When two tribes go to war....

At the beginning of this year, I wrote that if the Coalition government survived 2011, it would in all likelihood achieve its original objective of serving out a full five-year Parliamentary term.

What I was trying to say was not so much that it will all be plain sailing from 1 January 2012 onwards, but that if there was a point of maximum danger for the Cameron-Clegg government, it will come this year rather than any other.

The past few weeks seem to have proved the point, as tensions have erupted between the Coalition partners over a series of issues ranging from the NHS to immigration.

A year on from the opening TV debate between the party leaders which shaped the 2010 election campaign, serious commentators have started to pose the question whether another election might not be so very far off.

Last week I focused on the health reforms, and the ongoing Lib Dem-inspired backlash against health secretary Andrew Lansley's plan to hand control of the NHS budget to GPs.

Although they refrained from saying as much, the Lib Dems will doubtless have been privately rubbing their hands with glee at Mr Lansley's humiliation at the hands of Royal College of Nursing conference on Wednesday.

The yellows showed no such restraint however when Chancellor George Osborne suddenly enlivened what has thus far been a sleep-inducing campaign on whether to change the voting system.

Mr Osborne criticised the role of the Electoral Reform Society in simultaneously receiving taxpayers' money to run some of the referendum ballots and helping to fund the Yes campaign, saying: "That stinks frankly."

The comments earned the Chancellor a rebuke from his own Lib Dem deputy, chief secretary to the treasury Danny Alexander, who accused his departmental boss of "pretty desperate scaremongering."

It showed that, although the two sides have agreed to disagree on the subject of voting reform, it is very hard to have a civilised disagreement when the whole future of how we conduct our politics is at stake.

Predictably, however, the week's biggest Cob-Lib bust-up arose over Prime Minister David Cameron's decision to make a speech highlighting the impact of immigration on local communities.

Lib Dem Cabinet colleague Vince Cable said his words were "very unwise" and that the PM risked inflaming extremism.

Partly this was down to the timing of the speech, three weeks before some local elections in which the British National Party will once more attempt to make inroads.

But it also exposed real disagreements over the issue at the heart of the Coalition, with business secretary Dr Cable consistently arguing that putting a cap on immigration will limit firms' abilities to recruit key workers.

The Lib Dems have pointed out that Mr Cameron's wish to take net migration back to the levels of tens of thousands a year rather than hundreds of thousands is Conservative, as opposed to government policy.

The Coalition Agreement speaks merely of an "annual limit" on people coming to the UK from outside the European Union for economic reasons, making no reference to specific numbers.

One of the commentators who openly speculated this week that the Coalition might not see out its five-year term was the constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor.

He pointed out that while the leaderships of both parties will almost certainly want to hug together until the end, the fate of coalitions is determined by restless, committed party members whom leaders cannot always control.

Mr Bogdanor is right to point out that it is the wildly differing nature of the two parties' memberships that gives the Coalition its inherent instability, while the good relations between their respective leaderships have hitherto been its biggest strength.

If this week's events are anything to go by, however, that may not always be the case.

Europe debate not played out yet

In my Preview of 2008 at the end of December, the three things I confidently predicted would not happen this year were that there would not be a general election, that the Lib Dems would not changed their leader again, and that there would not be a referendum on the EU Treaty.

And indeed there will not be. Even if the Lib Dems had joined the Tories in the voting lobbies on Wednesday night, it still would not have been enough to force the government to hold a national vote on the issue without a much larger Labour rebellion.

But while that particular issue now seems to be done and dusted, there are other circumstances which could see the question of Britain's relationship with Europe back in the domestic political spotlight - as I argue in today's Journal column.

The first is if Tony Blair takes the EU presidency and every subsequent clash between Britain and Brussels becomes viewed through the prism of the Blair-Brown feud. It would be pure political soap opera, and the press would have an absolute field day with it.

More seriously, though, if concern about economic migration to Britain from within the EU continues to rise, it could conceivably create the conditions where withdrawal from the Union once again becomes a politically viable option.

My own view on this - though it goes against the grain of my views on both Europe and immigration generally - is that the conflict between continued unlimited immigration from Eastern Europe and our finite spatial resources will not easily be reconciled.

Home Thoughts From Abroad....

...was of course the title of Roy Jenkins' 1979 Dimbleby Lecture in which he first floated the possibility of the breakaway party that eventually became the SDP. Well, staying at my wife's cousin's cottage in South Normandy over the past week or so, I've been having a few home thoughts of my own.

As anyone who has ever been to Northern France in August will surely know, the place is pretty well deserted at this time of year. Much of the population heads for the South at the height of summer, and over recent days we have driven through fairly sizeable villages where there is not a soul to be seen.

The autoroutes are much the same. We made the journey between Calais and Rouen - a distance of 205km - in just under 1hr 40 mins, the equivalent of driving from Sheffield to the M25 in a similar time. It just couldn't be done in Britain any more, but in France, you can do it without even breaking the speed limit.

The overwhelming impression - from driving anyplace or simply from looking across the fields from the garden of our cottage - is that this is a country with a lot of that precious commodity, space.

You can get Radio Four longwave over here too, so we have been listening in each morning to catch up on the news from home and to express mild disappointment if not surprise that neither Prescott nor Blair have resigned yet.

In fact all the stories in our first week over here were about something else entirely - the influx of Eastern European immigrants into the UK, and Ruth Kelly's big speech, echoing john Reid, echoing Michael Howard, confirming that it is no longer "racist" to want to have a debate about immigration.

Personally, I think the Government has been pretty shameless in reaching this position, giving its denigration of Howard over the immigration issue during last year's election campaign, but nevertheless, it is the right one.

The debate about how many more people we should allow into the UK is no longer about race. It is about infrastructure, about space.

We are an overcrowded island. I have, increasingly, come to the reluctant conclusion that continued large scale inward migration into Britain, which may be desirable for all sorts of social, cultural and economic reasons, can only be achieved at further massive cost to our environment, to those remnants of rural life that remain.

Doubtless in some eyes to express sentiments such as these will make me a reactionary old Tory, one of those misty-eyed Daily Telegraph readers who wish the country was still as it was during the 1950s.

But what you get when you come to France - with a similar population to the UK's, but about four times the area - is a glimpse of a rural idyll of a much older vintage, the lost England of Thomas Hardy, of Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie before the coming of the roads.

Is it so very wrong to want to preserve at least some of that back home?