British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Implications of the present Coalition for British politics
A British Academy Forum, held on 7 December 2010, chaired by Professor Anthony King FBA.
List of participants
Anthony Barnett (openDemocracy)
Sir Ivor Crewe (University College, Oxford)
Maurice Glasman
Dr Catherine Haddon (Institute for Government)
Martin Kettle (Guardian)
Professor Anthony King FBA (University of Essex)
Dominic Lawson (Independent)
Lord Roger Liddle
Professor David Marquand FBA (University of Oxford)
Professor Judith Marquand (University of Oxford)
Chris Nicholson (CentreForum)
Akash Paun (Institute for Government)
Dr Marc Stears (University of Oxford)
Will Straw (Left Foot Forward)
Baroness Shirley Williams
Sir Robert Worcester (Ipsos MORI)
The discussion was opened by Professor David Marquand FBA. The following is his advance briefing note:
The first peacetime Coalition since the 1930s has now been in power for six months, and the novelty has worn off. But its implications for the future, the real meaning of its policies and the reactions of the Labour Opposition are still unclear. We know that the Coalition’s Spending Review sets out a programme of expenditure cuts more stringent than any since the Second World War, but we don’t know if the cuts will actually be made: the Chancellor has left himself plenty of ‘wriggle room’ for downward revisions if his optimism about the future course of the economy turns out to have been misplaced. We also know that, despite their stringency, the cuts will not shrink the state to hitherto undreamed of lows. The net effect is predicted to lower public spending to around 40% of GDP – not very different from its level in the year before the crash, when Labour was in power. The political implications are equally unclear. The polls suggest that the public are in favour of the spending cuts in principle, but they also suggest that there is much less enthusiasm for the distribution of the pain.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party has narrowly elected a young, untried but rhetorically accomplished new leader on a ticket of change, with consequences that remain to be seen. The Liberal Democrats’ future is equally uncertain. Despite restiveness here and there they have so far stuck to the Coalition agreement. However, their future course is uncertain: if AV is defeated in the projected referendum, or if the many Keynesian critics of the Spending Review turn out to have been right, internal party pressures to break with their Coalition partners seem likely to mount.
A more complex question looms in the background. The Coalition came into existence in the first place as a response to the parliamentary arithmetic produced by the May election. No other feasible government would have commanded a working majority. In a sense, it was a marriage of convenience, perhaps of necessity. But was it also more than that? Is it held together by deeper ideological or even philosophical affinities – about the role of the state and its relationship to civil society and the market – strong enough to withstand the inevitable upsets and disappointments of government? If so, what are they? And how do they relate to the ideology(ies) of the Labour Party?
The British Academy Forum is intended to examine these broad issues, and their implications for British politics in the longer term. In particular, it is intended to focus on three related issues:
- The significance of the ‘Big Society’ rhetoric favoured, in particular, by David Cameron. On the whole this has had a lukewarm reception from political commentators, not all of them Labour or Labour-leaning. But it would be a mistake to dismiss it out of hand as mere flim-flam. Rhetoric matters. At the minimum it tells us how the rhetorician concerned wishes to be seen. It may also tell us something about the nature of the support he or she hopes to win, and about the ideological star he or she steers by. In that perspective, the ‘Big Society’ rhetoric raises a number of overlapping questions for the future, not just of the Coalition but of British politics in general. Is it camouflage for a return to Thatcherism, or does it imply a turn away from Thatcherism towards a new version of the conservatism of Baldwin, Macmillan and Heath? Should it be seen as the latest manifestation of a long-standing strand in Conservative (and conservative) thought that goes back to Edmund Burke and his emphasis on the 'little platoons' as the nurseries of ‘public affections’? How far does it chime with the decentralist strand in the in the Liberal (and liberal) tradition? Insofar as it does can it provide the basis for a coherent governing project – not just in the immediate future but over the long term?
- For most of this century, the Liberal Party (and later the Liberal Democrats) has seen itself, and been seen by others, as a party of the centre-left. Has it now become a party of the centre right? Does the liberalism of Clegg’s ‘Orange Book’ mark the abandonment of the ‘social liberal’ or ‘new liberal’ tradition exemplified, e.g., by the pre-1914 Asquith-Lloyd George Liberal Government, the Liberal Yellow Book of the 1920s, the Beveridge Report of the 1940s and the Liberalism of David Steel and Paddy Ashdown? Does the Liberal Democrats’ support for the Spending Review imply that they have abandoned the economics of J.M. Keynes, arguably the greatest liberal thinker of the twentieth century. What does all this imply for the future direction of the Liberal Democrat party? Has it been captured by Cameron’s artful statecraft? Will it go the way of Joe Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionists or John Simon’s National Liberals? Or perhaps of the German Free Democrats – i.e. a party of the right, combining neo-liberal, free-market economics with a strong commitment to personal freedom and civil liberties?
- How should we understand Labour’s reaction to the Coalition so far, and where do we think its new Leader will take it? Immediately after the election, it looked as if sections of the Labour Party, at least, would oppose the version of electoral reform the party campaigned for in the General Election. Is that still the case? Equally, what do we make of Labour’s reaction to the cuts? Has it effectively reneged on the cuts programme it was itself preparing in Government? More generally, does Labour’s apparent disdain for the ‘Big Society’ show that it is irredeemably statist? Assuming a change in the electoral system, can it adjust to a more pluralistic political system – including coalition politics as a norm – as time goes on? And could it rediscover the non-statist strand(s) in its own heritage – e.g. Robert Owen, William Morris, G.D.H. Cole’s Guild Socialism and the syndicalists before the First World War?
David Marquand, 3 November 2010