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We’re living in the shadow of the Coalition Far from being a rupture from the technocratic politics of 2010, today's Government is cut from the same cloth

No, blame him: Johnson and Cameron Credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

No, blame him: Johnson and Cameron Credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty


May 12, 2020   7 mins

If a week is a long time in politics, what can happen in a decade? Ten years ago today, David Cameron and Nick Clegg gave the Coalition government its foundational moment, basking in the sunshine of the Downing Street garden, and their own cleverness.

Spool forward to the present day and the contrast in politics can look almost head-spinning. Since polls closed in the EU referendum in June 2016, Britain has had three prime ministers and two general elections, in a span of time that might otherwise have seen Prime Minister Cameron in office until the May 2020 election.

Cameron, like Clegg, is a blurred memory. Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage, who might interest future historians almost as much, are fading from view. Theresa May, who will not trouble posterity, is already gone.

There’s a lot to learn by looking back to that moment in the Rose Garden. The garden isn’t called that that, of course, but does that matter? It is, after all, how people have chosen to remember it. Perhaps that’s what really matters in the end.

But I wonder if we’re learning the right lessons by looking back on the Rose Garden and the coalition.  I don’t often disagree with UnHerd’s own Peter Franklin, but I have to quibble with his assessment of the Coalition years  as “unusually — almost freakishly — disconnected from what happened next. It’s almost as if they didn’t happen at all.”

Of the main players, Peter offers this enviably sharp verdict:

“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.”

I understand the argument, the narrative it supports, even if I don’t entirely agree with it. More of that in a moment. First, that narrative, which goes something like this: the Rose Garden moment marked a high tide for technocrat centrist elite politicians and their bloodless “new politics”.

Cameron and Clegg, public school and Oxbridge-educated fortysomethings with no real careers outside politics, were able to work together happily because they had more in common than they admitted to voters, and had few ideological convictions to impede their partnership. Together, they oversaw five years of stable government driven its very DNA towards the political centre: a bit socially liberal (gay marriage) and a bit economically conservative (austerity).

The same narrative says that all those things have now been swept away by a tide of partisan vitriol, culture-wars dividing lines and politicians intent on consolidating their electoral base, not winning over opponents. Boris Johnson, you might think, is the embodied repudiation of the Coalition years. Unlike Cameron and Clegg, this narrative suggests, the current PM has no willingness to compromise with opponents or critics. Far from technocratic centrism, he’s a gut-feel guy who won his majority last year on the tub-thumping populist simplicity of “Get Brexit Done” and leads a government whose illiberalism is captured in a home secretary who used to be quite keen on hanging; the new politics has given way to the old.

Or has it? Looking back, I can’t help but feel that the drama and turmoil that has swept away many familiar characters, terminally changing their career trajectories, hasn’t really changed the fundamentals of politics quite so much.

Vitriol? Well, there’s no disputing that the tone of politics has changed, but only in degree, not nature. The idea that Politics 2010 was a Socratic debate among patricians is for the birds; the happy smiles of the Rose Garden followed the Brown years, when it was commonplace for enemies of Labour’s then leader to debate his mental health, and MPs’ expenses, which made it acceptable to address MPs as thieving toerags. Political twitter may have been a friendly clique in 2010, but wider political discourse was often toxic.

A change of personnel? We’re governed by different people, but not a different type of person.  You can only think that David Cameron (Eton and Brasenose, Oxford) and Boris Johnson (Eton and Balliol, Oxford) are fundamentally different sorts if you go in for Freud’s narcissism of small differences. Perhaps you think Brexit is a tectonic gulf between the two, but it’s easy to imagine (as he himself did) the world where Boris was for Remain, and equally possible to imagine the world where Cameron supported leaving. After all, DC was willing to be pushed by his party into a referendum he didn’t want; a bit more pushing might well have seen him saunter across another red line.

On the other side of the House, Sir Keir Starmer is a bit different from Ed Miliband, but they’re not members of different species; after the genuine divergence of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leadership is reverting to the (north London professional) mean. More broadly, the House of Commons has changed a bit since 2010, but not dramatically: there are more women, more BAME MPs and fewer privately-educated MPs. But the place is still heavy with the sort of people whose CVs look a lot like that of Cameron and Clegg.

