I got to thinking about the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government this week. It is, in a sense, one of the more maligned governments of my lifetime. Labour people and indeed those on the left more generally paint it as an austerity creating beast; most Tory folk think of it as an unfortunate period that they had to endure before a full throated Conservative regime could take over. Even those remaining in the Lib Dems want to crap all over it, now thinking they can get the “progressive” vote back if only they apologise for taking part in this awful government enough times.
I will hold my hand up and say that the coalition government was the only one we’ve ever had in Britain that I liked during the time when it was in power. I can see upsides now of Blair and Thatcher’s governments that I didn’t feel at the time, which is different. I should confess that a lot of people I know and care about worked for the coalition government, including my wife, so it’s fair to say I’m not unbiased. Yet in trying to evaluate the pros and cons of the coalition from different perspectives, I have attempted to be as objective as possible.
I’ll start with the question of what effect the coalition had on the Tories and whether it a good thing for them in the long term, for the simple fact that this pretty easy to answer. While it probably helped Cameron hang on longer than he otherwise would have as Tory leader, it had no other real discernible effect on the Conservative party in the long term, really. I think the coalition delayed Brexit by a few years, that’s about it. Had the Lib Dems refused to go into government with them, there would have been a general election in a few months’ time and the Tories almost certainly would have won. Then, we would have had the same soap opera play out in the party as happened anyway, although we probably would have been spared Theresa May as prime minister (which, I’ll admit, is a strike against the coalition).
A brief note here on Labour and the Tory-Lib government. An enduring myth for many is the idea that Labour and the Lib Dems could have formed a government after the 2010 election. No, never. Not only were the numbers against this – together, the two parties still would only have had 315 seats – the real problem was that Labour really didn’t want it to happen. Or should I say, enough people around the top Labour table didn’t want a Lib-Lab coalition. Gordon Brown desperately wanted it to come together, I believe that much, but I don’t believe that anyone else – Balls, the Miliband brothers, Mandelson – really did. I think they figured it would be bad for them electorally to be in a fragile coalition that wouldn’t last, clinging onto power with the party that came a distant third. Better to let the Tories cut everything to death, making themselves unpopular in the process, and for the Lib Dems to commit suicide by going along with it. They’d be back in power in five years time, probably less.
I mention this because when evaluating the coalition from the perspective of what it did to the Lib Dems, this is important to bear in mind. The option wasn’t Lib-Lab vs Tory-Lib government, it was a coalition with the Tories or staying out of it all and waiting for the second general election of 2010.
Obviously, the coalition was bad for the Lib Dems. You can’t say anything else after what took place in 2015. However, it is worth looking at what happened in the 2010 general election and then trying to work out what might have happened if the Lib Dems had taken the alternative road and avoided going into government to get the whole picture.
At the time, there was a long held idea within the Lib Dems, around since merger had happened a little over 20 years previous, that if the Liberal Democrats could just get their voices heard – if only their leader could get on TV and reach millions of people who could hear the Lib Dem message unimpeded – then the breakthrough would come. That theory was perfectly tested in the 2010 general election campaign when after the first leaders’ debate, the Lib Dems actually topped a nationwide poll on 33%, one point ahead of the Tories. Clegg was “more popular than Churchill”. Although the polling sagged a little as election day neared, the final week or so before the big day saw the Lib Dems hover between 28 and 31%. We all knew at the time that the Lib Dems had to breakthrough and take at least a hundred seats, otherwise it was clear the two big parties were never going to allow anything like what happened in those three-way leaders debates to ever take place again.
And then, the let down. The Lib Dems got only 23% and managed to lose five seats. The theory that if only the party could get a hearing in the media and by the public it would result in electoral breakthrough had been tried and shown to be false. This was existential; the whole point of the party was now in question. ‘If not now now, then when?’ had been answered by the electorate as: never.
