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.

Fisking Polly Toynbee

Polly Toynbee has written a comment piece for the Guardian today which tries to argue that we should keep things regarding our MPs in perspective. I have tried to address some of her points below:

This isn't even the beginning of the end. After Jacqui Smith, expect a stream of MP expense scandals drip-fed into papers week by week. Rumours abound: is there a mole in the Commons fees office? Is it a Tory? Is someone selling these scoops? One thing is certain: deep-pocketed tabloids are chasing ministers, hiring Benji the Bin Man-type rummagers, bribing officials or just calculating MPs' property profits from expenses.

You are doubtless correct Polly, but the "deep-pocketed tabloids" would have nothing to uncover if the MPs had not been so greedy in the first place.

All parties are in for a roasting. In the autumn every MP's bath plug and lightbulb claim will be published. By bad luck, yesterday saw their pay rise by 2.33% to add to public anger.

Bad luck? They are in control of their own pay rises and have chosen to do this in the middle of a recession. Each individual MP is at liberty to give away their rise to charity or back to the Exchequer. Let's see how many of them do.

If moral instincts fail them, then every political sinew should alert MPs to do nothing they wouldn't want splashed across front pages, whatever the custom and practice of the house. Talk to MPs who don't claim much and they boil over at those claiming more than they need. Jacqui Smith calling her sister's back bedroom her main home looked all wrong, even if, apparently, officials said it was OK. The £10 blue movie fiasco is an embarrassing error, but hardly a high crime. For years no spotlight shone in this dark corner.

The blue movie fiasco will amost certainly destroy Smith's career and will become as emblematic of the sleaze of New Labour as brown envelopes and Neil Hamilton were for the Tories.

Now the system must change - and fast. What's up with the dilatory Committee on Standards in Public Life, refusing to lumber into action until September, not reporting until after the next election? This slo-mo response risks bringing the committee into the same disrepute as the MPs. Public thirst for blood spilled over on Question Time when Eric Pickles was booed and barracked for utterly failing to catch the angry moment. He looked shocked: frankly, they all do. If party leaders were wise, they would rush together to announce new rules, draw a line under the past and try to staunch the anti-politician bile.

I agree with all of this and indeed Nick Clegg has already written to the other two main party leaders suggesting this.

(Read online comments after this for waves of cynical hatred.)

This seems to be a pretty flagrant attempt to smear any criticism of her article before it has even been published (assuming this was not added afterwards but there is no EDIT comment attached to it). I have read some of the comments and they are largely polite but just disgusted with politicians and Polly's attempts at defending them.

But keep all this in perspective. Our politicians are among the cleanest in the world - 16th out of 180 nations and bunched less than two points from the top, according to Transparency International. Below us are the US, Belgium, France and Spain. But from the uproar, MPs stretching expense rules has been made to look like the pork barrel, backhander and bribery scams that plague other countries.

And? So what? We want a clean politics for this country. I don't care whether we are "not as bad" as some other countries. This is a red herring argument.

Let's repeat this: our MPs are rarely corrupt. Our feral press, however, finds growing transparency and freedom of information - brought in by Labour - offers easy meat for cheap stories. These hyped up "scandals" are frivolous compared with serious investigations such as the Guardian's arduous and risky revelations on company tax avoidance. If only more newspapers gave the same space to investigating opaque corporate bad behaviour that they devote to exposés of minor MPs' misdemeanours. Eternal trivia is not eternal vigilance.

Hmm. I agree with the need for us to more vigorously pursue tax avoidance but it is not an either/or situation. We should pursue things like that and also pursue public servants who have structured an "allowances" system to line their own pockets. The total amount of MPs expenses according to the figures released yesterday is over £80 million. This is not trivia.

But here's the wake-up call. MPs have been caught napping by the new wave of puritanism. Others will now come under unaccustomed scrutiny. Let this be a warning to all public officials, quangos, councils, NHS officials, sports authorities or anyone holding even minor power. Something has snapped. If public trust was always low, it has fallen down a crevasse in this financial crisis.

Absolutely. People are furious with our politicians and public officials and they have to respond to this right now. Right now. No kicking it into the long grass with inquries led by the great and the good reporting after the next election. Now.

Historians will see why: people feel a grand conspiracy by a well-paid elite has failed them. They were told this was a golden age, that astronomic pay at the top was yielding rich returns for the nation. They were told their soaring property values came thanks to the brilliance of the governing and banking classes. When your house price rose by £50 a day, why question the very clever, very well-paid people overseeing this great tide of wealth? Polls showed surprisingly little indignation as top pay rocketed. People believed those in power who said the golden geese were delivering the eggs.

I still thought there were problems with the current system as I am sure did many others even when times were good. However Polly is right that now times are tough there will be much more focus on this subject.

