After initially making positive sounds about David Cameron’s veto at the EU summit, Deputy Leader Nick Clegg has reversed himself and gone all in for European integration. He sees the UK’s future and the continent’s as fundamentally linked, and it at least once sense he is certainly right: The outcome of the EuroMess will likely determine which party becomes the “third way” in British politics.
In opinion polls and at the ballot box, the LibDems have been suffering almost since the day they joined the governing coalition. Their leader has now publicly and dramatically nailed the party colors to the European mast. Meanwhile, polls show that the proportion of UK voters who support the LibDems is similar to the proportions endorsing two other parties, the Greens and the fiercely Eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP).
If Europe somehow resolves the EuroMess and creates a new economic zone that disadvantages British interests, Clegg will look like a prophet ignored. That could go a long way toward redeeming his party with its base, thereby maintaining the LibDems as the main alternative to the duopoly of Labour and Tory.
However, if Europe goes down the drain Cameron will rise in the voters’ esteem and most of the remaining LibDem supporters will head for the exits, opening the door for the Greens or UKIP to become the third party of the UK.
UKIP proponents think 2015 will be their year. But they are probably wrong. Now that Cameron has drawn his line in the sand, a European meltdown might just as easily draw UKIP voters back into the Tory party than the reverse. Having largely stayed out of this particular fray, the Greens seem more likely to come to the fore if the Eurozone sinks under the waves and takes the LibDems with it.
“That could go a long way toward redeeming his party with its base, thereby maintaining the LibDems as the main alternative to the duopoly of Labour and Tory.”
Why? From what I’ve gathered, the Labour slogan of ‘vote LibDem, get the Tories’ has been made an absolute truth. The LibDems tied themselves to the Tory mast; Europe comes in second.
I think, to be honest, that David Cameron is being given a bit of a raw deal here. The coalition agreement between the Tories and the LibDems subjects all EU treaty changes to a referendum;
“We agree that we will amend the 1972 European Communities Act so that any proposed future treaty that transferred areas of power, or competences, would be subject to a referendum on that treaty – a ‘referendum lock’. We will amend the 1972 European Communities Act so that the use of any passerelle would require primary legislation.”
So, a treaty change would not only have to pass the House of Commons, but also a national referendum. The phrase “yeah, right” comes to mind, especially after the AV referendum clustermess.
Now, obviously, putting that in the coalition agreement was a pretty poor idea to begin with, but both David Cameron and Nick Clegg signed off on it; so, Nick Clegg suddenly getting religion and criticizing the Prime Minister for not attempting the impossible is a bit silly.
Katja
Spot on.
I think that David Cameron is being criticized in large measure because of his own staggering ineptitude. He evidently went to the summit with no concrete proposals, no allies, and no preliminary negotiations with either Germany or France. That’s nothing to do with the requirements for changing the treaty in the UK—-it’s simply an astonishing level of political incompetence.
As for the merits Cameron’s stand, I think the best thing Gordon Brown ever did was to keep Britain out of the euro but the idea that Cameron would be willing to isolate the UK from the rest of Europe on behalf of the very bankers whose greed got us into the dire situation we now face is, again, political incompetence on a grand scale.
Cameron is rightly being attacked from every angle because he screwed up. He screwed up totally and his government deserves to fall. It won’t because, as Barry said, the LibDems have basically been absorbed into the Tories’ furthest right wing. They are now nothing but a party of Thatcherite enablers.
“However, if Europe goes down the drain…”
What’s this “if”? It’s entirely clear that “if” should be replaced by “when”, with the only answers being “soon” or “very very soon”.
1 Well UKIP look to 2014 as our current target.
2 Are you seriously suggesting that the EU will have sorted out its crisis
3 Lib Dem polling has collapsed, UKIP’s has risen 3 fold and the Greens has risen by about 50%, not sure how you see the Greens pickinhg up the slack.
I don’t know if the EU will sort its crisis, no one does.
In terms of polling, the proportional rise does not matter, but the absolute amount. The YouGov polls I have seen (granted they change a bit each day) have UKIP, LibDem and Greens around the same amount.
What UKIP but not the Greens have to fear is that if Europe collapses and Cameron continues to stay out of it or to try to repatriate powers, UKIP will lose support to the Tories in the next general election. That’s where the Greens would “pick up the slack” by becoming the third party with the most supporters.
I’m not sure what will happen if the EU starts to fall apart. I think the UKIP and Labour can both argue that Cameron went to possibly the most important political gathering in recent memory without any sort of a plan and without laying any kind of political groundwork. In fact, he quite obviously wasn’t even pretending to be representing the UK at the sumit. He went explicitly to represent the bankers against the interest of Europe and against the British people, too.
