Power or Placards?

By David Beeson

As the Lib Dems hold their spring conference and try to whip up a bit of an atmosphere of self-congratulation (and God knows they can’t expect congratulations from anybody else), it’s great to see Nick Clegg talking about the difference between being in power and being in opposition.

Sounds as though he’s been through a bit of a learning experience. Next he needs to learn the difference between being in office and being in power. After all, power’s about making things happen and if the Lib Dems are satisfied with what they’re making happen today, then they’re very easily satisfied indeed.

A lot more easily satisfied than, say, the electorate.

What after all have the Lib Dems achieved by getting Clegg’s bum on a seat at the Cabinet table? Well, obviously, they’ve got his bum on that seat and one can’t help feeling that counts for a lot in his book. But apart from that?

Let’s just pass quickly over the U-turn on tuition fees. Enough ink’s been spilled on that subject already.

On the cuts, if they’ve managed to moderate them at all, it’s hard to tell where. Technically, we’re only in recession after two consecutive quarters of shrinkage, and we won’t know about that for sure until next month. But even if the government’s policies haven’t already pushed us into the dreaded double-dip, it’s hard to see how the massive increases in unemployment and the destruction of industrial output that the cuts entail can avoid plunging us into recession again soon. Extraordinary. I grew up at a time, in the fifties and sixties, when we were dealing with debt that had peaked at four times higher than it is now, and it was a time of unprecedented expansion.

But the worst prospect ahead of us is what’s happening to the health service. The creeping privatisation is loathsome but at least the rationale is understandable: it’s been Tory ideology for decades. So one expects the Conservatives to argue that ‘any willing provider’ should be allowed to deliver healthcare services, even if that means cherry-picking the most lucrative treatments and leaving public hospitals to deal with the financially unattractive rest.

But what about the introduction of GP consortia? Who other than the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley actually wants that? The GPs don’t. Their job is to deliver primary care. It isn’t any part of their role to be ordering care in hospital. They didn’t do seven years training in clinical skills to become commercial administrators.

The unions don’t like these changes, nor does the Labour Party.

Judging by their behaviour in the autumn, not even David Cameron and George Osborne are particularly keen. After all, introducing the reforms will cost £12bn and the benefits, if there are any, are nebulous to say the least. Somehow, though, Cameron and Osborne don’t have the guts to tell Lansley to go and do something else. He could perhaps take over as foreign secretary – there seems to be a vacancy in that position at the moment. Then we could get a health secretary who at least understood the NHS.

Now blocking these senseless, unpopular reforms, that really would be an achievement in government. The Lib Dems hate them. Go on, Nick. Show that you really are in power and not just in office. Stop these NHS proposals. It would make you popular in your party, it might even get you back some popularity in the electorate – after all, you’d be doing the whole country a favour.

But you can’t, can you? Because you’re not really in power. You decry the placard wavers – but are you really able to do any more to influence things than they are?