A wise column by Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian. Wise, of course, because he reaches a conclusion this blog arrived at some time ago:
Yet it is not too soon to insist that almost everything about this government so far, including today’s programme, is intended to be about more than making the best of a bad job.
Everything now points, indeed, to this coalition being a serious historic attempt to realign the liberal centre-right in the electoral middle ground. Cameron and Clegg, in their own ways, now almost say as much. “The more I see of this coalition in action,” Cameron said, “the more I see its potential, not just in solving the problems that lie before us but solving them with a shared set of values”. Clegg went even further, seeming to claim that the coalition’s compromises and differing traditions – he now routinely talks about the “blend” between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives – have made its programme even stronger than they would have been apart.
Make no mistake about this.
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