The Lies of the Land

by Adam Macqueen

  ‘I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative.’

  Nick Clegg, signed pledge to National Union of Students, 26 April 2010

  Sometimes, very odd things happen in politics. Unfamiliar faces come into public view. Voices which sound different say things that don’t sound like the sort of things politicians say. It happened in the autumn of 2015, when a new generation decided that Jeremy Corbyn was an exciting new force in politics, because they hadn’t noticed he had been a career politician since before they were born and the only reason he had failed to make any impact before was that he had always been useless. And it happened in the run-up to the 2010 General Election, when the nation fell head-over-heels for Nick Clegg.

  Seems impossible, doesn’t it? Many of us have successfully wiped it out of our minds. But it really did happen. ‘NICK CLEGG IS NEARLY AS POPULAR AS WINSTON CHURCHILL’ thundered a headline in the Sunday Times days after the Lib Dem leader went head-to-head on television with Gordon Brown and David Cameron.55 The following day’s Guardian asked ‘NICK CLEGG – THE BRITISH OBAMA?’ – and managed to keep a straight face.56 One opinion poll in the run-up to the election put the Lib Dems ahead of both the Conservatives and Labour, which really would have broken the political mould.57

  A lot of it was down to Clegg’s performance in that TV debate, where familiarity had bred contempt for his two rivals. ‘You’re going to be told tonight by these two that the only choice you can make is between two old parties who’ve been running things for years,’ Clegg pouted charismatically into the camera. ‘I’m here to persuade you that there is an alternative.’58 Viewers practically rolled over to have their tummies tickled: a poll on the night gave him 43 per cent of audience support, against 26 per cent for Cameron and 20 per cent for the sitting prime minister.59 Gordon Brown’s government was as tired as he looked: not-so-New Labour had been in power for thirteen years, and had taken over the position of clapped-out incumbents previously occupied by John Major’s Conservatives ahead of the 1997 election. No one had really taken to David Cameron. (I’m not sure they ever did, even when they voted him into Number 10 twice.) Clegg seemed like a breath of fresh air, rather than a long-serving member of both European and Westminster parliaments who had hauled his party back in a decidedly right-wing direction following the defenestration of his popular but pissed predecessor Charles Kennedy.

  There was another reason for ‘Cleggmania’: the fact that he pitched himself directly to students, with a promise ahead of Lord Browne’s review of university funding, due later that year, that he would absolutely, unequivocally vote against any rise in tuition fees. His party stood behind him: four hundred Lib Dem parliamentary candidates added their names to a pledge organized by the National Union of Students (NUS) alongside fifty-six of the party’s other sitting MPs.60

  Not only that, but Clegg told the students’ representatives that he would go further than they were asking. ‘You’ve got people leaving university with this dead weight of debt, around £24,000, round their neck,’ he told the NUS conference in a specially recorded video message on 13 April. ‘We used to want to be able to scrap tuition fees overnight. Because money is tight it is going to take a little longer. We have a plan to do that over six years. But it is a plan that works.’61 They believed it so strongly they even put it in the party manifesto: fees to be phased out totally in six years, but scrapped for final-year students immediately.

  The promise was something those of us with longer memories had reason to be wary about. The Labour MP I voted for as a third-year student in 1997 distributed leaflets which assured us of her implacable opposition to tuition fees being introduced; just over a year later she voted with the government to bring them in. In their 2001 manifesto Labour promised not to introduce top-up fees, which could triple the amount students had to pay; they duly brought them in two years after being re-elected. The flip-flop did at least cause one of the biggest backbench rebellions of Tony Blair’s time in Downing Street. In his memoirs he said it was ‘the closest I came to losing my job’.62 But he was also candid about how much a manifesto commitment counts for: ‘frankly it would have been absurd to postpone the decisions necessary for the country because of it.’63

