Clegg won’t laugh when this ends in tears
BRITAIN’S political odd couple began their shotgun union in the Downing Street rose garden – but despite the smiles, the thorns were already clear to see around them.
The unlikely coming together of David Cameron’s Tories and Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems has utterly transformed the political topography of the country – and could yet spell the break-up of the UK.
It is now clear Clegg always preferred a tie-up with the man he publicly calls “Dave”, and was just playing the Labour Party along to try and screw a better deal out of the Conservatives.
But the hard right of the Conservative Party and soft left of the Lib Dems are very unlikely bedfellows and the Cameron/Clegg dream of a ushering in an era of “new politics” could well end in a nightmare.
While the Bank of England governor Mervyn King has rowed back on his reported pre-election comments that whoever formed the new government would be banished to the political wilderness for a generation because of the spending cuts they would be forced to impose to get Britain’s deficit under control – the economic struggle facing the new administration is mammoth and will smash into the open at the emergency budget in 50 days’ time.
The Lib Dems have swallowed hard and gone along with Tory plans for immediate extra cuts of €7bn, and like the Greens here, are likely to feel the whiplash sting of the backlash against such measures, however necessary they may appear.
More than half the British public believes the economic situation can be healed without cuts to frontline services, but that is fantastical – and the parties that shatter that illusion will pay the price in the opinion polls.
The Tories even have more in common with Labour on issues like Europe, immigration and Britain’s nuclear deterrent than they do with their new Lib Dem partners in power.
Clegg went out on a limb to cut a deal with the Tories, and did get strong concessions from them in a number of areas, but while the Lib Dem leadership may be more pro-Conservative, the bulk of its traditional voters are strongly anti-Tory.
Despite Labour offering more than the Tories on the Lib Dems’ pet project to bring in proportional representation to Britain, Clegg dismissed pleas for a centre-left “coalition of the heart” and plumped for Cameron instead – that decision may well come back to haunt him.
But would the alternative have worked? Nobody won the general election, but Gordon Brown certainly lost it. So his bid to snatch a sort of victory from the jaws of defeat with a Labour-led leftish coalition was certainly audacious.
Brown briefly regained the initiative in dramatic fashion Monday night when – in the manner of a political suicide bomber – he promised to stand down in a last-throw-of-the- dice bid to snatch the Lib Dems from the Tory clutches.
But that coupling would have fallen nine seats short of a Commons majority and so dependence on the SDLP and other nationalists – not to mention the anger of the Labour right at such a deal – would have given such a government in-built instability.
The Lib Dems chose the solidity of an 80-seat majority with the Tories instead – but that was against their grassroot instincts and could well see them hammered at the next election, especially if – as is likely – their five-year deal breaks apart long before 2015.
And not only is this a perilous moment for the Lib Dems, but it could also mean the end of the UK. It’s slipped under the political radar so far, but the minority Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) government in Edinburgh has already scheduled a referendum on virtual independence next year. The SNP always saw this as a two-stage up-hill struggle with a second vote on full separation in 2014, which would probably see Scottish voters saving the union.
But now all is changed utterly, those referendums set against a budget-slashing Tory-Lib Dem government in London that Scotland did not vote for, could well tip the balance to independence. It is highly likely that Scotland would have succeeded in breaking from the union during the socio-industrial brutalism of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s if the parliamentary mechanism to do so had existed.
With only one Tory MP in the whole of Scotland – and not many more Lib Dems – nationalists will portray the Westminster coalition as an alien power that has no legitimacy north of the border. Ironically, that would also prove very bad news for the Labour Party. A fifth of its MPs come from Scotland, so a broken union would threaten its hopes of ruling at Westminster ever again.
The Downing Street rose garden love-in between Cameron and Clegg at times took on the hue of a platonic civil partnership as they stood side-by- side with beaming smiles and unbridled optimism about their long years ahead together.
The only awkward moment came when Clegg performed a mock storming off when a journalist reminded Cameron what he had once replied to the question: “What’s your favourite joke?”
His answer had been: “Nick Clegg”.
That was then, this is now. But the odds are that Clegg won’t be laughing when all this ends in tears.
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