If the Coalition started cohabiting earlier this year, it has now moved into the phase where the two parties are posting mean things about each other on Facebook and trying to get the kids to take sides. George Osborne has a grump in today’s Sunday Times about the emphasis that the Lib Dems want to place on tax rises to plug the gap after the 2015 election. He writes:
‘The Liberal Democrats are now arguing with themselves, so it’s hard to work out exactly what they think. While they sign up to deficit reduction, they want more tax rises rather than spending cuts. But they shouldn’t pretend to people that the sums required can be achieved by their homes tax alone. If you want higher taxes to do the heavy lifting, you’d also need to increase taxes such as income tax or national insurance.’
So Nick Clegg hit back when he appeared on the Marr Show:
‘I just think the Conservatives are kidding themselves and seeking to kid British voters if they are claiming that it is possible to balance the books, deliver unfunded tax cuts, shrink the state and support public services in the way that everybody wants.’
Why are they fighting in public? There are three main reasons.
The first is quite obvious – there’s an election on the way and no party wants to appear to be an annexe of another one. The Lib Dems had a weird autumn statement day, with Nick Clegg running away between the morning Cabinet meeting and the Statement itself to hang out with ‘normal people’ in Cornwall (he claimed this morning that he’d proved this was a successful approach, without a great deal of evidence for this other than that the ‘normal people’ clearly didn’t throw things at him or run away), and this weekend sees even more evidence of the parties trying to do and say rather different things when it comes to the economy.
The second is a little less obvious – nowhere in his Sunday Times piece does George Osborne say that the Lib Dem mansion tax plan won’t happen. Sure, a lot of people in the Tory party thought the stamp duty reform would shoot the Labour mansion tax fox, but don’t forget that Osborne was quite amenable to the idea when it was discussed before the 2012 Budget. He has since said he can plug the gap without tax rises, though, and so this piece may well be the Chancellor getting his excuses in early in case he does end up working with Clegg again after the election.
The third is a Lib Dem strategy to persuade voters that they can temper the Tories, and a Tory strategy to suggest to voters that only a majority Conservative government would be a good idea. So Osborne argues in his piece that the Lib Dems have the wrong attitude towards the economy (though he still points out that they have signed up to deficit reduction), while Clegg wants to argue that he’ll bring a new level of honesty to the debate by claiming the Tories are kidding themselves.
This sort of bickering will continue until election day. But as we watch the Lib Dems and Tories apparently going to war over the economy, it’s worthwhile watching what they don’t say about one another as much as the insults they do fling. Today George Osborne has said his partners do support deficit reduction and hasn’t said that he’ll block a mansion tax. It will be those things that the parties don’t say that will help us sketch out what a future coalition would look like in practice.
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