Former Tory leadership contender David Davies believes the Coalition isn’t right wing enough and rumours are spreading of a “Brokeback Club” to make trouble.
Former Lib Dem Deputy Leader contender Tim Farron has referred to the “Toxic Tories” and Simon Hughes, who won the vote to become Deputy Leader, has said the party wouldn’t have supported the Academies Bill if it were in opposition.
In a sense, Hughes’ comment is stating the obvious. A coalition means voting for some of their policies you can live with but don’t like, because otherwise the other lot won’t vote for yours. It’s a judgement about whether it’s worth holding your nose on some policies to get others and the party – MPs, Executive and members – has decided that it is.
That nuanced message is pretty impossible to get across to voters in any sensible way – one of the downsides of a coalition.
Collective responsibility means senior Lib Dems and Tories being publically “in favour” of policies they might not personally support (just as it meant Labour ministers having to front policies they disagreed with in the previous government).
And even without that, large parts of the electorate will see all Government policies as Lib Dem policies, and of course be egged on by Labour all the while.
When a single party governs, dissent is considered bad (and, electorally, it normally is). As we all know all too well, whatever the bitter arguments and disagreements over policy and personality in the last government, the spin doctors worked hard to cover it up – to the extent that bare-faced lies were told about the way senior politicians were working together.
In reality, dissent and debate is healthy for any government. Far better to have two parties challenging each other than one party just doing whatever the leader orders – especially when that leader’s predecessor considers him “mad, bad and dangerous”. Far better to have two parties holding each other to their agreement than one leader going his own sweet way and damn the consequences.
That tension within the Coalition is mostly positive – as long as we can live with the media speculating about an imminent split as soon as any Tory disagrees with any Lib Dem (news flash: we disagree on a lot and always will, and we went into the Coalition understanding that).
It’s also positive for the Lib Dems politically. Developments like the Brokeback Club give the lie to Labour claims that the Lib Dems aren’t pulling our weight in the coalition and show that, not only are the Lib Dems putting a whole swathe of our manfesto commitments into practice, but also pulling large areas of Government towards us (could anyone have imagined a liberal prisons policy of this sort under the previous Tory government?).
Open debate within the Lib Dems is important too. It may not be so beneficial in short term opinion polls, but for the long term health and wellbeing of the party it’s essential.
In true Lib Dem fashion, the party has put a degree of effort into keeping the backbench MPs, councillors and party activists informed and involved that our Conservative counterparts can only dream of.
That debate not only keeps our senior politicians honest, but gives another route to putting across the complex message that we don’t agree with everything the coalition will do, but we’ll vote as we’ve agreed because the overall package, including all those Lib Dem policies, is better for the country than any alternative that was on offer given the election result.
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30 Comments
This is spot on.
We need to keep shouting about what battles we have won whilst in government. The electorate aren’t stupid. They know that we will disagree. By being clear where those disagreements are, we can better win votes. If not, then anyone happy with the coalition may as well vote Tory.
“That nuanced message is pretty impossible to get across to voters in any sensible way – one of the downsides of a coalition. ”
I really don’t think it is – I just think that our MPs have, so far, not done a very good job of it. If an MP is asked about, say, the VAT rise, the general tendency has been to say “Well, times change, good of the country, etc” and give non-answers. Instead they could just say “No, of course we don’t think raising VAT is a good thing. But the Tories do, and we have to work with them, and by working with them we got the CGT rise and raise in income tax threshold, which make the budget a lot fairer than it would otherwise have been”.
