Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown hold secret talks

[Turborama]

Source: Channel 4 News (UK)

Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown meet in private despite ongoing Tory-Lib Dem negotiations, Channel 4 News political correspondent Cathy Newman has learnt.

The Lib Dem leader had so far refused to entertain talks with Gordon Brown - but tonight he agreed to attend a secret meeting with the prime minister, who snuck out of Number 10 via the back door, bound for the Foreign Office.

Members of the cabinet are now offering the prime minister's head on a platter as bait to lure the Liberal Democrats away from a coalition deal with the Conservatives.

First Secretary Lord Mandelson was one of a clutch of cabinet ministers summoned to Number 10 this afternoon. He and colleagues have been holding secret talks with Lib Dem negotiators in a bid to scupper the Tory agreement. And tonight it looked like Labour's cunning plan may be paying off.

Read more: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/domestic_politics/clegg+and+brown+hold+secret+talks/3642097

---

Brown meets Lib Dem leader Clegg

(Reuters) - Prime Minister Gordon Brown held a meeting on Sunday with Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, who is trying to clinch an agreement with the Conservative Party to govern together.

A Liberal Democrat official confirmed the meeting had taken place in the offices of the foreign ministry on Sunday afternoon, while in a nearby government building teams of Lib Dems and Conservatives were negotiating a possible alliance.

The Lib Dem official said the Brown-Clegg talk was amicable and Conservative leader David Cameron had been told that the meeting was taking place. just announced on Sky News that this was an hour long "amicable" meeting.

The Conservatives came first in Thursday's election but fell short of an overall majority in parliament. Brown's Labour Party, in power for the past 13 years, came second, while the Lib Dems came a distant third. Cameron is now seeking Clegg's support to form a Conservative-led government.

From: http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE6481RF20100509

Maybe Clegg is starting to get fed up with the Tories' bullshit.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. Brown should step the fuck down.

That is the major issue blocking a labor-lib coalition.

[harmonicon]

7. he may, but he can't do that yet

Right now Brown is still the PM. If he were to step down now, before a new government is established, the Tories would immediately be in control with a minority government. Brown stepping down may be one of the conditions of forming a coalition, but it can't be done until the governing coalition is established.

[Warren Stupidity]

8. True, but my understanding from this mornings papers is that he

won't agree to stepping down at all.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

21. it's a process that has to be gone through

it involves many people. I eman he could resign but I doubt he is going to do that.

[onehandle]

2. The Conservatives are wolves in sheep's clothing. I want the Lib Dems and Labour work things out.

The Tories are full of shit. With power, the Thatcher era will return.

Fucking Iraq War and the Bush/Blair poodlefest threw everything off.

[Inuca]

4. Stop saying that!

You make images from FIorina's ad pop in my mind and I was trying to drink some coffee, not safe :-)!

[onehandle]

6. LOL! I didn't think of that. Now I will.

Oh, those glowing eyes.

[hlthe2b]

5. For the life of me, I can't understand why Liberal Democrats &

conservatives would even be a possible coalition. Maybe it is just leverage to get Brown to step aside?

[Turborama]

9. The coalition would be the Liberal Democrats with the Conservatives

or a Liberal Democrat coalition with Labour and other parties from Scotland, Northern Ireland & Wales and the Green Party's MP.

[hlthe2b]

10. I mistyped.... What i meant to say is that I can not imagine

the Liberal Democrats forming a coalition with Conservatives...With that correction, the rest of my post stands

[Rosa Luxemburg]

20. the latter is better

[Rosa Luxemburg]

16. YES I AGREE!

[madmax]

3. Speaking of secret talks

were the hell are the papers from the Cheney/Oil Execs meeting?? Just askin. :shrug:

[Oregone]

11. Why is the UK so damn afraid of minority governments?

I don't get it. Sure gives Clegg a shitload of power

[Davis_X_Machina]

13. Because any time the government can't command a majority...

...on a major Commons vote, it's out on its ear, and new (expensive) elections follow. Running a national party when you a.) don't know when the next national election is and b.) who's going to lead the party going into it -- presuming the party leader who lost the vote of confidence is replaced before elections -- isn't something that anyone is in a rush to embrace.

