The Coffee House A-Z of the Coalition: A-F

The coalition is 1 today. Unfortunately, we can't serve jelly and ice cream over the internet — but we can write an A-Z to mark the first year of Cameron and Clegg's union. Below is the first part of that, covering the letters A to F. But, first, a little piece of political nostalgia for CoffeeHousers. A year ago today, this happened:

And now for the A-Z…

A is for Andrew Lansley Rap

John Healey, make way for MC NxtGen. The Loughborough rapper may not be part of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition, but his three-minute denunciation of the coalition's health reforms — video above — did the job better than most politicians ever could. You may not agree with its central thrust, nor approve of its brashness, but the Andrew Lansley Rap is a rare commodity in the national debate: an instance of more or less informed anger. Little wonder why it's so popular in the leftwing corners of cyberspace.

Watching the video again, it makes you wonder how the situation turned against the coalition so violently and so unambiguously. David Cameron once explained his political priority using only three letters: NHS. And, in another act of brevity, he crafted a policy around it that required only two words: more cash. Ringfencing the health service from spending cuts was meant to reassure the public about the Tories' intentions. And yet … and yet that has been complicated no end by Lansley's reform plans. There may be much of merit in what the Health Secretary proposed — but it was hastily devised, clumsily explained and was far too much for the government to take on in one swoop. The result? The Andrew Lansley Rap, among other general discontent.

The bitter ironies don't stop there. We now have Lib Dems joining with George Osborne to castigate a set of reforms that they initially agreed with. Andrew Lansley, who enjoyed "unsackable" status in Opposition, is now one of the most diminished figures of the coalition government. And where we go from here, no one really knows. It looks likely that Lansley's GP consortia will be broadened out to include nurses, local authority types and candlestick makers. But there could well be more change — and, with it, more controversy — than that.

B is for BS

It was, and remains, an attractive idea, the Big Society. But it's still unclear whether it is one to shape a government around. Even with David Cameron spreading the BS gospel as persistently as possible — particularly in his speech to last year's Tory party conference — the response has been ambivalent, at best. Take the below poll results that the Sun released in January. As Alex wrote at the time, it seems that the prevailing view of the Big Society is, "I don't know what it is. It sounds like a good idea. It probably won't work." Classic.

C is for Council Wars

With as combative a creature as Eric Pickles in charge of the local government brief, it was always likely that the coalition would have a scrappy relationship with the councils. And so it has proved, and then some. Pickles, ably assisted by Grant Shapps and Greg Clark, has set about the councils with the fury of a whirlwind. Whether is is executive pay, or spending transparency, the message coming down from the ministerial team has been unequivocal: do better.

It is a message that David Cameron enjoys broadcasting, too. Although it dwelt unusually long on matters local — due to the impending elections — last week's session of PMQs was a case in point. "Are not Labour local authorities playing politics with people's jobs?" he asked from the prime ministerial bully pulpit. "There are too many examples," he added later, "of chief executives being paid far too much and of not nearly enough attention being paid to cut the back-office costs so we can keep the services going." And so on.

For their part, the local authorities have struggled back. Many took part, for instance in a prolonged battle with Whitehall over the requirement to publish spending details online — with Nottingham City Council still holding out against Pickles' demands. Some have done everything they can to impede the spread of Michael Gove's free schools agenda — and that includes Conservative councils, as related by The Spectator. From universal benefits to healthcare, there are plenty of areas where the councils can impose their will, and defy the government in the process.

D is for Deficit-reduction

Ah, yes, the topic of our time — and one that CoffeeHousers are no doubt familiar with. For completeness's sake, though, let's dash through the story once again. The coalition came to power on a promise: a promise to deal with the nation's rampant, and unprecedented, deficit (in effect, the government overspend that has to be covered by extra borrowing). To do so, it has had to reduce the gap between what the Exchequer spends and what it collects. And that means two things: spending cuts and tax hikes, both of which have dominated the political debate for the past year. The government's chosen ratio is 75-25 in favour of spending cuts, and it hopes that will vanquish the deficit — particularly the "structural" part of it — by the end of this Parliament:

Of course, Ed Balls insists that this is going much too far, much too fast — but the differences between the coalition's plans and Labour's plans are not as pronounced as he would have you think. The coalition wants to terminate the structural deficit by 2015, whereas Labour, before the election, pledged to reduce it by "more than two-thirds". Osborne's spending cuts may be steeper than those that Alistair Darling would have presided over, but only just:

In the background to all this is The Great Impossible Debt Burden. Politicians have confused debt and deficit for their own ends in recent years, but, be sure, they are not the same thing. Debt is the sum total of all the borrowing that we have yet to pay off. It swells as the country borrows more. And it will increase over this Parliament, almost regardless of Osborne's spending cuts:

E is for Europe

David Cameron would be forgiven for reading that as "E is for Everywhere", as Europe and its demands have encroached all over his premiership. There have been the big shocks, of course: the bail-outs and budget demands, the directives over prisoner voting. But there has also been the relentless ticker-tape of Brussels regulation that, while it doesn't capture the front pages, has left ministers no less frustrated. And none of it is going to disappear any time soon. Already, the battle over next year's European budget is simmering, and more bail-outs loom. Cameron may point, with some cause, to the obligations that New Labour signed up for, and which remain in place. But the concern, for him, is that this fails to convince a public who are Eurosceptic already, and a set of Tory backbenchers who are even more fiercely so.

F is for Freedom for schools

We were thinking of calling this entry "F is for Free Schools" — but that no longer captures the thrust of Michael Gove's agenda. It might have done, once, back when the Tories were issuing their Invitations to Government, and emphasising the "free schools" that parents and charity groups would be able to set up from scratch. But, in government, Gove's triumph has been considerably more broad-based than that. It has been less parents and charities that have seized on the freedoms he is offering, and more those schools already in the state sector. As it stands, some 658 of them have taken up the opportunity to become Academies, liberated from central control. That's some way up from the 203 academies there were last year. And it's even a significant rise on the 407 in January of this year. The rate of growth is really quite astonishing:

Tony Blair believed that the tipping point for Academies would come when there were 400 of them. Michael Gove has surpassed that total sooner than even he expected. Few might have predicted that existing state schools would themselves be the driver of reform, but that is exactly what has happened. By the time the first free schools enter the national bloodstream in September, their principles will already be encoded within over 10 per cent of our state secondaries. Like I say, astonishing.

Click here to read part 2.