Joyce McMillan: Tories scamper back to nostalgic right

DO YOU remember the Scottish Liberal Democrats? I guess most of us do. Back in the 1990s, after all, they were a powerful force in the land and particularly in the constitutional debate. Strong for reform, historically committed both to home rule for Scotland and to proportional representation, and fiercely in favour of the European Union as an arena for new forms of federal government, at that moment they became vital allies for real reformers, both in the Labour Party and across the centre-left.

They formed a key part of the movement against Thatcherite triumphalism and also against the damaging social consequences of economic policy, and their reward was a steady 15 per cent of electoral support in Scotland, and representation of around 17 MSPs in the Scottish Parliament.

Scottish politics is still coming to terms with the extent to which all of that changed, following the UK general election of 2010 and Nick Clegg’s decision to take his party into a full-blown coalition with David Cameron’s Conservatives.

Given the outcome of the election, and the intense pressure of the global economic crisis, the decision itself was understandable. The neoliberal, public-sector-slashing tendency of the coalition’s policies may be desperately unpopular in Scotland, where Liberal Democrat support plummeted by half in the 2011 Scottish Parliament election.

Yet in England, voters seem convinced that public-sector cuts are necessary and are tolerant of the Liberal Democrats’ role in implementing them. And so long as the financial crisis rages across the economies of the West, it seems likely that the coalition will survive.

Unless, that is, it finds itself blown apart by differences in another area entirely: the field of identity politics, and of deep, visceral feeling about the future of Britain as a nation. Earlier this week, the coalition’s Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Moore, was reported as saying that he did not regard himself as a unionist, in any traditional sense of the word. His comments attracted high-profile media coverage. In reality, Moore was doing no more than repeating well-established Liberal Democrat policy: they are not unionists so much as federalists, committed to a federal UK within a federal Europe.

Now, though, within the coalition, the restatement of that policy becomes suddenly controversial. It seems to drive a wedge between the Liberal Democrat position and that of a Tory leadership, which, if it thinks about the subject at all, tends to take a traditional unionist line, and to regard the coming of the Scottish Parliament as a regrettable development, if probably now irreversible.

In terms of day-to-day policy, the difference between these two positions is currently quite small. Michael Moore and David Cameron are in agreement about the implementation of Calman-type proposals, offering a larger measure of fiscal responsibility to the Scottish Parliament.

Culturally, though, the gap is a huge one, between a party which has been a vital part of debate on constitutional reform in this country throughout the past century, and a party which, in the last generation, has wholly absented itself from that debate and largely tried to ignore it.

And if the “retro” constitutional tendency in the Conservative Party have trouble with the idea of devolution, those difficulties are as nothing compared with their attitude to the European Union. Witness the astonishing outbursts of Churchillian rhetoric and flat-Earth denial that emanate from David Cameron’s supposedly talented new generation of back-benchers every time the subject of Europe is mentioned.

Out in Bishop’s Stortford, one Tory council has even ended its “twin” relationships with towns in France and Germany in a bout of fervid euroscepticism. It’s difficult to imagine a cultural attitude more repellent to most senior Liberal Democrats.

For the moment, of course, the cultural storm may pass over Cameron’s head. The coalition arrangement gives him a cast-iron practical excuse for ignoring the wilder demands of his back-benchers, and, at a deeper level, he and George Osborne are now undergoing the kind of reality-check, in their regular dealings with other European leaders, that makes visceral europhobia increasingly difficult to maintain.

If you doubt how prevalent this back-to-the-future attitude is, though, among the younger generation of the British Right, you need only consider the general tone of London-based media coverage of the current eurozone crisis, replete with arrogant demands that the French and German governments should “get their act together”.

The discourse is drenched in a smug and – under the circumstances – wholly unjustified sense of the moral superiority of Anglo-American society. The account of the financial crisis has been edited so as to exclude all memory of the recent catastrophic failures of the City and Wall Street and of the massive taxpayer bail-outs they have required.

And these cultural attitudes are shared by many of the market-makers themselves. It’s small wonder that making downside bets against the euro, and blaming Angela Merkel for a disaster of their own devising, has become one of their favourite sports.

If differences over the future of the UK are not enough to disrupt the coalition, in other words, then sooner or later the Conservative Party’s complicity with this deep Anglo-Saxon chauvinism towards Europe could be the force that finally blows the arrangement apart.

In the House of Commons this week, to cheers from his party colleagues, the Tory MP Andrew Rosindell – representing Romford, just 45 years old – pressed the Prime Minister to show the “bulldog spirit” in his negotiations in Brussels. This is evidence, if any more were needed, that a frightening proportion of Tory back-benchers are still stuck in the cultural and emotional mindset of 1940 and of Britain’s “finest hour”.

Liberal Democrats, by contrast, are more accustomed to living in the 21st century, so far as identity politics is concerned.

And at the moment when confrontation between those two world views becomes unavoidable, my guess is that the coalition will be over.

This is not because of any great split between Cameron and Clegg, but because the parliamentary Tory Party – for all its apparent renewal at the last election – has now moved so far to the nostalgic right on matters of culture and identity that the Prime Minister will be left with no choice but to follow where they lead, or to submit his resignation.