All the pieces have moved around to give a different picture than before. Here is David Cameron on the same platform as former Labour Cabinet minister John Reid, competing (but not keenly in Mr Cameron’s case) to be seen as the most right-wing. There is Ed Miliband sharing a platform with fallen star Vince Cable (but not Nick Clegg, deemed too toxic to be associated with any cause). And under the thin cover of campaigning as independent parties, the Tories and Liberal Democrats are out of the traps to tear at each other’s throats. There is Mr Cable again – surely by now goading the Prime Minister to dare to risk the implosion of the coalition by sacking him – publicly and justifiably attacking Mr
Cameron’s speech on the need for “not mass, but better immigration”. This speech was not so much a dog whistle as the local election campaign opened as a trumpet chorus to the right-wing working class and Tory vote which his party’s own right-wing are increasingly desperate to court against the threat of the far right. Over there is Paddy Ashdown, the rancid old former Lib Dem leader, venting his spleen against George Osborne’s “stinking” tactics on the alternative vote referendum. Enter Nick Clegg to condemn the “smear tactics” deployed by the No campaign, which is largely supported (and funded) by Tory interests, not least the Prime Minister himself, who warns of a “threat to democracy”. A threat to democracy posed by his own Deputy Prime Minister? Surely this is little short of political treason? How – why – should such an alliance last? It is all an inevitably long way from the erudite, principled debate about the fairest system of replacing the allegedly discredited voting system which delivered the coalition at the 2010 general election. In the absence of any public upsurge of demand for change to focus the politicians’ minds, they have resorted to scrapping among and between themselves, to the bemusement of voters who were promised that AV would clean up politics and the despair of the professional elite whose passion for change is their guiding (and, in many cases, only) political aspiration. Within a short time of its launch, the campaign on the referendum between first past the post and what one critical commentator dubbed six past the post has turned into the old-fashioned political bun-fight which, like it or not, people grasp more easily than the arguments and mathematics of voting variants. It is this: if you want to end this abomination of a coalition, which way to vote in the referendum? Vote No in order to stop Nick Clegg dead in the water or Yes because the Tories want a No? AV supporters desperately worried about the outcome are deceptively pressing the case that a Yes vote would hurt Mr Cameron more by destabilising his party. The simple truth is that only one person’s credibility – and one coalition – rests on the vote and he needs to feel the hurt most.
