Posts Tagged "Coalition"

Ed Miliband is listening

From the Guardian, January 3rd, 2011:

[Ed Miliband] immediately instituted a language change that grumpy Labour backbenchers were impressed by. It was to be referred to as a “Tory-led government” not the more cuddly “coalition”.

From this site, July 29th, 2010:

It is this appropriate to treat the Coalition not as something strange but as something that is all too familiar; this is a Tory Government in all but name. It is up to Labour to call it as it is.

Seems like I’m getting on well with the Ed’s in the Shadow Cabinet.

Countering the Coalition 6: Conclusion, a Soft Opposition

This is without doubt a new era in politics. The end of a Labour decade, the Liberals are back in government, and of course the start of a coalition.

The Education Secretary’s disastrous mishandling over the Building Schools for the Future program posed the question of how long the government’s honeymoon will last and there are multiple factors worth considering in response. The fact that this is a coalition opposed to a single party gives the coalition a certain novelty aspect, particularly so as it follows 13 years where Labour has had extremely large majorities, meaning that the public will be more inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.

However, the conditions that prolong the government’s honeymoon like the ‘time for a change’ feeling are likely to dissipate very quickly. As cuts begin to impact on frontline public services people will inevitably become less sympathetic, in addition to this we have had a few minor political scandals with David Laws and Chris Hunhe, and now a larger competence-based scandal surrounding Michael Gove, which will accumulate and test the public’s patience.

Labour has to act in two stages, the immediate term and then a deeper approach. The timing of this falls along two parallels, primarily with the duration of the government’s honeymoon period and secondarily the long process of the Labour Leadership election.

The Tory strategy is almost crass in its execution; Labour left us in this mess, but we are clearing it up. They gibber about the deficit and they panic over national debt, completely neglecting the economic recovery and, even more surprisingly, forgetting the massive global financial crisis that Labour had to deal with to stop the economy collapsing.

True or not, fair or not, their criticism has a bold simplicity. Our argument is more evolved than theirs which means it is more difficult to understand and therefore less popular. It operates under what I call the “Garden Shed Principle,” which is to say that normal people understand how their household finances work, and how to use bank overdrafts, and so it resonates when Cameron uses such an analogy. Nobody knows whether saving the banks is worth trillions and billions because nobody can really understand whether it is value for money. Yet the anger was so much more explosive during the expenses scandal because people know the price of a garden shed, and when an MP claims several thousand pounds for a duck house, they can see the injustice.

The solution is to disarm the government of the argument. The Tories are in the same mode as they were before the General Election in that they are trying to frame the debate around what happened in the past instead of policies for the future. We have to move the debate forward by “accepting and moving on.” Harriet Harman as acting leader is in the perfect position to act as a lightning rod and clear the ground ready for the new leader to make a fresh start without so much baggage left over from the credit crunch.

A strategy of Soft Opposition currently seems the most appropriate for Labour. My example to follow is how Zapatero conducted his party before becoming the President of the Spanish Government in 2004. His prescription was to be as calm and constructive as possible, even going so far as to offer pacts to the government of the time, which under Aznar was as equally dangerous as ours is now.

Zapatero was famous for this almost bipartisan style of opposition, for which the British public seem to have an appetite at present. Although some would suggest that the Socialist victory in Spain was as an indirect consequence of the Madrid bombings, the evidence showed a firm, slow but steady improvement for the PSOE in the polls. This is exactly the kind of foundation we need to lay over the next four years.

In contrast, the bland and non-confrontational style of Zapatero in opposition, which I must say suits perfectly all five Labour Leadership contenders, made his attacks against the government much stronger. Labour will look so much more competent and even statesmanlike than Cameron did when he was constantly on the offensive like the noise of WWI artillery.

To conclude this series, I hope that I have demonstrated some of the key features of the new government and set out a plan for Labour to proceed in opposition. The coalition showed that the Tories could not win a majority by themselves even in such favourable conditions. Labour needs to use this to our advantage in order to shrink both the Tories and the Lib Dems into a co-dependent state. The Tories lose their teeth and the Lib Dems lose their independence.

The coalition will survive for the duration of the Parliament; the conditions are right for it to last because we have seen just how willing the Lib Dems are to throw away their principles. The government is structurally sound because the Tories do not depend on the Lib Dems to be in power, but for the Lib Dems this is their only chance.

The fact that the coalition will go the distance is good for Labour as we can occupy a broader space on the centre-left. It is important to stick the other two parties together, which is why we are better off referring to John Major’s government and its divisions over the callous spending cuts of Thatcher.

