Michael Henderson suggests

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Hurrah for ding dong

Saturday, 23rd June 2007

Matthew Parris has an excellent piece today in The Times, on the superiority of competition over consensus:

I worry that British voters benefit from dingdong politics without really liking it, or understanding why. We say: “I don’t need a choice of schools in my area, I just need one good school”; and many of us might say: “I don’t need competition between political parties, I just need one good administration made up of the best of all of them.” We might equally say: “I don’t need a choice of supermarkets in my town: just one good one.” But the point is that in all these areas it is choice, competition, the rivalry and the edge that sharpens performance and stimulates ideas. You may say that coalition politics leaves us free to choose between alternatives, but simply asks them to cooperate afterwards; but an ethos of cooperation suffocates argument, works against the careers of those who think the unthinkable and stick to their guns.
Good new ideas in politics and economics are often aggressive things; they often hurt somebody; they challenge vested interests; they challenge complacency. They do not thrive in committee rooms whose wood-panelled walls breathe the search for compromise. Would privatisation, the enforced sale of council houses, the taming of the trades unions, have survived a 1980s big-tent government? A political party is a kind of forcing-house for the growth of new ideas and spirits. It is an army by turns beleaguered or hubristic. It holds to and defends and hones doctrines and theories with an enthusiasm born of danger. A big-tent government produces a different internal culture – we see these all across Europe. Though in form it may be democratic because its formation follows an election, its spirit is that of an oligarchy. It ceases to believe, as a political party does, that it is going anywhere. It just is.

He's also got a good line about Brown's wooing of LibDems:

I think Mr Brown was trying to copy Nicolas Sarkozy but went about it ineptly, as so often happens when you attempt brain surgery with a big clunking fist.