Last night I headed over to Enfield to hear Nick Harvey talked to a packed restaurant of Liberal Democrats about his experiences of a minister. It was an impressive turnout from one of our smaller local parties in London and an impressive speech from Nick, who cut his political teeth in the borough.
One part was about how coalition government made for better government. Nick Harvey gave the example of how troops were deployed to Helmand Province in Afghanistan.
As a defence minister learning about one of the most important issues facing him and colleagues, he had wanted to get his head around the reasoning behind initially deploying only 3,000 international troops to an area which now has around 44,000 troops.
However, when he asked to see the British papers relating to that original decision – the strategy behind it, the assumptions made, the predicted impact and so on – he found there were almost none. No records had been destroyed or were withheld from him for being from a previous government. It was simply that the extremely informal sofa government style under Labour meant that major decisions such as how many troops to deploy to Helmand, on what mission and working to what strategy, were made through informal face-to-face chats.
As Nick Harvey pointed out, the nature of coalition – with two parties having to agree to decisions – means that there is enforced on the civil service and on ministers a more formal and careful decision making process. Important decisions have to be agreed by ministers from both parties, who have formal, minuted meetings with proper preparation from their civil servants.
That switch from informal, off-the-cuff chats to more formal, considered policy-making in one a Liberal Democrat special advisor also recently mentioned to me, saying what a welcome change it was for civil servants – especially those previously used to the Brown/Blair dysfunctional relationship where it often was as much a matter of hiding information from other ministers as of providing them with information on which to make good decisions.
It’s a good change.
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12 Comments
well said, mark. how bad were internal Labour relations when relations between two different parties actually make for better government? it shows how all parties are essentially coalitions, although New Labour seems to have been about two personality cults masquerading as ideologies.
And yet the government looks like a total shambles. Genuinely puzzling.
So would a coalition generally be better than a Lib Dem majority government?
@Duncan Stott
The Lib Dems have always seen themselves as the third party, able to work with left and right. A permanent coalition partner if you like.
I don’t think they have ever seriously expected to be a majority party, except when they have to make up excuses for doing the exact opposite of a manifesto commitment, then they tell us that coalition requires compromise, and the manifesto commitment was written in expectation of a majority.
‘It was simply that the extremely informal sofa government style under Labour meant that major decisions such as how many troops to deploy to Helmand, on what mission and working to what strategy’
I have to admit that whatever I might think of the Afghan conflict, the Coalition’s handling of Libya is underwhelming. Given that Danny Alexander appeared not to be able to even give a ball-park figure on cost last week, I’d be a bit reluctant to call this a model of cross-departmental information-sharing excellence.
Of course, we should not be anywhere near Libya, but that is for another day.
I think Labour were complacent in office because they thought history was on their said. Remember how Paul Wolfowitz claimed that the US trrops would be “greeted like heros” in Iraq once they deposed Saddam Hussein? A similar simplistic thinking was going on in this country about both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maybe today we are older and wiser, but even so I still think the US/UK continue to overestimate the power they have in the world. Policy in Afghanistan continues to be a shambles, although at least the UK government is committed to pulling out within 4 years. It ought to be sooner. We cannot afford this level of committment, it is pointless.
Given the length of time British and US forces have occupied Afghanistan, I cannot understand how Nick Harvey thinks there is anything positive to say about what we are doing there.
g Some of us “See ourselves” (or at least “saw ourselves”) as something very different from “the two old parties”. It is quite amazing after what we have been through in the last few months, and the disappearance from our vocabulary of “the new politics”, that some of us are still in here fighting. I have regularly argued the point that a coalition between NuLab and the Tories would have been considerably more natural than the current construction (yes, I also read the Julian Astle article in the Guardian June 23rd).
See the Guardian Letters Page Friday 24th June for letters from LDV contributors Richard Grayson, Matthew Huntbach and Ruth Bright, to name just 3 heroic souls!
I agree that coalition government can be better government, but our leaders (and therefore the Government) lack a mandate for some of the decisions and compromises they are making.
