Anarchy in the UK? This is not the country Cameron wants to lead

It is a moot point whether Thursday's protests over the government's decision to raise universities tuition fees to £9,000 amounted to the worst civil disturbances since the poll tax riots of 1990.

One should not forget that the fuel protests of autumn 2000 came close to bringing the country to a standstill - but they were by and large peaceful.

Measured purely in terms of street violence, this week's demonstrations almost certainly constituted the biggest outpouring of public anger seen since the days of Margaret Thatcher.

Should that be a warning sign to David Cameron and his coalition? Undoubtedly so.

The bare facts of the matter are that the government won the Commons vote on lifting the cap on fees by a majority of 21, down from its usual majority of 83.

While 28 Liberal Democrat MPs voted in support of the move, 21 defied the party leadership, including former leaders Charles Kennedy and Sir Menzies Campbell and a possible future leader, Tim Farron.

Meanwhile six Tory MPs also voted against the measure, including the former leadership contender David Davis who, like Mr Farron, appears to be positioning himself for the coalition's eventual collapse.

But while the government won the vote, the question is whether in doing so it lost the argument, as well control of the streets.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that the demonstrators have over-reached themselves, and that the ugliness of some of Thursday's scenes will turn the wider public against the students' cause.

In the short-term, it will have focused attention less on the fees issue than the question of whether security arrangements for the demo were even half way adequate.

But the debate over tuition fees is far from over. The House of Lords will certainly have a say on the matter, and there will have to be further legislation over the level and speed at which the fees are paid back.

That in turn is bound to lead to further rebellions which, if successful, could ultimately force the government to unpick the entire scheme.

So where does it leave the coalition? Well, firstly, what about the Lib Dems.

Their hope was that by getting the fees vote out of the way early on, it would enable them to move the political agenda onto other areas in which they are on firmer ground, such as political reform.

I wonder, however, whether memories will fade that easily, and whether we have not witnessed a seminal moment in terms of public perceptions of the third party.

It could well be that this will go down as the point at which the public stopped seeing the Lib Dems as a party of principle and started to see them as their opponents have always seem them – a bunch of opportunists who would break any promise for a taste of power.

Secondly, where do this week's events leave Mr Cameron? Despite his own protestations last week that he would "rather be a child of Thatcher than a son of Brown," he is not the Iron Lady.

His style is consensual rather than confrontational. Unlike his illustrious predecessor, he has no wish to see his premiership consumed by battles against the 'enemy within.'

Within weeks of those poll tax riots in the autumn of 1990, the Prime Minister had gone, albeit over a combination of that and other issues.

That is not going to happen to Mr Cameron just yet. But in his desire to lead a broadly united country, he won't want to see too many more weeks like this one.

Labour don't do assassinations, but if they did....

When Ed Miliband was elected Labour leader on the opening day of the party's conference in Manchester in September, a leading Tory blogger delivered a withering verdict on the result.

"They’ve missed out Hague and gone straight to IDS," said Paul Staines, author of the Guido Fawkes blog which, while not exactly impartial in its coverage of the political scene, is not without influence at Westminster.

Staines was, so far as I am aware, the first political pundit to make the comparison between 'Red Ed' and the failed Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, but he certainly hasn't proved to be the last.

"It may be too early to start talking about Ed Miliband not making it to the next election as Labour leader, but many more performances at PMQs as poor as he put on today and it won’t be long before he’s in IDS territory," said another this week.

Wednesday's Prime Minister's questions should have been a breeze for Mr Miliband with the continuing three-way split in the Liberal Democrats over whether to vote for tuition fees, vote against them or abstain.

On top of that, he had the leaked critique by Bank of England governor Mervyn King describing Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne as "out of their depth."

Yet Mr Miliband chose instead to base his attack on another leaked document in which William Hague had described himself, Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne as 'Thatcher's children.'

"I would rather be a child of Thatcher than a son of Brown," the Prime Minister responded, ramming home the open goal to hoots of laughter from the government benches.

For Mr Miliband to attack the coalition for its Thatcherite tendencies was politically inept on so many levels it is hard to know where to start.

To begin with, Mrs Thatcher would not even have contemplated some of the things the coalition is doing, particularly in the area of welfare, so the comparison breaks down at the first hurdle.