But no longer. MPs are getting the first blowback of the new mood. Everyone earning in the top tax bracket had better watch out: the real nature of inequality has been rumbled. Remember, only some 10% of people earn over £40,000. That means 90% earn less. All those with power - leaders, managers, controllers, commentators, decision-makers - inhabit a very small elite paid far above the norm. Median pay is around £23,000, so half the population earns less. Now trade unions no longer have the power to rattle the cage of the powerful, the upper 10% has lost its grip on reality, failing to realise how well off it is. MPs and others feel entitled to more if they compare themselves upwards, with the top 1% earning a monstrous swag. Extreme inequality causes pay dysmorphia - failing to see your pay in proper proportion to everyone else's.

But MPs earn more than 2.5x the median in salary alone (and that's before the tens of thousands of pounds of "allowances" are factored in). Do they really, honestly think they are badly paid?

It is unjust that the public sector - less greedy, less rich, more motivated by civic sense - will feel the blowtorch of this new mood. Beware throwing public-sector leaders into tumbrels. But as an easy target in a downturn, they had better cut back those top rates that have been infected by the private-sector pay virus. Meanwhile, businessmen flying "executive" class for no good reason, eating Michelin stars and conferencing in golf-friendly foreign spas pilfer public-company funds from other people's pensions under far less scrutiny.

No, I am sorry Polly but when times are tough, everybody has to share the burden. The caricature of businessmen eating swans and swimming in caviar is an attempt to distract from this. I am in business myself and we are having to be very careful on expenditure as I am sure most other businesses are. There are pay freezes, pay cuts, short time working, downsizing, suspended pension contributions, you name it going on in the private sector at the moment. the public sector cannot go on expanding whilst the private sector takes all the pain. It goes against natural justice and is economically wrong headed.

Beware of joining the general denigration of MPs. There are few Jonathan Aitken bad hats: you know them by the pricking of your thumbs. Most MPs in every party go into politics to change things for the better. A salary set today at £64,766 is fine, but most (not all) could do better outside.

This last bit is absolute rubbish. £65K per year is a huge salary and many MPs these days, certainly Labour ones are time servers who have never done a job outside politics. Once you factor in the "allowances" we are talking well over £100K. I simply do not believe that most MPs could earn this sort of money outside of politics and it insults our intelligence to suggest they can. Oh, and if they really do think they can, they should resign from the house and do it. There are no shortage of people waiting to replace them.

Few reach cabinet or even junior office. If they do, their powerlessness can still feel mortifying. Years of weekly graft in constituencies yield little personal benefit: most rise and fall with their party's fortunes.

MPs under collective omerta are usually better people in private than they are allowed to be in public. This era of Labour MPs has rebelled more than any other - though rebellion is not always as honourable as suffering under collective decision. We who comment on them do well to remember how plush is our perch, in comparison.

But the collective omerta is entirely their own fault. They control our system of government. If they want to be allowed more individualism, it is in their own hands. I agree it would be better if they were more independent minded but many MPs, certainly in the Labour and Conservative parties are politically cowardly when it comes to speaking their true mind on issues. Look at the conspiracy of silence for example on the failure of the "war on drugs". MPs are very quick to scream "Gaffe!" or "Soft on drugs/crime!" at each other as soon as one of them steps outside the ridiculously narrow bounds they set for themselves. It is their own fault.

Those who abuse, belittle and encourage popular contempt for MPs should consider that we need more good people in politics. Observing the excruciating public humiliation of the home secretary's husband for watching a couple of porn movies, with their children cringing indoors, how many potentially good future politicians decided they would rather not invite the world to root through their private life after all?

It is richly ironic that Jacqui Smith who has done so much to undermine our liberties and to ensure the state can poke their noses into our private business is likely to be undone by someone poking their noses into her private business (although made public due to the claim on taxpayer's money). Good people have nothing to fear from going into politics as long as they keep their side of the street clean and do not engage in the sort of egregious practises we have seen recently.

The MPs are getting exactly what they deserve and they only have themselves to blame.

Polly's argument is counter-productive

I have just been reading Polly Toynbee's latest article in The Guardian where she is advocating electoral reform.

I am a passionate supporter of electoral reform. Incidentally when I made this comment to a Tory last week she said "Yes, of course - you're a Lib Dem.". I then explained to her that it was actually the other way round. One of the reasons I joined the Lib Dems in the first place is because of their support for electoral reform. I have been a passionate advocate of this for years and long before I joined the party.

Anyway, Polly's central thesis seems to be a ressurection of her "nose peg" theme from before the last election where she was arguing that Labour is the lesser of the two evils (compared to the Tories). She dismisses the Lib Dems because of the electoral system in this country. She then goes on to advocate electoral reform. However, the problem is that towards the end of the article she is arguing from a very weak position. It could easily be interpreted (or spun) that she is now desperately trying to keep Labour in (or the Tories out) at any cost. Advocating change of the electoral system in the dying days of a deeply unpopular government which would likely have the effect of keeping the Tories out looks extremely cynical. Indeed many of the comments on CiF take this view.

She does make some good suggestions such as advising readers to get involved with Make Votes Count and/or the Electoral Reform Society with which I wholeheartedly concur.

I want electoral reform for the House of Commons. However the argument has to be made on the unfairness of the existing system. It will never gain traction if it is seen to be being argued for on the grounds of narrow partisan advantage.