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Sunday May 16 2010 |
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Sunday May 16 2010 |
By Martin Ivens
The new politics is "a squalid triumph of expediency over principle", fumes one rightwing opponent of the great political horse-trade between David Cameron and Nick Clegg. It's "a fix, a shabby compromise", barks a former Labour cabinet minister. Hypocritical talk about "the national interest" makes a media pundit want to "throw up". Excellent. The coalition is self-serving: therefore it might just stick.
The glue that holds this marriage together is a shared lust for power. By definition, a deal works only if both sides put something into the pot and take something out. Expediency has to triumph over some principles. The Tories keep Trident and immigration controls and surrender a referendum on the alternative vote. Daft policies on both sides have been relinquished. You want purity? Then get a religion.
This government starts with no guiding philosophy other than to make the spending cuts necessary to get us out of the IMF's clutches. But that will be the main business for years to come. Admittedly, the fault-lines are legion: the social democratic wing of the Lib Dems loathes the Tory right and the feeling is mutual. If Cameron and Clegg present themselves as the Paul Newman and Robert Redford of politics, then Vince Cable and George Osborne resemble fractious Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple.
On the Tory side, Osborne saw the opportunity first. By no accident, he is the one British Conservative who has got to know Henry Kissinger; he is a political realist to his fingertips. As the results poured in the Thursday before last, the shadow chancellor saw he had been given no doctor's mandate to put Britain on a starvation diet of fiscal rectitude. He needed a deal with the Lib Dems.
Despite a mere two hours' sleep, Cameron, too, grasped the gravity of his situation quickly. The figures tell a gloomy story. Had their swing been uniform, the Conservatives would actually have won a mere 274 seats to Labour's 281 and the Lib Dems' 66 (actual result - 307, 258 and 57 respectively). On that score, Gordon Brown would still be in Downing Street and Cameron would have been fighting for his political life. Fortunately for the Tory leader, his party polled better in the battleground seats.
His right-wing critics say that by failing to play the immigration card, their modernising leader blew it. Yet a similar core vote strategy had failed in 2001 and 2005. True, Cameron and Osborne never quite convinced on the economy but the fact remains that low earning whites hesitated to make the switch, swayed by Labour propaganda which warned that "the same old Tories" would gleefully cut their benefits and cancel appointments with the cancer specialist. Significant ethnic minority groups in the marginals positively shunned the party.
Cameron could have gone it alone, risking the Lib Dems making a deal with Labour or heading a tottering minority government. Under those circumstances, he would have been more hostage to his backbenchers than ever John Major was with his disastrously small majority after 1992. Six to nine months later he could have held an election. His pollsters told him the distribution of votes to seats meant victory would not be assured. It would be a gamble.
By making his offer to Nick Clegg with such breathtaking speed and generosity, Cameron instead made the political weather. A deal allows him to present his party as moderate and modernised - note his continual use of the phrase "Liberal-Conservative" - and stops him taking sole blame for cuts that might have unseated Margaret Thatcher had she not won the Falklands campaign. The genius of the Tories has also been to hold fast to the notion that they are only in politics to govern, a "principle" that has served them well for 200 years and will do for 100 more.
Let's accentuate the positive. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, frozen ideological positions thawed. The Orange Book wing of the Lib Dems rediscovered classical liberalism and market-based public service reform. In imitation, a group of socially liberal young Tories now clustered around Cameron, produced a Blue Book, drawing on much the same well of ideas. These young men together could effect changes of which Tony Blair only dreamt. They rub along. They are all part of the same white, male Oxbridge elite - just like the Labour leadership candidates.
On the other side, left-wing critics of the deal jeer that the Conservatives will eat the innocent, herbivorous Lib-Dems alive. After all, weren't the late 19th-century Liberal Unionists and the National Liberals of the 1930s gobbled up after coalitions with the carnivorous Tories?
Labour bigwigs snarl that they will make electoral mincemeat of them for abandoning their natural allies on the centre-left. But as any Labour and Tory constituency agent can tell you, Lib Dems are not nice furry creatures at all - more like rabid rabbits. Besides, you don't hang around for 37 years waiting for your third party breakthrough in a hung parliament without doing a little homework on coalition politics.
Before the 1997 general election, Paddy Ashdown got his party organiser Chris Rennard to ask his European sister parties for advice about his abortive romance with Tony Blair. The Dutch liberals, the VVP, were helpful. After a coalition deal, the junior party is indeed in danger of getting a smaller share of the vote but there are ways of avoiding it. They must strive to keep their party identity utterly distinct from their big coalition brother and make sure they get publicity for their gains. You will be hearing a lot about how Lib Dems secured low earners a tax cut.
Above all, if the Lib Dems win a referendum on the alternative vote, their prospects in an election improve as the natural second preference of those wedded to the two big parties. That's what disturbs Tories.
The Lib Dems campaigned for "change" until it bored the voters rigid. How, after that, could they prop up a defeated government and foist on the country another, as yet unknown and unelected, prime minister to replace Brown? Labour were unlikely to deliver every last backbench vote necessary to secure electoral reform. Shun working with the Tories? The entire Lib Dem argument for proportional representation is that coalition politics work.
It is a risk for the Lib Dems: their protest vote may vanish. But they get government experience - Clegg is the most powerful Liberal since Lloyd George-and will be treated as a serious force. In five years' time, temporary unpopularity for the cuts could disappear.
It is a risk for the Conservatives too. Divisions over Europe really could scupper the deal. Brussels is already pushing a draft directive that affects the status of hedge funds and private equity in the City of London.
There is also the danger of hubris. Clegg is openly contemptuous of parliament's stuffy ways and Cameron has shown little interest in a constitutional agenda. He appears to lean to the cynical approach of "if it works, it's constitutional".
Many MPs think a government with an uncertain mandate should think twice before altering the rules of the game. Here be dragons.
Talk of Liberal Conservatives and modernising contempt for old-fashioned Tories has an ominous ring too. One of the first Liberal Conservatives, Robert Peel, split his party between modernisers and ultras. Cameron and Clegg will have to attend to time-consuming party management.
This deal has been described as a civil partnership. It's more like an arranged marriage in which the newlyweds get to know each other only after the ceremony. Perhaps they will learn to love one another. Or not. Either way, to use that trite Tory campaign slogan, "They are all in this together." 'THESE MEN COULD EFFECT CHANGES OF WHICH TONY BLAIR ONLY DREAMT'
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