There are many reasons to be fearful of the Tory Dem government, but one advantage they have is that they will have to plumb uncharted depths to come over more authoritarian than the previous Labour one.
It has to be welcomed that they’ve agreed to end the detention of children.
And already they’ve abolished Labour's ID database. It’s gone, just like that. A very good saving of anything between £6-18bn. That said, they are not presenting this as part of their package of cuts.
It is the cuts to jobs and services that will make this coalition unpopular. The Lib Dems have said they'll be "savage". Bank of England governer Mervyn King has said that whoever won this election would be so unpopular that they would then be out of power for a generation.
Labour stayed out away from office to perhaps try and benefit from this. The problem for them is that they are part of the banking consensus that precipitated this crisis in the first place, and went into the election promising cuts “deeper and tougher” than Margaret Thatcher’s. It would take a level of chutzpah not reached even yet by the Labour Party to present themselves now as opposition to this agenda.
I suspect that they won’t do this, and for the same reasons that brought about the New Labour project in the first place. To win Downing Street they had to win over the rightwing press in England. Remember that Middle England, nay the whole of England, just voted for a Tory majority. The political culture there is different from Scotland and is unlikely to change in the years to come. The Milibands or whoever it is will have to continue playing to that audience.
Their Labour colleagues in Scotland may try and present themselves as economically to the left of them. It’ll be interesting to see if the media in Scotland continue to let them get away with the “it’s Labour or the Tories” line as if it is true.
