That whistling sound you hear emanates from Birmingham. It is in England’s self-styled second city that the Liberal Democrats are holding their annual party conference this year. The whistling indicates that all of them are desperately trying to keep their spirits up. For the realpolitik is utterly dire, not to say terminal.
Understandably, Nick Clegg and his fellow ministers in the coalition government tell us that their participation represents realism, that they exercise a benign influence on the more reactionary instincts of the Tories, that without their skilful playing of the hand that they have been dealt the electorate would presently be groaning under a far more painful burden.
For their part, the electorate appear to have none of it. I set no great store by opinion polls, as my regular readers will testify, but YouGov’s daily temperature reading has had Lib Dem support consistently below ten percent for so many weeks that it can hardly be gainsaid. This is as against the 23 percent the party took at the general election when, it is apt to be forgotten, they actually suffered a net loss of five seats on the 2005 result.
Of the 57 seats the party now holds, all but eight enjoy majorities below 10,000 and four of them are perilously marginal, which is to say they have majorities below 1,000. What is more, the new constituencies proposed for the next election by the Boundaries Commission would, by all calculations, deprive the party of more of the seats it holds – and hence a far bigger proportion of its total – than either of the other main parties. Given that the Lib Dems humiliatingly failed to secure voting reform in the May referendum, they are certain to emerge from their adventure in coalition electorally weakened, even before one starts to anticipate the actual judgment of the electorate.
Looking at the way the votes fall, it seems most likely that, whatever the outcome of the redrawing of the constituency map, the best hope of the Lib Dems winning any seats at all at the next election lies in a strong swing against the Conservatives. Lib Dem seats are concentrated, as they have been for many elections, in Scotland, the south west of England and London. Of their 43 seats in England, the Tories came second in 32. Any swing from the Lib Dems to the Tories is likely to cost the junior coalition partners dear.
And therein lies the paradox. Both Cameron and Clegg are pledged to fight the next election as separate parties, not to sink or swim together. The Tories can, with some conviction, argue that the Lib Dems have acted as a brake on their attempts to balance the books, an argument that will seem to be emphasised by the line that Clegg must and will take, that the Lib Dems have provided a degree of civilising restraint on the Tories’ more barbaric instincts. But unless the two parties of the coalition are to go before the electorate implying or even stating that the coalition has been a failure, they are both going to have to stand by their joint record.
The coalition has had some success in daily arguing that the measures they have introduced were made necessary by the “mess” left by Labour. Indeed, the greatest failure of Ed Miliband’s leadership, to my mind, has been his seeming unwillingness to nail this canard. I may be wrong; he may be playing a shrewd long game on that matter, as he clearly is doing on other issues. Be that as it may, though, Cameron and Clegg can hardly take their main stand in the election of 2015 solely on the record of Gordon Brown up to 2010. They will have to offer a persuasive narrative of their own time in government. “If it hadn’t been for our measures, it would have been worse” will not sound like a very catchy tune.
In a piece on the Lib Dem mood in today’s Guardian, Jackie Ashley buried this intriguing nugget: “there is a strong feeling among Lib Dems that Labour has lost its way and is failing to offer an alternative. They don’t feel under pressure from the left. As to the right, there are clearly deals being discussed that would help protect them from a stronger Tory performance”. Now, what ‘deals’ are those, pray tell? Frankly, I don’t believe it. There are more than enough Tory backbenchers who loathe being in coalition with a party they still consider to be sandal-wearing, bearded freaks for the Tory leadership to be completely unable to guarantee to “protect” the Lib Dems in the fight-to-the-death of an election.
It will be a miracle if the two parties can get through a three-week election campaign without damagingly bitter words being uttered, words that, for differing reasons, both Labour and the media will be only too delighted to repeat, magnify and analyse ad nauseam. Steve Webb, Lib Dem Minister of State for Pensions, told The Daily Telegraph on Saturday: “Different political parties will emphasise different aspects of a programme differently. We are not the same party, we have different … emphases”. The three dots do not indicate a cut in the quote but rather were meant by the reporter to illustrate a hesitation in choosing le mot juste. What Webb was demonstrating, ever so carefully, was the potential chasm between the two parties. If neither Labour nor the media can prise open this chasm in an election, neither will have done its job.
Were the Lib Dems “wrong” to go into partnership with Cameron’s Tories? It depends where you’re coming from. I didn’t want a Tory government, so Clegg’s making a Tory government possible was for me a capital offence. I suspect that view is shared by many who voted as an alternative to Labour – and indeed many who have always voted Lib Dem – as well as significant numbers of the party membership. These latter are in an excruciating position. The coalition is a fait accompli. To complain about it would be to undermine it. The party broadly understands that Clegg has a very narrow path along which to manoeuvre. To urge him to deviate from the path or to tax him for not doing so is, as politicians are apt to say, “unhelpful”. But what can a party member do if she firmly believes that this is a disastrous path? Resign or hold her tongue: these would seem to be the only options.
Some Lib Dems will be holding on to a notion that they might feel will save the party: that having (to coin a phrase) “broken the mould” by going into coalition with the Tories, they can happily show their … um … liberality by getting into bed with Labour after the next election, a union that would appeal to far more of the party activists than does the current affaire.
Polly Toynbee’s revisionist Guardian column on Saturday, pretending that she played no role in the electoral defeat of Brown, reckoned that “the last Labour government would have been improved by coalition with [the Lib Dems]: no Iraq; no imprisonment without trial; civil liberties upheld”. Well, that’s what’s called “a big if”. What’s more, it compresses successive Labour governments into a single entity. But one could equally imagine that, had the Tories been in power during those years, Toynbee might as easily now be writing that the same policies would not have been pursued if Labour had been in power. One should never underestimate how illiberal any party can be once in government. Has Barack Obama delivered the programme upon which he was elected? Does he practice as liberal as he preached?
In the YouGov polls, Labour has maintained a fluctuating lead for months. If successive by-election results be a guide, Labour is polling much better – and the Tories significantly worse – than the opinion polls record. The pain of the government’s austerity measures will get worse before it gets better. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the coalition is in fact redressing the deficit balance far more slowly than it claimed was necessary. And there is clearly a strong danger that the economy will go into double dip.
By disassociating Labour from the planned industrial action this autumn and winter, Miliband has ensured that the coalition cannot use the strikes against Labour. On the other hand, Labour will certainly pay a price among its own historic electoral base. If he can convince the electorate at large that, under Labour, such strikes would be avoided, he may make up that ground. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether the unions themselves can persuade the wider public that such issues as pension levels draw sympathy.
What is certain is that Cameron and Osborne will be unable to find any argument to justify cutting tax rates for top earners at a time when everyone else is under the cosh. If Vince Cable can head that one off, as he likes to pretend that he can, there might be some credit for the Lib Dems. If he can’t, will he stay in government? There must be quite a few Tories hoping that he will lead sufficient Lib Dems out of the coalition to precipitate an early general election, on the argument that Labour isn’t ready and the Lib Dems will be wiped out. Such a possibility is what keeps Cable and co on board. Truly, as Cable’s wife Rachel Smith put it in a World at One interview today, they are between Scylla and Charybdis. And as Cable himself spelt out today, things can only get worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment