Sixteen Good Things The Lib Dems Have Achieved
With the Welfare Reform Bill being debated in Parliament at the moment, a lot of good Liberals are once again worrying about to what extent they can carry on supporting the party. Some of the provisions in the bill are excellent (the universal credit, for example, is a policy the Lib Dems and before them the Liberal Party had for decades, but we dropped it for being too left-wing and radical), others are debatable (a cap on total benefits equal to the median income of the country – there are genuine arguments on both sides here) and a few are frankly horrible (cutting contributions-based ESA for some claimants after a year).
Now, to a large extent, even the bad things this government are doing are defensible. All three major parties agreed, before the election, that cuts had to be made, and this graphic by Duncan Stott illustrates how far the Lib Dems have actually won in minimising the cuts:
And that graphic is taken from a post written before the government announced it was slowing down the rate of cuts.
In other words, a Labour government or Labour/Lib Dem coalition would have done substantially the same things, and a Tory government would have cut much more. This is actually as moderate a government as it was possible for us to get in 2010.
But so often this is the only argument made for the Lib Dems – that we’re making things less worse (that is to assume for the sake of argument that all cuts are bad. I’d argue in fact that a lot of government spending – on illegal wars and nuclear weapons, for example, could be cut without any bad effects). We say things like “Well, we’ve got an exemption for nearly ten percent of orphans in the Widows And Orphans (Massacring) Act 2011, and we’ve got a sunset clause included in the Slaughtering Of The Firstborn Bill so it’ll have to be re-debated by Parliament in four years.”
Those sorts of things are, of course, real achievements, but they don’t really feel like it, do they? Thanks to us, some bad things some other people were going to do are now less bad, but still bad – that’s not a rallying cry to stir the blood.
But in fact, we have also done a lot of genuinely good stuff, things that make the world a genuinely better place, that wouldn’t have been done by any other government. I’m going to make a short list here, but it’s not an exhaustive one – it’s just a list of things that I or my friends have noticed. My main areas of concern are human rights and constitutional reform, while most of the people I’m close to in the party are particularly active in LGBT+ Lib Dems, so those are the areas I’ll highlight. But I’m sure if you talk to people interested in, say, transport or energy policy you’d get a similar list.
No longer deporting LGB people to countries where they’re at risk. Under the last government, the policy was “they can stay in the closet”.
£400 million extra for mental health services, targeted especially at talking therapies Having worked in mental health under the previous government, one that supposedly cared more about the NHS than this one does (their supporters say) I can say from my own experience that the Labour party deserve never, ever to be allowed near government again simply because of their appaling, criminal, *EVIL* treatment of people with mental health problems. Mental health services are already improving under this government (I’m having to access services myself at the moment, for work-related stress problems, and the difference is extraordinary). This is something that was a personal campaign by Nick Clegg.
Lords reform The first elections for the House of Lords are planned for 2015. We might soon actually be a proper democracy.
An end to child detention of immigrants Private Eye argue with the letter of this, but the fact remains, under Labour literally thousands of children were held for weeks or months in what amounted to concentration camps (primarily at Yarl’s Wood) prior to deportation (or not – half were later found to be legal immigrants). Last year, numbers in the low double figures were held for single-figure hours immediately prior to deportation. I don’t care if Private Eye thinks that counts as ‘child detention’ in a literal sense – in a qualitative sense there is a huge, enormous difference.
An enquiry into the UK’s part in torture in the ‘war on terror’. I’ve seen photos of people literally boiled to death by torturers in the Middle East, supposedly acting with the collusion of the British government. These people need to be brought to justice.
The highest ever rise in pensions and unemployment benefits. Pensions are now on a ‘triple lock’, which means they will rise with whatever is greatest – inflation, wages or cost of living. Unemployment benefit rose by the same amount this year.
Lowering taxes for the poor and raising taxes for the rich – Capital Gains Tax has increased by 10%, there’s been a levy on the banks, we’ve kept the 50% top rate of tax, there’s talk of introducing a mansion tax – and this is being used to raise the personal allowance for income tax so the poorest workers won’t have to pay anything.
Actual gay marriage is going to be brought in, not just the compromise that is ‘civil partnerships’. (EDIT should read ‘same-gender marriage’. *slaps wrist* BAD bisexual ally! BAD!)
Detention without charge has been dropped from 28 days to 14. Still too long of course, but we’re some way back towards being a civilised country again.
DNA data of innocent people is being destroyed
Gay men convicted of ‘crimes’ involving consensual adults that would no longer be illegal are having their criminal records expunged
We have fixed-term parliaments – no longer will elections be at Prime Ministerial whim – this has been a demand of reformers since the Chartists.
