History repeats itself for the Liberal Democrats

How will Nick Clegg retreat from coalition at the next election? David Torrance, author of David Steel: Rising Hope to Elder Statesman, finds that history may be in danger of repeating itself...

History repeats itself said Karl Marx, first as tragedy then as farce. It’s a cliché but a pertinent one, for when I was writing a new biography of the former Liberal leader David Steel I drafted the following paragraph on the Lib-Lab Pact of 1977-78:   “The Liberals planned a threefold election pitch: the party had stabilised the economy via the Pact and had therefore helped the country, while it had also curbed the Left and at least ‘opened the door to Liberal ideas’. The sticking point remained the lack of any tangible achievements to justify the third claim.”   When I ran this by a few people for feedback, one highlighted this paragraph and commented: “Substitute ‘coalition’ for ‘Pact’ and ‘Right’ for ‘Left’ and you could be describing the current situation!”

For history has repeated itself for the Liberal Democrats, only it’s more tragedy than farce. The current Coalition is, of course, more formal than the Parliamentary Pact engineered by Steel and the then Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, but the context and political consequences are remarkably similar.

In 1977 Labour, like today’s Conservatives, lacked a majority, while the UK economy, as at present, was in dire straits – providing the pretext for both the Pact and the Coalition. As a consequence of each, support for Britain’s third party plummeted in the polls. They lost by-elections; activists grumbled that they should never have got involved with government in the first place.

So why hadn’t Nick Clegg et al learned any lessons from history come May 2010? Firstly, today’s generation of politicians – not least Clegg and Cameron – show little interest in modern political history, and secondly there was a naïve belief that since this was to be a full Coalition rather than a Pact then such mistakes could be avoided.

At the time David – by then Lord – Steel urged his party to move cautiously and take time over the negotiations, even though he would have preferred them to be with Labour rather than the Conservatives. That said, Steel knew from experience (the general election of February 1974) the folly of being seen to sustain the “losing” party.

Even in Coalition there were echoes of the past. In late 1977 the Lib-Lab Pact nearly fell apart when Labour MPs failed to back (in sufficient numbers) the introduction of Proportional Representation for direct elections to the European Parliament. In 2011 it was a referendum on the Alternative Vote, but it constituted a similar make-or-break moment for the Coalition.

If the Lib Dems were paying attention they might also notice a Lib-Lab Pact-inspired escape route, for in 1978 the Liberals withdrew from their “arrangement” with the Labour government, giving them valuable time to rebuild support, and more importantly reassert their political independence, ahead of an election expected in the autumn of 1978, but ultimately held in May 1979.

Combined with a perfectly-timed bit of luck (a by-election victory in Liverpool Edge Hill) and a spirited campaign led by David Steel, the Liberals snatched a respectable result from the jaws of an anticipated wipe-out. Could Clegg manage something similar with a tactical retreat at some point in 2014? He might not have any other option.