VOLCANOES have consequences, and I’m not just thinking of the chaos caused to air travel by the eruption from Iceland’s unpronounceable peak (known to the Pentagon as E-15).
In 1783, a volcano in Iceland spewed so much ash into the atmosphere the entire northern hemisphere was cooled for almost three years. This resulted in crop failures and famine, and historians say it helped bring on the French revolution.
Should we blame the “British revolution” of 2010 on E-15? This would be going too far. But the agreement between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to form a coalition government does look revolutionary to many. In Britain, governing arrangements that other countries take for granted look like a radically new type of politics.
The election produced an inconclusive result, even though the Conservative Party got 7 per cent more of the popular vote than the second-placed Labour Party. The failure to equalise electorates in different constituencies counted heavily against the winners, as it takes more votes to send a Tory MP to Westminster than it does a Labour MP.
But the coalition negotiated by David Cameron’s Conservatives with the third-placed Liberal Democrats, which should give the government a comfortable majority in parliament, is not so novel as people think.
In the last years of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, coalition governments were quite common in Britain. It is only in the years since World War II that one-party government has been the rule, although the country did have an informal pact between Labour and the Liberals in the 1970s.
Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century prime minister, famously said Britain does not like coalitions. Although it is too early to judge, opinion polls suggest the British people do at least like the look and purpose of the current one.
But can this infatuation possibly last?
At the local level, Conservatives and Liberals tend to be at daggers drawn. This is partly because the Liberals have usually thrived by winning seats from the Tories when Conservative governments are unpopular. For their part, the Conservatives think of Liberals as combining sanctimoniousness with hard-ball electoral tactics.
Moreover, there are substantial policy differences between the two parties, with the Liberals putting political reform at the top of their agenda, in a push to establish an electoral system that would suit them.
Despite all this, the marriage has taken place, with the two parties’ smart, attractive and socially similar leaders, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, taking a bold gamble on their ability to get this new show on the road and keep it there.
Cameron and Clegg have agreed, in a constitutional innovation, that the coalition should last the full five years until the deadline for the next election. They have hammered out a common platform that has involved give-and-take on both sides. The Liberals have taken five seats in the cabinet, and more in the lower ministerial ranks. The Conservatives have agreed to hold a referendum on whether Britain should change its first-past-the-post electoral system to an alternative-vote ballot.
For both parties, the biggest justification for this unorthodox act of political courage is the scale of the economic problems facing Britain. The Liberal-Conservative coalition inherits, by common consent, the worst economic legacy since the war, with a huge hole in the public finances that is starting to look ever deeper as the new ministers get a chance to inspect the books for themselves.
Indeed, Liam Byrne, the outgoing Labour budget chief, left a note to his successor saying “I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards and good luck.”
It was meant to be a joke. But there won’t be many laughs when cherished public programs are cut, welfare entitlements curbed and taxes raised.
The bond markets will demand quick and effective action. So the new government has no alternative but to begin the long haul of restoring the nation’s finances to the black.
The lesson for other governments is clear: if you want independence of action, don’t put yourself in hock.
From the Conservatives’ point of view, there is much to be said for sharing responsibility for what has to be done. The Liberals, meanwhile, have a golden opportunity to show they are capable of government, rather than simply flakey representatives of the “None of the above” party.
As the months pass, both parties will probably find they face their greatest political difficulty in managing their own fringes – right-wingers in the Conservatives who don’t like the centrist moderation of the coalition’s policies, and left-wingers in the Liberal Democrats who don’t want to support a largely Tory government.
But if the coalition works and lasts, then we will see not so much a political volcano in Britain as a real shift in the tectonic plates. Nothing will be quite the same again.
(Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner for external affairs, is chancellor of Oxford University)
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