The ID Cards scheme and database have been ended
The government will guarantee most of the mortgage for first-time buyers – allowing those of us who’ve spent our entire adult lives paying rents to profiteering landlords because of the artificially-inflated property ‘boom’ to finally have the possibility of owning our own home, ending a particularly nasty piece of generational injustice.
The government are also building more social housing than has been built in decades for those who still wouldn’t be able to buy their own home, so they don’t have to rent from slum landlords.
No replacement for Trident will be bought this parliament – because if you’re going to cut spending, take the money away from nuclear weapons first.
So this is why, despite the fact that I don’t support the government, I *do* support the Lib Dems in the government, and why I give up several hours of my weekends to go knocking on doors and delivering leaflets. Because we haven’t made the world perfect in only eighteen months with only nine percent of the MPs in parliament – but we’ve made it better. And that’s more than I can say about the actions of any other government party of my lifetime.
A few lessons from last month’s disaster
I’ve been thinking about the lessons the Lib Dems can learn as a party from last month’s debacle at the council elections and the AV referendum, and have come to a few conclusions that seem a little different from the consensus on the ‘blogosphere’.
We need to concentrate more on constitutional reform
Everyone seems to be saying “Well, we lost the AV referendum, that shows that the public don’t care about constitutional issues, so we should concentrate on bread-and-butter managerial stuff that people care about, and give up on Lords reform.”
Well, no.
Firstly, what people want and what is the right thing to do are two different things. This is undoubtedly the only time in my lifetime we’ll be able to get Lords reform – it’s not like we’re going to get a second term, is it? – and the way the system is set up directly affects all those things that people *do* care about.
Secondly, Lords reform is a far less controversial area than reform of the Commons electoral system. I’ve lost count (literally) of the number of times I’ve had this conversation with my dad, a typical Labour voter:
“I’ll never vote for that AV thing, it’s a load of rubbish, a miserable little compromise [thanks Nick...] and it’s just to keep the Lib Dems in power for ever. Now what you really should do if you care about democracy is get the Lords elected.”
“Well, we are doing that…”
“You only went into this to get AV and you’re not even going to get that, you should get the Lords elected instead.”
“We’re doing it as well…”
“Get the Lords elected instead.”
But also, a point to remember – more than twice as many people voted ‘yes’ in the referendum than voted for us!
For every Lib Dem voter there’s at least one more person out there who *doesn’t* yet vote for us but *does* like our position on constitutional matters. And those people are *passionate*. They voted Yes despite one of the most inept political campaigns I’ve ever seen or heard of (as Millennium put it, it appeared to be run by people who’d masterminded a lot of third place triumphs in General Elections for the Lib Dems, so they considered second place an improvement). The 60% who voted no didn’t, as far as I can tell, really care that much either way – they had a slight preference, and they expressed it, but many of them were voting to ‘get Clegg’ or ‘to break up the coalition’ or (in a few insane cases) because they wanted more radical reform.
When you’re on 17% of the vote, going after the 40% who passionately agree with you is probably better strategically – as well as being the right thing – than going after the 60% who mildly disagree.
However:
We need to link our principles explicitly to our actions
Community politics works. It not only wins us elections, but it’s undoubtedly the morally right thing. Work with communities, find out what those people want, and help them to bring it about themselves, rather than imposing something on them. It’s both the liberal thing to do and an election-winning thing to do.
There was, however, a rather good cartoon posted on Lib Dem Voice recently, an old one from the 80s:
(Interesting that it’s an SDP politician. From what I can gather (being a small child at the time) they were rather less keen on the community politics stuff than the Liberals were in the Alliance days.)
There’s an element of truth in that, but it slightly misses the point.
People vote for us because they like that we get the potholes in their roads fixed. The problem is, they don’t know *why* we get the potholes in the roads fixed. WE know that community politics is a valuable Liberal tradition and springs from everything we believe in. THEY don’t know that. Which means then that people get upset when we act in unpredictable ways like going into coalition with the Tories rather than just being the slightly fuzzier, squishier version of Labour. Or WE get upset when people who tell us they’re lifelong Lib Dem voters also tell us they’re going to vote against AV, because they’re not interested in reform.
We need, as Jonathan Calder has said, more ideology and less policy. I like this post on the subject,, but especially Simon Titley’s comment:
If I were to establish a rationale for Liberal Democrat ideology, I would start like this:
Each of us is on this planet for a relatively short period of time. In that short time, each of us seeks to lead a good life. But, each of us has a unique personality and so each person will have a distinct idea of what will fulfil them. Therefore, the only person who can decide what constitutes a good life is ourselves; it is not something others can decide for us. To be able to make those decisions, we need freedom – not merely an absence of restraint but the practical ability to exercise freedom; not merely a ‘chance’ at the start of our lives but an ability that lasts throughout our lives. Hence we should see freedom in terms of ‘agency’, which means the capacity of individuals to make meaningful choices about their lives and to influence the world around them.
