Over on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, former Liberal Democrat MP, Evan Harris, has an article defending the party’s decision to enter a coalition with the Conservatives last year, but also setting out some of the mistakes that have been over the last year – with the benefit of his “retrospectoscope” – as well as some suggestions of how they can be avoided in the future.
Here’s a sample:
When we opted last year to form a coalition with the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats were not so naive as to think these elections would be anything better than extremely difficult. But last May we realised that none of the options that the electorate gave us were attractive.
Even if Labour had been united and willing to form a “coalition of the losers”, the arithmetic did not stack up to anything like a stable majority without the Nationalists and the Democratic Unionists, which by definition would make such a coalition “not stable”. A Tory minority government would have required the Liberal Democrats to abstain on votes of confidence, budgets and the Queen’s speech, and we would have been accused – fairly – of propping up a Tory government while getting nothing in return. We would also have reneged on the clear commitment we gave that if we lost and there was a hung parliament, we would seek to provide the stable government that the country needed.
That left only the option of a Tory-Lib Dem coalition and it’s simply unfair and irrational to criticise the party for voting overwhelmingly for a deal that secured, among other things: the return of civil liberties and the protection of the Human Rights Act from Tory attack, the prospect of constitutional reform including electoral reform, however modest, more funding for poorer pupils and early years, a fairer tax system (income tax cuts for the low paid funded by higher taxes on the rich) and significant steps towards a greener, sustainable economy.
You can read the full piece over at the Guardian.
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23 Comments
Comforting these words may be but they repeat the pre Thursday line that if only the electorate understood us more everything would be ok. It might be unfair and irrational but politics isn’t a sixth form debating society – the voters simply see the Lib Dems as Tory Lite and going on about great achievements (all highly debatable anyway) simply doesn’t resonate with voters concerned about jobs, standards of living and the NHS.
Peebee. Well said.
The continued denial of the real problem will only succeed in making matters worse. In fact the constant line that it is all Labour’s fault only underlines the problem. How do you encourage centre left people to support you when you go on about the how important the coalition is with the conservatives (who are proving to be as every bit as nasty as they have ever been) and that Labour is to blame for everything. Not the best way of getting support. You will be disliked by Tory supporters who see you as a problem and hated by Labour supporters who see you as traitors. No matter how good your communication is you will not change the tribal make up of most people.
there’s so much to be unpacked. The idea though that the UK needs (or wants) a moderate Tory party has now been shown to be patent tosh, and the myth of the ‘new direction’ needs to be slayed now.
If nothing else, please can we have an end to the cloying internal mailings trumpeting this or that as a great victory when, in fact, it’s more usually a gritty compromise.
I saw a party website that decribed itself as the official voice of ‘a moderate centre left party which values social justice and the rule of law’. The party in question was the SNP.
Sure it’s not a betrayal of the party in the strict sense. But it ignored the reality of who was voting. LIb Dem voters in places like Liverpool and Newcastle, people who come from a strong tradition labour voting and more importantly a deep seated antipathy to The Conservative Party were never going to go with this coalition Plus it is a fact that the student vote was courted and pledges signed and then ripped up.
Arguing that somehow the people who voted were in the wrong is, I don’t know what is frankly. Well actually I sort of do, it’s pride and the last refuge of every unpopular politician. It’s the argument that you can make better voters instead of better politics.. The SNP won in Scotland because they have a good leader and make decisions the Scottish people approve of. Free higher education, no prescription charges and socially progressive things like that.
As someone else said slightly moderated Tory politics isn’t actually wanted by that many people, not even in the Conservative Party. It’s certainly not wanted by people who are actually liberal in the broad sense and from the look of Thursday’s election results least of all by Lib Dem voters.
There is an analysis piece on the BBC News website that sums things up quite well for me – in the recent past we had various groups of voters who voted for us for a variety of reasons – some saw us as a left-of-centre party; some as a better alternative to Labour or Tory (depending on local political makeup); some saw us as a Tory-lite party; and so on. Being at the centre of the coalition at this time has disaffected most of those groups in one way or another.
Despite being “coalition sceptic” at the start, I became convinced that joining the government was the right thing (not least because we had campaigned for a proportional voting system that would require us to participate in governments of various hues). I did not think we were doing everything right, and months ago I predicted on here that we were sacrificing our councillors at the alter of the coalition agreement.
However, imvho as a simple party member, we cannot just walk away from the coalition now. Nor can we be an “enemy within” – the job to be done is far too important for the country. But this will continue to hurt the party, especially as concepts like “localism” get warped into a Tory-friendly concept that means “locally, do what Eric Pickles says”.
That said, when this economic crisis is over we will need rebuild the party from the floor up. We will need to be clear what Liberal Democracy means. We will need to refocus on local action. We will need to reflect on the huge errors made (for the record, parliamentarians, it was the message handling of breaking the pledge on tuition fees as much as the actual breaking of the pledge that were the errors, not making the pledge in the first place).
The political careers of some of our number have reached unexpected heights. This has destroyed the opportunity for the many, including those who have served their neighbourhoods well for many years. It will take many years to recover from that and, in the interim, we will be under-represented at parliament and in local government.
