Over in the Daily Telegraph Paddy Ashdown writes:
For many of us in the Liberal Democrats, this is a rather unexpected moment. And a somewhat nerve-racking one, too.
For decades, our party worked towards a realignment of the Left; an alliance with Labour that would reshape politics and bring in a new and more modern form of government. Now we find ourselves in coalition not with the centre-Left, but with the centre-Right. What happened? And can it work?…
A deal with the Labour Party would have been easier, more comfortable and far more consistent with our strategy of realignment – and it was this which I worked for over the past few days. But some of the old Neanderthals in Labour wrecked that opportunity, and have now turned their party back towards tribalism.
We Lib Dems could then have abandoned Nick Clegg’s promise to work with others in the national interest, moved back to our comfort zone, sat tight and done nothing. That would have been the simpler thing to do. But it would have been the wrong one.
You can read the full piece here.
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25 Comments
Do you know what?
Yes – we’ll lose lots of voters and activists
Yes – we’ll fall out with our coalition partners
Yes – we’ll get the blame for the bad stuff and they’ll take the credit for the good stuff
Yes – we’ll lose seats in 2015 (if not earlier)
But .. it’ll be one hell of a journey! Fasten those seatbelts …
It takes two to tango, and Labour just wasn’t interested.
In their defense, Cameron was putting some terrific deals on the table, and probably would have stopped at nothing to win a bidding war; whereas Plaid and SNP would have made for an terribly unstable partnership.
But what is telling is the “centre-left” outrage reflex at the new government when nothing has happened as of yet. It is a time for introspection and a New Politics and they go further in the opposite direction!
Where was the outrage after 13 years of New Labour? Labour could have unilaterally enacted all the things they claimed to want to pursue jointly with the Lib Dems after the Hung Parliament: Lords reform, AV, etc.
They put it on the backburner for 13 years so they could launch their illegal wars and then cried that Clegg doesn’t want a deal!
Labour and the “centre-left” need some time in wilderness. Perhaps afterward they will have the hunger for deal making that the Tories had.
“Labour could have unilaterally enacted all the things they claimed to want to pursue jointly with the Lib Dems after the Hung Parliament: Lords reform, AV, etc.”
Anyone who supports Labour who is railing at a Con/Lib coalition – if your party had enacted referendum plans on AV+ we would be in a very different place.
We will lose seats, votes and activists if we keep telling ourselves that. But we need to start by being positives. And there are lots of positives namely:
1) We now have 4 high profile ministers in Government. We get media time!
2) We have power. We can protect the poorest in society from the Tory cuts. Labour surrendered power.
3) We are a cohesive party, more so than the Conservatives.
We must make this coalition work and simply, we have to make sure that this is one of the best and most loved Governments in history. Aim high. If we do that then we can then tell the British people that if they want more Government like this then they must turn on Labour for doing everything they could to stop this government.
Believe!
Just saw the pictures of the Liberal Democrats in the cabinet and Clegg walking into No 10 with Cameron.
My god, what have you done?
I’ve now heard both Polly Toynbee and Billy Bragg say this coalition is more progressive than Labour. It kind of annoys me that Labour claim some divine right to be called progressive when, as previous posters noted, they had their chance and failed. Afterthought made a good point about hunger for a deal; 13 years of majority rule has made it difficult for Labour to listen to people. Hopefully they will start to listen and we can look towards the ‘true’ realignment of the left that paddy talks about.
Staggering, really hits home seeing it.
Alan – Wot? Polly changed her tune in that case!
We’ve rolled up our sleeves and decided that getting policies implemented to help some of the poorest in our society is worth getting our hands dirty for. It’s not going to be a bed of roses, but if we keep our heads and our principles we can do some real good here.
@ Andrea – heh, yes, I thought that when reading the first half of her article, but she hasn’t changed her tune that much, it was more a case of “they say they’re going to do all these progressive things but the Tories will eventually get their own way an it’ll all end in tears”.
@Tabman
I admire your grasp of reality and the fact that you are looking forward to the ride, nay plummet into oblivion ahead.
@Chris D
“We will lose seats, votes and activists if we keep telling ourselves that. But we need to start by being positives. And there are lots of positives namely:
1) We now have 4 high profile ministers in Government. We get media time!
2) We have power. We can protect the poorest in society from the Tory cuts. Labour surrendered power.”
