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.
ERS – The Wrong Kind Of Reform Slate? #yes2stv
This is an honest question, and a request for information.
I’ve been a member of Unlock Democracy for a few years, and took part in the disastrous AV campaign (though thanks to a lot of work by activists in Manchester, we did much better than the national campaign). Straight after that, I joined the Electoral Reform Society.
That may seem a strange, even perverse, decision, but the AV referendum is not the end of electoral reform in the UK. Just look at Scottish devolution – failed referendum in 1979, successful in the late 90s. But it probably *is* the end of AV as an option, and I wanted to campaign vigorously for STV (a better option in any case).
If nothing else, the AV referendum showed that this isn’t just a Lib Dem issue – twice as many people voted Yes as voted Lib Dem. It’s something that can be built on, horrendous as the result was. And I wanted to push harder to get STV.
The ERS is the only organisation that *just* campaigns for STV (though it agreed to take part in the AV referendum as being a massive improvement). Unlock Democracy, for example, is now campaigning to keep Lords reform at the forefront (we’ve got a stall on Saturday the 27th in Manchester, if you want to come and help out), but the ERS is strictly about STV, so I joined.
However, I’m not *at all* happy with the way the AV campaign went – millions of pounds, and tens of thousands of supporters’ hours, were pissed up the wall by the campaign, which was led by the ERS and Unlock Democracy. So I want to see some real reform of the ERS.
The ERS council elections are happening (by STV) at the moment, and a slate of candidates are standing as the reform slate. My initial instinct was to give all of them high preferences. But looking at their manifestos I feel worried.
Almost none of them actually state that they support STV. This shouldn’t be a reason to worry – it could well be assumed – but it still seems odd. Many of them refer to ‘PR’ or ‘fair votes’. On top of that, many of them talk about ‘expanding the ERS’ mission’.
The cumulative impression – especially since so many of the reform slate talk about their experience working for the Fabians or other talking shops – is that the reform they want to see is to change the ERS from an organisation dedicated to STV and broaden it into a more amorphous campaign for, y’know, fluffy good stuff and against bad things, but that they want to keep the essentially talking-shop nature of the organisation. It *looks* like the reform they have in mind is something like the way Blair ‘reformed’ the Labour party – which is the exact opposite of what I want to see.
BUT
This is just my gut impression, and is based less on what these people are saying than what they’re not saying – in a very short space for personal manifestos. I’ve not been involved in the organisation long, and of the fifty-three candidates, I’m personally acquainted with two, know one more by reputation, but otherwise have only these manifestos to go on. It could be that the reform slate are passionate, committed activists for STV and everyone else knows this. I’m just getting a hunch, and I never trust those.
If the reform slate want real reform of the type I want – making the ERS into a truly effective grassroots-led campaigning organisation for STV – I’ll gladly give them all high preferences. If what they want is to be another think-tank with unspecified ‘progressive’ aims then I’ll give them the lowest possible preferences. Does anyone actually know which is the case?
(I understand that some people I know may not want to say anything publicly, because they know people standing for the council. If you have anything to confirm or refute my hunch but want it to stay private, please either email me or post a comment under a pseudonym – first-time commenters get held for review, and I’ll not publish anything from a new commenter that doesn’t say “OK to publish” in the body).
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.]
Vote #yes2av so I can get some rest!
This is the last post I will make on this blog until, probably, Saturday. This is because I will be *busy*.
In a couple of hours, I will be making a two-bus journey to a target ward. There I shall deliver a couple of hundred leaflets, to go with the 500 I’ve already delivered this week. I will then come home and, if I’m lucky, get three hours sleep before getting up at 4AM to go out leafletting again. I shall then spend an entire day delivering leaflets, knocking on doors and tallying at polling stations. This will finish at 10PM, at which point I shall make my way to the Town Hall, to try to help supervise the council election count until maybe 3AM. At which point I shall go home and get some sleep before going out to the actual referendum count.
This is how I spend my holiday time from work.
And I would like not to have to do this any more. I’m not a natural campaigner – I simply don’t have the energy for it – and yet I’ve spent a huge chunk of my spare time in the last five years doing this kind of stuff. In the last year I’ve helped out at twenty Yes street stalls as well, lugging a huge table and big boxes full of heavy leaflets on buses. (And before that I helped out regularly at No2ID street stalls until we won that one).