  The country went to the polls on 6 May, and another rather odd thing happened. The country returned a hung parliament, as everyone had predicted, but all the vocal support for the Lib Dems, all that Cleggmania, translated into… a minimal increase in their vote and the loss of five Commons seats. Nevertheless, with his fifty-seven MPs, Clegg had all the power. He instantly began horsetrading with both the Conservatives and (with considerably less enthusiasm) Labour to see what his party could get in return for their support. He was surprised to discover quite how much the Tories were willing to offer. A member of the negotiating team told journalist Andrew Rawnsley: ‘We’d say what about a, b and c, and they’d say we’re surprised you haven’t asked for d and e as well.’ 64 There was, however, one big sticking point, a principle on which Clegg was not willing to compromise under any circumstances… a referendum on whether proportional representation should be introduced to the voting system. Tuition fees barely even featured.

  It would later turn out that the head of the Lib Dems’ negotiating team, Danny Alexander, had advised two months ahead of the election that in the event of a hung parliament, the party should ‘seek agreement on part time students and leave the rest.’65

  On 12 May Clegg stood in the Downing Street garden alongside Cameron as they announced the terms by which they would govern Britain in coalition for the next five years. Tuition fees were way down in the small print. The Lib Dems hadn’t actually agreed to vote for a rise in fees if that was what the Browne review recommended when the report was published in the autumn. Instead they were allowed to abstain from the vote – but they didn’t even all manage to do that. When the issue of raising the cap on fees from £3,375 to £9,000 came before the Commons in December 2010, twenty-one Lib Dems voted against it, and twenty-seven – including Clegg – came out in support.

  They were the sort of numbers the Lib Dems could only dream of following the next general election. In 2015 all but eight of them were swept out of parliament, including three of the five cabinet ministers they had wangled places for in the coalition agreement, although a chastened Clegg hung on to his own seat.

  His former partner, meanwhile, was returned to government with a majority of his very own. But Cameron’s perfidy had been no lesser than Clegg’s. Prior to the 2010 General Election he repeatedly promised that under his rule there would be ‘no more of the tiresome, meddlesome, top-down re-structures that have dominated the last decade of the NHS’.66 Within two months of being elected, his government announced a massive re-structure which independent think tank The King’s Fund called ‘perhaps the most significant and far-reaching in the history of the NHS’.67 Pushed through against the vocal opposition of medical experts, and at a cost of nearly £3 billion, it created what the think tank called ‘an unwieldy structure… with leadership fractured between several national bodies, a bewilderingly complex regulatory system and a strategic vacuum in place of system leadership.’68 Cameron, never a man to bother himself with the finer details of government when there was chillaxing to be done and box sets to be watched, sailed on regardless.

  ‘The coalition Government have inherited from their predecessors the largest budget deficit of any economy in Europe, with the single exception of Ireland. One pound in every four we spend is being borrowed…. The formal mandate we set is that the structural current deficit should be in balance in the final year of the five-year forecast period, which is 2015–16.’

  George Osborne, budget speech, House of Commons, 22 June 2010

  The Conservatives won the 2010 election – well, nearly won; they needed the Lib Dems to help them take power – because they hammered home a message to the British people that Labour could not be trusted with t
he economy. All right, it might be true that the emergency measures Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling had taken to rescue the banks had set the global agenda in how to tackle the 2008 crisis, and the country was already pulling out of the resulting recession. But the message that David Cameron and his sidekick George Osborne repeated – until it achieved such resonance that Labour even seemed to believe it themselves by the time the next election rolled round – was that Labour had drastically overspent, recklessly overborrowed and generally behaved like fiscal Viv Nicholsons for the past thirteen years.

