Were the Lib Dems "useful idiots" in coalition?

Polly Toynbee seems to think so.

She wrote a piece yesterday using this exact phrase expressing her disgust with Nick Clegg and the legacy that she perceives he and his party have left behind following the coalition of 2010 - 2015. Some of her points are reasonable but amongst it all are many unfair claims and some of what she says is absolutely ridiculous.

I thought it was time for a good old fashioned fisking:

Can you forgive him? That depends on whether you think Nick Clegg venal or just a political idiot. Seeking power was no sin, as that’s the purpose of politics: he is to be judged by how he used it. In a rich crop of self-justifying politicians’ books this autumn, Clegg’s Politics: Between the Extremes is first to invite an assessment of how he did.

He might have been wiser to keep his head down and hope the country has a short memory. But that would be out of character, as his own account reminds us of one grave political misjudgment after another. Almost everything he colluded with in the Cameron government was an error, while almost all he achieved was piffling in comparison. His role now is as a warning beacon of what not to do in future coalitions.

It's not fair to say that almost everything Clegg did in government was an error although of course there were some big ones. But I would certainly agree with Polly that there is a lot that the Lib Dems did in government and the way they approached it that should be lessons for future putative junior coaltion partners. (For further reading on these lessons by the way I recommend this excellent piece by Former Lib Dem MP David Howarth).

How Icarus-like was his fall from the dizzy days of Cleggmania. Back in 2010 “I agree with Nick” was mirrored by opinion polling. For the record, this paper backed the Lib Dems in 2010, though its political columnists – myself included – wrote supporting Labour.

It took decades of local pavement-pounding for the Liberals to grow from a taxi-full of MPs into a 57-strong coach-load at Westminster. But after Clegg led them to a thrashing last year, they are now back in an eight-MP people carrier (with probably only four MPs after boundary changes) – and have few local councillors. They have deserved it.

Start back in that 2010 sunlit No 10 rose garden, with toe-curling smiles that look yet worse in retrospect. Clegg and his party had to make one big call: was the country indeed on the verge of Greek-style bankruptcy and in need of David Cameron and George Osborne’s emetic austerity medicine? They fell for the bait and called it wrong, as even the likes of Mervyn King, Bank of England governor at the time, now agree.

It's easy to forget now just how much turmoil the political and economic world was in in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 general election. The country hadn't had a peacetime coalition since before the Second World War and the financial crisis was still rumbling on. I agree with Polly that the Lib Dems were a bit too hasty to accept the need for the level of austerity that Osborne wanted but to pretend that this was somehow an easy and obvious call that they should have avoided is to play the game of hindsight. The press was going ballistic. The markets were all over the place. Had the politicians carried on much beyond the Tuesday with their coalition discussions God knows what would have happened.

Now I happen to think that this is ridiculous. There are countries all round the world that wait weeks or months for new governments to form and give their politicians plenty of time to thrash out the agreements needed to govern in coalition. But that is not what was happening here. Our body politic and the Fourth Estate are not used to this way of doing things. They expect the removal vans to be round the back of Downing Street the morning after an election result. The press were pushing very hard the narrative that Gordon Brown was "The Squatter in Downing Street" which was preposterous given that all he was doing was fulfilling his constitutional duty*. We needed a Prime Minister and a functioning government whilst the coalition talks were going on. But our press were unwilling to acknowledge that and hence there was massive pressure on the Lib Dems to cut a deal, any deal to get a "legitimate" government in place.

The Lib Dems swallowed the story that the country needed a boiling down of every function of the state to its bare bones. They were useful idiots for what was always an ideological project: Cameron and Osborne said within a short time that even once the deficit was down, there would be no restoring of cut-down public services.

I hear this "ideological" claim about the Tories and austerity all the time. I'll just say that up until the financial crisis of 2007 Cameron and Osborne were not contemplating anything like this. Their mantra was in fact "sharing the proceeds of growth". But of course by the time they came to power there was very little if any growth to share and the economy was in the toilet.

In accepting extreme cuts as an economic remedy, Clegg abandoned his party’s greatest thinker, Keynes, who would have gone for growth through government investment. But even if Clegg has been right on austerity, why did he let the axe fall on the most vulnerable? In policy after policy, the bottom half bore the brunt as VAT rose, while the top had an income tax cut and kept their many benefits: tax reliefs, and cuts to capital gains and corporation tax.

And here I would (at least partially) agree with Polly. The VAT rise, the cuts to capital gains and corporation tax as well as the reduction of the top rate of income tax from 50% to 45% in the pound were all largely regressive and unwelcome measures.

The rightwing thinktank, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, showed how Osborne raised the lifetime tax-take from the bottom 20%, while tax for the top 20% fell. Even Clegg’s flagship raising of the income tax threshold was soon revealed by the Resolution Foundation to direct most of its huge £10bn cost to the benefit of the upper half while low earners gained little.

I would quibble with this point though. I remember seeing these analyses at the time. What they did was highlight that the very poorest did not earn enough to benefit from the tax cut. But that ignores or at least misunderstands what the point of the raising of the threshold was meant to do. It was supposed to allow people who were previously earning not very much but still paying tax keep more of the money they had earned. Polly's is an argument for never raising the tax threshold at all as this will never benefit the very poorest, most of whom do not work. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if this would be fair.

Guardian readers need no reminding of the extreme severity of the benefit cuts – hitting children, mothers and people with disabilities hardest. Clegg had no need to fall in with the vindictive spirit of the bedroom tax, the sale of swaths more social housing, or the ever-tightening screw of work capability tests, as food banks opened everywhere. Labour supporters seeing the Lib Dems sitting on their hands and saying nothing may never forget. But then social justice was never the Lib Dems’ strong point: good on human rights and the environment, social equality is not in their DNA.

This is bullshit. I was a Lib Dem from 2008-2013. Many of my closest political friends are still in the party and I struggle to think of any of them who would wish for anything other than social equality and justice. In most cases they have spent decades fighting for just that. That their parliamentary representatives in government may have fallen short of this ideal is not a reason to besmirch the DNA of the entire party in this way.

In 2012 Andrew Lansley’s health and social care bill was stumbling in parliament, as it dawned on the Lords that this was a project to blow the NHS into fragments by setting up a market tendering every shard out to any bidder. “No top-down NHS reorganisation,” said the coalition agreement, and the Lib Dem grass roots rebelled. But they were soothed by Shirley Williams, and Clegg voted it through.

Why? Cameron was astonished not to lose the bill. So disastrously unworkable has it proved that it’s now being dismantled again, but deep, lasting damage was done to the NHS that Clegg could easily have stopped.

