In the rose garden, everything changed. Credit: Christopher Furlong - WPA Pool /Getty Images
It will be 10 years ago tomorrow, in the rose garden of 10 Downing Street, that two men stood side-by-side. David Cameron, the Conservative Prime Minister, in his blue tie; Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat Deputy PM, in his yellow tie. Together, with studied ease and joshing humour, they launched the first British coalition government since the war.
It was Clegg, the junior partner, who said it best: “Until today, we have been rivals: now we are colleagues… This is a new government and a new kind of government. A radical reforming government where it needs to be. And a source of reassurance and stability, too, at a time of great uncertainty in our country.”
The Coalition government even had an official colour, a soft green— a mix of the two party colours, as if the Cameron and Clegg ties had copped-off and had a baby.
There were those who said it wouldn’t last, that a coalition of mismatched parties (a big one of the centre-right, a small one of the centre-left) would soon collapse. And yet it lasted a full five years — Tories and Lib Dems referring to one another as ‘honourable friends’ for the duration of the parliament.
But where’s the legacy? David Cameron had 10 years as Tory leader. Six years of them as Prime Minister. In George Osborne he had a politically-potent, but loyal, deputy — not to mention an heir apparent. Together they swallowed up the Lib Dems, wrecked New Labour and won the first Conservative majority since 1992.
Clegg may have been doomed from the start, but the future should have belonged to Cameron and the Cameroons. Yes, at some point, they’d have lost power — in a true democracy political ascendancies eventually and inevitably descend. But usually they shape what comes after them.
Thatcherism left its mark on Blairism, which in turn influenced Cameronism. A new broom may set out to sweep away the legacy of what came before it; yet there’s still a connection — a negative example which the incoming regime seeks to define itself against.
But with the Cameron-Clegg years there isn’t even that. Unless you look very hard, the Coalition years are unusually — almost freakishly — disconnected from what happened next. It’s almost as if they didn’t happen at all.
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Though they were the big beasts of their era, Cameron and Clegg can be seen as an evolutionary dead-end — the last of a line wiped-out by a series of cataclysmic events.
Occasionally, in the history of a nation, there will be an upheaval of such magnitude as to completely redefine the politics of the present. The future is severed from the past — rendering what happened before irrelevant to what happens next. What’s so extraordinary looking back across the last decade is that three such upheavals stand between 2010 and 2020.
The first was the election of 2015 — which ended the Lib Dems as a serious force in British politics. What was literally a party of government is now a joke party of the loony centre. Vince Cable once remarked that Gordon Brown had gone “from Stalin to Mr Bean”, but little did he know that the Lib Dems would go from Vince Cable to Layla Moran.
The second upheaval was Brexit — which ended David Cameron as a serious force in British politics — and George Osborne too. If you look at their record, there is everything that the two amigos achieved over their political careers. And then there is them losing the 2016 referendum. The latter stands beside the former like the White Cliffs of Dover against a sandcastle.
Now, it is Brexit’s turn to be overshadowed — and by the tiniest of things, a virus. Looking back on that scene 10 years ago, what better setting could there have been than a rose garden? Because it all seems so impossibly, heartbreakingly, quaint.
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And yet those years aren’t entirely without significance. As well as the fateful promise to hold an in/out referendum, there are other threads that still connect the past to the present: consequences of the Coalition that we still live with today. Here are five of them.
1. The Cameroon style of government
To be fair, this was a continuation of the Blair-Brown style of government — i.e. an over-centralised, headline-obsessed, PR-driven operation, that treats the Cabinet like middle management.
All governments need strong leaders, but good leaders allow the most talented individuals in their organisations to thrive. Bad leaders stunt the growth of those closest to them, and sideline those who refuse to be smothered.
For instance, no one doubts the dominant role that Margaret Thatcher played in her time as Prime Minister, but, contrary to the sexist stereotypes, she did not emasculate the big beasts in her Cabinet. She certainly fought with them (in Michael Heseltine’s case, to the death); but, to this day, Heseltine, Howe, Hurd, Major, Clarke, Lawson and Tebbit are seen as substantial figures in their own right.
