COAGULATION GOVERNMENT

The contradictions grow more evident with every passing day. The three most damaging charges successfully levelled by oppositions against British governments over the last half-century have concerned “u-turns”, “dither” and “sleaze”. David Cameron’s government has yet to be overwhelmed by sleaze and perhaps has been sufficiently energetic to avoid attracting many accusations of dithering, but the u-turns come thick and fast.

Ken Clarke, the Lord Chancellor (aka Justice Secretary), hinted at this failure of the coalition in his interview in The Daily Telegraph at the weekend. Clarke ruminated that “I don’t think middle England has quite taken on board the scale of the problem”. He was talking about the economy, which is not of course his fiefdom since the restoration of Tory rule. Some sixteen months before the election, Cameron brought him back into front-line politics as shadow Business Secretary. Until then he had spent the better part of a decade on the backbenches, from soon after the Tories lost the 1997 election – he had served as Chancellor for the last four years of John Major’s government.

Kenneth Clarke: a personal view of civilisation not shared by all Tories

It is middle England that has been kicking up roughest just lately about government policy, especially the proposed sale of forests, the widespread closure of libraries and the evidence of a watering down, by complicated but suspicion-rousing means, of Cameron’s much-trumpeted commitment to the National Health Service. My reading is that Clarke’s remark is his way of indicating that he thinks the government is wrong on these issues because they will alienate core Tory votes. And indeed, it is in these areas, beginning with the fate of the greenwoods, that the u-turns have begun to look most likely,

Many on the Tory right (and not only on the right) loathe Ken Clarke for what they see as his unsound views – socially liberal, staunchly pro-European – and his faintly plebeian, even faintly bohemian style. He attended a direct grant rather than a public school, favours jazz, real ale and hush puppies and looks uncomfortable in evening dress. But he is a very old hand, only one MP short of being Father of the House (that is, the longest serving MP), and he has an undoubted populist touch, cutting a jovial, almost Falstaffian figure: the cover of the new issue of Private Eye makes splendid use of a funny picture of him.

Cameron: leading a government of clots

His interview with The Telegraph preceded the vote in the Commons on the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The court decided that the disallowing of all those in gaol from voting in parliamentary elections – as Britain has done for centuries – is unlawful. Clarke took the view that “I do not contemplate either government or parliament suddenly deciding it’s not bound by the rule of law”. He must have known by that stage that his leader fiercely, even emotionally deprecated the Strasbourg line. In part influenced by the PM, the House, in one of its bursts of almost universal outrage and self-righteousness, voted to defy the ruling by 234 votes to 22. Two former Home Secretaries, Jack Straw and David Davis, led the assault.

I found this vote incomprehensible. Parliament is a legislative body. The rule of law is its sovereign duty. How then can it in all conscience vote to defy the ruling of a court of law? In his speech, Davis said: “If you break the law, you cannot make the law”. He was talking about those in prison. But surely the complementary observation is true of parliamentarians: if you make the law, you cannot defy the law. So I find myself with the Justice Secretary on this – a matter of principle and protocol – while Cameron and most of the rest of the Commons are playing to an imagined gallery.

Pickles: give 'er the money, Mabel

Within 48 hours, Cameron was again questioning a court ruling when Britain’s Supreme Court found that those listed on the sex offenders’ register ought to have the right to have their names expunged from it if they prove themselves to be reformed. The Prime Minister may imagine that he is shoring up his middle and not-so-middle England support in striking back at the courts, but the courts will not be on the government’s side if it leads the Commons into a situation where individuals who reckon that their rights are being denied start taking the government to law. The potential for the government having to pay out millions is high.

More errors have been committed concerning the armed forces, usually an area where Tory governments take it for granted that they are more trusted than Labour governments. The decommissioning and subsequent breaking-up of Nimrod spy planes has left many aghast, both within the military establishment and in the lay community. I cannot understand why the government did not seek to sell these extremely expensive planes to some other government. Now, pilots who have almost completed hundreds of hours of training, along with various other types of service personnel, are being informed that they are surplus to requirements and, to the fury of such military wallahs as Tory backbencher Patrick Mercer, they are being (in his words) “dumped by email” which he describes as a tactic “more appropriate to the ending of a playground romance”. More Tory support is endangered by these developments.

