Smelling the Coalition coffee: an open letter to Ed Davey

Dear Ed

Congratulations on being elected leader of the Liberal Democrats. As a recent rejoiner to the Party, after a gap of more than thirty years, I was encouraged to hear your determination to listen. Here, for what it’s worth, is my contribution.

A little bit of background. In some ways we have a lot in common. We both read PPE at Oxford, and rose to the eminence of President of the Oxford University Liberals (I think you arrived just after I left). I was in the hall when David Steel told us to go back to our constituencies and prepare for Government. We both went on to work for the Party, although, having tired of the endless backstabbing and, to be blunt, open bullying that stalked the corridors of the Liberal Party Organisation in those days, I went off to work in the Civil Service, spending the next quarter-century or so as a senior policy adviser in Whitehall and Brussels. I took early retirement, and — after a brief flirtation with the Greens — I joined the Labour Party, and was a local government candidate in Brighton in 2015. After 2016 I devoted my political energies to opposing Brexit. I left Labour in frustration at its failure to oppose the neoliberal isolationism of Brexit, and because I wanted to be able to look my Jewish friends in the face again; in December 2019 I campaigned for, and rejoined the Party. I did so because of a sense of the utter urgency of re-establishing a truth-based, rational progressive political discourse; something I believed the Labour Party, even with a new leadership, had lost its capacity to do.

I’m writing this now because I believe the Liberal Democrats are facing an existential crisis. At 5% in the opinion polls, and about to slip behind the Greens, we’re in deep trouble. And yet the liberal values we claim to represent have never been more important. In post-truth, post-Brexit Britain, increasingly the playground of authoritarians and culture-warriors of the nationalistic Right — people who in a few brief months have fundamentally undermined so many of the democratic norms we might have taken for granted in the past — our Liberal values, a progressive politics based on rational discourse and faith in democratic institutions, with social justice at its core, have never been more important. And the twin crises of Brexit and Covid-19 have shifted the terms of debate irreversibly. In these circumstances, centrism — the choice not to be radical — is complicity.

So if we as a party are serious, we have to campaign on and reassert our values. Listen — yes, absolutely; there is no democracy without listening. But we cannot just be a sounding-board; I’ve seen where that led in Ed Miliband’s Labour Party, too scared of its own shadow to challenge the Tories on economic policy. We have to be secure in our liberal values, and what we stand for, and become passionate advocates for those values.

And that means we have to talk about the Coalition. We need to do this because, as every Liberal knows, however much we seek to tell ourselves comforting fictions to the contrary, it stalks our every move. It is the reason why we are a party in crisis.

And we will only make progress when we have owned, and repudiated, that coalition. It was a coalition based on a big lie: the lie that Labour overspent in office and that austerity was necessary to restore the nation’s maxed-out credit card. But, of course, as anyone even with the smattering of macroeconomics that Oxford PPE gave us knows, it wasn’t true. Austerity was a political project, never just an economic one, and, bolstered by the bankers’ pseudo-economics of the Orange Book, we fell for it. It was always obvious that the deficit was, by historical standards, not large; that it had been created, not by overspending — Gordon Brown was among the most prudent chancellors in history — but because of the banking collapse of 2007–8 and the collapse in tax revenues that followed it. Austerity was always going to destroy jobs and lives. And in Government we were not just complicit in that policy; every Civil Servant knew that many Liberal Democrat Ministers, notably that born-again banker Danny Alexander, were among its most vigorous proponents.

And, yes, everyone makes mistakes in Government. But the point about the coalition is that in Government our party was complicit in political decisions from which every decent liberal and progressive should recoil in horror: from the Bedroom Tax to housing benefit cuts which represented nothing less than the economic cleansing of parts of our cities; to the culture war education reforms instituted by Gove which were, at root, the cause of the recent A-level crisis (and which, incidentally, launched Dominic Cummings’ political career); to the marketisation of the NHS through the Lansley reforms. Above all, the collapse in living standards for the most vulnerable in society and the grotesque inequity of the effects of austerity: the foul lie of “we’re all in this together”. And of course the appalling dishonesty to an entire generation on tuition fees; people whose votes we desperately need now, but will never begin to deserve until we acknowledge what we did.

And against that background it is simply not good enough to argue, as you have done, that you challenged the Tories in office. In the face of what the Coalition did, to rest your anti-Tory credentials on the fact that you advocated renewables around the Cabinet table, frankly, sounds facetious. I’m not denying the importance of renewable energy, especially given the march of climate change; it’s just as a line this won’t wash with the electorate. It’s patronising and insulting. They know, and will remember, what the Coalition did; not least because the Labour Party will remind them at every turn.

And one of the biggest problems we face, in a time of post-truth populism, is convincing people to re-engage with with democratic rational politics. We, as the party of rational politics, need to be honest and credible. We cannot feed people the lie that we opposed the Tories when everyone knows we put them in office. It’s just intellectually dishonest, pure and simple.

And, yes, I know that many people argue that our future lies in attracting disaffected Conservatives to vote for us. I agree. But let’s remember that our best election result in the post-Lloyd George era was under the leadership of Charles Kennedy, whose integrity meant that he could attract voters while never sacrificing his radicalism.

So, Ed, the first test of your leadership — the one on which everything else depends — is for you to get up at the best early opportunity (our online conference might be a good time to do it) and repudiate and apologise for the coalition. Be honest with the electorate and treat them like grown-ups. Tell them we acknowledge we made a terrible error of judgement. We let ourselves down as well as the people who trusted us with their votes. And we’ve learned the lesson and will not make the same mistake again. At a time when we have a Prime Minister who seems to be almost pathologically incapable of taking responsibility, let’s offer the electorate a lesson in humility show them that we’re the adults in the room; let’s own what we did as a party, and then rebuild and argue the case for a new and different kind of politics, a liberal, green and credible politics founded in honesty and respect for the electorate, a willingness to tell them truths that they may not find immediately comfortable. And let’s reach out to the younger, Green-leaning activists who flocked to Layla Moran’s campaign and were energised by her obvious radicalism and determination to adopt a new style of politics.

And above all let’s put the coalition behind us and become the party that can offer a genuinely radical vision, based around tackling climate change, and repairing an economy blasted by Brexit and Covid, and doing so in a way that is socially just. Let’s remember that perhaps liberalism’s greatest modern achievement is the legacy of those Liberals Keynes and Beveridge, who, deep in the crisis of world war, laid the foundations of a better society that did not keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

And you may find the coffee smells just that bit better in the mornings.