Comment: Predictions of the coalition’s early demise are a fantasy
HMS Lib Dem is springing leaks and listing badly, but commentators should know better than to predict the annihilation of a political party five years out from a general election.
It seems the fashion in Westminster right now when concerning the Liberal Democrats to herald – Nostradamus-style – the inevitable demise of Britain’s third party. Viewing the remarkable transformation of Nick Clegg from new politics demigod to a cinder burnt in effigy in Parliament Square in the space of just six months certainly tempts one into agreeing.
It emerged this week that Colin Firth – Mr Darcy himself – was abandoning his brief flirtation as a supporter of the party. If as glossy a rat as this is leaving the sinking ship, then HMS Lib Dem is in dire straits indeed.
If the reputation and – perhaps more importantly – the poll ratings of the party continue to slide as they are doing in the wake of the tuition fees saga, then it doesn’t really matter whether they secure the Alternative Vote next May or not. A rating of eight per cent (as YouGov recently showed – the lowest the pollster has ever given the party) may well see a return to the days when the entire Liberal parliamentary party could convene in the back of a cab.
No electoral system on Earth would be able to save the Lib Dems if there were a general election tomorrow.
The only problem (or reprieve, if you are a Lib Dem – there must be some of you still out there), is that there isn’t a general election tomorrow. In fact, it’s scheduled for May 2015.
Ed Miliband had some sport with Mr Clegg at prime minister’s questions recently, joking of the manifold Lib Dem policy contortions: “A week is certainly a long time in politics.”
What the Labour leader is quite aware of, given his current propensity to lounge amiably mouthing pieties and platitudes while his party undergoes a languid policy review process, is that if a week is a long time in politics, then about two-hundred and twenty five of them (which, according to my highly questionable maths, is the length of time until we’re next due to cast our ballots) is a damn eternity.
You can always spot a fool, because he is the person who will tell you he is able to predict with certainty the result of an election four and a half years in advance.
Received wisdom says the coalition won’t last that long – that the tensions brought so vividly to the surface last week will boil over in an orgy of inter- and intra-party bloodletting as soon as next May. I’m not so sure.
What it is rather easier to predict is the likely outcome of those local elections mere months away, and it will be quite a mauling for Mr Clegg and company.
Labour will continue its recovery from the abominable result it had in 2009 without really trying, while the Lib Dems will almost certainly lose swathes of councillors.
There is no conceivable circumstance under which, as the impact of the spending review just begins to bite, the Liberal Democrats can recover for those elections (and important ballots in Scotland and Wales) in time.
Perhaps I am guilty of the same sin as the Nostradamites, but if someone can come up with a decent explanation as to how such a thing is possible, then good luck to them.
Prominent commentators are using this prediction to declaim, grandly, that a split will then inevitably occur as soon as next year.
At a recent panel discussion I attended, the columnist Steve Richards predicted with some justification that Lib Dem poll ratings could hit mid single figures next year. He then argued that once that happens, in his words, “something will have to give” in the party and we may see a split down the middle, with each half subsumed into the two larger parties or relegated to insignificant rumps in a repeat of the Liberal collapse in the 1920s.
In slightly less moderate language, Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer wrote today:
“We are only at the beginning of the end for the coalition. There will be other horrible measures to vote on, and each time the fractiousness and rancour will increase. Mr Clegg will have to keep on betraying his “principles”, as managerialists do. And then one morning – Friday, May 6, 2011, to be precise – the Lib Dems will wake up to find they have been obliterated in English local elections, savaged in Scottish and Welsh assembly elections, and have lost a referendum on the alternative vote as well.
“At which point, the calculation becomes this: “Do we have more chance of holding our seats if we get out now, or would it help if we stayed in longer, and betrayed our voters a bit more?” The answer is already clear, even to some of Mr Clegg’s bovine MPs.”
But politics has a habit of confounding expectations, often simply to prove the wiseacres and would-be Mystic Megs wrong. There are two big reasons why I believe the coalition will endure beyond next year.
The first is necessity. David Cameron and his colleagues have been quite happy to allow the Liberal Democrats to squirm fitfully and tie themselves in knots over tuition fees up until now. That issue has considerable legs, and will dominate the headlines for quite some time yet. It may even have tainted the Lib Dem brand irrevocably.
But political attention will, in its fickle way, flit to other areas of the gargantuan story that is the spending review – and a policy of wheeling out Sarah Teather or Lynne Featherstone to defend what will essentially be largely Conservative measures will no longer suffice.
Although it may be Mr Clegg being burnt in effigy now, it won’t be too long before the Conservatives begin to feel their honeymoon period, which the party has wrapped around itself like a warm blanket, slipping away from them – and quickly.
More importantly, as last week’s close vote on fees revealed in stark relief, the prime minister cannot afford to see his junior coalition partner sink to the depths beyond hope of recall.
The Conservatives cannot hope to win a general election campaign with an overall majority while the deficit reduction plan is still hurting families.
During the next three years, the coalition will cease to be a marriage of convenience and become a battle for survival. Mr Cameron will need to take the Lib Dems with him.
Mr Miliband is, of course, mistaken if he believes that he can waft into No 10 with a comfortable majority through the medium of nay-saying alone. But the coalition will have to endure a storm of unpopularity which has the potential to make the student protest movement look like an entreé to the main course to come over the next few years.
Both parties will suffer, but the Lib Dems are starting off from by far the worse position.
All well and good, but what of the left of the Liberal Democrats – Mr Heffer’s ‘bovine’ MPs? Surely once the Lib Dems’ poll ratings sink to within the margin of error of zero, something will indeed “have to give”?
It won’t happen. I just can’t see Simon Hughes charging off into the sunset of oblivion next June with the likes of Tim Farron in tow to form a progressive democrat party/social progressivist brigade/people’s front of Judea. They are not entirely stupid.
They know that to split from the coalition in the near future would mean absolute annihilation at the polls. They are tied to the mast just as much as Nick Clegg.
Their only hope, and it is a slim one at that, is to cling on until 2015. An election in 2013 or 2014 will probably still see them demolished.
The Nostradamuses may still be correct, but should HMS Lib Dem weather the deep eddies of unpopularity into which they are plummeting, as the Conservatives have a vested interest in them doing – then no commentator, however eminent, will be able to predict what happens next.
The views expressed in politics.co.uk’s comment pages are not necessarily those of the website or its owners.
