Comrades, get a grip

ID cards have been scrapped. The third runway at Heathrow has been scrapped. Capital gains tax will be restored to 40%. In 2011 those earning under £10,000 per year will be removed from income tax. Electoral reform is on the table.

Had any of these measures been taken six months ago, the libertarian left would have been celebrating a more enlightened turn for the Labour party. Instead, the Labour party stood against each of these policies, excepting their deathbed conversion to a slightly more proportional system of voting.

I confess, it sticks in the throat a little that the Tories will be delivering all of this instead, but it has less to do with some Disraeli-esque calculation on Cameron’s part than with the genuinely accommodating nature of an unprecedented coalition deal. Even if it’s all blue from here until 2015, Labour simply would never have legislated for these policies and we should allow ourselves a moment’s celebration.

So why are my left-leaning friends so downcast about the new order? The party that took us into an illegal war with Iraq is out of office, but instead of giving ourselves a few days to celebrate their demise, talk has immediately turned to a Lib Dem sell-out and Tory cuts. As a neat bit of PR, the Greens are offering a year's free membership to anyone switching from the other parties, those who may feel disaffected by the new Liberal-Conservative pact. One Green friend of mine posted as her Facebook status that it’s “as if the past 13 years never happened”.

It did happen, and it was disastrous. For all the improvements in human rights legislation and public services, we emerge from years of bloody foreign policy, authoritarian domestic policy, and an economic policy that was hopelessly short sighted. It's over, and my heart is glad!

But perhaps this is all secondary to the larger point that our new government is based on a new pluralism, a new inclusiveness that says ‘21st Century’ to me more clearly than any hate crimes act ever will. For all the cynical (if enjoyably witty) comment in the press this morning, I experienced the Cameron-Clegg 'love-in' as a refreshing change from vicious sniping, if nothing else.

I'm not going to get carried away. The Tory brand is rightfully beneath contempt in Scotland. If Thatcherism stole England’s soul, it battered and bruised our social body. But good policies are good policies, and bad policies are bad policies. So far, a mere 48 hours in, the latter have replaced the former, and I’m unashamed to be pleased at that.