Comment: Mass outrage alone won’t demolish the coalition
The unions should never forget that fomenting ‘poll-tax’ style discontent is just a means to an end. Their real target should be the Lib Dems.
Don’t be fooled by the government’s diplomatic language. The prime minister’s spokesperson said this morning that “we want there to be a genuine partnership with trade unions”. Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude told the BBC he refuses to revert to a “complete stand-off” with the unions. History will not remember these statements of goodwill, just as they have forgotten Adolf Hitler’s appeals for a settlement which filled Britain’s newspapers in 1939 and early 1940. The government and the unions are already at war.
The first pitched battle comes on October 19th, a day before the full details of the comprehensive spending review are published. “We have to start and win this great debate about the country’s economic future,” TUC general secretary Brendan Barber told delegates in Manchester this lunchtime. His argument to union staff calling fo a great mobilising of society against the government’s plans.
“It can be done,” Barber said, but it will not be just by targeting the public alone. The fight for mainstream opinion is winnable for the unions. Of course the cuts are going to be devastatingly unpopular. That doesn’t mean the government will change its mind.
Ministers know the impact their decisions will have. They have already begun fighting back, although they must do better than George Osborne’s uneasy defiance at Bloomberg last month and Nick Clegg’s strange lecture on the long-term view last week. They will seek to appear reasonable and calm when confronting red-faced protestors. That doesn’t mean they will budge.
For the government has an answer to the angry shouting on the streets outside: far more influential are the quiet words of the economists convinced the government is on the right track. Some, like centre-right thinktank Policy Exchange’s chief economist Andrew Lilico, want the coalition to go even further. He has argued for larger and quicker cuts – and damn the political consequences.
“People aren’t going to like it – that’s tough, that’s just the way it is,” he told politics.co.uk in a feature marking the coalition’s first 100 days last month. “That kind of approach is going to get you hated, get you infamous. But as I’ve been saying – if you didn’t want to do this, you should have got a different job.”
Those reading this as a break from plotting the great public uprising against the spending cuts need not collapse in complete dismay. The battle for public opinion will not be decisive in itself. It could yet prove critical in the smaller but more vital battle to come.
Every administration has a chink in its armour. Barber identified this one’s in his speech today. “The prime minister has been clear that these are not temporary cuts, but a permanent roll back of public services and the welfare state,” he said. “Not so much an economic necessity as a political project – driven by an ideological clamour for a minimal state.”
The biggest test for the coalition is not the electoral reform referendum, but the suspicion that the government is using the deficit as an excuse for what it would have done anyway. Its weakness is the ever-present danger of internal collapse. The deep, distressing sense of unease which pervaded the air of the Commons chamber as Osborne announced the emergency Budget will be as nothing to the horror on show on October 20th. One Lib Dem MP sat slumped, his eyes shut, his hand occasionally clasping his forehead. Looking back, the Budget with its VAT hike was painful. It pales into comparison with the announcements coming next month.
Ordinary Lib Dem delegates are ripe for persuading their leadership has made a mistake. Opponents to the government will have no better opportunity than the spending cuts debate to withdraw their confidence from Clegg. This side-alley scrap, away from the main contest for public opinion, offers the real opportunity for making a difference.
Placards and chanting will not change the resolve of ministers steeled with the enthusiasm of their favourite economists. In this winner-takes-all war the union can only claim victory if it brings down the coalition.
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