| A Lib Con Trick? |
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Julian Astle The Conservatives have been talking up their chances of doing a deal with the Liberal Democrats if the general election fails to deliver them a majority. Conservative shadow business secretary Ken Clarke has even suggested that “Nick Clegg is a conservative”. David Cameron meanwhile regularly describes himself as a “liberal” and has claimed that on a range of policy issues, “there’s barely a cigarette paper between us”. But according to a new report from CentreForum, the liberal think tank, the two parties’ similarities are being wildly overstated, as are the chances of them working together in a formal coalition if the Tories are returned as the largest party in a hung parliament. The paper, entitled ‘A Lib Con trick?’, points out that although the election of a self-styled ‘liberal Conservative’ as Tory leader should have increased the likelihood of meaningful co-operation between the two parties, so far, that co-operation has been conspicuous by its absence. In part, this is down to a deep rooted mutual mistrust – policy positions may be ever changing, but the culture of a party, and the core instincts of its members, are not. In part, it is a simple result of electoral imperatives – as long as the success of each party depends on the failure of the other, co-operation will prove difficult. According to Julian Astle, Director of CentreForum and the author of the report: “The continuing poor relations between the parties are also a result of something more fundamental: the belief, held by virtually every Liberal Democrat, that the Conservative party has not been engaged in as fundamental a re-invention as David Cameron would like voters to believe. The Lib Dem view is that the Conservatives – with their regressive inheritance tax policy, their ardent Euro-scepticism, their failure to translate their rhetorical commitment to the environment into hard policy, and their refusal to countenance far-reaching constitutional and political reform – are simply not as liberal as they claim. “It would be a mistake to assume from this that the Lib Dems would, in a hung parliament in which the Conservatives were the largest party, simply revert to ‘business as usual’ opposition. With politics set to be dominated for the foreseeable future by the need to tackle the UK’s massive structural deficit, the over-riding objective for the Liberal Democrats will be to demonstrate that they are part of the solution, not the problem. In a hung parliament, the Lib Dems will wield significant political power, but will have to use that power sparingly. They will remain on the opposition benches, but will increasingly have to think and act like a governing party. The rules of the game could be about to change dramatically.” |
