Six Conspiracy Theories about the New Tory-Lib Dem Coalition

Posted by Dr Rajesh Venugopal

1. The Tories Ambushed the Lib Dems: The Tories cleverly lured the Lib Dems into a trap, offering them everything on paper, but little in practice. In reality, Clegg and Cable control nothing, and remain under the thumb of Cameron and Osborne respectively. Worse, the Tory offer on electoral reform (a referendum) is a trick designed to fail. Clegg cravenly sacrified his ideals, betrayed his followers, and bartered away electoral reform for an illusion of power. Just remember - the last deputy PM was John Prescott - and what was he in charge of (except punching voters)? Gotcha!

2. The Lib Dems Ambushed the Tories: This was a very Lib Dem coup. With just one-sixth of the Tory strength in parliament, the Lib Dems have gained disproportionate influence on government, cheating the Tories of their long-deserved victory and emasculating their agenda. The first Tory PM for 13 years is now hamstrung by a cabinet full of Europhiles and socialists. City bankers who paid for Osborne, but got saddled with Cable will think again before unburdening their wallets. The Lib Dems, who are now set to obstruct plans to cut spending or curb immigration, might, if not kept under close watch, get ambitious and replace ‘God Save the Queen’ with Dąbrowski's Mazurka.

3. David Cameron Ambushed the Tories: David Cameron’s unseemly haste to compromise and share power with Nick Clegg reveals his hidden agenda to gut the nasty party of its carnivorous core, and to turn it into a kinder, cuddlier, less ideological, and more herbivorous creature. As the hoodie-hugging, self-styled 'compassionate Conservative', he has always been viewed with suspicion by the retired Colonels in the shires, many of whom were alarmed during the first debate when he admitted that he had spoken with a black man (in Plymouth!). He will doubtless use the Lib Dems as an excuse to marginalise Thatcherite holdouts and justify a centrist path. Watch the letters column of the Daily Mail and Telegraph in the coming month for more details.

4. Labour Pushed the Lib Dems into Cameron’s arms: The Tory-Lib Dem alliance is a sly Labour plot to get the other two parties to fix the financial crisis, take the tough decisions, and absorb the public anger, while they sit back and watch (making pious platitudes about protecting the poor). As the Lib Dem deal team will tell you, Labour was just not interested in negotiating, and Labour outriders such as Reid and Blunkett talked down the deal as negotiations were in progress. Labour grandees, led by the Prince of Darkness, have calculated that the coalition will turn dysfunctional within a couple of years (Cable will be the first to buckle), and that their own party, reinvigorated with new leadership, would stand poised to recapture power after the Clegg-Cameron coalition collapses amid vicious bickering and plunging polls.

5. The Scots Ambushed the English: Cameron is the third successive prime minister that the Scots have imposed on the English. Tony Blair was born in Edinburgh to Scottish parents. Gordon Brown openly admits to being a Scot. And despite the fact that his name is a give-away, many have missed the fact that David Cameron himself is also of recent Scottish ancestry – his father is from Aberdeen. Scotland has just 8% of the UK’s population, but has mysteriously managed to stitch up the prime ministerial selection since 1997. Is it any mystery that the West Lothian question festers on?

6. Women Ambushed Men: The real power behind the Clegg-Cameron deal is the female vote. Media stereotypes and the X factor in politics have promoted inflated expectations among women voters of what male public figures should look and sound like. Can there be any doubt that it was the female vote that brought these two young, articulate, under-weight and telegenic men to power, rejecting the less telegenic Gordon Brown, Neil Farage or Nick Griffin? Most men groaned in disbelief when they saw the images of the Clegg-Cameron joint press conference on Wednesday, and found that it promoted a demeaning, unattainable and unhealthy ideal of masculinity, with attendant consequences for self-esteem and future political aspirations. David Miliband's soaring candidacy provides depressing evidence that Labour has also succumbed to this pressure of competing for the female vote in what is becoming the 'hunk' parliament.

The Coalition Government

Posted by Dr Andrew Connell

Look at how the Cabinet seats have been distributed between the parties. All the big and totemic spending departments- Health, Education, Defence, Home Office, Communities and Local Government, Work and Pensions, and Transport- are in Conservative hands. This government is going to have to make big spending cuts and this will give the Conservatives the maximum of control over them- although it is the Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury, David Laws, who will have the blood on his hands when the cuts come.

Now look at where the other Lib Dem ministers are. Vince Cable’s appointment to Business was perhaps more or less inevitable once it is accepted that he was not going to be Chancellor, and Energy and Climate Change, which Chris Huhne has been given, was an important department in the last government. But Deputy Prime Minister- Nick Clegg’s post- has usually been a more or less ornamental role and although the Scottish Secretary (Danny Alexander) may achieve a certain importance as a liaison with the SNP government in Edinburgh, since devolution the job has not been the almost mini-premiership that it once was.

These are the first peacetime Liberal/ Lib Dem cabinet ministers for nearly 80 years, and they are no doubt pleased to be there. But the jobs they’ve been given emphasise their party’s junior role in this coalition.

