http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31776943

That's where we're at with English politicians - a PR man with a twisted little agenda for a prime minister, a living cartoon who wants to be prime minister, and both are afraid of the Scots.

If this general election results in a conservative/labour coalition, the next general election will have a turnout in the 25% area. I mean, why the hell bother if that's what we get?

David Cameron calls on Ed Miliband to rule out SNP deal
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31780935

It's hard to know if Baker was wheeled out to start an argument, or if Dave is finding himself having to react to a blunder. He's already had to have sandwiches with the DUP.

I can't for the life of me think of any appropriate response than 'Why do you care about this unless you think you're going to lose?'

And especially the way he worded his speech.

i think that if there ever was a lab/con coalition i would give up on politics and voting ...

Is a centrist coalition where left-of and right-of-centre parties work together, actually scarier to you people than one in which a largely centrist party is dragged off to the far right or left by an oversized frivolous protest movement?

Says the UKIP voter

You can mock but I don't think he's alone. Despite the growth of the Greens, UKIP etc most of the population of the UK still see general elections as a straight up fight between Labour and Conservative parties. And the rhetoric of both suggests the parties think so too. They both publicly assume they will win, or the other one will win - none of them are talking about coalitions or minority governments. In fact they're dodging any questions asked about it - see Labour's scripted reaction to the question of whether they'll form a government with the SNP. They may be planning for them in the background but they patently don't believe the public wants to hear about that stuff.

Given all of that, what do you think the message a lab/con coalition in 2015 would be for most people? It's pretty simple. "Your vote didn't matter at all". No matter which side you voted for, you got 50% of the other side anyway.

If that happens, public disengagement with politics will become pretty much the norm, IMO. It would possibly be a success in short term political terms, but in 'strategic' democratic terms, it would be an utter disaster for the UK. In a decade or two when the idea we're in a new, poly-party system with maybe 5 or 6 parties who have genuine solid parliamentary blocks in place and the idea of coalitions is more 'bedded in', maybe it could happen. But right now.. god I hope not.

But yet in lots of Europe coalition is the norm with centralist left and right parties working together

Yeah, read what I posted.

I think what bothers me the most is that the policies and their marketing for this will be aimed at a few “battleground” seats, whose demographics will have been analysed in great detail. It’s not every voter who gets to say who runs the country, it’s a few in the marginals who have all the power. If a marginal looks a little, well, “UKIP” then we’ll hear a lot of tough talk on immigration and dealings with the EU. If you have any hopes to hear about funding for, say, education, science, or the arts, then you may have a long wait.

It's a fundamental problem with our system of representative democracy, and possibly would always be in any system where the population is segmented into constituencies (as oppose to an 'everyone votes and we divvy up the seats by percentages' PR method some euro states use). When you have a system where small gains in certain places have a disproportionately large effect on the final result, you're going to concentrate on those small gains. It's simple optimisation strategy.

The issue in general though is that politics has become all about winning power and not really much about using power. We seem to have few politicians who want to be elected through a sincere wish to change or manage our social and economics systems - 'vocational' politicians, if you will - and an awful lot who want to be elected because it's a really nice job to have, there are plenty of side earners and they get to wield political power even though they have no real interest in what happens to the rest of the population when they do - call them 'professional' politicians.

I still say the biggest possible issue with a lab/con pact is it would make a very large portion of the electorate feel disenfranchised, not because they didn't get a vote but because a lot of people vote to keep 'the other side' out, as much as they do to get 'their side' into power. If you vote labour and labour get as many votes as the tories but you still get some tories in power (or vice versa) then you're going to feel cheated if you're used to labour or conservative governments for the whole of your life so far. The UK public is not used to coalitions and lab/con is the most divisive coalition we could possibly have.