The received wisdom of the past fortnight is that Labour is better off out of it. “Let the Tories and the Liberal Democrats cock it up”, the theory goes. The marriage of David Cameron’s desperation and Nick Clegg’s ambition will never last. “Give it two years and, when it collapses, people will have nowhere else to turn. We’ll be back.”
But the decision not to push harder for a coalition of “everyone against the Tories’” may turn out to be a historic mistake for Labour.
The argument put forward by party heavyweights such as David Blunkett and John Reid is that Labour lost the general election, but that the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition is bound to end in disaster and we will automatically pick up the spoils when political fortunes change. However, to follow this train of thought isto make a lot of assumptions.
The first is that this hung Parliament is an aberration rather than the start of a trend. But what if messy election results become the norm in Britain? What if the “new politics” of no party winning an overall majority of seats is a permanent change? A record number of voters at the 2010 election opted for none of the three main parties and that trend looks set to continue as political loyalties splinter.
It is also a big assumption that the hard choices of reducing the budget deficit will make the coalition unpopular enough to fall before its five-year term is up. The Tory media will make sure Labour gets the blame for the cuts the new Government is “ forced” to make. Clearly, blaming the previous administration won’t wash forever, but they will get away with it for a while.
If the current growth forecasts are accurate (and the European Commission has endorsed them) and the banks return to profitability (which Lloyds TSB already has), then there may be more money to plug the deficit more quickly than we have anticipated. If warnings about savage Tory cuts and a double-dip recession are wide of the mark (and let’s hope for the sake of the country that these twin horrors do not materialise), there is a risk this will be taken as a success for the Tory-Lib Dem Government.
The coalition can also cause political mischief for Labour ahead of the next election. The Tories’ plan to reduce the number of parliamentary constituencies by 10 per cent and equalise their size is designed to shrink Labour’s political base and reduce the number of strong Labour constituencies. Similarly, any moves to reform party funding will see the Tories and Lib Dems ranged against us with plans to limit the role of the trade unions.
The Tories realise that their situation is precarious. There is no greater legitimacy in Cameron’s minority Government than a Labour-led coalition of the other parties which, combined, clearly represents a majority of voters in the country. That is why the new Prime Minister has given so much ground to the Lib Dems. He purchased their allegiance, buying them off with ministerial seats, knowing he was probably finished if he failed to make it across the threshold of Number 10.
Meanwhile, the Lib Dems insist that Labour was not serious about doing a deal and the tone of the party’s negotiating team was “belligerent”. But the Lib Dems did not display any integrity throughout the process. Instead of first seeking a principled agreement based on philosophical common ground with Labour and the other smaller parties, they let their pro-Tory wing seize the day. It seems that a ministerial car is enough to buy Nick Clegg’s conscience.
But the greater danger may well be for Labour. If events don’t unfold quite as we expect they will, we may well look back in a few years and rue the day we didn’t try harder to keep the Tories out while we had the chance. Labour had an opportunity to build a more natural coalition with other progressive parties in the House of Commons that, with the exception of the Democratic Unionist Party, are all basically social democrats. And we didn’t take it. That may have been the smart move for the party in the long term, but you don’t get silver medals in politics.
As the anomalies at the heart of the coalition deal grow every day, those seasoned campaigners David Blunkett and John Reid may be proved right. I sincerely hope they are. But what if they’ve got it wrong?
