None of us know exactly what’s happening at the heart of the coalition.

We like to take pot-shots at the Lib Dems for propping up George Osborne’s relentless drive towards the establishment of ‘free’ markets in every corner of civil society.

And there is no doubt that, for many in the Orange Book crowd, the Tories’ passionate embrace of neo-liberalism is a perfect complement to their misguided belief that being permitted to exploit others, with the enforcing hand of the law to back you up, equates to economic freedom.

But there are tens of examples of individual Lib Dems attempting to put a restraining hand on the government’s shoulder. Baroness Miller’s attempt – ultimately squashed by her ministerial colleague Lady Northover – to amend the Legal Aid Bill with respect to squatting has been covered by my colleague Pete Mills.

Lord Oakeshott, a former Lib Dem treasury spokesman, has proved an outspoken critic of attempts to row back on City reform and top pay. His criticism of the ‘Tycoon tax’ brokered between Nick Clegg and Tory cabinet colleagues was wilfully misinterpreted by inimical party enforcers, but the message was clear: if you’re going to introduce a tax measure, it has to do the job.

Oakeshott ally Vince Cable’s interventions need no introduction, and Labour supporters can easily imagine what a difficult colleague he would be. But they would surely, even if grudgingly, admit that his leaks and outbursts do (in his words) ‘have a moderating effect’ – and as The Daily Telegraph’s Michael Deacon noted, Labour figures could learn a thing or two from his stubborn ‘peck-peck-pecking’ away at the coalition elite.

And most recently, a number of senior party figures have expressed their disquiet over Theresa May’s plans to extend and deepen the government’s powers over personal communications. They will surely find comfort in a mini-coalition of their own: with Tory traditionalists like David Davis and Dominic Raab, who describes the proposals as ‘a plan to privatise Big Brother surveillance’.

I strongly recommend listening to Davis’s merciless dissection of the arguments in favour of snooping, which as May herself confirmed in today’s Sun are always, but always, about ‘terrorists [and] paedophiles’.

Lib Dem activists shouldn’t get too cosy about an emergent resistance, however. For at the top of the tree remains Nick Clegg, as committed to the coalition’s ideological programme for ‘tearing down’ the state ‘brick by brick’ as any of his Tory brethren.

It is instructive that he chose to open today’s local elections launch with the boast that ‘25m people will get a £130 tax cut on top of the £200 tax cut we gave them last year’. Hardly the top priority when over a million young people are unemployed, and public sector workers need every penny they can get to avoid serious reductions in the quality of their services.

Yesterday Clegg announced the £1bn Youth Contract: a programme to get some of these young people into work, apprentices, or work experience. The key here is in the word ‘contract’. As last night’s Panorama showed, some of the private subcontractors who run apprenticeship schemes –  who are not required to submit themselves to inspection, despite receiving public funding – are churning out qualifications based on fraudulent documents and teaching practices (one year apprenticeships being ‘completed’ in 16 weeks, for instance).

Of course the taxpayer should be outraged, but the real losers are those young people whose energy and time (and money, let’s not forget, with respect to the travel and food expenses incurred) has been comprehensively wasted – and in some cases, exploited to provide free labour.

It would be wrong to omit that there are a large number of apprenticeship providers (including private companies like Rolls Royce) who do an ‘outstanding’ job, in Ofsted’s words, of providing young people with the skills they need for a proud and happy career. But accompanying the launch of the Youth Contract should have been detailed proposals to ensure that universal standards are maintained by those organisations who stand to gain – £9000 per qualification, according to one Panorama interviewee – from inclusion in the scheme.

Only last month, David Miliband gave an interview to mark the publication of a report from the commission he chairs on youth unemployment. In it he recommended a national system for registering apprenticeships, alongside a mentoring scheme designed to share knowledge between generations of school-leavers.

These are the kinds of common-sense proposals that turn a £1bn invitation to unscrupulous private education providers into a policy designed with young people’s needs in mind.

If the Lib Dems want to make a real difference (inside or outside a coalition) they could do worse than look to Labour. Osborne and the Orange Bookers offer nothing but get rich quick schemes for dodgy organisations with the corporate ethos of A4E. ‘Responsible capitalism’, on the other hand, suggests that investment can be social, not just financial – and shows us how to do it.

Patrick Macfarlane writes the Blue Labour column for Progress and is deputy editor of Shifting Grounds.