For contra: a more detailed rebuttal
Cleggeron liberalism works if you're winning. But it's callous if not | Madeleine Bunting | Comment is free | The Guardian
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The champagne bottles are in the recycling bin, the bouquets on the compost heap and the cake crumbs swept away. The wedding is over, and it's down to the day-to-day business of marriage – who does the washing-up, who remembers to rinse the bath out and who gets the milk when it runs out. Every day we hear more detail on how exactly the task of governing the country will be divvied up in this unlikely pairing.
But there is a longer term issue that Nick Clegg and David Cameron will need to address. They will have to develop a convincing story of why they are in power together beyond the obvious explanation that the electorate provided them with a tricky hand. The wedding celebrations may have delighted a few guests from the media, but it has left plenty of others incredulous at the display of smug alpha male ambition. All round the country come howls of fury – Facebook groups in outrage, Question Time audiences excoriating their politicians for betrayal, infuriated letter writers declaring they've ripped up their membership cards and/or left their party.
Converting this kind of hostility, and even its milder equivalents of scepticism, into a grudging agreement to give the new government a chance is a novel challenge for an incoming government. Having effectively shelved their manifestos, having disorientated the electorate and the punditry, this government will have no period of grace to adjust to the task of governing. There is a heavy onus to explain, justify and defend what their coalition is about – other than pure expediency. This is an issue of legitimacy and it can't be left for later. The argument advanced by Tory grandees like Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd in recent days that the British had got the government they had voted for – the product of a hung parliament – won't wash. The election verdict was a deeply divided country.
The adjectives we heard repeatedly during the frenzied coalition talks were "strong", "stable" and "principled" government. They stitched a deal together that can plausibly claim the first two, now they have to convince us of the third. Not the usual order of things, but not impossible. Clegg's recent piece in the Guardian is the first bid to define this new liberalism.
What can now be dug out and energetically promoted is a trail of thinktank papers and pamphlets that explored the ground of a Lib-Con convergence long before anyone thought it feasible. The prize for the most prescient must go to Julian Astle's paper, A Lib Con Trick?, which was published in March. It now stands as one of the sharpest analyses of the overlaps and faultlines of the current government. As Astle points out, Cameron has been moving into Liberal Democrat territory ever since he became leader in 2005, declaring he wanted to turn his party into a "liberal, progressive" force. By September 2009 he clearly believed he had largely achieved this aim and claimed "there's barely a cigarette paper between us in all these areas", referring to localism, civil liberties, education and social mobility. For Cameron, this coalition is the culmination of an audacious bid to reshape the centre ground of British politics as liberal, and claim it as his home turf.
For Clegg this must have felt like a loud, messy new flatmate moving in, but now he can acknowledge that they like the same music. "Clegg and Cameron have developed a similar liberal critique of the current government – as too centralised, too big and too interfering – [they] committed their parties to the same challenge; to break decisively from Labour's top-down, centrally planned approach to governance and put real power back in the hands of the British people," wrote Astle. This redistribution of power will be much trumpeted in coming months.
There's more of this kind of thinking to be found at Demos, which has been hard at work excavating the liberal common ground – its reading of the political runes has proved uncannily accurate. Demos boasts cabinet ministers from both parties – George Osborne, Vince Cable, Danny Alexander – on its advisory council. Treasury officials searching for ideological orientation in dealing with this hybrid government last week were allegedly being advised to read Demos's 2009 pamphlet The Liberal Republic.
Liberalism has been a notoriously elastic word – as often used as a term of abuse applied to Islington chatterati as claimed to define an acceptable form of individualism. New Labour flirted with liberalism – David Miliband, Alan Milburn, James Purnell, for instance – but they now find themselves outflanked by a Cleggeron land grab.
At the centre of this re-emergent liberalism is the much used idea of a "self-authored life", in which individual autonomy is paramount to shape one's own version of the good life. The only role the state has is to ensure the individuals have the capabilities for autonomy, such as education and health. Power resides in individuals, who should be free to make their own choices in public services such as health and education. The state must leave people to run their own lives, dismantling big institutions and bureaucracies. This kind of liberalism – with references to JS Mill and Amartya Sen – pulls together Cameron's "big society" with Lib Dem localism. It provides them with a shared story of what their government could be about.
What it can achieve in tackling welfare dependence, broken Britain, political disengagement and other objectives for which it makes great claims, remains to be seen. Liberalism, has, at heart, a deeply idealistic view of human nature: give people power and they will know how to use it. That contrasts with Conservatism, which has traditionally been more sceptical, recognising the "crooked timber of humanity". Furthermore, governments intent on reducing the size of the state rarely achieve the objective, as the Thatcherites bitterly recognised.
What is lost in this coalition – as Shirley Williams recognised in the Guardian – is any notion of state action to achieve equality and social justice. But perhaps this is where Labour needs to do some hard thinking: its version of state action – managerialist, technocratic, efficient – has profoundly antagonised those who work for it and many of those who uses its services. Also absent from this narrative of liberal Britain is any notion of solidarity or recognition that inter-dependence is inescapable. For instance, these ideas of "self-authoring" and autonomy jar with women's lives, which are so often framed by care, nurture and dependence; they underline the current re-masculinisation of politics. It is striking that those who most ardently espouse this renovated liberalism bear similar characteristics: fluent, high-achieving men with an ability to duck and weave round the uncertainties of life to cut good deals – such as Cleggeron.
It's a set of ideas for government that will appeal to successful, aspirant England – southern England outside London opted for it en masse in the election in a flat rejection of Labour – but it offers as much loneliness and insecurity as it does freedom. Combine it with a savage programme of spending cuts, and it could look plain callous. New political battlegrounds are beginning to emerge from the earthquake of last week.
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So basically, screw what everyone else voted for: you have decided that what is good for them is a highly intrusive, authoritarian government based on offensive gender stereotypes.
Did you ever stop to think that a lot of people who voted for this government were... erm... women? They can vote too these days, however much you may dislike the fact. Historically tended to swing towards the Tory side of things too.
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