We have to *vote* for Tory policies, but we don’t have to *defend* them, and I think that’s something too many of our Parliamentarians have been doing. Understandably, of course – we don’t have any experience with this kind of thing and it’s only a couple of months – but it will have to change if we don’t want to be down to single figures in the next parliament…
@Andrew Hickey
Amen to you brother. I think I find this the most infuriating part of the coalition’s conduct. The Tories seem a lot happier saying they dislike elements of the Lib Dem manifesto and won’t vote in support of them. I can think of a referendum on STV for one. BUt can you really think of one thing that the Lib Dems absolutely wouldn’t back? Now, I know that the Tories have more seats than us, but this is irrelevant. Iain Roberts says it best:
“…A coalition means voting for some of their policies you can live with but don’t like, because otherwise the other lot won’t vote for yours. It’s a judgement about whether it’s worth holding your nose on some policies to get others…”.
That is the metric by which you have to judge the success of this governing experiment: is compromising on VAT, Trident, nuclear power, Free Schools, immediate cuts, worth holding our nose to get £10,000 tax threshold, a referendum on AV (something we don’t really think is all that good, pupil premiums, and a slight rise in CGT?
mpg
Not only those things though – an elected Lords, an end to child detention at Yarl’s Wood, the end to the ID database (Tories said they would scrap the card but never outright said they’d get rid of the database, which was always the worrying part)…
I believe we’re getting enough out of the coalition that it is – just – worthwhile. I don’t think it’s a good thing, and I think it will do us and the country immeasurable damage, but I think it was the least bad of a set of horrible options that were open after the disaster of an election.
But we should – absolutely – promote those things we do get, and we should also promote those Tory policies we’ve blocked (more important in my view – I view the coalition as a damage limitation exercise rather than a chance to do positive good), while making clear that what’s left is a compromise, and we don’t have to like everything.
“That nuanced message is pretty impossible to get across to voters in any sensible way”
That’s because the voters have more sense than to accept a message which is so damn nuanced that it is meaningless.
It is not just a matter of presentation. The voters will not be mighty impressed by our abstaining on things we don’t like while we continue to prop up the Tories. “Shouting about what battles we have won whilst in government” is going to be a waste of breath. The voters simply do not believe that things like “the pupil premium and a slight increase in CGT” are worth a row of beans, when compared to all the other things the Tories are doing – massive changes in health, education and benefits. And you know what? The voters are right.
The Tories are acting as if they won the election and had a mandate for a five-year programme of radical right-wing reforms that will put Thatcher into the shade. They don’t. They have a limited mandate to sort out the deficit and govern by consent and agreement with ourselves. We should be holding them to that. We are failing to do so.
Sixty percent of those polled by Newsnight think our party is diminished by its role in the coalition. Four out of ten of our supporters have already left us, and that’s before the cuts bite and the health and education changes percolate into general knowledge. It is time we acted!
And of course, heresy coming up – more people dislike our “liberal” personal policies eg dispensing with CCTV, the end of “bang ’em up” policies under K Clarke etc, than would wish us to continue with our pro public sector, anti-privatisation policies, which, I would venture to bet, many of the “40% who have already left” are fed up about. We know, from other debates here, and Richard Grayson’s Compass paper, that the coalition and its programme has come about as a result of the gradual leadership takeover by orange bookers and fellow economic travellers.
There is also some doubt about the depth of our public debt problem, and the alacrity with which our MPs have accepted Tory and Gov of the Bank of England analysis. One interesting point on public debt, though, and one not remarked on with any emphasis by the Govt, is the use of PFI programmes, especially for the Building Schools for the Future programme. I note the Tories have said “no provision was made” for BSF into the future. I think both Labour and Tories have been concealing the truth on this, and Labour (or some there) are preparing to abandon NuLab’s commitment to PFI, and the Tories are waiting a better financial climate to reintroduce such financial leveraging. We should be saying upfront we want no part in this sort of off balance sheet stuff, but at present we are being no more honest about it than they are! This, of course, parallels the Government’s lack of resolve on radical reform of banking, and the need for a thorough reform of the national and international public finance system.
One thing we can never know is how many of “our” voters would have jumped ship if we had joined the “Rainbow Coalition” or stayed in opposition. My guess is that we would have lost a big chunk whichever route we picked. The point now is to get the lost voters back &/or win new ones, regrets about the past are almost always a waste of energy.
