The Last Post ? By Andrew Tarrant
Written by Editor Monday, 10 January 2011 09:34
The leadership of the UK’s Liberal Democrat Party may now find themselves caught in a destructive embrace.
The Conservative Party leader David Cameron has shown immense skill in having Liberal Democrats Ministers operate as the public faces for the most unpopular Government measures.
Unfortunately for the Liberal Democrats, the fatal embrace includes the adoption of policies which will inevitably lead to the closure of two thirds of the post offices in the UK.
The most famous mural on the Berlin Wall depicted the East German leader, Erich Honecker, being hugged by the Russian leader, Leonid Brezhnev. It was captioned “God help me survive this fatal love”.
Although nominally an independent state, East Germany was a pawn of the dominant power in the Warsaw Pact, the Russian state. The constraint of this “partnership” forced East German leaders down the path, familiar to governments throughout the Eastern bloc, of making public claims for policies that were the opposite of their actual content.
This helped destroy the credibility of East German leaders in the eyes of their own population. The leadership of the UK’s Liberal Democrat Party may now find themselves caught in a similarly destructive embrace. Here the political direction of travel is to the neo-liberal right rather than communism. Nonetheless, it does a violence to the traditional centrist Liberal Democrat notions of “fairness”.
The Conservative Party leader David Cameron has shown immense skill in having Liberal Democrats Ministers operate as the public faces for the most unpopular Government measures. Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has presented most of the cuts in government spending.
Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Secretary of State at the department of Business, Innovation and Skills, is the politician responsible for introducing the massive 80% cut to funding for teaching in universities. The source for funding the universities has instead been switched to student debt, thereby trebling the costs of attendance from £3,250 to up to £9,000 per year and provoking the recent angry demonstrations.
The allocation of portfolios and the selection of areas for cuts suggests that the Liberal Democrats were comprehensively out-manoeuvred by the Conservatives during the coalition negotiation. Material leaked via wikiLeaks has alerted us that the Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King thought that David Cameron and George Osborne, the key Conservative Party strategist and now Chancellor of Exchequer, were focussed on the fortunes of the Conservative Party to the exclusion of all other concerns.
Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, seems, fatally, not too have sufficiently appreciated this. Like any other party, the Liberal Democrats have a comprehensive raft of policies but they are particularly known for a much smaller set.
At constituency level, the most popular policies they have advanced in recent years have been opposition to cuts, opposition to student fees and campaigning to keep local post offices open. On two of these key policies the agreement between the parties has forced them to do the opposite of what they promised at the election. How fares postal services - the third of these issues?
Fatal Embrace
Unfortunately for the Liberal Democrats, the fatal embrace includes the adoption of policies which will inevitably lead to the closure of two thirds of the post offices in the UK. A Liberal Democrat minister, Ed Davey, has been made responsible for privatising Royal Mail. He is also responsible for setting up new rules regulating the relationship between the privatised Royal Mail and the network of post offices which will stay in government hands.
At first glance, it seems positive. The Minister announced to the House of Commons that, unlike the previous Labour Government, he has no “planned programme of closures”. However, despite his claim, the mechanism he is creating will inevitably lead to a massive round of closures. It is hard to see the credibility of the Liberal Democrats surviving a third 180 degree u-turn at the expense of the people who voted for them.
Evidence from the Managing Director of Post Office Limited to the House of Commons committee reviewing Ed Davey’s draft Bill, reveals that only 4000 of the 12000 post offices in the UK are profitable on a stand-alone basis. The state, as owner, currently requires Royal Mail to subsidise the post offices and to keep the full network of post offices open.
Normally when a Government privatises a post office, as happened in Germany and the Netherlands, it also passes a law setting criteria in the law, obliging the privatised company to maintain the same number of post offices. This is done because an easy way for the newly independent management of a privatised company to increase profits is by shutting post offices. The large profits in running a postal service are in serving a small number of direct mail corporate clients, not in providing a public service.
Ed Davey is refusing to adopt similar rules to those in place in Germany and the Netherlands. The reason for this is the Coalition desire to get the highest possible price from a private buyer from Royal Mail. The funds from a sale will eventually go towards a tax cut at the next general election. But the electors whose overriding preference is for tax cuts already vote Conservative.
Honecker’s regime did not survive the fatal embrace. The argument of the East German leaders that they had fought to marginally reduce the malign effects of Russian power on their countrymen and women were ignored when free elections were held.
It is similarly difficult to see how the Liberal Democrats will be able to persuade their previous electors to come back. Their standing in the latest polls has shrunk to 8% of preferences. As the discussion of post offices suggests, there are further hammer blows to their support to come.