I keep hearing this. That the coalition "destroyed" the NHS. I have no idea what Polly and the people who say this are on about. I can still see my GP in exactly the same way as I could when Labour were in office for 13 years. I have also had cause to use hospitals numerous times in the last few years and again they are as accessible and free at the point of use as they always were. There is literally no difference at all in that respect. The changes were very complicated but essentially were attempting to allow the NHS to use facilities and services whether private or public where appropriate without dogma getting in the way. It is simply a small extension of what Labour had already done.

I think in fact what this episode tells us is that whatever the Tories do with the NHS when they're in office, however bland or minor it may be they will always, always be described as having "privatised" and "destroyed" it as well as trying to flog off its constituent parts to their mates. Especially by people like Polly Toynbee.

The charge list is long. The value of his pupil premium remains disputed, and he has suffered enough for his tuition fees debacle. He boasts of pushing through 5p plastic bag charges, but he should have stopped the banning of land-based wind turbines. He was treated as a minor irritant in the great Tory project – and that’s all he was.

In his book, Clegg observes Tory savagery on benefits and housing as if he were a non-participant; yet he had the power to stop or soften much of this. What makes him more of an idiot than a villain is his weak understanding of the power he had.

Take his failure to seize the one great prize his party sought for decades – proportional representation that would make such coalitions a fixture. His party would justify a pact with the devil to secure electoral reform. But out of sheer incompetence, Clegg blew that chance. He got his referendum, but only on AV: the weak “alternative vote” even his own side didn’t want. Fatally, he failed to force Cameron to pledge his party’s support. The same team of Tory liars who swung the Brexit vote ran the anti-AV campaign, preposterously claiming the tiny cost would deprive babies of NHS incubators and our boys in Afghanistan of kit. How Cameron’s crew laughed when Clegg lost.

Had he secured PR, the political landscape would be changed for the better, beyond all recognition. The Tory party would have split between pro- and anti-EU wings. Labour would split between Corbynites and social democrats. Ukip and the Greens would have their fair share of seats.

Above all, citizens could vote for a party closest to their views. At a time of turmoil and alienation, it’s never been more urgent to restore a closer link between what people want and what they get in Westminster. I can never forgive Clegg for bungling that once-in-a-generation mission so badly.

This is the part of Toynbee's piece that I most profoundly disagree with.

I am not happy with the legacy that the Lib Dems left behind. Indeed I left the party part way through their time in office disillusioned with what had been achieved and more specifically the lack of a difference in their approach to politics (I highlighted Clegg's very disappointing approach to PMQs when he deputised as an example of this). I myself wrote a pretty scathing piece late last year about Nick Clegg and how he hasn't been held properly accountable for his failings in government.

But the idea that Clegg somehow bungled the chance for PR is to misread reality so badly that I wonder just how well Polly even understands the dynamics of politics in this country.

The Tories are opposed to any change at all to the electoral system for the Commons. That is almost all of them. Certainly almost all of them in parliament. I could write a very long piece on the reasons for this but it is a bald fact.

Furthermore the Tories are absolutely implacably opposed to any change to a proportional system for the Commons.

These two facts conspired to make it impossible to get a proportional system during the 2010 coalition agreement. It was difficult enough for Cameron to get them to agree to a referendum on a pretty minor change to the electoral system (AV) that wouldn't have been proportional. The idea that Cameron could ever, ever, ever have got his party to vote for a referendum on a proportional system for the Commons is laughable.

With AV, the Tories would have been looking at maybe losing 10 or 20 seats that they would ordinarily win in an election. With a properly proportional system they'd lose 100 or more seats that they consider "rightly" theirs. I of course utterly disagree with them about this but that is what they think. They would consider it electoral suicide. Even a referendum on such a system would have been (and would still be) way, way beyond the pale for them because of the risk they might lose it.

They just about accepted the AV referendum thinking that they'd have a pretty good chance of winning it as it's difficult for those opposing the status quo in referenda and AV is a system that nobody is particularly enthusiastic about. But a fully proportional system whose benefits would be much easier to coherently argue for in a referendum? Over their cold dead bodies.

I am 100% certain that had Cameron tried to force this through we would have seen one of two things. Most likely the coalition agreement would have failed. The Tories would have governed alone for a few months doing all the easy things. There would have been no austerity during this time and they would have spent it spreading poison about how the Lib Dems had eschewed their chance at governing because they "selfishly" wanted to change the electoral system "massively in their favour" and away from our "stable" system that had "served us well" for "hundreds of years". And then gone to the country again in the autumn of 2010 and got a majority.

The second possibility is what happened with Lords reform. Which is that the Tories might have said they would do it but in practise when it came to a vote in the Commons loads of backbench MPs would have voted against it. And Labour would almost certainly have found a pretext to oppose it too in order to dish the Lib Dems (in exactly the same way they did when they had the same chance with Lords reform) and hence the referendum would not have got through. And that would have caused the government to fall with the same outcome as the previous paragraph, "selfish Lib Dems" etc. etc. etc. followed by a Tory majority.

To suggest that Clegg somehow fumbled an historic opportunity on PR is so far from the truth and what was possible that it actually makes me angry. Angry that Polly Toynbee would write it and angry that so many people in my country seem to also believe it.

Clegg did lots of things wrong in government but messing up his One Big Chance for PR was not one of them. Such a change at that time was simply politically impossible.

History may remember him as no worse than clueless. But one tragedy is that the country needs a strong unequivocal pro-European party, as the Lib Dems once were. Clegg’s miscalculation of everything has left behind only a tiny rump with too little heft to influence the battle ahead.

I would certainly agree that Clegg's miscalculations have left the Lib Dems as a small rump but to characterise this as "everything" he did in government is manifestly unfair and does not give him credit for the things he did manage to achieve in his five years as Deputy Prime Minister of this country.

It's worth mentioning as well that throughout the piece Toynbee falls into the trap that many people seem to of overestimating the leverage that the Lib Dems had in office. They had 57 MPs so despite the fact that they had 23% of the vote vs the Tories 37% (i.e. roughly 4 voters for every 6 the Tories had) they only had 1 MP for every 6 the Tories had. That put them in a fairly weak position in terms of being across issues in the government and certainly in terms of parliamentary firepower. A junior partner with a seventh of the MPs of a government simply cannot dictate terms on every single policy as her piece suggests they should have done.

Had the Lib Dems pushed it too far, eventually the coalition would have broken down. I used to talk about this and used to predict that were that to happen, all those Labour supporters cheering for the end of the coalition would be very sorry when we saw a majority Tory government. I was derided for talking such "nonsense" but of course in 2015 when the parliament ran out that's exactly what we saw. It's now pretty obvious in hindsight that that would have been the result had the election been earlier.

So in actual fact the Lib Dems ameliorated the worst Tory excesses, did some good things and some not so good things (as every party in government does) and staved off majority Tory rule for five years. In a just world they'd be thanked for "taking one for the team" instead of being pilloried and castigated by left wing columnists who don't appear to understand how politics actually even works.


