Nick Clegg’s tuition fees nightmare was never going to be over after the Commons vote.
Nick Clegg’s tuition fees nightmare was never going to be over after the Commons vote. Even if every Liberal Democrat MP followed him into the ‘aye’ lobby, it would still not change the party’s policy on the issue. That fight goes on. The Lib Dem Federal Policy Committee has already shown that it plans to make the Deputy Prime Minister go several more rounds. It declared recently that the abolition of fees remains party policy, whatever its leader might say.
At the next Lib Dem spring conference, a motion will almost certainly be tabled (and passed) reaffirming that the party remains committed to the abolition of fees. If this were not embarrassment enough, Clegg could even be forced to go into the next election promising to reverse the policy that he and his ministerial colleagues have expended such political capital to pass.
Clegg finds himself in this bizarre situation because of the internal structures of the Liberal Democrat party, where the activists control the leader, not vice-versa. The Deputy Prime Minister is not supposed to lead his party, but to act as a front man for the policies agreed by the Federal Policy Committee — the last redoubt of the beard-and-sandals brigade.
As if dealing with protesters burning him in effigy and demonstrating outside his front door were not enough, Clegg is also the target of an internal resistance campaign. When the Lib Dem left saw the direction that the party was heading in under Clegg’s leadership, they decided to take over the committees. They knew that they could use them to wage a policy insurgency against the leadership.
Richard Grayson, who until recently was the vice-chairman of the Federal Policy Committee, says that after the leadership won a vote at the 2008 conference to scrap the party’s commitment to a 50p tax rate for the rich, ‘the social liberal wing of the party realised that it needed to get organised’. He makes no bones about the fact that he stood for the committee to act as a check on the leadership.
Those closest to Clegg are now telling him that to turn the Liberal Democrats into a credible party of government he must reform these party structures. Clegg needs his own version of Blair’s ‘Partnership into Power’, the reforms that broke the stranglehold of the left over the Labour party. As one Lib Dem minister puts it, the current arrangements ‘don’t allow the leader to lead’. For that reason, they must go. No party that aspires to be a party of government can bind the hands of its leader.
For all the bravery he has shown in the last seven months, Clegg has always shied away from confrontation with his party. This is why he accepted the fees policy in the first place. Last year he backed down on the issue at both the spring and autumn conferences when he discovered just how much opposition to fiscal reality there was among Lib Dem activists.
But if Clegg doesn’t deal with this structural problem now, he could be left trying to defend a manifesto at the next election that is in direct contradiction with what he has done in government. He may find all the work he has put into making the Liberal Democrats look like a serious party is undone.
The current Lib Dem structures are designed to create internal opposition to the leadership and are born out of the deep suspicion between the Liberal and Social Democratic wings of the party following the merger of the two parties in the late 1980s. Their defenders proudly boast that they make the Liberal Democrats the ‘only democratic party in Britain’.
But it is a very peculiar form of democracy. These committees are elected on a turnout that would embarrass an MEP. In this autumn’s elections to the Federal Policy Committee, only 1,731 of the Liberal Democrats’ 65,000 members voted.
One candidate was elected to the committee with only 24 first preference votes; Nick Clegg won more than 20,000 votes when he was elected leader in 2007. It would hardly be undemocratic for the man who received the votes of so many thousands to exert authority over a committee elected on a turnout of about 2.5 per cent of the membership.
The other reason for Clegg to act now is that the Federal Policy Committee is flexing its muscles. After it had quashed Clegg’s attempt to downgrade the tuition fees pledge at last year’s 2009 autumn conference, a majority of its members wrote to the Guardian to assert that the committee not only decided policy, but also which policies took priority. In other words, if a majority Lib Dem government was elected it would have no discretion over its legislative timetable. A Liberal Democrat prime minister would have less autonomy than a Lib Dem council leader.
Downgrading the role of the Federal Policy Committee would also help to move the Liberal Democrats on from being a party of woolly populism. Its role in government means that it can no longer hope to be the choice of those who are inherently oppositional or who wish to put two fingers up at the political process. The party needs to persuade voters that what it has done — and would do — in government is good for the country. As one Clegg ally says, ‘We need to replace those who voted for the party because it couldn’t win with those who didn’t vote for the party because it couldn’t win.’
Any attempt to cut the Federal Policy Committee down to size would provoke howls of outrage. There would be some embarrassing publicity. But this is the price that the Liberal Democrats pay for growing up in public, a fate which coalition has foisted upon them.
Power brings credibility. This is the great hope of the Lib Dems. It is what enables them to put up with the protests and the excrement through the letterbox. It would be a tragedy for Clegg if he were to jettison this most precious of political commodities because he was too frit to take on the bearded men in sandals.
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