I was shocked, for example, to hear Norman Baker on Question Time this week disowning our manifesto commitment to free university education, given that (as far as I am aware and notwithstanding that last December nearly half our MPs controversially voted against that policy and against their personal pledges to voters not to increase tuition fees) it is still party policy to phase out tuition fees. He and his colleagues need reining in.
As well as the procedures agreed at conference in March, our leaders need to present the Government’s draft programme to Conference each September so that we can debate and vote on it.
What was this about the Government’s daft programme?
Oh, sorry, Paul, I see you refer to the draft programme.
@AndrewR “And yet the government looks like a total shambles. Genuinely puzzling.”
You have a point, but I don’t think it’s puzzling.
Labour were obsessed with media image and had a very controlling leadership. That meant that, especially in the early years, Labour presented a pretty unified and effective public image, even when appalling mistakes like the Helmand intervention were being planned and announced.
I’m sure coalation-haters would claim otherwise, but a year in, it’s far too early to come to a clear conclusion about the decision-making within the coalition. I’d agree that the handling of its media image has been poor, and, in part, I think that’s why it can come over as shambolic.
But I wouldn’t have wanted them to focus on media image, if that meant worse decisions.
g
I don’t think they have ever seriously expected to be a majority party, except when they have to make up excuses for doing the exact opposite of a manifesto commitment, then they tell us that coalition requires compromise, and the manifesto commitment was written in expectation of a majority.
Well, sorry, but what are the Liberal Democrats supposed to do in the current situation? What threats can we exert as a party to make the Conservatives give up what was in THEIR manifesto and what they regard as their key ideas? The only REAL threat we have is “Give in to us, or we’ll opt out”, to which the Conservatives would probably reply “Go ahead, make our day”. They know the most likely outcome of an early general election is the Liberal Democrats being wiped out and a majority Conservative government. The paradox is that all those people yelling “Dirty rotten Liberal Democrats, I’ll never vote for you again as you have sold out your principles” are the very people making it most sure that the coalition will continue and the Liberal Democrats will be weak in it.
Practically minded people who aren’t Labour trolls ought to be able to see that if the Liberal Democrats are to be stronger in resisting the Tories in the coalition, the thing they need is to be able to point to active support for their position in the country. If every time the Liberal Democrats stopped the more extreme aspects of Toryism going through – and despite my being rude about our leadership, I accept they HAVE had a few successes in it – they went up a point in the opinion polls, they would be more emboldened to do it and to be able to say to the Tories “look – the people are behind us in our resistance to you”, and eventually it would be the Tories scared of a new general election. Instead, when whatever the Liberal Democrats in Parliament do to stop the worst of Toryism all they get is the same old abuse from many who used to support the LibDems, one can forgive them for thinking “why bother?”. This is simple human nature – if you get work hard and all you get is abuse from your managers (and we the people ARE the managers of the MPs we elected) – you tend to stop bothering. If as a manager you think an employee is not doing enough, often the best way to get that employee to do more is to praise him or her for what has been done that you want to be done, and give him or her confidence to do more.
The real issue is that Labour hate the idea of political pluralism, so they are happy to see the Tories wrecking the country while they are safe in opposition, and for the Liberal Democrats to be ground to destruction between them. It would be great if Labour were preparing the grounds for an alternative coalition when this one fails, but of course they are not. They are just wittering on mindlessly in the hope the pendulum will swing their way and they won’t actually have to think or work to gain votes. I never particularly thought Miliband E would be non-tribalist, but I did think him the best of the batch of leadership contenders in terms of offering productive policy development, and so I am extremely disappointed to have seen none so far from him. The consequences are that though I hate what is happening to us in the coalition, and I really do think our leader has been a disaster throughout, I just don’t have the enthusiasm for bringing it to a swift end because I don’t see any viable alternative at the moment.
That’s all very well Matthew Huntbach. But surely he should still believe in Lib Dem policies underneath.
How can he say that his *manifesto* was wrong?