The original agreement was ‘a document designed to please the Liberal party, rather than the Liberal voter’. The larger party didn’t even take the time to put the agreement to its backbenchers, let alone the party membership. The hope was that the alliance would lead to a government of national renewal, while for the Liberals it was meant to prove their credentials a party of government.
The story’s not from 2010, but 1977. History, observed one of the characters in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, is like an onion sandwich: it repeats. If the Liberal-Conservative coalition was the blockbuster movie, then the Lib-Lab pact was the BBC TV series, with Jim Callaghan the Alec Guinness to David Cameron’s wholly inferior Gary Oldman.
I was recently lucky enough to acquire a copy of Simon Hoggart and Alistair Michie’s ‘The Pact’, a history of the 18 months of red-and-yellow rule that punctuated two periods of Labour minority during the unhappy Labour governments of 1974-79.
Despite being published in the summer of 1978, when the Lib-Lab pact was barely cold in its grave, much of the book still remains hugely relevant today. The Labour party’s complex relationship with the electoral process has never been more beautifully expressed than by Eric Varley in this book: ‘It’s carrying democracy too far if you don’t know the result of the vote before the meeting’, while Hoggart and Mitchie capture the party’s true divide better than anyone before or after: ‘the Labour party can be divided into those who are principally concerned with doing the right thing and those who prefer to get on with the job’.
It’s not just Labour partisans, though, who will find much to recognise today if they take the time to track down a copy of The Pact; Liberal Democrats may find much to ruefully smile over. Then, as now, they were sold a pup as far as proportional representation was concerned, and discovered far too late that a pledge to introduce a proposal is not the same as having to support it. Tories will find much to recognise in that last period of Liberal-tinged government, and little to cheer over. The dominant partner in that coalition-of-sorts was fractious, hopelessly riven on Europe, divided between increasingly unhinged ultras and a revisionist tendency which, like Fàbregas’ Arsenal, preferred a flounce to a comeback.
It is in the Liberal leader, though, that the coalitions of 1977-78 and 2010-15 find their clearest echo: a figure steeped in liberalism but slightly apart from it, and with the same strategy for survival in the battle to come – to fight as a restraining party of the centre, against Labour excess on one hand or Tory cruelty on the other.
The parallels between then and now might appear to cheer supporters of the Ed Miliband project; after all, at the end of the story the government gave way to a period of prolonged rule by their opponents. But Margaret Thatcher’s triumph in 1979 was powered by votes won from Labour by the Tories; Ed Miliband’s lead comes from disgruntled former Liberal Democrats.
The Liberals polled 18 per cent of the vote in October 1974. They won up 13 seats. During the course of their ill-starred support of Labour they experienced thumping defeats in by-elections, humiliations in local elections, and were generally expected to go extinct. In 1979 they polled 13 per cent of the vote and picked up 11 seats. It may be that Labour’s path to a majority is not as clear as we might hope.
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Stephen Bush is a contributing editor to Progress, writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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The Pact: the inside story of the Lib-Lab government, 1977-1978
Alistair Miche and Simon Hoggart
Faber & Faber | 192pp | £14.00