But the real problem with referencing Margaret Thatcher in contemporary political debate is the wildly differing reactions she still elicits, even 20 years on from her downfall.

Labour's core voters may still regard her as the devil incarnate - but to many of the swing voters the party needs to win back, she was, and remains, a heroine.

Inevitably, the mounting discontent over Ed's slow start has led to continuing speculation that South Shields MP David Miliband might yet get a second shot at the leadership.

For my part, I can't see it. David may have deserved to get the job in September, but his brother's performance since then is in danger of trashing the entire Miliband brand.

It is simply inconceivable to my mind that, charged with finding another new leader at this stage, the party would replace a failed Miliband with….another Miliband.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, who should have stood for the job this time round, is surely in pole position to take over should the opportunity arise.

What will probably save Ed Miliband is that Labour doesn't really do leadership assassinations. They knew Michael Foot was going to lose badly in 1983, yet passed up the chance to put Denis Healey into the job instead.

They probably knew Gordon Brown was going to lose in 2010, but again, they failed to move decisively against him.

The big difference, though, between those two leaders and the current one is that while they, at least to begin with, could claim the support of their own MPs, Mr Miliband was foisted on his by the wider party.

And, of course, there was another recent party leader who found himself in exactly that position. His initials were IDS.

Ed Miliband needs to reform his party first

With his leadership of the Labour Party still barely two months old, it did not take long for talk of plots against Ed Miliband to start crawling out of the Westminster woodwork.

One national daily informed us that David Miliband was standing ready to take over should his younger brother prove a flop in the job he so narrowly beat him to in September.

I doubt very much whether David had anything to do with this 'story.' Indeed, many more stories like it and the South Shields MP will probably have to quit politics altogether, rather than risk becoming a focus for discontent over his brother's leadership.

No, I suspect this story arose, as these things tend to do at Westminster, from a Labour MP speculating idly to a journalist about what might happen if Ed Miliband were to fall under a bus.

But the story was not completely without significance. It demonstrated that some Labour MPs remain far from convinced by Ed, and that the new leader still has a big job on his hands to unite his party.

In that respect, his return from paternity leave at the start of this week came not a moment too soon.

Mr Miliband's announcement on his first day back of wholesale review of Labour policies is a wise move as far as it goes.

Barring an irretrievable bust-up if next May's referendum on the voting system goes against the Lib Dems, the coalition is likely to be in power for five years, and there is thus plenty of time for Labour to reinvent itself.

Furthermore, it is a tactic that has worked successfully for the last two Leaders of the Opposition who have managed to be promoted out of that job into Number Ten – Tony Blair and David Cameron.

Both men used policy reviews as a means of detoxifying their parties in the eyes of voters, Mr Blair from its tax-and-spend image, Mr Cameron from its 'nasty party' tag.

But it doesn't always work. Neil Kinnock launched a similarly wide-ranging review in the 1980s called 'Meet the Challenge, Make the Change', but failed to convince the electorate that Labour had done.

Likewise William Hague's much-vaunted 'Common Sense Revolution' in 1999 served only to reinforce voter perceptions of the Tories at that time as shrill and extremist.

For me, the fate of those two leaders seems to sum up the real difficulty facing Ed Miliband – whether he has the personality to connect with the British public and project a new and compelling vision of what his party stands for.

This is what ultimately distinguishes the successful opposition leaders from those who ultimately failed to make the transition to government.

Personality aside, his other big problem is whether the party under him can forge a distinctive policy agenda that is neither Old nor New Labour

For all the talk of the "death" of New Labour, and its replacement by True Labour, Real Labour or Next Labour, any departure from it will inevitably be portrayed as 'Red Ed' lurching to the left.

If anything, Mr Miliband needs to try to out-modernise the previous generation of modernisers by being prepared to tackle issues which they ultimately shied away from.

Welfare reform is one obvious example, but so is reform of the party's own archaic structures and its absurd system of electing its leaders.

It would be a brave politician indeed who, having prospered under the electoral college system, would then advocate its replacement by one member, one vote.

But if Mr Miliband is looking for a 'Clause Four Moment' which will force the electorate to sit up and take notice of him, that could well be the best option.

The quiet man finds his niche at last

For good or ill, most Prime Ministers ultimately tend to remembered for a single defining event or achievement that happened on their watch.

