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.
POSIWID
According to the cyberneticist Stafford Beer the purpose of a system is what it does – we shouldn’t look at an organisation’s stated principles, but at its results.
Applying this principle to politics, we can see that for my whole lifetime, the purposes of both the Labour and Conservative parties have been the same – to move that which was formerly the preserve of the private sphere into the public sphere and make it the business of government (ID cards, DNA databases, control orders, ASBOs) while simultaneously moving what was formerly considered the legitimate business of government into the hands of business (privatisations, PFI, outsourcing) in such a way that all the risk remains with the government but the rewards go to shareholders.
The current government hasn’t stopped the second part of this, but thanks to the Liberal Democrats it is partly reversing the first. This is why I can continue to support the Lib Dems despite very definitely *not* being a Conservative. The purpose of the Lib Dems is clearly different from the other two major parties.
A Few Good Things The Lib Dems Are Doing…
Here’s the thing…
I’m not a supporter of this government. Of course I’m not. I’m a Lib Dem, and this government’s MPs are 5/6 Tories.
But nor have I been a supporter of any other government in my lifetime (possibly I may have supported the dying days of the Callaghan administration, but I was only a few months old at the time, and rather politically naive). And as far as I can see the bad things this government is doing are the same bad things that every government of my lifetime has done, while it’s doing a few good things that none of the others have. And the good things seem to me to be pretty much entirely down to the Lib Dems.
Furthermore, the Lib Dems also seem to be preventing a lot of the worst ideas the Tories have.
However, the ranting about ‘ConDems’ and so on seems to have left a lot of people – decent people, for the most part – with the impression that by going into coalition with the Tories, the Lib Dems have ensured that Satan will rule the earth for a thousand years. Because the very real good stuff that’s being done really isn’t getting spoken about.
So every so often I’m going to just do a quick run-down of good things the Lib Dems are doing as a party – either good government measures they’ve brought in, good new policies from the party, or bad government measures they’ve stopped. This doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly turned into some government loyalist – *FAR* from it – and I’ll continue attacking bad government decisions as much as anyone. But it should go some way toward explaining why I’m still in the party.
Vince Cable and Danny Alexander resist pressure to drop the 50% tax rate – though they may support replacing it with a mansion tax (probably a good idea – taxes on property tend to be fairer than taxes on income) they’re ensuring that any tax cuts benefit poorer, rather than richer, people.
The party is likely to call for an inquiry into decriminalising drugs.
The worst parts of the Digital Economy Act are getting dropped, and copyright law will be reworked to make better allowances for personal use. Julian Huppert is still pushing for even more reform, though.
The Hughes Report, if implemented, will ensure more young people from poor backgrounds get to go to university.
The Lib Dems, unlike other parties, stood up to Murdoch and refused to be bullied.
The government will be the first to add new social housing since Thatcher started selling council houses off.
And so on… this is just a list of things from the last three weeks – see this for some of the other things the Lib Dems have already done.
And these may look like only minor good things – and the ones from the last few weeks are, though the ones in that last link include some major, important, good things – but other than the first three years of the Blair government (which brought in a few decent things like the minimum wage) I can’t think of any government in my lifetime where I could list even that many small good things they’d done.
So yes, I’m going to continue to fight against the illiberal tendencies of this government, and to ensure that the Liberal members live up to their professed ideals, but I’ll continue to do so from within the party.
This has been going round the Lib Dem blogosphere
But only because it’s so great. And since I am too headachey to write tonight, I too will reproduce Paddy Ashdown’s wonderful speech on Lords reform in full. This kind of thing is why, despite everything, I still feel at home in the Lib Dems:
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon:
I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that in a democracy the minority is always right. That thought has given me much comfort over the years as a Liberal, and it appears that it will have to give me comfort in this debate as well. I spent an engaging hour and a half yesterday in the House of Lords Library, looking through opposition speeches made in December 1831 to the Great Reform Act 1832 and to the Reform Act 1867. Five arguments were put forward. The first was: there is no public call for such reform beyond those mad radicals of Manchester. The second was: we should not be wasting our time and money on these matters; there are more important things to discuss such as the Schleswig-Holstein problem, the repeal of the corn laws or the crisis in the City that caused Anthony Trollope to write his wonderful novel.
