Anti-Conservative prejudice is nothing new in British politics, though

it has to be one of its odder characteristics. It continues to colour the

judgement of certain people, for example, to the extent that they revolt
violently over Tory policies that are near identical to those they
acquiesced under Labour (NHS reform, tuition fees, top-up fees etc).

And, yesterday, Chris Huhne joined with lefty trolls Caroline Lucas
and John Denham to urge voters to rig the electoral system against the
Conservatives, on the basis that they have never polled more than 50%
of the vote in any of the twentieth century's general elections bar two -
1900 and 1931 - and that therefore the majority who didn't vote for
them ought to be the ones forming a government.

Their claim about this lack of majority support is, of course, correct
but they omit to mention that the Conservatives are the only party
ever to have polled 50% of the vote in the twentieth century (and in
1935 and 1955 they still polled more than Labour and the Liberals
combined).

Even in 1945, Clement Attlee only managed 49.7% - meaning, by

Huhne's own logic, there was a majority in the country against
Labour's 'cradle to grave' welfare state, NHS and mass nationalisation
and that it ought never to have taken place.

Their assertion, too, that 'the Conservatives have dominated our

politics for two-thirds of the time since 1900' is on shaky ground. That
the party has spent only 49 of those 110 years in government appears
to have completely eluded them - as in any healthy democracy, the
tables in fact turned a great many times.

The first ten years, for example, were still very much in the shadow of
the Liberals' welfare reforms, while the decade following the Great
War saw the reins of government swapping with each election between
blue and red. This itself was followed by a long period of three-party
coalitions stretching to 1945.

Then, of course, the following three decades were wholly dominated by

Attlee's landslide Labour victory. The Conservatives not only declined
to reverse the Attlee reforms but swallowed the new consensus whole -
adjusting their public spending commitments accordingly. Indeed, the
only period one could credibly claim as Tory-dominated was the
Thatcher consensus after 1979.

But of course, Huhne, Lucas and Denham are not talking about
Labour or the Liberals respectively - it's far more convenient for them
to speak in terms of an imaginary 'progressive majority' between those
parties, the nationalists and the Greens.

Indeed, their entire argument rests on the seriously flawed

assumption that - despite the coalition serving evidence to the
contrary - Tories are irreconcilably different from all other parties and
that Labour are the Liberals' natural partners.

But this beggars the question as to why, if they are so similar, they
have not worked together more often in the past and why, on the
occasions in which they have (March 1977 to June 1978 for example),
the relationship has broken down so quickly. Furthermore, why did
one half of what is now the Liberal Democrat party (the SDP) split
from Labour in the first place? And why have none of them ever gone
back?

The whole thing rather flies in the face of Charles Kennedy's rhetoric
early in the last decade that the Lib Dems were neither to the left nor
the right of the political spectrum - that they opposed much of both
Labour and Conservative policy because of the uniqueness of their
ideological viewpoint. It also ignores the fact, highlighted by Tim
Montgomerie, that a substantial number of Lib Dems, when pressed,
see themselves as closer to the Conservatives than Labour, particularly
in the south.

Hence, of course, why a coalition deal with the Conservatives was so

relatively easy to hammer out. Both parties found strong common
ground on the issues of civil liberties, choice in public services,
localism and reducing bureaucracy - all things Labour had
comprehensibly failed to deliver - while the Lib Dem policy of
increasing the income tax threshold to £10,000 proved extremely
popular with the Tory grassroots.

But this all really boils down to the question of what 'progressive'
actually means. For example, it's not entirely clear - given modern
attitudes to the subject - who was being 'progressive' on the issue of
free trade in the 1920s and '30s; Labour and the Liberals for
supporting it or the Conservatives for opposing it? And were the
Conservatives being 'regressive' when, with a 103-seat majority, they
extended the vote to all women in 1928? Or, indeed, a large swathe of
the working class in 1867? (Huhne does, but that's because he doesn't
believe these things actually happened).

No, the root of the matter is statism, pure and simple. The lowest
common denominator binding Labour, anti-Union nationalists, loopy
Greens (who want to stop you going abroad on holiday by the way)
and some Lib Dems is higher and higher state spending. Meaning, of
course, that they are all in favour of higher taxes and/or more public
borrowing (though the latter, as we are seeing, inevitably leads to the
former).

It is for this reason that the Conservatives will never go away and,
despite the best hopes of these doppelgängerdemocrats, will never be
permanently excluded from government. In the end the issue is,
indeed, the economy, stupid and - even in 1997 - there is ample
evidence to suggest voters wanted Conservative policies - sound
economic management, prudence, a tough line on law & order -
without the Conservatives, whom they had come to despise for their
hubris and 'sleaze'.

But, in the 88 years since their first government, Labour have yet to
prove their economic competence and have managed to consistently
leave office with unemployment higher than they found it. The voters
know this and, I can guarantee, a lot of Lib Dems know it too. And I
wager it's the reason Germany - which has one of the most
representative voting systems in the world - has had more
conservative-led coalitions than any other.