It’s telling that the two figures who managed to emerge from the shadow of Cameron and Osborne — Theresa May (for a while) and Boris Johnson — were those who’d managed to maintain their distance from the leadership without being thrown out altogether.
The legacy, here, is that the Cameroon style of government has persisted, albeit under the new management of the May and Johnson regimes. At a time in our history when we need a government led by giants, we have a ministerial team of ever-diminishing stature.
2. The tuition fees fiasco
Tuition fees: the original sin of the rose garden. Though first introduced by Labour, they were tripled by the Coalition. That was despite a very public pledge, made by the Lib Dems during the 2010 election, to vote against any rise in fees. Cleggmania, if you remember that such a thing ever existed, was swept along by a tide of student support. But once in power the Lib Dems not only voted for the increase, but implemented it as part of a Tory-led government!
Politicians break promises. We all know that — and we expect it to happen. But this was on another level. The Lib Dems’ reputation was destroyed and has never recovered.
As for the funding of higher education — student numbers have swollen and as a result so have the pay packets of vice chancellors. The student loan system, however, is a shambles. An IFS report from last year found that approximately half of all loans are written off — the taxpayer picking up the tab. This accounts for 90% of all government spending on higher education — a subsidy for failure that rewards the courses and institutions that make the least contribution to their students’ future prospects.
It’s an absolute mess that loads young people up with debt, while still leaving taxpayers on the hook. And, of course, those responsible — the fat cats of the higher education establishment — get paid regardless. The whole thing is morally bankrupt — and the current crisis is pushing it ever closer to financial bankruptcy too.
3. Breaking the housing ladder
Having alienated the young with its tuition fees policy, you’d have thought that the Coalition might have won them back by making homeownership affordable again.
Not a bit of it. In 2010, poleaxed by recession, the big housing developers were on the floor. The Government could have dictated terms — putting an end the landbanking scam, for instance. Instead, ministers rescued the sector without reforming it .
The Coalition’s flagship policy was ‘Help to Buy‘ — basically a mortgage subsidy that only serves to pump more finance into a rationed housing market. The impact on prices was entirely predictable. So, 10 years later, Generation Rent is still struggling to get on to the housing ladder. With the oldest millennials now hitting middle age, they face a lifetime of exclusion from the property-owning democracy. Good luck getting them to vote Conservative!
It’s not that nothing has been achieved. There were some useful reforms to the planning system and, more recently, the excellent work of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. But these have been initiatives of the Department of Communities and Local Government (latterly, the Department of Housing, Communities and local Government). The policies that really count were — and still are — dictated from the Treasury and Downing Street. And those power centres are still dedicated to the protection of the landlord class.
What a shameful legacy.
4. Austerity the stupid way
It has to be said that the Coalition government was not dealt the easiest of hands. Like the Obama administration in America, they came into power with the consequences of the Global Financial Crisis to sort out.
With its outsized financial sector, the British economy was in a vulnerable position. Add to that a hung parliament plus the Eurozone crisis gathering momentum just over the Channel, and it is clear that the new government absolutely had to establish its credibility.
As the Left always pretends to forget, a mountain of public debt doesn’t just allow a country to spend more than it earns, it makes it deeply dependent on the confidence of its creditors — i.e. the international money markets. As events would prove, the loss of that confidence would have dire consequences elsewhere in Europe.
As painful as austerity has been the UK, it could have been worse. Just ask the Irish or the Italians or the Greeks. And yet while he had no choice but to rein in spending, George Osborne made some unforced errors.
For instance, he ruthlessly exploited public support for curbs to social security. It was right to encourage people off welfare and into work, but lasting harm was done by underfunding vital reforms like the introduction of Universal Credit.
