By Marjorie Smith
As Parliament rises for the summer recess one or two important highly negative pointers are already emerging about our new Government and we have also learned that the Labour Party has made little impact since the election.
The savagery of the proposed cuts is startling and the lies about ring-fencing the NHS and Education are already exposed as deceitful untruths that spilled so easily from Cameron's mouth during the general election campaign.
However, there is one vital but simple political lesson to learn already and that is that the Lib Dems are a strategic irrelevance. We have a blatant Tory-led administration in which Clegg and his cohorts are willing supplicants to Cameron's Conservatives.
Direct attacks on the Lib Dems are becoming pointless, a waste of political capital and self-defeating. If they continue they will make the Labour party and its leaders look small and bitter in the future and play completely into the hands of the Conservatives. It will also help to define the Lib Dems as a political party of substance that should be taken more seriously than they are now, or previously have been.
The scorn of many Labour activists was quite rightly directed at the Lib Dems in the days after the last election and in the first few weeks of the coalition. There did appear to be a chance that a sufficient number of supposed 'left-leaning' Lib Dems might be shamed into refusing to work closely with the Tories and therefore help to undermine the coalition or at least significantly weaken it. That is clearly no longer the case they have made their own bed, let them lie in it.
It doesn't need the Labour leadership to undermine the Lib Dems they are doing it to themselves. It is quite clear that they are already seen by the electorate as Tory lackeys. Nick Clegg needs no help from Labour in portraying himself as 'Cameron Lite', in fact he is doing a sterling job in portraying himself as just another public school 'Tory boy' .
The latest poll results in a YouGov tracking poll taken last week gave the Lid Dems a paltry 13% of the national vote, which would only give them 18 seats in Parliament. The converse of this is of course the continuation of the political honeymoon for the Conservatives, still riding high in the polls at 44%, nearly three months after the general election.
The central political lesson to be learnt from the past three months is that the Lib Dems are a convenient lightning conductor for the public's dissatisfaction. They are and will increasingly become the scapegoats for this administrations savaging of the public sector. Cameron's has so far got off very lightly due to the political attention the Lib Dems have received.
The long Cameron honeymoon is also partly due to Labour's dismal reaction to the general election defeat. An incoherent front bench and demoralised parliamentary party has understandably, but mistakenly, still reserves its greatest ire for the Lib Dems. Whilst the seemingly interminable Labour leadership election campaign lazily meanders its way to a conclusion, the Tories are making massive cuts in public expenditure and Labour is hardly landing a glove on them.
Absenteeism from the front bench in Parliament by much of the shadow cabinet and former senior ministers (due to memoiritis?) only aggravates a rapidly worsening position for the public sector. The Tory lie that the NHS and Education would be ring-fenced from cuts is already exposed as the Big Lie it always was going to be. This is no Big Society it will be a Rigged Society.
All of the Lib Dems in Parliament have adopted a siege mentality, most Lib Dems are currently in deep denial, accepting the conceit that they are making a real difference as to how Britain
Labour needs to adopt a fresh approach to this Government, one that places the Tories at the heart of it (which they are) and portrays the Lib Dems as an irrelevance (which they are increasingly becoming). The party needs to understand that we are living under a Conservative Government and should not only be treated as such but reffered to as such at every turn. Every time somebody refers to the coalition allows the Tories to hide themselves behind a vacuous political construct that only serves to disguise what this Government is really about.
Every Labour MP, activist and member should only refer to this Government as a Conservative Government. The Lib Dems should be denied any recognition that they are making any positive difference. At every turn Labour should patronise the LibDems and merely ask them what will the Tories will decide.
Make Cameron the architect of the cuts – Cameron has managed to construct two line of defence around his political appeal – one the fall guy Lib Dems and the fallback from that is Osborne and the right of his party. If Cameron is not nailed to the mast of this Government then he could disown the lot of them and win a second term for the Tories, campaigning on a neo-liberal economic platform.
The Tories are already thinking of ways to raise the profile of the Lib Dems, in order to try and continue the usefulness of Clegg's idiocy in the furtherance of the Conservative party's base self-interests. Tory strategists know that a badly wounded and enfeebled Liberal Democrat party is of no use to the Conservatives until at the most six to twelve months from a general election.
As the deserved backlash hits the Lib Dems, they will cling ever closer to the notion that coalition with the Tories was the right thing to do. The current Lib Dem leadership has nowhere else to go but remaining as junior partners to the Tories. The rest of the Lib Dem Parliamentary party have already demonstrated their weak and craven attitude and although there will be defections from the coalition in the future, it is now quite apparent that they will become increasingly insignificant.
In dealing with the Lib Dems the party's mantra should be "I want to speak with the organ grinder, not the monkey". Diminish them with disdain.
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