A noble Lord: Not in 1832.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon: No, but in 1867.
The third argument, which was put so powerfully—indeed, in bloodcurdling terms—by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, was that if we were to embark on this constitutional terra incognita, the delicate balance of the constitution would collapse around us; mere anarchy would rule upon the world.
The fourth argument put forward in those debates was, “No, no, let us not disturb the quiet groves of wisdom within which we decide the future of the nation by letting in the rude representatives of an even ruder republic. God knows what damage we shall do if such a thing should happen”. The last and fifth argument was the argument actually used by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, just a moment ago: “if it ain’t broke, don’t mend it”.
Those are the arguments that were put forward against the 1832 Act, the 1867 Act, the 1911 Act—every single reform that we have ever had—and they are the arguments that are being put forward now. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. Perhaps I might explain before I come to the substance of the argument.
The first argument is that there is no public interest in this matter. Of course there is not; it is our business, not the public’s. The public have made it very clear that they do not trust our electoral system in its present form. Is there anyone in this Chamber who does not realise that the dangerous and growing gap between government and governed that is undermining the confidence in our democracy must be bridged? It must be bridged by the reform and modernisation of our democratic institutions, and we have a part to play in that too. This is not about what the public want, it is about us putting our House in order.
The second issue is that there are more important things to discuss. I do not think so. Frankly, we have been very fortunate to have lived through the period of the politics of contentment. The fragility of our democratic system has not been challenged because the business of government and democracy has been to redistribute increasing wealth. If we now come to the point at which we must redistribute retrenchment, difficult decisions, hard choices, I suspect it will come to something rather different, as we see on the streets of Greece today and as we saw on the streets of London not very long ago. This is very important.
The third is that we are embarking on a constitutional journey into terra incognita. Of course we are. We do not have a written constitution in this country. I wish we did, but we are told that the genius of our constitution is that it is unwritten, that it responds to events, that it develops, that it takes its challenges and moves forward. Oliver Cromwell did not have to say, “We will delay the Civil War until we have worked out the proper constitutional relationship between Parliament and the King”. In 1832 they did not say, “Let us hold this up until we have decided what proper constitutional balances would be achieved”. If you believe in the miracle of the unwritten constitution, you must believe that our constitution will adapt. You cannot argue that that is a good thing and then say that we cannot move forward unless we know precisely and in exact detail what will happen next. Of course this will change the balance between us and the other Chamber. It will not challenge the primacy of the other Chamber, but it will challenge the absolute supremacy of the other Chamber—that is called check and balance.
The fourth argument is that this will disturb the gentle climate of wisdom in this place. I have no doubt that there is unique wisdom here, although I have to say that I do not believe it is necessarily evenly distributed—maybe in some places it is, but not everywhere. However, I am not persuaded that there is less wisdom in the 61 second chambers that are elected, that there is less wisdom in the Senate of the United States, or the Sénat in France or the Bundesrat in Germany. I do not believe that the business of election will produce less wisdom than we have here now—rather the contrary. It is not wisdom that we lack; it is legitimacy. My old friend, Lord Conrad Russell—much missed—used to say, “I would happily exchange wisdom for legitimacy”, and I will tell your Lordships why.
This is where we come to the final point—the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd: “If it ain’t broke, let’s not fix it”. It is broke; it is broke in two fashions. First, our democracy now and our institutions of democracy in this country do not enjoy the confidence of our people in the way they did. That confidence is declining. We have to be part of the reform that reconnects politics with people in this country. If we do not, our democratic institutions will fall into atrophy and may suffer further in the decline of the confidence of the people of this country. If noble Lords do not realise that, they do not realise just how difficult the current situation is in Britain.