Another false economy was the decision to implement Labour’s planned cuts to capital spending (infrastructure, etc). Failing to mend the roof when the sun’s shining (the charge that the Coalition levelled at Labour) is certainly irresponsible, but failing to fix it when it is raining is even worse. In fact, downing tools at a time when the economy has lots of idle capacity is simply perverse.
The recovery was undoubtedly delayed as a result. And the work that could have been done was added the country’s backlog of necessary infrastructure improvements. That’s an especially big burden on those parts of the country that have suffered decades of under-investment.
Goodness knows what the Covid-crisis will do to it, but the current government’s “levelling-up” agenda is just what Britain needs. But we needed it 10 years ago too.
5. The three horrible aitches
As if to make up for their early mistakes, Cameron and Osborne went on to develop a penchant for really big infrastructure investments — promoting the three horrible aitches: HS2, Hinkley Point C and Heathrow expansion. The political advantage of these massive projects was that with their very long lead-in times, big announcements could be made years, even decades before the bills become due.
However, this also provides plenty of time for costs to be revised — which they have been, in the usual upwards fashion.
The horrible aitches are obvious white elephants that should have been shot by the Coalition. Instead, they gained such momentum, that the more sceptical May and Johnson administrations felt unable to stop them. Coronavirus may put to a halt to Heathrow (indeed to whole swathes of the aviation industry) — but it looks like we’ll be paying billions-and-billions for HS2 and HPC for decades to come.
This will be the longest lasting and costliest legacy of the Coalition years.
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I’ll admit I’ve been accentuating the negative. There were some positives: the Govian reforms to education; the devolution of power to English cities; a pretty good climate change policy. But I’ve focused on the mistakes because they were avoidable.
It’s not like we can afford to make them again.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeCFPB is Eliz Warren’s intrusion on the exec branch. Her little sandbox, helping her ideology, and painfully few regular folks.
Trumps move to shutter CFPB is anti- Warren. She is all about elite, top down control. Not a populist cell in her body.
No fan of Warren, but if one of Trump’s ‘Little Guys’ begins to find his credit card company starts ripping him off on the interest rate and he’s no protection do you think any connection made to CFPB? Maybe not, but maybe so. It’s all a fun game until…
There is a bill in the Senate, sponsored by Sanders and Hawley, with Trump’s reported support, that will cap CC interest at 10% for all affected voters for the next 5 years.
The agency is prima facie unconstitutional. There is no oversight, no checks or balances. It is the worst of a very sad lot of government cronyism run amok.
It doesn’t take many unintended consequences from the collapsing of such Agencies to change the impression. No doubt one couldn’t contend every decision made by such an Agency universally supported, but if you detonate the lot you are rolling the dice.
Whether sufficient Federal cost reductions materialise to quickly get the Reconciliation Bill through the House remains unclear. Trump wants to spend alot more on Immigration controls and collect alot less, including the Billionaire tax cuts. Extending debt to do this anathema to good number of key House Republicans. That’s partly why the announcements on cuts are well out ahead of the actual confirmation of savings. He doesn’t need to have turned off many to lose his House majority.
But you can already discern the 2026 campaign response – ‘he increased your debt, protected his Cronies Billions and reduced your protections’. Trump needs a surge in living standards or it’s a potential gift.
There comes a point when you have to make hard choices. Sometimes a building is in such poor condition that it’s better to just demolish it and start over. Sometimes that means a lot more work and it may mean it takes a lot longer to get the new structure built, but we shouldn’t avoid doing the right thing because it’s more difficult or more time consuming. The bureaucracy as it currently exists has too much independence and not enough accountability to elected officials. It’s been captured by special interests, billionaires, and corporations, and it needs to be reformed. The bureaucrats who have been acting independently of the government have to be purged and replaced with those who have a proper respect for the Constitution and for democratic rule, and yes, I’m aware that Trump doesn’t have sufficient respect for the Constitution either, but he will be gone in four years and these bureaucrats can be there for decades. Ultimately, if we’re going to put these organizations beyond the authority of the elected President to fire whoever he wants for whatever reason, we should recognize that there is a need for bipartisanship. There should be oversight committees that are required to have equal representation from both parties, or maybe each state can send their own auditor/inspector. We have to get to a point of democratic accountability, and the entrenched interests are likely to be fighting, kicking, and screaming the entire way there. It’s a battle that needs to be fought. Trump wasn’t and still wouldn’t be my first choice to do it, but it needs to be done.