Our political mission is therefore to ensure each person’s freedom.
Our starting point is our humanity. We value people above things; we do not make a fetish of the state or of markets.
We should rework our policies to better fit values like this (Jennie has a great suggestion re: employment law for starters) – right now everything should be up for consideration. We should look at all the old Liberal ideas like a citizen’s income (especially since we’re pretty much getting that with the benefit reforms), Land Value Tax (especially since Vince seems quite keen on the idea in principle), zero-growth economy (could easily appeal to the Green vote) and so on, and see if any of them are worth bringing back – possibly in a modified form, but worth consideration. Drug law reform. We’re down to our core vote, so we have little to lose – let’s try to have a genuinely radical set of policies to go with the people in the party.
(Note I’m not suggesting we actually go with any of those particular things as policies – I have very, *very* little knowledge or understanding of economics, and for all I know I’ve just said “why don’t we consider dooming the whole planet to dying of starvation?” – but they’re all ideas that have long had a currency in the Lib Dems and our predecessor parties, and so they’re the kind of ideas we should be looking at.)
But we also need to link those policies, and our actions in local government, to our principles in a very obvious way. We need to start talking about political philosophy.
I don’t mean we need to be handing out copies of John Stuart Mill [and Harriet Taylor], like the Gideons, or turn into a SWP-like debating society (“Well, I think you’ll find that Keynes said…”, “If you’d only *read* Michael Meadowcroft’s position paper from 1981, The SDP Are All A Bunch Of Bastards, you would *know* why you were ideologically wrong!”, “We must expunge every trace of reformist Grimondism from the party and get back to the true Liberalism of Lloyd George! An end to female suffrage!”). What I mean is that our campaigning should, along with saying *what* we’re doing, say *why* we’re doing it.
Come up with some simple bullet-point summary of Liberalism – four or five points, something like the preamble to the constitution – and make sure one of them’s on every page of every Focus. If you have “Lib Dems fight to save local schools” page, put something on there about the principles of valuing education and of valuing independence from centralised decision making. Nothing huge, just a box with a bullet point at the bottom – “Helping people to help themselves is one of the Lib Dems’ key principles. Find out more at http://libdems.org.uk/what-we-think “.
That kind of thing will, hopefully, help convince our voters to think more liberally and convince liberals to think of voting for us.
And finally, for now (I have some thoughts on co-operation with other parties, which might not be what you’d expect from me, but I’m saving them for later as this is long enough as it is):
Things are going to get better for the party
I know a lot of tribal Labour people who spent much of the last year attacking the Lib Dems quite viciously. After the council election (and the recent hatchet-jobs on certain Lib Dem MPs by the right-wing press) they seem to have stopped. The public mood appears now to have swung against attacks on the Lib Dems and more to feeling sorry for us. “They’re not that bad really.” “I don’t like that Clegg but it’s a shame that Councillor X lost hir seat”. Richard Herring (a comedian I like but who has been one of the more vitriolic critics of the coalition) said of the council election results “It’s like breaking into the Top Gear studio with a gun with one bullet and then using it to shoot Richard Hammond when Jeremy Clarkson’s right there”. Plenty of other people have said things like “I think the Lib Dems were just naive, they’ve been tricked by the Tories. It was their own fault, but the Tories are to blame.”
That may not sound comforting, but these are people who were spouting utter *hatred* about the party fairly recently. Some of them no doubt will again. But I think the attacks on us have started to lose public sympathy, and over the next few months we’re going to turn more and more into the underdog in the public’s eye. Which is not a good place to be, but it’s better than being the whipping boy.
[NB I have used the word tribal in this post. I dislike this word and consider it to have racist connotations. However, I don't know of a better word for it.]
But What Have The Liberals Ever Done For Us?
I’ve had a migraine for the last couple of days, so NaBoWriFoNi might actually become NaBoWriFifteenOrSixteenDays, unless I can get a couple of ten thousand word days in (entirely possible – I have next week off work, though tomorrow is busy between the Yes stall and the new Doctor Who episode…). However, I can do angry political rants even when I’ve got a migraine (funny that).
I was planning to write this yesterday, and then I read this by Jennie, which says a lot of what I want to say.
What I do want to say is this:
I AM UTTERLY, ABSOLUTELY, SICK OF PEOPLE TELLING ME THE LIB DEMS ARE NOT MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN GOVERNMENT.
