There won’t be much talk of coalitions this week in Manchester – and nor should there be! It’s the Lib Dems, whose only route to government is coalition, who should have worried more last week about the messages they were sending – I’ll say more about this below.
But Ed Miliband was right to brush off Andrew Marr’s questions about potential coalition as being of interest largely to those intrigued by political process and comment. His priority is to spell out what Labour stands for post-financial crisis when the old discussions about where Labour would spend have to be replaced by an argument about what Labour should do with less, not more, public spending.
He is beginning to unpack the idea of predistribution which first came back into Labour political discussion in Tristram Hunt’s chapter for last year’s Purple Book, but now needs to be translated from wonk into doorstep. He made a good start on Marr – fairer markets, such as in energy; reformed banks focused on business lending, not financial instruments; better-skilled and more productive workers supported by trade unions acting as social partners and the champions of the contribution of labour within successful and entrepreneurial workplaces; and government investment aimed at filling the gaps left by private investment failure, such as into innovation and housing.
This is an active approach to the idea of building a ‘good’ capitalism which is the only way out of the wreckage of ‘bad capitalism’. It is a much more positive idea of the role of government than that put forward by a coalition with just one ‘austerity’ club in the golf bag.
This is the forward-looking, outward-facing task for this week’s conference. However, for those of us who do enjoy a bit of political process and comment, let me reflect on the Lib Dems’ last week. In one way, Nick Clegg’s speech was quite impressive. He was clear with his party that there was no future for them in the oppositional and opportunistic Lib Dem politics of the past. They are a party of government and will be judged as such. This, of course, is likely to be their downfall as they will have to answer for what seems likely to be the economic failure of the government and for their own failure to live up to the centre-left values that they have previously spouted.
But there are two big problems with his speech. First, there seemed to be no moment at which Clegg recognised that there is still two and a half years to go to a general election. There is no clear programme for the next period of coalition government and no process in place for determining one. He is a lame duck deputy prime minister.
Second, he suggested that they now wanted to be a party of power. But the only way they can ever again wield national political power will be in another coalition. It seems most likely that would be in a scenario where Labour were the majority party in a hung parliament. However, Clegg went out of his way to be both personally offensive and dismissive of Labour politicians and ideas. Yesterday’s Observer tells me that Lib Dems believe that they can work with Labour, but that Ed Balls must go. What arrogance! It will be the British people who will decide if there’ll be another coalition – I sincerely hope there isn’t. But if we are in that territory, I believe that Clegg has made it impossible to build a working partnership with senior Labour figures. Sorry Nick, but it will be you who has to go after the next election, not Ed Balls!
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Jacqui Smith is former home secretary, writes the Monday Politics column for Progress, and tweets @smithjj62