Nick Clegg joins the IfG’s Dr Hannah White OBE at an event on Tuesday the 20th of May.
British politics tends to be chaotic and random at the best of times, but last week’s revival of talking points from the late 2010s felt particularly bizarre. Tuesday’s headlines felt like a tribute act to the summer of 2018 with all the talk of Brexit betrayals and fish — all that was missing were arguments over a backstop and Gareth Southgate in a waistcoat. Adding to this sense of looking back into the past with rose-tinted glasses was Nick Clegg’s speech at the Institute for Government this past Tuesday, in which the former Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Liberal Democrats made his case in defence of the coalition government which ran from 2010-2015, while offering actual Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer some ever-so-slightly-friendly words of advice.
Clegg’s speech offered a firm rebuttal to arguments that the coalition government was a failure, framing it as a period of relative stability between the alarm of the financial crisis and the chaos of Brexit. Insisting if he had the choice now, he would “do it all again”, Clegg argued that forming the coalition (at the expense of a large chunk of his party’s support) was the right thing for the country at the time, saying “political capital should be used, not hoarded”.
Whether Clegg is right in this view or not has already been litigated to death, and it’s not a debate that is likely to end anytime soon. It’s certainly an interesting question when we look at the current state of the polls in the UK. Reform UK have gone from a minnow party to runaway leaders, while Clegg’s Lib Dems came third ahead of the Tories this week for the first time since May 2019 in a poll from YouGov. The increasingly fragmented electorate has meant that party leaders Nigel Farage and Sir Ed Davey have been forced to field a host of questions around coalitions in recent weeks. Kemi Badenoch and Farage hastily downplayed any potential Conservative-Reform coalition, while Labour quickly pounced, with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer suggesting voters were being “conned” by the two parties on the right.
Clegg suggested that coalitions should always be considered by minority parties if given the chance, saying that “politics without power is like a car without fuel”; unfortunately, coalitions can burn through political goodwill like a Dodge Charger does petrol. For Davey and the Lib Dems, there will be real concern of damaging their carefully rebuilt support base again and affirming the image of the Lib Dems as the party that exists to prop up the big two. For Reform, who are positioning themselves as the party willing to rip out the floorboards in government and bring about widespread change, entering into Government with the party from which many of its voters have defected would be a hard sell. It is likely to be an irritating question for both parties for the foreseeable future; expect regular soundbites from any major sit-down interviews with Davey and Farage.
Speaking of issues that refuse to go away (as much as politicians pray they would), one talking point notably absent from Clegg’s speech was tuition fees. Its only brief mentions were to highlight how the biggest drop in Lib Dem support came from the coalition being formed rather than any individual policies, and as an aggravating factor in the failure of the AV referendum. Clegg suggested a similarity between the circumstances faced by the coalition government and Keir Starmer’s, with both sitting in power in the wake of major US-based economic shocks while trying to navigate an increasingly fractured electorate.
Where comparisons between Starmer and Clegg have more commonly been drawn in recent months though has been between Clegg’s backing down on tuition fees, and Keir Starmer’s woes over the winter fuel payment. The Independent published an article in September suggesting that the decision to means test the payment will be seen as Starmer’s “tuition fees’ moment”, an anchor that weighs his support from voters down and proves impossible to shake.
Luckily for Starmer, he has the luxury Clegg never had of being able to U-turn on his major political nightmare, and he began that process on Wednesday at PMQs. If he were able to completely extinguish the flames of the accusations that he is freezing pensioners, it would probably go down as one of his biggest political achievements, but the recent local election results and polling figures would suggest there is still serious work to be done.