But I come back to the original point – we had to go into the coalition, we have to work on with the coalition agreement (sticking rigidly to the letter of what was agreed, nothing more) and we have to clean up what is left of Labour’s mess. Otherwise we will have failed the country.
When we have repaired the country, we must start to heal ourselves. Urgently and radically.
Yes, Evan it’s clearly a case of the electors not getting it, the ungrateful lot !
Sorry for a second post.
But what happens if the economy doesn’t pick up and what happens to the unemployed, the bright kids who look at the cost of university and think no-way, the local government workers and the failing businesses?Because all the signs indicate that the economy, whilst not in a double dip, is stalling. not growing. Will the treasury be blaming a heatwave for lower spending next time. Will it be snow again in the winter?
In truth I don’t just think the coalition is bad for the Lib Dems, I think it’s bad for the country. And trying to peddle the unfolding mess as a fiscal patriotic war is just nonsense. It’s no liberals duty to support the coalition and certainly no ones duty to vote for it.. Neither Nick Clegg or David Cameron is Winston Churchill, Gordon Brown was not Hitler and the economy isn’t the Battle of The Bulge. To me the coalition is looks more like work the muddle-headed and the amoral.fighting reality.
We have not recovered from the Tuition Fees shameful fiasco. Our parliamentarians chose to treat individual pledges designed to attract votes as a simple manifesto issue. They threw away the credibility of our Party. The public aren’t stupid and it has been all downhill from there. We are damaged goods and the irony is that our leaderchip just can’t see why.
There are some who read my Guardian article as saying it was all down to the electorate not understanding but in fact the article identified “some of the lessons” to be learned for us which are specific.
There are plenty of policy-specific ways we can identify to change what we are doing, so it i9s not just about communication.
You can’t say betrayal is a myth when it’s an opinion. An opinion can’t be ‘myth’. Ultimately it’s up to the voters to decide if you betrayed them or not. Personally, I think having every MP make a personal pledge from them as an individual to their constituents to vote against any increase in tuition fees and them increase them to £9,000 a year is a betrayal.
Evan’s right – the coalition with the Tories was the only sensible and responsible path last May and the Lib Dems have to stick with it.
And others are right to point out that the betrayal wasn’t the decision to enter into coalition, it was the Tuition Fees fiasco with a Lib Dem minister publicly promoting it. Every serious cock-up demands a sacrificial lamb – sorry Vince, but you should do the honourable thing and resign from the front bench.
David – are you a student?
@Glenn “The SNP won in Scotland because they have a good leader and make decisions the Scottish people approve of. Free higher education, no prescription charges and socially progressive things like that.”
Unfortuntely for us, unlike the Scots, we don’t have anyyone else to pay for all these good things
I dispute the idea that the coalition was the only option or even the honourable option. The Conservative party would have formed a minority government and been forced to seek cross party support on issues to get bills through parliament because their majority was not large enough to do it alone. This is exactly what many Lib Dem supporters and fellow travelers argued for in the first place. Virtually no one thought a coalition with labour was viable. Instead the Lib Dem leadership opted to form a full blown coalition, agreeing to vote on a package that over half of their party members and more of their voters did not agree with.
The AV vote was tied to an agreement to support boundary changes, literal gerrymandering, which will increase the Conservative Party’s hold on power despite their inability to win an election.
Thinking about it, it is a betrayal. That’s why decent counsellors who had built up support were wiped out in the local elections and why the AV vote got shot down. The voters looked and said ” if this is what we get, No !” at a rate of about 70% to 30%, It wasn’t the press, the Tory Party or Labour, it was the antipathy of mostly left leaning voters They saw the Con Dem coalition and AV as the same thing.
. Nick Clegg’s downfall isn’t Shakespearean it’s Faustian.
@David 09.13
If I disagree with an asserted belief (that LIb Dems betrayed their principles by compromising in coalition) then I can describe it as a myth just as I can some other asserted beliefs (e.g. that the earth and universe were created 6,000 years ago and we are descended from Adam and Eve – the creation myth, or that the planet is not heating up or that MMR causes autism) as myths – i.e. beliefs not founded on good evidence or rational thought.
It is a rather bizarre argument you make that I that I can’t describe some beliefs as mythical just because people believe them. I would agree that you have provide arguments in the rebuttal, which I did.
There is one fundamental act of betrayal which we must deal with if we are ever to regain any credibility. We went into the election pledged to vote against any rise in Tuition Fees. No sooner in government not only did we ditch that pledge, one of our MPs presented the bill introducing the rise in fees to the House. During the election campaign we had gained the support of many young people who believed Nick Clegg when he promised a new way of doing politics. We betrayed their trust and faith and optimism and we have probably lost a generation of young voters as a result. Until we face up to that and understand that THIS is the reason why so many people have deserted us, and why our leader is so derided, we stand no chance whatsoever of regaining the confidence of the electorate.
@Glenn
Being a minority Conservative government would have still made Cameron PM and therefore the man who could call a general election when he wanted. The Tories would not have taken any unpopular decisions, would have allowed the fiscal deficit to yawn wider, and no doubt played some dirty politics to make it look like Labour and the Lib Dems were being obstructive. Then Cameron would have called a second election in later 2010, asking for a majority to secure stable government to sort out the economic mess, and would have almost certainly won it.
