The Digital Economy Act includes the so-called ‘three strikes’ policy whereby ISPs are asked to send warning letters to customers suspected of illegal file sharing, eventually leading to their internet connections being cut off or severely throttled. The Open Rights Group launched a petition and website calling for the repeal of the act almost immediately after the coalition government took power, along with a counter which continues to tick until the act is repealed (if ever).

During the election campaign, Nick Clegg pledged that a Liberal Democrat government would repeal the act. The Conservatives mostly abstained from the act’s second reading in April, and the Act is not mentioned in the Coalition agreement or the new Programme for Government – though some had hoped that this would be included in the much-vaunted Freedom/Great Repeal Bill.

Campaigners against the act – or at least the more insidious measures it contains – can take some hope, however, from Hunt’s hints that the act may not remain in it’s entirety – he told paidContent that individual measures in the act will be subject to alterations depending on how they perform – suggesting that some of the more controversial provisions of the act may still be up in the air.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be going through the Programme with a fine toothed comb, giving you our impressions and drawing attention to sections we think are interesting and enlightening. In the meantime, the website for the programme lets you read the whole thing and leave comments on every section, or read the entire thing in the embedded reader below.

Coalition Programme on Scribd

NB: For fellow Kremlinologists, throughout the document the coalition is simply referred to as ‘The Government’.

Now that the two of them are having to come together and work out their differences, the relationship between activists is having to change. Conservatives must learn to respect the party which called the Iraq war the right way, and has long been a champion of the ideals of freedom and liberty. Liberals are having to take a fresh look at the Conservative Party and consider that it has changed under David Cameron and can’t really be called ‘The Nasty Party’ any more (a phrase, incidentally, first used by our new Home Secretary Theresa May as she campaigned within the party for modernisation and a liberal stance on equalities).

This shift in attitudes and willingness to drop prejudices was demonstrated rather brilliantly by Lynne Featherstone’s account of speaking at the Liberal Democrat Special Conference on Sunday.

One of the amendments to the motion for coalition was to reaffirm our commitment to the Lesbian, Gay, B and Trans communities – so obviously – I put a card in and spoke to that. I made it clear – to the delight of the assembled ranks – that there would be no roll back of equalities on my watch.

What was interesting though, is that I read out four manifesto commitments:

- Change the rules for gay people fleeing persecution to be granted asylum

- fight for unequivocal support for gay rights around the world, and use international groups like the Commonwealth to put pressure on countries to tackle persecution of LGB and T people

- change the law to remove the requirement to disclose historical convictions for consensual gay sex

- tackle homophobic bullying including a new category of exclusion data specifically for homophobic abuse

The shocking thing about the above four manifesto pledges above – is that they come from the Conservative manifesto – not ours!

The thing is, those manifesto commitments are not all that shocking to those who have followed the Conservative Party’s modernisation process and already been willing to give David Cameron the benefit of the doubt. Until now, many Liberals have felt unable to use the words ‘modern’ and ‘Conservative’ in a sentence together without air-quotes.

In many ways, this really proves how horrifically unsuccessful the ‘decontamination’ strategy has been. It turns out, it really doesn’t matter how much you change your party or your policies if your reputation has sunk so low that no one will believe you anyway. The only way to convince anyone of anything is to forcibly thrust the fact that you’ve changed in their face – for the Liberals that moment may have been when Nick Clegg appeared alongside the other leaders in the television debates and showed that he runs ‘a proper party’ after all. For the Conservatives it’s finally coming with their decision to enter into a coalition with a truly liberal party.

To an outside observer, of course, all of this is like watching… Well, every rom-com ever, in which the two star-crossed individuals, though on the surface absolutely hating each other, are forced to go on a journey. A journey on which they will learn the true value of friendship – and learn to appreciate that it’s their differences which make them unique and special.  At the end of the film, of course, true love and a happily ever after beckons.

Well, perhaps it won’t quite be like that. Which is good, because I don’t really want to spend the next five years throwing up.

Had the Conservatives won outright, or formed a minority, it would be ‘our new Conservative government’. Likewise for Labour. A Labour-Liberal government could have laid claim to ‘The Progressive Alliance’ (Frankly, they’d be welcome to it). As it is, we’re left with a choice of numerous bewildering and long-winded phrases, any of which might roughly describe the government, but none of which manage to sum it up in a easy and obvious phrase. Off the top of my head, here’s some options I’d put forward for consideration:

• The Con-Dem Coalition 
• Liberal Conservatives
• The Change Coalition (hat-tip to Guido Fawkes for that one)
• The Tory Liberal Alliance
• The Freedom Alliance
• Libservatives
• Conservative Liberal Unionists
• Government of all the Liberals (GOAL!)

Of course, the naming carries a significance – are we suggesting that this is a Conservative government with a flavour of Liberal Democrat policy? A Liberal government with a blue tinge? Names can have power and relevance, describing subtle divides and demonstrating where the real power lies. I just wish the negotiating team had sorted this one out in advance.

Any thoughts on what it should be? This is important, dammit!

The broad outlook of this blog is that the coalition government between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is a promising and encouraging development in British politics, with the potential to make much needed reforms to this country – politically, economically and socially. We hope to see the new government fulfill this promise and meet this potential.

Whilst blogs exist which provide a voice for the Conservative and Liberal Democrat grass roots, the coalition, due to its cross-party nature, is in an unusual position of having no ‘grass roots’ of its own, a balance we would like to go some way address. We want to accentuate the positive areas where members of the parties agree, and provide a forum to discuss and debate the areas where they do not. The blogosphere has never divided perfectly along party lines, and now neither does the political system itself. Iit’s time there was a blog which  reflected this.

We welcome dissenting opinion, and this blog is intended to be a forum for disagreement and civilised debate. We have no interest in supporting the coalition government blindly or slavishly, either, and we will seek to hold our new government to their promised mandate, as described in the parties’ manifestos and the Liberal Democrat-Conservative Agreement: an agreement to tackle the budget deficit, bring fairness to our tax system, reverse the erosion of our civil liberties under the Labour government and make wide-ranging and much-needed reforms to our political system.

More than this, we would like to see fulfilment of the promise of a new kind of politics. A new politics which is honest and open about making difficult and unpopular decisions, which values evidence and outcomes over populism and headlines, and in which the individual is held to be more important than the state, not the other way round.

Above all, this blog aims to be interesting, informative, and fun.