Watching David Cameron and Nick Clegg standing side by side in the rose garden of No. 10 yesterday afternoon, one might have thought they came off the same production line. If you closed your eyes a little, the blurred figures became interchangeable, and it was impossible to tell one from the other. Both are young, personable and handsome. Both come from moneyed and privileged backgrounds, being privately educated at top public schools before going to Oxbridge. Both men have spent most of their adult lives as trainee politicians, with little experience of the real world. Both are metropolitan figures. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are members of our new ruling class, mostly drawn from an alarmingly narrow stratum You may say that one is a Tory and the other a Lib Dem, and so appearances are deceptive. They can't really be the same. But I wonder whether the differences in policy that are supposed to separate them are really as significant as all that. It didn't take them long to set them aside so that they could sit around the same Cabinet table. They even sounded the same yesterday afternoon - similar in accent, almost identical in their talk of the need for change and the importance of stability. Even when Mr Clegg said that he wanted 'to change Britain for ever' - my God, is the man mad? - Mr Cameron looked on fondly. His own election slogan was: 'Vote Conservative for change.' The BBC's political editor Nick Robinson has rightly suggested that the reason the Con-Lib Dem talks went so 'swimmingly' (Mr Clegg's word) was that the negotiators on each side came from similar backgrounds - privately and Oxbridge educated, wealthy, male, and around the same age. William Hague protested that he had gone to a comprehensive, but he is one of only a few exceptions in the new Cabinet. Most are privately educated. Many went to Oxbridge. (I have counted at least five who read Politics, Philosophy and Economics - PPE - at Oxford, including, of course, Mr Cameron.) The great majority are men. Like Messrs Cameron and Clegg, many have spent most of their adult lives playing politics (e.g. George Osborne, our new Chancellor) and few have prolonged experience of business or anything else that might broaden their horizons or deepen their understanding. So their alleged political differences seem to me rather less important than social, educational and other similarities. No wonder these chaps got together so easily and get on so well. They are members of our new ruling class, mostly drawn from an alarmingly narrow stratum. Incidentally, David Miliband, who declared his candidacy for the Labour leadership yesterday, is cut from a similar cloth. Apart from Eric Pickles and one or two others, you will look in vain in the Cabinet for grammar school-educated politicians, such as Margaret Thatcher or Ted Heath or Harold Wilson, who have risen from working or lowermiddle-class origins. We have a new cadre of elite manager-politcians. There are exceptions, like that old warhorse Kenneth Clarke who answers to nobody, but the point stands. And it doesn't at all surprise me that such politicians should have found it so easy to betray their parties - the grass roots to whom they pay regular but empty obeisance - in forming a new coalition government largely made up of like-minded men. One week ago today - it seems an age - we went to the polls to vote for this or that party. Even if most of us had not actually read through a manifesto, we voted for policies which in our minds had the force of pledges or promises. Isn't it incredible that within days the Tories and Lib Dems should have cancelled a large number of these commitments without a word of apology? We are invited by commentators to applaud what is supposedly an expression of democracy, with two parties coming together that account for 60 per cent of the vote. I look at it another way. It is no service to democracy for parties to make firm promises one week, which they sweep aside the next before a new government has been constituted. I would feel as resentful if I were a Lib Dem voter as I do as someone who happened to vote Tory. We have all been short-changed. Most who voted Tory will have done so in the belief that the party would not raise taxes. Throughout the campaign the Conservative leadership reiterated its promise to raise the threshold for inheritance tax - arguably its most popular policy of the past few years. Now, under Lib Dem pressure, it has shelved the idea until at least after the next election, scheduled for five years' time. The Tories made no mention in their manifesto of raising capital gains tax from its present level of 18 per cent to 40 or 50 per cent, as the Lib Dems are demanding. It won't be the fat cats in the City who suffer, but ordinary people who may have saved up to buy a small flat as a second home, which they now want to sell, or who have managed to invest £20,000 or £30,000 in shares. Genuflecting from time to time at their grass roots, these similar-seeming and apparently like-minded Tories and Lib Dems could govern for some time If they voted Tory, these people are entitled to ask by what right the party feels justified in announcing that it is in favour of astronomically higher capital taxes after all. Had they known what they now know, they might have voted Labour, which, having standardised the rate of capital gains tax at 18 per cent not long ago, would almost certainly not have increased it had it won the election. In their talk about the need for stability, and their endless chatter about the need for change, the Tories and the Lib Dems forget promises which have not been broken over a period of years, as one might expect in the dirty game of politics, but in a matter of days. Is this not at best high-handed, at worst downright cynical? The prevailing view is that there was no alternative to the shabby deals - so derided by Mr Cameron during the election campaign - of coalition politics. Without a rapid agreement, the markets would have instantly hammered the pound to destruction. There is no evidence they would. It suited self- serving politicians to fan the flames of panic in order to justify a shotgun marriage. The Tories should have tried to govern as a minority government, and if that had not worked they should have called another election. Of course, that might not have given Mr Cameron the five years in No 10 which he now believes he has secured. What he finds so 'incredibly exciting' I view with foreboding since I believe that this Government, presided over by Tories, might even turn out to be to the Left of the one we have just ejected. In order to hang on to power, the Tory leader has given away too much on electoral reform and several other policies, on Cabinet seats and on ministerial positions. The effect is partly to disenfranchise millions of Tory voters who did, after all, vote for what was comfortably the largest party. Wise heads are saying that what David Cameron yesterday described as the Liberal-Conservative Government will not last. According to this view, neither party will be able to govern in combination for long in defiance of the wishes of the supporters whom they have disregarded. I wouldn't be so sure. Genuflecting from time to time at their grass roots, these similar-seeming and apparently like-minded Tories and Lib Dems could govern for some time. My fear is not that the coalition will break up, though I hope it will, but that it will endure because its members relish power so much. Forgive me for not sharing the euphoria supposedly sweeping the land. I hope I am wrong. Maybe the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition will contribute much. What disturbs me though is that, watching David Cameron and Nick Clegg yesterday, it was no longer possible to tell the difference between them.Forgive me for not joining the euphoria, but watching Dave and Nick, I couldn't tell them apart
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Thursday, 13 May 2010
Last updated at 9:27 AM on 13th May 2010
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