Category: Politics

Politics in the UK, with a Liberal Democrat (LibDem) slant

Dec 03 2010

This makes me angry

This makes me angry:

Instead nice, gentle Nick Clegg has secured the position of Britain’s most hated man. He has been burnt in effigy by student rioters. Police have told him that he must no longer cycle to work for fear of physical attack. Excrement has been shoved through the letter box of his Sheffield constituency home, from which his family may now have to move for safety reasons.

I can hear the Labour apologists winding themselves up for response already: “Was his family in residence when the shit was pushed through the letter box? Have you got a crime number for that? It’s terrible, but you know he betrayed the people who trusted in him. Moving out of the home is just theatrical.” The president of the National Union of Students, Aaron Porter, Labour party member, decries the “betrayal”, the breaking of a pledge. Anyone like odds on how likely it was that he voted for the Liberal Democrats? Let’s face it: he didn’t, he didn’t vote for the party that he’s excoriating for not implementing the policy he didn’t vote for, the only party to oppose tuition fees. All those Labour folk, talking of the “betrayal”, they didn’t vote against tuition fees either. “Satirical” they say of David Mitchell advocating pissing through Nick Clegg’s letterbox , it isn’t satirical if someone’s actually done it.

As the riots progress an army of armchair revolutionaries bemoan the violence of the police, as buildings are smashed up. “The police should simply keep the protesters moving on, so they don’t cause any trouble”. “The police are stupid”, they say, “I could manage a large crowd of protesters, some intent on violence, much better than them. That’s why I’m sitting here tweeting about it.” “The police van was bait, because every right-thinking person when they see an unattended police van thinks: “Fuck me, I better smash the crap out of that”.”

I used to think it was the Tories who felt power was their divine right but now I know it’s Labour. Len McCluskey, leader of Unite, a Labour affiliated union calls for demos to topple the government, speaking approvingly of the poll tax riots. John McDonnell, Labour MP, says:

I know the Daily Mail will report me again as inciting riots yet again. Well, maybe that is what we are doing.

Beaten in an election, they use weasel words to get people out on the street smashing stuff up. “These cuts aren’t what people voted for, they voted, but they didn’t vote for this. They really meant to vote for Labour, the party who repeatedly reneged on promises to introduce fairer voting. The party who said they were going to reduce the deficit by making cuts, but now only have a blank piece of paper; who can magically make the deficit painlessly go away.”

For the first time in 60 years Liberal Democrats are in government, they are in government at a time when the country faces the largest budget deficit it has had in many decades, it is a crap time to be in government. They are taking hard decisions that Labour would not have the guts to take. For some this is a “betrayal”, they’ll happily contribute to an atmosphere that means a family gets shit pushed through the letterbox of their home, and a columnist in a respected paper can applaud it.

But more than ever before I am proud to say “I agree with Nick”.

Dec 01 2010

Tuition Fees

Since I am repeatedly in the position of discussing tuition fees on twitter, I thought it helpful to put down my thoughts in one place without the 140 character constraint.

I’m in favour of supporting universities, and students, via general taxation because the benefits of university education are public: they benefit all of us. I, along with many others, benefited directly from a free university education 20 years ago. I, along with other people and companies, currently benefit from university trained lawyers, nurses, doctors, engineers and so forth, regardless of my own education. I believe that the higher education system should be reformed to separate teaching and research, and also that we should consider all post-18 training in the context of any reforms to university education i.e. we should not distinguish between plumbers and physicists – they are equally valuable. As I watched water freely flowing from a burst pipe last winter, I strongly believed the former more valuable than the later.

The Liberal Democrats have been very tied up over tuition fees because they signed a pledge to vote against tuition fees, largely it has been asserted that the pledge on fees indicates that it takes priority over all other manifesto pledges. In retrospect it would have been wise not to make such a pledge which could so easily invite such a distinction. In their defence I think it illustrates that LibDem MPs did not anticipate fully finding themselves in Coalition government, unsurprising given the last 60 years of elections. Nick Clegg did attempt to persuade the party to scrap this pledge towards the end of 2009, which would have been a politically wise move. It’s worth noting that the LibDems could fulfil their pledge to the letter if they were in opposition, or in a looser electoral pact, in neither of these cases would they be able to influence the policy of the government so their opposition would be entirely decorative. No doubt many believe that LibDems should have given up Coalition government on this issue, that would have been stupid and pointless.

Politically I believe the appropriate response to not being able to fulfil the pledge is to say that the LibDems are sorry they did not receive a sufficient electoral mandate to enable them to fulfil this pledge and other manifesto pledges in coalition government. I note that more experienced government parties, such as Labour, have found it easy to brazenly ignore their pre-election pledges on tuition fees, twice, without little protest from the Labour dominated National Union of Students.