In doing so, we must move away from the line that the Lib Dems betrayed their voters. If the voters feel betrayed, we cannot mock them if we want their support, this is why it is better to dismiss the Lib Dem leadership as useful idiots or even hostages in some cases, while we concentrate are arguments against a typical Tory government.

However, we do need to understand that the game we play with the Lib Dems has changed, or perhaps it would be better to say ‘exposed.’ This is why we have to resist the obvious temptation to mock their hypocrisy.

Finally, Labour needs to accept responsibility for its record in government and act accordingly. We have to show that the party is not bitter and can be constructive, but that we are always ready to right for those who need help. It is a case of picking battles carefully.

The coalition does not represent New Politics, but as the Labour Party it is our duty to come up with new ideas.

Countering the Coalition 4: Don’t attack the Lib Dems

In the previous one, two and three parts, I have covered various opportunities that have arisen from the peculiarity of a Coalition government, argued that the Coalition will remain intact until the end of the parliament and why Labour should not try to drive a wedge between the two parties. The first trilogy was about what we should do, this next one will try to explain how to do it.

It is lots of fun and easy to do, but the Labour Party needs to be disciplined enough to resist attacking the Lib Dems over the betrayal of their voters. However, as the parable of the Labour MP on a cliff goes: kick off the Tory before the Lib Dem; put business before pleasure.

In many ways, this is not the New Politics but an even more secure return to two-party politics. As much as we would like to say that it was Labour that denied the Tories the majority they took for granted, until the Lib Dems gave it to them, the increased amount of ‘others’ in the Commons make it more and more difficult for any party to win a majority. This is the real damage done by the Lib Dems, and perhaps in the future we will have to add the Greens to the list.

To that extent, we should prepare ourselves for two party politics and focus our arguments against the real enemy of the Tory Party.

It is important to remember the real reason that the Coalition exists: the Tories could not get a majority by themselves. The fact that Conservatives released the “Hung Parliament” scare video should show that they invited the Lib Dems into the Government not by choice but by necessity. Cameron will rightly want to go it alone as soon as he can, though given his own announcements on fixed terms and dissolution he will have to bide his time unlike Wilson in 1974. Even if Cameron does wish to continue the coalition for a second term, it will be almost impossible to convince his backbenchers.

The key point is that the Coalition is not a marriage of two equal partners; it is a hostile takeover of a big company consuming a little one, and not all the Lib Dem shareholders will agree.

A similar example is President Sarkozy’s party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). Few people realise that his government is actually UMP-Nouveau Centre. The Nouveau Centre was originally part of the Mouvement Democrate (MoDem), a party very similar to our Liberal Democrats, which will be a point of focus in Part Five, but it was formed by a group of MPs who decided to break away and ally with Sarkozy.

The worry for the UMP is that the Nouveau Centre will present its own candidate in the presidential election in 2012, draining a few important percentage points away from Sarkozy and a time where he is currently on level pegging with the Socialist Leader Martine Aubry. The Nouveau Centre thus tries to assert its independence despite not having any, being a tiny minority within the government.

The lesson from France is that Labour the best kind of Lib Dem squeeze will be to drop all the clumsy and ineffective lines it has been using since May. References to the “Con Dem Party” and repetition of the word “coalition” and “betrayal” serve no purpose except that it creates a novelty factor that will undoubtedly prolong the honeymoon period.

It is this appropriate to treat the Coalition not as something strange but as something that is all too familiar; this is a Tory Government in all but name. It is up to Labour to call it as it is.

By doing this, it takes away the room to manoeuvre that both parties are currently enjoying. They cannot keep using the excuse that their weakness, hypocrisy, u-turns and climb-downs are simply a result of having to compromise and that it is the “other party” that is responsible for all the bad things while they take the credit for the rest. In interviews, you can be sure that when things are going well a Conservative will represent the government but when it gets tough, they will wheel out a hapless Lib Dem fall guy. We have already seen it on Question Time over the last few weeks.

This reinforcement of collective responsibility is the only way Labour can hold the government to account from Opposition. The central theme is not to play on what the Lib Dems have done to form the Coalition but instead Labour should emphasise their similarities over their differences. It is vital that any Lib Dems who would associate themselves more with the left come to Labour instead of “others” however, it is possible that protest voting is just a component of the Lib Dem DNA.