*Indeed the depth of the lie of this "squatter" narrative is exposed by the fact that Brown actually wanted to resign and was persuaded not to by Clegg who begged for more time. In the end Brown resigned before the coalition agreement had been finalised and hence Cameron went to see The Queen unsure if the deal would be formally reached and if instead he would have to lead a minority government. That's just how wrong the narrative is and yet it still persists. Even now people talk about how Brown "squatted" in Downing Street. We truly live in a post-truth world now.

The unaccountability of Nick Clegg

Something that has been bubbling under for a while with me is a niggling feeling that Nick Clegg hasn't really been held to account for the utter devastation that the Lib Dems suffered back in May. Sure he resigned and is now just a lowly backbench MP. And indeed he is now in the somewhat excruciating position of not being able to step down as any subsequent by-election under current circumstances would probably lose the Lib Dems another seat that they can ill afford to squander.

So perhaps that combination is enough. And yet I feel that somehow it is not.

I was a Lib Dem from 2008 to 2013 and I still very much consider myself a fellow traveller at least with the membership if not the leadership in the latter years of the coalition. I was excited by the vibrancy of the party in the run up to 2010 and after the coalition was formed I was genuinely optimistic about the possibility of real political reform and a strong liberal flavour to the government that would play out over the following 5 years.

Sadly it was not really to be. At least not in any meaningful and sustainable way. Despite the promises the only political reform we got were fixed term parliaments which were only really instituted to protect the Lib Dems from their larger coalition partner and they were set at 5 years rather than the more accountable and liberal 4 years that most campaigners for this change wanted to see. Apart from that, electoral reform at Westminster, Lords reform and other measures people like me wanted to see fell by the wayside.

In addition to that a number of measures that most liberals would never have wanted to see on the statute books were rammed through in the teeth of party opposition. Secret courts were a resignation issue for some, most notably Jo Shaw who made the best political speech I have ever seen in person from the podium at the 2013 Lib Dem conference. I nearly left myself at that point but stayed on in hope only to drift away disillusioned later that same year. There were other things as well, tuition fees, 45p tax rate etc. etc. etc. I don't need to go through the list. Most people reading this will know them all by rote.

But politics is tough and it certainly wouldn't be fair to blame Clegg for all of those, although he was complicit.

There are some things though for which the blame squarely falls on his shoulders. I'll highlight just three here although there are more.

Firstly the complete lack of any attempt to change the way PMQs was practised at all. Clegg stood in for Cameron at PMQs many, many times. And instead of using the opportunity to do it differently, perhaps taking a more emollient tone and not constantly bashing anyone who criticised the government he did the exact opposite. He used the bully pulpit to attack the opposition over and over again. In many respects he was worse than Cameron. It made him look like Just Another Tory. Indeed after he resigned as leader he cited "sitting next to the Prime Minister" at PMQs as one of his biggest mistakes because of the "optics". He is right about that but it is much much worse than he states because of the way he himself carried out the same duties.

I asked Clegg about this very subject when I interviewed him in September 2012 and he claimed that he would have liked to change PMQs but when he had made slight attempts to move in this direction he had been branded as "ineffective and weak" and hence he had had no choice but to stick to the bearpit style. But this just simply is not good enough. What was the point of having a Lib Dem Deputy PM taking PMQs if when he deputised for the PM he made no difference to how it was practised and more importantly gave no inkling of how a liberal PM could do it? He had a responsibility to show how liberals in general and Lib Dems in particular were not happy with the current system and would change things. On this particular point he completely and totally failed.

Secondly cleaving far too closely to the Conservatives in the early years of the coalition. The "Rose Garden" press conference was clearly a misstep but it was indicative of a wider problem about how the party presented themselves. On the media and in parliament they went on and on and on about how there was a strong Lib Dem flavour to the government. They pounced on research that suggested 75% of their manifesto had ended up in government trumpeting this from the highest rooftops. But all this just made the Lib Dems look like they were crypto-Tories; when the cuts started kicking in, the tuition fees were raised, the NHS reforms were announced and all the other policies that were anathema to 2/3rds of the voters who backed Clegg in 2010 they "owned" the entire lot. There was no serious attempt to distance the party from these policies in government from the top level. Indeed Clegg seemed to revel in what he was doing, at one point light heartedly quoting Blair saying "It's worse than you think, I actually believe in the policies.". By the time the "differentiation" strategy kicked in in the last year or so of the parliament it was far, far too late.

The final one I want to focus on is how totally misguided Clegg's long term political strategy was. He seemed totally convinced that there were a huge swathe of liberal leaning voters out there who had previously gone for the Tories but now the Lib Dems had demonstrated they could do government they would come flocking to the yellow banner. And that these voters would replace all the lefties who had previously backed the party. Time and again at conference we members were all assured that the leadership knew exactly what it was doing and it would all come good. After the wipeouts in local elections and in 2014 losing all but one MEP (a devastating result for "The Party of Europe) the members were urged to keep the faith.

It was all wishful thinking. In May this year the electorate delivered their verdict. The Lib Dems lost 83% of their seats. They are now down to 8 MPs. There are some projections (that I take seriously) that suggest that in 2020 after the boundary changes they could be down to 4 MPs. They are a shadow of their former selves and are likely to be a political irrelevance for a generation or more.

I'm not saying there were any easy answers after the 2010 general election. There weren't. As I have argued many many times Clegg took the only option for stable government for 5 years and his party have paid in my view a disproportionate price for effectively putting the country before party.

But Clegg and his aides were complicit in a large number of tactical and strategic mistakes that made the ultimate result 5 years later even worse than it needed to be. They didn't listen to the many many voices from both inside and outside the party urging them to change tack. Clegg refused to stand down in June 2014 after the Euro elections when it was obvious to almost all political observers that he was a busted electoral flush.

I have no specific recipe for what sort of "punishment" Clegg should now undergo. Indeed it is unrealistic and probably even churlish to think there is one. But the party, its current and future leaderships and its members should think very carefully before pursuing the line that Clegg was very brave to do what he did and that the party in any way owes him a debt of gratitude. They should also all do their best to try and make sure he does not ultimately become a well respected and loved grandee of the party (like say Paddy Ashdown) who is listened to and has great influence in the future direction of the party.

He made some major errors that have cost both the party and ultimately the country in terms of much reduced liberal influence in parliament for many years to come.

At the very least he should be held accountable for that.

This is why people hate you Gloria

Labour MP Gloria De Piero has a piece on LabourList today where she highlights Lib Dem "hypocrisy" on pay transparency.

She talks about how Jo Swinson has been going around saying that compulsory pay transparency is now Lib Dem policy and how it is necessary to help close the gender pay gap.