For Clement Attlee, it was the creation of the welfare state. For Anthony Eden, it was Suez. For Ted Heath, entry into Europe. For Jim Callaghan, the winter of discontent. For Tony Blair, Iraq.

It's early days for David Cameron. But what he most wants to avoid – apart from losing the next election - is for his government to be remembered solely for the cuts.

He wants it to go down in the history books for something else entirely – for reforming the welfare state that Attlee created and for mending the society that he claims has subsequently been broken.

It is no mean ambition. Welfare reform has proved to be a 'mission impossible' for successive Prime Ministers – even ones who told their welfare reform minsters to "think the unthinkable."

Mr Blair's failure to bring about meaningful change in this area – despite a 179-seat majority and a favourable economic headwind – has become symbolic of the many missed opportunities and thwarted hopes of his long premiership.

By contrast, Mr Cameron must depend for his parliamentary majority on the Liberal Democrats, while the economic environment could hardly be less conducive to his aim of moving people off welfare and into work.

Yet, perhaps by force of circumstances in the shape of the need to reduce the deficit, his government has embarked on a programme of change which, if successful, would amount to the biggest recasting of the welfare state since its inception.

Perhaps even more improbably, the reform programme is being overseen by Iain Duncan Smith, the quiet man who failed to turn up the volume and seemed destined to go down as no more than a footnote in Tory Party history.

Forced into the political wilderness in 2003, he skilfully reinvented himself as a Beveridge de nos jours, and now, as Work and Pensions Secretary, has the chance to put his radical ideas into practice.

At the heart of the changes announced in his White Paper this week are two relatively straightforward principles.

First, the replacement of the labyrinthine system of work-related state support with a single Universal Credit, and second, the idea that it will always pay better to work than remain on benefits.

So will it succeed where other attempts have failed? Well, in its favour is the fact that there is an unusual degree of political consensus over the central objectives of the changes.
"If the government gets this right we will support them because we accept the underlying principle of simplifying the benefits system and providing real incentives to work," said Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Douglas Alexander.

New Labour leader Ed Miliband has already made clear he will not oppose the coalition for opposition's sake, and this is a wise strategic move on his part.

He realises there is a public consensus not just that the deficit needs to be cut, but that the dependency culture which has become entrenched in some deprived communities needs to be addressed.

But Labour's caveat, of course, is that the crackdown on benefits must go hand-in-hand with pro-growth policies to ensure the jobs are there for people to move into.

This highlights the biggest obstacle to Mr Duncan Smith's proposals – the fact that the government's cutbacks in other areas are likely to lead over the coming year to rising unemployment.

If there are not the jobs to go round, moving people off welfare into work becomes not just politically impossible but practically impossible.

As with much else, the fate of the government's welfare reform gamble depends on whether its greater economic policy gamble succeeds or fails.

Clegg will come to regret broken promise on fees

The cry of 'betrayal' is one of the most oft-heard in politics. Labour faced it on numerous issues between 1997 and 2010, not least when it introduced university tuition fees despite a manifesto pledge not to do so.

"We have no plans to introduce university top-up fees, and have legislated to prevent them" actually translated as "We have no plans to introduce them during the 2001-2005 Parliament, but we will legislate to bring them in thereafter."

The subsequent backbench revolt came close to bringing down Tony Blair, whose government only survived when a few MPs switched sides at the last moment on the orders of Gordon Brown.

One potential North-East rebel was told to support the measure with the words: "I'm not asking you, I'm [expletive deleted] telling you" - an interesting illustration of the way the Brownites used to do business.

But Labour's shameless U-turn created a huge political opportunity for the Liberal Democrats, which they subsequently sought to exploit to the full in constituencies with large student populations.

Among the seats they targeted in 2005 was Newcastle Central, and it was probably only the personal popularity of the then MP, Jim Cousins, that stopped them winning it.

The Lib Dems were again making the most of the issue during this year's campaign, which they fought on a pledge to abolish the fees in place of a 'graduate tax.'

As one Sheffield student told the BBC's Question Time on Thursday: "Nick Clegg was never out of our student union during the election. Now we can't even get a meeting with him."

