Stephen Tall writes today at Comment is Free that not only is it healthy to be open about disagreement within the coalition, but that it could be good for future Lib Dem – and coalition – success.
He cites the results of this week’s Lib Dem Voice survey, in which 84% of respondents still support the coalition partnership between the Lib Dems and Conservatives – yet just 17% believe it will be good for the party’s prospects at the next general election.
Far from being taken for a ride by the Tories or being carried away by power-hunger, as some tribal Labourites have suggested, Stephen describes Lib Dem members’ pragmatic acceptance of the party’s risks and achievements in coalition government.
Given party (and public) understanding of this balance, Stephen suggests that the party’s leadership should be more relaxed about the coalition, resisting the urge to put on a united front on every issue, lest the weekly “rift” headlines emerge:
It’s understandable that coalition representatives have been so anxious to present a united front – but there is nothing stopping Lib Dem (or Conservative) ministers reminding voters that the two parties disagree on some significant issues, while working amicably together on those issues where agreement can be reached. It’s really not such a hard sell; the public understands already.
Fostering a coalition which is relaxed with honest disagreement is important for the Lib Dems’ future good health. But it also is vital for the future of coalition partnerships.
If the public comes to regard the inevitable policy accommodation between two (or more) rival parties as an insipid muddle, weakly settling for the lowest common denominator simply to avoid conflict, then the hope of a more pluralist politics will be doomed almost before it has begun.
Yet if the coalition is able to demonstrate that dynamic tension can work – that the clash of political ideas within government can leverage greater gains for society than single party minority rule – then there is still time to prove that a new politics genuinely is possible. At the very least it might cure the Lib Dems of our masochism.
Read the full piece here.
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6 Comments
“yet just 17% believe it will be good for the party’s prospects at the next general election.”….have so few been so wrong about so much. Tonight you have just hit your lowest percentage for 9 years.
… yet we’ve also managed to do something that Labour haven’t done for years – come top of the opinion polls. It’s August, it’s silly season and the public don’t care about politics at the moment – go back down your hole until Spring.
What are “tribal Labourites” exactly? The LibDems are finished, as a political force. The people who have power and or influence, may not mind having their heads stuck in the sand, but it is apparent that the vast majority of LibDem supporters do not believe that the LibDems will gain any political capital from being part of this coalition government.
Also, this united front that the coalition like to display, is not being forced on LibDem members, there are no real areas of disagreement between the LibDem leadership, and the Conservative leadership. Any contrived disagreements will be seen as just that. The electorate can see that the LibDem leadership are very comfortable, some may even say zealous, in their defence of coalition policies.
This poll is a delusion. Those people responding are likely to be the active enthusiasts and the deeply antagonistic. The results coincide with the latest Yougov Poll which shows Lib Dem electoral support at 11 % and shrinking steadly. Erosion starts at the bottom and moves upwards.
To pronounce that the Lib Dems are finished as a political force without supporting evidence amounts to little more than a baseless prediction. There are too many variables at play for anyone to state that they know the voters mind right now, never mind in four or five years time. By all means state your opinion, but do not try and bolster it with bogus facts, such as trying to read the minds of the ‘vast majority’ of Lib Dem supporters, or sell your particular interpretation of events as the only possible explanation. Finally, and most definitely, never believe anything you read in the papers, or anywhere else for that matter!
Our achievements in the government are necessarily limited. It’s a Tory government with a little LibDem influence, not a LibDem government. The Tories won many more MPs, the arithmetic gave us little alternative but to agree to support them into government, but that is surely “first past the post” democracy which Labour supports.
Labour are now running propaganda – I’ve today had a bit through my letterbox – written as if we are the government, as if what we would do were we governing alone is what the coalition is doing now. Obviously it is not, a junior coalition partner cannot implement its entire manifesto. We seem to have gone for trying to get a few bits in that the Tories would not object to – civil liberties stuff etc – while leaving the Tories to get on with their economic polices.
OK, that’s maybe realistic, but we really do need to find a way of getting across that’s how it is. It was portrayed for so many years that we would be in a “kingmaker” position in a “hung parliament” that Labour is able to get away with making out that it was us who “put the Tories in”. It wasn’t – it was the electorate and the electoral system which Labour supports and we do not. To some extent also Labour’s unwilingness to seriously negotiate an alternative coalition, though I think the arithmetic anyway was against that, also the feeling that Labour had been in for too long and a change was needed.