You are not telling yourself that you will lose people. I am telling you will lose voters and activists. Not just me, but lots of other dismayed former Lib Dem voters that have taken the time to post on these forums confirm my point.
Points 1) 2) are exactly what the Lib Dem jubiliation is all about.
The attainment of power at the cost of any pretence of values or principles are exactly why myself and others are flocking from the party.
“We’ve rolled up our sleeves and decided that getting policies implemented to help some of the poorest in our society is worth getting our hands dirty for.”
A laudable aim. But are the Tories really interested in helping the poorest in society? Only time will tell, but I’m not optimistic.
@ Anthony Aloysius St
The Liberal Democrats are not about helping the poorest either.
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/05/clegg%E2%80%99s-10k-tax-allowance-is-no-tory-concession-its-a-tory-dream/
In essence the poorest people don’t pay enough income tax to benefit with the net effect being that it redistributes furthur wealth to the rich.
The Liberal Democrats are pursuing nearly all Tory policies with no coherent plan or message of their own.
@ Anthony – I don’t know if the Tories are interested or not (as you said time will tell), but I’m not really bothered as long as it gets done, and the personal allowance rise is in the agreement to start being phased in from next April, so should be announced in the July budget.
@ Betrayed Liberal – alternatively from an actual accountant instead of a Labour think tank: Mike Warburton, a tax partner at the accountants Grant Thornton, said: “We can already see in these proposals the influence of the Lib Dems on policy, with money being moved from middle and higher income earners to help those on lower salaries.” Even Polly Toynbee admitted it was a progressive policy, and you’d be hard pressed to call her a regressive Tory type.
Brace yourself the tory cuts are coming. For Lib Dems the mitigating factor is that David Laws will get to brief the media and the country.
John Major after the death of John Smith promised a new kind of politics,Tony Blair promised a new kind of politics and now David Cameron and Nick Clegg have promised the same. Everyone has a plan until they get hit and I expect Cameron and Clegg are going to get harder than most. The Tory Party is a huge brawling beast with massive fault lines ,it has tolerated Cameron because he’s made progress but the rumblings of discontent are already starting. I also expect Lib Dem activists around the country to start playing up when they have to start addressing cuts in local services in their newsletters.Should be interesting.
@ChrisD “then they must turn on Labour for doing everything they could to stop this government.”
That’s not a great outcome, actually, since the Tories then move into majority, without any voting reform. Although I understand why Clegg had little chance of getting more, PR is the missing part of this deal and we just have to hope that (particularly if it’s seen as a success) an opportunity to move towards PR opens up somewhere. We have a commitment for PR for the Lords, after all (and I’ve not seen any references to local government at all – if the national AV referendum does go through, surely we can’t leave Councils as the only bodies left with FPTP??).
The other hopeful scenario – which it is quite possible Cameron has in mind – is that the coalition has a modernising liberalising effect on the Tory party and the Tories start losing their head-banging tendency from the right wing, allowing the Tories to become a more modern Christian Democrat type of party and, presumably, opening up a space for a more right-wing entity built around the remnants of UKIP and others?
@ betrayed liberal – it seems to me that either we will never have any power at all (which some may favour but quite honestly wouldn’t you be happier in a charity or pressure group?), we somehow catapult ourselves into a majority scenario in one go (which when even the merest outside chance of this happening opened up during Cleggmania, appeared to generate a backlash – the British electorate not having a history of being a reckless lot, by and large), or at some point we have to share power with others.
If we’d done a deal with Labour this forum would be full of just as many critical postings arguing the same points the other way around – and in the event Clegg (and therefore we) didn’t really have the luxury of a genuine choice, anyhow. Our job now is to try and make the best of it – and there clearly are a lot of potential upsides, including steps towards voting reform (and whatever the piece of paper says, Cameron must know that the coalition falls apart if AV falls – which of course is possibly his plan; to be honest that scenario is the one thing that worried me). There isn’t any viable sensible alternative, and there are plenty of examples from Owen and Meadowcroft backwards of where seeking to retain supposed political purity in reality leads…
The predictive powers of people on here is a wonder to behold!!
