The entire cabinet surface area of the kitchen now lies beneath your unwashed dishes. The walls of your room and surrounding corridor are covered in a choking, amber tobacco-smoke residue. The floor of the living room is impenetrable under the mass of loose paper, empty cans and Gwen Stefani CDs strewn across it. It is your fourth day of living out in Oxford. Sadly your ignorant, philistine housemates fail to grasp that you are merely subverting oppressive and archaic social norms and you fear the rising tide of anger against you may lead to your imminent decapitation. What you need is a master-class in conflict resolution.
Perhaps you could take a lesson from the Prime Minister, who this week penned an article in the Sunday Times calling on Lib Dems and Tories to work together to mend the ailing coalition. “I have always called myself a liberal Conservative” effuses Mr Cameron, presumably in the hope that Nick Clegg will respond by stating that he considers himself a Tory democrat. He lists a number of coalition achievements: that they have reduced the long-term public sector pensions bill by half (i.e. public sector workers will receive much lower pensions); they have created a “tax system that rewards effort” (that is, they have given tax breaks to millionaires) and they have overseen an expensive railway investment plan (except they haven’t, not yet at least, but Mr Cameron feels the need to mention it anyway). There was no reference to the government’s deeply controversial health reforms and the tuition fee rise received an honourable, if very brief and indirect, mention.
The document is, in essence, a list of reforms the Lib Dems would certainly not have passed were they the sole force within the executive, tied together with a vague message about how both Tory and Lib Dem are both into “progressive goals” and against “uniform state control”, whatever that means. The article unintentionally highlights the increasing uselessness of the coalition to the Liberal Democrats. It is very clear given the failure of the AV referendum and increasing likelihood of Lord’s reform derailment, that the Lib Dems will come out of this coalition with nothing to show for it. If their two flagship policies are sunk, then they too cannot possibly hope to remain afloat as anything like a serious political force in the future.
Clegg’s recent threat of “consequences” (surely all actions have consequences?) following a failure to reform the upper house are hence perfectly understandable. Matthew Paris and other may have decried the Liberal leader’s comments as blackmail, but they must be using a very atypical definition of blackmail. Threatening to withdraw support for your partner’s policies if they do not support yours is simply how a coalition works. If Clegg had threatened to release photographs of Cameron masturbating a sheep whilst dressed as a Nazi (Cherwell disclosure: to our knowledge no such photograph exists) then that would have been blackmail.
Cameron’s plea, and of course the very need to publish it, show how rickety the coalition is getting. With Labour consistently polling a good ten points above the Tories and a Labour majority at the next election (whenever that may be) looking very likely, the only remaining utility of the coalition to either Lib Dem or Tory is that it is a means of staving off an inevitable political wipe-out for a little bit longer. Perhaps this is the shared value Cameron should really have mentioned.
Oh and for christsakes go wash those dishes. I mean seriously.
