Press Story

On IPPR's journal site 'Juncture', Professor John Curtice writes:

"In scuppering the Liberal Democrats' hopes of securing a proportionally elected Lords, Tory MPs have thrown Nick Clegg and his colleagues a lifeline. Sitting at 10 per cent in the polls, a dozen of them might manage to survive in 2015 - twice as many as would do if the boundary review were to take place. Liberal Democrat turkeys have gratefully seized an unexpected opportunity to vote for the postponement of Christmas.

"At the same time, Tory MPs have also potentially put at jeopardy their own party's future prospects for power. With the boundary review in place, the seven-point lead over Labour the Tories secured in 2010 might just have been enough to secure a narrow overall majority. Without it, then, on the conventional calculations, the party will need no less than an 11-point lead - not just one more heave but a landslide. With the party now finally beginning to suffer mid-term blues, achieving such a result has come to look like a bit of a tall order."

For more see: http://bit.ly/IPPR9508

Writing on his IPPR blog, IPPR Director Nick Pearce explores the ideological dimensions of the disintegration of the Coalition's governing project.

Nick Pearce writes:

"The Conservative party has still not yet risen to the existential challenge of forging a coherent and broadly accepted post-Thatcherite direction. Cameron's modernisation project has proved to be skin-deep. It hasn't staked out new political territory or taken broad swathes of Conservative MPs, activists and opinion-formers with it, and its hegemonic potential has failed at the first hurdles of constitutional reform. But the exit route of a return to Thatcherism looks like a political dead-end, and is anyway closed off while the Conservative party remains in a coalition. The alternative of a 'Blue Collar' modernisation has superficial appeal, but it is largely polling-driven. It has some policy pegs on which to hang Conservative politics but little if anything yet to say about the institutions, alliances, discourses and commitments that might constitute a new Conservative transformation of Britain.

"For the Liberal Democrats, the experience of Coalition has proved that a centre-right government has no foundational unity on key political issues such as democratic renewal, public service reform and Britain's role in Europe. The initial impetus to liberal politics that the Coalition secured came largely from a reaction to Labour's late-stage statecraft: the removal of targets, ID cards and the rest of it. Once those policies had been delivered, and the austerity gamble had failed to deliver growth, the Liberal Democrat position in the Coalition was always likely to become more precarious."

For more see: http://bit.ly/NP120807

Contact

Richard Darlington, 07525 481 602, r.darlington@ippr.org