David Cameron owns this dispute. If he's not careful, he might end up irreversibly alienating the public
It doesn't always happen to every government. But all prime ministers need to be aware of it. Sooner or later, they risk getting on the wrong side of the voters over an issue that can permanently define their government, weaken its legitimacy in the public mind and, in the end, can help to bring it down. It happened to Harold Wilson over devaluation and to Ted Heath with the three-day week. John Major had the exchange rate mechanism crisis and Tony Blair had Iraq. If David Cameron is not extremely careful, the public sector pensions dispute could be the coalition government's Iraq moment.
That's not to say that the issues at stake in the pensions battle, though important, are as lethal as those involved in Iraq, because they aren't. Nor, even more emphatically, is it to say that a botched coalition confrontation over public sector pensions will automatically play Labour's or the unions' way, because it may not. But it is to say that the public pensions argument resonates in some unpredictable and sometimes contradictory ways with the public.
Public sector workers' terms and conditions are a delicate subject for a Conservative government to manage, even in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. And since Cameron's Conservative party are increasingly putting their mortgage on the line over this dispute, it is worth stressing that they could lose it if they make foolish errors or lack clarity about the outcome they seek.
So far, that has not happened. The strikes came and went. But public opinion is volatile about this dispute. It is currently on the unions' side, albeit narrowly, over maintaining existing pensions rights – but against them, again narrowly, over striking on the issue. That could change if either side overplays its hand. For the moment, ministers seem to grasp that sweet reason is better for their cause than striker-bashing. But they seem less clear about what compromises they are willing to make when the talks resume. That is ominous.
The tragic coincidence of the death at Glastonbury of Cameron's constituency chairman Christopher Shale at the beginning of the week, along with the one-day strikes by a group of unions at the end of it, perhaps illuminate the political risks with particular harshness. But Shale's leaked weekend memorandum, with its eloquent frankness about the Tory party's strategic failings, is a reality check for a party that may have enjoyed a charmed political year but which is not currently riding so high in the polls – 37% at the last count – that it can afford to get the pensions dispute badly wrong.
Shale's memo is full of sometimes brutal observations: that "we are not always an appealing proposition"; that the Tories have come across as "graceless, voracious, crass, always on the take"; that, within its own walls, "we sometimes morph into something different, less attractive" and that Tories must "try to see ourselves as others see us". Shades there of Theresa May's "nasty party" remark in 2002. Or as a revered journalistic colleague used to put it: "I like going to Tory party conference every year. It reminds me why I still vote Labour." But Shale was talking about Cameron's party today, not the William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith or Michael Howard vintages of yesteryear.
However, the key comment comes when Shale, citing the Downing Street political strategy director Andrew Cooper, observes how politics is deeply off-putting to most people. The country can be divided into two groups, says Shale. There are those who are "politics heavy", who are interested in politics the whole time. And there are those who are "politics light", who are not interested in politics except in an unusual crisis or when an election comes around. The two groups, says Shale, inhabit different worlds. The heavies can never get it into their heads that the lights aren't as interested as they themselves are, while the lights simply switch off when the heavies start talking. But his killer point is this. Two per cent of people are heavies, while 98% are lights.
Shale chose his figures to make a point not on the basis of detailed research. Nevertheless, if Shale was even three-quarters right, then both Cameron and the unions need to think extremely carefully about how the pensions dispute looks through the eyes of politics-light people, and not get too distracted by the politics-heavy people on either side of the divide. Leftwing heavies may want to bring down the government, while rightwing heavies may want to break the unions as they did in the 1980s. But the great mass of lights want, above all, for this dispute to be solved on reasonable terms, so that they don't have to think too much about it.
Tory-leaning lights want to be reassured that Cameron, whom they instinctively (and correctly) recognise as someone with a clear understanding of politics light, is still the man they voted for, and that he is not another politics heavy in disguise. Labour-leaning lights also want to think about Ed Miliband in the same way. But the stakes are higher for Cameron. Having embarked on the dispute, he cannot now afford to fail. Cameron owns it – just as Wilson, Heath and the other prime ministers also owned the issues which eventually undermined their governments. But does he know how he wants it to end? It is not clear that he does.
By and large, the coalition won the public argument in 2010 in favour of a severe fiscal tightening to pay down the deficit. But ministers need to be careful not to assume that the public has a bottomless appetite for austerity. That is especially the case when the austerity message is delivered by ministers who by now may have, in Shale's words, morphed into something less attractive than they perhaps appeared in the immediate aftermath of Gordon Brown. The fact that the government puts up consensual-sounding figures like Cameron, Michael Gove and Francis Maude to deliver its message is a sign that the dispute is being run by people with political nous (though Maude was pretty hopeless when interviewed on yesterday's Radio 4 Today programme).
These are not the 1970s or the 1980s, when the unions could so easily be framed as a threat to economic prosperity and social stability. Today the unions are neither the source of Britain's economic problems nor a threat to national order. Most want a negotiated settlement based on the defined benefit pension that the government has already promised. Ministers will be lucky to find a better time to settle than now. The politics-light public may not be paying detailed attention, but they get all this too. Cameron should remember his history. He has been warned.