Regrets are one thing, learning from history to take different decisions in the future are another. I think we are in an analytical phase now.
Paul Barker, you have absolutely no chance of getting this voter back, and I judge that there are hundreds of thousands like me. You LibDems are in total denial. The situation is this: I am not a Tory, I am not particularly “left-wing”, but I dislike virtually everything about the Tory party (and I know the Tory mindset very, very well). I voted LibDem for the third time in my life in order to keep the Tories out. A couple of days after voting, your mob had used my vote to put the Tory party in power, power that they had not earned at the ballot box. That is it. Finish. End of. I will not vote Lib Dem again. On principle (a concept forgotten by your party). I am totally certain that your support for all things Tory (for, in reality that is the way things are) will destroy your party. You people then perhaps will cease to in denial.
It may be, DaveN, that the leadership has judged that they may gain MORE voters than they lose by going the route they have. I think they are wrong, but I also think (and seeing as how you mention the word “principle”) that the route they have chosen is less consistent with Lib Dem principles than possible alternatives. And TINA was never the case after this inconclusive election result.
In my humble opinion, this paragraph from David Allen sums up the reasons for the Liberal Democrats’ drastic fall in popularity:-
“The Tories are acting as if they won the election and had a mandate for a five-year programme of radical right-wing reforms that will put Thatcher into the shade. They don’t. They have a limited mandate to sort out the deficit and govern by consent and agreement with ourselves. We should be holding them to that. We are failing to do so.”
The Lib Dems problem was summed up by the Lib Dem MP who appeared on Newsnight.He appeared more right wing than David Willets and his role was limited to defending huge public spending cuts.The
DaveN, maybe you should have looked at what the party said before voting then. We argued all along that in the event of a hung parliament we would work with whoever had the biggest mandate. Working *with* – rather than against – people *is* one of our principles.
It might not be one that you share, but it’s quite an important one to us. And happily if the AV referendum passes, it’s one you’ll feel the benefit from, as you’ll be able to vote *for* your chosen party rather than against the Tories. Your vote for a non-Lib-Dem party next time might actually count, because of the Lib Dems…
I frankly loathe the Tories and everything they stand for, but I’d rather have us inside the government moderating it than have a Tory government with no Lib Dem moderation, and those were the only choices we had. That may not be the correct decision by *your* principles, but it is not an unprincipled decision.
It is entirely possible that the party will be destroyed by the coalition – and we all knew that going in to this. Personally I think sacrificing oneself (or one’s party) for the long-term greater good is actually quite an admirable thing to do, and hardly ‘unprincipled’. But then, my own set of principles amount to rather more than “I’ll support the Red Tories over the Blue Tories no matter what”…
“I’d rather have us inside the government moderating it than have a Tory government with no Lib Dem moderation.”
That’s what I thought, two months ago. It has not worked out that way. As Norman Tebbit put it on Newsnight, we provide “cover”, which the Tories have used to move further and faster than they would have done on their own. Quite why our leadership has allowed us to do that is beyond me.
Argue it any way you want to Andrew Hickey, the Lib Dems have lost my vote and next election time there will be many like me. It will be Green or Labour for me (yes Brown was an utter disaster), but not Tory or LibDem, who in my mind (and many, many others) are one and the same. You are being led up a blind ally by your Conservative Leader (Clegg), meanwhile the likes of Cable and Hughes are talking right-wing rubbish and making fools of themselves at the same time. People like them really do know better.
David A
We’re only two months into a presumably five year term, and the economic aspects – which most Lib Dems will dislike the most – came first. I’m far from happy with those two months, and we need to start making that unhappiness clear to the parliamentary party, but I’m going to give them a reasonable amount of time to prove their capability or otherwise.
