Clegg's Dilemma: How to Sell Compromise?

The Lib Dem dilemma - how to govern with the Tories and then defend their policies before the base - mirrors a problem for U.S. conservatives as well.

In the U.S., primary politics and campaign finance allow small groups of highly committed voters to capture political parties and disenfranchise the middle. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In the UK, Liberal Democrats face some tough choices about the future of their party. The parliamentary leader of the party, Nick Clegg, is serving as deputy prime minister. He signs off on every important decision. That does not mean he always gets his way. But he gets his way often enough that this government bears his impress as much as it does that of any of the Conservative leaders, Prime Minister Cameron included.

So how can Nick Clegg in 5 years time turn around and campaign against the record of the government he helped to lead? For electoral purposes, he will be an incumbent, not a challenger; prevented from attacking and bound to defend the record of the Conservative-Liberal coalition he jointly led.

That's not the bottom of it. Already the Liberal-Conservative coalition is making decisions that will have effect beyond the life of the current Parliament: defense planning, procurement, infrastructure and so on. It's inevitable that cabinet colleagues will ask Clegg and the Liberals: If you share responsibility for these decisions now, will you then turn about and criticize them in the next Parliament, after our pact is scheduled to lapse?

Under the pressure of those mutual obligations, Clegg has begun to talk about extending the Liberal-Conservative pact into a second parliament. The gravitational pull of events is leading the Libs into something like an electoral alliance.

Other Liberals intensely dislike this prospect. Party president Tim Farron has denounced it as "raving mad."  In truth, it's all too plausible: hence Farron's outrage.

Which brings us to an interesting problem for American conservatives - in a next post.

Click here for part 2 of this series.