  When Osborne stood at the dispatch box to deliver his first budget as chancellor in the summer of 2010, he vowed that things were (finally) going to be different. He called it his ‘emergency budget’, a title he liked so much that he would pull it out again, to rather less effect, during the Brexit campaign. ‘This Budget is needed to deal with our country’s debts. This Budget is needed to give confidence to our economy. This is the unavoidable Budget,’ he intoned. ‘I am not going to hide hard choices from the British people or bury them in the small print…. The British people are going to hear them straight from me, here at this Dispatch Box.’69

  One message that the British people heard, loud and clear, was that Osborne was going to get the deficit down. They might not all have known exactly what the deficit was – the amount that the government has to borrow to cover the difference between what it receives in tax and what it spends – but they understood that it was a bad thing, and it needed to be eliminated. No one disputed that it was running at an unprecedentedly high level – 10.2 per of gross domestic product (GDP), the measure of what the UK’s economy was actually worth.70 Even Darling, Osborne’s predecessor as chancellor, had been talking about the need to get it down, though he had had great difficulty convincing Brown, who had grown so addicted to announcing giveaways (genuine or not) that he was terrified to even utter the word ‘cut’. In the pre-budget report the previous year, Darling said he aimed to slice the deficit in half by 2014.71

  But Osborne committed himself to going further than that. He would, he said, within the same time scale, cut the deficit right back down to zero – and then beyond. ‘Thanks to my action today,’ he told the Commons, ‘[t]hat deficit will… be eliminated to plus 0.3% in 2014–15 and plus 0.8% in 2015–16. In other words, it will be in surplus.’72

  It was the rationale behind the coalition government’s programme of savage cuts to public services, what Cameron had already christened the ‘age of austerity’.73 Osborne was clear that ‘the bulk of the reduction must come from lower spending rather than higher taxes. This country has overspent, it has not been under-taxed.’74 He brought in swingeing cuts to investment in infrastructure, and his cabinet colleagues set about cutting waste with a vengeance, including such fripperies as public libraries, spare rooms, jobs for disabled people, welfare payments for children, lawyers for victims of domestic violence, prison officers, firefighters, police and soldiers. Trouble was, pulling money out of the economy and banging on endlessly about the need for us all to tighten our belts meant that everyone, consumers and businesses alike, spent less and hung on to their money. As a result, tax receipts went down too. Osborne had no choice but to carry on borrowing to cover the spending that had survived the budget, and by the time of the next general election, the country was £600 billion more in debt than it had been when the coalition took over.75

  Osborne was forced to admit that getting rid of the deficit was ‘clearly taking longer than one would have hoped’ by the end of 2012.76 By December the following year he had officially pushed back the target date for running a surplus to 2017–18.77 By 2014–15 – the year he originally claimed we would be back in the black – he had moved the goalposts for achieving an overall budget surplus, not just the ‘structural deficit’ (the version with temporary economic effects stripped out which he had been talking about before) by 2020. He felt so confident about his promise that he put it in a new ‘fiscal charter’ to ensure that whoever was in government, ‘This country has to live within its means.’78 Independent experts at the Institute for Fiscal Studies were warning by March 2016 that there was ‘only just the right side of 50–50’ he would manage it,79 and Osborne abandoned the target after the Brexit vote in the summer of 2016, shortly before he was kicked out of his job by Theresa May. As the financial year 2016–17 drew to a close, the Office for Budget Responsibility, which Osborne had set up to keep tabs on his figures, were predicting a deficit of £51.7 billion, or 2.6 per cent of national income. They expected it to get bigger the following year, before beginning to shrink, and the prospect for a surplus was distant: ‘We do not expect to see a surplus in the next five years.’80

  It’s not Osborne’s problem. He has decided to have a go at being a newspaper editor instead. Just in case that doesn’t work out, he’s taken on one or two other positions too. Together, they will push his income up to a decidedly non-austere £700,000 plus a year.81

  ‘I’m not going to be calling a snap election. I’ve been very clear that I think we need that period of time, that stability to be able to deal with the issues that the country is facing and have that election in 2020.’

