A "new politics"?

In the election campaign we were promised a "new politics" by all three parties. Clegg promised to "persuade you to put your faith in politics once again" and Cameron created a taskforce on restoring trust in politics.

But have we entered a new era of transparency, honesty and integirty among politicians, or have we moved further along the centralised, closed-door and media centric approach that has grown since the 80s?

Unfortunately, it appears to be the latter. I want to highlight several examples that aren't significant on their own, but taken together show a worrying tendency to lie amongst the coalition.

1) Gove misleads on academies

In early June, Gove announced that 1,114 schools had applied to become academies in just one week. But it emerged yesterday that only 153 had applied - just days after the Academies Bill was rushed through parliament. Of course, the number that apply at such an early stage is not necessarily indicative of the scheme's eventual success, but to rush the Bill through without bothering to make the true state of affairs known to parliament is extremely slippery.

2) Pushing through boundary changes

Equalising constituencies and reducing the number of MPs by 10% was in the Tory manifesto, so is hardly surprising. But the way in which the issue is been tackled is truly shocking. For the first time in living memory, local people are to be denied rights of consultation or appeal. Is this the "new localism" the Lib Dems talk about or the "empowering communities" agenda the Tories talk about??? Of course, there are exceptions - you'll be allowed to have much less than the average number of people per MP if your constituency is over 13,000 square miles - all Scottish Lib Dem constituencies.

All very dodgy. But instead of taking the entirely sensible course of splitting AV and boundary changes into two separate Bills, Cameron simply ignores Labour criticism by making a completely irrelevant point about AV. I find it quite worrying that the government are prepared to debate AV but aren't prepared to have a proper debate on perhaps more significant changes to constituency boundaries.

3) Clegg tells two stories on AV

Clegg told the Commons that AV without a referendum "was not offered by the Labour Party in those discussions". Utterly unequivocal. Its important to realise how important this is. Cameron told Tory MPs and the shadow cabinet that Labour had offered AV without a referendum, the basis on which the Tories offered a referendum on AV to the Lib Dems. This leads to one of three irresistible conclusions. Either Clegg lied to Cameron to get him to improve his offer, Cameron lied to Tory MPs to get them to make the offer, or both leaders were so incredibly full of spin that they were perfectly happy to trick both their MPs and the public into something that simply wasn't true.

4) Clegg U-turns on cuts

In the campaign, Clegg described Tory spending cut plans as "economic masochism". Of course, it was understandable that the Lib Dems would compromise on cuts as part of the coalition agreement. But its the narrative Clegg provides that worries me.

Initially Clegg and most Lib Dems claimed that they got convinced when they "saw the books". But this isn't remotely credible. Borrowing was revised down by £11bn in Labour's March Budget due to better than expected tax revenues and it was revised down again by another £5.5bn just after the coalition took power. The case for immediate and/or deep cuts was substantially weaker in June than it was before the election.

After being caught out on this, Clegg claimed that he actually changed his mind just before the election. He just "forgot" to mention this to the electorate and continued to campaign against immediate cuts and for the maintainance of fiscal stimulus. Oops.




Each is indicative of unnecessarily dishonest politics. You do expect that kind of thing at elections, but to my mind its pretty shocking that such a bad pattern is emerging so quickly into the coalition's first term.

The coalition has only been in power 2 months and we are already seeing the kind of rot normally seen once a party has been in power for a decade. It simply isn't necessary to make up lies about academies or gerrymander constitutional Bills through when you are guaranteed to pass them anyway. Once the rot sets in, its all over: you only have to look at how inept and unprincipled the last Labour and Conservative governments became in their dying days. Sooner rather than later the public are going to grow weary of this rubbish. The coalition is going to become desperately unpopular by this time next year if it continues to operate in this way; and that is before you factor in the impact of cuts.