The Liberal Democrat Betrayal

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The acceptance by the UK Government’s Business Secretary, Vince Cable, of the basic tenets of the Browne report this week can be seen as one of the latest examples of the Liberal Democrats leadership abandoning their key election promises.  Trident has not been scrapped, nuclear power is here to stay and it is widely predicted that the budget cuts, to be announced next week, will be radical and hard hitting.  While there is still talk of a referendum on Alternate Voting, this is looking like little more than a sop from the Conservatives to their coalition partners.  With a Liberal Democrat backbench rebellion being a serious possibility, it is worth asking how culpable Nick Clegg and other leading party members are for reneging on their election promises.

Was Clegg wrong in bringing the Lib Dems into a coalition government with the Tories after the May 2010 election?  To be fair, in this situation he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.  On the one hand, the Liberal Democrat election promises of fairness and equality sat uneasily with Conservative promises of large cuts, and the two parties were completely opposed on issues such as nuclear power and Trident; however Clegg had based his campaign on a manifesto that claimed to put co-operation and policies that worked above political wrangling.   To reject the possibility of a stable coalition with the Conservative party that ensured a comfortable majority in the House of Commons, in favour of a rainbow coalition that barely reached an overall majority and included too many parties with niche interests, may have been seen to have made a mockery of everything that Clegg had argued for beforehand.  For the man who supposedly wanted to rise above politics in order to benefit the country, it would have seemed churlish and dogmatic to reject the opportunity to help create a working and sustainable government.   

Additionally, it is a dangerous generalisation to view the Liberal Democrats as simply ‘Labour with civil liberties thrown in’.  The party often likes to play up its social democrat credentials, and before the election championed ‘left’ causes such as the environment and the eradication of nuclear power; however, it has traditionally stood for decentralised government and for a focus on the individual much more in keeping with Big Society style Conservative philosophy than that of the traditional left wing.  Arguably, some responsibility must lay with voters who were lazy enough to view the Liberal Democrats as the left wing alternative and transferred their vote from Labour, weakening the only true prospect for left, or at least centre left, government in this country.

However, despite all of this, what is inarguable is that the Liberal Democrat leadership has gone back on nearly all of its election promises that made the party stand out to so many people as the only fresh thing on the menu.  Clegg, Cable et al may have been in a no win situation when they were faced with the decision of forming a coalition government with the Conservatives,  but it was hoped that their presence may have kept the more right wing free market tendencies of their partners in check.  Co-operation in government should not have to mean complete surrender of one’s principles, no matter how much Machiavelli you read.  Now it seems that the Lib Dems not only have no power to push through any of their election promises, even in compromised form, but are also actively endorsing that which they only six months ago railed against.