Con/Lib or Lib/Lab - why not Con/Lab?

[ASecretLemonadeDrinkerDAVE]

Probably a very dim question, but why is it either going to be con/lib, or lib/lab/others - seeing as a huge majority of the country want either labour or conservative, and them together makes a huge majority and labour got nearly 5 times as many seats as lib dems?

[TheHeathenOfSuburbia]

It's a good point. They are traditional enemies, but really their policies are much more similar to each other than they'd like to think.

There is a Venn diagram floating around of the overlap between the parties, quite interesting.

[vesela]

cutting and pasting from other thread (and what Heathen said about Labour/Tory overlap - there's definitely quite a bit of it)

There's no set way up that it has to be, really. There are definitely Lib Dems who think the Conservatives and Labour should be left to each other to work something out. And there are sometimes "grand coalitions" of the two largest parties in other countries.

I think that in the current climate the Tories and Lib Dems are seen as more able to work together on the top priority of cutting the deficit, though. While in some ways the Lib Dems' deficit policy is closer to Labour (the Lib Dems and Labour dont wants to start cutting the deficit in the next year, while the economy is recovering, whereas the Tories do) there's also an assumption that Labour got us into this so aren't best placed to be getting us out - the Lib Dems and Tories would between them take a more critical view of Labour spending.

[ASecretLemonadeDrinkerDAVE]

Hmmmm. I do think that Lib and Con (bored of writing it in full now after nearly a week!) are almost so opposite they are sometimes similar, and also they could balance out the extreme-ness quite well (well, in my simple mind I think we could possibly get the best of both worlds). GB seemed abit desperate (trying to sweeten libs into a deal) so I wondered why he didn't then turn to the cons. Mind boggling stuff, love to be a fly on the wall right now!

[snowlady]

vesela - can you tell us it will all be alright and the lib dems/tories will work something out.

If they don't a lab/conservative govt would be interesting!!