But I’m not arguing that the government so far has been a good one – I don’t think it has, though it’s arguably better than what we had before – just that it’s not unprincipled for us to have gone into government with the Tories at all, which I think we’re both agreed on…
DaveN,
What would you have done differently if you’d been Nick Clegg on May 7?
@Andrew Hickey “It is entirely possible that the party will be destroyed by the coalition – and we all knew that going in to this. Personally I think sacrificing oneself (or one’s party) for the long-term greater good is actually quite an admirable thing to do, and hardly ‘unprincipled’”
My sentiments entirely. Last May, the country, with a deficit unprecedented in peacetime, and faced with a firestorm across the economies of southern Europe, desperately needed us to help form a stable government.
At enormous political risk, we did.
Andrew,
No, I don’t think it was unprincipled to have considered the Tories as potential government partners. Indeed, I thought at the time that the deal on offer looked acceptable, given that the alternatives would also have been difficult. However, I did think that our presence in government would effectively restrain the Tories. I didn’t foresee that they would blithely race ahead with major “reform” projects in health and education which were hardly mentioned in the coalition agreement. I didn’t think Vince would so comprehensively lose the argument with Osborne as to how fast and savagely to cut and who should bear the brunt.
I got it wrong. Perhaps DaveN, and some of the many people who post similar comments, will want to tell me I was crazy to even think that the Tories might be trustworthy. Perhaps others will accept that our decision last May was a difficult one and that it might have looked like a reasonable decision at the time. But it really doesn’t matter, because “What would you have done differently if you’d been Nick Clegg on May 7?” is yesterday’s question. Today’s question is what to do now.
You say “I’m going to give them a reasonable amount of time to prove their capability or otherwise.” I fear that this is a bit like saying “I’m going to see if things work out OK if we play without a goalie for the first ten minutes”, and then finding that you are losing ten-nil with another eighty minutes to play. The Tories have now found out by direct experiment what they can get past our objections and what they can’t, and I fear we could have set the pattern for the next five years. They have found out that we meekly roll over and allow them to drive through the Academies Bill using fast-track anti-terrorist provisions. Frankly, I wonder if they did that just as a sort of dare, just to see how much they could get away with, just to establish who is in charge.
We could have set the pattern for the next five years. Or we could belatedly show determination to change it.
Nick Clegg, of course, made the mistake long before May 7th, in assuming WE would be the coalition determiners in a hung situation (despite “We will not be the kingmakers”). OK, our party had not got the voting power of Tories or Labour, but we could have exerted huge moral authority on them to work together, either in a Tory-Labour coalition, or working with them. Had we had the opportunity to be the official opposition, it would have been much better politically. I am sorry, I don’t buy all this nonsense about Labour being unable to negotiate being in Govt. Neither do I buy the stuff about them being the biggest losers, and therefore not “being entitled” to take part!
Fair question. I would have kept well clear of any coalition, Labour were burnt out (plus Gordon) and the Tories are still a bad brand – they could not get a Parliamentary majority with the help of a knackered Labour Party with Gordon Brown doing his best to get them elected (the Tories). The LibDems should have let the Tories govern as a minority government, there was a risk – for instance another election in nine months time. The route the LibDems have taken has, however, guarantees them problems. They have allowed the Tories to claim far more power than the election result justified, the Tories can make cuts to their hearts’ content (ideological heaven for them) and the LibDems will get the blame. Cuts to schools, hospitals, social services and everything else will not be blamed on the Tories because “that’s what they do”. The LibDems are expected to behave in a much different way, they are now perceived to be no better than a bunch of right-wing no-brain Tories; this is almost political suicide. I will have no sympathy.
I am at pains to try to show there were other options than Tory minority.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/steve-richards/steve-richards-the-tories-are-running-the-show-2036235.html
DaveN wrote:
“The LibDems should have let the Tories govern as a minority government, there was a risk – for instance another election in nine months time.”