But the twist in the tale is that Labour are organising a vote on this issue on 16th December and the Lib Dems are not going to vote for it. Hence all the talk of hypocrisy.

I'm not a Lib Dem any more and I don't blog as often as I used to mainly because I feel so often like I am just repeating myself but I'll have another go.

Gloria, the reason why the Lib Dems cannot vote with you is. Wait for it. Because....

They. Are. In. Coalition.

That means they cannot just go around voting on things that are not agreed government policy. If they were to do that the government would collapse.

Gloria knows this of course. She's just playing political games in the hope of "embarrassing" the Lib Dems.

A couple of years ago Gloria went round the country speaking to people on her "Why do you hate me?" tour, trying to find out why people dislike politicians so much. Well here is a prime example. An MP pretending she does not understand how collective government responsibility works in order to score political points from one of her rivals. I'd say that's a good reason why people hate MPs Gloria.

There is a way to redeem yourself though. If there is another hung parliament after the next election, and if Labour find themselves in coalition with a smaller party, you will need to argue vociferously for that smaller party to be able to vote any way they wish on any issue. And Labour will just have to put up with the consequences of this.

After all, anything else would mean that party being "hypocritical" wouldn't it Gloria?

And we can't have that now can we?

Since 2010 the Government has been more popular than Labour

In 2010 something quite remarkable happened.

Two parties came together, they claimed in the national interest (although some would of course dispute that motive) to form a coalition in order to govern the country for the next 5 years.

It has been difficult for the Conservatives and Lib Dems. They haven't always agreed and there have been at time bitter arguments between them. However they have managed to remain in government together and nobody now seriously thinks that they will not last another year until polling day on May 7th 2015.

In the meantime, the Labour opposition have tried to find different ways to position themselves against the government. They have been quite inventive in this. They have referred to it as a "Tory led government" as they clearly think this is a good attack line. They have at times accused the Lib Dems of "betraying" their voters and also implied that this government has no mandate as nobody specifically elected the coalition. They have questioned the motives of ministers of both parties in the way they have implemented the cuts, claiming they are "ideological". They have berated the government for being heartless, out of touch, in the pocket of millionaires and many, many, many other such attacks.

This has been rather effective. Look:

Labour climbed ahead of the Tories in the polls a few months after the 2010 general election and apart from a slight blip a year or so later when the Tories briefly overtook them they have basically stayed ahead. The Lib Dems slid down to around 10% and have bumped around at that level ever since.

Surely based on this Labour is winning the argument and the public would prefer Labour then?

Well not quite actually. Look:

If we combine the totals of both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, (i.e. the two parties of government) then that combined total has largely been ahead of Labour. There's a bit of crossover around the time and for a while after the "Omnishambles" budget of 2012. But for the majority of the time and certainly quite recently the "government" total has been ahead.

Of course the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are two separate parties. They won't be merging or standing on joint tickets, or even going for some sort of "coupon" agreement next year. They will stand separately. But Labour consistently attacks and berated the entire government. The pejorative term "ConDem" government is used to great effect in their campaigning. So if they are going to attack the entire government it is only fair to look at the figures in that context. And that shows us that despite the fact that for 4 years the government has had to make swingeing cuts and has launched unpopular reforms in all sorts of areas, they are still more popular than the Labour opposition.

If I was a Labour politician or activist I'd be very worried about this.

House of Comments - 100th Episode Extravaganza!

Episode 100 of the House of Comments podcast "100th Episode Extravaganza" is out. This week Mark is joined by Emma and Nick as well as former House of Comments co-host from way back Stuart Sharpe and our first ever guest from back in 2009, LBC presenter Iain Dale to celebrate our 100th episode. Topics discussed this week are the Harriet Harman and Jack Dromey NCCL/PIE story, Labour's special conference (which Emma spoke at) and the move to One Member One Vote and also whether the Conservatives and Labour would be wise to rule out potential coalition in 2015 as a manifesto commitment.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Other podcasting software e.g. for Android can be pointed here to subscribe.

You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 100 - 100th Episode Extravaganza’ on Audioboo

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboo for hosting the podcast for us. We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

Tristram Hunt rules himself out of ever being a minister in a coalition or minority government

New Shadow Schools Secretary Tristram Hunt has been sounding off today on LabourList.

Ostensibly it is an attack on Nick Clegg and his record on education policy. But specifically it is attacking the entire idea of compromising in government:

It begins:

“The doctrine of collective responsibility is not some old musty constitutional suit of armour. It is much more concerned with common sense, good faith and comradeship amongst those who must act together in Parliament if they are to give effective leadership… No alternative substitute for that good faith exists”.

So said Michael Foot, who knew a thing or two about the dangers of loose tongues around the table. But he never reckoned with our Deputy Prime Minister. 

Nick Clegg’s speech in Bethnal Green was supposed to set out his vision for education. 

But as he railed against the policy of unqualified teachers – which his Government has implemented – a rather simpler message began to emerge. It went something like this: 

“I may be the Deputy Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s Government. But please believe what I say, not what I do.” 

Is it any wonder that politicians struggle to gain public trust? 

Alas for the DPM, it is actions that speak louder than words, not the other way round. 

So he is attacking Clegg for having been part of a government that has implemented a particular policy whilst he and the Lib Dem party would ideally prefer to have done something else.

I have highlighted before what the logical consequence of this sort of argument is but I'll spell out the reality first. It's a bit complicated but hopefully I can explain it clearly:

We. Are. In. A. Coalition.

So by definition we are going to have to compromise. Tristram was educated at some of the best schools and universities in the country. It beggars belief that he does not understand this. If a party does not have enough seats to get a majority then it simply has to compromise, either as part of a coalition or as a minority government when bill by bill negotiations will have to take place in order to ensure legislation and budgets can get a majority.

Therefore the only conclusion I can draw from Tristram's comments are that he is an absolute purist. Ergo it is impossible for him ever to take up a ministerial role in anything other than a Labour majority government. Anything else would require compromise and the Hunt doctrine clearly does not allow that.

I look forward to him stepping down from the Labour front-bench if he is ever asked to serve in a minority or coalition administration.

If Cameron is a "loser" we're going to see a lot more of them

If this is losing, I'll have a bit of that please...

One thing I find difficult to get my head around is how so many people consider Cameron to have been a loser in 2010.

The argument goes that Gordon Brown was a terrible Prime Minister, that a solid majority was ripe for the picking for the Tories and Cameron totally screwed it up.

I'm afraid I don't really buy it.

Yes, Brown was dreadful but for all kinds of complicated reasons it was always a big ask for Cameron to get a majority. In 2005 they were still way behind. The way Labour's vote is distributed across the country makes it hard for the Tories to get enough seats even in a bad year for Labour (indeed 2010 was the red team's second worst vote share since WWI). UKIP shaved some of the Tory vote away, enough to perhaps cost them a dozen or more seats by some calculations. The Lib Dems were surgent in a way not seen in previous elections. Etc. etc. etc.

