No Winners
I've gradually come to come to the view that The Times newspaper has the most impressive range of commentators - on politics and public affairs.
Just about every title has someone who stands out - for good reasons and bad - but The Times manages to provide a cross section of views which I don't always agree with - though I have to say that its writers often make me stop and think.
Probably because many of its regular contributors are thoughtful and reflective - not just the usual party political hacks.
As in this piece written by Philip Collins in the wake of the Eastleigh by-election - where all of the parties claimed a great victory even though all of them lost - in one way or the other.
Together the prudent can beat the profligate
By Philip Collins
Eastleigh’s lesson is that no party can win on its own. But the coalition could see off Labour’s deficit deniers
It was clear from Eastleigh even before the vote was counted that, whoever won, nobody could win. Eastleigh has been conducted under the old political rules of conflict and party rivalries but the campaign has shown that this is a time in which there are no winners, only various constellations of loser.
The Eastleigh by-election has been the most peculiar in living memory. There is the spectacle of coalition partners, freed from the tight-lipped politeness of government, relishing the rudeness that an election permits. There is Maria Hutchings for the Tories, about as far from A-list central casting as one can imagine and whose views on social issues come from the same decade as Michael Gove’s history curriculum.
The Liberal Democrat campaign has been a series of stills of Nick Clegg in headphones, digging a new hole every day over who knew what and what he knew about Lord Rennard’s allegedly wandering hands. Into this unscripted farce Labour pitched an actual comedian, John O’Farrell, whose main contribution was to remind us of a tasteless joke that he once made about Mrs Thatcher.
No writer of dramatic fiction would dare to make the departing MP a former Cabinet minister and aspirant leader of his party awaiting sentence for admitting, after months of denial, that he did get his wife, a government economist, to pretend that she was driving his car a decade ago on the way home from Stansted.
The paradox of British politics at the moment is that, although somebody has to win, nobody is in a position to do so. The Liberal Democrats cling to a crumbling political base by hoping that the electorate will vote on broken pavements in Eastleigh rather than broken promises in Westminster. The strategy of the Tory chairman, Grant Shapps, to target Liberal Democrat seats will be in grave doubt if he fails to win Eastleigh. Labour cannot win without a better performance in the South of England and Eastleigh seems to offer no sign of that. In a none-of-the-above by-election, only UKIP is having any fun.
But the main lesson from Eastleigh will not be a national wave of Farages. It will be that none-of-the-above politics is a serious force in the land. Neither of the two potential winners of a general election has a leader who can carry his party into unusual territory. Labour won only 29 per cent of the vote in 2010, which is a long way off a majority. The Conservatives are trying, against all precedent, to increase their vote of 37 per cent while closing services. Nobody can win; someone has to win.
At the same time as victory seems so distant, activists in the coalition parties are increasingly keen to live apart. Conservatives routinely describe the Liberal Democrats as an obstacle. The Lib Dems revel in this as it implies that they are holding back a rampant Tory party. It has always intrigued me that people steeped in politics should be so poor at recognising what is in their own interest, but they are. The impartial spectator would surely tell the governing parties that the current stalemate can be broken, but that all the solutions imply more co-operation rather than a rush to separate.
The most comprehensive way to change the rules of the game is the 1918 option, whereby the Tories and the Liberal Democrats run together in 2015. In 1918 Liberal and Conservative candidates held up a “coupon” to the electorate, which was a letter of endorsement, in effect binding them together. It is only a couple of years since the Planning Minister, Nick Boles, suggested this as a possible strategy for the next general election but political ill-will has killed it off.
The alternative might be 1997. At the end of the Tory years there was an informal, tacit but effective arrangement whereby Labour and the Lib Dems went easy on each other in seats where one was the obvious anti-Tory option. There was a lot of tactical voting to maximise opposition to the Government. It’s not clear if this option exists either, as it too requires goodwill that has gone missing.
There is, however, another option that does not depend on overcoming tribal affiliations and could therefore change the terms of trade. The relevant year is 1924. The Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, had called an election on the issue of protectionism or free trade. The Tories were the party of tariffs and the Liberals and the young Labour Party the advocates of free trade.
The election was fascinating because, although the Tories secured most seats, the free traders were deemed to have won, as the opposition parties, taken together, had won a greater share of the vote. No party had secured a majority but an argument clearly had. The nation voted for open markets and it is an oddity of British history that the Labour Party’s first term in office is owed to its preference for free trade.
The parallel with 2015 is not exact but is clear enough. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats should fight 2015 on the same intellectual ticket. This does not mean the same manifesto. There will be plenty of scope for rows about mansion taxes and Europe. It does, however, mean that there is profit for the coalition in casting the 2015 general election as one that pits the prudent against the profligate; the deficit realists versus the deficit deniers. No majority is available for any one party, but there may well be a majority available for that argument.
When the doors are closed and the blinds drawn in the Treasury, the Chancellor, George Osborne, for the Conservatives and the Chief Secretary, Danny Alexander, for the Liberal Democrats are talking in these terms. The spending review now being negotiated will make binding decisions that endure beyond the next election. This is not at all the political constraint that it appears. On the contrary, it is the first draft of the intellectual alliance for 2015. The best hope for both parties lies not in throwing off the chains of coalition but in learning to love them.
In the Treasury talks it is Mr Osborne, not Mr Alexander, who is the supplicant. There is no low-tax nirvana and no Tory prince over the water who can conjure outright victory. The only way to win is to turn 2015 into a referendum on risk. With cautious parties on one side and improvident Labour on the other, defeat can be avoided. It’s not an inspiring message but these are not inspiring times.