Meanwhile, the cuts juggernaut rolls on, some of its work adumbrated in last year’s spending review, some emerging from the backs of Treasury envelopes and then hurriedly withdrawn again. We are lately learning the extent of slashing and burning that local authorities are obliged to indulge by government fiat. Cameron is taking the line that, Pontius Pilate-like, the government is washing its hands of the specific cuts that councils make, in the hope that the opprobrium for cuts of whatever nature will attach to the hapless councils rather than to the coalition that imposed them.

Cameron and his slogan: "Big Society, Not Big Government". Catchy, eh?

Despite this avowed self-denial, however, Cameron and his attack dog, Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles, are quick to decry any cuts to front-line services that councils feel they have to impose. They call instead for what they term “back-office savings”. This, the latest in a long line of political weasel phrases, is meant to convey a cut that is only painful for local authorities themselves and that somehow mysteriously does not affect the public (that is to say the voter). What this phrase means in practice, of course, is redundancies and pay cuts. These measures, devastating for individuals, are less visible and less likely to bring onto the streets members of the public (as opposed to organised demonstrators like students and union members). They are being demanded of the police, the NHS and the BBC as well as of local councils.

Of course, as I pointed out in a letter published in The Guardian last week, the government has yet to demand “back-office savings” of those banks that are now partly in public ownership or indeed of any other institutions staffed by what used to be called “the Tories’ friends in the City”. Even in middle England, resentment of the kid-gloves treatment of the banks and their greedy employees is detectable. People have wearied of the government being sucker-punched by the banks with their "warnings" that "the best people" will go abroad or that whole businesses will relocate if the managers don't receive shedloads of money. Call their bluff, tell them to fuck off if they'd prefer to live in any other country that will have them (if indeed any other will). Redraw the tax laws so that earnings made in Britain cannot be sheltered in tax havens. Let those who live and work elsewhere but keep a home here and send their kids to schools in Britain pay a big levy for the privilege.

In any case, what about all those scientists whose resarch funding is being cut? Doesn't the government fret about them moving abroad in a new brain drain? What about other important talents and skills: academics, teachers, doctors, nurses, surgeons, law enforcement officers, writers, directors, actors, technicians of all kinds? Why should greedy bankers be the only people Britain wants to keep?

As for local authorities, I advocate that councils play on this restiveness in the Tory heartlands. The government is taking an avowedly partisan line in palming the choice of cuts onto councils while distancing itself from the choices that those councils make. Is there any reason why the councils should not respond in kind – for instance, by withdrawing services (refuse collection, road repairs) specifically from those wards that returned Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors, on the argument that those residents will be looked after by the Big Society?

Cameron continues to believe that he can distract the electorate from their increasing pain by his talk of creating a Big Society (or his BS as it is widely called in Westminster and Whitehall). Defending the concept in The Observer, Cameron tried to pre-empt his critics: “the first objection [to the Big Society] is that it is too vague” but the rest of his article was unspecified, unargued waffle. For instance, he reckons that “if neighbours want to take over the running of a post office, park or playground, we will help them” but he ignores the obvious objection that there are well-established regulations, drawn up to protect both people and institutions, which cannot simply be “taken over”. Cameron airily says that he’s going to sweep away all those checks and balances that prevent untested people from working with children, a curious stance in the light of his subsequent rant against the Supreme Court.

Stay out of my garden, Maude

Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet Office and another bête noire of the Tory right, has been obliged by Cameron to speak for the BS concept – it is noticeable that no other cabinet member ever mentions it – and he has been complaining that Labour have been spreading the myth that the BS is just a cover for the cuts. This is pretty rich when you consider how repeatedly (and evidently successfully) the government has put onto the last Labour government the whole blame for what, at the time, we all understood to be a global recession. Now that inflation is the latest statistic to be soaring on his watch, the Chancellor George Osborne announces that it is an “international problem”. How does that work, then?

Ministers need a diversionary tactic because they have begun to comprehend that the cuts will grow steadily more unpopular and that the government that the voters will seek to punish is their own. Blaming Labour will pay diminishing returns. Ministers are now talking in terms of "unpopular but necessary measures" rather than simply "necessary measures". Forecasts of "choppy water" and "difficult months" pop up almost routinely, as if to soften the blows that the government knows it will receive in by- and local elections this year. "We're in for a long haul to get back to normality" Clarke told The Telegraph.

What is so distasteful about this kind of talk is that it is all about the government's own fortunes and nothing about the people's deprivations. "When we get through this." the assumption is, "the nation will thank us". But for people who lose their jobs, their homes, their services, their support, their businesses, maybe their health and in some cases even their lives, there will be no recovery. The damage that the government is doing now will, for many people, be irrevocable.