The new Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, with his fetish for fancy phrases, says it is “a double conundrum”. Others are using less kind descriptions for the facing-both-ways stance adopted by the Lib Dems over their partnership in the Scottish government coalition. Such words as “hypocrisy”, “bad faith” and “totally unprincipled” – terms not often associated with the nice muddle-in-the-middle party – are freely bandied about.
Disraeli said: “England does not love coalitions.” Now that we have had brief experience of our very own coalition, for England read Scotland. It is freely predicted that the coalition cannot last beyond the end of the year and will founder on the vexed issue of Labour’s insistence that students should pay tuition fees and the Lib Dems’ wish to abolish them.
When it does, there will be huge sighs of relief all round, because Scotland will really be in the era of the much-vaunted “new politics”. Labour’s Donald Dewar invited the Scottish Lib Dem leader, Jim Wallace, into the power-sharing agreement for the sake of an easy political life. Rather than four years’ soldiering on as a minority administration and fighting on every issue, the extra votes would help him push legislation through the Scottish Parliament.
The pictures of the signing of the historic coalition agreement tell their own story. Wallace is flushed and excited, Dewar just looks satisfied. But that agreement has been bought at the cost of considerable embarrassment to both parties and, in any case, Dewar cannot count on the Lib Dems’ support on the crucial issues. The signs of strain increase every week and the coalition is collapsing under them.
Meanwhile, at the Liberal Democrat conference in Harrogate, Kennedy will have to justify his “double conundrum” of how to justify fighting Westminster elections in opposition to the Labour government, while being in government with Labour in Scotland.
“That is going to be a devilishly difficult thing to do,” he admits. Whatever contortions he performs, they are not going to amuse his members from those parts of the UK, such as Liverpool and London, where the only thing Lib Dems and Labourites agree on is their mutual hatred. Scottish Liberal Democrats are finding their first taste of government power is laced with poison.
Jim Wallace may have got the (largely meaningless) title of Deputy First Minister and his bottom on the back seat of a ministerial car, but it has been at the expense of exposing himself to some of the most scathing attacks ever suffered by a Scottish politician.
Never mind that it has largely been due to his bumbling ineptitude, he has also been used as a convenient can-carrier by the Dewar administration. On the ground, Liberal Democrats are finding their party has been compromised in the eyes of the electorate. Their Hamilton South by-election candidate, Marilyne MacLaren, is constantly being forced to explain why she is bothering to stand against Labour.
While the Lib Dems squirm, the Tories and Nationalists are gloating because they believe the coalition has taken one of their opponents out of the game. If it survives, the Lib Dems are tarred with the Labour brush; if it collapses, they are discredited anyway.
Wallace insists he has not sold out the party; but merely by having to say that, and keep saying it, he undermines his leadership. He has had to suffer the indignity of sitting in parliament while his opponents scorn him as “Labour’s lapdog” and a “naive dupe”. He will not even be allowed the politician’s privilege of rewriting history, as was shown by Kirsty Wark’s recent Restless Nation documentary on BBC. It showed Wallace claiming: “I don’t ever recall that I said tuition fees would be dead by Friday [the day after the Scottish Parliament election].” Cut to video of pre-election press conference, where Wallace is sitting alongside Lord (now “Sir” in one of the few voluntary demotions ever by a politician) David Steel, while Paddy Ashdown looks on disdainfully, like a commanding officer whose ill-trained squaddies are about to blunder into a minefield.
Steel declares bullishly: “Tuition fees are dead as from next Friday.”
Wallace: “Well, as good as . . . “
Cut again to a photograph of Wallace signing the National Union of Students petition to kill off tuition fees. Once more, Wallace has been kebabbed by Wark’s razor-sharp mind and tongue. She it was who skewered him in the live head-to-head debate of party leaders in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, finally forcing out of him the undertaking that an end to tuition fees was “non-negotiable”.
The report of the committee, chaired by the lawyer Andrew Cubie, on fees, university finances and the whole question of student poverty is due in December. Already, there is talk of get-out clauses. Wallace believes it may be possible to “ring-fence” the issue of tuition fees and the partners in the Scottish government would agree to disagree over this one item. The Dewar camp is now saying hazily: “There should be no rush to abandon tuition fees without knowing first how they would be replaced.”
Leading Lib Dems are making it clear that even if the Cubie committee comes down in favour of retaining student fees, they will still vote them out of existence – even if it means wrecking the coalition. Donald Gorrie, a full-time member of their back-bench awkward squad, makes no bones about it: “We have to vote against tuition fees or we are dead.”
The coalition might be saved, but only at the expense of more accusations of fudging, fiddling and discreditable double-dealing. It would be far more honourable, and more in the spirit of the “new politics”, to let the coalition collapse. There is much to be gained from Dewar and co functioning as a minority government, making the case for its programme issue-by-issue and forcing opposition parties to justify voting against them.
Coalitions have only worked in times of national emergency – war and its aftermath, and the National Government of 1931-35, formed to combat the economic crisis. Herbert Asquith, the Liberal prime minister who reluctantly led the first world war coalition government, said: “Nothing is so demoralising to the tone of public life, or so belittling to the stature of public men.”
That is still true. A coalition that sacrifices principle for political convenience lowers the tone of Scottish public life. And the stature of Jim Wallace and the Liberal Democrats appears to be diminishing daily. Let us have done with it.
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