The Sunday Times reports (£) this morning on the ructures in the coalition and an apparent open revolt from business secretary Vince Cable while Ashdown says the coalition’s politic’s “stink”.
Cable is reported to be advising colleges to mount a legal challenge against David Cameron’s bid to win the support of white man voters in the south with cuts to immigration.
It follows Cable’s intervention earlier this week when he described Cameron’s speech on immigration as “very unwise”.
His words caused embarrassment for Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg and drew the spot light away from what Cameron wanted to focus on.
That alone would have been enough had been a Tory minister to get him sacked. Something that some Tories clearly wanted. Matthew d’Ancona in the Telegraph said that while “Cameron can be forgiven for wanting one fewer headache. But he should have sacked Vince Cable last week”.
But having tested how far he can go he appears to have gone further still. The Sunday Times says that last week Cable met a constituent who speaks for the Association of UK Private Schools and Colleges. A week later that organisation has started legal action for judicial review at the High Court to stop the UK Border Agency withdrawing hundreds of licences to admit non-EU students.
When asked about his defiance, Cable said, “I am very concerned both as a constituency MP and as business secretary that obstacles are being placed in the way of good businesses that undoubtedly benefit the British economy.”
He added that “they do have potential for legal action”, yet insisted he had not directly encouraged the colleges to go to court.
Despite his denials Neil Mackay, academic principal of Alfred the Great College in central London, told the paper that Cable advised “to take out an injunction”.
The attack on the coalition a few weeks short of its anniversary comes ahead of an almost certain Lib Dems drubbing in the local and Scottish elections. The party is on course to lose hundreds of council seats and possibly igniting open war in the party as Clegg’s leadership is tested to its limits.
A loss in the Alternative Vote referendum could finish Clegg and the coalition if the kind of open warfare that Cable has ignited continues.
The coalition in-fighting comes as senior Lib Dems campaign side by side with their Labour opposition counterparts who are backing AV.
Cable will this week share a platform with Ed Miliband in support of AV. While former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown has laid into chancellor George Osborne.
In the Observer Ashdown did nopt pull his punches:”The strategy is clear,” writes Ashdown. “Throw as much mud as you can, don’t let the issue be discussed openly and frighten the public over the next three weeks into voting to preserve the power the present first-past-the-post system gives you. This strategy stinks of the same odour which has surrounded our politics recently.”
Damning stuff. This all points to evidence of a party at war with itself. This impression is further cemented with more news in the Sunday Times of some in party wanting to talk to Labour.
Tim Farron, the Lib Dem president, has confirmed that he was approached by an intermediary in his party to start talks with Labour. The senior parliamentary figure who approached him had already held preliminary discussions with Labour counterparts. “I was talked to but I am not taking this anywhere,” he said.
That he was approached and has openly commented on the issue upon smacks of manoeuvring and shoring up his position should a challenge to Clegg be mounted if the party loses the AV vote and suffers terribly in the elections.
If a change does comes we might see it first in Scotland where there lies the possibility of a Lib Lab deal after next month’s devolved elections. Could that be the beginning of the end for Clegg’s Lib Dem Tory coalition?