Twitter might have changed, but politics itself is still done by much the same sort of people who were in charge a decade ago, and often done in a similar way to the same people. Many of those ‘Red Wall’ seats Johnson claimed in 2019 were also Tory targets in 2010. I spent the 2010 campaign tracking Cameron around the country; most of my days were spent in the north-west watching the man try to win over Labour voters who watched football and rugby league. On election night in 2010, a Tory friend said she knew they’d missed the majority because Gedling had stayed red. Cameron may have felt comfortable with Nick Clegg, but it’s not what he wanted. He had to form a coalition with the Lib Dems because he was unable to form a coalition of voters within the Conservative Party big enough to reach from Guildford to Gedling.

What about policy? Surely here we find support for the idea of an essential rupture between the Coalition what came after? Again, I’m not so sure. Cameron and Clegg may have looked good in the garden, but they weren’t entirely the compromising centrists that jolly press conference promised and some people now recall. In part this is because history is written by the former incumbents, several of whom are keen to play up the idea of the Coalition as driven by compassion and moderation.

In Cameron’s own book about his premiership, he describes his political approach as “compassionate” more than 30 times and calls himself “a genuine, moderate and liberally-minded One Nation Conservative.”

That would be the compassionate, moderate Coalition that reduced taxes for people earning £150,000 at the same time as making cuts in welfare payments including tax credits and housing benefit. The compassionate, moderate Coalition whose welfare policies led to claims that they would result in in the Kosovo-style ethnic cleansing of the poor. Those claims were made by one Boris Johnson, of course.

What about liberal internationalism?  Cameron in his book says: “My idea was to mark us out as the most open, globalised, free-trading anti-protectionist nation on Earth”. Which sounds nice, but was hardly the reality of Coalition policy.  

As for liberal internationalism, that might have been an accurate description of Nick Clegg’s personal outlook, but it was hardly the reality of coalition policy. David Cameron and his Home Secretary (remember her?) spent five years tweaking immigration rules, promising yet more crackdowns and generally blaming foreigners for stuff that wasn’t their fault.

Even George Osborne now concedes that he and his friend Dave “didn’t make enough of the value of immigration”.

Cameron banged on about immigration even though his own inclinations on the issue were fairly liberal; he just thought he had to talk tough on the subject to keep party and public happy. Draw your own comparisons with the current PM.

A pro-European coalition? Pull the other one. One of the reasons Cameron lost his referendum was that he asked people to vote for the EU membership he’d spent the previous six years slagging off as an undemocratic fetter on the UK economy. Far from “not happening all”, the Coalition years and Cameron’s European policy were the linear precursor of Brexit. That’s not just my verdict either: Osborne has said the referendum was lost because Cameron and Co were too negative about Europe.

Boris Johnson is routinely described, in Brussels and elsewhere, as a Little England Tory brute with no regard for European history or solidarity. But that’s hardly unprecedented. Rewind to Friday, 11 December 2011, and savour the opening paragraphs of the Guardian’s lead story that morning:

David Cameron plunged Britain’s position in Europe into the greatest uncertainty in a generation as he used his veto to block a new EU-wide treaty and left at least 23 other countries to forge a pact to salvage the single currency.

With the apparent blessing of the pro-European deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg — and the subsequent delight of Tory backbenchers — Cameron deployed the ultimate weapon in European summitry at about 2.30am yesterday.

What about economics? It’s early days and the Coronavirus has obviously scrambled the compass, but there are credible signs that the Johnson administration will end up being even closer to the centre-ground of economic policy than the Coalition. Johnson won his election by junking corporate tax cuts put in train by George Osborne and promising to spend more on the NHS. “Levelling up”, meanwhile, is strongly reminiscent of the agenda pursued by the Coalition’s Vince Cable when he was Business Secretary, and often blocked by the Coalition’s higher-ups. Cameron eventually came around to a more interventionist approach to markets, adopting the Ed Miliband energy price cap he once derided. These days some Tory free marketeers (quietly) grumble that Boris’ big-state economics are not a million miles away from the “reheated Milibandism” that Theresa May tried to serve up.

Then there’s climate change. Husky-hugging Cameron and his yellow-green partner talked a good game on environmental policy, but who was it who ended up promising to “get rid of the green crap” on energy bills and effectively banning onshore wind?