We in this Chamber cannot leave this to others to do. We must be part of that reform, modernisation, reconnection and democracy. It is said that this House does its job as a revising Chamber well. So it does. It is allowed to revise, change, amend legislation, but is it allowed to deal with the really big things? It does the small things well, but is it constructed in a way that would prevent a Government with an overwhelming majority in the other place taking this country to an unwise and, as we now know, probably illegal war? No, it would not because it did not. I cannot imagine that the decision to introduce the poll tax and the decision to take this country to war would have got through a Chamber elected on a different mandate and in a different period, or if there had been a different set of political weights in this Chamber from the one down the other end.
The truth of the matter is that we perform the function of a revising Chamber well, but that is not our only function. We are also part of the checks and balances in this country. The fact that we do not have democratic legitimacy undermines our capacity to act as a check and balance on the excessive power of the Executive backed by an excessive majority in the House of Commons. That is where we are deficient and what must be mended.
The case is very simple to argue. In a democracy, power should derive from the ballot box and nowhere else. Our democracy is diminished because this place does not derive its power from democracy and the ballot box but from political patronage—the patronage of the powerful. Is it acceptable in a democracy that the membership of this place depends on the patronage of the powerful at the time? We are diminished in two ways. We are diminished because we do not perform the function that we need to perform of acting as a check and a balance on the Government, and we do not do so because we are a creature of the Government’s patronage. I cannot believe that noble Lords find that acceptable in this Chamber .
A noble Lord: Time.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon: Perhaps noble Lords will forgive me, I will finish now. I have already strained my time but I ask for patience. The Leader of the House is right. We have spent 100 years addressing reform in this House. It is time to understand why that is necessary—both to make our place in modern democracy and to fulfil our proper function to provide a check and balance on an Executive who may get too powerful. We turned our hand to this 100 years ago; it is time to finish it now.
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…
Why I Will Not Be Helping In The Old & Sad By-Election
(Batman posts will come tomorrow, I had to say this now).
I am, despite my unease with some (many) of the coalition’s policies, still a member and supporter of the Liberal Democrats, and still want to see as many Lib Dems as possible elected. I also live relatively close to Oldham & Saddleworth. However, I will not be helping out in the coming by-election.
The reason is simple. In the run-up to the General Election, Elwyn Watkins was quoted in multiple sources as saying, publicly, that he would ‘rip up’ the Geneva Convention and the European Convention On Human Rights. According to these sources, he actually managed to attack the odious, race-baiting Phil Woolas *from the authoritarian right* on the issue of immigration.
I, and many other Lib Dems I know, all contacted both his team and Cowley Street as soon as we were made aware of this, asking him to clarify his position, but until today we got no response. However, after several increasingly angry emails I finally got a reply today – a form email that has been sent out to many others.
In this email, Mr Watkins notably does not deny that he said those things. Nor does he deny that they are his views. Nor does he say they were in any way taken out of context. He does, however, talk about how “the position of the minority who abuse asylum is a genuine concern for local people” and how Labour have “swept the issue under the carpet”.
As I have been very, very vocal in my belief that the party is already too illiberal in its immigration policy, and as the Coalition is even more illiberal than that thanks to the Conservative dominance, I cannot in good conscience bring myself to spend time supporting this campaign, though I still wish good luck to my Lib Dem friends who will be doing so, and I certainly don’t endorse any other candidates.
I also hope very much that me saying this publicly does not lose me any friends within the party – a party of which I remain a loyal supporter. I feel very, very conflicted and upset about posting this (not least because I know many good people who have devoted huge amounts of time and effort to this campaign, without knowing of or endorsing Watkins’ views). I’m shaking and tearful, in fact, because my party loyalty and loyalty to my friends has come into conflict with one of the very small number of principles on which I really cannot remain silent. If you think it wrong of me to post this publicly, because of the damage it may do to the party, please forgive me. I hope I can forgive myself…
ETA David Matthewman has more on this, including the full text of Watkins’ email.
The Coalition Three Months On
For those of you wondering why I’ve not done many ‘fandom’ type posts recently, it’s because I’ve had no money, so was unable to pick up my comics for a few weeks, or to replace my broken DVD player. Payday is Friday, so the balance should return then.
Anyway, this post is one of the few I’ve ever done that’s at someone else’s request. Penny Andrews (who is one of the more sensible Labour people I know) asked me as a Lib Dem to post my views on the coalition three months in. I’m not sure that three months is adequate time to form a judgement.
