With it looking more and more likely with each passing hour that the Liberal Democrats will do a deal with the Conservatives, huge opportunities have opened up for the Labour Party – opportunities which if seized could propel us back into power in a matter of months.
The Fabian Society has today published a briefing paper outlining the potential for a revitalised Labour party to take full advantage of the discord, disillusionment and downright anger amongt Liberal Democrat voters – many of them Labour supporters who switched tactically – and win a second election within the year, in the event of a highly unstable Lib-Con alliance falling.
The reasearch shows that 18 of the Lib Dems’ 57 seats are prey to a Labour surge were just one in four Lib Dem voters to switch. If one in ten switch, the most achievable aim, eight seats will fall – Norwich South, Bradford East, Brent Central, Manchester Withington, Dumbartonshire East, Birmingham Yardley and Edinburgh West.
The Liberal Democrats are also vulnerable in Lib-Con marginals. In the south west of England, where 13 of the Lib Dems’ 57 MPs were returned, the Tories finished second in all but one of those contests. A swing of only 2.5 per cent from the Lib Dems to Labour would see the Tories take six of those seats, with a swing of 5 per cent resulting in the Lib Dems losing all but two of their seats in the region.
As I argued on these pages two weeks ago, it just doesn’t make sense for the Liberal Democrats to join forces with the Conservatives. On a whole range of policy issues, from Europe to equality, from climate change to the economy, in opposition to fox hunting and the Tories’ regressive inheritance and marriage tax plans, the Lib Dems are much much closer to Labour than they are Tory, their activists and those who voted tactically even more so.
But it is on electoral reform that they are most at odds with the Conservatives. As the graph below illustrates, the Liberals were even more screwed by the first-past-the-post system this time than in each of the past three elections, losing five seats in return for an increase in their vote of nearly 850,000:
The ball now firmly in his court, wooed by everyone, the world at his feet, it’s the moment he’s waited his whole life for, but in his haste for power, and his desire to “do the right thing” – even though he’d be doing nothing of the sort – could Nick Clegg be opening his side up for attack from left and right, and from within, and in so doing signing his own political death warrant and consigning his party to another 90 years in the wilderness.
It’s high stakes poker with the dice loaded in his favour; the question is, will he roll ’em or be rolled?
As the Liberal Democrats maintain their rating in the polls, with Nick Clegg flying high having lived up to heightened expectations in the 
