The Conservative Liberal Coalition in the UK. Or… doesn’t this sound very familiar?

Events in Ireland have tended to dominate posts on this site for quite a while now. There was a time when issues relating to the US, or Serbia, or indeed the UK were given much greater prominence. But as a chunk of chaos dropped onto our own island writing about more abstract, if only be dint of distance, – albeit often interesting – matters abroad has seemed almost an indulgence when so much that is utterly serious is taking place here and all around us.

Still, reading Prospect and the New Statesman recently I was struck by a few points which might have some relevance to this polity.

And while we’re talking about Prospect, they’ve moved on from New Labour and how. David Goodhart in August had an editorial which shows how far the pendulum has swung. He’s laying out the ground upon which Anatole Kaletsky’s piece [dealt with here on the CLR previously] engaged with with contemporary capitalism and its next phase and indeed some of the tropes being discussed by the Coalition.

Moreover, with public finances looking awful for decades to come, the state simply cannot afford to provide these things in the way it used to. In countries like Britain, where the state dominates such services, it raises the question of how private and public funding can be mixed more equally without further entrenching inequality and class division. After 30 years of growing inequality, there is a widespread assumption, even on parts of the centre-right, that cutting and re-ordering the state should not be done at the expense of the least well off. That probably requires a big increase in means-tested payments for public services from those that can afford to pay more for them. But that, in turn, may drive the affluent into the arms of low-tax, anti-welfare state politicians.

Indeed. Which Goodhart further contextualises as follows:

Kaletsky has not always made the right calls through the recent crisis in his newspaper columns, but he is one of Britain’s most consistently stimulating political and economic analysts, so his new book (from which our essay is taken) could be a summer-reading antidote to all of those ideas-free new Labour memoirs.

Except surely the idea of means-testing is the antithesis of the welfare state, is in an essential sense, anti-welfare state in and of itself?

In November Goodhart was even more cautious as regards the Coalition – for which read cautiously positive.

He wrote while discussing how the two governing parties had ‘torn up major pledges within weeks of making them in an election campaign’ and continued:

The argument that this has been made necessary by a more threatening economic situation than expected… is obviously nonsense…

And argued that this was a byproduct of coalition government, ‘decisions… based on intra-coalition bargaining rather than on commitments made to the electorate by a victorious party’.

Well that’s okay then. Actually he seemed to think it is.

…one of the outcomes of coalition politics may be a superior content of political decision making (more rational, less tribal) at the expense of its democratic form. The combination of coalition politics and fiscal retrenchment is certainly forging some innovative policy thinking that’s hard to locate on the old left-right spectrum: liberalism on prisons; scaling back the middle-class welfare state; reform of university funding..

This is a fascinating thesis. Fascinating for its inability to see that none of these are left of centre policies as such (bar, very tentatively the issue of prisons) as we traditionally understand that term, policies. And in that sense there’s absolutely nothing about them that is ‘hard to locate’ on the supposedly antiquated left-right spectrum. They’re very clearly right of centre policies with a dash of liberalism.

This is innovation? Only if one is looking back a half century or more. Moreover they are antithetical in their impacts to the ends Goodhart seems to be promoting. By placing funding on means-testing rather than general taxation they profoundly change the nature of the welfare state.

Prospect, as a paid up member of the centre of British politics, has been prey to the winds that cut across that ground. But this is something new, to me at least. Which makes it even more interesting as a read in terms of indicating how certain sections of the commentariat are attempting to come to terms with the new government.

As a useful contrast Mehdi Hasan’s The Politics Column in the New Statesman is instructive. Rather than pointing to any great sea change in the approach of the Conservative Liberal coalition in terms of what they offer, he writes: ‘Coalition? This is a Tory Government’.

Those of us who write about politics have been struggling with our terminology since Britain’s first coalition government in 65 years was formed in May. Is it a Con-Lib coalition, a Lib-Con coalition or, in the words of the Daily Mirror, a Con-Dem coalition? As the dust settles on a tumultuous political year and the coalition prepares to enter its ninth month in office, I propose a rather simple solution. Call it a Conservative government – for that is what it has proved to be.

And he continues:

The recent debacle over higher education funding, in which only eight Lib Dem backbenchers voted with the coalition to increase tuition fees, is just the latest evidence suggesting that the party of Prime Minister – or should that be “President”? – David Cameron is calling the shots in this government.

