SENIOR LABOUR Party figures, still smarting at the Liberal Democrats’ decision to ally themselves with the Conservatives after May’s general election, strongly rejected overtures from Lib Dem cabinet minister Chris Huhne, who said his party could enter coalition with Labour after the next election.
Mr Huhne, energy secretary in the coalition government, was speaking to a fringe meeting on the edge of the Labour conference in Manchester.
He said: “Each parliament is going to be dealt with in its own right. We will, in my view, be in coalition with an agreed programme with the Conservatives until the next election, and at that point we will fight as an independent party with a programme which we will put forward which will be quite distinct from the programme of the Conservatives or Labour.”
He said he had a lot in common with newly elected Labour leader Ed Miliband, and went on to imply that Mr Miliband would not rule out future co-operation with the Liberal Democrats. “Three-party politics is here to stay. Sometimes that will mean that there is a coalition between Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, sometimes between Liberal Democrats and Labour and sometimes it may even mean Labour and Conservative.
“I think [Mr Miliband] has a lot to offer and he is not instinctively the sort of tribal politician who will attempt to pull up the drawbridge. Given where we are in British politics, I think that’s a good thing,” Mr Huhne told the meeting, which was attended by, among others, Labour’s former work and pensions secretary of state Yvette Cooper, who is one of the favourites to become Labour’s shadow chancellor once the party’s shadow cabinet elections finish in a fortnight.
However, Mr Miliband – who received a boost yesterday when his brother, David, defeated by him in Saturday’s election, urged Labour members to unite behind the new leadership – is expected to launch a strong attack today on the Liberal Democrats when he gives his first address as leader.
He will criticise the party for signing up to deep cuts in public spending proposed by the Tories.
Rejecting charges that the Liberal Democrats had misled anyone during or after the May campaign, Mr Huhne, who benefited from Labour support in his Eastleigh constituency, insisted the Liberal Democrats were “part of the political landscape” and that coalition governments would be the norm in the UK, regardless of whether the voting reform referendum went through next year or not.
“The Liberal Democrats are here to stay. We are not about to disappear in a puff of smoke.”
Responding to Mr Huhne’s overtures, Ms Cooper said the Liberal Democrats were losing their identity in the coalition deal with the Conservatives.
“The difficulty with Chris’s analysis about the idea that the Liberal Democrats have a distinct identity and could now work with any party . . . is that the defining nature of the coalition has been a conservative one, not a liberal one,” she said.
She added that the third-largest party was divided between those with social democrat tendencies, such as Mr Huhne, and the party’s conservative wing, represented by party leader Nick Clegg and others.