John Humphrys asks: Is the coalition breaking apart?
Things are getting a bit fractious in the coalition. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, has had some harsh things to say about policy ideas emerging from his Tory colleagues. And leading Conservatives have been mouthing some less than complimentary remarks about him. Are we reaching the point where collective cabinet responsibility is breaking down? Can the government survive until the planned election next year? Indeed, should it? And does the latest bad-mouthing affect our views on whether, in general, coalition government is a good thing or a bad?
The New Year is the traditional time for party leaders to speak to their party faithful. Their messages are intended to rally the troops. This year it matters more than most. With less than eighteen months to go to the general election the leaders need to start setting out their stalls and begin the business of trying to persuade the voters that their party, uniquely, offers the country salvation if only they could be given the chance to govern alone.
For Labour this is a relatively straightforward exercise in that they are unencumbered with the responsibility of government. Their task is simply to come up with policies that will both appeal to the electorate and survive scrutiny by their opponents. But the other two coalition parties have to try and pull off a more difficult trick: to carve out distinctive policies from each other while, at the same time, governing the country together.
The Tories have to consider more than one danger. It’s not just Labour that threatens their hopes of staying in power, let alone winning an absolute majority. To the right they are under severe pressure from UKIP which doesn’t expect to find itself in government but could well deprive the Tories of staying in power simply by attracting votes away from them. To counter this threat the Tories have to advocate policies attractive to potential UKIP voters – policies, in other words, which are likely to be anathema to their LibDem allies.
The LibDem problem is, if anything, even more severe. Since the last election their share of the vote has shrunk from 23% to around 10%, most of it going to Labour. If the party is to have any chance of being a significant player after the election it needs to win a lot of these votes back, which means adopting policies attractive to voters ready to flirt with Labour.
So it’s no wonder that, as the coalition parties have found themselves needing to appeal to opposite ends of the political spectrum, they have found themselves at each other’s throats.
That explains why Nick Clegg and his LibDem colleagues have started to focus the attack on areas of policy on which the two coalition parties are sharply at odds: tax and public spending, Europe and immigration.
So there were fireworks when George Osborne, the chancellor and Tory election strategist, announced that a re-elected majority Tory government would aim to cut a further £25bn out of public spending, half of it coming from the welfare budget. Mr Clegg accused him of being ‘extreme’ and wanting to solve the country’s financial problems by imposing the burden on those least able to bear it. On Europe, he accused David Cameron of ‘flirting with the exit’ because of his promise that if he is returned to power he will hold a referendum on EU membership in 2017. LibDem peers along with Labour Lords have been trying to thwart that plan in the House of Lords. And on immigration, Mr Clegg’s LibDem colleague, the business secretary, Vince Cable, accused the Tories of getting in a panic He even compared their response to Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech in the 1960s.
Tory attacks on the LibDems have been more personal than political and none too flattering. Boris Johnson, the Tory mayor of London and the man many Tories want to replace David Cameron one day, said of Mr Clegg this week: ‘He’s there to serve a very important ceremonial function as David Cameron’s lapdog-cum-prophylactic protection device for all the difficult things David Cameron has to do’.
This Punch-and-Judy stuff may seem too many people to be just the usual business of politics, except that because the Tories and LibDems are in government together they are supposed to practise collective cabinet responsibility. In other words, they are supposed to support everything the government does, no matter whether they personally agree with it or not. To a casual observer, all this sparring looks like a palpable breach of that hallowed doctrine.
It could be argued that if you look at the small print the two parties are attacking only the policies the other is advocating for after the election, not the ones being pursued jointly now. But often it seems a rather fine distinction, with Mr Cable in particular coming close to being what one of Mrs Thatcher’s more outspoken colleagues was dubbed, a ’semi-detached member of the government’.
What is clear is that there is an increasing perception of disunity in the government that is likely to get worse as the election approaches. Some argue that the honourable way out is for the LibDems to leave the government sometime over the next year, sustaining a minority Tory government in power until the planned election date, but giving themselves the freedom to campaign on their own policies.
But Mr Clegg seems not to be at all interested in this idea. In his view a commitment was made to govern jointly for the entire parliament and this commitment must be maintained if the party is to seem serious. Furthermore, he seems to think that these internal but public spats are in the nature of coalition government, are perfectly normal in countries more used to coalition government and that we need to get used to it ourselves.
The polls seems to suggest that coalition may indeed become normal here too. Labour’s lead is significant, but governments tend to pull back support in the last year before an election so another hung parliament after the next election is regarded by many commentators as the most likely outcome.
In this context it is perhaps unsurprising that Ed Balls, one of the most combative and partisan of Labour’s frontbenchers, has started to say soothing things about Mr Clegg. In the past he has said it was ‘shocking’ of Mr Clegg to get into bed with the Tories and no member of the shadow cabinet could ever work with him, but he’s now saying he understands ‘totally’ why Mr Clegg did so. He went further: ‘I can disagree with Nick Clegg on some of the things he did but I’ve no reason to doubt his integrity. We’ve never, I don’t think, ever had a cross word.’
Over the next eighteen months, then, we’re likely to see Labour make a big appeal to be allowed to govern alone, while making sure they’re not too hard on the LibDems, just in case. They, in turn, will want to convey the sense that their role in politics is to mitigate the excesses of the two parties, a strategy which requires them to attack the Tories while still trying to govern with them. And the Tories will be wanting to tell us how wonderful it would be if only they could govern alone, without the encumbrance of the pesky LibDems, while defending the record of the two parties in power together.
This, then, is democratic politics in an era of coalitions. Is it viable?
