Budget 2011 – should Lib Dems be proud?

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Chris

Michael White for the Guardian has written off Liberal Democrat influence over the budget, claiming there isn’t much for Nick Clegg and his fellow MPs to write to activists and the public about. Clegg disagrees, of course, quickly firing off an email to party members entitled “Budget 2011: Helping Alarm Clock Britain” (as an aside, I’d be interested to know whether people identify with this phrase!).

I think, however, and I suspect many Lib Dem members will agree, that it is excellent news that the government continues to make towards implementing our flagship policy of no income tax paid on the first £10,000 earnt. This is taking the lowest paid out of tax altogether, and taking significantly less from the millions of people who suffered from Labour’s abolition of the 10p tax rate.

As Mark Pack picks up on his post on Lib Dem Voice, it’s certainly better that the Lib Dem policies being implemented come from the front of our manifesto (as Phil Reilly points out) than from the back (in a rather strange reference to barcodes – is this a joke Mark!?).

So no, I don’t agree with Michael White. We should be proud. This is one of the four key pledges every Lib Dem standing for election spent hours, days and weeks campaigning on. We are liberals. We believe that individuals and families know what they and their children need, and can choose what to spend their money on best. It is a Lib Dem policy. It wasn’t implemented in 13 years of Labour government. It wouldn’t have been implemented in a Tory government.

We don’t believe in Labour paternal statism which takes people’s money and only lets the poor spend it on certain things after burdensome paperwork. We don’t believe in the Conservative suspicion of the poor, blaming the poor for wasting their money rather than giving them the life opportunities to succeed. That’s why the second of our four key pledges is a pupil premium giving extra money to schools teaching children who qualify for free school meals.

White’s key point is the following:

My complaint about the Lib Dems position since the coalition agreement has been that they were persuaded to embrace the core Tory position on the economy – Osborne’s Plan A, which says that sharp financial retrenchment is the best road to recovery – and left to tweak policy on the margins.

This argument is both dangerous and wrong. It is Brownite fantasy-land economics, where reducing government spending is considered “taking money out of the economy”. The coalition’s position – and my position – on the economy is that growth needs a massive boost to get people into private sector jobs, to start producing valuable goods rather than messing around on the international money markets, and for our private sector to lead the world in manufacturing, science and technology. This is why corporation tax is being cut – excluding tax on banks. It is the hundreds of thousands of small businesses, with a handful of employees, who will benefit from this, in addition to the thousands of people starting up their own business who will benefit from the enterprise zones.

It cannot be right that a government spends more than it takes in when there is a strong economy, as there was in the early-mid 2000s. In the global market-driven economy, it is not possible to abolish bust (or boom either), as Brown once claimed. Governments must recognise this, and make sure the roof is fixed when the sun is shining. But what can new governments do when the previous one has tried to hide the hole from the public view, and the rain is now pouring in?

The coalition is making tough but necessary cuts to public spending. Most of them are the priority of the Conservatives, but some of them are the priority of the Liberal Democrats. If there was a Liberal Democrat majority government, we’d be making cuts as well. So would the Labour party given a Labour majority government. Every year there is a budget deficit the national debt grows, meaning more taxpayers’ money is spent on interest repayments rather than the services the public expect – schools, hospitals, police and the like.

I don’t agree with budget deficits. They penalise future generations, who will find their tax revenue spent mostly on interest repayments for costs incurred by this generation and previous generations.

Labour’s alternative is “not this cut, and not now”, passing on their economic legacy for the next generation to pick up the tab. The public deserves better in these challenging times.

That’s why I support this budget. I support green economic growth, I support alleviating the burden on the poorest. That’s what Liberal Democrats believe and it’s why I’m a proud member this week.

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X-factor meets military action and the responsibility to protect

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Chris

The ongoing debate in Parliament this afternoon (liveblogged by the Guardian) has been excellent, as it normally is when profound issues are being discussed. Many MPs across parties have made insightful comments on the nature of intervention in war. I was particularly taken with the beginning of Kris Hopkins’ comments about the X-factor approach to support of military action – his example being a media programme doing “kill Gadaffi/do not kill Gadaffi” phone-ins. Judging, reporting and even influencing public support or opposition to military action is a crucial role played by the media leading to and during a conflict – just look at its impact during the Vietnam War.

But in the internet age with instant polling and Facebook campaigning how can the complexity of these issues be put across when it is so much easier for those with less moral scruples to take advantage of a oversaturated public?

This point must be considered in light of a common reaction from many, particularly those most concerned about human rights, that while Gadaffi is a brutal dictator murdering civilians, why are we intervening here, and not in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, or even Gaza, as Kel Blundell puts it excellently:

So, with my marketing head on, how would I want to persuade Britain that war with a country that had the single largest oil export market was both justified and necessary?

