The Lib Dem irrelevance

Lib Dem members are indeed fed up with the ridicule they experience on the doorstep and at polling stations for selling every principle they claimed to have for a fistful of senior Cabinet posts.

Many actually believed that their leadership was committed to no increase in university tuition fees.

They didn't realise that it was no more than a ploy to hoover up student votes in the wake of new Labour's conversion to Tory policies on tertiary education.

Top Lib Dem "negotiator" Danny Alexander was happy to heave the tuition fee commitment out of the window at the first time of asking in the talks to establish the Con-Dem coalition because he understood that it was never to be taken seriously.

Lib Dem leaders got what they really wanted - the right to strut self-importantly around Parliament with ministerial tags as though they were taking key governmental decisions.

It is clear that coalition economic direction is set by George Osborne alone, leaving his front-bench Lib Dem hostages to greet every decision with initial enthusiasm before raising meaningless caveats for public consumption in response to back-bench and grass-roots complaints.

The Chancellor is intent on ignoring David Cameron's pre-election charm offensive as tinselly window dressing - which it was - and seizing the chance to expedite the bankers' agenda of dismantling what remains of the postwar gains won by the working class during the Clem Attlee Labour government.

Apart from a little tinkering on policy fringes, the Liberal Democrats' only price for propping up the most right-wing Tory government in living memory was a referendum on the alternative vote.

Even that was an unprincipled retreat from traditional Liberal support for proportional representation and it received a well-deserved kicking from voters.

An AV referendum was such a negligible concession that it would have also been available if Nick Clegg's legions had agreed to keep Balls's patron Gordon Brown in Downing Street.

It is therefore no surprise that Balls should be adamant that Clegg's lack of support for Brown should merit his similar rejection of any role for the Lib Dem leader in a Lab-Lib coalition.

While Balls's intention of engineering a collapse of the coalition long before 2015 is commendable, his "responsible" attachment to a variant of the Tory cuts policy - just not so deep or so swift - undermines the development of an effective mass movement to demand change.

Labour's failure to back a real alternative to the bankers' prescription for economic health, simply repeating the ineffectual "too deep, too fast" mantra, encourages the media-fuelled campaign to portray the Tories as more credible on the economy.

If Cameron and Osborne secure enough of a lead in the opinion polls, they will ditch the Liberal Democrats and seek a Tory majority through new elections on this basis.

Labour would be better served by giving voice to the public perception that the current crisis was caused by the banks, aided and abetted by Brown's love-in with the City and his addiction to all but non-existent "light" regulation.

It should target tax avoidance by the rich rather than signing up to a neoliberal assault on working people's pay, pensions, jobs and services.