There is a glorious element of poetic justice in the Liberal Democrats’ latest discovery about the nature of the deal they signed up to in return for a few seats at David Cameron’s Cabinet table.
It now turns out that the re-drawing of the electoral map, which they endorsed in order to get their disastrous referendum on the alternative vote, looks like costing them a quarter of the 57 parliamentary seats they currently hold at Westminster.
According to a Liverpool University study reported in The Guardian, Cameron’s plan to reduce the total Commons membership by 50 seats, which was originally sold to Nick Clegg and company as hammering the Labour Party hardest, will actually hit the Lib Dems far harder than either Labour or the Tories.
The poor darlings were already facing heavy defeat at the next general election. The new boundaries look like turning that into near wipeout.
The temptation to jeer loudly, and say: “That’ll teach you”, is (in my case, at least) totally irresistible. Yes, yes, I know I was preaching restraint in our dealings with the Lib Dems only a few months ago, on the grounds that we will need them if the present Government is to be prevented from destroying the economy and the welfare system.
And, yes, it is true that the less-suicidal Lib Dems are belatedly putting up a fight against the more outrageous aspects of Andrew Lansley’s health “reform” bill. But at the same time, they are backing monstrous attacks on the Labour and trade union movement, in the squalid belief that it will benefit them.
One of the nastiest of these attacks is the proposal to put a £50,000 cap on all contributions to political parties, a scheme which would end the relationship between the Labour Party and the trade unions and remove the party’s largest – overwhelmingly largest – source of finance. If implemented, both the Tories and the Lib Dems would also face cuts in their biggest donations. But the Labour Party would effectively cease to exist as a national electoral machine. We would be back to the days of the ILP, before the Labour Party replaced the Liberals as the main alternative to the Conservatives.
Challenged with this, most Lib Dems tend to come over all innocent and pure, saying that neither people nor organisations should be able to buy political influence.
They pretend not to be able to see the difference between some crook turning up with a fat cheque for Nick Clegg and a trade union which is actually a constituent part of the Labour Party handing over the contributions of its levy-paying members. But there is a difference, and a big one, as they perfectly well know.
This is pretty disgusting, but not quite as disgusting as Vince Cable’s sabre-rattling at the GMB conference this week. The man we used to call “Saint” Vince, because he seemed to be well to the left of the last Labour Government on economic matters, is threatening the unions with even tougher anti-strike legislation if they have the temerity to exercise their already severely constrained right to down tools in defence of their pay and pensions.
That is the kind of thing we used to expect from Norman Tebbit in his Rottweiler heyday, not from a representative of the cuddly, loveable Lib Dems.
The question Cable needs to answer is what exactly he imagines the trades unions are there to do, if it isn’t to defend their members’ plain interests in matters like pay and pensions.
Their right to call for strike action, always a last resort in any sensibly-run union, is already subject to some of the tightest restrictions anywhere in the advanced world – restrictions which were brought in by Margaret Thatcher and were only slightly loosened in the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years.
Just how effective those restrictions already are was demonstrated in the dispute between British Airways and its cabin crews, when successive strike ballots were ruled illegal by the courts over piddling irregularities in the voting system which would not have affected the outcome even if they hadn’t happened.
Cable had the effrontery to speak about the damage to the national economy caused by strikes and industrial disputes. In fact, days lost by strikes and industrial disputes are currently at historically low levels, for the very good reason that workers who fear unemployment are too scared to go on strike – one reason why employers and their political representatives are quite sanguine about high levels of unemployment.
But, by virtue of his radical past, “Saint” Vince is better qualified than anyone else in the coalition cabinet to know that the real damage to the economy is not being done by militant trade unions but by the man who sits down the table from him – Chancellor George Osborne.
Yet “Saint” Vince still sits at that table, trying to pretend to us that he is fighting successfully to hold back the tide of reactionary, pre-Keynesian economic dogma which forms the basis of Osborne’s slash-and-burn budget policy.
There is barely a shred of evidence to support this assertion, for the very good reason that his claim to possess the “nuclear” option of resignation in his fight against Osborne vanished in a puff of pale blue smoke on the day he foolishly boasted about it to those two undercover Daily Telegraph reporters. Cameron didn’t sack him then, but he neatly gelded him.
He now sits in the Cabinet as a political eunuch. I have lost all respect for the erstwhile saint.
