Scars of tuition fees battle may cost Lib Dems byelection victory

OLDHAM LETTER:Nick Clegg is finding that proximity to power has badly tarnished his moral superiority

OLDHAM USED to have two entirely predictable House of Commons seats – one Labour, one Conservative – until a 1995 byelection that saw the Conservatives fall to the Liberal Democrats in yet another example of the party’s one-time attractiveness to voters faced with byelection decisions but unhappy with the major parties.

Labour lost out in the 1995 byelection to the Liberal Democrats, but not until after the party’s election strategist, Peter Mandelson, had tried to tarnish the reputation of the Liberal Democrat candidate in campaign literature.

In May last year, Phil Woolas, the Labour loser in 1995, drew on the Mandelsonian handbook to try it again. In Oldham, Labour has form.

Since the 1997 general election, Oldham East and Saddleworth has been a Labour-Liberal Democrat marginal. Woolas held on three times, but his grip was never secure. In panic last year, he and his team sought to paint Elwyn Watkins of the Liberal Democrats as “soft” on Muslim extremism. “We’ve got to get the white vote out,” warned one of Woolas’s campaign team.

Such tactics would be questionable anywhere, but in Oldham they were particularly so, given that the memories of the rioting between white and Asian youths a decade ago still linger in the memory of a town that is less divided that it was back then – on the back of millions of investment by the Labour government – but only marginally so.

Unlike many before him faced with such calumny, Watkins did not back down, taking Woolas to an election court – without, it must be said, any obvious sign of support from his party in the early stages.

Eventually, the judges decided that Woolas was unfit to be a member of the House of Commons and stripped him of the seat – the first time such a verdict has been imposed since an Irish MP lost a seat for Louth in 1911.

In the usual way of things, the byelection should be a sure-fire winner for the Liberal Democrats: a Labour MP ejected in disgrace from parliament; some bitter in-fighting within Labour locally and a new Labour leader in Ed Miliband who has so far struggled to establish himself. All this and a Liberal Democrat candidate, who was just 113 votes behind Woolas last May.

But this is not the past. The Liberal Democrats are in power, not in virtuous, if impotent opposition. If Nick Clegg had had any doubts before about Watkins’s decision to challenge, they will have been copperfastened by three campaign trips to the Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency in recent weeks, where voter anger about his decision to go into coalition with the Conservatives is visible, if not entirely rampant.

The scars left by the tuition fees battle have badly hurt the party’s morale, while Clegg’s own general campaign rhetoric – where he trumpeted his moral superiority over his opponents – has been tarnished by its proximity to power, as always happens. Years into his political life, he has discovered that past promises can come back to haunt.

The tuition fees issue, in particular, has driven away the young voters the Liberal Democrats have so relied upon for byelection gains. Voicing the fears of many of her classmates, Umair Naheem, an 18-year-old student from Oldham sixth form, said: “I’m worried. By the time I finish I will be in at least £70,000 to £80,000 worth of debt and there are already rumours about a lack of jobs. How am I going to be able to pay that off?”

Clegg insists that he is still fighting to win in the constituency, though few give Watkins real hope of doing so. Ed Miliband’s candidate, Debbie Abrahams, should win when polling boxes are open tonight, if last-minute polling in the constituency is accurate.

Indeed, his leadership will come under considerable strain if she does not.

Invisible during the campaign, Woolas, who is now badly in debt and out of a job, emerged on Tuesday to give an interview to the Manchester Evening News, when he opted to play a British version of "them fellas up in Dublin won't tell us what to do" – when he portrayed himself as an victim of a London social elite.

“The feedback I have had is that people in the constituency did not like two judges coming up from London and telling them who to vote for. What happened to me will work in Labour’s favour,” he told the newspaper.

On the other hand, Oldham East and Saddleworth is important for Conservative prime minister David Cameron. His candidate is Kashif Ali, an Oxford graduate and full-time barrister who has lived in the constituency all his life. He fought the seat in 2010 and made considerable gains, putting the Conservatives back into real contention for the first time in 15 years. However, the Conservatives have put up a lack-lustre campaign behind him.

Cameron desperately wants Clegg’s man to win, to bolster the Liberal Democrats’ place in the coalition. Indeed, the Cabinet held a full discussion on what the Conservatives could do to help their smaller partners before the Christmas break. The disclosure of such debate infuriated many in Cameron’s own ranks.

For now, Cameron’s enemies – many of whom were vocal in Tuesday’s Commons debate on legislation to give British voters the right to a say on future European Union integration – are not strong enough to seriously challenge him, but this will change during the course of 2011 – which could be the toughest of the years that Cameron hopes his government will run.