Ultimately, we have to keep in mind that the Lib Dems are just there to make up the numbers on the Tory backbenches. We should therefore show them up as what they are: useful idiots. In interviews, you can be sure that when things are going well a Conservative will represent the government but when it gets tough, they will wheel out a hapless Lib Dem fall guy. We have already seen it on Question Time over the last few weeks.

Repeatedly, the Tories have taken advantage of the Lib Dems who are hopelessly out of their depth and essentially benign in that the Tories are winning the internal arguments so easily. On the Economy, on Foreign Policy, on Europe, on Health, Immigration, Families and more the Tories get their way, and that is just the original coalition agreement. It is clear that the Liberal leadership is content to let the conservatives run free, providing that they get a ride on the odd hobbyhorse. Instead of Proportional Representation, a referendum on Proportional Representation, the Alternative Vote, they seem to be happy with a paltry referendum on the Alternative Vote, which the Conservatives (and Labour if we have any sense) will oppose. There is no better example of giving a baby its bottle without literally presenting Clegg with one.

Before the election, the Lib Dems were given an inflated about of publicity which Labour now needs to suffocate by sidelining and dismissing the yellow dummies at the back. Here I have described how Labour should change its response to the Lib Dems; in Part Five I will examine how the Lib Dems have changed by themselves.

Countering the Coalition 3: United they fall, Keeping the coalition alive

In parts one and two of Countering the Coalition, I outlined how the current political terrain has changed and argued that the coalition will hold together for the duration of the parliament. Now I will explain how Labour can take advantage of the situation and discuss the role of leadership.

Given my previous points, Labour should not waste time trying to break up the coalition from the outside as MPs and activists have been trying to do. The conditions for a surviving partnership are in place and so by trying to exacerbate and exaggerate their differences we foster only a sense of solidarity between the Liberals and the Tories, which gives the appearance of a government united against the barbarians banging at the gates.

However, it is more desirable that the coalition remains intact until the next election. On our side, the main argument for not removing Brown as leader was a time limit. Should the coalition break down in as early as a year or two, then our new leader will not have the time to make a name for himself. (Note that I say ‘his’ for grammatical over political purposes.) Nor will he have the time to set a clear, distinct policy agenda; that is to say, if I can borrow the phrase, to show us his vision for Britain. From what I have seen of the very uninspiring contest so far, time is definitely something that they need.

The massive financial constraint in which the party finds itself dwarfs the time argument. Labour could not even hope to match the combined power of the Lib Dems and the Tories even in the best of times. In any case, it leads us to the question of how the parties will function together.

Normally in coalitions, there are no by-elections on a national level because a coalition is typically the result of Proportional Representation, which typically operates on a party list system. One out, everybody else moves up a space. They are even less frequent in France as each candidate has a running mate that has the democratic mandate to take over if necessary.

It therefore makes more sense to use a local example of a by-election that was caused by the cancellation of a result rather than a resignation or death (hence, why the running mate was unable to take over). Last summer, I was a by-election campaign manager for the Socialist candidate in the sixth district of Nice. The council is UMP (conservative) run and so the Socialists and Greens form the opposition group in coalition; usual practice is to have a discussion and then field one candidate. (Note how dependent the entire political system is on closed-door negotiations between party representatives.) Despite this, the Greens were overconfident after their good result in the EU Parliament elections and decided to go it alone. They broke the agreement, stole momentum from the Socialist candidate and ended up with a measly 7% anyway.

The spotlight here focuses on the practical implications of running a coalition, but if the Liberals and the Tories can work out a makeshift manifesto and a queen’s speech and a budget, it is safe to say they will work something out. Logic would suggest that the government would field a Liberal candidate where they are in the best place to win and a Tory where the Tories are in second place. The difficulties lie in Liberal/Tory marginals in the South, since they cannot criticise their honourable friend’s record with negative campaigning, nor can they campaign positively on the same program. I am not going to give them any clues on this one, though.

What Labour needs to do is push the debate to focus on the future (as I set out in part one), which means that we shall have to drop “Back to the 80s” as a campaign theme because it is pointless to fight non-ideology with ideology. Tony Blair wisely sustained the ghost of Thatcher while she still haunted the Tory party, and even though I was born in 1989 and never knew Thatcher, I can safely say of David Cameron that he’s no Thatcher. The Hague-wig strategy was effective in 2001, but nine years later, it no longer works.

