The week in politics: Cameron joins Clegg in the dog house
Nick Clegg had a tough week, but at least his unpopularity is now affecting the prime minister too.
By Ian Dunt
Is the ‘big society’ dead yet? It’s hard to tell. Every week a new nail finds itself firmly embedded in its coffin. Liverpool council’s decision to pull out seemed to signify something important. This week’s intervention by Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, the outgoing head of the Community Service Volunteers (CSV) organisation, served to hammer away a little more. “It’s about one hand not appreciating what the other hand’s doing, and not getting the decisions made in a timely fashion,” she told the Today programme. “There are a lot of people putting a lot of energy into the ‘big society’, but it’s not strategically planned.”
That allowed Ed Miliband to get in on the act in PMQs, asking Cameron, with more than a little mischievousness, how his ‘big society’ plan was working out. By the end of the exchange, the prime minister was fuming.
Everywhere the government looked, its economic agenda was coming in for major criticism. Chancellor George Osborne announced a permanent levy on the banks but it wasn’t enough to mask the widespread disappointment with the next day’s Project Merlin deal. It didn’t help that it was announced on the same day that the full extent of the Conservative’s financial reliance on the City was revealed.
The extent of the discomfort with the government’s economic plans was laid bare even further when a group of Liberal Democrat councillors wrote a letter criticising the spending cuts programme in the strongest possible terms. They threw in some personal attacks at Eric Pickles too, just for good measure. That development started to peel back the surface and reveal the extent of discontent among the Lib Dem rank-and-file. There’ll be more of this to come.
It was just one of many crises for Nick Clegg this week, who also saw his Treasury spokesman quit over the Merlin deal. In a series of memorable comments, Lord Oakeshott said the Treasury negotiating team enjoyed both “arrogance and incompetence”. Not only that, but a knife-edge vote in the Lords saw a benchmark imposed on the future AV referendum of 40%. If turnout comes in below that level, it’ll be up to the Commons whether to allow the result. The passage of the AV referendum bill is so tense Clegg cancelled a trip to Latin America next week to see it through.
But it wasn’t just Clegg suffering the knock on effects of a gargantuan policy fiasco and public antipathy. This week, David Cameron joined the club, with the first evidence that his honeymoon period is well and truly behind him. The Independent’s poll of polls finally saw his personal popularity dip into the negative for the first time. “Mr Cameron has lost his shine and doubts are creeping in about the government’s handling of the economy,” the ever-present professor John Curtice pointed out.
There was also continued trouble over the PM’s weekend speech on multiculturalism, which found supporters exactly where he wouldn’t want them – in the French National Front. When Gaelic fascists are with you, you start to question your tactics.
All in all a bad week for the coalition. This level of near-disastrous underperformance will be par for the course from now on, as fury and hatred become the default response to all government pronouncements. As the full stop at the end of a pretty gloomy few days, the government started to U-turn out of its forestry sell-off disaster. They’ve fitted in quite a few U-turns into a short spell in office so far. Judging by this week, there’ll be a few more on the horizon.
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