Why there won’t be a Labour-SNP coalition

A quick thought about this story. There are, at the moment, two kinds of politicians in Europe: the Ins and the Outs. The Ins are the respectables, either conservative, liberal, or social democratic. They form governments, run the European Union, and practically drip seriousness. On the other hand, nobody believes a word they say, and they are painfully easy to mock. Their biggest problem is that people increasingly don’t distinguish between different varieties of Ins, and increasingly don’t vote.

The Outs, on the other hand, are the people who are against. They don’t get to exercise much real power, and they are usually deeply unserious, but on the other hand, they seem to have actual public support and to communicate with the electorate. Here we find the various national flavours of the extreme-right, people like Syriza, Podemos, or Die Linke, the Greens up to a point, and the Euro-nationalists. The common factors of the Outs are usually that they are critical of either the European Union or the national state they’re part of, and that they project authenticity.

Nothing, of course, is as fake as authenticity. It’s basically always a style statement rather than a fact – but saying this doesn’t get rid of its attraction, and it doesn’t help you project it either. We can get a grip on this by considering a case study, Nick Clegg. Ha ha, you say. Clegg authentic? But this is now. Let’s remember then.

In 1997-2010 the Lib Dems were arguably the UK’s leading Outs, the party you picked if your answer to “Tories or Labour?” was “You can’t make me”. Opposition to the Iraq War, to PFI/PPP, drugs prohibition, tuition fees, and various manifestations of the surveillance state, and wholehearted support of the European Union (in the UK, an Out position) made them distinctly different to the Ins. As a result, Nick Clegg held a substantial amount of authenticity as capital going into the 2010 election campaign. The TV debate – the night of “I agree with Nick” – was the moment when he tried to use it to address the electorate directly, a classic Out strategy.

His problem was then how to use this to get In without destroying it in the process. Unfortunately, coalition by its very nature involves a lot of the sort of compromise, weasel-words, and expediency that we perceive as being classically In, and everything that the Outs reject. Clegg, I think, has spent down the capital, every penny of it, to the point where he’s polling worse than the Greens. Only he can say whether it was worth it.

Interestingly, along the way, the Lib Dems’ Outish unseriousness has been repeatedly exposed. Before 2010 they had a reputation for wonkish competence, but since then we have had things like their signature achievement, the pupil premium, that ended up making schools forcibly enrol everyone in free school meals to keep from missing out, or that time they didn’t realise schools would need kitchens to serve free school meals. These days, they still have the Outs’ flakiness, but they have lost their reputation for policy chops.

This leaves them utterly identified with the system, the big problem of the Ins, but also with a reputation for bungling, the big problem of the Outs. (Ask Natalie Bennett.)

This example must weigh heavy on the other key Out party in the UK, the Scottish Nationalists. Their post-referendum decision to double-down and blame everything on Labour seemed like bunker thinking in the days immediately after the referendum, but it has paid off. The greatly increased activist base created for the referendum had to be kept in action, or else it would have lost interest and wandered off. The organising muscles had to be exercised to maintain their strength, and only Scottish Labour presented a target worth going after in terms of votes or seats.

This leaves Nicola Sturgeon with a lot of Outish capital that must eventually be converted into something. The conversion has to happen, because In parties are expected to deliver something whereas Out parties are expected to express something. The SNP can’t choose to be a permanent protest party, because it’s an In party in Scotland – it’s the government. Its success has been built on a balancing act between being an In party in Holyrood but an Out party in Westminster.

This is useful; François Mittérrand liked to quote an 18th-century French cardinal who said that when you resolve an ambiguity you always deny yourself something. And he should have known. The danger, though, is that whatever happens in May will do just that, collapsing the wave-function into one of its possible states. The SNP isn’t going to give up being the government in Holyrood, so it’s easy to see what the failure mode here is. Outness is fragile. One false step and all that effort could be wasted. Going into coalition might Cleggify the SNP, and you bet Labour would try to make it happen, being their best chance to reverse the SNP surge.

At the same time, Labour has plenty of reasons to dislike coalition with the SNP. It would hugely complicate their plans to retake seats in Scotland, and there is an enormous amount of bitterness to swallow. Ed Miliband’s Labour is more of an Out party than you might think, probably more than any other mainstream social democrats in Europe – they’re very much about trying to address the public directly via TV debates, public question times, the Internet, and door-to-door retail campaigning, and Miliband does well at channelling public rage (see taxdodgers, Murdoch, energy prices).

So coalition is a big “no”. That said, there is a lot of negotiating space left. Both Labour and the SNP need to beat the Tories. They can agree that David Cameron should not be the next prime minister, and given the relative numbers, that Nicola Sturgeon won’t be either. Labour can offer policy concessions to the SNP, and most of all, a non-Tory government. The SNP can put them over the top. Some sort of agreement that stops short of coalition and maintains both parties’ freedom of action is obviously possible.

Of course, it was for Nick Clegg too.

Update: A more quantitative way to operationalise this would be to look at turnout. Outs get people to turn out. See this from Alberto Nardelli:

Biggest uncertainty around @theSNP landslide isn't a swing back to Labour, but these levels of turnout happening: pic.twitter.com/33ZWBCjCOP

— Alberto Nardelli (@AlbertoNardelli) March 16, 2015