I’m not sure that we should assume any government agency automatically does what it is supposed to do or what it was intended to do without proof that’s what it was actually doing. I have seen many criticisms of how Trump shut down this agency but I have yet to see any of these critics offer anything the organization has tangibly done for any American particularly. If people have been helped by the CFPB, surely somebody ought to be able to find some of them to testify to that effect. Otherwise this just looks like some other government bureaucracy doing God only knows what behind the scenes and without any serious oversight and getting paid by the taxpayers to do it.
After seeing the results of Obama’s health care law, I’m skeptical that anything created by his administration was created without direct input from the organizations it was meant to regulate. That was the MO his health care law established. Put regulations in place that protects the profits of these companies and locks them in at an ‘acceptable’ level in exchange for giving them cover from the vagaries of competitive markets and deflecting the wrath of angry voters. The ACA was basically written by and for insurance companies, ensuring their perpetual existence and perpetual profits indefinitely. It didn’t work though. It has only recently become apparent how much it didn’t work when people cheered for a man who murdered an insurance executive. If these CFPB defenders can produce even one person the agency has helped, maybe I’ll care whether it gets shut down. Until then, I’m defaulting to it’s useless bureaucracy that wastes taxpayer money.
Why do Republicans always oversimplify the ACA? Just because the Affordable Care Act (ACA) relies heavily on private insurance companies doesn’t mean it was written by them. It was modeled after a conservative-backed plan, including Romneycare in Massachusetts, and aimed to expand coverage while maintaining a private insurance system.
Both sides benefitted.
Insurance companies:
The individual mandate forced more (mostly healthy) people into the market, balancing out high-cost enrollees.Government subsidies made plans more affordable, ensuring insurers got paid.Medicaid expansion brought millions of new customers to insurers managing Medicaid plans.Consumers:
Preexisting condition protections meant insurers couldn’t cherry-pick only healthy customers.Medical loss ratio rules required insurers to spend at least 80-85% of premiums on actual care, limiting profit margins.Essential health benefits mandated coverage of services insurers previously avoided.
While insurers adapted and profited, they also lobbied against certain ACA provisions, like the public option. The ACA was a compromise between universal coverage advocates and maintaining a private insurance framework.
Second, I always know when healthy people are weighing in on policies. You won’t have to go far to find stories of the CFPB saving people. My insurance dropped a chemo drug I needed to survive and left me with a 22k bill. Without the CFPB, I wouldn’t have got that money back. I am not sure what rock you are living under, but guess what is the number one reason people declare bankruptcy – medical debt.
Now, the new medical debt rule that would have kept medical debt from hurting people’s credit reports is gone. And we all know that’s why Republicans want it gone – because they don’t care about the sick. Too bad you will be there one day too, and karma is a real b***h.
Thank you for responding. This is just the sort of thing I was looking for actually. I asked for an example of someone the CFPB helped and here you are. This I respect. The people criticizing Trump should be trumpeting your story from the rooftops and sounding the alarm that he isn’t the man of the people he claims to be. That’s surely a sign of the times, that I am believing a random stranger on the Internet before the politicians, government, and most of the media. I never have believed Trump is a true populist or really wants to advocate for the people. I do maintain he is a disruptive influence and accomplishes the purpose of destabilizing the political establishment and their corporate backers so maybe it will create an opening for a real populist to come along and finish the job. He’s better than another corporate shill like Kamala Harris, not that I voted for either of them mind you. Neither meets the required standards for using up 15-20 minutes of my day.
