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Home > All site sections > HR blogs and comment > HR blogs > Specialists' blog

Conservative bluebirds fly in Whitehall – but for how long?

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John Philpott

12 May 2010 | 12:13

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Articles more than one month old can be viewed only by CIPD members or PM Subscribers.

It’s 7am. I’m at the London Stock Exchange for a series of media interviews on the economic outlook following David Cameron’s entry into Downing Street. Broadcast TV news footage showed the hint of a rainbow over Buckingham Palace yesterday evening as the new prime minister was asked by her majesty the queen to form a government, the vibrant natural phenomenon outdoing the “Rainbow” coalition between the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats and sundry minor parties. And there are now bluebirds flying in Whitehall too, with the orange/yellow Lib Dem logo, showing a bird in flight, turning the colour of their new partners in the first proper UK coalition government since Winston Churchill led the country in war time.

Another famous Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, once famously said –-courtesy of Monty Python - the Lib Dem logo resembled a dead parrot. In order to attain office, her latest successor has breathed fresh life into a bird that actually lost ground in the general election. Is this a bold principled move that heralds a new kind of politics and builds a stable government, or instead a desperate ruse that will ultimately end in tears?

We should give the Lib-Con – or is that Con-Lib? – coalition the benefit of the doubt. Mr Cameron spoke well in his speech outside number 10 last night, his stress on the importance of pursuing common good carrying echoes of former President Kennedy (JFK that is, not Charles). The new prime minister has certainly been generous, offering five cabinet seats to his new Liberal Democrat chums plus concessions on a number of policy issues, an act that might stir as yet unspoken resentment in Tory ranks. However, the core of the economic policy platform set out in the Conservative election manifesto remains intact, with the Liberal Democrats seemingly content to do a U-turn on their previously stated concern about cutting public spending in the current financial year. Consequently, the Conservatives have effectively ensured that their coalition partners will share in any political flak that arises in what the new chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, once referred to as the coming “age of austerity”.

The Liberal Democrat leadership is presumably comfortable with the implications of what Mr Cameron yesterday called “hard and difficult” choices. After all, Nick Clegg spoke a while ago of the need for “savage cuts” in public spending - whether all his parliamentary troops, not to mention his grass root members, feel the same is far less clear. What this demonstrates is that the new coalition has to navigate all manner of political tensions as well as being potentially prone to the normal cultural tensions that arise whenever two organisations with very different traditions and ways of working join forces. Will it persist and give our country stable and effective government in a period of major economic challenge? Perhaps. But don’t be surprised if we’re back on the political hustings before too long.