Coalition

David Laws’s 22 Days in May is a first-hand account of the talks that led from the inconclusive general election of 2010 to the formation of the first Coalition cabinet. It suggests that Labour didn’t seriously want to form a coalition and Ed Balls pretty much sabotaged the talks; the Tories meanwhile were professional, eager to compromise and constructive.

Is this true? Well, I wasn’t in the room, of course. There are disputes about the sincerity of the Labour talks, though Peter Mandelson in The Third Man has said ‘I doubted whether there was a real prospect of a government combining ourselves and the Liberal Democrats. It would have been a coalition of the losers’. Since Mandelson was leading the Labour talks, perhaps he is acknowledging that there was no real appetite for talks.

However, it serves David Laws to blame the Labour Party for the failure of a new Lib-Lab agreement, or a ‘progressive alliance’ that Paddy Ashdown and others had dreamed of. The book makes it clear that talking to the Tories was extremely unpopular with some members of his party. In one striking section, Laws shows up at a meeting of the parliamentary party and sits next to Ming Campbell: ‘I knew Ming would be disappointed that the prospect of a coalition with Labour was over, but I did not realise just how angry and upset he was until I sat down next to him. Ming and I are friends [...] but on this occasion he was in no mood to talk, and I was relieved when I was eventually asked to come to the front of the room to join the other negotiators’.

The book is throughout written with hindsight, so we know the Labour talks will go badly even before they are begun. There is quite unconcealed personal contempt for Gordon Brown that runs through the book and, on the other hand, a breezily admiring attitude to the Tories. Laws notes that ‘there is a clearly a strong relationship between David Cameron and Nick Clegg, and the importance of this can’t be underestimated - it sets the tone for the government at every level’, an opaque phrase which might say as much about their shared class background as anything else.

David Laws is an odd Liberal. He was offered a post in the Tory shadow cabinet in 2006, with the promise that this would translate into a cabinet post if they were elected. He turned it down, saying that ‘the truth is that I am a liberal, not a Conservative. I believe passionately in creating a fairer country, but I happen to believe that this will be done through liberal means and not by big government solutions’, which is pretty much saying he’s a liberal because the Tories are too socialist for him. He speaks like a true Tory when he observes that ‘the Treasury was relishing getting back to fulfilling its traditional role as guardian of the public finances and taxpayer interest after a long period of public profligacy’. After his first (and only) performance as the despatch box as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, one Conservative MP called him ‘the biggest Tory in the Cabinet’ and it’s hard not to disagree.

David Laws was coeditor of The Orange Book, a collection of essays published in 2004 with the subtitle ‘Reclaiming Liberalism’ which, broadly, means reclaiming economic liberalism for the Liberal Democrats. The first of his two contributions to the book is a strongly-argued call for the Liberal Democrats to embrace libertarianism at the personal level and economic liberalism (i.e. neoliberalism) at the state level. He argues that the Party has drifted towards what he calls, with typically Tory rhetoric, ‘nanny-state liberalism’. In fact, he breaks the liberalisms he thinks the party should embrace into personal, political, economic and social headings, arguing for rolling back the frontiers of the state, repatriating powers from the EU, embracing privatisation, lowering taxes and introducing more market competition into the NHS. It’s Thatcherism, though without her emphasis on Victorian morality.

His last proposal is set out more fully in his second chapter, which considers how to improve the NHS. Inevitably, he disdains the idea of a ‘better-funded status quo’ (an option that he deals with peremptorily and tendentiously), then dispatches the Labour reforms and the Tory voucher system, and proposes a National Health Insurance Scheme in which everyone would choose from a range of health providers, including the NHS. We’d be able to change every year. The transaction costs would be enormous and - rather nannyishly - it bossily demands that we research into our doctors in a way that the evidence is that most people don’t want to do. The majority of people never change their bank account; where would we get unbiased, reliable and appropriate information about the quality of our health provider? It’s a nerve-racking and silly system that could only be born in the head of someone with a madcap love of market mechanisms and no understanding of people.

So David Laws is basically a Tory who thinks the Liberal Democrats could be repositioned to the economic right and social left of the Tories. He was never going to be sympathetic to a coalition with the Labour Party so I am left wondering if the lack of goodwill is entirely to be laid at the feet of Ed Balls.

These thoughts matter because the Coalition currently seems more splintered than at any moment in its first year. Nick Clegg and David Cameron have expressed precisely opposite views about the nature of apprenticeships. Vince Cable has been outspoken in his rejection of David Cameron’s anti-immigration speech. Nick Clegg, Simon Hughes and Chris Huhne have been extremely vociferous in their criticism of the low, lying tactics of the ‘No’ campaign in the AV referendum. William Hague and others have tried to sound conciliatory and it may be that the Lib Dems are trying to reassert their independence fearing a haemorrhage in their support at the local elections, but it’s going to be awkward round the Cabinet table next time they meet.

Laws paints the Party has having surprisingly embraced the Tory coalition, pace Ming and Paddy, but if - as looks likely - the AV Referendum fails and senior Tories are responsible for lying about the proposal, it would be very difficult for Nick Clegg to retain the support of his MPs and of the Tories, Could the Coalition fracture? Well, if it was the perfect marriage, as Laws suggests, then maybe it’s solid. But if he’s wrong, or simply seeing it with blue-tinted spectacles, then we may see the Coalition split apart, with the Tories forced to soldier on as a minority administration, facing constant votes of confidence and unable to legislate. We’ll see.

Three other small things: first, the book is very boringly written indeed. Banal, impersonal, Pooterish in places. Take this piece of reportage: ‘We strolled back in silence across Portcullis House, and then down the escalator that connects with the main Palace of Westminster. We turned right before reaching the Terrace of the House of Commons, and then right again to the lifts to take us up to the first floor of Parliament’. A literary stylist he ain’t. And that confirms my sense that he’s not a ‘people person’.

Second, it seems as though university tuition fees were barely mentioned in the negotiations. Could the Lib Dems really have given up their pledge on fees without a whimper? David Laws was not a supporter of any pledge on tuition fees so maybe he plays this down too much, but it does look as though the Lib Dems and Tories seriously underestimated the significance of the tuition fees debate and the level of resistance they would meet.

Finally, and quite off-topic, this is the first eBook I’ve read. In fact I read it via the Kindle app on my iPhone so it’s about as unfriendly a reading experience as you could imagine. But it was surprisingly pleasant and easy to do. Being able to find quotes by the app searching the text - as I’ve done to write this - is extremely helpful. It’s making me seriously think about trying to move away from paper...