The Tory-led coalition is using the national deficit as an excuse to pursue ideological policies, centred on a small market-driven state. In this, they have the active connivance of their Liberal Democrat partners. Talk of compromises having to be made within a coalition, hence the ditching of the promise on university tuition fees, is a smokescreen. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not read David Laws’ inside account of the negotiations leading up to the coalition agreement – a text that Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and Danny Alexander hold up as the defining document underpinning this Government.
It is not just cover that authors of the neo-liberal Orange Book have provided for David Cameron and George Osborne. They are willing participants. In his book, Laws explains how he was keen to work with Osborne – someone he “liked, admired and had always got on with”. But his reasons were political as well as personal.
“We needed a Liberal Democrat in the Treasury. I felt particularly strongly that the coalition would never work if the Treasury was wholly staffed by Conservative ministers. This was for two distinct reasons. First, it was clear that there was a good deal of unpopular work to be done in tackling the deficit and I did not believe that we would have a stable coalition if all the tough decisions were being made by a Conservative-controlled Treasury without any Lib Dem intput. Second, I am very much a believer in the power of the Treasury and its importance. It therefore seemed vital that we had a Liberal Democrat in the Treasury to safeguard our interests”.
The essential thing to remember in the current furore over tuition fees and an education system which will be at the mercy of the market is that the Lib Dem leadership did not regard the pledge on fees as one of those “interests”. Not until more than halfway through the book does higher education feature in Laws’ account. Negotiations were going well. The body language of the Labour team had, it seems, been an important reason why members of the Lib Dem negotiating team felt they were better off talking to their opposite numbers from the Tories.
On page 185 of his tome, Laws writes that, after a brief debate between himself and Oliver Letwin on the “mechanics of schools reform and market mechanisms which left other members of the team impatient for us to conclude, we secured a good agreement on the pupil premium”.
He goes on: “Higher education was clearly going to be a much more difficult issue. David Cameron and Nick Clegg had already spoken about this particular issue themselves. But we agreed a form of words which set out principles rather than policies and which left the key decisions to the Browne Report, which Labour and the Conservatives had established. We also made provision for Lib Dem MPs to abstain if the Browne Report came up with proposals that the Lib Dems could not accept.”
Here we have to recognise just how little room for manoeuvre the Labour Party had been left by the strictures of Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson before the general election campaign.
Nevertheless, the protestations of Lib Dem ministers that they have had to compromise because they did not win the election are fallacious. “In truth”, writes Laws, “I felt our own policy on abolishing tuition fees was simply not the right priority in the current economic environment and I had personally pressed hard for changing the policy before the election – without success.”
We know from a leaked email to The Guardian that he wasn’t alone in wanting to dump the policy. Yet still the party leadership campaigned on it in university seats up and down the country. This is why there is now so much anger and why so many people feel betrayed.
It’s not that the Lib Dems compromised during negotiations for a coalition agreement. It was that they didn’t even attempt to make it part of that agreement. Of course, the Lib Dems didn’t win the general election – they actually lost seats. But they became winners when Clegg gained high office and some of his colleagues got to join him around the Cabinet table.
Nor did the Conservatives win enough seats to claim a mandate for the devastating cuts they are implementing at breakneck speed. But both parties have ditched policies their leadership went along with for reasons of low political cunning.
Yet on the issue that beats in the heart of all Lib Dems, their cunning deserted them. They settled for a referendum on the alternative vote as the only alternative to the first-past-the post system – something Clegg once described as a squalid compromise.
What must Labour do? We can make common cause with the thousands of decent, progressive Lib Dems who hate where Clegg’s gang have taken their party and despise what has happened with regard to tuition fees and the reprehensible axing of the Education Maintenance Allowance. Such people despair at the damage all this has undoubtedly done to their party’s reputation and future electoral chances.
Clegg reckons the Lib Dems have “come through the fire” and are now seen as a “party of government”. They are hoping that the row over tuition fees will be forgotten as the economy recovers. As the cuts really begin to bite, we must make sure that hope is a forlorn one.
