With the parliamentary session ended, we should be spared sight of the precocious Nick Clegg, the pious Vince Cable and Danny Alexander squeezed in on the Government benches in the House of Commons like the patsies they are – at least for a few months.
All three are wounded. Clegg blundered through his first stand-in for David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions when he challenged Jack Straw to justify his role in “the most disastrous decision of all, which is the illegal invasion of Iraq”. The Liberal Democrat leader may have been spot-on, but it seemed he had forgotten which side of the House he was on. Clegg is speaking on behalf of and alongside those who refuse to accept that the war was illegal.
The coalition has become a cartoonist’s dream. A brilliant Martin Rowson cartoon in The Guardian depicted Cameron as Little Lord Fauntleroy and Clegg as Pinocchio sitting on the head of a pin and blowing bubbles. The bubbles – the graduate tax and the alternative vote, for instance – are beginning to burst. And that could also signal something bigger, as the right of the Conservative Party breaks cover to give increasing voice to its disquiet.
Cameron is a smart politician who has seen the benefits of his partnership with Clegg. But he is a liberal Conservative and his backbenchers are to the right of him. Things that social democrats and socialists should support – the proposed prison reform, for example – are anathema to the rows of Tory MPs sitting behind their leader.
Cameron has been warned that, after the summer break, trouble will be in the air. Has David Davis, with his dismissive comments about Cameron’s “Big Society” being mere “Blairite dressing” to use as smokescreen while the state is being cut back, shown his hand too early?
Meanwhile, who among the Lib Dems will become the party’s champion against the brutal cuts in the welfare state? There is a possible rebellion brewing over Michael Gove’s plans for academy schools.
The Lib Dems ought to be able to see the writing on the wall. A recent YouGov poll had them down to just 13 per cent. Perhaps, once the phoney war is over and the attacks on the living standards of millions of workers and all those who rely on the public services start to cause real havoc, it may all become too much for Vince Cable. He has had to do some spectacular political somersaults to justify his U-turns, particularly on public spending cuts. During the general election campaign, he argued forcefully that immediate cuts would derail the fragile recovery. Now, after a few words from the Governor of the Bank of England, he accepts that “early action isabsolutely necessary”. History suggests that his initial analysis of the economic situation may turn out to be the correct one.
As TUC general secretary Brendan Barber put it: “With depressed export markets, unemployment remaining stubbornly high, the worst conclusion that could be drawn is that recovery has now been secured. Deficit fetishism still risks a return to a flat-line economy.”
The problem for Labour is that it has been hamstrung by Alistair Darling’s pledge to cut the deficit in half within four years if the party was re-elected and to implement more savage cuts that those visited on the country by Margaret Thatcher. It is now widely recognised that Labour being in awe of the City London while neglecting manufacturing in this country led to an unbalanced economy. And it is fanciful now to think that the private sector can fill the void once the public sector is decimated.
The last Labour Government had its achievements, not least keeping Britain out of the single European currency. As far its failings are concerned, revisionism is already underway. Peter Mandelson is peddling his memoirs. None should underestimate his role as the third man in the creation of New Labour, but no one should imagine that Labour only lost its way because of the perpetual squabbling between the occupants of Number 10 and Number 11 Downing Street.
Commentators now bewail the fact that when they first wrote about the stories of Labour feuds, they were rubbished by the very man who has now produced a best-seller with its agonising details of the “mad, bad and dangerous” Gordon Brown. This dysfunctionality, we are now told, was of the utmost importance because it paralysed Government decision-making. If only. We could have done with some of that paralysis before the invasion of Iraq.
As each week passes, more of the mendacity perpetrated to prepare us for war is revealed. Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, told the Chilcot inquiry that intelligence on the threat posed by Iraq was not substantial enough to justify the action that was subsequently taken. For good measure, she added what must of us know even though it is still denied by Tony Blair: that the invasion of Iraq “substantially” increased the terrorist threat within this country. It was a devastating critique. And it is the Iraq catastrophe, not fights between the people at the top, which ultimately led to Labour’s defeat.