The reason for that, of course, is that the Lib Dems are now part of a Tory-led coalition that is set to remove the current £3,000 cap and raise it to a maximum of £9,000.

They point out that the coalition agreement does not commit them to supporting the measure, allowing them to abstain when the proposal comes before the Commons.

But if party leader Mr Clegg saw this is some great concession wrung from his Tory partners at the height of those tense negotiations following the election in May, I suspect he has since been disabused.

In fact the public sees it for what it is – a fig-leaf to enable the Lib Dems to stand aside holding their noses while the Tories introduce a two-tier system of higher education.

The purpose of this column is not to go into the rights and wrongs of how universities should be funded and how that fits into the larger question of how to tackle the deficit.

My own personal views on the matter are inevitably coloured by my own experiences as a student in more benign economic times.

As someone who would certainly not have been able to go to university without the state support that was then on offer, I find it very hard to argue that the next generation should be denied the same benefits.

That said, alongside a 'free' university education, in those days you also used to be able to buy houses in the West End of Newcastle for a few hundred quid. It's a different world now.

No, the main point I am trying to make here is that this is yet one more example of the coalition's inherent instability.

It seems likely that a number of MPs, possibly including the former leaders Sir Menzies Campbell and Charles Kennedy, will rebel rather than abstain on the measure, calling into question Mr Clegg's control over his own party.

As the Lib Dem leader has frequently reminded us, compromise is a necessary part of politics, especially in a hung Parliament scenario, and some political promises are seemingly made to be broken

With hindsight, however, I suspect he will come to see this as one that really should have been kept.

Despite the cuts, it is Labour that has the harder task

In the normal course of political events, any government that announced the largest cutbacks in public spending for more than thirty years would be seen as batting on a particularly sticky wicket.

And it is true that there has been no shortage of criticism of the £81bn cuts programme unveiled by Chancellor George Osborne on Wednesday.

Already, the coalition’s attempts to present the package as ‘fair’ have begun to look somewhat threadbare, with think-tanks such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies claiming it will hit the poorest hardest.

Given that public spending is of necessity higher in the worst-off areas of the country, it seems to me that the IFS is making not so much a contentious political point as a statement of the bleeding obvious.

Yet for all the sound and fury directed at the coalition this week, it is my belief that the spending review – and the wider question of how to tackle the deficit - actually poses a bigger problem for the Labour Party.

Why? Because like it or not, the government has succeeded in creating a consensus that, irrespective of whether or not the cuts are fair, they are certainly necessary.

The general election in May was essentially decided on two issues: whether the public could stand another five years of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, and how fast the deficit should be cut.

It is because Labour lost the argument on not one but both of these issues that it finds itself out of power today.

So on the question of the £18bn cuts to welfare benefits, even allowing for the undoubted human cost, there is actually a broad consensus that this is something that needs to happen.

If the coalition can succeed in reforming the welfare state – something Labour really should have done from a position of strength post-1997 – the political as well as the economic dividends will be huge.

Likewise, there is also a broad consensus that the last government created too many ‘non jobs’ in the public sector that are now having to be shed.

If as the government’s own documents appear to confirm, the cutbacks do lead to 500,000 public sector job losses, many of those not personally affected will see it as a necessary re-balancing of the economy.

It has become almost a cliché over the past week to say that Mr Osborne’s spending review will determine the result of the next election, but it is true nevertheless.

If his great gamble pays off, and the economy recovers before 2015, the coalition will have succeeded in constructing a political narrative that will be well-nigh unbeatable at the polls.

It will be the well-worn cry of Tory governments down the ages - that Labour turned the country in an economic disaster zone, leaving the coalition to clear up the mess.

However good or bad a leader Ed Miliband turns out to be, it is inconceivable in those circumstances that the country would then turn back to Labour after just one term out of office.

Yet for Labour, the alternative scenario in which Mr Osborne’s cutbacks plunge the country into a double-dip recession is almost equally baleful.

Messrs Brown and Balls would then be powerfully vindicated – but at the cost of millions of lost jobs, repossessed homes, failed businesses and shattered lives.

Hence many Labour supporters who might ordinarily hope that the Comprehensive Spending Review proves this government’s undoing will instead be praying that Mr Osborne is proved right.

It may condemn their party to a decade of opposition. But at least they might still have their jobs by the end of it.