Who’s Afraid of a Coalition?

You English, sometimes you are the crazy people. Here’s Iain Dale for instance, dismissing any notion of a Tory-Liberal arrangement:

All coalitions end in failure, the partners don’t agree, postponement and indecision become the order of the day. Britain today does not need a two-headed donkey.

This, as anyone with any knowledge of politics anywhere else could tell you, is piffle. It’s not even true of British politics. Few people would argue that the Labour-Liberal coalition at Holyrood was one of democracy’s grander moments but it wasn’t obviously worse than, say, a majority Labour ministry might have been and it was, in fact, all too stable and all too able to get things done. Not good things, you understand but definitely things anyway. 

And of course there are any number of international examples that disprove Dale’s argument. Sometimes these are unlikely beasts indeed, such as John Bruton’s Fine Gael-Labour-Democratic Left coalition in Ireland: a partnership that, if anything, proved to be unusually honest while also, of course, having the great virtue of excluding Fianna Fail from government.