Yesterday was the ten year anniversary of the 2010 general election. It wasn’t an anniversary widely celebrated. Every corner of British politics had something to feel bitter about on the night. The Tories fell short of what many felt was their destined return to being the natural party of government; the Labour Party were chucked out of government after 13 years, by far the longest they had managed to keep hold of Number 10; the Lib Dems crashed and burned on the night, far short of where they had expected, actually losing five seats over all.
What is the legacy of that election? It still seems to me like a turning point in British politics, the effects of which we are still coping with. An argument that has been made over and over again ever since was that the Lib Dems made a horrible mistake going into coalition government with the Tories. This point can be batted back and forth and I’m not really interested in going over all that here. What I’m more interested in is the legacy of the coalition, as in, the things we’re still dealing with from it politically, and whether those things were worth it.
I would argue the biggest legacy of the coalition is the British left losing their collective marbles, something that ten years later is yet to fully play out. And it happened pretty much literally overnight after the Lib-Con government was formed; Labour went from being a broad church that was still considered a natural party of government, to a weird communist rabble in the space of several days. I don’t mean the PLP and the internal structures of the party disappeared that quickly; they were still keepers of the old flame, at least temporarily. But everything at a grassroots level fell away very, very quickly. I recall the chants of “Tory scum”, a relic from the early 90s, starting up again within days of the government being formed.
Once that happened, things like Corbyn becoming leader take on an air on inevitability. That’s what made Ed Miliband’s leadership such a shitshow, when you strip away all the surface; the left had decided to lose its collective mind and nothing was going to stop that from playing itself out to the painful end. And, you know, what? I think the Lib Dems going into government with the Tories needs to take some of the blame for this happening.
If the Lib Dems hadn’t taken that fork in the road, many things might have happened. The Tories probably would have struggling on as a minority government, contested another election soon after and won handily. Yet when I think about that taking place, I have to concede that the left would probably not have gone full-communist in those circumstances. We’d have a much more functional Labour party now. How much you value such a thing is another matter, but I’m more and more convinced on this point as the years go by.
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I have a new book out now. It’s called “Politics is Murder” and follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. The plot takes in Conservative Party conference, a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.
Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!
It’s available here:
I have an impossible and unfair counterfactual question: if the Lib Dems had refused to enter in coalition (or, alternatively, just done a confidence-and-supply deal in lieu of full coalition), would the UK still be a member of the EU today?
Cameron had already signed his Faustian pact before 2010 when he pulled the Conservatives out of the European People’s Party. The pressure from Tory Europhobes and the the threat of Farage would still have been there. So the answer is quite a high probability of a similar result. However, at this point we have to recognise a fairly event spit, so a referendum could easily have gone the other way.
One difference is that the election of Corbyn would have been less likely (though still possible) and this could have been enough to tip the balance.
If that had happened we would still have the scorched earth, xenophobic head bangers. I doulbt a referendum would have shut them up, particularly with a close result.
Or to put it another way, popular consent for the UK’s membership in the EU has hovered around the 50% mark since about the time of Maastricht, and that’s not a sustainable basis for governments to keep dragging us into closer integration without ever giving the people a say.
The real opportunity to head off the referendum was missed by Gordon Brown, when he refused to hold the referendum that had been promised on the European Constitution when it was renamed the Treaty of Lisbon. If that referendum had been held, as Tony Blair had promised it would be, then, whichever way it went, we never would have had the in/out referendum (because either the people would have given consent for closer union, so the question would have been decided, or they would have refused closer union, so some form of ‘associate membership’ would have had to be invented for the UK, again making an in/out referendum irrelevant for those whose main fear was being drawn into a closer union).
The Tories probably would have struggling on as a minority government, contested another election soon after and won handily. Yet when I think about that taking place, I have to concede that the left would probably not have gone full-communist in those circumstances
Are you sure? After all the Labour Party went full-communist mad after losing in 1979, didn’t it? And it took a humiliating general election defeat, a decade and a half, and the sacrifice of a leader to claw it back to electability, something that seems likely to happen again.
Theory: as has been pointed out many many times, the besetting sin of the Labour Party is the idea that it is the sole repository of virtue, and that the Tories are fundamentally evil and want to murder working people. Therefore when the working people choose to vote for the Tories (as they must to some degree for the Conservative Party to get into government, though obviously there are greater and lesser degrees of it: Thatcher and Boris being the most successful Tory leaders when it comes to getting working-class votes) those in the Labour Party who hold this ‘the Tories put working-class tears on their cornflakes’ view go full Star Trek computer ‘this does not compute! how could people vote against their class interest! Illogical! Illogical!’ and blow a gasket, with sparks and everything…
… hence what we saw with Michael Foot in 1979 and Ed Milliband in 2010.
It’s a purely internal Labour dynamic, in other words: the Lib Dems are not really relevant. The Labour party just can’t handle rejection.
Hm. The Labour party as crazy ex-boyfriend, stalking the British People, showing up getting increasingly more dishevelled from months of living on the streets, alternately begging the electorate to take them back, pleading about how much more they care than the new guy, and threatening dire consequences if things don’t go back to the way things were. Is there something in that?