The story that seems to have taken hold is ‘evil Judas Nick Clegg betrayed his promise to the British people to support Labour (the Only Rightful Government) no matter what, and instead sold his party’s soul for the promise of a referendum, AND NO OTHER CONCESSIONS AT ALL, which he’s going to lose because I hate him hate him hate him!’
This is, simply, a lie.
You may dislike the current government – I do (though I am less unhappy with it than I have been with any government in my lifetime, except the first few months of the Blair government when I was giving them a chance). You may think that the party’s leadership has handled things ridiculously badly for the last few months. I do – and so do some of our MPs – though I’d point out that they handled things ludicrously *well* when it really mattered, in May. You may be angry about some of the concessions we’ve had to make – I am. I twice came close to tearing up my membership card (over the ridiculous fudges over control orders and child detention), and it’s still entirely possible that we’ll cross some red line over the next four years that causes me to do so. All of these are defensible positions.
But to say that the Lib Dems have got nothing in return… well… that’s true.
Apart from the AV referendum, the first chance of significant constitutional change in my lifetime.
Apart from fixed term parliaments, a demand of reformers since the Chartists
Apart from legalising civil partnerships in churches
Apart from stopping hundreds of thousands of the lowest-paid workers (3 million by the end of this Parliament) from having to pay income tax, paid for by tax rises on the rich
Apart from preventing gay people being extradited to countries where they face persecution or even death
Apart from reducing the amount of time someone can be held without trial from 28 days to 14
Apart from equal marriage for same sex couples (coming soon, that one)
Apart from removing the criminal records from men who had consensual sex with other men when that was illegal, allowing them to no longer be treated as sex offenders
Apart from the Universal Credit – which used to be party policy but was dropped for being a ridiculously utopian left-wing idea we could never actually get through, and is now being implemented by one of the most right-wing politicians in the country
Apart from restoring the earnings link for pensions which Thatcher got rid of
Apart from stopping the Tories from cutting Housing Benefit by 10% after a year
Apart from removing innocent people’s records from the database of criminals’ DNA
Apart from getting rid of the ludicrous ID Card scheme
Apart from ensuring we won’t replace Trident this Parliament
Apart from a proportionally-elected upper chamber (coming soon, but definitely coming)
Apart from bringing in a fairer student fees system than the one we did have *or* the one Labour were advocating *or* the NUS were calling for (yes, yes, it’s not as good as our policy. If you’d voted for us maybe we could have brought in our policy. As it is, we did the best we could and will *still* pay for it for decades to come).
Apart from stopping people from having to have a CRB check before they do any kind of work with children
Well, yeah, there’s nothing the Lib Dems have done in government…
Apart from raising Capital Gains tax so the rich are paying closer to the amount the poor pay in tax (still not as much, but a lot more than they were).
Apart from shared parental leave
Apart from protecting the NHS from Andrew Lansley
Apart from spending an extra £400 million on mental health services, reversing the trend which had seen Labour destroy two hospital beds a day, every day, during its entire thirteen years in government, for this most vulnerable group.
Apart from a right to recall MPs guilty of misconduct
Apart from a ban on fingerprinting schoolchildren without their parents’ permission
Apart from a referendum to increase the powers of the Welsh Assembly
Well, yeah, I guess there’s nothing else they’ve done, is there?
Apart from the pupil premium – extra money for the poorest schoolchildren
Apart from scrapping ContactPoint
Apart from stopping the Tories from selling off our forests
Apart from increasing funding for talking therapies so that where only 60% of the country can access them currently (still an improvement on last year) 100% will be able to by 2014
Apart from opening the Government Art Collection to the public
Apart from giving a week’s respite to people who have to care for sick relatives
Apart from a judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture
Apart from having drug recovery wings in prisons, and better mental health treatment for prisoners
Well, yeah, apart from all that stuff, the Lib Dems have *DEFINITELY* betrayed their voters by going into government with the rich right-wing plutocrats rather than the slightly-less-rich right-wing war criminals, and by agreeing to cuts to end the deficit rather than going with their own policy of ending the deficit through cuts, or the Labour policy of cutting things until the deficit has gone. I can see how that makes us evil.
Don’t get me wrong – I disagree with about half of what the current government is doing, maybe more. But given that Lib Dems only make up *one sixth* of government MPs, i don’t think they’re doing too badly, all things considered…
What I Mean When I Call Myself A Liberal
I was meant to write a couple of posts on comics and a short story today, but I appear to have developed logorrhoea on totally unrelated matters, don’t I? Oh well…
One of the big things I hear a lot from people is that they don’t actually know what the Liberal Democrats stand for, or what liberalism actually is. This is especially true at the moment, with the Parliamentary Party being in a coalition with the Conservatives. It’s also not helped by American English having a fundamentally different meaning for the word ‘liberal’ than Commonwealth English, and by British sites like Liberal Conspiracy (a Labour mouthpiece) using that meaning.
