Senior Lib Dems express doubt about the Coalition. Big Deal!

Vince Cable has been caught out expressing doubts about Coalition policy, and saying that if he disagreed too much, he could resign. A few other Lib Dem MPs have similarly been recorded saying they are unsure about some policies, notably those on tuition fees and the cuts. The BBC has been all over the story, and rushing to interview Labour figures about it. Aside from the amazing lapses which led Cable and the others to just shoot their mouths off to total strangers, I suspect no-one outside Westminster quite understands what all the fuss is about. The nation yawns, you might say.



Ed Milliband (I actually wrote 'David Milliband' by mistake there, it still hasn't really sunk in that anyone could make D. Milliband look mature) has been jumping around like a rabbit on steroids desperately trying to tell us that the Coaltion is now a sham. Come again, Ed?

All parties are coalitions, to an extent. The Labour party most certainly is, after all without trade union backing the absurd Ed would never have been thrust blinking and trembling into the limelight. Remember the agonising over the long road to reform that Kinnock, and then Tony Blair, took their party on before they were able to affix the label 'New' to it? The splits between Blair and Brown's supporters only served to highlight Labour's divisions.

The Conservatives are basically a coalition between Eurosceptics (now in the ascendance) and Ken Clark-style Europhiles. They are also a coalition between the socially libertarian and socially conservative wings, the former being the more natural bedfellows of the Lib Dems. And of course the Lib Dems grew out of the 'Alliance' party, that of David Steel and David Owen ('the two Davids').

Given that the Con-Lib Dem Coaltion government is therefore a coalition of coalitions, what is remarkable is how well it has managed and how cohesive it has so far been. Even the tuition fee controversy didn't collapse it (which I thought it might). Vince Cable, Nick Clegg and the other Lib Dem members rather like being big cheeses now, swanning round in ministerial limousines and the like. But everyone - and I mean everyone - knows that they are (by dint of the election results) the junior partner and therefore that there is only so far that they can swim with the Conservative's tide. Push them too far and they'll leave. No sh*t, Sherlock. Cable was just saying what Cameron and other Tories (and the country) know full well.

Perhaps the real reason that Ed is so breathless with faux excitement at all this is because it is (for him) a welcome distraction from the policy wasteland that Labour has become. He is a nonenity. Vacuous, pointless, policy-less. Labour haven't budged much in the opinion polls, mostly because the country realises that they left Britain in a debt-fuelled mess and have nothing coherent or meaningful to say any more.

Just what doees Ed Milliband stand for? What defines him? What does he even believe? With Tony Blair it was 'New Labour'. With Thatcher it was, well, Thatcherism. With Cameron it's the Coalition, cuts and realism on the foreign stage. I'm not saying it's the right policies, just that people are beginning to work him out. His 'Big Society' idea hasn't caught on yet - it might still, but it was overshadowed by the recession during the election campaign, and 'Bigotgate'. Which brings us to Gordon Brown. What did he stand for? That's easy. He stood for boom and bust of the most extreme kind, light-touch regulation of banking, debt bubbles, selling off the gold, raiding the pensions, an unsustainable housing boom and sending the army into battle without having the deep-seated conviction to back them all the way. Now look what he hath wrought.

So pipe down, Ed Milliband - Vince Cable is a more experienced and honourable fellow than you'll ever be, even when you've grown a bit older. When you have something useful to say, a credible alternative to present or policies that amount to more than just carping from the sidelines, then maybe you'll have earned the right to be taken seriously.