Wag the Dog
I agree with the assessment of Philip Collins in this opinion piece from The Times because the political reality at Westminster suggests that the Conservative/Labour stranglehold on power has been broken and that Coalition Governments are more, not less, likely in future.
The problem for the Lib Dems is that they faced a tough choice after the 2010 general - stick to their manifesto pledges (which all parties renege on in government of course) and remain in opposition, or agree to enter a coalition with their Conservatives and present the latter decision as being in the national interest.
In 2010 the Lib Dems chose to enter government which was not very surprisingly after spending so many years on the opposition benches.
But Westminster politics is not used to the compromises required in coalition government, even though such power sharing arrangements exist across Europe and in local council chambers up and down the UK.
So if you ask me, Philip Collins is right to tell the Lib Dem activists to stop sobbing, shut up and calm down - because in a coalition the tail should never be allowed to wag the dog.
The crushed Lib Dems have a bright future
By Philip Collins - The Times
The protest vote has gone, but Nick Clegg’s party can still hold the balance of power. Ditching him would be suicidal
There is an important new force in four-party British politics and its name is the Liberal Democrats. Just as long as its members can avoid the pleasure of panic, they stand on the verge of a prize that has eluded all their predecessors since Lloyd George — to be considered a natural party of government.
The preposterous, incompetent rebellion of Lord Oakeshott, commissioning polls to teach us that Nick Clegg isn’t popular, and the incredible denial by Vince Cable that he knew anything about it, are the reaction of those who either cannot fathom the role in which politics has cast them or do not care to play it.
The local and European elections were indeed the predicted disaster for the Lib Dems, measured in the usual way of votes won and seats lost. Down in the weeds it looks like a swamp, but last week’s elections produced plenty of losers but no winners. Lib Dems should take comfort from the fact that the two main rivals for power both struggled to get above 30 per cent. Neither David Cameron nor Ed Miliband can leap to victory from here.
That means there is a viable, indeed a necessary, future for the Lib Dems as a counterweight in office to the larger parties to its left and right, neither of whom, in a divided nation, can command majority opinion. As a smaller, avowedly liberal party, the Lib Dems can offer something no other party can, with the prospect of national power. The most senior Lib Dem to grasp this is Nick Clegg and it is a truth that may be hard for the Lib Dems to digest. They are not, as Lord Oakeshott and some hot-head pundits seem to think, at a fork in the road. They are halfway down the only path through the wood.
It is not primarily a verdict on its leader that explains why the Lib Dems are gaining only single-figure support in the opinion polls. Their decline is structural and unavoidable and the only one of Mr Clegg’s decisions that matters is his first and best — to take his party into the coalition in 2010. From that sun-drenched moment in the rose garden the rest follows.
In that instant the Lib Dems gave up the mantle of the party of protest, a crown that they always wore in local and European elections. The easy votes of the “none-of-the-above” party were lost for ever. It must be worth 5 percentage points. At the same time a similar fraction of those who voted Lib Dem because they were the alternative left-wing party broke away because they could not stand fraternising with Tories. On the day of the 2010 election the Lib Dems polled 23 per cent. Five days later they had settled for 13 per cent, which, give or take, is where they will end up in 2015.
All the tribulations and disputed events, including reneging on the tuition fees promise, are metaphors for this structural decline rather than its cause. Besides, if there was one person in the Lib Dems who ought not to be blamed for the tuition fees fiasco it is Mr Clegg. Time and again he tried to get his party to see sense and every time they frivolously defied him. Now the very people who ensured that the Lib Dems entered office with an irredeemable promise — the “watery Labour men”, as Keynes once put it — are blaming Mr Clegg for their own fiasco and trying to bodge their own man, Dr Cable, into the top job. In a final dreary irony, Dr Cable is the very apostate who took tuition fees through parliament.
