Editorial Thursday 9 February 2012: The politically patriotic TINA defence, as Britney advises the revolting Lib Dems

'Oops" has become a key word for the travails of the Health Bill. Yesterday saw an unwelcome oops moment when a symbolic amendment inserting the wording "physical and mental" meant that Labour won its first vote on the Bill.


......................................................................

Click here for details of 'PM Cameron - Mr Lansley's "as one" or assassin?', the new issue of subscription-based Health Policy Intelligence.

......................................................................

The Guardian's LiveBlog says that three Lib Dem peers rebelled, showing that the majority of Lib Dem peers are solidly on-message.

It also shows that the cross-bench peers are grumpy, which should be useful to the Labour lords and ladies.

The Guardian have also had a brief from Government sources that the penny has dropped with both the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister that the reforms are going to make the NHS a hard issue for them over the next three years.

No shit.

The piece by Patrick Wintour and Juliette Jowit reports that 'one senior minister involved in deciding how to proceed with the bill admitted: "This is a politically rubbish place to be. We can either go back, sideways or forward".'

Once again, no shit. The finest minds of their generation are clearly hard at work on the strategy here.

TINA is a punk rocker
Messrs Cameron and Clegg apparently propose to use the TINA defence - There Is No Alternative. Last autumn I wrote about why this is politically dim, if not illiterate. Nothing has changed.

The TINA defence is political patriotism: the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Revolting Liberal Democrats pulling a Britney?
However, The Guardian also picks up on the fact that the same Liberal Democrats who forced the pause and Future Forum onto the Coalition via their last Spring Conference may try to get a debate on the Bill reforms at their Spring Conference.

In the words of health policy expert Britney Spears, 'Oops, I Did It Again'.

This matters because the Lib Dem constitution means their party conference makes its policy. (It's frighteningly democratic of them, isn't it?)

Fun for the Lib Dem party stage managers. And you never know: there may be trouble ahead.