Some bad advice for Nick Clegg [updated]

Every bullfrog and his leg-rope is giving British Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg advice on what he should do next, even NZ bloggers—and Rodney Hide--which is odd, when you think about it, because a fortnight ago very few of those bloggers (or Rodney Hide) even knew who Clegg was; and because Clegg is unlikely to be reading New Zealand bloggers to pick up tips on what to do next.

And even odder still, since so much the advice being proffered consists of telling Clegg to sign up for a “confidence and supply” agreement in return for action on some sort of proportional representation system.

Why is that so odd?  It’s odd for two reasons.

First, the Brits are already gun-shy, now, at the horse-trading and log-rolling they’re seeing as a result of this hung parliament, an unusual result in the first-past-the-post system they’ve enjoyed for centuries.  So how are they going to feel about the person or party who resolves this present uncertainty by offering much more of it; who delivers a system that virtually guarantees this kind of wheeling and dealing necessary after every election, and every time any major piece of legislation is being discussed.

I suspect that “gratitude” isn’t the word that will be used.

Second, most of the recommendations from local bloggers have averred that “confidence and supply” agreements have “worked” here in New Zealand.  But have they?  Just take a roster of every party here who’s signed up to a “confidence and supply” agreement with one of the big parties, and see where they are now.  Alliance, NZ First, Mauri Pacific, Te Tawharau… Most of them now gone and all-but forgotten, all of them wiped out by their association with government and the ministerial baubles they were offered—burned off by their closeness to power, and inability to sufficiently distinguish themselves from their larger partner. (To which list you can add ACT, for whom extinction now is only a matter of time; but not the race-based Maori Party since their existence is uniquely backstopped by holding race-based seats, nor Jim Anderton’s and Peter Dunne’s one-man bands—whose existence has been maintained by force of personality. This last, by the way, is a joke.)

So if “confidence and supply” agreements have “worked” they have worked only for the larger party, not for their erstwhile smaller partners that have been chewed up and spat out just to maintain the larger parties’ grip on power—and it’s hardly worked for New Zealand either, since some of the worst law we’ve seen in the last fifteen years has been either the product of a minor party (Sue Bradford’s tail wagging everyone’s anti-smacking dog, for just one example), or has been foisted on them in the sure expectation it will bury them (Auckland’s super-sized bureaucracy, anyone, in which Rodney Hide has invested his party’s little remaining political capital,and for which he’s enthusiastically made himself the scapegoat), and it’s certainly produced most of the worst political grandstanding anyone would ever want to see (a chocolate fish for every time Winston Peters has staged a walk-out would leave you feeling as sick as we all do when his face pops up on our TV screen).

So in that respect, signing up to a “confidence and supply” agreement is hardly the sort of advice Mr Clegg should take, is it, unless he wants to be reduced to a Dunne-like rump.  (And who would want that ignominy?) No, the simple fact is that “confidence and supply” agreements have been disastrous here for every smaller party propping up a larger one.

No. A much better option for a minor party, one I’ve always favoured ahead of either coalition or “confidence-and-supply” agreements,” is the cast-iron promise that as a party you would vote en bloc for any measure that moves towards more freedom (however small the move) just as long as there is no new coercion involved.

That’s a cast-iron promise that any major party could take to the bank-or, at least, to the Treasury benches. It would work as a “ratchet,” moving the country towards more freedom one baby step at a time.  And it would have every politician and every political journalist in the country assiduously studying what freedom actually means, so they’d understand precisely what was being promised. [About which, more here.]

Mind you, however, to make such a promise the party themselves would need to have some sort of firm commitment to maximising freedom, and removing unnecessary controls.  So in that respect, since that project and those principles are is of absolutely no interest to Clegg’s clog-wearers, that advice is about as useless as all the rest of the advice Mr Clegg is now getting.

But at least I’m sufficiently self-aware to know that.

UPDATE:  Devil’s Kitchen makes his own prediction:

    “You can bet your last penny that—no matter what the outcome is of the backroom deals that are currently being undertaken—the resolution will have been arrived at not for our benefit, but theirs.
    “The idea of a hanged Parliament continues to look ever so attractive...”

And, on the splits that are delaying all the various “three-ways” being proposed,

    “Of all the three main parties, it is the split in the LibDems that has always been the most apparent. On one side you have the (mostly) classical liberal Orange Bookers and, on the other, the completely hat-stand, socialist, sandal-wearing element.
    “I am sure that the Labour Party is just gearing up for a massive internal punch-up but, in the meantime, I suspect that it is the LibDem ferrets who are fighting in that sack...”