And what would the Tories have said? No, I won’t keep you guessing, I’ll tell you. They would have said: “We warned you. If you vote Lib Dem, you could get a hung Parlaiment, and that would mean unstable government that would frighten business and jeopardise the economy.” The rubbish about Clegg being a Nazi and his grandfather being Russian didn’t cost us 6 percentage points, it was fear-mongering about a hung Parlaiment that did that. Now we have gone into coalition with the Tories, if only until we get the deficit sorted out, that is something they cannot say again.
Do you really think a Labour government would be making fewer cuts? If you are inclined to believe it (and you’ll hear it from the likes of Mike80 and Rob Sheffield), I would recommend you look at the Wilson/Callaghan government of 1974-79, which was FORCED to make swingeing cuts to public expenditure by the IMF, having allowed public spending to get out of control in much the same way as Brown did.
I have been in and around politics long enough to have met many, many people who promise never to vote for us again (if they ever voted for us in the first place). So much so, that whenever I hear someone say that, I yawn.
Sesenco, I too have been in and around politics for a very long time, I was a Labour Party member in the ’70s period you mention. You are falling into the very old trap of taking voters for granted “as a party we can do what we like, the punters are bound to come back to us”. I have seen Labour and the Tories in turn go the same way – and it is deadly. In order to get parliamentary power any political party has to impress me and people like me, we are called voters. The The LibDem leaders (and you) are believing their own propaganda “we are doing this in the national interest, the voters will come to realise this and thank us” Nonsense. The only outfit that will thank the LibDems is the Tory party. You are a gift to them – Human Shield and all that. And you choose not to see it!
DaveN:
What gives you the special insight to know better than apparently anyone else what voters are thinking?
Also, had you been Nick Clegg, what would you have done?
Sesenco, you still don’t get it, even remotely. Do not take my word for it, this is from Matthew Norman in today’s Independent: …… “The death of the Lib Dems as a viable solo party was inevitable the moment the coalition was agreed, because a party of protest for disaffected voters of both Right and Left loses all purpose when it makes common cause with the one and terminally alienates the other……..Viewed as closet Tories by Labour voters and as the Judas party by 40 per cent of those who voted for them in May, the Liberal Democrats future now rests solely on continually selling themselves to the highest bidder.” ……….. So there we have it, the LibDems are disliked by a lot of people. In a year’s time when the cuts have fallen hardest on the poorest (or are there to be staff cuts at Eton? Is the private health industry no more?) that dislike will turn to loathing. And all to keep the Tories in power and Cameron as PM!
@DaveN
You quote Matthew Norman: “a party of protest for disaffected voters of both Right and Left loses all purpose when it makes common cause with the one and terminally alienates the other”
Some of that is true. It has always been a weakness in the Lib Dems that so much of our support is a protest vote. Indeed, if we’d joined in a coalition with Labour, our polling problems would have been even worse. (Imagine propping up Gordon Brown, and sharing not just the odium of the cuts, but responsibility for the creation of the deficit in the first place)
But there is a paradox in Matthew Norman’s words. If the Lib Dems lose all purpose if they ever join a government, then what purpose do they have, which they couldn’t achieve by becoming a pressure group?
To have a real purpose, a party has, ultimately, to be about changing government policy. Changes that it genuinely thinks are in the country’s interests.
Clearly, many of you guys think a rapid reduction of our enormous deficit is the wrong thing to do. While I’d prefer to slow the the pace of reduction somewhat, I think a viable plan to get rid of the deficit is essential to the long-term future of the country. Obviously we’ll have to agree to disagree.
But if my opinion is shared by the majority of the party membership, then this coalition isn’t a terrible sell-out of our principles. Rather, it is implementing the horribly painful but necessary measures needed to get us out of the terrible mess we’re in. And, on top of it, implementing some important parts of our manifesto.
Please read Andrew Grice in today’s Independent. You will be able to see just how badly the LibDem’ Conservative leadership misled voters (yes, people like me) and how (I sincerely hope) they are likely to be slaughtered at the next election.