On the art of Compromise (and why people are WRONG.)

I've been hearing a lot on the message boards and twitter and wherever from a lot of people saying that the Lib Dems' deal with the Conservatives will kill their vote share and that it was the wrong thing to do. In particular, there are a lot of people claiming to be Lib Dems voters who "would never have dreamed of voting tory" or claim that they "are normally labour voters who voted lib dem but now they've sold their souls". This is the issue with voting for someone to keep someone else out. You are bound to be disappointed at some point, either when your second choice starts instituting policies that you disagree with, or when your second choice (legitimately!) decides to work with that party or person you wanted out.

A Lib Dem supporter would be pleased, nay, delighted, to see their policies coming to fruition, whereas a person who just voted for them to keep the tories out should have known better, frankly. Vote for the party or person whose priorities and policies most closely match your own; then, no matter what the final result, you can be sure that your vote has gone towards influencing the result towards your preferred outcome. Vote against, you risk your vote having the opposite outcome to the one you had intended. Vote for, and you know that your goals will be advanced.

What's more, there's been a lot of talk about electoral reform and how much of a priority it is for the lib dems and how they musn't leave talks without it. It's true - and I myself have advocated a change of the voting system - that it is important, in fact it's a priority, and it's right that the lib dems should negotiate hard for it. But to claim that they should walk away unless they get it is a misunderstanding of the nature of compromise. The tories, for whatever reason, do not support electoral reform. They received significantly more votes than the lib dems. Their offer of a referendum on AV is frankly pretty generous. The Lib Dems and their supporters need to understand and accept that they can't have everything. Negotiations involve give and take, and in this particular set of negotiations the lib dems have actually done rather well.

Particularly for advocates of a system that would regularly produce hung parliaments, the lib dems have to understand that a coalition doesn't mean a lib dem government. It does mean that the lib dems can reign in the conservatives on areas which they see as unfair - for example, the inheritance tax cut - and that some lib dem policies will become governmental objectives. But that's all taht can be said about that.

I don't believe a lib-lab coalition would have been, somehow, more legitimate that a con-lib one. I know that it will hurt them in terms of votes (though I suspect that is also overstated - most of the lib dem voters are presumably people who have voted for the lib dems many times before given their tiny increase in vote share, and who thusly agree with lib dem policy and will probably return to them in time), but I think that working with the conservatives here is not just the best thing for the country and for the party's priorities.

A lib-lab coalition doesn't have a majority of seats. Labour lost. The Lib Dems and Labour are not conjoined twins, and there are subsantial differences between the two, which mean that a so-called progressive alliance would have required similar amounts of compromise etc.