Liberal Burblings

It was Ross Noble’s joke on “Have I got news for you” last night. Vince Cable is now a flex. You have to see it to appreciate it. It seems that it is David Laws who has got the driving seat position in the cabinet, for a LibDem. While Vince Cable, as the set-up to Noble’s quip went, was given the Business department and then had $900 million slashed from his budget. “He’s now a flex” etc etc

In a similar vein, Alastair Campbell, who apparently carries round with him a framed portrait of David Laws (he is obviously smitten – well Laws is a handsome lad, after all), quipped on Question Time that Vince Cable looks a bit lost in the coalition government. He said:

He looks like a Burnley supporter made to stand at the Blackpool end

I am sure Vince will prove all the naysayers wrong and prove to be an excellent Business Secretary. It’s quite right that he is clearing the decks by stepping down as LibDem deputy leader.

Apart from workload considerations, there is also another reason why it is a good idea for Vince to step down as deputy leader. It will be good for the party to have a deputy leader who is not in the cabinet (or indeed in the government) and who is therefore better able to represent views from outside the, doubtless rather seductive, atmosphere of government. I think this will become more and more important as we progress and hit choppy waters. Having both the leader and deputy leader in the cabinet would have been too much. The party would have risked becoming unnecessarily divided. Activists would have felt that the whole leadership had “gone native” with the Tories.

Which brings me back to Question Time and the august figure of Piers Morgan. Back from abroad, he just could not believe that the Tories and LibDems had got together and said it wouldn’t last more than a few months.

In one sense I can understand where he is coming from. Indeed, Vince Cable himself is not a natural co-habitee of the Conservatives. He cut his political teeth in Glasgow, where Conservatives are something of a rarity. He was a Labour councillor. So one can understand that he is not a natural in Conservative salons.

Whereas, I suspect Nick Clegg is a natural for cross-party relations with the Conservatives. He was born and brought up in Chalfont St Giles, for goodness sake. He’s 100% a liberal. But in Chalfont St Giles you tend to get used to dealing with Tories. Glasgow – not.

But I think what Piers Morgan (and Alastair Campbell, who chipped in, in a similar vein) is missing are the historic strands of common thought between the LibDems (formerly Liberal Party) and the Conservatives. OK there are wings of the Tory party that are so right wing that you’d never see any common ground between them and the LibDems. But when you look at the likes of Kenneth Clarke and, historically, Ted Heath, they tend to be philosophically in the same ball park as us liberals.

Indeed, the best historic example of someone who was easy temperamentally, philosophically and politically in the Liberal and Conservative parties, and indeed in coalitions between the two and Labour, was, of course, Winston Churchill.

Many people look at him as a Tory and regard his career as a Liberal politician as short-lived and a “marriage of convenience”, often basing their thoughts on his oft-repeated quotes about ‘ratting and re-ratting’ and ‘any hack to get out of the stables’ etc etc. 

But if you look at his ministerial career (below) he spent most of it serving as a Liberal Party member. He spent 10 years as a minister in purely Liberal governments. 10 years as a minister in purely Conservative governments. 6 years serving under Lloyd George in a coalition government while he was a member of the Liberal Party. 5 years as Prime Minister in his own coalition government during the second world war (while a member of the Conservative party). So 16 years beats 10 years or 16 years beats 15 years. Whichever way you look at it, Churchill was temperamentally ambi-dextrous between Liberal and Conservative (witness his foundation of the Labour Exchanges and National insurance which show his liberal credentials – but he also went off the rails and did some very illiberal things like sending the Black and Tans in to Ireland and suggesting that striking miners should be machine-gunned during the General Strike, while expressing his admiration for Mussolini etc etc).

I would suggest that what we are seeing in terms of, to an extent, a natural coalescing of policies between Tory and LibDem is not completely out of left field. There is a tradition of some of the philosophies of the two parties being compatible. …As there is also a lot of natural affinity between the LibDems and Labour. The most obvious distinguishing philosophy, which has been brought sharply into focus recently, is the Liberal Democrat belief in decentralising power. This has found an echo in the Conservative belief in “small government” (shown in the relatively easy merging of policies on things like stopping ID cards and lowering tax thresholds) and an anti-echo (if there is such a thing) in Labour’s belief in centralising power and authoritarianism, which, I wager, was one of the main stumbling blocks in trying to form a Lab-Lib coalition. 

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