  Theresa May, BBC Andrew Marr Show, 4 September 2016

  One of the very first announcements of the coalition government led by David Cameron was a fundamental change to the way politics worked in Britain. Starting in May 2010 no prime minister would be able to call an election at the time of their own choosing in order to capitalize on their own political advantage. Instead, as in many other democracies, elections would be held at strict intervals on set dates, and all sides would just have to take their chances. There would be no more shenanigans as in 1992 or the recent poll, when respective incumbents John Major and Gordon Brown had clung on to power until the very last possible minute in the hope that something, anything, might turn up to save their administrations from the knacker’s yard. No more, either, the machinations of 1983 and 2001, when Thatcher and Blair chose to go to the country before they were obliged to, cashing in on a peak in popularity or hedging against the expectation of bad economic news.

  ‘I’m the first prime minister in British history to give up the right unilaterally to ask the Queen for a dissolution of Parliament,’ Cameron boasted. ‘This is a huge change in our system, it’s a big giving up of power.’ He insisted – in words that would come to seem rather ironic seven years later – that it was ‘a good arrangement to give us strong and stable government’.82

  The date for the next election – the first Thursday in May 2015 – was set in stone as part of the coalition deal Cameron signed with the Lib Dems. The process was then formalized in the following year’s Fixed-term Parliaments Act.83 Against everyone’s expectations, that pre-planned election resulted in a slim Conservative majority – and a prime minister who was stuck holding himself to the promise of a referendum on the question of Britain’s continued membership in the EU. When that gamble didn’t pay off quite as Cameron had hoped, the woman who succeeded him into Number 10 pronounced herself content to stick by its strictures.

  ‘I think what’s important, particularly having had the referendum vote, is that we have a period of stability,’ May told the nation, brushing aside concerns that the only people to give her a mandate lived in her Maidenhead constituency. ‘We’ll be continuing the manifesto on which the Conservative government was elected in 2015, so I don’t think there’s a need for an election…. I’m not going to be calling a snap election. I’ve been very clear that we need that period of time, that stability to be able to deal with the issues that the country is facing and have that election in 2020’.84

  Her tight-knit team kept reiterating this message over the coming months, even as the fortunes – and poll ratings – of opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn dwindled. ‘It’s not going to happen,’ a spokesman told the Telegraph in March 2017. ‘It’s not something she plans to do or wishes to do.’85 The Financial Times were similarly slapped down a few weeks later: ‘The
re isn’t going to be one. It’s not going to happen. There is not going to be a general election.’86 The last possible date when a national vote could be called to coincide with the local elections that May – which, along with just about everything else, the Conservatives were predicted to storm – came and went. It seemed we were definitely in for the long haul.

  Then, on 18 April 2017, mere weeks after revealing a budget that made plain the new regime was not in the least bound by the manifesto commitments of its predecessors,87 May performed a screeching U-turn. Standing at a hastily erected lectern in the middle of Downing Street, she announced that the country should go to the polls three years early, on 8 June 2017. ‘I have concluded that the only way to guarantee certainty and stability for the years ahead is to hold this election and seek your support for the decisions I must take.’88

  The opportunism was naked. The prime minister made it evident that she was not simply looking to improve on her party’s tiddly seventeen-seat working majority, but to annihilate all opposition; her preferred option was a one-party state in which her actions could not be questioned. ‘At this moment of enormous national significance, there should be unity here in Westminster, but instead, there is division,’ she announced, blithely sweeping aside the three-hundred-year tradition of parliamentary opposition.89 She insisted that ‘every single vote for me and Conservative candidates will be a vote that strengthens my hand in the negotiations for Brexit’, despite the fact that the only stage of the negotiations where a crushing majority could possibly help would be in the single vote she had grudgingly been forced to offer Parliament, on the final terms of the deal with the EU two years down the line.90 A gargantuan band of backbench loyalists would be insurance against the increasing likelihood that she would not be presenting them with anything like a good deal, but it would not, as she was implying, make the slightest jot of difference with the EU negotiating team she was going to have to face down first.91