Again, the Lib Dems were faced with two choices after the election. One was to form a government with the Tories; the other was to tell the country they couldn’t form a government with either party and let the chips fall where they may. They could have played up the latter as a principled move. But in the general election that would have followed, the Lib Dems would have been severely punished. As badly hit as they were in 2015? Hard to know. Probably not. But you have to ask yourself what future the Lib Dems had after the second 2010 general election with say, 20 or 25 seats, having refused a chance at government.
Before I go there, let’s dispel the myth that the Lib Dems could have done well in a second 2010 election. Had they got 100 seats in the one that actually took place and refused to go in with either the Conservatives or Labour, their pitch could have been strong in a follow up that year. ‘We will not sacrifice our principles,’ Clegg could have said. ‘Back a Lib Dem government.’ And at that point, that wouldn’t have seemed far-fetched.
That same pitch cannot be made by a party that had just been hyped to hell and ended up losing seats. We would have had a zombie parliament for a few months, with the Tories nominally in power with a minority government, until both parties could replace their leaders and have another go. I think the Tories would have won that follow up election, mostly in the same way they won in 2015, by taking Lib Dem seats. It would have been a clear choice between the Tories and another Labour government, and the choice a lot of voters would have made in Lib-Tory seats seems pretty clear. Any idea of a Lib Dem breakthrough would have already been proven impossible, crushing the party’s vote share.
For here’s something not enough Lib Dem activists who claim all would have been well had it not been for the coalition consider – by refusing to go into government after the 2010 general election, throwing the country into chaos for a period, the Lib Dems would have been destroying one of their most cherished ideas. Namely, the notion that coalition and parties working together, usually in a PR voting system, is a better way of doing things. Having been given a chance to form a coalition government and not taken it, they would have been essentially rubbishing this whole plank of their raison d’etre.
To conclude the Lib Dem section: yes, coalition was bad for the Lib Dems’ electoral fortunes, but so would staying out of government have been. Basically, the 2010 general election killed the party. Even after getting the break of the leaders’ debates and subsequent massive coverage, the breakthrough did not occur. The Lib Dems were able to freeze their moment of death in aspic for another five years by going into government, that’s all.
In retrospect, the biggest negative I can lay at the coalition’s door is that it made the Labour party go both crazy as well as become smugly arrogant at the same moment, which time has demonstrated to be a lethal combination. I don’t believe this would have happened without the coalition having come into existence; in fact, my gut tells me that Labour would have avoided their worst excesses if we’d just had a straight up Tory government instead of the coalition. Something about being told by the Lib Dems that New Labour was this right-wing evil force for years and years, only for the Liberal Democrats to then go into government with the Tories, traumatised Labour and the wider left very deeply. They have yet to fully recover, more than ten years later.
The one option the Lib Dems had in government they should have taken in hindsight was essentially merge with the Tories. Take Nick Boles idea and form a National Liberal party that would have taken the Tory whip in exchange for the Conservatives not standing candidates against them. Lib Dem activists almost certainly hate this idea for obvious reasons but think about it: this pact having been formed is the one thing that might just possibly have stopped Brexit from happening. It also would have made the Tories subsequent cultural swing to the right far more difficult. Who knows, the National Liberals might even have split the Tories by now if they tried this out.
My final thoughts on the coalition is this: particularly in comparison to all that has followed it, the Con-Lib government was a good one. Whatever else you can say about the Lib Dems, from whatever political persuasion, at least there’s that to say.
in fact, my gut tells me that Labour would have avoided their worst excesses if we’d just had a straight up Tory government instead of the coalition. Something about being told by the Lib Dems that New Labour was this right-wing evil force for years and years, only for the Liberal Democrats to then go into government with the Tories, traumatised Labour and the wider left very deeply. They have yet to fully recover, more than ten years later.