You can’t convince me the ACA wasn’t a sellout though, because I believe that the insurance companies should not exist period. They neither provide healthcare, nor do they consume it. They are parasites, plain and simple. It is classic rent seeking for revenue streams to fund financial speculation, pure greed that has nothing to do with health care. That is why they exist, to fund Wall Street speculation. That’s all insurance companies by the way, not just medical insurance. Ever wonder why there are laws that require people to buy car insurance? It actually is a racket. Insurance companies are little more than rent collection agencies for Wall Street trading funds. Whatever the solution is, they should get no part of it. That’s what I won’t forgive Obama for. He is smart enough to know all this, and he should have had the courage to bring it all out into the light and take his case directly to the people. For all that he gets wrong, Trump at least has the courage to go directly to the people. For that alone, people will overlook quite a lot. Obama should have been the one to do that. He was elected on a platform of hope and change. He failed to deliver. I voted for the man, and I have not voted since, not for Trump or anyone else. Obama allowed the corrupt system of insurance companies and employer provided healthcare to continue to exist in exchange for them making it marginally less awful and unfair. He sold out, plain and simple. We, the people, have the right to demand better than this. If I ever see it, I might vote again. Had Sanders won the primary in 2016 or 2020, I might have voted for him. I would support single payer healthcare or Medicare for all. While I don’t believe it would improve the healthcare system as a whole based on the evidence we have from similar systems in places like the UK, it would finally and forever cut the insurance parasites out of the process.
Further, you’re wrong. I actually was one of the people who couldn’t get insurance because of a pre-existing condition. Believe it or not, it is possible for a person to believe and reason that the optimal solution for society is not simply the one that advances his or her personal fortunes or interests. I would prefer a competitive marketplace where doctors and hospitals charge fees and patients can compare prices and choose the best option, and then those who can’t afford healthcare below a certain income level get vouchers, something similar to education vouchers. This would encourage and encourage providers to compete on the basis of quality and price for customer dollars, and the entire industry would be more efficient, lean, and responsive. The current system is frankly the worst of both worlds. We have all the bureaucracy, red tape, delays and problems of a national health care system, and we still have people going bankrupt. Further, if I ever get cancer, I will most likely choose not to treat it at all, as I don’t have the financial resources to pay and I refuse to burden my family with medical debt. I think I’d rather make the best of the time I have rather than try to extend my life and be bled dry by a parasitic system that preys on the sick and the poor for the sake of funding Wall Street’s endless quest to get rich without actually producing anything or doing anything productive.
Parasites. Not true. Profits are tiny compared with other businesses. Their existence allows the government to play fairy godmother by leaving the judgements about cost and necessity to them, unlike Canada and the UK where the state run systems do the tough parts. If you think a state run system will be better, look into Canada and the UK for waiting times. Close to home, check out the Veteran’s Administration, the Indian Health Service, or the estimated billions in fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. Be careful about what you wish for.
The definition of a parasite is an organism that derives sustenance from the activities of another organism, called the host. In order to be a parasite, the organism must take resources and nourishment from the host and thus cause harm without providing any meaningful benefit. They fit the definition, as they do not provide health care nor any other service related to health care to patients, yet their profit comes entirely out of a series of transactions that could and would exist without them. According to the definition, insurance companies are parasitic to the healthcare system because A.) they do not provide health care nor improve it any identifiable way and B.) depend upon the healthcare industry for their own sustenance, and C.) cause harm by distorting free market competition in a way that’s essentially no different than governments setting prices. I don’t see how that can be any clearer. How much money they make relative to other industries is irrelevant. Whether they make ten million dollars or ten, that’s money that should go to the people who actually provide the service or the people who pay for it. I could live for years with a tapeworm and still be mostly fine but I’d still want it gone if I found out I had one. I honestly don’t think much would change if we went to single payer healthcare. I think it would be mostly the same as it is now since Medicare, Medicaid, and the insurance conglomerates already effectively set the prices. For all intents and purposes, we already have a national healthcare system. It will still be better than the UK/Canada because the government isn’t running the hospitals. What would be better than either would be to eliminate employer healthcare coverage and medical insurance and let the marketplace function through the mechanism of competition between healthcare providers on quality and cost and allow the government to provide vouchers for the poorest to get access to healthcare that providers can then redeem from the government without all the overhead, bureaucracy, and financialization.
