When Business Secretary Vince Cable told two undercover reporters from The Daily Telegraph that he was part of a “Maoist revolution”, he was being foolishly indiscreet but not wholly inaccurate. Although it is difficult to see David Cameron as Mao Tse-Tung and Nick Clegg as Chou En-Lai, the coalition Government over which they preside is practising high-speed fundamentalism. As both the Tory leader and his Liberal Democrat counterpart sought to appeal to the centre during the 2010 general election campaign, this has been an unexpected development in some respects.
Many commentators see the coalition as increasingly unstable, but its leadership is united by common dogmas. Those on the Government side of the House of Commons are divided, but not necessarily on Conservative-Liberal Dem lines. The parties are split internally, with the right wing of the Tory Party hostile to and distrustful of Cameron and his acolytes. The Thatcherites fear a formal electoral pact with the Lib Dems, which would leave them marginalised. David Davis’ disparaging reference to the “Brokeback coalition” was indicative of the frustration felt by those on the Conservative right who consider that traditional Tories are being sidelined. They think the current Tory leadership is more concerned with keeping the Lib Dems sweet than enacting proper Conservative policies.
Many Lib Dems are equally challenged by an alignment few of them expected before polling day last year. David Steel helped to keep James Callaghan’s Labour Government in office in the 1970s and – at least at national level – the Liberals have tended to favour the centre-left over the right. (Some Labour councillors who have dealt with the Lib Dems at local government level may have a different story to tell.)
Nevertheless, Tony Blair was attempting to woo Paddy Ashdown before Labour’s 1997 landslide victory. As late as 2002, an opinion poll conducted by YouGov found that Blair was regarded as slightly more right of centre than left of centre by a majority of respondents (36 per cent to 34 per cent). Meanwhile, then Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy was perceived as being more left of centre than right of centre (44 per cent to 10 per cent). Iain Duncan Smith, then the less than successful Tory leader, was seen as right of centre by 70 per cent of voters.
Up until the 2010 general election, many people continued to regard the Lib Dems as being to the left of Labour – or at least to the left of New Labour. The Guardian was among the progressively inclined that called for a Lib Dem vote at the election, perhaps misled by the pantomime of the leaders’ televised debates.
In reality, the Lib Dems had already been take over by the Orange Book faction – Nick Clegg and David Laws are prominent members of it – which advocates the politics of free-market fundamentalism and has marginalised the bloc created when Steel’s Liberals merged with the Social Democratic Party. The alliance that came together when Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rogers left the Labour Party in the 1980s has effectively ceased to exist.
We need a new analysis to explain the orange-blue coalition and its two shared dogmas. The first dogma is the belief in free-market fundamentalism. This is the logic of the “Big Society”. It means a small state and the destruction of the welfare settlement established by the 1945 Labour Government. The second unifying factor for the coalition’s leading lights is their belief in the ability of a small clique of mainly Oxbridge graduates to run English society better than anyone else and impose their philosophy on the rest of us.
The governing parties have ditched many manifesto promises and are doing things that were not mentioned in their manifestos. But Cameron and Clegg are contemptuous of Parliament. Initially, Cameron wanted to cut the numbers of the House of Commons by 50 MPs and Clegg by 150. Cameron’s is now the preferred option.
It is no accident that many of the senior coalition figures were educated at public school. Old Etonian Cameron has roots in the landed gentry – his uncle is Sir William Dugdale, a former chairman of Aston Villa Football Club. A previous Sir William Dugdale wrote a classic 17th century study of the antiquities of Warwickshire, but Cameron and Clegg have little interest in the past. Like Blair, who they seem to have taken as their role model, theirs is the politics of year zero – a radical attack on a society they regard as hopelessly collectivist.
They have embraced Blair’s drive for directly-elected mayors and academy schools. They advocate elected police commissioners. Their reforms will mean the end of the National Health Service as we know it and the destruction of local education authorities. These people have never done a proper job in their lives. Their arrogance has led them to the astonishing conclusion that Blair was too cautious in his first years in office. They were determined that their Government would not make the same mistake.
However, their arrogance is matched by their incompetence and they are failing to deliver, even on their own terms. As the Commons select committee on public administration has noted, the axing of quangos to cut costs has not been a conspicuous success. As Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin, the chair of the committee, put it: “The whole process was rushed and poorly handled and should have been thought through a lot more”. Vince Cable told The Daily Telegraph’s reporters much the same thing.
The orange-blue political alliance running the Government is an ideologically-blinkered elite whose members have little or no understanding of ordinary people and how they live. Vince Cable was right: these are latter-day Maoists bent on a dogmatic cultural revolution. This is a new political trick and it needs a new politics to counter it.