Well, as it was the “left” I would need to convince, I would have to appeal to a sense of justice, democracy and fairness. A persuader of great need, that the left can empathise with and justify.

David Cameron and Ed Miliband referred to this in the House of Commons as the “why clean my room when the whole world is a mess” argument, and replied just because we can’t do everything doesn’t mean we cannot do anything. I accept this, as I believe most do. But this leads to the important question of how do we prioritise which actions we do take? We have limited military resources, especially in economically challenging times. We are still engaged in Afghanistan, and have been for a decade.

Do we intervene to protect civilians in a country where their despotic leader is acting in a particularly barbaric way, as measured by television images and video? Our leaders have made a great deal of the regional consensus from the Arab league. But some dictatorships  are geographically located in a sea of dictatorships. Are we pandering to less brutal dictators – but human rights violators nonetheless – by setting ourselves the goal of requiring their support?

I have no doubt that intervention in Libya is the right action. It is legal. It is morally justified. It can be achieved. As Jo Swinson said in the House of Commons, when people struggle for freedom in the face of brutal repression and cry to the international community for help, how can we not respond? What message does not responding send to pro-democracy groups around the world?

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Manifesto commitments in coalitions

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Chris

The Guardian asks what is the point of manifestos in this coalition world.

I’m not ashamed of the decision by my party to join in coalition with the Conservatives. It isn’t ideal. But we didn’t convince enough of the public to vote for the Liberal Democrats to win a majority in the House of Commons. The votes were as they were, and the seats were as they were – a hung parliament. All three parties faced a choice that was far more challenging than they have had to make for a long time – enter into coalition with another party, govern in partnership and accept that compromise is necessary; or take the politically opportunistic route of walking into opposition at a time when the country needed political stability.

So I asked the question – what should the three parties have done, given the scenario?

The main alternative suggested for the Liberal Democrats was supporting the Conservatives on a case-by-case basis, e.g. by abbeyroad:

Voted on a policy by policy basis, rather than entering into wholesale Coalition with very right wing (economically speaking) Tories. Given the pitch of their election campaign, they were honourably bound to adopt this course.

In reality, this is no option at all, and is thoroughly debunked in David Laws’ book 22 Days in May. The country needed – and still does need – financial stability, with a government prepared to deal with the massive budget deficit left to us by the Labour government. In a vote-by-vote agreement how could the long-term decisions to balance spending and taxation be made? All three parties would have been preparing for a general election in the not-too-distant-future and have been taking decisions to maximise their electoral opportunities in the next few months. At best, decisions would be short-term. At worst, they would be playing politics with the nation’s finances.

A coalition between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, or between Labour and the Conservatives were the only options which would provide a majority in the House of Commons and stable government.

A serious question remains – did the Liberal Democrat negotiating team deliver the goods in light of the party’s manifesto and the general election campaign? The party’s manifesto had four key commitments, but were these the public thought were the key policies of the Liberal Democrats if elected? I’d be interested if polling on this had been done. Given the furore following the breaking of the party’s pledge to vote against a rise in tuition fees, are members of the public (particularly Liberal Democrat supporters) of the opinion that higher education funding is a key priority for the party, in place of one of the four key policies on our manifesto?

Our team have also made important progress on civil liberties and human rights, and are working well on libel reform. Yet these are seen as “chattering class” issues.

Alex Marsh phrases this important question as follows:

As a Liberal Democrat I am, of course, convinced that such successes [on civil liberties and political reform] are important. But I am less convinced that they play particularly well with most people, when set alongside declining incomes, rising prices, increasing risks of unemployment, the dismantling of the NHS, cuts in public services and the like.

There are important lessons to learn from the tuition fees pledge. Firstly, if we were wrong on our priorities and higher education funding and reform is ranked above fairer taxes, a pupil premium, the sustainable economy, and cleaning up politics, then our negotiators should have reflected that, foreseeing that compromising on an issue more held dear to Liberal Democrat supporters is a bigger problem than compromising on a less important policy. We also need to work far harder to change the debate – how can an issue affecting less than half the population become so dominant in the political sphere, above primary education and fair taxes?

If we were right in our pledges, then how did we end up in a situation where voting in favour of tuition fees was seen as such a betrayal of core principles? Failing to implement a pupil premium, or not delivering on raising the income tax threshold would be a betrayal to Liberal Democrat voters.

Finally, how can we regain the trust of voters who supported the Lib Dems because of our key pledges in the 2010 general election, without apologising for being in a coalition government? It seems to me that our fortunes are tied inexorably with the success of the government’s growth agenda and improvements in education, particularly for children from poor backgrounds. In broad brush, if unemployment is down on 2010 figures, if the poor pay less in tax compared to their tax burden in 2010, and if more children from disadvantaged backgrounds are achieving good GCSE grades, then our time in government will be a success, and this will be recognised by voters.

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