In a piece for the Times last month, I summarised the current situation of the Grand Coalition by saying:

how long does the Grand Coalition have left? Devoid of imagination, with a predilection for ignoring Parliament and its own cabinet, and apparently losing internal support to inertia, this failing experiment may well be in its death throes.

Little did I know that, a couple of days after going to press, the Labour Party would hold an internal party debate on its future in the government. An internal debate that would be skewed almost entirely against the Government, and an internal debate that would reveal just how fed up Labour MPs and members are with the Tories in Government.

One of the commonly accepted stories of the House - albeit possibly apocryphal - is that going into coalition with the Tories is an experience not dissimilar to sailing through an ocean inhabited by sirens. Parties are lured in with promises of cooperation and demonstrations of just how much Tory policy has been dropped to accommodate a coalition, only to find themselves inexplicably drowning after striking sharp rocks mid-way through the term. Nobody is quite sure why this happens, but the accounts of the Liberal Democrats, Ukip and the NUP all attest to the death by inertia caused by going into coalition with the Tories.

This may be unfair on the Tories, or then again it may not be. Labour concerns over the current governing coalition centre on the Tories steamrollering policy and not consulting. Now, I do not know the whole story here, but as these comments were made in private we have to accept that the Labour MPs making these comments are at least genuine in their feeling that they’re not being listened to by their senior colleagues in Government.

And further corroborating evidence can be seen by /u/wtench’s recent letter to the Prime Minister. A long-time europhile and the only (public) Tory MP member of the final referendum petition campaign, /u/wtench was incensed at the Government’s response to the petition; of course, we already knew the Government planned to block the referendum and water it down with another - entirely pointless, I might add - referendum, but now the Government’s duplicity has irritated one of its own backbenchers.

Full discussion on the ramifications of the Government’s approach to the petition is a discussion for another time, but what this shows is that the Grand Coalition is neither grand, nor is it a coalition. I spoke with a dissenting Labour MP who was away for the all-important internal Labour vote on the government, and he assures me he would’ve voted to leave. So, I can say with some confidence, if anecdotally, that more than half of the Labour Party is unhappy in coalition. Add to this at least one Tory backbencher becoming restless and with inactivity in every Government department, and it’s clear that this Government is a Government in name only.