I dunno. This is heaping speculation on speculation, but the sense I got from Labour all during the coalition was that they were firmly of the belief that the electorate had just made a perfectly understandable mistake and accidentally, without meaning to, voted in a Conservative (and sotto voce Lib Dem) government, as if people had been struck en masse with a fit of the vapours as they stood in the polling booths making their vision blurry and leading to them putting their ‘X’ in the wrong box, and that all Labour had to do was wait for their next chance and people would correct their mistake and re-elect the Labour government that they had really meant to vote for in 2010.
Hence the leadership of Ed Milliband, the Great Placeholder, and the 35% strategy where they didn’t even try to win the 2015 election, just assumed that it was obviously theirs because they couldn’t imagine people would make the same mistake twice.
It was that second loss — not anything to do with the coalition — that I thought sent them totally mad. It was as if the electorate had broken up with them and moved on to someone else, and they had consoled themselves the whole time with the thought that when the rebound relationship was over, things would just go back to where they were. In grief-stages terms they got stuck in denial, never even bothering to try to get beyond that. Then when it became clear that they really had been rejected, they went straight off the deep end in a spiral of anger and depression.
The only question is whether that would have happened even sooner, after a second election in 2010 (which Labour would clearly have fought on the basis of ‘look what a mistake you almost made, now be sensible this time’ with the result you correctly identify of a thumping Conservative majority) or whether they’d have been able to keep the delusion going until the next election before falling apart.
It’s probably completely unfair but I always got the impression that Ed Miliband was somebody for whom Labour’s ‘natural’ vote share was the 40%+ they had in the Blair years and that things all went wrong when things like Iraq drove lost of left wing voters towards the Lib Dems.
If you accept that as his theory of the case then it makes logical sense that he’d focus all his efforts trying to win back those ‘natural Labour’ voters and undo 2003-2005. After all, the Tories had only managed 36% even against someone as unpopular as Gordon Brown, surely just not being in government and not doing unpopular things would help them return to what he thought of as ‘normal’?
Otherwise I agree with Nick (pun completely accidental) that 2010 killed the Lib Dems
It’s probably completely unfair but I always got the impression that Ed Miliband was somebody for whom Labour’s ‘natural’ vote share was the 40%+ they had in the Blair years and that things all went wrong when things like Iraq drove lost of left wing voters towards the Lib Dems.
That’s exactly what I meant. The idea had taken root in Labour that people obviously didn’t want a Conservative government, so they must have voted one in by mistake.
Whenever it was proved that that wasn’t true, the Labour party was going to go a bit mad, whether that was in 2015 as it happened, later in 2010, or (if they could keep the denial going that long) in 2014 after a second election in 2014 after a second 200 election returned a Conservative majority
I thought going into coalition was the best option at the time, because as you say, the alternative was a snap election and a Tory majority. In hindsight, I had a stupid level of faith in my fellow British left-of-centres to understand that coalitions happen and a LD-C coalition was better than a C government.
The other thing it did, though, was royally fuck Scotland. Without the backlash against the Lib Dems in the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, there might have been no second Salmond administration, and certainly not a majority administration able to inflict the 2014 referendum and all that followed on us.
Yes, if you read David Laws on the negotiations you can see Labour behaved badly and had a patronising older-brother attitude. The LDs should probably, purely politically, have not asked for the AV referendum (I voted Yes, and believe you were a leading Yes campaigner, but No were always going to win) and pushed harder on tuition fees using the increased power this gave them.
I actually agreed with the coalition on tuition fees, and raising the income tax threshold, but they were a bad government overall; the LDs behaved badly politically and I believe it’s now settled that austerity was wrong and pointless. A big reason we’ve got Brexit lies in the failue to grapple with the global economic meltdown.
They buggered themselves and evidently didn’t learn the lesson over the next few years; I hope Davey succeeds in what he’s trying to do and believe he has more of a chance than Moran would have done, but fear that Johnson may hold on to the people he hopes to win round.
I voted for Layla because I thought she would be a clean break from the party’s recent past (having not been an MP or a full-time politician during the Coalition era, she has nothing to answer for in that regard). She also seems to have a lot more media cut-through than Ed, even while she isn’t leader. I think she and Caroline Lucas would make a good double-act.