[Oregone]

14. Look, I understand that, but a minority government can still maintain confidence

Look how long Harper has been in power in Canada. Its not the worse arrangement in the world. He must always cater to someone else on major measures (or play chicken with an election). It gives the parties out of power some bit of say on each confidence measure

When parties enter in coalition agreements that will secure confidence for X number of months (if thats how its done in the UK), it can make parties vote against their own interests once in that deal. It shuts down a bit of the debate, just so long as the underlying points of the agreement are adhered to.

I don't get why having a minority government that must answer to at least one other party is such a horrible thing.

[Davis_X_Machina]

15. You can stay in power forever...

...provided you never do anything remotely controversial, or attempt any major changes. (c.f. Harper in Canada, all the way back to Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium, in Trollope's The Prime Minister. The latter couldn't get his beloved decimal coinage through.)

So if you're a small-c conservative party, with no bold ideas about the role of government, it's a feature, not a bug. All attempts at change can be blunted by pointing to some faction or other who won't play nice, and say 'Gee, I'd like to, but...'

But if you want to rattle cages, say by filleting the welfare state (U.K. Tories), it's not enough to rely on such ad-hoc-ery.

[Oregone]

22. Not forever

Again...I don't know how its done in the UK, but in regards to Canada, the last floated coalition agreement had a year and a half time span. If the NDP would of been disappointed by the results, they could of told the Liberals to fuck off

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/12/01/coalition-talks.html

Don't coalition agreements there have the same sort of thing?

Yeah, I get that ruling with a majority makes you really effective, but a minority government isn't the end of the world and it seems like the UK is deathly afraid of it.

[harmonicon]

32. and LD/Labour coalition would still be a minority government

... but it may well be able to be stable because of votes from the Green and SNP MPs. A Conservative minority government wouldn't have enough backers to stay in power for very long at all.

[muriel_volestrangler]

29. Remember, power in Britain is centralised, especially in England

Scotland has roughly the autonomy of a Canadian province, and Wales and Northern Ireland not quite that much, but the UK government in Westminster (government, not parliament) has huge amounts of power. If there's a Tory minority government, it gets to run a hell of a lot of things, and the only brake on them is the threat of a vote of no confidence. So the prospect of the Tories running all government departments, with no agreements in place, or even just cabinet discussions, is not appealing. The only 'power' Clegg would have is to force a new election - and the Tories have the money to fight a new one, while the Lib Dems certainly don't, and Labour might not have much either, unless the unions get enthusiastic.

[Davis_X_Machina]

12. Replacing Brown as head of Labour...

...on a permanent basis is a complicated and multi-step process, involving Labour MP's, the constituency Labour committees, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, and it can't be done quickly.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

19. It will come eventually

they might aswell get on with a Lib-Lab coalition with Green, Welsh, Scottish, NI parties etc

[totodeinhere]

17. It seems logical to me that since the Conservatives got the most votes and hold the most...

seats in the parliament, they should be the ones to form a government. And I think that Clegg has said as much. I think that some posters at DU want Labour to form a government just because they are perceived as being more liberal than the Conservatives are, but the voters have spoken and their will should be honored. And besides that, the Conservatives in the UK are probably to the left of our Democrats anyway, so either way the new government will be more liberal than our own.

[Democat]

24. I think you missed a huge issue - actual vote counts!

Look at these numbers from another post on DU:

Votes and seat for each of the main 3 parties:

Conservatives - 305 Seats from 10,681,417 Votes

Labour - 258 Seats from 8,601,441 Votes

Liberal Democrats - 57 Seats from 6,805,665 Votes

Votes needed per seat for each party were:

Conservatives - 35,021

Labour - 33,338

Liberal Democrats - 117,339

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4373199

The combined vote total for Labour and the Liberal Democrats is 5,000,000 more votes than the Conservatives. The Conservatives are nothing but a minority compared to the combined vote totals of the other two parties.

Why should the Conservatives be allowed to run the country when they are the minority party compared to a coalition of the other two top parties?

[Oregone]

26. Without IRV there is no way to gague the will of the voters though

We cannot say that liberals who voted for Liberal Dem prefer to so Labour in power over Conservatives. It seems intuitive, but it cannot be determined. What we can probably guess is that people left Labour in flocks to vote Conservative.

Its a pretty fucked up voting system that makes it too tough to really rationalize what the true will of the people, collectively speaking, is, and how it should properly manifest into a coalition.

