It’s the final countdown on raising student fees

Ministers are aiming for a simple vote on raising the cap on tuition fees in the House of Commons before Christmas. If they can win the vote, then they will have drawn the sting from the tuition fees issue. Potential Liberal Democrat rebels will have settled and the Coalition will be able to develop university policy in its normal fashion. Student protests may linger on, but will be of little consequence.

So we are now entering the final month of the tuition fees chaos. How many votes does the government have?

The arithmetic in the Commons is this:

Conservatives - 306 (after allowing for the Speaker)

Liberal Democrats - 57

Labour - 257 (after allowing for Phil Woolas)

Others - 24 (excluding Sinn Fein absentees)

If the Lib Dems vote with the Conservatives, then their vote seems overwhelming - 363 vs 281, a majority of 82. Whatever the substance, whatever the rebellion, David Cameron can’t fail to get a vote through if Nick Clegg is whipping his party past the Aye tellers. But that scenario now seems unlikely.

Clegg and Vince Cable have been consistently arguing that this scheme is truly progressive and an improvement on the existing arrangements. Yet there is no sense of any Lib Dems other than the most loyalist MPs buying what they are selling. The party, via its Federal Policy Committee, has reiterated its stand against a rise in tuition fees and sentiment within the party does not seem to have shifted much in recent weeks. For Clegg to repudiate the party’s position and set a whip in support of the government would now be a Clause 4 moment signalling, as it did for Tony Blair, the emasculation of the party and the capture of power by a dispassionate London elite. But there’s no sign of the party being ready to accept that, or of Clegg making any preparation for it. Clegg's only hope is for the party elections on Saturday to deliver a dramatically more loyalist FPC prepared to green light repudiation.

At the other extreme, Clegg could set a whip for abstention. Then the arithmetic gets tighter - the Conservative 306 vs a maximum of 281 others, a majority of 25. Are there 25 potential rebels who would break the whip and vote No among Lib Dem MPs?

For a fuller accounting, we need to look at the minor parties. Of these, the SNP (6 MPs), Plaid Cymru (3 MPs) and Greens (1 MP) have so far publicly allied themselves with the antis.

Of the remaining 14 seats, 8 belong to the DUP, which backed a pro-Browne-ish motion in the Northern Ireland Assembly this month. The SDLP (3 MPs) voted against the motion. We can expect that these two parties will also vote against each other in the Commons.

Let’s also throw in the 4 Lib Dem Cabinet ministers, who seem widely expected (and accepted) to vote with the government.

This gives us a government total of 318 versus a maximum of 273 others, a majority of 45. Is it possible that fully 45 of the 53 remaining Lib Dem MPs are ready to rebel? That would require not only all the backbenchers but a fair few, too, of the payroll vote of 14 junior ministers and 5 bag carriers. That seems far fetched. And there’s no sign yet of any Conservative rebels.

In any case, a better option for Clegg might be to make it a free vote for his backbench MPs, the question of the level of cap on undergraduate tuition fees in English public universities being a matter of personal conscience for Lib Dems, while insisting that the payroll vote is duty-bound to vote with the government. This would make it easier for Lib Dem ministers and bag carriers to vote with the government without destroying relations with their local party members. A few backbenchers might even join them.

So the issue seems to be not whether the government can win the vote on fees. With the DUP and Tory right on board, it surely can. Rather, the issue is how Clegg minimises the scale of rebellion and the damage it causes. Questions will be asked if the vote only gets through because of support from the DUP. And many individual Lib Dem MPs will worry about their own seat and party relations. But even more importantly, Clegg needs to prevent the rebellion becoming bitter and crystallising a factional divide within the Lib Dems between his own Orange Book-ish set and social liberals.

This may be happening anyway. In the Independent today, the columnist Johann Hari wrote, “If you are a member of the Liberal Democrats appalled by Clegg's choices, you can join the Social Liberal Forum, an internal group that is trying to reclaim the party.”