I wouldn’t presume to speak for the rest of the party, but I thought if I wrote something on here at least my readers would get some understanding of my own political position.
This will be incoherent. Large chunks of it will go against party policy. Some of it is utterly wrongheaded, I’m sure. I have a very good understanding of issues to do with civil liberties, electoral reform, LGBT rights, and so on – I’ve spent a fair amount of time investigating these issues. I have almost no understanding of economics, so when I talk about that I’m probably going to contradict myself and talk shit.
So this is what *I* mean when I refer to *myself* as a Liberal. I joined the Liberal Democrats and decided to call myself a Liberal because, of all the political parties that matter electorally in England, the Lib Dems’ policies come closest to the idiosyncratic list below. They’re not the same as that list though. In some cases that’s because of a compromise between principle and pragmatism – you can’t get elected on the platform I’m going to describe. In many others, though, it’s because people who are cleverer than I, who have more knowledge of the issues, have thought long and hard and come to a different conclusion. As few of those conclusions seem obviously immoral or absurd, I go along with them until I understand the issue better.
I’m going to break this up into three sections, Freedom, Hatred of privilege and Democracy, for the three things that motivate me most.
Freedom
The Lib Dems’ most important text is On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor). In particular, the ‘harm principle’ seems to me the single most important point of principle, from which all else should follow:
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right… The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
Not only is this morally right, it is also the pragmatically correct attitude. Anyone who has studied cybernetics knows that to control a system you must have as many options open to you as there are degrees of freedom in the system (this actually follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the single most basic law of physics). It is, quite simply, impossible as well as undesirable for a government to try to control its citizenry in every detail of their lives, as the last government did. Assuming each person in a country of sixty million has five options open to them that the government cares about, to get them all to choose the option you want them to would require the government to have 5^60,000,000 (that’s roughly 8 with forty-nine zeroes after it) different options open to it. The only way for a government to control people’s behaviour successsfully is to choose a very, very small number of things it’s interested in, and for those things to be things that most people wouldn’t do anyway. Laws against murder and theft can be somewhat effective (though never 100% effective) because the vast majority of us don’t want to kill or steal anyway, so the government can concentrate on that small number who do.
It’s also possible for laws to work when they’re setting an arbitrary convention – we all agree that we need to drive on one side of the road and not the other, and that it’s better if we all follow the same rule. Nobody has a huge emotional attachment to driving on the left or right, so the government can set a standard and everyone will follow it.
From this follow various other things – laws against free speech, against drug use, against private sexual practices, none of these can ever really work, and where they exist they should be abolished.
Hatred of privilege
Despite the above, Liberals are strong advocates of the rule of law. Those laws which we do support should be applied equally to everyone. Either murder is illegal, in which case all murderers should be prosecuted (though there should be no aspect of vengeance in this – people’s liberty should be limited only in so far as it’s necessary to prevent further harm to others), or it isn’t, in which case none should. And the same rules – rules of evidence, burden of proof and so on – should be applied across the board. These rules should also be biased *against* conviction – if we are going to restrict someone’s liberty, that’s a big, important thing to do, and should only happen if we’re *ABSOLUTELY* certain it’s the correct thing to do.
Having different rules for different people is the original and most important definition of privilege – it comes from the Latin privi legium, private law. And privilege in every sense is something I, at least, want to defeat.
In many cases, this means clearing away bad laws that privilege one group over another. Getting rid of the stupid rules regarding marriage, for example, or allowing immigrants to vote, getting rid of the House of Lords with its appointed and hereditary rulers (and especially getting rid of the bishops from within it, who privilege one religion over all others by being there).
There is also such a thing as economic privilege, however. You can’t be totally free if you can’t eat, or you don’t have healthcare, or you never learned to read or write. There’s a reason both Keynes and Beveridge were Liberals.
Now, while I’m no economist so this is probably the weakest part of this, my view is simple. Every human being should, to the extent it’s possible, have a roof over their head, food, clothing, enough education and access to information to take part in society, and enough medical access that they don’t suffer needlessly. Any society in which that’s not the case is not one which I would call civilised.
My personal favoured method for this is a citizens’ income, which used to be Lib Dem policy but was scrapped as too radical, but the current ‘universal credit’ welfare reforms come very, very close to it. In this, rather than the government giving people housing benefit, money off prescriptions, money for childcare, whatever – a bunch of vouchers and tokens you can only use for one thing each, and which require a great deal of administration – the government just gives everyone enough money to pay for those things and says “here you go”, trusting them to do what’s best for themselves. (Yes, I know there are problems with this. There are problems with every system. This is my ‘ideal world’ system.)