A minority Conservative government would have become a majority Conservative government. I think that would have been far worse for the country.
We were dealt a pretty awful hand at the election last year. We can’t pretend there were better options than the one we took.
I have never read or heard from someone who opposes the Coalition any prescription that would do anything other than lead inevitably to another election and a Conservative majority government. I am willing to read any that people may wish to set out below.
@Stuart
“I have never read or heard from someone who opposes the Coalition any prescription that would do anything other than lead inevitably to another election and a Conservative majority government. I am willing to read any that people may wish to set out below.”
Now that is a perplexing myth – why do so many Lib Dem members believe that the Tories would win a snap-election (it is a belief, because it is not grounded in evidence – i.e. opinion polls). I’ve come to a conclusion that this myth is a false post-rationalisation based on Lib Dem insecurity, as in reality Lib Dems aren’t afraid of a snap-election returning a Conseravtive government; they’re afraid of a snap-election reducing Lib Dem influence in parliament substantially, so a bogeyman justification is created.
@Evan Almighty
“That left only the option of a Tory-Lib Dem coalition and it’s simply unfair and irrational to criticise the party for voting overwhelmingly for a deal that secured, among other things: the return of civil liberties and the protection of the Human Rights Act from Tory attack, the prospect of constitutional reform including electoral reform, however modest, more funding for poorer pupils and early years, a fairer tax system (income tax cuts for the low paid funded by higher taxes on the rich) and significant steps towards a greener, sustainable economy.”
Anyone that disagrees with you is irrational. Nice. How about the VAT increase that your party has introduced, that was against your 2010 campaign and is regressive across all income deciles, hitting the poorest the hardest?
So the evidence that the Lib Dems betrayed their election promises on tuition fees, the speed of the deficit reduction, VAT, etc, is irrational because you, presumably, don’t think these were important issues, whereas you do think the other issues you’ve listed were? It boils down to which election promises were key to the 2010 Lib Dem voters. Calling such voters irrational because they have diffrerent priorities to you is irrational (and not very helpful to your party’s future election prospects).
The truth is that the Lib Dems negotiated a poor deal in rushed negotiations for which there was no excuse, given you were always the party looking to form a coalition.
In 2009 Clegg tried to persuade the Lib Dem party that scrapping tuition fees was unaffordable. In 2010 he tripled the cap on tuition fees – so he was consistent, except for that bit in-between called the election where he was happy to cynically win votes by making promises for something he himself thought unworkable (and whilst claming the lib dem manifesto was fully costed). That simply makes him a liar and he can’t have been ignorant the significance of the youth vote related to tuition fees as it was widely discussed in 2009, for example. His behaviour was similar with the speed of the deficit reduction, campaigning for a slower pace than the other two parties in an election where it was the biggest issue. He then changed his mind with indecent haste in the days after the election. Clegg is rightly perceived to be a dishonest man – it is based on evidence, not myth.
“While the failure has been mitigated by the progressive nature of the income-contingent loan repayment scheme, making what students owe more of a future tax code than a personal debt,”
It isn’t though – the new system is regressive across the top four to five graduate income deciles, meaning that a graduate on a high income will pay less a a proportion of their gross lifetime income than a graduate on the same course that ends up on a lower, middle-income. This is the opposite of the Lib Dem ‘policy’ of funding HE through progressive taxation. Just because Clegg keeps talking about a very small range of incomes across which the system is progressive (i.e. between low incomes and lower middle-incomes) does not mean that it is progressive per se. You really shouldn’t get taken in by that man.
The idea that the conservatives would have won a snap election is conjecture. They could have put their ridiculous show trial emergency budget in front of the voting public and been cut down in swing seats by the public sector wavering voters they were threatening to sack. In truth a lot of the conservative plans were so unpopular so quickly this is probably what would have happened. Anyway this is all after the fact debate.
The truth is the Lib Dem leadership did not pay enough attention to who was voting for them and why. The evidence that they were wide of the mark was there within weeks of the coalition forming and there in spades in the AV vote and local elections. The elephant in the room is the results. They’re not mid term blues it’s glimpse into the next general election.
@Steve
Cognitive Dissonance at it’s finest in the Lib-Dem faithful as well as their Mp’s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
@Glenn
“The idea that the conservatives would have won a snap election is conjecture”.
Take a look at the May 2010 figures. Conservative vote share – slightly greater than Labour’s in 2005. Labour vote share – below 30%, similar to their 1983 disaster under Michael Foot.
Labour were reduced to their diehard core vote. If the Lib Dems had suddenly forgotten how they used to preach the virtues of hung (sorry, balanced) parliaments and coalition government, and caused a snap election – with the economy in freefall (the dreaded financial markets hate political uncertainty) – I wonder how big the Tory majority would have been? Any advance on 200 seats?
As for the Lib Dems, they wouldn’t have needed the proverbial taxi to travel together to Westminster. A Nissan Micra would have sufficed.