If, like me, you plan to watch Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne present the UK coalition government’s 2013 budget to Parliament today, you might like to use this handy tool to pass the time. You can treat it as either a bingo card or a drinking game, depending on how pessimistic you feel about the budget contents…
30 minutes until showtime. Enjoy!
If you do not already do so, please consider following me on Twitter @SamHooper.
Happy Budget Day!
While Conservative MPs and most right-leaning commentators continue to shriek loudly about dastardly betrayal by their Liberal Democrat coalition partners, the rest of the world has moved on and decided that it is the Tories who are the coalition cheaters in this particular relationship. Quoting a recent YouGov poll, The Spectator reports:
Here’s an interesting statistic from YouGov: more voters think the Conservatives have broken the coalition agreement than think the Lib Dems have failed to stick to it. When asked whether the Tories have ‘mostly kept to their side of the deal they made in the coalition agreement’, 51 per cent said no. For the Lib Dems, 45 per cent of voters thought the Lib Dems had stuck to the coalition agreement against 32 per cent who thought they had not.
So 51% of voters think that the Conservatives have failed to uphold the coalition agreement, while only 32% of voters think the same of the Liberal Democrats.
The ludicrous position in which the Conservative Party now finds itself is entirely due to political blundering by their leadership, and blinkered stubbornness from their grass roots. The Liberal Democrats have, in general, taken far more of a political kicking over the past few years than the Conservatives as a result of their mutual decision to go into coalition government together – look no further than the tuition fee increase furore as a prime example. If, as some commentators say, electoral constituency boundary reform is the most important thing to the Conservatives as they seek to win a straight majority at the next general election in 2015, perhaps they should have read the tea leaves better and realised that thwarting a cause dear to the hearts of their coalition partners might bring about a reprisal that would damage a cause dear to their own.
To clarify my own position: I am no fan of modifying the voting system in this country, and certainly no fan of AV. I’m glad that the referendum yielded a resounding “no” vote. I am, however, very much a fan of having the upper house of Parliament finally becoming a democratically legitimate body, one with equal status to the Commons and thus ending their primacy if possible (though the current bill would not do this).
It is all very well talking about principle and the fact that ministers are expected to support the government in Parliamentary votes. But we are living in interesting times and uncharted political territory. We have a government that no-one elected, comprised of two parties with (at times) very divergent views. The “glue” that holds this together, and the only thing stopping the Conservatives from having to form a lame-duck minority administration or calling a new election, is the threat of political reprisal by one party when the other strays. You squash my policy proposal, I’ll scupper yours. Is it pretty, and is it ideal? No, of course not. Coalition government is not ideal in any way. But successive governments, in their laziness, have failed to put in place a better mechanism for dealing with a hung Parliament, so this is what we are stuck with.
We conservatives screwed our Lib Dem coalition partners on House of Lords reform, and now they have hit us back. We tried calling the waambulance and demanding the sympathy of the British electorate for the terrible things that the naughty Lib Dems did to us, and by a margin of 51%-32% they told us to quit crying and grow up. By and large, no one outside the Westminster village cares about process. They care about outcomes. Referring to a sub-clause in the coalition agreement with outraged, wounded indignity will not win us any more supporters.
So there are two choices now, as far as I can tell:
1. Yet another embarrassing, totally avoidable political U-turn. David Cameron gets tough with his backbenchers and whips them into line to pass the House of Lords reform bill, or
2. Cameron accepts the Liberal Democrat retaliation, waves goodbye to boundary reform and possibly the only chance of winning an outright majority at the next general election.
It’s not complicated.
I should say from the outset that I do not believe a centralised, taxpayer-funded, government-provided healthcare system is the optimal way to deliver healthcare to a population, though I do appreciate the reasons behind the founding of the NHS, and acknowledge that it does deliver generally satisfactory results when compared with other systems, including the various times throughout my life when I have used the service.
I think that the American “best healthcare system in the world!” method is far worse, and that having a concentration of the world’s best medical facilities does not make up for the fact that these world class resources remain off limits to the vast majority of the population with insufficient insurance coverage to pay for them. I also believe that while ObamaCare fixes some of American healthcare’s most egregious flaws (the huge number of uninsured and the ability of health insurance providers to screw their customers), it leaves other problems (the link between health insurance and employers, for example) totally untouched.
Anyway. Since we do have a national health service in Britain, and that consequently healthcare spending must compete with the myriad of other government and departmental priorities from education to national defence, I would hope we could all agree that since the NHS isn’t going anywhere any time soon (being a realist), it should be made to work as efficiently as possible, the levels of spending on it should be justified in terms of tangible outcomes, and equally that the monies which are spent on other areas, to the detriment of healthcare spending, should be able to be justified by the government of the day.
What does all of this have to do with foreign aid, and the money that the British government spends on aid to developing countries?
Well, as right-leaning blogger Guido Fawkes reports today, Prime Minister David Cameron has just been schooled on this very point as he participated in a radio talk show for LBC:
In this video clip, David Cameron is confronted by a caller who (while details of the case are clearly lacking), appears to be in great distress because the additional course of treatment for her cancer is not covered by the NHS, and consequently the potentially life-saving treatment is unavailable to her. He responds, of course, in meaningless soundbites and platitudes, but the look on his face – much as when Gordon Brown was confronted with the realisation that he had called a prospective voter a “bigoted old woman” on a live microphone – says it all.