But how is this to be paid for? If someone works hard and earns money, we don’t want to take that off them. If you go down a mine and dig up a load of coal for a couple of hundred quid a week, should you be paying half that to someone else who can’t be bothered to work?
Well no, obviously not. However, not everyone does work. There’s a huge class of people who get their money not from work but from rent-seeking – either from actual rent (landlords) or from the exploitation of other monopolies (bankers, people who live off ‘investments’).
There are only two ways I can think of of getting money, either by creating wealth by making or thinking of something (‘workers by hand and brain’ as the old Labour Party Clause Four had it), or by exploiting government-created monopolies (for example ‘intellectual property’ laws or mining rights to an area).
It’s the latter which should be taxed far more than income from actual work, as a way of redressing economic privilege. Monopolies are effectively gifts from the government (which is to say from the population at large) to individuals, and those individuals should repay the bulk of the wealth they get from these gifts back to the population. Someone who builds or designs a house is creating wealth – there is something there that wasn’t there before, that’s of value. Someone who rents the house out, however, is not creating wealth, just taking advantage of a pre-existing inequality (they have a house and their tenants don’t).
Hark! The sound is spreading from the east and from the west!
Why should we work hard and let the landlords take the best?
Make them pay their taxes on the land just like the rest!
The land was meant for the people.
The hatred of privilege ties very strongly into the need for freedom. Unless a transsexual, polyamorous, black person with cerebral palsy born on a council estate has the same tools to make the life she wants for herself as Prince Harry does, then she is less free than he is. (Of course, it may also be that Prince Harry would quite like to stop being third in line for the throne and become a juggler in a left-wing arts collective, but is being stopped from doing so by his position in society. Privileges can hurt the privileged as well as the unprivileged, though usually not as much).
Democracy
If we are to assume that a government should exist at all, then we want that government to have a few properties. We want it to not do anything that the majority of the people in society think is intolerable. We want it to protect the rights of minorities, no matter what the majority think. And we want it to be effective – we want its actions to have the intended consequences.
The second of these is best solved by some kind of constitution or bill of rights – in the UK the European Convention on Human Rights and its incorporation into British law with the Human Rights Act fulfil this role. Things like this, while a departure from pure democracy, are necessary to prevent democracy turning into tyrranny. (I could easily imagine a situation where the majority of the population decided it was OK to murder fat nerdy blokes called Andrew if they really got on your nerves by writing overlong blog posts. I don’t particularly want such a law to be passed, even if it was the democratic will of the country).
Handily, our third requirement is best solved by feedback – the more information you can get into the system the better. This is handy because it also fulfils the first criterion, that government should not do anything that the majority find intolerable. If we have some kind of democratic system, then these criteria are fulfilled handily.
Some might argue for direct democracy – people voting on every issue. There are problems with this, however. Partly, the problem is that people’s opinions aren’t consistent – I could very easily see a majority voting “yes” to “Should we spend more money on the NHS, education and fighting crime?” *and* to “Should we cut your taxes by a thousand pounds a year?”. The other problem is that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to investigate the issues. I think of myself as a fairly well-informed person, for example, but I have absolutely no idea whether the seven billion pound loan to Ireland that Britain just made was a good decision or a bad one.
So the best compromise is representative democracy – everyone votes for the person or persons who they agree with most on the subjects they know about, and make it that person’s job to find out everything they can about every subject necessary for government. This actually works quite well, because votes in aggregate will produce someone who’s a good compromise on all competencies – people who know about civil liberties will vote for candidates who are strong on civil liberties, people who know about economics will vote for candidates who are strong on economics, so a candidate who is strong on both will get both sets of votes.
However, our current First Past The Post system isn’t a very effective way of getting this information into the system, because a single cross every five years, in a seat where for the most part a maximum of two candidates have a chance (which is nearly all of them), is a rate of one bit every five years. To put that into perspective, for an individual voter to get across the information in this post up to the end of that last sentence would take 520,320 years (assuming elections every five years. If they were every four years, it would only take 416,256 years).
On the other hand, a ranked preferential system like the Alternative Vote (which we will be voting on next year) or Single Transferable Vote (which the Lib Dems like) gets *FAR* more information into the government. In my constituency last time, only Labour or the Lib Dems could have won, so I had a binary choice between those two candidates if I was voting for an MP – one bit of information. On the other hand, there were eight candidates on the ballot. If I’d been able to rank my preferences, that would have given me 8! different ways of expressing myself. That’s 40,320 different options, or on the order of sixteen bits of information. Government is going to reflect public opinion much better – and be more effective – if voters have 40,320 choices than if they have two.