This is the essential backdrop to those fits of agonies that, in dark parts of the web, seize Lib Dems. With less than a year to go what, they ask forlornly, can Mr Clegg do to restore their fortunes? To which the answer is, of course, that he can do nothing at all and it is better to stop asking such dumb questions. Nobody can restore the Lib Dems if recovery means the heights of 2010. On the basis of the local election results, though, the Lib Dems will win between 35 and 40 seats in next year’s general election. That could well put them back in coalition talks.
It would be greedy for a small party to ask for more than to provide the deputy prime minister, but the case for Mr Clegg is not just that he can cling to office. It is that removing him would be an act of self-immolation. It would be a disastrous strategic choice made in the dubious hope of tactical gain.
No putative leader can rapidly restore the protest vote. It will take years of impotence to do that, though Dr Cable may eventually be up to that task. The only people who might come back in 2015 are those who deserted the Lib Dems for the Labour party and here is the primrose path down which Matthew Oakeshott beckons his gullible party.
The clue is contained in Lord Oakeshott’s resignation letter. Referring to his part in the formation of the SDP in 1981, he writes “we then, like most Liberal Democrats now, wanted a radical progressive party, not a ‘split the difference’ centre party”. Oakeshott is one of those Jenkinsites who has been in three parties and a misery-guts troublemaker in every one.
Their set text is The Progressive Dilemma, in which David Marquand laments the split in the British left between the Labour and the Liberal forces. The likes of Lord Oakeshott cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that, by going into coalition with the Tories, Mr Clegg accidentally reunited the left and they all find themselves on the wrong side of history. It is easily fixed. The social democratic malcontents should rejoin Labour and Mr Clegg can then wave them not only goodbye but good riddance.
Instead the Oakeshott-Cable plan is for the Lib Dems to become an explicitly social democratic party of the left. That would, in effect, rule out a second term for the coalition. Dr Cable would be a supplicant to Mr Miliband and the Lib Dems would become a subsidiary of Labour. Any hope of a durable identity as a liberal party would be lost. Coalition has not annihilated the Lib Dems but moving left assuredly would.
It might not have been a conscious act but Mr Clegg’s original sin in the rose garden began the process of creating a new party. This, rather than the ephemeral nihilism of Nigel Farage, is the most intriguing experiment in politics. The wider party has avoided anarchy in the storm so far, but the mask is slipping.
So then, those 40 per cent of Lib Dem activists who said Mr Clegg should resign, it’s time to see what stuff you’re made of. There is a year to go before the fight for your lives. Time now to stop your sobbing. Time to shut up and calm down. Time to bed down and grow up.
The protest vote has gone, but Nick Clegg’s party can still hold the balance of power. Ditching him would be suicidal
There is an important new force in four-party British politics and its name is the Liberal Democrats. Just as long as its members can avoid the pleasure of panic, they stand on the verge of a prize that has eluded all their predecessors since Lloyd George — to be considered a natural party of government.
The preposterous, incompetent rebellion of Lord Oakeshott, commissioning polls to teach us that Nick Clegg isn’t popular, and the incredible denial by Vince Cable that he knew anything about it, are the reaction of those who either cannot fathom the role in which politics has cast them or do not care to play it.
The local and European elections were indeed the predicted disaster for the Lib Dems, measured in the usual way of votes won and seats lost. Down in the weeds it looks like a swamp, but last week’s elections produced plenty of losers but no winners. Lib Dems should take comfort from the fact that the two main rivals for power both struggled to get above 30 per cent. Neither David Cameron nor Ed Miliband can leap to victory from here.
That means there is a viable, indeed a necessary, future for the Lib Dems as a counterweight in office to the larger parties to its left and right, neither of whom, in a divided nation, can command majority opinion. As a smaller, avowedly liberal party, the Lib Dems can offer something no other party can, with the prospect of national power. The most senior Lib Dem to grasp this is Nick Clegg and it is a truth that may be hard for the Lib Dems to digest. They are not, as Lord Oakeshott and some hot-head pundits seem to think, at a fork in the road. They are halfway down the only path through the wood.