Over the Lib-Lab-Nat Rainbow…

Posted by Dr Simon Parker

If back around the time of my birth Harold Wilson could claim that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ we have just seen that yardstick disappear into the black hole of the space-time continuum that is 24 Hour Rolling News (or in the case of Sky News -Fight Club).

As recently as Tuesday lunchtime the Rainbow Coalition looked like it was heading for the Emerald City arm-in-arm with the Tin Man (Lord Mandelson), the Scarecrow (Ed Balls) and the Cowardly Lion (Lord Adonis) with Ed Miliband, ruby red slippers in hand auditioning for the part of Dorothy (don’t phone now because your vote won’t count and you may be charged a large subscription to the Labour Party).

I realised a deal was doomed as I woke to the cackling voice of the Wicked Witch of Westminster (played alternately by John Reid and David Blunkett)

“Ring around the Labour rosie, a pocket full of Blears! Thought you were pretty foxy, didn't you? Well! The last to go will see the first three go before him! And your mangy little Guardian bloggy, too!

While from North Yorkshire there blew an icy-cold tweet, it was the Hon. Member for Richmond warning us that he was on his way to Whitehall. The Munchkins of the media shimmered and swayed outside 10 Downing Street, while the BBC’s own Nikko the Monkey (ably played by Nick Robinson) declared that Mr Clegg was back on ‘his chosen path’—that being the YELLOW AND BLUE brick road and not that NASTY RED one which takes you to “the coalition of the defeated” in Munchkin City.

Interestingly, Alan Johnson suggested that the failure of the Rainbow Initiative had as much to do with the state of exhaustion and mood of defeat in the parliamentary Labour Party than the difficulties of the arithmetic. It is unlikely that a single policy area or ‘red line’ scuppered the Lib-Lab deal given that so many cherished Liberal Democrat priorities—from Europe to migration to Trident— have been sacrificed on the alter of the Cabinet table. But what finally persuaded Clegg’s team to walk away from a rainbow alliance, according to one senior LibDem source, appears to have been Labour’s refusal to make any concessions on civil liberties.

If true this suggests that either Labour’s negotiators badly misunderstood what Nick Clegg’s real ‘red lines’ were (one suspects that they were written on more than one piece of paper) or that the whole exercise was something of a charade to give the Browns time to finish packing.

The release of the coalition agreement shows what an ill-fitting suit has been cut from the remnants of the two parties’ manifestos, but there are little silver linings sewn into each section of blue serge to appease the LibDem faithful.

· On immigration—gone is the amnesty, and in comes the annual cap on migration, but child immigration detention is to be stopped (a policy change which I frankly never expected to see under a majority Labour government)

· On tackling the deficit—the £6 billion cuts package will go ahead but some of the money saved from “efficiency savings” will be put into job creation and green investment.

· On the Spending Review there was more common ground to begin with on pupil premiums and protecting NHS spending in real terms, as well as the ring-fencing of overseas aid to 0.7 of GNI. But the costly replacement for Trident will no longer be part of the Defence Review. The state pension will have the earnings link restored but the value of public sector pensions will be drastically reduced (a fight that Liberals and Conservatives are happier to have with the unions than New Labour would have been).

· On tax, Vince Cable gets his £10,000 starting threshold and the inheritance tax threshold will stay where it is for the time being. But the national insurance rise planned by Labour (aka ‘the tax on jobs’) is now history.

· The planned political reforms with the significant exception of devolution to Scotland, Wales and N.Ireland are more far reaching than any measures introduced during the 13 years of a Labour government. These include fixed five year parliaments (the next ‘planned’ general election will be May 2015), there will be a mainly or wholly elected upper chamber elected by PR, and there will be referendum on AV for the House of Commons.

· On civil liberties, the ‘roll back’ of Labour legislation and policy proposals is genuinely significant: ID cards are to go, the right to peaceful protest without being branded a terrorist is to be restored along with the right to jury trial. DNA data retention will follow the much stricter Scottish model, and libel laws will be reformed to protect freedom of speech.

· Europe is the one area of policy where the Cameron red line appears to have been drawn most heavily and emphatically. There will be no ‘ever closer union’ under a Lib-Con government and to emphasise the point a new act restoring the sovereignty of the UK parliament. The working time directive will be opposed as will the jurisdiction of a European Public Prosecutor. The one fig leaf left for the Lib Dems is a vague commitment to European dialogue on climate change and poverty reduction.

All this amounts to a new manifesto, and civil servants will be studying it closely to work out how, together with the first coalition cabinet since the Second World War, they can re-tool the Whitehall machine to deliver a challenging array of policies in the context of a financial crisis that one wouldn’t wish on one’s worst political enemies.

Although, as Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, unguardedly remarked, if the ‘winners’ of last Thursday’s election will be out of power for a generation—perhaps there really will be election gold over the rainbow once this little twister blows over.

Remember Gordon, just click your heels together and repeat, ‘there’s no place like Kirkcaldy, there’s no place like home…’