By contrast, consider the environmental stance of Boris Johnson. So far, he’s upheld a legal commitment to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050 even though most voters don’t even know what net zero means (Government polling shows only 35% recognise the term) and certainly don’t know the disruptions that hitting that target will bring to their lives. (Just google “hydrogen boiler”.) Oh, and he’s restarted onshore wind, too. So who is the populist driven by public opinion, and who is the know-all technocrat driving through policies that lack obvious public approval?

I am not denying that things have changed since 2010 — that would be foolish. But the differences between the days of the Coalition and now are easy to overplay, while their similarities are easy to overlook. We should be wary of the idea of historic rupture between then and now, not least because the changes that lie ahead for post-Covid Britain may yet make the differences between the worlds of Dave and Boris look like minor details. Sometimes, the present is more like the past than the future.


James Kirkup is Director of the London-based Social Market Foundation

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William Cameron
William Cameron
4 years ago

I think the article is too quick to turn away from investigating vitamin D deficiency.
I also think its hard to argue for social deprivation when BAME doctors or senior nurses are the deaths. These jobs are in no way low paid. Social deprivation clearly is unhelpful but its not the primary causal factor. What about Viral load ?
And we are surrounded by statistics but how many are useful ? For example if people over 65 are at the higher end of risk, how does that compare with BAME risk. So many unknowns .

Martyn Hole
Martyn Hole
4 years ago

Given that the author is studying psychiatric genetics, I would have thought genetic issues may be important. Think sickle cell anemia for example or breast cancer in the Ashkenazi Jewish population.

Julia H
Julia H
4 years ago

Wouldn’t the chances of dying also be affected by the effect of the vitamin D deficiency? Perhaps (I don’t know) severe vitamin D deficiency on its own is a big risk factor for Covid-19 mortality and is also more prevalent in darker skinned people because melanin, which causes skin pigmentation, lowers the skin’s ability to make vitamin D in response to sunlight exposure.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

‘I beg your pardon, they promised us a rose garden’, as someone almost sang a long time ago.

Instead we got Libya, an insane and immoral university fees/student borrowing system, Help for House Builders (sic (very sick)), that absurd referendum on a voting system that nobody wanted when Clegg might have got PR as a condition of coalition, hundreds more corrupt and disgusting peers, all manner of green nonsense including wind farm subsidies to Samantha Cameron’s father, another insane reorganisation of the NHS by a Tory spiv whose name I forget, mass immigration, Vince Cable, George Osborn… and oh so much more, so much more to sicken the stomach and torment the soul.

In retrospect, the whole thing was almost as bad as the New Labour years, but from this farrago did at least come the historic saving grace of Brexit.

Tony Hay
Tony Hay
4 years ago

From today’s Analysis section (https://unherd.com/2020/05/… “There’s an interesting statistical anomaly called Simpson’s paradox. It is that you can find a trend going one way in lots of individual datasets, but that when you combine those datasets, it can make the trend look like it’s going the other way.”

Phil K
Phil K
4 years ago

Interesting article but I disagree that Johnson won by “junking corporation tax cuts” – surely more that the Brexit party stood down in so many seats allowing the Tories to win. I’m a keen follower of politics, an ex Tory (after Brexit), and rather in despair. I always thought Johnson was a clown but have found myself gradually accepting him – but doesn’t that say a lot about our politics? Outsiders must have a low opinion of our political class which is one hell of a shame – we are a country with many clever and resourceful young people, we can achieve great things, and we must find a way to achieve that potential, despite our politicians……

