The coming Tory coup

Liberal Conspiracy has the lowdown on how the Tories plan to sieze power in a hung parliament:

Here is what has now emerged as the Tory plan:

• Declare victory anyway.
• Have the party’s media allies strain every sinew to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Insist on being given the keys to number 10 without having to talk substantively to any other party first – to avoid a coalition or any substantive policy concessions.
• Make a partisan challenge to the civil service in seeking to overturn any existing constitutional convention or practice that might conceivably get in the way, or even slow this down a little.
• Threaten to drag the Monarchy into political controversy for partisan advantage, by challenging the conventions designed precisely to avoid this.
• Hold out against electoral reform, whatever the election result.
• Threaten apocalyptic political and financial meltdown if anybody disagrees.

The key objective of this strategy is to use the vociferous campaigning of the press – no doubt amplifying interventions from friends in the City – to argue that any negotiations between parties would be democratically illegitimate, without first putting the Conservatives into power, even (or especially) if Labour and the Liberal Democrats could between them muster a majority of both votes and Commons seats.

What does that remind you of? Me, it does the Republican coup of 2000, when the Supreme Court declared Bush the winner of the presidential election, even though Al Gore had actually won Florida by all counts. There you had the situation that the Republican administration in the state before the election did its best to purge the voters rolls of likely Democratic voters, then when the election became too close to call did its utmost best to stop recounts, going so far as to fly in a rentamob of Republican staffers to stop the count in Miami Dade county. This was paired to a media campaign in which Bush was presented as the obvious winner and the need to get a decision fast rather than making the right decision.

The more it’s become obvious some form of a hung parliament is going to be the outcome of Thursday’s elections, the more we’ve heard about both the mistrust of business in it as well as the need for a speedy resolution because “Britain needs firm, clear leadership”. These are of course obvious propaganda ploys to prepare the ground for a Tory coup. Obvious, since the experience in other European countries with coalition governments clearly says otherwise. Our own dear Holland after all is not some third world hellhole and is in fact weathering the crisis better than the UK so far, despite having had a long drawn out coalition process during it, followed by a fallen government not too long after it had finally been formed.

Meanwhile, as Palau posted last week, Labour is fond of a little election fiddling as well…