Politics: Westminster just isn’t built for coalitions

The Liberal Democrats’ current problems can be traced back to 28 October 1943.

The Liberal Democrats’ current problems can be traced back to 28 October 1943. On that day, the House of Commons decided that the bombed Commons chamber should be rebuilt and its oblong structure preserved. This ensured that the British tradition of confrontational politics — and with it the pull towards a two-party system — would continue into the post-war era.

Winston Churchill understood what was at stake in the debate. He knew that ‘we shape our buildings, and our buildings shape us’. As he told the House, the chamber’s shape ‘is a very potent factor in our political life’. It is what ensures that we have a party system, with a government on one side and an opposition on the other.

There were those who disagreed with Churchill. Viscountess Astor appealed for a circular chamber on the grounds that she hoped the country was about to enter into a ‘more reasonable age’. Viscount Hinchingbrooke thought that one should be considered because coalitions might become the norm after the war. But Churchill carried the day and that is why the Liberal Democrats’have so many problems today.

The layout of the Commons’ chamber — with MPs facing each other, separated by the distance of two swords — creates an expectation that there should be two sides in politics, a government party and an opposition party. It makes no provision for coalition. It is no coincidence that it was in the chamber itself that Benjamin Disraeli declared, thumping his fist on the despatch box, that ‘England does not love coalitions.’ Or that the creation of the Liberal party in 1859 out of the Whigs, the Peelites and the Radicals was prompted by the fact that they believed they had to be one party if they were to sit together on the government benches.

This belief that the government is one party is why the Liberal Democrats are plummeting in the polls. If you’re for the government, you’re for the Tories, and if you’re against it, you’re for the opposition: Labour. Since the election the combined vote of the two main parties has increased by 14 points in the polls while the Liberal Democrat vote has fallen by the same amount, dropping from 23 per cent to 9 per cent.

How to reverse this slump? It is a subject of intense debate in Liberal Democrat circles. Those close to Nick Clegg argue that the most important thing for the party is to show that coalitions can work. They say that only when the country comes to love — or at least accept — coalitions, will it consider the Liberal Democrat holy grail of proportional representation.

To this end, they maintain that running around talking up differences with their Conservative coalition partners would be counter-productive and would put the public off coalitions for good. To their mind, the party needs to show that coalitions can govern competently; emphasising the party’s identity is something that can wait until the fiscal heavy lifting has been done, they say. In a presentation to the party’s MPs shortly after the coalition was formed, the leadership made it clear that demonstrating competence was its strategic aim for the first third of the parliament. Policies must wait until the middle third and then perhaps a final effort to be distinctive could come in the final third.

Others argue that it is vital that the party asserts itself now. They want to shout both about what the Liberal Democrats have achieved in government and what they have stopped the Tories from doing. This has been the approach taken recently by both the party’s deputy leader, Simon Hughes, and its newly elected president, Tim Farron.

Neither approach is without its flaws. The current one has left the Liberal Democrats in danger of looking irrelevant. Labour, sensing an opportunity to become the sole party of the centre-left, is trying to write the Liberal Democrats out of the script. It has stopped talking about the coalition and instead started attacking the ‘Conservative-led government’.

But the other approach is actually far more dangerous. The more the Liberal Democrats boast about their power, the more the Tory right will act up. A government that is being pulled this way and that by its backbench factions will be seen by the public as too weak to lead. It will reinforce all the negative stereotypes of coalition.

In truth, though, there is no perfect approach for the Liberal Democrats. They are a third party trying to operate in what, by tradition and design, is a two-party system and there is no easy way to do that.

If history is our guide and design is destiny, the next few years will bring about a restoration of the two-party system. The Liberal Democrats, long the most ideologically diverse of the parties, will be broken apart by the demands of government.

Most Orange Bookers (the name for the right-wing Liberal Democrats who are the political descendants of the Peelites) did not become Tories for three reasons. They were put off by the Tories’ socially illiberal approach, their perceived lack of compassion and their Euroscepticism. But these obstacles are fast disappearing. The Tories have dumped Section 28 and embraced compassionate conservatism while recent events have challenged the faith of even the most ardent pro-European. Indeed, Clegg himself recently told a private gathering that he no longer believes that Britain should join the euro.

It is easy to see how these modern-day Peelites will, in time, return from whence their forebears came. If they do, the coalition will have succeeded where Lord Derby and Disareli failed in 1858 when the Peelite William Gladstone turned down the chance to join a Conservative administration. The split in the party caused by the repeal of the Corn Laws will finally have been healed.

But, of course, most Liberal Democrat MPs are not Peelites. There are about a dozen of them, a dozen social democrats with the remaining 30-odd a pragmatic rump. The party’s social democrats will, again in time, head back to their traditional home in the Labour party with the rump going this way and that.

It might seem bizarre to suggest that the first coalition of the post-war era will be what restores the two-party system. But that is what the polls suggest is happening. It is proof of just how potent a factor in our political life the shape of the House of Commons chamber is.

‘I do feel for these quangos.’