Consider the personnel. Of the 29 coalition ministers who attend cabinet, five are Liberal Democrats. That might initially have seemed like a fair and proportionate allocation of jobs, given that more than five times as many Conservative MPs (307) were elected to the Commons as Liberal Democrats (57). But the distribution of portfolios and responsibilities inside the cabinet suggests that the Lib Dems secured ministerial salaries and chauffeurs at the expense of influence over key policy areas.
The three great offices of state – HM Treasury, the Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – are held by Conservatives. So, too, is the Ministry of Defence.

For all the abstraction of the analysis in Prospect where overarching edifices entailing ‘superior decision making’, ‘innovative’ leading to a ‘new politics’ are constructed out of in truth very little in order to explain even less, the basic power relationships demonstrate the reality of what is taking place. A Conservative government in almost all formal aspects, leavened only cosmetically by a sprinkling of Liberal Democrats whose offices are so effectively marginal as to render any great thesis heralding a new dawn in British politics untenable.

But, doesn’t this all sound very familiar? Doesn’t this have echoes of Summer 2007 when the Green Party entered government in Dublin and had two Ministers appointed?

Then too there was a certain sense of ‘change’ simply in the unlikely conjunction of FF and GP (except there was still, sort of, PD to throw into the equation). And change was in and of itself almost a justification or validation for much else.

But underlying that… well. Their departments, although important to the GP, were very clearly not ‘great offices of state’. And though the GP wisely attempted to dampen expectations, to some degree unlike the Liberal Democrats, and manage the process by tending to say areas beyond those two Departments were not their concern, events rapidly overtook them pushing economic matters which they had literally no control of, but every responsibility for – given collective Cabinet responsibility – to the fore.

Moreover when that happened after an initial reluctance to engage, they eventually settled on the ‘willing to take tough decisions’ line which they’ve used since. The Liberal Democrats were much earlier adopters of that approach in their so far short time in government. But if they look at the plight of the GP they might note that rather than that strengthening their vote or their reputation it acted like a lightening rod bringing down the anger of the electorate upon them as the crisis deepened.

To which of course there is the response that the crisis in UK terms has passed. Well, yes in some respects, in that the financial situation is more positive than it was, but no in the sense that the cuts which the Con-Lib coalition have agreed to have only just begun to be implemented and whose effects will rain down on the heads of the British voter for quite some time to come.

When that happens both parties will be hammered, but arguably the Liberal Democrats to a greater extent because this simply isn’t the natural terrain of their own voters. But that too is in many respects similar to the GP.

And Hasan makes another point which can be seen through the prism of our own polity.

Where were Nick Clegg’s red or, for that matter, yellow lines? To abandon a pledge to scrap tuition fees is one thing; to vote for a trebling of those fees is quite another. Lib Dem ministers claim to have won concessions from their Conservative coalition partners but, on closer inspection, these tend to be exaggerated.
Was swapping one tax cut (inheritance tax) for another (raising the threshold to £10,000) the Tory equivalent of the Lib Dems’ dropping of their historic support for PR or their iconic opposition to student fees? It is often forgotten that the Tories backed the idea of a pupil premium in their manifesto.
And the coalition’s liberal approach to law and order has come from the Conservative Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, and the Tory prisons minister Crispin Blunt rather than Lib Dems.

That last is a good riposte to Goodhart’s piece, all by itself. But the issue of what were the yellow lines is central to discussions about coalition formation whether in the UK or elsewhere. Because participation, were parties to engage in at all, in coalition should have been as much about what wasn’t acceptable as what was. And what were, or are, issues that would see a party leave government?

And ironically in Britain the situation isn’t quite the same as it is here. What did for the Green Party was not so much that it entered Government, though that was no great surprise to some, but it remained in Government – to the open dismay of many who would have wished it well. In Britain the issue is rather that the Liberal Democrats went in for what seems to be so little. Their eventual departure, and probable appalling election results are almost subsidiary issues.

And all this points up the essential hollowness of the machinations directly after the UK Election and the slightly disbelievingly commentary subsequently… ‘A Con-Lib coalition? How strange, how unusual, what a change!’. Something echoed in Goodhart’s piece in Prospect.

This a change? No change at all.