Leadership is now a major current in British Politics, the Presidentialisation of which is one of Thatcher’s many legacies. A pattern has emerged whereby years of strong and unbending leadership precede a period of chaos and division; an obvious parallel to draw is the Thatcher-Major Blair-Brown axis. Each one appears to be the antidote to the other, until their leadership strengths become weaknesses. Thatcher was isolated because of her unwillingness to accept dissent, so Major seemed like a sensible return to Cabinet government. Blair ruled from the sofa, and Brown’s premiership is epitomised around the word ‘leadership’ more than any other.

This has implications for our own leadership contest. All the candidates so far have been parroting conciliatory words like “open,” “debate,” “progressive,” “listening,” when the political cycle in fact demands another conviction politician from our side.

It is time Labour finally laid the Thatcher threat to rest, not least because a whole generation of voters did not experience the 80s. Nevertheless, we can evoke the ghost of John Major, whose government’s divisions may have trodden the path the coalition will follow. Without contradicting myself on Major, it was best for Labour that he was sufficiently weak as a leader, but it was still vital that he remained in Number 10. If the coalition is sinking, we want to keep the rats firmly on board the ship.

Countering the Coalition 2: Why the coalition will go the distance

At the start of the hung parliament, our instincts told us that the coalition would be unstable and probably break down within a year or two. Be it out of No Confidence from parliament or confidence that the Tories could win a majority alone, as Harold Wilson did in 1964. On the contrary, everything we have seen so far suggests that this coalition will be able to continue for the duration of the parliament.

Primarily, coalitions do not break down as easily as we are prone to think they do, and they last for as long as they need to last. Cameron can no longer call an election as it suits him, not least because he would need to include his deputy, who happens to be leader of a different party, it will even be constitutionally unavailable pending the introduction of Fixed-Term parliaments. Given the games the two parties are playing with 55% and 66% and dissolution votes being different from No Confidence votes, the framework is being set to keep the coalition in government for the whole five years.

If the coalition is going to be constitutionally secure, it is also structurally sound. We might have assumed that more Lib Dems would be feel uneasy working with the Tories but there has been little resistance so far, with the exception of a little tantrum over the rise in VAT. There seems to be very little dissent and no defections yet.

However, the VAT rise may be revealing. The parliament is young and the government has yet to face any real stress tests on difficult decisions where there exists a huge canyon between policies. With the exception of the Euro currency crisis, “Europe” as an issue is unlikely to arise as it did over the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties. The economic crisis is over and slowly recovering, giving the government a temporary sense of direction as it aims to reduce the deficit, which will keep the two parties on the same path.

The real pressure will come when by-elections and councils start to swing, but until then we have no effective barometer. Thus far, the Liberal Democrats have shown themselves to be much closer than anyone had expected, and coalitions have gone the distance between much more distant colleagues.

The regional government of the Generalitat in Catalonia has been governed by a coalition of three parties (a ‘tripartit’), and is now just a year away from the end of its mandate. They have been able to stick together despite mutually exclusive policy differences; that is to say, one party is against independence and the other is for it, as we might imagine a Labour-SNP coalition in Holyrood. The tripartit has been relatively successful in implementing and delivering a program. A government with three voices and three leaders gives itself to certain incoherence; the government will spin “normal constructive debate” but it inevitably gives the impression of disunity and confuses the public.

On a national level, it is more appropriate to draw a parallel with cohabitation in France. Cohabitation, where the President was of one party and the Parliament was of another, occurred three times. There was the widespread assumption that the public institutions would halt, and there would be political deadlock until the next election. This never happened because they found a way to work together; in essence power, responsibility, and the realities of government; something with which the Lib Dems are wholly unaccustomed, kept them together.

The Cohabitation governments were inevitable when Presidential terms were seven years and parliamentary terms were five years, but there was a constitutional provision for it but our constitution (or lack thereof) means that on the one hand the Coalition is flying blind. On the other hand, it also means that they are free to move and adapt with little constraint. As constitutional reform is on the agenda, they have even more freedom to set precedents for the future.

The coalition only exists because no party could win a majority. Depending on the effects of tampering with the electoral system, this is not the New Politics, but we are stuck with it for now at least.

Countering the Coalition 1: Understanding change and coalitions

After four Conservative governments followed by three Labour governments, a coalition seems very strange to us. It is a peculiar step away from the past, but it should show us that one odd coalition does not mean that the political structure of the UK has changed forever.

In 1993 there was talk of conservative one-party hegemony, and that Labour would probably never govern again. We know now that it was not the case. Then in 2006, it was thought that Labour had established permanent electoral advantage, which wasn’t true either. Since before 1945, it seemed impossible to believe the Liberal Democrats would ever be in government, but how wrong we were.

