may be more frequent in the United Kingdom. As the report says, I was the only witness to firmly oppose coalition as the best resolution to hung Parliaments. I will explain by saying that what I fear is that public and politicians may now assume that coalition is the natural, the automatic and perhaps the only response to hung Parliaments. The House should have on record that this is not the case.

Recent history, as I experienced in Downing Street in the 1970s, shows at least two alternative practical responses to a hung Parliament. One is minority government by the largest party. This can and did work reasonably well in terms of progressing and processing government. It may not have been wholly successful, but that was a political matter. A second alternative is a loose pact between a major and a minor party, as in 1977-78 between Labour and the old Liberal Party—sometimes called “supply and confidence”—whereby the minor party gave broad support to the Government while it was consulted sympathetically on all coming legislation. It had the advantage of being without all the formalities of coalition, especially in not having members of the minority party in the Cabinet—something which Conservatives opposite must now, I imagine, look back on with envy. It worked well and lasted almost five years, while opinion polls showed public support for this loose arrangement.

These alternatives are not perfect. They leave uncertainty about the Government’s long-term survival, whereas a coalition offers more assurance, as the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, pointed out very well. However, they have the advantages of maintaining the coherent values of a single-party Government, recently exposed to the nation and voted on in a general election campaign. They do not have the clear disadvantages of a formal coalition, which we have witnessed with sadness and compassion over the past four years, such as those listed by the noble Baroness, Lady Jay. They include: the confusion over the operation of collective responsibility; the muddles over what the Government’s policies actually are; the mediocrity of having some people in government only because they are part of a minority quota; and the public bickering, as there was recently over free schools.

Fundamentally, I suppose that my reservations are primarily about one single party—in practice, the Liberal Democrats, who have insufficient public support but massive overrepresentation in this House—being perhaps permanently in government. I hope that the next majority party and the civil servants advising it immediately after a future election will follow the wise advice of this report. I hope that they will consider the two alternatives of minority government and a loose pact with an open mind, and will not assume that a coalition is always the best and only option. That will not always be the case.