The discussion on tuition fees is made in a context where, in Liam Byrne’s words “there is no money”, all of the major Westminster parties proposed to address a large deficit mainly by making cuts to government spending, rather than raising taxation. In light of this, and the Browne report, making a bid for even flat central funding in the higher education sector was always going to be an uphill struggle.

I estimated previously that tuition fees could be replaced by an increase of 2p on basic rate tax, or 8p on higher rate tax and the Greens have proposed 4p on corporation tax to fund higher education. Those are tax increases of 10%, 20% and 15% respectively.  Clearly combinations of these three elements would also work. However, it must be recognised that higher education will always be in competition with other claims on the public purse. If you had £7bn to spend would higher education be your first priority? Or would it be schools, benefits, hospitals or tax cuts?

The scheme proposed by the Coalition does shift paying for university education further from general taxation. However, I believe Vince Cable has done a fair job of adding LibDemery to the Browne report, commissioned by Labour. In particular covering part-time education, capping tuition fees, and attempting to make repayment progressive. The principle difference to a pure graduate tax is that a tuition fee is stated, if not paid up front. A large number of people seem keen to imply that tuition fees will be payable up front, which they are not, and simultaneously claim that poorer students will be put off applying – perhaps because they have been repeatedly told fees will be payable up front.

As for what LibDem MPs should do when presented with the relevant parliamentary bill. It’s quite clear that backbench LibDem MPs should abstain, those that vote against are free to do so but should suffer the consequences in terms of party discipline. Government ministers are in a less clear position, the Coalition agreement does allow for them to abstain, however particularly in Vince Cable’s case, where he was heavily involved in developing the proposed legislation and feels happy with the results, it seems to me he must vote in favour – anything else just looks strange. There is a logic for all Liberal Democrat government ministers voting for the tuition fee proposals, this would be the case in a simple, one-party majority government.

In a coalition government, the policy of the component parties is not the same thing as the policy of the government. I tentatively believe the LibDems should retain an ambition to fund higher education from general taxation, I struggle to see how this policy will be implemented in the next 10 years but I do not feel this should rule out LibDems holding it as a policy. I believe, in future, the LibDems should avoid, like the plague, making pledges in the form that they made on tuition fees. They should also apply a disclaimer to their manifesto that they will negotiate to implement what they can from the manifesto but only in majority government will they pledge to deliver all policies.

Nov 21 2010

A little bit of politics

This is, to put it pretentiously, a meta-politics post rather than a post about particular political tendencies. It arises following a few months of Coalition government and a lot of chat on twitter and elsewhere, it is a personal view.

I joined a political party because I couldn’t be doing with the “plague on all your houses” view of politics. That I joined the Liberal Democrats is perhaps a sign I wasn’t fully committed to the alternative! Commitment to a party is a ticket to complain with confidence, you have a defined ground to defend and a crowd to back you in attacking the opposition. The downside of this is you tend to believe that any other criticism comes from a purely party political standpoint, and you in some ways tied to views that you don’t hold. This does make me somewhat rare: the Liberal Democrats have around 65,000 members, Tories 250,000 and Labour 166,000 (source), so of a voting population of 30,000,000 people less than 2% are members of a political party.

I struggle with mindless opposition, so end up always being mildly pro-government. To me standing on the sidelines and complaining automatically that the government is doing it wrong, whilst not proffering alternative solutions, or even tweaks to proposed solutions, is intellectually barren. I’ve been a party member for 20 years, for most of that time I’ve been an inactivist. Since the election I’ve been much more involved, this is partly due to the internet: online activism is the sort of activism I can cope with but also the fact of being in power brings home what the point is: not just to have policies but to enact them.

The Coalition has also brought to light the various strands of the Liberal Democrats: the old social democrats who left the Labour Party, original Liberals and the Tory equivalent of the social democrats. If you’re interested I’m probably closest to the latter group although I never considered joining the Tories (those Young Conservatives were a bit extreme).

No party really adequately captures an individual’s views – how can it? And further to this, many people find themselves utterly out of tune with the electorate and so destined to be unhappy with whatever government is in power. The benefit of a party out of power (and out of the likelihood of power) is that you can confidently project your desires on them without real fear of contradiction since they are untested in the white-heat of government. The problem with party politics is that it supresses attempts to gain consensus on key, long term issues and it does it’s best to supress free thought amongst parliamentarians.

Funnily enough in many senses the politically committed, by which I mean party members, get on with each other better than they do with the uncommitted. This was visible back in my days as an undergraduate, the members of the political clubs interacted with each other and disagreed quite considerable. Labour and Tory were despicably extreme ;-) but we shared a degree of enthusiasm for the political programme. The politically committed are approximately tied to a point of view, which can be argued with. The uncommitted can drift along in happy opposition to everything.

