The unbearable lightness of being (a liberal democrat)

Forget about the disaffected Tory right and inter-party squabbles.  It is the existential crisis of the Liberal Democrats that poses the greatest threat to the coalition. 

Poor Nick Clegg.  It wasn’t long ago that the whole country was fighting just for the chance to agree with him. Now, after just five months in government, he has become by most accounts a sort of tragic Faustian figure, selling his soul to the wicked Tories in exchange for a fancy title and a seat at the top table. 

Even more charitable interpretations cast him as a well-meaning but essentially misguided fool, discarding his principles for the promise of an AV referendum which, if current polling is to be believed, may become the most Pyrrhic of victories. 

The underlying truth, however, may be even more unpalatable to the party faithful than either of these extremes.  If Nick Clegg sold his principles, it was not by entering coalition with the Tories.  It was by masking his true beliefs and agenda from his own party and the electorate.

Take university tuition fees.  Much has been made about Clegg’s apparent U-turn since the Browne review, proposing in government a raise in fees having campaigned voraciously prior to the election to abolish them. 

But as Nick Robinson reported this week, if Nick Clegg sold out it was not in endorsing the Browne review – but in signing a pledge to abolish them in the first place.  He and his inner circle have apparently long been working to persuade their party to drop their opposition to university fees. 

He is now paying the price of this duplicity. Having campaigned hard to win the support of disaffected leftist voters with vocal opposition to tuition fees and the Iraq war, voters are now starting to experience buyer’s remorse as they get home and read the small print. A recent Yougov poll put the party on 11% - down from 23% at the general election. 

This is the essential problem for the Lib Dems.  Whilst a large chunk of their electoral support and parliamentarians hail from the social democratic wing of the party, the current leadership inner-circle are committed liberals, as suspicious of big-government as many on the Tory right. In many ways the party is suffering an existential crisis stemming inception as an alliance between Liberals and Social Democrats 30 years ago. 

And it is this intra-party friction represents the single greatest danger to the future of the coalition government.