To start with, my basic position has remained unchanged from three months ago. I am a supporter of the Liberal Democrats. I think it was right for them to go into coalition. But I am *not* a supporter of the current government. Long before I figured out my own political philosophy enough to realise it’s a reasonable match for liberalism, I knew that “the opposite of what the Tories want” is a pretty good rule of thumb.
I believe this will be a bad government. It will make things worse. But I also see enough concessions in the coalition agreement that convince me that the coalition government, if it keeps to that agreement, will be significantly better than a Conservative government with no Lib Dem presence would have been. I’m not hoping for or expecting good government over the next few years, just that we make it a little less painful.
I’m going to split this into three areas – economic, civil liberties/constitution, and impact on the Lib Dems. I would have added an ‘environment’ one, but frankly I’ve not seen anything, good or bad, on the subject from the government yet. I’m going to skim over a lot of stuff – this government has done a *LOT* in its first few months
Economics
Well, this is the hard one, isn’t it? No question, the emergency budget was fairly horrible. It wasn’t quite as bad as Labour are making out – there are some important Lib Dem concessions in there which will make a real difference, like the rise in Capital Gains Tax and the rise in the level at which you start to pay income tax – but nor is it the ‘progressive’ budget the Lib Dem leadership were spinning it as afterwards. The cuts announced – and the rise in VAT – will cause immense damage to some of the most vulnerable people. People will *DIE* as a result of these cuts. No question of that.
The question is, would more people have died had things been done differently? I have no way of knowing. What I do know, however, is that all three main parties were agreed before the election that cuts were necessary (Alistair Darling told Nick Robinson that there’d have to be cuts worse than those Thatcher made) – they were only arguing over small implementation details, not over principle, however much Labour wish to give a different impression now.
I suspect there were *possibly* ways of cutting less and taxing more, but that’s just a suspicion, and economics is my weak point.
Some of the complaints, though, have been motivated by sheer partisanship. Take the cuts in Housing Benefit. I can see why people oppose the new rule that will mean people can only claim the thirtieth percentile rent in their area, rather than the median – that might well hurt a lot of people. On the other hand, it could also drive rent down and get rid of what is in effect a massive state subsidy of private landlords. We’ll have to wait and see. But people are complaining about the cap being placed on the top housing benefit payments, as if it was somehow horribly regressive. They’re capping the rent at four hundred pounds a week.
To put that in perspective, the government are saying they’re not going to give people more in rent than I earn after tax – and I earn more than the average wage. Quite frankly, I agree with that. My current – very nice and quite spacious – two-bedroom flat costs four hundred pounds *a month*. Given the choice to pay for four flats of that standard for people who actually need it, or pay for one mansion on housing benefit, I know what I’d choose. (Even in London it’s perfectly possible to get somewhere decent to live for significantly under four hundred a week, and if we shouldn’t be subsidising landlords, how much more should we not be subsidising absurd regional inequalities?).
But many of the cuts *will* hurt people, and this government will quite rightly be punished for that. I just hope people remember that Labour would have done the same, and at least turn their protest votes to smaller parties that genuinely wouldn’t have made those decisions, if they’re going to protest.
Some of the other changes, I don’t want to judge. The changes to the NHS sound like more Blairism, frankly, while the simplification of the benefits system depends so much on the implementation details that it could easily be one of the best things ever to happen to the country if done properly, or it could be a cock-up of such gargantuan proportions that it ends up with people starving to death for lack of money. I’m going to wait to see how those shake out before judging.
Civil Liberties and Constitution
This is *MUCH* better. We’re getting rid of child detention for asylum seekers, we’re no longer going to deport gay people back to countries where they’d face jail or execution (this was sped up by a High Court ruling, but was in the coalition agreement anyway). We’re bringing in an upper chamber elected by PR, and a referendum on AV for the Commons. We’ve got rid of the ID Card scheme (though there’s still work to do there).
