Daily Mail, 17 May 2010 The sense of disorientation following last week’s tumultuous events and the formation of a coalition government has far from abated. People are still trying to work out the contours of this most unfamiliar political landscape. We don’t know if this is a temporary phenomenon or if a great political realignment is under way. Over the weekend, however, one feature of British life resurfaced that is as predictable as the flowering buds of May — the deep aversion in the Lib Dem psyche to reality. True to form, assorted Lib Dem grandees and others came out against the coalition — on the grounds they couldn’t stomach an alliance with ‘unprogressive’ Conservatives. So blinded are they by their tribal antipathy to the Tories, these Lib Dems can’t see just how advantageous this deal is for them. Even though three-quarters of the country didn’t vote for them, this party of traditional losers has no fewer than five Cabinet seats. True, posts such as Deputy Prime Minister lack substance. And Chancellor George Osborne is using Chief Secretary to the Treasury David Laws to do his dirty work in cutting public spending, thus helping neutralise the Lib Dems as an opposition force. But the fact is that the many Conservatives who are furious with this deal have much more cause than the Lib Dems to think that their side has been betrayed. For the Tories have made much greater concessions to the Lib Dems than vice versa. For example, not only has the Tories’ popular commitment to raise the inheritance tax threshold been scrapped, but Mr Cameron has agreed to raise capital gains tax from 18 per cent to an astounding 40 or 50 per cent — rightly described by City experts as ‘legalised theft’. On Europe, the Tories have abandoned their aim of taking back from Brussels some of the power that Britain has surrendered. Their new pledge not to give away any more powers without a referendum is meaningless, since, under the new EU constitution, Britain’s sovereignty has been stripped away. Or look at the farce about to play out in the energy ministry. To stave off Britain’s looming power crisis, the Tories are committed to building more nuclear power stations. Yet the new Lib Dem Energy Secretary Chris Huhne is viscerally hostile to nuclear energy. So to stop the lights from going out in Britain, Mr Cameron has apparently given the Tory junior energy minister Charles Hendry responsibility for civil nuclear power. But with Mr Huhne so opposed, is it not all too likely that Mr Hendry’s boss will find ways of kicking the nuclear power station programme into the long grass — thus provoking a possible nuclear explosion in the energy department? Worst of all are the coalition’s proposals for constitutional change. Mr Cameron has agreed to a referendum on the Alternative Vote system (AV) — and to whip his MPs into voting that referendum through. But AV would take seats away from the Tories and hand them to the opposition. Even though the Tories would oppose AV in the referendum, the chances are that, with the public so disillusioned with the old politics, the proposal would be carried. Worse even than that is the proposal for fixed-term parliaments, which could be dissolved only if 55 per cent of MPs voted against the government in a no-confidence motion. This is nothing less than a coup against Parliamentary democracy. It means that, even if more than half of MPs voted against the coalition so that it could not get its legislation through Parliament, the Government would remain in place. The historic rights of Parliament would thus be over-ridden by an executive that would stay in power without the consent of the people’s representatives. It is not surprising that the Lib Dems, who are desperate not to lose the power they have so narrowly obtained, would ride roughshod like this over constitutional checks and balances. But it is deeply disappointing that Mr Cameron should promote and defend such a travesty of democracy, as he did on TV yesterday. This coalition has divided Tory supporters. Many welcome it as providing stable government to deal with the economic crisis. There is also a more general yearning for an end to adversarial yah-boo politics, and a corresponding belief that in a coalition each party will temper the other’s extremes. Such thinking, I’m afraid, is naive. Coalitions are inherently unstable; and the fear of collapse can lead to paralysis over the most contentious and important decisions. More profoundly, this one threatens to be a betrayal of authentic conservatism. For the suspicion is growing that Mr Cameron is seizing this opportunity to bury his ‘Tory Right’. Since he describes himself as a ‘liberal Tory’, we must conclude that the policies he developed in order to neutralise attacks from the Left — socially libertarian, green, hearts bleeding for the poor of the world — did not represent a cynical strategy, but reflected what he really believes. Even if he has not set out to bury the ‘Tory Right’, he certainly wants to use the Lib Dems to prove once and for all that the Tories are not the ‘nasty party’ by repudiating traditional Conservative attitudes. But this is the lazy prejudice of the Left, used to demonise people who aren’t necessarily Right-wing at all. They merely want to defend their country’s identity and culture, and uphold freedom, justice and common sense against illiberalism, injustice and upside-down thinking. Conservatism is supposed to defend what a society most values. So the Tories should be upholding real human rights against the fanatical illiberalism of political correctness, defending national culture and identity against mass immigration, and protecting democracy itself against the destruction of self-government by the EU. Instead, Mr Cameron has abandoned his aim of tackling the abuses under the Human Rights Act, turned Left-wing guns against the middle class and put a deep green zealot fox in charge of the energy hen-house. In this way, he thinks he will position the Tories on the centre ground as part of a ‘progressive’ alliance. But the centre ground has long been hijacked by the Left, who have turned words such as ‘centre’, ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ into their precise opposite. By yoking themselves to the Lib Dems, who are neither liberal nor democratic, the Tories have formed a government that in many respects is to the left of Labour. As a result, authentic Conservatives find themselves abandoned — and implicitly demonised as neanderthals by a Conservative Prime Minister. In the light of all this, the fear must be that Mr Cameron’s boldest and most promising move in appointing Iain Duncan Smith and Labour’s Frank Field to reform welfare may simply be no more than yet another piece of smart politics and a sop to the Right. There is a yawning gap where people once defended national identity, morality and meritocracy. In a previous era, when the Labour party owed more to Methodism than to Marx, it promoted this agenda under the label ‘ethical socialism’. Now it is idiotically demonised as being of ‘the Right’. If those jockeying for the Labour leadership were able to raise their sights above the tribal Left-wing prejudices that have brought them down, they might realise they have a gloriously paradoxical opportunity to fill this gap on ‘the Right’. If they were to do so, they might find that despite the love-in for the Hugh Grant and Colin Firth of British politics, the big prize would be theirs sooner than anyone might think. 12 months left to watch (or download at BBC iPlayer). Last broadcast yesterday, 18:00 on BBC Parliament (see all broadcasts). David Dimbleby's guests in London are: Conservative peer Lord Heseltine, Labour peer Lord Falconer, Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips and Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman. 12 months left to watch (or download at BBC iPlayer). Last broadcast yesterday, 18:00 on BBC Parliament (see all broadcasts). David Dimbleby's guests in London are: Conservative peer Lord Heseltine, Labour peer Lord Falconer, Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips and Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman.
13/05/2010
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