I'm not trying to make excuses for Cameron. I am not a huge fan of his. It's just that the narrative that it was there for the taking and he bollocksed it up does not stand up to serious scrutiny. He actually got a larger share of the vote than Blair did in 2005 (which delivered Labour a solid majority) but it wasn't enough for him to get over the line.

Many across the political spectrum and within his own party really do consider the Prime Minister a loser though because of this lack of a majority. His own side mutter darkly about how if he does not win a majority next time then he will have twice failed the electoral test and will be forced out as leader, even if the Tories are still the largest party and can form a government. They cite Thatcher and Blair with their thumping majorities and highlight how by comparison Cameron came up woefully short, but that wilfully ignores how the political landscape has shifted over the decades.

Other countries where their Prime Ministers and Chancellors regularly have to share power and often go on to win successive election victories (i.e. remaining in power, not having a majority!) must look upon our hung parliament discourse with bemusement. For them, the dynamics of compromise and coalition are completely normal.

Many psephologists now think that hung parliaments in the UK will become the norm despite us retaining First Past the Post for the foreseeable future. The vote share of the two main parties combined has gone from around 97% in the 1950s to around 65% in 2010. The trend is clear, people want to vote for alternatives to red and blue. Whether it is Lib Dem, UKIP, Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Mebyon Kernow and a multitude of other smaller parties, in the consumer and internet age we like to be able to exercise a much wider choice. This is not Cameron's fault and the idea he can somehow reverse all of these trends is completely unrealistic.

I think the analysts are right and we will see more coalitions/minority governments. Politics is now much more volatile and unpredictable than it once was. If I had to put money on it I would wager that in the next 20 years we will see at least half of the governments being led by someone who was unable to muster a majority at the ballot box.

If Cameron is a "loser", I suspect we're going to see many more such losers walking into 10 Downing Street in the not too distant future.

No confidence in "Confidence and Supply"

Liam Byrne has come out in favour of a minority Labour government if there is a hung parliament where Labour are the largest party after the 2015 general election.

His view is that he thinks a minority Labour administration could achieve more than a coalition and also that the current government has "given coalitions a bad name".

In some ways this view is unsurprising. In the political memory of almost everyone in the contemporary PLP (at least in the Commons) they have never had to share power. Their experiences in government between 1997 and 2010 were of sole stewardship of the levers of government and it is hardly surprising that elements within would want to repeat that, even if the electorate did not want to give them a majority.

But there is an implicit assumption built into this idea from Byrne. For a minority government to have any stability it would require minor parties (likely including the Lib Dems) to be willing to agree a "Confidence and Supply" arrangement with Labour. This would mean them promising to support Labour in any confidence motion and also to allow budgets to pass.

I have previously detailed my views on confidence and supply explaining how I think it would give all of the downsides of a coalition but without many of the benefits. This would apply just as much in a potential arrangement with Labour as it would with the Conservatives.

I do not think my views on this are unusual. There are plenty in my own party who feel similarly, indeed that is one of the main reasons that the 2010 coalition went ahead as the alternatives were all worse in the views of the key negotiators.

So if Byrne's view prevails within Labour and they as the largest party in a hung parliament try to go for a minority government that is predicated on some pretty big assumptions about how smaller parties will fall into line and provide the day to day support needed to even perform the basic functions of a government. It is far from clear that would be forthcoming and it is somewhat arrogant in my view for Byrne to simply assume that it would and that somehow it would mean Labour could achieve more than it could in a coalition. In fact this is the same arrogance that Adonis betrayed in his book "5 Days in May" (that I reviewed here) where he and other senior Labour figures were convinced a coalition with the Lib Dems could work despite the maths not favouring such an arrangement based on a series of assumptions about how all the other parties would back them.

To an extent I can understand Byrne's wish to find a "better way" to govern were there to be a hung parliament. There is no denying that coalition has been tough and from the outside looking in to Labour politicians I can see why they might balk at such an arrangement themselves.

But the idea that a minority government would be better strikes me as tribalistic and short-sighted. Any minority government is unlikely to last more than a year or two and parties who show they are unwilling to work with others may well find they are punished at the ballot box at least as much if not more than those who are willing to take the risk of going into coalitions.

The real lessons from the 2010 coalition negotiations

I've just finished reading Andrew Adonis’s 5 Days in May: The Coalition and Beyond and it has given me food for thought both about how the 2010 coalition negotiations proceeded and what lessons we might learn for any potential future coalition discussions.

Having already read David Laws’s 22 Days in May and Rob Wilson’s 5 Days to Power and having watched various radio and TV programmes about the 2010 negotiations, I already had a reasonable idea about how they went. But it was interesting to get a Labour perspective on the talks.

The fairly settled view from Lib Dems is that Labour were unprepared for discussions and some members of their negotiating team and parliamentary party seemed to be mentally ready for opposition, rather than seriously trying to make the necessary compromises to stay in power.

One figure, however, in all the accounts that I have seen, heard and read, who clearly did want to try and make the negotiations work was Gordon Brown. There is no doubt in my mind that he really did want to see a Lab-Lib coalition. Unfortunately, because he had not properly prepared the ground for any such discussions, having been so used both as Chancellor and PM to working majorities, he was destined to fail. The passion with which Brown tried to make the discussions with the Lib Dems work comes across in Adonis’s book as almost tragic, but given how much we already know about what a tribalist was, he cuts a contradictory figure, desperately trying to convince Nick Clegg of how a radical Labour-Lib Dem coalition could deliver.

A telling vignette from 5 Days in May is how Peter Mandelson, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls all discussed with Adonis how they had never come across Andrew Stunell before and did not know who he was. He had been Lib Dem MP for Hazel Grove since 1997 and a frontbench spokesperson for almost all of that time. This demonstrates a shocking level of engagement by Labour with the party that they were supposedly attempting, in good faith, to form a government with.

An important theme from the Adonis book is that of how the question of 'the numbers' seemed to be eminently solvable in the view of Brown and some other senior Labour people. Despite the fact that Labour only had 258 seats and the Lib Dems 57 (so a total of 315 vs the Tories' 306, with a majority requiring 326) Brown was convinced that most of the minor parties would fall into line. I’m not sure if I would describe this as wishful thinking or self-delusion but the idea that a 'rainbow coalition' or even a minority coalition that took the votes of the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Caroline Lucas, the SDLP and the DUP all pretty much for granted would have been plain sailing, and was somehow an obvious and equal choice to the stability of a solid working majority with the Conservatives, is optimistic in the extreme.

