Nick Clegg's party must be seen to be doing positive things in coalition, as well as putting a brake on the Tories
Inspector Gregory: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
Sherlock Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
Holmes: "That was the curious incident."
It is easy to suggest that this is night-time for the Liberal Democrats. The party that is gathered in Birmingham for its annual conference has had a searing 12 months. At the peak of the protests against tuition fees, their leader was burnt in effigy on the streets and had excrement poured through his letter box. The eternal dream of electoral reform ? the greatest of the prizes they thought they had secured from the coalition deal with the Tories ? turned to dust when the modest proposal to switch to the alternative vote was comprehensively rejected in the referendum in May. On the same day, they were pummelled in the Scottish and local elections. Their local government base, painstakingly built up over decades, suffered its worst losses in 40 years. Their poll rating can be described as stable but critical. It is bumping around a level which is about half of their vote share at the general election 16 months ago.
The philosophical tensions within the party between its social democrats, social liberals and classical liberals are pretty plain. The biggest risk that they took when they went into the coalition was to nail their prospects and Britain's future to George Osborne's economic judgment. The best that can be said of that gamble is that it looks bigger than ever.
And yet the dog is not barking. A curiosity about this conference is that there is no clamour to kill the leader who took them to this rather bleak place. For sure, you can find plenty of people within their ranks who can draw up a charge sheet of the tactical errors and strategic misjudgments made since the birth of the coalition. One senior Lib Dem says delicately that "there is a question for the longer term" about whether Nick Clegg will be the right face to lead them into the next election. The last time I interviewed him, Mr Clegg absolutely denied any interest in filling the vacancy that will arise for a British European commissioner in 2014, but that doesn't stop colleagues from continuing to speculate that this would provide him with a graceful exit. The big point, though, is that there is no mood at present for regicide. Given that the Lib Dems have a habit of changing their leaders almost as often as they did their socks, and given the adversity they face, that deserves some explanation.
It is partly because the Lib Dems have always been a more resilient party than rivals often give them credit for. Most of them are still signed up to the coalition, some relatively enthusiastically, others because they know there is nothing else they can do at the moment but suck up the pain. Before he closed his deal with the Conservatives, Mr Clegg was compelled to seek the approval of his MPs, his federal executive and a special conference of party members. At the time, these mechanisms were mocked as typically Lib Dem in their elaborate deference to seeking consent. As it has turned out, the party's internal democracy has been a lifesaver for Mr Clegg. His party cannot fairly complain that coalition was imposed upon them by a mad and wilful leader. They voted for it, very nearly unanimously. Put another way, all their hands are dipped in the blood.
They have also proved extraordinarily disciplined. In the early days of coalition, David Cameron would jokingly say to Nick Clegg that the Tories had a "Napoleonic" command structure which more or less allowed the leader to do what he wished while the Lib Dems were "like a kibbutz" in which the leader was obliged endlessly to consult his colleagues. Contrary to the expectation implied by that remark, the Lib Dems have proved to be remarkably cohesive. In fact, their MPs have been more biddable by the Lib Dem whips than Tory backbenchers have been by their managers.
This is one thing that people have consistently underestimated about the Lib Dems. Another is how much they have taken to power. As with elements of the Labour party, there is a side of the Lib Dems which is happier in opposition and quietly yearns to go back there to escape the burdens of responsibility. But there is a strong ? I would say much stronger ? side of the Lib Dems that continues to relish being in government even with all the associated unpopularity. In the days when Lib Dems were a party of perpetual protest, security was so slack at their conference that you could almost walk in off the street. I recall one of their MPs once asking regretfully: "Who would want to bomb us?" Security around this year's conference has been elevated to a level similar to that which encloses Labour and Tory gatherings. Lib Dem delegates will groan about all the inconvenience while secretly enjoying this confirmation that they are a party of importance. Never forget that, before 2010, the last Liberal to sit in the cabinet was Sir Archibald Sinclair as minister of air in Churchill's wartime coalition. They like having five members of the cabinet.
It is important, too, that their leadership has become more adept at handling the politics of their relationship with the Tories. In phase one of the coalition ? those sweet, scented, long ago days epitomised by the rose garden love-in with David Cameron ? it was Nick Clegg's strategy to take "ownership" of everything done by the government. In an early interview with the Observer, he declared that he would not get into parading "trophies" and boasting when the Lib Dems had scored one over the Tories. He was driven then by the belief that his most vital task was to prove to a sceptical public and media that the novel adventure of coalition could be made to work. One cabinet colleague says: "To be fair to Nick, that was probably a stage we had to go through."
But he and his party paid a punishing price. The Tories were more skilled at gaming coalition. They snaffled up Lib Dem ideas with the potential to be popular ? such as tax cuts for low earners ? and claimed them as their own. The Lib Dems were left to take nearly all of the heat for hated policies, tuition fees being the most traumatising example.
Since the spring, Mr Clegg has made an increasingly aggressive effort to reassert his differences with the Conservatives. Lib Dem strategists say it was always in the master plan to move to this second phase of coalition. Well, maybe it was. But the truth is that a switch in strategy was hurried upon them as the only refuge from the disasters in May. It is that which prompted Mr Clegg and his colleagues to be much more determined to advertise where they disagree with the Tories and trumpet victories over them. The list of public differences between him and David Cameron has now grown to include clashes over the correct response to the summer riots, human rights legislation, the EU, health, free schools, taxation of the wealthy and how to deal with Islamic extremists.
Some of these fights are real; some are not all that they seem. In the latter category, there are "coalition rows" which are mainly contrived for the consumption of the media or so that each leader can maintain to his respective party that he is fighting its corner. The recent apparent spat over free schools, triggered when Mr Clegg claimed to have stopped the Tories from allowing them to be profit-making institutions for "the privileged few", is a good example of the confected row. Some Tories were cross, but the Lib Dem leader's real purpose was to persuade his own party, which last year voted to boycott free schools, to soften its hostility towards them.
The Lib Dem claim to have "saved the NHS" is only wholly believable by those who forget that the Lib Dem cabinet ministers originally signed off on the Lansley plan and all but four of their MPs voted in the aye lobby when it first came before the Commons. They changed their minds only when they grasped just how toxic it was with the public, professional bodies and their own party. Nor is that over as an argument. Continuing opposition to the NHS reforms will surface both at the conference and, crucially, in the House of Lords, where the legislation faces a mauling by a combination of Lib Dem, Labour and crossbench peers.
On the most important call of them all ? the government's austerity programme ? senior Lib Dems are still singing from the same hymn sheet as the Conservatives. There are differences in tone and emphasis, but Lib Dem ministers are highly wary of creating any sort of open breach. "A flaming public row while the markets are so febrile would be very dangerous," says one cabinet member.
A more assertive approach to coalition has helped to bind some of the party's wounds, but it has yet to have any palpable effect on voters. Over the longer term, the Lib Dems will want and need to have more to show for being in government than just claiming they constrained the Tories, an essentially negative achievement. They will have to convince the country that some good things wouldn't have happened without them either.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/18/nick-clegg-liberal-democrats-coalition
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