The Lib Dem party destroyed liberalism
By joining a Conservative party which used a banking crisis to assault the public with Thatcherite gusto
By abandoning Liberalism it opened the door for the far left
The Conservative Liberal pact was the most extreme government since the war
And I include the Thatcher government’s
Nick Clegg has murdered liberalism
Short term gain for his cv
Those orange book idiots not only nearly destroyed the labour party
They built the foundation for a Tory government of the right for perpetuity
Thank god Starmer has stopped this outcome
Nick Clegg you hubristic deluded charlatan
The Lib Dems can only be held responsible for their choices, not Labour’s. I agree with M that a perennial Labour problem has been that many of their supporters see themselves alone as virtuous whilst Conservatives are inherently evil – thus any coalition with them by a progressive party was immoral from the start. Ed Miliband fuelled this type of discourse and, in opposition, sadly it was effective in blackening the Lib Dems by association. Despite Labour having acknowledged the need for cuts before the 2010 election – even agreeing with broadly the level of cuts that the Coalition actually delivered – overnight, all cuts became painted as a political choice by the Tories – and their Lib Dem “enablers”. Economic reality was completely denied. This in turn, as you say, easily paved the way for Corbyn who had been denying economic reality for decades.
Were they right to go into coalition? As you say, had they not done so the Tories would have won a GE a few months later; the Lib Dems would have been painted as not serious about the one chance they had for government. From the country’s perspective they were right to do it, but they paid a huge price politically.
In specific terms I think the legacy of the Coalition is that today’s LibDems, is that, for them specifically, nothing has really changed. It’s tempting to follow the fork in the road to Labour’s – private – grief, but the piece above isn’t about that. From there, if like me you have no interest in the LibDem Policy platform you have no inclination to pay them any heed. It doesn’t matter that – apparently – ‘the policies are popular on the doorstep’, it doesn’t matter if ‘we’re winning in local elections’. Demonstrably it isn’t translating to the national vote. And please, nobody waste my time with childish garbage like ‘the electoral system’. Before anyone quotes it – wake up. You have to win in the system we have. That’s the target. Not sullenly lounge around claiming the world is stacked against you.
From the reactions to the announcement of the coalition ten years ago, it was fairly plain to me that the LibDems had not really prepared or adjusted mentally for the compromises that Coalition would obviate. ‘We can’t get everything we want’ may well have been a frequently-mouthed platitude, but I saw no real appreciation among LibDems that phrase was actually valid. No matter how often it was trotted out, I saw no shortage of MPs and Party members wide-eyed and bewildered that they were not, in fact, getting everything they wanted. Not understanding at the fundamental level why not.
The subsequent stance post-2015 has not returned a lesson in that. Coalition – from my limited observation – was seen by all too many LDs to have been something inflicted upon them in the final accounting, rather than a valuable exercise in political development. Hence now, with a small DNA base in Parliament there are very few MPs with any real credibility as even the leader of a small Parliamentary Party, let alone a Prime Minister in waiting. If Mr. Davey really is the best you have, then, boy, do you have problems? But a great many things need to change.
Does the Party possess the earnest will to win a GE? You have to develop a policy platform which will attract a majority of the UK electorate. Not a partial majority of the people who usually already vote for you. At time of writing, I think the LibDems are all to comfortable in convincing themselves they really have nothing at the base level wrong with their strategies or their policies. If that doesn’t change, and I don’t believe it ever will, then each and every General Election will be returning the same disappointment on the night.
It doesn’t matter that – apparently – ‘the policies are popular on the doorstep’, it doesn’t matter if ‘we’re winning in local elections’.
It’s also worth noting that for all the crowd-pleasing Lib Dem policies, they also have a bunch of policies which are absolutely toxic among the general population, as Swinson found out when she ended up having to defend the line on gender identity (and, at a wider level, the whole ‘revoke’ thing). And voters aren’t going to vote for a party which would do some things they really like and some things they absolutely hate over one which they don’t love but could just about put up with on everything.
The gender identity thing really worries me. Quite genuinely. I come to it from the Twitter exchanges I’ve seen between Graham Linehan and his eloquent allies (a great many from the LGBT community) on Twitter in a thankless battle with, well. ‘Loons’. At base level, in my opinion (and, as the old saying goes, ‘I’m entitled to an opinion’) a ‘bloke’ (dictionary, medical, anatomical def.) cannot define himself as a ‘woman’ and thereby entitle himself to wander into a Women’s changing room or toilet. He just can’t. It’s a very simple and obvious cultural standard for people to hold themselves to. The invasion of these spaces by self-defining ‘blokes’ has led to multiple instances of rape. Those who refuse to accept partial culpability for it are dangerous people.
However, I’ve seen no lack of otherwise allegedly-sane MPs and senior figures turn themselves out in logical gymnastics to avoid this very simple point. An MP who refuses to protect the fundamental rights of women to safe spaces at obvious social junctures is someone who cannot be relied upon to protect much of the populace, in cowardly preference to a ranting (but temporarily trendy) and extreme minority.
On the other hand – ‘Revoke’ – I personally had no problems with. No Political party (that’s ‘Party’ in the wider context) is under an obligation to accept the Referendum result. I voted to leave in 2016 and would do so again today in a heartbeat. By and large, with a small percentage of exceptions, the LibDems are a pro-EU party. It’s not something they can live in denial about. It’s also one of the fundamental aspects upon which I base my decisions of voting. I don’t vote LD in large part due to their enthusiasm for the EU.
If the LDs won a Parliamentary majority with a clear advance campaigning manifesto to ‘Revoke’, ‘Remain’, ‘Rejoin’, in democratic terms I can’t argue with that. However, if that intent was concealed behind nebulous language and they went into a pro-EU Coalition with – say – Labour who similarly suppressed any open discourse on the subject, I would see that as a non-legitimate outcome. That the LibDems removed Swinson’s stance mid-Campaign last year is a matter for concern for me. That they remain pro-EU is plain. That they don’t want to talk about it, even in an Election Campaign demonstrates to me yet another lesson (this time on fundamental trust) that they refuse to learn.