It also suggested to me a level of arrogance, perhaps fostered by 13 years in government, within senior Labour ranks that the minor parties would come to heel. The Lib Dems were doing the responsible thing in not assuming that all these smaller parties would stay in line and instead considering that any deal with Labour would be on the basis of a minority government which would have been very difficult to control. This was not least because a number of Labour MPs spent the five days of the coalition negotiations making it clear that there were things they would not agree to or vote for. So far from Brown being sure of being able to deliver his 258 MPs, it was far more likely that the total would regularly fall short of that depending on which issue the vote was on.

A good example of this is how during the first formal discussion with the Labour team, Adonis highlighted how Labour was open to a proportional representation option being on the AV ballot paper. But I know from my own personal discussions at the time that Labour MP Tom Harris would never have voted for a bill that included a PR option in the referendum. He told me categorically. It was also clear to me that he was not alone in this respect and there were a number of Labour MPs who would also have defied party whips to defeat this. Labour was negotiating on something it would never have been able to deliver on.

So what lessons can we draw from the various accounts of the 2010 coalition negotiations? I would say the most important thing is preparation. Both the Lib Dems and the Conservatives wargamed a number of scenarios before the 2010 election. They approached coalition negotiations professionally and with the clear purpose of forming a stable government that could last for a whole parliament. Contrast this with Labour, which didn't even start seriously planning for coalition until after the result was announced. And it made a big difference. The Lib Dems did not take Labour as seriously as the Conservatives as potential partners, not for ideological reasons (as Adonis seems convinced of), but primarily because the reds had not done the basic groundwork. So the key lesson from 2010 for Labour is to be open to the possibility that there will be a hung parliament in 2015, long before it actually happens, and to plan, war-game and prepare in advance for this outcome. Even just making sure the basics, such as having enough backchannel communication between key players. Happily, there are signs that Ed Miliband gets this now and is preparing the ground for just such an eventuality.

Another important factor is to be realistic about what can be achieved. Brown's offer of PR on the AV referendum ballot simply could not have been delivered by him in the circumstances he found himself in. Indeed the numbers made any alliance at all very tricky. If the maths makes things difficult, parties should be open about this. That is the only way that good faith can be maintained.

The final lesson to draw for now is more related to how the current coalition has played out. The Lib Dems have been reasonably disciplined in keeping their troops in line and ensuring that most items from the coalition agreement have gone through, even when, as in the case of tuition fees, they have gone directly against what the party wanted. Whatever you may think of the individual policies, this has been done in the name of coalition cohesion. By contrast, the Conservative backbenches have been much more restive and have forced defeats on measures such as Lords reform in defiance of their party leadership.

The various processes that the Lib Dems had (and have) in place to facilitate buy-in from the parliamentary and wider membership were seen by both Labour and Conservatives in 2010 as somewhat eccentric. Indeed, one of the reasons Brown found it so hard to get hold of Clegg on several occasions during the five days is because the Lib Dem leader was in one meeting or another keeping colleagues closely informed of what was happening and consulting them. But it is hard to argue that the legitimacy those processes conferred on the coalition from a Lib Dem perspective is anything other than a very good thing. I was one of the party members who voted in the special conference convened towards the end of May 2010 and it certainly gave me a feeling of ownership which has been sorely tested over the last three years. It is not a panacea and we enter a grey area when measures that were never in the coalition agreement are legislated on, sometimes to the chagrin of myself and my fellow party members. But a complete lack of any such process within the Conservative Party has led to a widespread feeling amongs its members, both in parliament and more widely, of a lack of legitimacy in the current coalition.

There was no modern precedent on which the parties could draw three years ago and they were, to an extent, flying blind. But in 2015, should such discussions become necessary, that will not be the case. All parties should learn the lessons from those five heady days in May 2010.


This piece was first published online in The New Statesman.


We discussed the Adonis book and the lessons for future negotiations on this week's House of Comments Podcast which guest starred Hopi Sen.

House of Comments - Episode 59 - Five Days in May

Episode 59 of the House of Comments podcast "Five Days in May" was recorded on Sunday and was out yesterday. This week myself and Emma Burnell were joined by Labour activist and blogger Hopi Sen to discuss Andrew Adonis' "5 Days in May" about the coalition negotiations from Labour's perspective, Loongate and the Tories incipient nervous breakdown over Europe and equal marriage.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here (note - this is a new feed so if you used to subscribe to the old feed a couple of years ago you'll need to do so again).

Other podcasting software e.g. for Android can be pointed here to subscribe.

You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 59 - Five Days in May’ on Audioboo

If you are a political blogger and wish to be considered as a future guest please drop me an e-mail at markreckons@live.co.uk.

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboo for hosting the podcast for us and especially to Audioboo's James O'Malley who has helped us out getting relaunched. James is also editor of The Pod Delusion podcast which is about "interesting things" and is well worth a listen too! We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

Freezing or reducing the minimum wage would be economically wrong-headed

So there are rumblings that the government is planning to freeze or perhaps even reduce the minimum wage for those over 21 years of age. This would be completely wrong-headed for at least three reasons.

Most importantly it is simply not fair to penalise those who earn the least (which by definition are those earning the national minimum wage). They are the so called "strivers" that George Osborne keeps banging on about. Surely this government should want to protect them rather than see their real-terms salary fall?

But if that's too wishy-washy namby-pamby sandal-eating muesli-wearing for you then here are a couple of economic reasons for you.

If salaries are reduced then benefit claims will increase. The government will simply be shifting the burden from the private sector to the taxpayer and hence helping to further subsidise companies that should be paying their staff more not less. If anything this will make the deficit even worse.

Also those earning the least are the most likely to spend what they get. This is exactly what you need to boost growth and hence the mooted policy is the exact opposite of what the country requires.

I hope this is just bank-holiday flag flying. I also hope that Lib Dem ministers will have nothing to do with this mean-spirited and economically dubious nonsense.

The Majoritarian Muddle

There's an interesting piece from Dan Hodges yesterday in which he suggests that many Tories are so sick of having to govern in coalition with the Lib Dems that they may actually prefer to be in opposition.

This is a phenomenon that I witnessed first hand in the run up to the 2010 general election. At the time I was doing a lot of media and in one of my radio studio appearances I was chatting to a right-wing commentator who I knew from previous conversations was considering a potential future career as a Tory MP. The subject of electoral reform came up and he stated in blunt terms that if first-past-the-post was ever abandoned for Westminster he would quit politics. For him it was not enough to have power, it had to be absolute power for his party alone.

As a long-standing pluralist, I find this attitude hard to understand. Some might suggest that as a Lib Dem I would say that. But I thought this long before I joined the party. Compromising with colleagues is something that almost everybody does all the time in the "real world". Extending this across party boundaries within politics should not really be controversial and yet, somehow, it is. Well, in this country at least. Most other countries have political systems that ensure the most likely outcome is the sharing of power in various ways. Very few have such a brutal winner-takes-all system as the United Kingdom.