So, anyway, that’s roughly what *I* mean by being a liberal. It may not be what other liberals mean, but I think it’s close to what a lot of them think. If you’re a liberal and vociferously disagree, please do so in the comments – I’ll be very interested to see to what extent people agree or disagree with this…
Spending Review Linkblogging
As you’d imagine, reaction to the spending review has been… mixed… at best among Lib Dems, just as it has among the general public. Here’s a few of the responses I’ve seen:
Oxfam say “The coalition has taken the tough choice to prioritise the poorest people on the planet during the bad times as well as good.”, though they give Osborne and Cameron the credit for that.
Jennie thinks it’s not as bad as the hype suggested.
Millennium, whose Daddy Richard I trust on economic matters more than almost anyone, says “Tonight Mr Danny’”champion of the spending round’ Alexander is e-mailing Liberal Democrats to say we’ve done the right thing. Well we haven’t. We’ve merely done the LEAST WRONG thing we could…This is hard, possibly the hardest thing we’ll ever do. And it’s cruel. And it may even be terribly horribly wrong…But if it succeeds, just you remember who it was who did this and did it RIGHT.”
The Social Liberal Forum say “It is heartening to see policies that we as Liberal Democrats have long campaigned for being delivered: the Pupil Premium, the universality of most welfare payments, the creation of a Green Investment Bank, Regional Growth Funds and the protection of spending for schools, the NHS, international development and science. We are pleased to see the levy on banks made permanent and Trident not renewed…There remains a significant danger, however, that many of Chancellor George Osborne’s measures will disproportionately affect the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalised in society – precisely those that depend on public services the most.”
And David Matthewman says “I want to apologise but, really, what use is an apology in this situation? I’ll make one anyway, mind you; I’m sorry about what my party (in coalition, yes, but still my party) is doing to welfare…I don’t need the apology to be accepted, and I’m aware it may not be, but I’m sorry, and I’ll continue to argue both within the party and outside it for the importance of having a strong welfare state.”
If I’d Wanted A Government That Attacked The Poor, I’d Have Voted Labour
I’m waiting for a few people who know more about economics than I do, and whose views I trust, to post analyses of the Comprehensive Spending Review today. On many fronts, it’s a damn sight better than I (and most people) had worried – cuts to science funding are minor – and some things that have come out of it are actually good. A Universal Credit benefit system is a huge improvement, and not replacing Trident this Parliament is a *huge* victory for the Liberal Democrats. As George Osborne pointed out, there is actually *less* being cut than Labour had said they would cut pre-election.
Of the charities I follow on Twitter, Scope and Shelter hated it, the mental health charities seemed cautiously optimistic, and Oxfam were positively enthusiastic.
However, there are several things that have come up which are, to me, absolutely abhorrent:
The removal of full housing benefit from those between the ages of 25 and 35. This is just *wrong*.
Removing benefits from non-single people who are too ill to work EDIT who are disabled and out of work but deemed ‘able to work take on work related activity’, but whose partner works, after a year of claiming benefit. This will destroy relationships, make sick people reliant on their partners, and push people into poverty who weren’t before.
The removal of mobility allowances for those in residential care.
And, hidden in the small print in the defence review yesterday, and possibly worst of all, every email, phone call and web visit in the UK is to be monitored by the government. Despite the coalition agreement saying this will not happen.
These things can be fought, and will be fought. But depending on how our (non-ministerial) MPs vote they will make the difference between me supporting the coalition with huge reservations and wanting us to pull out as soon as possible. I certainly won’t campaign for anyone who votes for these changes without at least trying to get them amended.
What absolutely *DISGUSTS* me is that Clegg is still following his ‘own the coalition’ line, claiming this Spending Review to be liberal and fair. The changes above are not ones that I – nor, I believe, any Lib Dem voter – voted for. I am becoming more and more convinced that Clegg – who I never voted for as leader, but who I thought did an amazing job at the election and immediately afterward – is everything his detractors claim.
Most of the cuts fall into the ‘harsh but fair’ category, and I could gladly support the cuts to Elizabeth Windsor’s household budget, or the cuts in ‘defence’ spending. And in general, a cut down to 2006 levels of spending as a percentage of GDP (or 2002 levels of staffing in the public sector, depending on how you want to look at it) is not an intrinsically bad thing – certainly not the ‘greatest attack on social democracy this century’ as someone (I thought Laurie Penny, but I can’t see it on either her personal or her New Statesman blogs, so it may have been someone else) said yesterday before the cuts had even been announced.
