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Beyond Westminster

Factual: Politics

Series looking at politics beyond and outside the Westminster parliament

Beyond Westminster: Lessons learned from Coalitions past

01/01/2011

Lessons learned from Coalitions past

BBC Radio 4 - Beyond Westminster, Lessons learned from Coalitions past

What do past coalitions tell us about how politics may develop in and out of Westminster?

Amid the ructions within the Tories and Liberal Democrats, what lessons can today's ministers learn from earlier coalitions? Will politics be re-shaped or just re-branded?

In a special New Year's Day edition of "Beyond Westminster", Andrew Rawnsley considers the lessons of history for Britain's coalition government - and its opponents. 

Conservative and Liberal Democrat ministers are busily advancing their ambitious political and economic agenda - albeit amid parliamentary revolts and embarrassing comments to undercover reporters. Exactly a hundred years ago too, no party had an outright majority at Westminster, and a Liberal government relied on Irish Nationalists and a fledgling Labour Party to enact reform of Parliament, a radical budget and social changes. 

Lloyd George continued in coalition with the Conservatives after World War One only for peacetime tensions within the government to culminate in the ejection from Downing Street of Britain's last Liberal prime minister, amid mass disaffection with Liberal splits. Can Nick Clegg avoid a similar fate befalling today's Liberal Democrats? And can the present Conservative leadership prevent tensions at Westminster - and across the country - from undermining David Cameron's and Nick Clegg's "new politics"?

For Labour too, past coalition experience is ambiguous. Some aims were achieved, but the 1930s National Government and its break-up left a legacy of bitterness that has long endured. How savvy will Labour be in opposing the coalition parties not just at Westminster but in this year's polls for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly and in local government?

Seven months into "new politics", Andrew Rawnsley explores with historians Juliet Nicolson and Martin Pugh the record of past coalitions. And he discusses with The Rt. Hon. David Davis MP, Simon Hughes MP and Tristram Hunt MP the lessons of the past and if this coalition will re-shape British politics.

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