The fears that some have about Layla (which perhaps led to the election of Ed) seem to be based mainly on assumptions and stereotypes. There is the misconception that she would be some sort of “woke warrior” or that her politics are similar to those of the embitted sectarian hard left (when she has distanced herself from them), or only talks to her “tribe”. But you don’t win a seat like hers (OxWaB is more Abingdon than Oxford, and doesn’t include the University) as a non-Tory, let alone with 53% of the vote, by being a sectarian ideologue. The idea that she would be Jo Swinson 2.0 was also silly, because she is a very different type of person, and Jo was brought down by *among other things) Coalition baggage, which Layla doesn’t have. And BTW this isn’t a value judgement on the Coalition, simply a reflection of the reality that a personal Coalition-era voting record is an open target.
Hello Alex, as you know I am much less convinced by the ‘coalition bagage’ theory. To me this seems the least of Ed Davey’s problems. In the end I needed a more positive case for Layla and sense of a stronger Liberal backbone, which did not come across. That said, I could not claim Ed is delivering either.
My conclusion is that the Party needs a deep thinker who has a distinctive analysis and who attracts respect for the substance of his/her contributions to debate, but I do not see such a person.
There is much in this article that is patently true (despite revisionists), however the final bizarre speculation of a merger with the Tories reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of Liberalism and of the Party. It also buys into the ‘Clegg is a Tory’ nonsense. Clegg had plenty of chance to have had an easy career in the Conservatives, but he chose a path that he could not have anticipated would have taken him into government.
The big mistake at the outset was to agree to the Tory’s offer of an AV referendum. This could only have been acceptable if AV had been adopted as Conservative Party policy.
Nick Tyrone has very little understanding of the Lib Dems. I think it boils down to being so tightly ensconced in the Westminster bubble of Spads and think-tanks that he has little idea of political life outside it. In this respect he is similar to his wife’s former boss who shares the same given name as him. Nick Tyrone’s idea that the Lib Dems and Tories should have merged, creating a potential for a later split, reflects his view of politics that sees people as ideological chess-pieces who can be naturally moved into any suitable ideological grouping that presents itself; he completely forgets the campaigning aspect of politics, and in particular the difficulty that any new party has in establishing itself.
I have written elsewhere under this article about Clegg’s political naivety. That AV referendum mistake is just one example of the poor negotiation by the Lib Dem team. But it’s even worse than that. Clegg thought he had a gentlemen’s agreemnent with Cameron that the Tories would not aggressively campaign against AV. Of course we know what happened.
Clegg thought he had a gentlemen’s agreemnent with Cameron that the Tories would not aggressively campaign against AV.
How could Clegg possibly have thought that Cameron could stop the Tories — who absolutely loathe the idea of electoral reform — from aggressively campaigning against AV?
I believe it’s now settled that austerity was wrong and pointless.
Is it? By whom?
First there’s the point that the coalition government didn’t actually do very much (any?) actual ‘austerity’. Practically every bit of the government budget actually rose during the 2010-2015 years. The only cuts were in planned spending. That’s hardly ‘austerity’.
Second, and more important, is that those cuts in planned spending are what meant that when the coronavirus kerfuffle hit, the public finances were in a just-about-good-enough state to cope. The government has had to expand borrowing massively over the past year. That was bad enough, but to do that on top of the kind of debt burden we’ve have had from running 2009-level deficits for the last decade would be horrendous.
So no, I don’t think it is ‘settled’ in any way, shape or form.
Let’s just say I disagree with you on the ‘Con-Lib government’ being a good one. That you suggest that the Lib Dems should have merged with the Tories is staggering and shows exactly why you don’t understand why the coalition was so unpopular with many Lib Dem activists and those that voted Lib Dem in 2010.
I’d just like to comment on this point:
“And then, the let down. The Lib Dems got only 23% and managed to lose five seats. The theory that if only the party could get a hearing in the media and by the public it would result in electoral breakthrough had been tried and shown to be false.”