Obama disappointed alot, but you fall into the trap of assuming he had such a strong position in Congress at the time he could be much more radical than he eventually was. He was also initially consumed with the Financial crash. He basically managed to extend cover to millions more by with some legal coercion to take out insurance. And that way extend the risk pool which made it viable. But the market for insurance was insufficient to stop costs continuing to rocket.
So I agree the US system a disaster. The World’s richest and most developed Nation but with millions still without proper healthcare cover and millions screwed on the smallprint. It’s partly because of vested interests, but it’s also partly because social solidarity much weaker culturally in the US (with maybe some of that a racial legacy too) meaning Galbraith’s ‘private affluence, public squalor’ more true today than when he wrote it.
Well, I was younger and more naive then. Perhaps I overestimated Obama or misjudged him. Whatever the reason, Obama was not the change agent he advertised himself to be, but he could have been if he had really wanted to and had some courage and determination I believe Obama could have gone directly to the people with his message and confronted the institutional powers that be and the people would have had his back. I think he could have been a transformational, visionary leader and done a better job than Trump, but maybe he never was what he advertised himself to be. Maybe he was just another corporate shill pretending to be on the side of the people. Maybe he lacked courage. Maybe he was even threatened. Who knows, but for whatever reason, he didn’t take his case directly to the people and offer to fight the establishment. Trump did, and here we are. A reality television personality has brought the political establishment to its knees. Trump understands real power comes not from money, but from loyalty, devotion, and a shared sense of purpose. For all their money, for all their institutional control, for all their domination of the media and the bureaucracy, the donor class could not buy Kamala Harris the presidency. Their failure is worth something even if the winner does nothing. Trump has shown what can be done. Even now, he uses the popular will to overrule the establishment. Does anyone seriously believe Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, or RFK Jr. would have been confirmed if the voting were done secretly? Of course they wouldn’t, but it’s a public vote, as it should be, and the Senators would have had to declare their opposition to the popularly elected President, which very few did, because they feared the wrath of voters, and when politicians fear the voters, they are more apt to listen to the voters and consider public opinion, and that’s something that has been missing in this country for far too long. Where government fears the people, there is liberty. That’s the thing that’s good about the Trump movement. It sent a message. It reminded the oligarchs that this is America, and the people expect the politicians to obey, not the other way round. The real power comes from the people. For all he gets wrong, Trump at least understands that. Even if he fails, and that’s a strong possibility, the message will remain, and the door will be standing wide open for the next revolutionary outsider who can capture the public’s mood.
Nonsense. This type of board is a wealth redistribution scheme initially proposed by Harvard’s “First Native American Law Professor” Elizabeth Warren.
It’s role is to essentially to hand out financial reparations and grant debt waivers with very little accountability or discernment. It is Socialism plain and simple.
Furthermore, Trump’s 2017 tax cuts immediately increased the disposable income of of every working person I know. It did not increase the disposable income of people not working.
Populism and Socialism are not synonymous concepts. Its becoming clear how the Kulaks felt during the collectivization scheme in the Soviet Union.
You could make an argument that Trump is just following his promise of draining the swamp. Hidden government expenditure and hidden debt are part of the swamp – favouring those who have jobs ‘managing’ the visibility of such items.
It’s not an assault on consumer protections. If the CFPB is anything like our financial regulators, the FOS and FCA, it is simply more bureacracy that generates costs for financial service providers – costs that are, of course, paid for by consumers – without actually providing any real protection. London Capital and Finance anyone?
Independent investigation into the FCA’s supervision of London Capital & Finance – GOV.UK
The only effective consumer protection is caveat emptor.