Even under first-past-the-post, it seems likely that the smaller parties will continue to eat away at the long-term vote share for the big two. Indeed, across the world the "Westminster model" is now usually returning hung parliaments. This could well lead to more opportunities for coalitions in the UK. If this is correct, Conservative and Labour MPs and activists are going to have to get used to sharing power. The sort of monumental strop that numerous backbench Tory MPs are now throwing will be utterly counterproductive.

The idea of working with one's political opponents has been anathema to the main parties for the last 60 years. The "winner" of the election gets a majority of seats and pushes through what they want. That has been the basis of our politics for so long that it is a genuine culture shock to find ourselves in a world where constant compromise is necessary. That is as true for the Lib Dems as for anyone else, which is perhaps surprising given they are the party of electoral reform - but that shows how deeply embedded our previous settlement was. We need to see a culture change in this country's body politic. Instead of compromise with political opponents being seen as weak, we need to accept it as an inevitable part of policy making. No one party has a monopoly on good ideas and our country can actually be strengthened by ensuring that more than one political philosophy and tradition has input into that process.

And if we can all accept this, then maybe next time we have a coalition the MPs that form the backbenches will have a slightly more realistic expectation of what can be achieved and perhaps be grateful for the opportunity to contribute, rather than equate compromise with betrayal of their principles.

This post was first published in the New Statesman online

The Lib Dem leadership are treading a dangerous path

I'm off down to Brighton on Friday.

I really like the Sussex seaside town and I am sure I will find plenty to do while I am there. There's the pier, the Laines, the beach, the Royal Pavilion and lots of nice restaurants.

While I'm down there I may pop into the Lib Dem conference which is on. That is ostensibly the reason I am actually going to be there to get involved in debates and vote on party policy. Although after last night's vote where the parliamentary Lib Dems were whipped to vote for the Secret Courts bill against the clear expressed will of the party membership in conference votes I am thinking it might well not be worth it. After all if our ministers in government can just completely ignore what its members think despite the fact that we are supposed to be a democratic party then why should I bother?

I suspect plenty of others will be wondering this today. I also suspect in the light of the Eastleigh by-election result that many will be questioning whether it is worth campaigning so hard for the party in future too. Thousands of activists poured into the seat in the last few weeks in order to help us secure the by-election victory. Now as it happens Mike Thornton had not been sworn in in time for the division last night so he couldn't vote. I'll be generous to Mike and assume there is a good reason for this. Although I will say that if I had been elected MP for Eastleigh last week I'd have made damn sure I was sworn in in time and then voted against the bill along with the 7 other Lib Dem "rebels" who actually voted the way the party membership wants. But it is a real kick in the face for all of those activists who fought so hard to deliver the "stunning victory" that has so boosted Clegg in recent days. I was one of them and I have to say that I will not be as keen to go out and fight for our party on the doorsteps in future if we don't see a real change in how our internal democracy is accounted for in government.

What's even more infuriating about this is that it appears the timing of the vote was scheduled precisely to avoid an "embarrassing" vote at conference that would put further pressure on Clegg and our ministers to vote against this bill. So our leadership has connived with the Tories to deny its own membership on this key piece of legislation.

I understand it is difficult for Lib Dem ministers to get their way on things all the time but liberty is a fundamental precept of our party. Secret Courts are diametrically opposite to what we should be doing. We need an urgent review into how to fix our broken democracy. This weekend's conference is the place to do it.

And if we don't then perhaps next time conference is in Brighton all the other attractions may prove too tempting for me. Let's face it, wandering around the Laines and the Pavilion may be time better spent if our votes on key issues like this count for nothing.

False binary choices

This government has chosen the wrong course on the economy.

Well, it's self evident isn't it? I mean they said there'd be 3% growth in 2012 and (according to the preliminary figures) it was flat. They've failed haven't they?

And therefore, Ed Balls and Labour were right. The coalition have cut too far, too fast and we are now seeing the consequences of their economic folly. We should have done what Labour suggested, i.e. delayed the cuts for a year and had slightly fewer of them. Then we'd have been fine.

Well at least that's what you'd think if you listened to Labour.

I'm not saying they're not right. They might be*. What I am saying is that there is literally no way of knowing. We cannot run a counterfactual where they won the 2010 election and enacted their economic plans. We cannot know if faced with another 5 years of Brown (who would doubtless have remained PM had Labour formed the government) if the markets would have panicked and interest rates would have shot up. We can't see how all the consequences of their approach would have played out. It is impossible to know. So therefore what I can say with absolute confidence is that Labour are being highly misleading when they try to present the economic situation in these binary terms. The coalition did one thing. It didn't work. They planned to another (slightly different) thing. Ipso facto that would have worked.

For all we know, neither approach would have worked. Maybe a third or fourth approach would have done the job. Or maybe the economy was so screwed by May 2010 that no economic plan would have helped. It's actually possible when you look at it like this that the current approach is making the best of a bad situation.

But I am sure this sort of nuance will not make it into the debate in the run up to the next election.  What will go on the leaflets and the in the adverts is that the evil ConDems have cut unnecessarily for "ideological" reasons "destroying our economy" in the process and that Labour know for sure that had they had been in power and enacted their plans we would have escaped our economic fate.

The fact that they can't possibly know if this is true won't get a look in.


*For what it's worth I would have put more into infrastructure investment at an earlier point but there is no guarantee that would have helped much either.

Coalition tax rates are far more progressive than under Labour

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.

Well:

This is the difference in income tax that people are paying in the current tax year versus what they paid under the last year of Labour government. When let's not forget they had had 13 years to align the tax rates in any way they wished with a large majority in parliament.

We can see that someone earning £10,000 is paying almost 30% less tax now whilst those earning the highest amounts (£500,000+) are paying well over 20% more. Oh, and that line above seems to me to be the dictionary definition of "progressive". It goes up progressively.

Worth remembering this next time Labour are banging on about how unfair the coalition is being to the poorest people.


Hattip to Len Gates and Carl Minns for the original data.

House of Comments - Episode 43 - The One with the Onesie

Episode 43 of the House of Comments podcast "The One with the Onesie" was recorded on Sunday and is out today. This week myself and Emma Burnell are joined by Conservative activist and former PPC Charlotte Vere to discuss the government relaunch, childcare reform, Labour's proposals for regulating landlords and we all reveal whether or not any of us own a Onesie like Nick Clegg.

There were some slight technical issues on the Skype call we used to record this it so occasionally the voices break up a bit although it gets better towards the end. Apologies for this.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here (note - this is a new feed so if you used to subscribe to the old feed a couple of years ago you'll need to do so again).

Other podcasting software e.g. for Android can be pointed here to subscribe.