That’s not quite true. Our first past the post system and poor targeting is why we didn’t see an improvement in seats. We were never going to win the most seats and lead a government no matter what we did, but we should have won a lot more seats than we did.
Our strong showing in the opinion polls during the 2010 campaign was the result of a good performance by Clegg in the first of the 3 leader debates. But it was not a performance that he was able to repeat in the subsequent debates, and he was also unable to counter the attacks on him or the party when our rise in the polls caused our opponents to pay more attention to us and attack us in the press. I suspect that after “I agree with Nick” there were a lot of hacks staying up all night scanning the party manifesto for anything that would make the party look bad. This led ultimately to a late swing from us to the Tories on election night, hence our disappointing election result.
However, the flash in the pan that was Cleggmania probably saved the Lib Dems from a much worse result in 2010. Opinion polls and local election results indicate that the party was starting to flag at about the time Clegg became leader. Clegg, however effective he may have been as a government minister, had no clue about the rough and tumble of campaigning politics, and this is what made him singularly unsuitable as a leader of a small party that relies on compaigning to succeed electorally.
The Lib Dem tuition fees fiasco is the most strategically inept thing I have seen a political party do and compounded the difficult position they were already in. Never a good idea to murder your own core vote. Especially if you’ve always made yourself out to the guys.
Do you think it was at all possible that Clegg would have kept to the letter of the coalition agreement and left government after 2 years? Did anyone even consider that a possibility?
I don’t dispute that going into coalition was the Tories was the right thing to do in the circumstances following the 2010 election. The error was in how the party leadership conducted the coalition. While being a junior coalition partner is often a poisoned chalice, loss of support in the following election is not inevitable, and certainly not on the precipitous scale of 2015. The Lib Dems maintained or even increased support in the elections following the Lab-LibDem coalitions in the Welsh and Scottish devolved authorities. The reason was that the Lib Dems succeeded in maintaining a separate identity in those coalitions, with wins that were visibly attributed to them (one of those, ironically, being abolition of tuition fees in Scotland). The big mistake made by the Lib Dems in the Cameron–Clegg Coalition (apart from the Tuition Fees fiasco) was to conduct it as a love-in, rather than as a business arragement. The Rose Garden press conference was a massive error, but it was just the start of a catalogue of unforced errors in which we made it look like a 1/6 Lib Dem, 5/6 Tory government was doing everything the Lib Dems wanted. The Lib Dems should have been much more explicit and honest about what it was possible for a junior Coalition partner to achieve in the circumstances. And we should have talked more about what an undiluted Lib Dem government would have done. A missed opportunity to do this was the 2014 Euro election, which should have focused on what our MEPs, who were not bound by Coalition collective responsibility, had done and showcased it as undiluted Lib Dem policy. We certainly should not have had our Westminster leader debating with Farage, who ran rings around him.
So in summary, the Coalition was the right thing to do, but we screwed up in the execution. The reason is that the leadership at the time basically had no idea about campaigning politics. With hindsight Clegg’s decision to withdraw our candidate in David Davis’ vanity by-election in 2008 (in what was then a target seat for us) should have raised a red flag. An equivalent action would have been standing down our candidate in the Richmond Park by-election caused by Zac Goldsmith’s “principled” resignation over Heathrow expansion. If we had done that, Goldsmith would still be the MP, and Lib Dems would probably be in 3rd place.
Too many of our senior MPs and people of influence within the party were far too comfortable with Tory policy. Couple that with naivity and it alienated so many people who had voted for us in 2010 and before. The fact that David Laws and Danny Alexander were actually preparing to try and extend coalition after 2015 shows just how out of touch they were with both party and public opinion.
Wonderful to see Nick Tyrone back again with a fascinating blog and equally vigorous debate ensuing. Keep up the regularity in 2021! We need the blog and its discussion to help keep sane in these crazy times!