"Why should the Conservatives be allowed to run the country when they are the minority party compared to a coalition of the other two top parties?"

The same could be said about why should that coalition be allowed to run over a LibDem & Conservative coalition, which has more aggregate votes.


My opinion is that Clegg needs to look short and long term and roll with whoever will reform voting. Then no one has to make these lame arguments again.

[totodeinhere]

28. Any other party is also a minority compared to a coalition of the other two.

Labour is also a minority compared to a coalition of the other two parities. So your point is not valid.

[Democat]

36. My point was that the Conservatives do not have a "right" to govern

So, I think it's still valid.

[w4rma]

30. The non-Tory vote was much larger than the Tory vote. (nt)

[totodeinhere]

31. The non-Labour vote was even more larger than the Labour vote. n/t

[mwooldri]

33. The Lab-LibDem vote combined is larger than the Tory vote.

Remember how the Lib Dems came into being:

Gang of Four, disaffected with Labours' very left wing turn form the SDP. They ally with the Liberal Party, then they eventually merge together.

However Labour drifted rightwards - starting with Kinnock, then John Smith, and then Tony Blair (who accelerated it). Had Labour not drifted so far left in the late 70's and early 80's then I don't think we would have three Maggie Thatcher terms, and John Major would be a footnote in history.

Idealogically, Lib-Dems, Green, SDLP, SNP, and Plaid aren't that too far apart really. To this bunch, Labour are closer than the Conservatives ever are, and to some extent the BNP are closer left-right wise - though on the authortarian front they're way ahead of anything else in the British political system.

[totodeinhere]

34. Where are we going with this? The combined Tory LibDem vote is larger than the Labour vote as well.

Any way that you want to dissect this election, the Conservatives got a a larger plurality of votes than any other party. And I don't need the history lesson. I already know all that.

[Turborama]

35. "the Conservatives in the UK are probably to the left of our Democrats anyway" = Apples and oranges

The ideology behind Tory fiscal measures sound just like Bushco's...

Voters listened carefully last autumn as David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party and his Finance Minister, George Osborne turned a blind eye to the reckless behavior of the City of London. They ignored the extent to which taxpayers had bailed out private bankers, and taken the full burden of their losses on to the public sector balance sheet. Instead Osborne implied that responsibility for economic failure lay with millions of public sector workers, and the essential services they provide.

In a politically disastrous move, Osborne threatened to punish the innocents with a 'new Age of Austerity', while promising to give an inheritance tax break to the 3,000 richest families in the country. He vowed "to freeze the pay of millions of public sector workers, cut benefits enjoyed by the middle classes and cap civil service pensions at £50,000 a year."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-pettifor/the-real-deal-in-london_b_569079.html

"so either way the new government will be more liberal than our own."

Not according to their political compasses. These graphs show that even Labour are to the right of and more authoritarian than Obama and Biden...

UK Parties: http://www.politicalcompass.org/ukparties2010

Where Obama and Biden sit on the political compass: http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008

"I think that some posters at DU want Labour to form a government just because they are perceived as being more liberal than the Conservatives are".

Well, Labour are to the left of the Conservatives and DU is a politically left discussion board so what's wrong with that?

[Captain Hilts]

18. If Clegg works to get Cameron in office, he reveals himself to be a total opportunist tool. nt

[Oregone]

23. Yeah, fuck him if he gets proportional representation passed in the process

:rofl:

Odd how people can boil complex arguments down into some fight you would see in a pre-school sandbox

[Democat]

25. Conservatives have said they won't support proportional representation!

So how exactly is he going to do that? If he falls for that trick, it will be worse than Obama falling for the year of "negotiations" with Republicans on health care.

[Oregone]

27. Then he probably wont help them get into power

(if he isn't a hypocrite)

And he can do that while also not helping Labour if they also refuse to work with him. Hell, he can just sit on his haunches, let the people's votes stand, and politicize the failure of the electoral system. A new election won't be far off in that scenario, unless Labour folds and props up the Conservatives (which only helps him in the end).

[provis99]

37. why the heck would Clegg even want proportional rep?

That would mean the death of the Lib-Dems, as all the loony parties like the Greens, Scots Nationals, and Brit Nationals soaked up their voters.

[muriel_volestrangler]

38. Is that post meant as satire?

It is remarkably uninformed.