Andrew Baldwin
Andrew Baldwin
4 years ago

The clearest case where the coalition government really did make a huge difference from what went before, largely in a negative way, was in the domain of official consumer price indices, destroying the formerly sharp distinction between household-oriented (e.g. the RPI) and macroeconomic (e.g. the UK HICP or CPI) consumer price series, and working towards making the CPIH the one index that rules them all and in the darkness binds them. To this end Osborne recruited that remarkable chameleon, Mark Carney. Most of Carney’s public career was in Canada, where he supported without reservations the official Canadian CPI as the target inflation indicator of the Bank of Canada, but he was happy to trash the way owner-occupied housing is calculated in the RPI, which uses the same accounting approach to measuring OOH as the Canadian CPI. The House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee report “Measuring Inflation” released in January 2019, was a curate’s egg of a document, correctly casting doubt on the suitability of imputed rents to measure OOH costs but endorsing the idea of one index that rules them all. The UKSA only picked up on the second part of the idea, and now wants to “reform” the RPI by replacing its accounting measure of OOH with an imputed rents measure. Johnson’s then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid David, had no better response than delay, saying such a change could only take place between 2025 and 2030, rather than categorically rejected such a reactionary move. It is really difficult to imagine a more dysfunctional outcome than making the CPIH the one index to rule them all. In Canada, where I live, this is the world we operate in. That’s why Carney, already indoctrinated in this way of thinking, needed no convincing. But at least our ruling index, the Canadian CPI, is an excellent household-oriented measure of consumer price inflation. And if it is a much more defective macroeconomic index, it at least includes housing prices. The CPIH is a duck-billed platypus of an index, a macroeconomic HICP series with an anomalous imputed rent component tacked onto it, and it doesn’t include house prices at all. If the Johnson government wants to make a sharp break from the past (and it certainly should) it should make the current ONS experimental series for consumer prices including a net acquisitions approach to OOH the target inflation indicator of the Bank of England as quickly as possible. And it should absolutely not give any consideration to replacing the current treatment of OOH costs in the RPI with imputed rents. The obvious reform to the RPI, as has already been indicated in the Johnson (Paul, not Boris) report, is the addition of a stamp duty component, already part of the ONS experimental series just mentioned.

Richard Slack
Richard Slack
4 years ago

The Coalition was essentially fraudulent and with a parallel from 80 years earlier. In the late 1920s the City of London was borrowing short term money and lending it to risky ventures in Eastern Europe longer term. The profits could be good though the risk high. As always the banks thought they had the skills to get out in time and as always they all took the same risks at the same time, as Keynes often observed. And they were caught as banks in Eastern Europe crashed and the City’s creditors wanted their cash back. What was at risk the likelihood of the UK having to devalue sterling to pay its debts and the banks would lose their reputation for prudence and honest dealing which for some reason they enjoyed. So a different narrative was chosen; Sterling’s weakness was nothing to do with the banks, it was due to the difference between Government Income and expenditure and the newly elected Labour Government (minority) under Ramsey MacDonald was blamed for the gap and told this had to be removed, not by taxes (perish the thought!) but by cutting expenditure particularly welfare expenditure (or “waste” as the bankers called it). The Labour Cabinet could not accept this and so MacDonald was persuaded that a coalition government had to happen which was a effectively a Tory Government with the hapless MacDonald nominally leading it. It did not keep Britain on the Gold Standard, we came off it and sterling devalued by about 25% against Gold. The miseries of the 30s were the result.

In 2008 we discovered that the financial institutions had been playing fast and loose with everyone’s money and, guess what, had all be doing the same things and there was a hole where the money should be. Gordon Brown, actually sustained the crisis quite well with essentially Keynesian measures which even held the budget deficit but it cost him an election. With a hung Parliament the same voices were heard of the need for a coalition to “restore confidence” “balance the budget” and, more to the point cut public expenditure which had been allegedly out of control under Labour. The Lib Dems conceded on areas of policy such as Health, Welfare and Education and Privatisation, in return they got a pledge on pupil expenditure for poorer pupils which was washed out by the cuts, and a referendum on proportional representation which the Conservatives did their best to sabotage. Clegg was given a sinecure of Deputy Prime Minister.

Could it have been different. I think it could, all Clegg had to do was to agree to support all measures a minority Tory Government wanted to do to reduce expenditure( if he really thought that was a problem) , he did not need to support the policies on welfare etc, he might have had a chance of manoeuvring towards proportional representation., and he might have had rather more MPs in 2015 or whenever the election came.

The effect on the Labour Party was as bad. As New Labour was PR based rather than policy based the reaction in opposition was to apologise for much of its record and adopt a policy of “Austerity with a human face” rather than advocate the the Quantitative Easing could have been used to rebuild the economy. Ed Balls, as a student of Economics understood the parallel with 1930 but failed to make this point. By the time of the 2015 election no-one had a clue what the Labour Party stood for, Scotland went to the SNP and Balls was out on his arse.

Adrian Smith
Adrian Smith
4 years ago

So the BAME community now has a far greater level of herd immunity than the white community.

robertjones770
robertjones770
4 years ago

“Sometimes, the present is more like the past than the future”. Nicely put.

Stephen Follows
Stephen Follows
4 years ago

‘generally blaming foreigners for stuff that wasn’t their fault.’

Like all those people coming back from Wuhan after Chinese New Year? Not so much foreigners, more like barbarians at the (airport) gates.