Britannia Radio

December 6, 2010

melanie phillips

The orange jelly flavoured coalition dream

Daily Mail, 6 December 2010

For politicians on the Left, there’s surely no more toxic epithet that can be hurled at them than the taunt of ‘sell out’.

This week, if reports are to be believed, the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg will be ‘selling out’ his party’s principles by ­supporting the Coalition’s proposal to triple university tuition fees.

According to other interpretations of the i mpending melodrama, gallant Deputy Prime Minister Clegg will be displaying courage and maturity by leading his troops into the ‘aye’ lobby in Thursday’s Commons’ vote.

Or, if yet further reports are true, he will lead his party into total chaos — with some Lib Dem MPs voting with the Tories to support the proposal, others voting with Labour against it and others trying still to hide in the no man’s land of abstention.

Mr Clegg is being made to appear either a statesman or a turncoat, depending on which shadowy ‘sources’ are briefing the media. In fact, the real danger is he and his party will end up looking totally ridiculous.

Farcically, even Lib Dem Cabinet ministers may be planning to abstain, thus breaching the hallowed doctrine of collective ­responsibility — over a policy they actually say they support.

Last week, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said on TV that he was prepared to abstain — even though he believed in the tuition fees increase.

Most absurd of all, Business Secretary Vince Cable, the minister responsible for crafting the policy proposal in the first place, stunned Westminster by declaring that he might abstain on his own proposal; then saying he would be voting for it after all; then saying that no final decision had been taken.

The reason given for Mr Cable’s bizarre simulation of a pinball machine is that he has been having a blazing row with Mr Clegg, who has suddenly started ‘wobbling’ over the policy which Mr Cable had carefully crafted as a compromise precisely to placate his party.

This is because the tuition fees issue seems to have plunged the Lib Dems into nothing less than a seismic existential crisis.

The ostensible reason is that the rise breaks their manifesto commitment to abolish tuition fees altogether. But this is hardly the first time that a party has reneged on its manifesto.

Indeed, you could say that since no party proposed to the electorate the idea of a coalition government, this is in itself a betrayal of both Tory and Lib Dem voters because of the compromises it inevitably requires.

No, the real issue is not that the Lib Dems have betrayed a manifesto commitment, but rather their visceral opposition to ­tuition fees being raised.

Despite the fact that Mr Cable’s policy forces those who become high-earners to pay more towards their fees than the less well-off — thus corresponding to the Lib Dems’ sacred principle of ‘soaking the rich’ — the rise in fees provides a knee-jerk slogan on which the Lib Dems can go to war.

This is the politics of infantilism. But instead of telling his party to grow up, Mr Clegg is apparently consulting his rank-and-file — before deciding whether or not to vote for a policy put together by one of his party’s own ministers. Barmy or what?

The really perplexing thing is that — unlike his party members who are famously away with the fairies — Mr Clegg is ­supposed to be the realist who understands that political power necessarily entails hard choices.

The source of the problem would seem to be that Mr Clegg has experienced a political panic attack.

We are told that he’s been having a terrible time over the student protests. The police have advised him to stop cycling for fear of his personal safety; excrement has been pushed through his letterbox.

He is said to be shell-shocked by the personal abuse. Of course, this sounds extraordinarily unpleasant. But students are always revolting.

So what sort of a politician is knocked off course by such protests — other than one who has never managed to leave his own college scarf in the drawer?

‘Nick hasn’t been in front-line politics that long,’ explained one source close to Mr Clegg, who became an MP in 2005. ‘He is not battle-hardened and was not prepared for being so unpopular.’

Diddums! But this man is Deputy Prime Minister, for heaven’s sake. What would he do if he were faced with a really hard and unpopular decision — like committing troops to war in the national interest — in light of the fact that, faced merely with the inevitable compromises involved in coalition politics, he dissolves into a quivering orange jelly?

The problem for Mr Clegg is that he burned his party’s electoral boats by going in with the Tories in the first place.

Suppose the Coalition broke down and a new election was called. Why should anyone vote for the Lib Dems, since any attempt to pretend to be opposed to the Tory Party would be met with howls of derision?

Indeed, although the mutinous Lib Dem rank-and-file may not ­realise it, we may now be seeing a profound realignment of British politics.

For the Tory leadership seems to have concluded that just as Mr Clegg needs them, they need Mr Clegg.

Some senior Tories — and David Cameron must be assumed to be sympathetic — have been openly musing that, even if they were able to win power on their own account, it would still be better to be in coalition with the Lib Dems.

The former Tory Prime Minister John Major recently said he hoped co-operation with the Lib Dems could be prolonged beyond this Parliament, and he speculated that this ‘temporary alliance’ might turn into a ‘mini- realignment of politics’.

The Tory Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude went further, reportedly telling a private gathering that ‘the Coalition is a bloody good idea’ and that ‘even if the Conservatives win a majority at the next election, there will be a desire to continue with the Coalition among parts of the Conservative Party’.

What these extraordinary opinions mean is that liberal Tories can now see, through the development of a kind of ‘coalition party’, the chance to bury true conservatism forever and institutionalise a Left-of-Centre government in perpetuity. In fact, the resulting disillusionment of Lib Dem voters might drive them to vote Labour.

But the Coalition Party is already developing. The Left-leaning character of the Coalition is blamed upon — or credited to — the Lib Dems.

But before the last election, the Cameroons had already repositioned the party to go with the flow of Left-wing shibboleths. Now they can use the Lib Dems as human shields to pretend they are still really conservatives and are being forced to make all these concessions in order to keep the ­Coalition show on the road.

In fact, we may be looking at the development of a new, ­Liberal Conservative Party. Real Conservatives who care about defending the nation and its historic values will thus be left totally disenfranchised. But who cares about them? Not the Cameroons, for sure.

John Major argued disingenuously that, since the Conservative Party was itself a coalition, there was nothing intrinsically wrong with forming an alliance with another party.

But all parties are, at heart, coalitions. And all experience suggests that coalition government generally leads to inertia, ­corruption and an absence of the clear electoral choice between alternatives that is the essence of democracy.

The Lib Dems’ tuition fees comedy illustrates that coalitions ­necessarily involve tearing up manifesto promises and denying that crucial choice.

If we’re not careful, this farce may also represent our electoral future.