No doubt they also foretold:
9/11
UK to be embroiled in two foreign wars
the banking collapse and world rececssion
and more recently
a volcano stopping flights across Europe for days on end
(a year ago) an overall Tory majority
(a month ago) a big increse in Lib Dem seats
Maybe if they can post Saturday’s winning lottery ticket, I’ll have more faith in them!!
“I don’t know if the Tories are interested or not (as you said time will tell), but I’m not really bothered as long as it [helping the poorest in society] gets done”
My point, of course, was that if the Tories aren’t interested it _won’t_ get done.
There’s little point in raising the personal allowance if the effect is wiped out by rises in indirect taxation and cuts in public services – both of which will hit the poor hardest. And – as has been pointed out many times – those who don’t pay income tax will not benefit from this measure, though they will still be hit by the VAT rise and the spending cuts.
The assumption that we will lose setas at the next general election cannot be made. if the coalition goes full term, 2015 may be in the middle of another economic boom and we will get the credit for wholesale political reform, and a greener Britain. Who knows, the troops may be home from Afghanistan.
It’s how we campaign and deal with this that matters, especially when the cuts come.
As I see it, we need to do several things. Firstly, challenge Labour to produce alternative proposals – after all, they’ve had the benefit of working with the financial figures for the last 13 years, we’ve only had three days. When they fail to do this – for they will – we accuse them of not having a clue of how to get out of the hole they dug. Oh, and we also need to remind people of that too.
Secondly, we need to be as certain as we can be of the effect of the cuts. Keeping them as far from the front line as possible, particularly in education and health, would be a start.
Thirdly – and particularly in Scotland and the North of England – we need to act like we’re in opposition. This was actually the tactic that the Tories took in the early 1990s, and it had some effect, particularly in the 1992 election. Take the fight to Labour; challenge them to produce workable alternatives; attack them when they fail to do so.
Is there a vast supply of money hidden away in Switzerland waiting to be transferred to the Treasury? I like the constant references to “cuts”; there were going to be “cuts” whichever party got into power. Cuts of large proportions on the basis that you cannot run a budget deficit of £160+bn forever. With tax rises as well…and who has been in power for the last 13 yrs…oh wait…..
Of course there will be cuts, better though to try and put your policies into action and be part of a government as opposed to bleating endlessly from then sidelines about it, ineffectively…..
I like all these predictions of activists leaving in droves, election wipeouts and the rest. If the last 3mths are any guide there is actually no point in calling an election and racing to the bookies until after the 3rd leaders debate. There is also little point in making dire predictions until 2015, especially if there is an element of voting reform.
Look I hate to say this, but my membership is going up this week and we’ve been approached by two Tory Councillors who are thinking of joining us!
So, Nick and Paddy reached the same destination. Paddy is telling us, very clearly, that they travelled by different roads. Paddy’s road is the one that I can identify with. We would have preferred a progressive coalition of the centre-left, but Labour just weren’t capable of the intelligence, the discipline, or the fair-mindedness that would have been necessary to make it workable.
Clearly this has been a dream result for Nick – and, it sems, for Cameron as well. In its favour, that chemistry has given us a comprehensive, effective deal with a decent chance of success and stability. But we’ll need Paddy, and like-minded colleagues, to make sure we stay true to our core beliefs.
The lib Dems will lose seats before the next election. The fixed term agreement ignores the effects of local election jitters and possible defections. Obviously, no one can predict the future, but this kind of thing happens in even strong ideologically unified governments. The Coalition you have is not an unofficial referendum on PR. It’s a marriage of convenience forced by stalemate. There are MPs and activists in both parties who are quietly and in some cases not so quietly fuming. Real Economic recovery is a possibility, though far from certain because to huge extent the banking system has been exposed as a number crunching delusion of wealth creation and could just as easily collapse again when the bail-out money stops circulating. Personally, I suspect this fear is why Vince Cable does not look like a happy bunny.
The reality is that the Lib-con coalition is an austerity government that will face a sustained period of unpopularity and whilst it has the seats to get through to May 2015, many within its ranks don’t feel that it has a true mandated. Also, as someone who has voted Lib Dem in the past, I can tell you that my dislike of the Conservative Party is much stronger than my annoyance with New Labour. I don’t believe that we are anywhere near the dawn of “new politics”. Only 65% population voted, the debates proved to be media hype, the Lib Dems lost seats and the two party system rallied. Sure, the Lib Dems held the balance of power but it was by default not because of huge levels of support.. .