The coalition’s attitude to prisons and crime has been a complete U-turn on the last twenty years of insanity, with Ken Clarke (who is a Tory arsehole of course, but one who’s surprisingly liberal on social matters) talking a huge amount of sense here. Lynne Featherstone is making huge strides in equalities (though there’s still a lot of work to do there). We’ve got the Freedom Bill coming soon. We’ve agreed to stop collaborating with torture (and how I wish that was something that didn’t have to be said).
Were it not for the (apparently temporary) extension of 28-day detention, and the stupid, unworkable, *EVIL* plans for an immigration cap, this government is shaping up to be truly *great* in the areas of civil liberties, freedom and democracy, something I never thought I’d say about a Tory-led government.
Impact on the Liberal Democrats
We’re fucked, electorally, for at least one election. That’s worth it, if we manage to do some good/prevent some harm, but the problem is the leadership seem intent on worsening the situation.
We’re working with the Tories, but we don’t have to pretend we like it, and so far Nick Clegg in particular has been doing just that. There has been almost no clear distinction between what is Tory policy and what is Lib Dem policy in the media, and Clegg has done nothing to make that distinction.
It’s got to the point where some Tories (but, thankfully, no Lib Dems I know of) have been talking of the possibility of electoral pacts at the next election. Let me make something clear now - if the Lib Dems decide not to stand an official candidate against some Tories, I will personally stand as an ‘independent Lib Dem’ against the most high-profile of them, and pay the deposits of at least two other people if they’ll do the same. But I can say this confident that there is no way the party would do something so mind-bogglingly stupid.
Luckily, the back benchers haven’t been so complacent. While not making a fuss or being an ‘awkward squad’, decent Lib Dem MPs like Adrian Sanders and John Leech have argued in Parliament against bad policies in the coalition agreement (while of course still having to vote for them) and voted against bad policies that are not in the agreement. I’m particularly proud of Leech as he’s been entirely sensible in his public statements, while taking what seems to me the correct line in balancing principle and pragmatism in Parliament. He’s no longer my MP, but I spent several years in his local party and campaigned for his re-election, and am very glad I did.
We need *QUICKLY* to start establishing ourselves as an independent voice, separate from the Tories. I suspect this will start to happen with Autumn Conference. The question at this point is whether we’re only going to lose the five to ten percent of people who voted for us because they thought we were Labour-lite, or whether we’re going to do such a poor job of putting forward liberal values that we alienate our actual real supporters.
So overall, the coalition – horrible and evil on the economy, but quite how horrible I’m not yet sure, just like I’m not yet sure if it’s better or worse than Labour in that respect, pretty damn good on social issues, and terrible for the Lib Dems as a party. Exactly as I expected.
Linkblogging For 12/06/10
My in-laws are visiting from the US, so blogging will probably be lighter than normal for the next week. In the meantime, some links:
On Twitter, Lawrence Miles has started a World Cup Of Things (you’ll need to be logged in to see that link). One of the two teams I’ve entered – ‘a 1970s Comic-and-Record of “Escape from the Planet of the Apes”, Where the Record Tells the Same Story as the Comic’ is the host team. The two matches so far have been a 1970s Comic-and-Record of “Escape from the Planet of the Apes”, Where the Record Tells the Same Story as the Comic vs Jupiter and The Trumpton Fire Brigade vs Fistfights Between Academic Scholars, both draws. Other Things entered in this World Cup include the crows from the Kia-Ora ads, a dried out-of-date cheese slice, my other entry – “Those passages of I, Claudius and Claudius The God not used in either the TV or radio adaptations of same”, disdain and “The thing best described at any given time as ‘The thing best able to win its current match.’”
Millennium gives about one-and-a-half cheers for the news that Simon Hughes is the new Lib Dem deputy leader.
Andrew Rilstone continues his look at the new series of Doctor Who with the Weeping Angel two-parter. I do hope “Weeing Angel” was intentional, rather than a typo, because the image it calls up, of marauding Mannequins Pis, is fantastic.
Botswana Beast annocommentates Batman 700. I’ll probably have something to say about this tonight or tomorrow.
And Jess Nevins seems to have found the first occurrence of the Mad Scientist archetype.
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