The coalition had a lot of new features and breaks several historical precedents but there is no reason, above all after just a few months, to assume it is here to stay forever. Despite this, it presents Labour with a very special window of opportunity to which it must learn to adapt quickly.

I consider myself to be in a unique position to observe the coalition; from June 2009 to January 2010 I worked for Labour’s sister party in France, the Parti Socialiste. From then until June 2010 I moved to Spain where I was a student and activist in our other sister party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol. Since then I have returned to Nice where we, that is to say the Socialists, are in a coalition government following a victory in the regional elections on March 2010.

Coalitions, with a few historical exceptions, are not the British way. The panic and confusion in the days preceding and succeeding the General Election over the spectre of a hung parliament demonstrated the lack of precedent in a constitutional blind spot. Such uncertainty rarely happens on the continent, where deal making and compromises are a regular component of politics in other European countries.

This is why I have written a series of six articles under the theme “Countering the Coalition.” Having discussed the issue with everyone from grassroots members to civil servants to parliamentarians, I hope that my proposals and conclusions we be of use to the Labour Party, as we learn to adjust to our new role in Opposition against an unknown enemy.

In the series, I intend to discuss first what Labour’s aims and objectives should be and how the coalition might affect politics in general terms. In the second part, I will argue why the coalition will stay the course for the duration of the parliament, instead of breaking down as originally predicted. Next, I intend to show how a durable coalition is more beneficial to the Labour Party than one that breaks down. The fourth part will set out how we should react to the Lib Dems, while the fifth will discuss how we should act against them, as well as considering why their poll rating and publicity failed to translate into electoral success. Finally, I will make the case for how Labour should conduct itself in Opposition in order to achieve the objectives described in the previous sections.

It will be to nobody’s surprise that the main goal of a political party in Opposition is electoral success. I will discuss short-term strategy in Part six, but in the long term it is clearly in Labour’s interest to steal permanent support from both of the government parties. The Lib Dems are an obvious target, particularly in the south of England.

Tactical voters do not tend to come home. An example of this is my own constituency party of Bath; a safe Liberal seat, but with the Tories posing some threat. It became that way in 1992, where the safe Tory seat of Chris Patten became the site of a famous decapitation by the Lib Dem Don Foster (who until recently was Culture/Media/Sport spokesman). His win was largely attributed to a large portion of the Labour vote voting tactically, which has never recovered. In 2010, the Labour vote was reduced by 7%, and Foster increased his majority.

The example should hopefully show that we can now use this period to bring back Labour tactical voters and soft Lib Dems (who ever heard of them?). A university lecturer of mine was a strong Labour activist in the 80s, but left the party because of New Labour and the Iraq War, he said something that will stay with me for a long time: “I didn’t feel like it was home anymore, in many ways, it was the Labour Party that left me.”

In wider terms, we have to accept that the next election is five years away, but it presents us with a new challenge. There is a lot of ground that needs to be recuperated in local councils, because it is only by showing people that we have a local dynamism we can be trusted with a local mandate. Time means that we should revive the Blairite “toehold strategy” of a Labour group in every council.

By increasing Labour representation as a whole, the party can grow permanently, which is desirable. This seems fairly evident, but it is worth considering on a more profound level. A good illustration is the fall and rise of the Liberal Party, which in the post war period had between 6 and 12 MPs. Instead of being consigned to the dustbin of history, they have slowly a steadily grown and their party has now returned to its status of “a party of government.”

Parties, therefore have a certain status that give them credibility and consequently representation. In Europe, there are generally three types: the dominant kind, like the Labour Party in Britain and the PSOE in Spain, which can form governments and command majorities. Then there are opposition parties like the Parti Socialiste in France and the SPD in Germany, which are capable of governing, provided only that smaller parties give them a boost. The rest can usually be called influential parties, like the French Communist Party, that can only hope to participate in a minor capacity as part of a coalition, trying to extract the odd concession.

Labour should therefore allow the coalition parties to be so tightly bound that they can be squeezed together and compressed, while Labour expands to fill the gap. The idea behind it is to try to “downgrade” the Tories from dominant to opposition while also weakening the Lib Dems. The ideal result will be to make them co-dependent without the capacity to form a permanent anti-Labour alliance.

The coalition is already showing signs that it is more cohesive than we might have originally anticipated. In part two, I will try to show why coalitions, in particular this one, stay together more often than they fall apart.