House Divided

There are many things that can cause a division between partners and take from them the undeniable benefits of cooperation. Last week, the coalition faced its most serious divide - the kind of split every minor disagreement has been portrayed as for the past two years. Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat leader Mr Nick Clegg publicly accused the Tories of breaking their word and the coalition agreement that had been so sorely tested, though not outright broken, in the past (BBC, 2012).

It appears that ideology has won out over the 'national interest' that the coalition had avowedly a 'chance to serve' (2010). When you consider the competing commitments of those involved, it comes as more of a surprise that the coalition agreement hadn't been seriously imperilled sooner.

The commitments of the Tory backbench to staunchly conservative ideas have been confronted at every turn by Liberal Democrat attempts to liberalise coalition policy - and that was always going to be a difficult balance to juggle for the Conservative Prime Minister Mr Cameron. These competing commitments seem to have forced the emergence of what analysts have described as 'a definite air of tit-for-tat' (Brant, 2012).

However, the emergence of tit-for-tat need not demand as much pessimism about the future of that relationship as some propose. In fact tit-for-tat may represent some prospect of continued cooperation. In a talk for the RSA, expert on human evolution and development Mark Pagel (2012) described humanity's 'inexorable' advancement in terms of our increasing ability to cooperate with others.

'Cooperation can normally win out over endless cycles of betrayal and revenge, because there's always a sort of seduction of competition and killing your enemy - because then you get to occupy those lands - but you have to live with the fear of that enemy trying to kill you. And so it seems to be an inexorable part of our history that cooperation has had greater returns than competition.'

And this isn't a limited observation (Nowak & Highfield, 2011). It has been observed in numerous situations where several players compete for limited resources - a famous example from game theory being the Prisoner's Dilemma. And it is here that tit-for-tat emerges as a basis for a potential strategy for recovering cooperation rather than both sides collapsing into a 'death spiral' of aggression.

What, after broken trust and punitive response, does this information hold for the Coalition Agreement? With Mr Cameron's backbench broken from their bounds and with three years still to run, the shaken trust within the coalition will have to be repaired - because while both the Tories & Lib Dems surely have back-up plans, their chances at the next election largely depend upon public approval of their fully implemented program.

This creates room for the Liberal Democrats to seek a renegotiation of the Coalition Agreement (Kampfner, 2012), and necessity for Mr Cameron to find a way to bring his party back around the table to discuss it.

If he can't, he is presenting the main opposition, the Labour Party with the same kind of choice. To remain on the fence and take their chances in three years time or to be proactive now and drive wedges, to show the daylight between the liberal and conservative ideologies, all while offering a policy middle ground to court the potential coalition partner Labour would need to govern now.

The three main parties - due to the divisions resulting from ideology, find themselves competing for a finite staple resource: votes. These competing interests, however, do not  rule out the possibility of cooperation - in fact cooperation becomes the best strategy for representing all views. So, regardless of which of the three main parties seizes the initiative, all of them need to cooperate with others to guarantee their survival.

==========
References:
==========
+ BBC's 'Nick Clegg: Lords reform plans to be abandoned'; 6 August 2012.

+ 'The Coalition: Our programme for government'; Cabinet Office, 2010.

+ Robin Brant's 'Analysis: What does ditching Lords reform mean for the coalition?'; 6 August 2012.

+ Mark Pagel's 'Wired for Culture: The natural history of human cooperation'; (Quote at 11:01); March 2012.

+ Martin Nowak & Roger Highfield's 'Supercooperators: The mathematics of evolution, altruism and human behaviour'; April 2011.

+ John Kampfner's 'The Lib Dems are in a stronger position than the Tories – but hide it well'; in The Guardian; 9 August 2012.