Who’s afraid of the big bad tory wolf?

Strategy with Sue Marsh

It amuses me to watch our media treating this government like any other. Discussing the likely lay of the land at future elections, asking whether or not Labour can return to power after just one term, even conferring some kind of strategic-genius role on Little-Lord-Osborne. Pundits discuss the likely staying power of Dave’s Teflon and devote endless column inches to the future of the Lib Dems.

Yet time and time again, they ignore the incompetence.

We have a coalition of losers. No great mandate, no strategic brilliance. Poor Dave, despite absolutely everything in his favour couldn’t win a majority. Nick faced an even tougher verdict from the electorate. His dazzling promise of April and May 2010, the crowing expectations of becoming the natural opposition party, fizzled into fewer seats than his party had won in 2005.

Do you remember how ludicrous, how totally unlikely the idea of a Con/Lib coalition seemed? We should remember, because it’s no less ludicrous today. “But what about Europe? Tuition fees? Defence?” We all cried! What about them indeed.

My only twinge of doubt, was over what George Eaton recently called the “Tory plan for a permanent majority“. Add five year parliaments and the 55% majority required for a vote of no confidence and it was clear that Conservative strategists knew well that the only way they might ever win a majority again was to cheat. Luckily, cheating is in their DNA. Change the boundaries, flood the Lords with cronies and we’d be back to the status quo of aristocratic rule in no time.

Unlike some commentators, I’ve never been convinced that the coalition would last. Nonetheless, I would not have placed a bet on it falling apart either. When we remember the “coalition of losers” problem, it is firmly in both Dave and Nick’s interest to cling together like lovers in a storm. Where would they go if the coalition fell apart? Dave would almost certainly fail to win a majority and Nick is facing total electoral oblivion. They need each other as much today as they did in May last year, but what they want and what they can achieve are not necessarily the same thing.

So let’s re-frame the debate.

The Conservatives failed to convince the electorate that they could be trusted. Despite 13 years in opposition, the scars of the 80s still sat heavily on their reputation. The “nasty party” tag was far from forgotten and the evidence of a “progressive majority” was and is irrefutable. For decades, Britain has become more socially democratic and pundits might like to recall the policies Dave had to embrace before he could even cobble together a coalition. No referendum on Europe, ring-fencing the NHS budget, a commitment to maintain foreign aid and outraged defences of winter fuel payments and free bus passes. There was no appetite for the slash-and-burn social anarchy that we now have to endure. There was – and is – no mandate.

Opinion polls still give Dave too much confidence. The electorate, constantly terrified into believing that we’re on the brink of economic disaster, have survived the first year of the coalition without the pain they expected. But few are aware of the pain to come. Cuts of 20 or 30% and budgets slashed by billions are all academic at the moment. Sure, the cost of living has gone up, a few cuts have started to filter through, but the real pain is all in store. Those who debated a possible end date for the coalition had their money on 2012 from the start.

But they didn’t take into account the sheer incompetence of the ministers suddenly in charge of our futures. No-one could have expected the endless own goals and the awkward u-turns and no-one seems to really see a vision of our country in a year or two’s time.

No-one could have imagined that on the one area the Tories should have stayed a million miles away from – the NHS – they’d be fighting a desperate rear-guard action over accusations of privatisation and cuts that will undo the work of a generation.

No-one could have imagined the disasters they would brew in almost every department. Tuition fees, welfare reform, free-schools, justice, crime, health, forests, libraries, the voluntary sector, defence, the economy, pensions – I struggle to think of a department that isn’t about to run into problems of a titanic scale. How a government can be so consistently wrong is quite breath-taking. Do they have no advisors? No strategists?

Add to that George Osborne’s entirely made-up “Expansionary Fiscal Contraction” approach to the economy and I can hardly bear to watch.

Do we imagine that the mistrust felt by the electorate last year will be soothed by all of this? When unemployment soars, growth falters, poverty increases, the middle classes feel the squeeze, hospitals start to close, disabled people start chaining themselves to railings, homelessness shoots up, schools fail, crime doubles and our military staff find themselves joining police officers, fire-fighters, nurses, doctors and paramedics in the dole queues, exactly who will be inclined to vote Conservative in 2015?

This is no fairy story. It’s real. George Osborne is no big-bad-wolf, Lansley and Gove and May are not all powerful magicians. They are pantomime dames, lisping out a parody of government.

Far from this being the start of permanent Conservative rule, without some pretty swift happy-endings it could well see the Tories left to sleep for 100 years.