I have my own personal view of political change, which is that the British are largely non-revolutionary and they vote a government into power not because they offer compelling new ideas but because they believe they will offer broad continuity and that the incumbents have been sufficiently reduced in their eyes by the ordinary attrition of government that it is now time for a change.

Coalition is a novel position for a party to find itself: Britain hasn’t seen coalition since the Second World War. The interesting thing for a Liberal Democrat these days is how to behave in government, particularly in coalition government where the policies of the government differ from those of the party. I think this is worth repeating “In a coalition, the policies of the government are not the same as the policies of the component parties”. The government is still the government and as such there is a low limit to how much rebellion within it’s own ranks it can bear – this is true regardless of whether the government is a single party of a coalition. For the rest of the party things are somewhat easier. Liberal Democrats should argue for the party’s policies – particularly those being enacted by the government. They should be thoughtfully critical where they think the government is going wrong – this is our best opportunity to influence the workings of government across the board.

Nov 09 2010

Poor attendance record in the House of Lords?

I know my readers love a chart, and today I found some data I thought was begging for a good graphing. It’s the attendance figures for the House of Lords found in a report entitled “Members Leaving the House” – found at the bottom of this article. The motivation for the report is to explore the idea of retirement for peers, something some peers are seeking regardless of any other changes taking place. A secondary motivation is that there is wider reform of the House of Lords proposed, and one of the issues is that the new House is envisaged, ultimately to have substantially fewer members – this type of discussion informs how that transition might be achieved.

The report contains a set of tables for the last five years indicating the fraction of sessions which peers attended broken down into groups:

  • Attended 75% or more sessions
  • 50% to 74%
  • 25% to 49%
  • 10% to 24%
  • Attended at least once but less than 10%
  • Zero attendance

This is what the data looks like:

PeerAttendance

To give some idea of scale: across the period shown here the total number of peers decreased from 777 to 741, the average number of sessions in a year was 140, this latter figure means that a peer attending “less than 10% of sessions” was attending less than twice. It compares with the number of working days in the year of approximately 240 (48*5 day weeks). Nearly 20% of peers attend a session in the House of Lords only once or twice a year.

Being a member of the House of Lords isn’t a proper job, it does not attract a salary, although peers may claim a subsistence and office allowance of up to £26,000 per year. In this sense we should not anticipate the levels of attendance achieved by those working “normally”. Some of the peers will be paid as government or opposition working peers. However, peers do have a direct effect on the laws the country makes and turning up twice a year (which is all 20% of them achieve) does suggest a fairly low degree of interest – if I did something twice a year I wouldn’t even consider it a hobby, I go to the dentist more often!

Nov 05 2010

A Coalition candidate for Oldham East and Saddleworth?

Following the news that Phil Woolas has lost his seat of Oldham East and Saddleworth for knowingly lying about his opponent, Graeme Archer has proposed on Conservative Home that the Coalition should put up a joint candidate selected in an open primary. Much as I respect Graeme on this I disagree, although I should point out this is a cautious rather than an emphatic rejection.

The function of a by-election is to selection an MP to represent a constituency in parliament, at a General Election this selection – repeated across the country – amounts to a decision on who should form the government. The General Election this year demonstrated that decision may not be clear.

Speaking from the point of view of a Liberal Democrat, potentially giving up the race in this seat would be damaging – it plays directly to the idea that the Liberal Democrats have been subsumed into the Tories. Should the LibDem candidate win in the Open Primary they would, almost inevitably be seen as the Coalition rather than the LibDem candidate. The great risk that the LibDems face during the Coalition is that as a minority party in a coalition they will be electorally damaged at the next General Election – this is observed in coalitions across Europe.

Successfully contesting a three-way election would illustrate how by-elections under coalition work, something that has been demonstrated already in the Thirsk and Malton by-election held over the summer. Furthermore it would help maintain the separate identity of the Liberal Democrats. I can join the Tory Party whenever I want, but I don’t want to – it is so blinding obvious to party members that the merger of the two parties is undesirable that amongst party members it is not even worth talking about. The public, and commentators need convincing of this.

From the point of view of the Coalition the situation is less clear cut, offering a combined candidate does demonstrate the joint nature of the Coalition, and the opportunity to argue the Coalition’s joint platform. However, at this point in a Government it would be difficult to see the by-election as a true referendum on their joint record, there are better ways of doing this than a by-election in a single constituency under special circumstances.

From a more practical point of view, as Tory Radio points out, it is more than likely that a faction within the losing party of the Open Primary would put up their own candidate.

Rather playfully I will point out to Graeme that the Open Primary followed by election scheme contains elements of an ad hoc election by alternative vote in the sense that there are multiple rounds of voting with candidates dropping out at different stages.