National governments are anti-democratic

Martin Kettle wrote on Friday that he would no longer (entirely) rule out the possibility of some sort of national government.

In six months' time, though, advocates of a genuine government of all the talents - an economic national emergency cabinet including Alistair Darling, Ken Clarke and Vince Cable - may suddenly find themselves with an audience.

But this is a very bad idea. There are two major democratic accountability problems.

First, because the major parties have a major difference on the economic response, Kettle cherry-picks individuals who might not. But this suggests a coalition on the Lloyd George 'GOAT' model, where the Prime Minister chooses individuals from all parties or none, who float free of their party allegiances. Parliamentary accountability can by weakened by such an approach.

Secondly, national governments are not the answer to political polarisation and a growing extremist threat. They often encourage and incentivise it, because there are few if any moderate routes for opposition. It then gets harder to form any non-grand coalition government, exacerbating the problem. That has been the story of Austrian politics. It was also a feature of the first German grand coalition in the 1960s, and is part of the reason for the rise of the Linkspartei know.

On both of these issues, such scenarios are fundamentally different from a proper party-based coalition government (such as the Katwala coalition plan). This involves a political negotiation to genuinely share power, and so would be a real coalition, whereas individual cross-party ministers can often be primarily decorative (beyond their potential issue specialisation).

Secondly, and most importantly, this sharpens the political choice on offer to the country, rather than denying it. What General Election do advocates of a Kettle-style National Government envisage taking place? They should be used only where the scale of emergency is such - as in the second world war - that it really is necessary to suspend the normal rules of democracy.

And that is also why I just can't see anything substantive at all in Luke Akehurst's comparison of my call for a coalition with the National Government of 1931. I don't recall advocating that Brown and Darling form a government with mostly Tory Ministers, plus Nick Clegg, to fight a campaign to back Tory candidates against most of the Labour Party. So what is comparable please?

Now, Luke is a nice guy and a clever one too. He certainly isn't usually into the old leftist kneejerk politics of shouting 'betrayal' and '1931' before engaging the brain, since he inherits the tradition of the loyalist and tribalist Labour right. This tradition managed to achieve much good, if often through its skill at stitching up deals in smoke-filled rooms. But political cultures change too, as our no longer top down party (work in progress) is seeking to demonstrate.

It is obviously pretty disappointing for me to hear that a newsletter called 'Liberal Demolition' is not signed up to a pluralist approach or a progressive realignment. (For some reason, I've never been on its mailing list). But, whether Liberal Demolition is aware of it or not, Luke knows enough history to be aware that Labour owed most of its presence in Parliament in 1906 to the (secret) Lab-Lib electoral pact of 1903.

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