It is not primarily a verdict on its leader that explains why the Lib Dems are gaining only single-figure support in the opinion polls. Their decline is structural and unavoidable and the only one of Mr Clegg’s decisions that matters is his first and best — to take his party into the coalition in 2010. From that sun-drenched moment in the rose garden the rest follows.
In that instant the Lib Dems gave up the mantle of the party of protest, a crown that they always wore in local and European elections. The easy votes of the “none-of-the-above” party were lost for ever. It must be worth 5 percentage points. At the same time a similar fraction of those who voted Lib Dem because they were the alternative left-wing party broke away because they could not stand fraternising with Tories. On the day of the 2010 election the Lib Dems polled 23 per cent. Five days later they had settled for 13 per cent, which, give or take, is where they will end up in 2015.
All the tribulations and disputed events, including reneging on the tuition fees promise, are metaphors for this structural decline rather than its cause. Besides, if there was one person in the Lib Dems who ought not to be blamed for the tuition fees fiasco it is Mr Clegg. Time and again he tried to get his party to see sense and every time they frivolously defied him. Now the very people who ensured that the Lib Dems entered office with an irredeemable promise — the “watery Labour men”, as Keynes once put it — are blaming Mr Clegg for their own fiasco and trying to bodge their own man, Dr Cable, into the top job. In a final dreary irony, Dr Cable is the very apostate who took tuition fees through parliament.
This is the essential backdrop to those fits of agonies that, in dark parts of the web, seize Lib Dems. With less than a year to go what, they ask forlornly, can Mr Clegg do to restore their fortunes? To which the answer is, of course, that he can do nothing at all and it is better to stop asking such dumb questions. Nobody can restore the Lib Dems if recovery means the heights of 2010. On the basis of the local election results, though, the Lib Dems will win between 35 and 40 seats in next year’s general election. That could well put them back in coalition talks.
It would be greedy for a small party to ask for more than to provide the deputy prime minister, but the case for Mr Clegg is not just that he can cling to office. It is that removing him would be an act of self-immolation. It would be a disastrous strategic choice made in the dubious hope of tactical gain.
No putative leader can rapidly restore the protest vote. It will take years of impotence to do that, though Dr Cable may eventually be up to that task. The only people who might come back in 2015 are those who deserted the Lib Dems for the Labour party and here is the primrose path down which Matthew Oakeshott beckons his gullible party.
The clue is contained in Lord Oakeshott’s resignation letter. Referring to his part in the formation of the SDP in 1981, he writes “we then, like most Liberal Democrats now, wanted a radical progressive party, not a ‘split the difference’ centre party”. Oakeshott is one of those Jenkinsites who has been in three parties and a misery-guts troublemaker in every one.
Their set text is The Progressive Dilemma, in which David Marquand laments the split in the British left between the Labour and the Liberal forces. The likes of Lord Oakeshott cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that, by going into coalition with the Tories, Mr Clegg accidentally reunited the left and they all find themselves on the wrong side of history. It is easily fixed. The social democratic malcontents should rejoin Labour and Mr Clegg can then wave them not only goodbye but good riddance.
Instead the Oakeshott-Cable plan is for the Lib Dems to become an explicitly social democratic party of the left. That would, in effect, rule out a second term for the coalition. Dr Cable would be a supplicant to Mr Miliband and the Lib Dems would become a subsidiary of Labour. Any hope of a durable identity as a liberal party would be lost. Coalition has not annihilated the Lib Dems but moving left assuredly would.
It might not have been a conscious act but Mr Clegg’s original sin in the rose garden began the process of creating a new party. This, rather than the ephemeral nihilism of Nigel Farage, is the most intriguing experiment in politics. The wider party has avoided anarchy in the storm so far, but the mask is slipping.
So then, those 40 per cent of Lib Dem activists who said Mr Clegg should resign, it’s time to see what stuff you’re made of. There is a year to go before the fight for your lives. Time now to stop your sobbing. Time to shut up and calm down. Time to bed down and grow up.