Then, too, there is also the fact that his opposition to the treaty changes was totally unprincipled. Remember, if Germany and France had been willing to give the bankers what they wanted, Cameron clearly would have been willing to be the 27th vote for the new Europe. He took the UK out of Europe because because they wouldn’t protect the bankers from necessary regulation. It very clearly had nothing to do with what was best for the country.
Good post, Keith—not that I’m enough of an expert on U.K. politics to judge properly.
But I am something of an expert on the metaphors that express commitment strategies. As such, I must point out that the expression is “*nail* one’s colours [or, for Americans, colors] to the mast,” not “tie.” A ship’s colors, i.e. its flag, would normally be tied to the mast with a rope. In that normal case, they could be lowered as the conventional signal for “we surrender.” The whole point of *nailing* one’s colors to the mast was that it made surrender practically impossible since the colors couldn’t be lowered except at phenomenal risk. (I.e. one couldn’t simply pull on a rope from the deck; one would have to climb to the top of the rigging and do some carpentry during a heated battle.) That’s why nailing expressed commitment to victory—or total defeat.
Andrew: Thank you for the correction and also the intriguing etymology! I will amend the post, and give you 5% of all future royalties from it.
I think the LibDems are finished as a party. Clegg, in particular, comes out of this looking weak and foolish. If European integration was something he strongly supported before Cameron’s disastrous performance at the summit, then the time for expressing those views was before the summit. The about face looks like he’s just got his finger in the wind and is desperately trying to distance himself from the senior coalition partner. Presumably, Clegg knew what Cameron intended and agreed that it was the right thing to do at the time.
If Clegg didn’t know because nobody bothered to consult him, then the LibDems are pathetic if they don’t break the coalition over this. If he knew, then it was just as much his decision as Cameron’s, so how does his justify his volte-face? Either way, Clegg looks totally feckless and the LibDems look totally gutless.
How important is the identity of the UK’s third party? Like the U.S. and hardly anyone else, the UK has a system of single-member parliamentary districts and first-past-the-post election rules, with no runoff or proportional representation. If one wanted to dictate a two party duopoly, that is probably what one would impose, and it works. It is a little less clear-cut in the UK because, unlike the U.S., there is the potential for a relatively small party to control the balance of power and become a coalition partner with a hold over the government. The current parliament is the first one in a very long time where that has played out — and it appears to be devastating for the opportunistic third party. My advice is to enjoy the duopoly and don’t bother too much about third parties, or junk the whole system.
It is potentially very important. For example, during the run up to the invasion of Iraq the LibDems arguably had the opportunity to get quite a few defectors from Labour’s backbench which would have made them the unquestioned party of opposition and probably have shifted the political centre in both the party and the country slightly to the left.
The Canadian system is very similar to the British in giving seats to plurality winners and having no proportional elements. They have a recent pattern of establishing the same kind of parliamentary despotism that developed in Britain, only it’s arguably much more extreme under the current PM. The big news there is that in the last election the Liberals, who dominated national politics for most of the 20th century, were essentially destroyed. The official opposition consists mostly of neophytes and its leading parliamentarian died suddenly a few months ago, so the Harper government now has an extraordinarily free hand.
Ken: The reality in the UK is that no party is able to convince more than 40% of voters to support it. In Churchill’s stunning defeat in 1945, his party got a greater share of the vote than when Cameron won in 2010. That makes the “number one third party” important as a kingmaker, and I don’t see that changing.
I think it highly unlikely that the ground rules of British politics will be changed by the European disaster in the least. Britain has historically been a two party system (Conservatives versus some sort of loosely left-wing or liberal grouping), with a third party occasionally trying to replace one of the larger ones. Traditionally, the basic division was liberal versus conservative, and the real surprise of the 20th century was the hollowing out of the liberals and their replacement by Labour. It seems to me that Clegg’s basic error was not to recognize that by binding himself to the Tories he was effectively making it impossible for the Lib Dems to achieve sufficient distance from Labour as an alternative to the Tories - distance that might just possibly have enabled him to hollow out Labour and make the liberals into the “other” big (anti-conservative) party while relegating Labour to struggling third party status. Neither the UKIP nor the Greens command enough national respect, nor possess a credible platform for government as opposed to protest, nor have a strong enough organization to achieve any lasting impact. When push comes to shove, over the long term the Greens are likely to default to the Lib Dem/Labour grouping, while the UKIP will dissolve back into its Tory roots. The basic law of British politics is that you get two parties capable of government and while other parties may look exciting for a brief while, they always lack the stamina to push on.