One of the first acts by the Lib-Con coalition will be to table legislation requiring a minimum 55% of House of Commons votes to force dissolution. So the simple majority no-confidence vote to force a new election evaporated as day dawned at the start of an era of “new politics”.
What this means is that even the implosion of the Lib-Con coalition that sees all Lib Dem MPs streaming into the opposition lobbys with Labour et al will be insufficient to bring down a Tory party government that can count 47% of the available votes.
So one of Clegg’s first acts as Deputy Prime Minister is to hand Cameron a veto on when and if this administration should end. If such a trick had been attempted by Labour during its 13 years in office, it’s safe to say the Lib Dems across the country would have self-combusted in fits of moral outrage.
We all know power corrupts, but isn’t it supposed to take a bit longer than this?
If this is a taste of the “progressive, new politics” that Paddy Ashdown and Simon Hughes have been touting these last 24 hours, I’m not surprised Labour didn’t want a bar of it.
Yuck!
Hat tip: L.R. in the comments.
UPDATE: An inescapable conclusion flowing from the inability of one party in the coalition to end the coalition is that we don’t really have a coalition at all. What we have is a Tory administration that, right now, Lib Dems are happy to sustain. But should they decide otherwise somewhere down the line, a Tory administration will still very much exist, something that a refusal to accede to the new 55% threshold could change.