We also mustn’t let ourselves be fooled into thinking things are worse than they are – a couple of ‘cuts’ people seem most annoyed about are to a commitment to cut cancer waiting list times, and to provide free prescriptions for certain long-term conditions. Both those things were promises made in the dying days of the last government, that have never actually come into practise. Nothing’s been cut there because nothing’s being spent, the government are just not going to do something that Labour (who, remember, wanted to cut *MORE* than this review will) said they would have done had they stayed in power.
But those listed above are – unless I am mistaken about their impact and their consequences – disgusting, immoral, and something I cannot and will not support. I will be remaining a member of the Liberal Democrats – these changes are *NOT* Lib Dem policy, they are ‘coalition’ policy, and I’m not a member of the ‘coalition party’ – but examining *very closely* the voting records of any MPs before I decide which areas to campaign in next election. I don’t have a Lib Dem MP myself, but I wil be contacting Lib Dem MPs in local constituencies and letting them know of my views here.
The cuts I’ve listed are things we would expect from the Tories, and we might not be able to stop them, but the least we can do is not pretend they’re somehow fair or right. If my analysis of this is right (and I’ll be the first to admit it isn’t if I turn out to be overreacting), then Clegg has disgraced himself by supporting these moves.
One Delicious Thought…
My wife is a member of the Liberal Democrats. She’s also an immigrant, and was upset that she didn’t get to vote in this election.
The rumour is that party members are going to get balloted on whatever deal has been agreed.
If so, my immigrant wife will get far more of say with her vote on the government of this country than roughly 60% of its population did with theirs.
Still like First Past The Post so much, right-wingers?
Linkblogging for 05/04/10
And a few links before I go to bed (Mark Thomas and When Worlds Collide posts tomorrow).
Jess Nevins rewrites the King In Yellow in the style of The Cat In The Hat
Rachel Zall on homosexual cooties
Lib Dems reviewing The Eleventh Hour – Millennium Elephant (and Daddy Richard), his Daddy Alex (with stuff about Quatermass and Harry Potter too) and Jennie
Dave Page talks about Manchester Lib Dems’ local election manifesto
And The Heresiarch sums up a lot of my own problems with the Singh libel case…
Linkblogging For 16/03/10
Firstly, an update on Print PEP! for those who are wondering why it’s taken so long:
Simply, my Scribus problems escalated – at some point a system update replaced a load of my fonts with similarly-named ones, and confused it enough that I didn’t just have to redo the last 15 pages and add in a missed line from Plok’s article, but had to redo the lot – and not only redo it, but try to redo it so it still looked more-or-less like what I’d done the first time. I should be getting – soonish – the proof copy though. This *WON’T* happen with PEP! 2, so expect the print copy of that not long after the print copy of PEP! 1…
Anyway, links…
Millennium gives a very thorough look at the Lib Dem Conference, while Jennie, who isn’t named Sue no matter what her latest subtitle thinks, has the first in a series of posts on why you should vote Lib Dem.
(I’ve actually taken two weeks off in April/May – a week for sleep and reading, to try to overcome my current exhaustion, and a week for non-stop pre-election campaigning for any cause I can find – Lib Dem, No2ID, Hope Not Hate, whatever…)
Double Articulation is back, and Jim has reposted this, on Steve Gerber’s Thing…
George Monbiot thinks if we name more plants and animals, we might think twice about making them go extinct.
James Graham absolutely eviscerates a recent Fabian leaflet over on the Social Liberal Forum.
LessWrong have a very good piece on ‘undiscriminating skepticism‘ – which sums up a lot of my problems with a lot of the darlings of the ‘new atheism’ very well.
And some of Ronald Searle’s drawings as a court artist in the trials of John Bodkin Adams and Adolf Eichmann.
Linkblogging For 26/11/09
Apologies for the lack of new contend. I do have a few posts planned for the next few days: HELP! tomorrow, James Bond on Saturday, a review of Bryan Talbot’s new graphic novel Grandville on Sunday, but I’ve been quite tired for the last few days and also planning stuff for PEP! – my new magazine, out next month, as well as planning my contribution to the Mindless Ones’ zine.
In the meantime, have some links:
Jazz Hands Serious Business is unimpressed with the Lib Dems’ new social network ACT (I’m on it myself, but haven’t found a real use for it, and suspect it, like a lot of online campaigning stuff, is preaching to the converted. But we’ll see).
Millennium talks about how the banking ‘loans’ were more like outright fraud, and reviews The Empty Child, from the first series of the Welsh series.
Laurie Penny thinks that there should be no feminism without trans feminism.
And a couple more people have come up with reworkings of classic characters – Gavin B has done Doctor Who, as has pillock, while Rab has done a Tarzan.
30 comments