Indeed, it is very hard to argue against the caller’s point at all.
There can be no justification that I can think of – none – for giving £1.5bn in aid over five years to a country which spends $31.5bn USD on defence, which has a space programme nominally more ambitious than that of the donor country, and which has explicitly stated that it does not want the funds. None.
And when the government takes such an active role in providing healthcare – not just regulating the system and ensuring universal access, but actively providing the care itself through a national health system – politicians will always be ambushed in this way by citizens who feel that the government’s misprioritisation of resources has let them down.
Tim Montgomerie, writing at Conservative Home, believes that the decision by the Liberal Democrats to renege on their support for electoral constituency boundary reform in retaliation for Prime Minister David Cameron’s inability to win Conservative backbench support for House of Lords reform represents the Conservative’s “worst single electoral setback since Black Wednesday”, when Britain was forced to quit the ERM, torpedoeing the Torie’s reputation for economic competence:
When the Parliamentary and Voting Constituencies Bill was passed I celebrated the moment, noting that the introduction of fair-sized seats of equal population could boost the number of Tory MPs at the next election by up to twenty. That was certainly Conservative HQ’s view. This morning the hope of boundaries fairness** is close to death, if not dead. After having explicitly said there that there was no connection between Lords reform and equal-sized seats Nick Clegg has u-turned and claimed there needs to be a connection.
…
** Boundaries “unfairness” is one of the explanations for why Labour get a majority with a 3% lead in the popular vote while Conservatives need an 11% lead for the same result. Or to put it another way John Major got a majority of 21 in 1992 with an 8% lead and a 42% share of the vote while, in 2005, Tony Blair got a 66 majority with just 36% of the vote and a 3% lead.
There has been much outrage from Conservative MPs and political commentators about the decision, but most of it seems to be directed toward the Liberal Democrats – “how dare they do this to us?!” – than inward at their own political strategy and leadership.
If, indeed, boundary review is so crucial to the Conservative Party’s hopes of winning an outright majority at the next general election (and if this is the case, when Conservatives have managed to win elections under similar circumstances in the past, it is a pretty damning indictment of the current party’s policy positions and campaigning ability), perhaps David Cameron should not have played chicken with Nick Clegg on such an important matter.
Tim Montgomerie pretty much agrees in his article:
The only advantage of the likely defeat of boundary changes is that a central plank of the Cameron/Osborne battleplan has gone. Any residual complacency must have gone. They can’t carry on as they were. They need a game changer and, preferably, soon.
And perhaps, instead of venting their anger at Nick Clegg when said strategy blows up in their faces, Conservatives with an eye on the next election would do well to remember that because they sadly, miraculously failed to win the 2010 election outright, as a consequence they govern in partnership with the Liberal Democrats, and that if they screw over their coalition partners on a policy point close to their heart, they are quite likely to get screwed in return.
I don’t care what Nick Clegg said about whether Lords Reform and Electoral Boundary Changes were linked or not back in April of this year, as Guido Fawkes appears to do:
The Boundary Review had nothing to do with House of Lords reform. It was linked to the AV referendum which the LibDems secured.
Clegg accusing others of breaking promises beggars belief. The LibDems are desperately trying to spin this, but in reality the backbench Tories are the ones to sacrifice political gain for sticking to their principles – however wrong they are to defend the current upper chamber.
Waah waah waah. The Conservatives are supposed to be the more mature, politically experienced political party and they got played by the LibDems. Now people like me have lost two policy proposals that were dear to our hearts – democratic reform of the House of Lords, and reform of the UK’s constituency sizes and boundaries to make them more equal. I have no sympathy for them.
The Conservatives are the senior party in the coalition government. They should try acting like it.
For most politicians, being accidentally suspended several metres above the ground on a zipwire whilst trying to promote the Olympic Games taking place in your city would be considered a negative occurence.
But despite having an internet meme modelled after him, Mayor of London Boris Johnson seems to be riding high in the polls and in the general public estimation.
As Conservative Home notes:
Johnson is in a unique position: he is a national figure, an elected British politician with a large individual mandate, and does not have the pressure of constituency surgeries and whips, and so on. He is therefore able, in the style of American politicians (think Mitt Romney’s recent trip to London), to take a foreign trip and build his foreign policy credibility. His perceived rivals for the leadership (the Independent today gives the odds on Johnson, Gove, Osborne, Hammond, Hague and Davis) are not able to do that; they would either be on government business, or would slip under the radar.
A source tells the Times: “Frankly, Boris is one of the few people who could deliver this … his contact with sovereign wealth funds and big business leaders, as well as his draw as a political personality, is a key selling point for a lot of these people”.
These points are all very true. And given the strong leadership vacuum currently being left by the hapless David Cameron (though let’s wait to see what kind of Olympic bounce he might receive in the opinion polls) and the coalition strife being formented by Cameron’s decision to put off the government’s plans to modernise the House of Lords, a future Boris Johnson leadership challenge is certainly on the cards.
Cameron should take note – even if it results in the occasional misstep or gaffe, people appreciate authenticity and conviction most of all. Agree or disagree with him, Boris Johnson has both of these qualities. If they do lurk within David Cameron, he has yet to show them so far.
Semi-Partisan Politics 