Having thought about the matter long and hard, I have reached the somewhat distressing conclusion that if we are serious about halting this Government’s bid to destroy the welfare state, then our best course of action is to go out on the street and hug a Liberal Democrat. I realise that this is not an attractive proposition to most Labour supporters, who see the Lib Dems as mainly responsible for landing this country with its worst government since the 1930s. But I do not see any other way of achieving our aim of bringing the coalition down, other than by sucking up to the blighters.
Of course, it is true that the opinion polls suggest Labour has a good prospect of winning the next general election by a handsome majority, with the Lib Dems facing something close to a wipe-out. But by the time that election comes around, the odds are that we will have lost the National Health Service as a taxpayer-funded, free-at-the-point-of-use service, an entire generation of young people will have seen their career prospects blighted, our local authorities will have been reduced to overseeing street cleaning and little else, and the rich bankers will be richer and more arrogant than ever.
So our main hope must be to halt the Government in its tracks and, if possible, bring it down entirely before it can complete its slash-and-burn programme. There are those on the far left who believe that this can be achieved by a programme of strikes and other militant action, citing the impact of the violent disorders provoked by the poll tax as an example of successful direct action. But for a start, I don’t believe it was the riots that killed the poll tax; it was Tory MPs realising they were going to lose their seats if they didn’t dump it.
However, my main case against this activist course is that it is highly unlikely that even RMT leader Bob Crow and his allies will be able to generate direct action on a scale large enough to actually bring down the Government – a quasi-revolutionary aim. Even Karl Marx was forced to accept, more or less ruefully, that the British proletariat were not natural revolutionaries – his hopes lay with the German workers. While I support the idea of demonstrations, I share Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls’ fear that a
half-cocked campaign of strikes against the coalition is simply going to alienate the voters we are going to need when the election finally arrives.
So the key question remains: who or what could actually bring down the Government? And the answer is glaringly obvious: the Lib Dems. It was they who made the coalition possible, and it is they who ensure that it continues to work from day to day. If they pull out, the whole edifice will collapse. If they stay on, it will survive. Hence my “hug a Lib Dem” proposal. However distasteful the idea may be, Labour has got to suck up to them to have half a chance of saving the legacy of the 1945 Labour government. If we have to wait until 2015, most of that legacy will have gone, and it will be close to impossible for any incoming Labour government to get it back.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean that we have to be totally undiscriminating in which Lib Dems we choose to hug. If, for instance, you step out in the street and the first Lib Dem you see is Nick Clegg, I reckon it would be entirely appropriate to kick his backside rather than give him a cuddle. But that is not just because he deserves a kicking; quite a lot of his colleagues deserve one almost as much, not least the discredited Vince Cable. It is also because the Lib Dems themselves seem to have rumbled him at last. They can now see that he isn’t really a Lib Dem at all – and not even a Tory either. The true Nick Clegg is actually a far-out, Manchester School liberal free marketeer emerging straight from the 19th century.
Judging by last weekend’s Lib Dem assembly, quite a lot of Clegg’s rank-and-file members would gladly join in any backside kicking. His leader’s speech was frankly outrageous. At one point, he actually had the effrontery to claim authorship of the NHS for the Liberal Party – although he failed to offer any explanation why, if that was the case, he is actively helping the Tories to take it to bits.
Happily, the assembly delegates paid no attention whatsoever to this nonsense, and voted overwhelmingly against the coalition’s plans for the NHS. It is not a very long step from this act of defiance to actively urging their representatives inside the coalition to pull out, bringing the government face to face with a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons. So we’ve got to be nice to them.
But our best hope of success will be a simple piece of political reality, which is that the most powerful influence on members of parliament is not the survival of governments, or even the survival of ministerial jobs, but their own survival in their constituencies. Nothing so concentrates an MP’s mind as the prospect that they will lose their seat. It is the driving force that makes parliamentary democracy work.
