Nick Harvey says we must get a better deal if we go into coalition again

Nick Harvey has given an interview to the Huffington Post that is well worth reading.

In it he - rightly, I think - questions Nick Clegg's enthusiasm for giving free school dinners to all children at infants schools while doing nothing more for older poor children:

"Someone, somewhere, has found £600m a year we didn’t know about down the back of a filing cabinet and has come up with the brilliant brainwave that the best way to spend it is to give a free school meal to all five, six and seven year olds - regardless of their income level. I am sitting there, gawping in open-mouthed astonishment."

Harvey also considers how the party may react if the next general election again produces a hung parliament:

"I don’t think you should take it as read there would be a stampede to join a coalition again," he cautions. "I think there would be serious debate to be had inside the Lib Dems as to whether we would do better to remain outside of government and let them form a minority government."

He and the interviewer between them also make a point that those who are debating which other party we should form a coalition with must take on board:

"We won’t get the choice. We don’t need to trouble ourselves. We are talking about a fluke within a fluke." This is because the Lib Dems will stick to the line that the party which wins the most votes and most seats will get the first chance to form a government. And it is also unlikely that the electoral maths will enable the Lib Dems to pick which larger party to drag over the finish line.

But for me the most important point Harvey makes is one not picked out by the headline writer. Because he questions the deal that was struck to form the Coalition:

"It was completely unacceptable to ask a national political party like the Lib Dems to come into government on a comprehensive deal and then have some departments in which there is no Lib Dem minister," he says. "Why on earth should we support any executive action or any legislation which came form a department in which we don’t have a minister, it's absolutely preposterous." 

"If you don’t agree with something don’t agree to it," Harvey says, slapping his leg for emphasis. "In the nature of the horse trading that has gone on we have agreed to a lot of things that we don’t basically agree with and I don’t think we would make that same mistake again."

I am hearing reports of disquiet on the Liberal Democrat backbenches at the moment.They are such a disparate bunch that you suspect there may be as many reasons for this as there are backbenchers.

But the critique Nick Harvey offers in this interview is an important one and should be listened to by the leadership.