You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 43 - The One with the Onesie’ on Audioboo

If you are a political blogger and wish to be considered as a future guest please drop me an e-mail at markreckons@live.co.uk.

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboo for hosting the podcast for us and especially to Audioboo's James O'Malley who has helped us out getting relaunched. James is also editor of The Pod Delusion podcast which is about "interesting things" and is well worth a listen too! We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

House of Comments - Episode 42 - The Shelf Stacking Reflex

Episode 42 of the House of Comments podcast "The Shelf Stacking Reflex" was recorded on Sunday and is out today. This week myself and Emma Burnell cover Labour's work guarantee, the coalition's mid-term review and they give their own assessments of how the government and coalition has worked thus far. Also, Emma takes me to task on my reflex for conflating entry-level jobs with shelf stacking!

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here (note - this is a new feed so if you used to subscribe to the old feed a couple of years ago you'll need to do so again).

Other podcasting software e.g. for Android can be pointed here to subscribe.

You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 42 - The Shelf Stacker Reflex’ on Audioboo

If you are a political blogger and wish to be considered as a future guest please drop me an e-mail at markreckons@live.co.uk.

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboo for hosting the podcast for us and especially to Audioboo's James O'Malley who has helped us out getting relaunched. James is also editor of The Pod Delusion podcast which is about "interesting things" and is well worth a listen too! We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

An appeal for the NHS

Now that the dust has settled a little bit on the NHS reforms I have a request.

I tried to pay close attention to the detail of what the changes mean as the bill was going through parliament. Lord knows we had enough coverage at the time (although there was often much more heat than light I fear). As far as I can tell the changes are fairly modest and essentially involve more devolution of power to local GP practices and some extension of private providers running NHS services (which was also done by previous administrations). Everything that was free at the point of use before will still be free at the point of use and again as far as I can tell the NHS budget has been protected (albeit there will be some efficiency savings with the money ploughed back into the NHS budget).

So, can someone please tell me, with links to evidence, how the NHS is being "abolished" or "destroyed". I have seen many people claim this, often Labour activists but I have never seen proof of it, or even a convincing prima facie case.

Just in case anyone here thinks I am being provocative, I am not. I am genuinely asking. I am a member of one of the parties in government in this country and if I really thought that my government had enacted a bill that would end the NHS and free at the point of use healthcare, I would leave the party and vigorously campaign against it.

So I am appealing for someone to prove to me that these claims about the NHS being destroyed are true.

Anyone?

Why are Labour opposing what they did in office?

I know politics tends to be played in a certain way and that Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition are there to oppose. It's there in the title.

But it is remarkable just how many times Labour in opposition are now against almost exactly what they did when they themselves were in office. In some cases not just against them, but viscerally against them suggesting all manner of nefarious motives on the part of the EVIL CONDEMS for even considering them.

There's a good example today. It has been reported that the government is encouraging the NHS to use its expertise globally in order to make a profit from international markets for re-investment domestically. Sounds perfectly sensible to me to explore such opportunities, especially with a brand that is as strong globally as our National Health Service is.

Labour however have wasted no time at all in attacking the plans. Which is very odd because only 2 years ago, Andy Burnham, the then Labour Health Secretary was all in favour of pretty much exactly the same idea:

“A key part of responding to the economic challenge that the NHS faces will be realising the full potential of innovation, not only making effective use of our knowledge and skills at home, but also making money abroad that can be reinvested back into the NHS."

The Labour attack is based around this being the "wrong time" for such a change and that the "priority" should be sorting out the "mess" in the NHS. But If Burnham 2 years ago, in the midst of an economic crisis thought then was the right time for this and that it could form a "key part" of the NHS's economic challenge then I cannot for the life of me work out why now is the wrong time. Surely Labour think the NHS has got worse in the last 2 years so anything that can bring more money in for reinvestment (as they clearly thought this would when in office) should be a good thing?

This apparent contradiction has been reported widely today and I have seen a few Labour activists make an attempt to defend the new position usually along the lines of the "approach" that the current government is taking being wrong.

Frankly this is a load of rubbish. It is becoming ever more clear that Labour are going to oppose anything and everything that they think they can get political capital out of regardless of how hypocritical they are being. The theory seems to be that if they shout loudly enough against all these policies, the fact they used to be for them will be forgotten. They should be held to account for this, otherwise how are we going to know what we'll get if they end up back in government again?


Andy Burnham being interviewed about this subject today:

How the Lib Dem response to the doctrine of "Collective Responsibility" is screwing us

Compare and contrast:

“Of course, there is no reliance on our support for a Coalition Agreement commitment for progress on unrelated or other significant parallel constitutional formations. I have said that. There is no link; of course, there is no link.”

...and:

"Lords reform and boundaries are two, separate parliamentary bills but they are both part of a package of overall political reform. Delivering one but not the other would create an imbalance – not just in the Coalition Agreement, but also in our political system.
Lords reform leads to a smaller, more legitimate House of Lords. Boundary changes lead to a smaller House of Commons, by cutting the number of MPs. If you cut the number of MPs without enhancing the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Lords all you have done is weaken parliament as a whole, strengthen the executive and its overmighty government that wins."

Both of these statements were made by Nick Clegg in the last few months. The first one was at a Select Committee hearing in April where he also specifically said the words "There is no formal link" between Lords reform and the boundary changes.

I highlight this, not to embarrass the leader of my party (there will be plenty of others in Labour and the Conservatives queueing up to do that) but to highlight how our approach to collective responsibility within the government is now screwing us over.

i have been arguing for a long time that in public our ministers should have been making it clear that there are things we are doing that we would not do were we governing alone. I think the electorate are mature enough to accept this. But instead our approach seems to be to essentially "own" the entire government programme and to argue in favour of every element of it. This then leads to a situation with for example the boundary changes where Clegg can be painted as "having been for it, before he was against it" which is very damaging in politics.

If the approach had been to consistently explain that we were supporting the boundary changes as part of an overall package of constitutional change and all of it needed to go through (which is a perfectly reasonable position) it wouldn't seem like we were going back on anything now.

To be fair to Clegg there are examples including in the evidence to that committee where he did try to make this link but there are too many other examples where he has said things like "There is no link". The position has been too muddled.

This is not the only area where this has happened. For example Clegg has been quoted in the past as saying that Andrew Lansley is the "right man for the job" of Health Secretary. That's strange because before the election surely he though Norman Lamb was the right man, otherwise why was he Lib Dem spokesperson for health? I wonder why he felt the need to say this? He could have worded it along the lines of Lansley getting on with the job he was appointed by the PM to do or similar without endorsing him above all other possible ministers.

In the inevitable post-mortems that will come whenever this coalition finally ends I hope that our approach to collective responsibility comes under a sharp spotlight and we learn some important lessons. We are a separate party with a distinct identity. We need to find a way to make this clear, even when we are sharing power with another party.