And I’ve been doing this because we have an unfair voting system. The party I support needs to get far more votes per MP than the Tories or Labour – we have to make a Herculean effort to get the same results they get *without even bothering*. That means that if I want my vote to count the same as a Tory or Labour voter, I have to persuade another four or five people who otherwise weren’t going to vote, to vote the same way I do. And I have to do this even though I’m burned out.
I’m not a campaigner at heart. I just want to live in a world where I’m not raised to a blood-boiling fury by the government and totally impotent to get them out. If we can get AV in I might well help out a bit when I’ve got time, but I won’t feel the need to take election weeks off out of my small holiday entitlement and spend them doing heavy physical work, because we’ll have – not a totally fair system, but one where *my vote matters*.
Otherwise… well, there’s council elections next year, the Euro elections the year after that, more council elections the year after *that* and a General election in 2015. I’d better get that ‘holiday’ time booked when I get back to work on Monday, hadn’t I?
More Seven Soldiers posts on Saturday.
I Mean It, Get Out The Fucking Vote #yes2av
So the polls are showing the Yes campaign massively behind the No campaign. I’m already seeing people all over the place criticising aspects of the way the campaign’s been run, like they’ve decided we’ve lost.
We haven’t.
There are two very, very important points to be made here. The first is that polls are usually more accurate *before* an election campaign starts than during. Do you remember ‘Cleggmania’ last year? It evaporated – and the election came out almost exactly as anyone would have predicted in March.
The second is that it’s going to be down to who can get the vote out on the day. Most people don’t care about this referendum one way or another. THEY ARE WRONG NOT TO CARE – this is literally the most important decision they will ever make, and will affect everything from crime policies, to immigration policies, to tax levels, to how healthcare is run, for decades to come. But we’re looking at something like a 30% turnout. YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. The No campaign have no real volunteers. They’re reliant on Tory activists and a few of the more moronic Labour people who can’t tell when they’re being used to entrench the Tories in power for another century. They’re winning the air war because they have money and we don’t, but we have volunteers. We need more though.
And this doesn’t even just affect the UK. I have seen two Canadian friends (Plok who comments here regularly and the comics blogger David Uzumeri) beg British people on Twitter to vote Yes, because then the Canadians will take notice and might be able to avoid ludicrous results like the one they just had.
The No campaign DO NOT DESERVE TO WIN. There have been faults with the Yes campaign, and whether we win or lose you can expect to see them gone over ad nauseam. But the No campaign has been built entirely on lies. The No campaign are liars, and they are lying to you in order to keep control over you. The one time I’ve met any No campaigners in real life (three local Tories who turned up for half an hour to do a spoiler stall near ours, before giving up), they joked about all the lies in their leaflets.
Understand this – the decision you make on Thursday will determine the make-up of the government for the next century or more. Do you want another century of the broad liberal-left being split between two, three or more parties, and the Tories winning two thirds of elections while getting around a third of the vote? Of ‘elected’ dictatorships with unshiftable majorities destroying industries or taking us into illegal wars when only 30% of people voted for that party? Because that’s what a No vote will mean. It’s what not bothering to vote will mean. It’s what not getting everyone you know out and voting yes will mean.
VOLUNTEER, NOW! Here’s a list of events in your area. Here are the phonebanks you can help out at. If you don’t do this, you forfeit your right ever to complain again that the government you got isn’t the one you voted for.
This image seems to be persuading people #yes2av
This image, sadly, seems to be far more successful at persuading people of the case for AV than anything the official Yes campaign have come up with. Reposting to boost the signal. 
(Not sure of the source of this, but @zombywuf on Twitter is the earliest person I can find to have posted this.)
Zatanna post in an hour or two. Klarion post (hopefully) some time tonight.
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…
No2AV Objections Answered #yes2av #no2av
I’ve been volunteering for the Yes campaign for a while now, and I’ve heard surprisingly few arguments put to me against AV and for First Past The Post. I’ll try, in this post, to answer all of the ones I’ve either seen online or come across while campaigning. Some of these arguments appear strong at first, others pitiful, but they’re all genuine arguments from genuine No supporters. I’ll try to put a case against the arguments, but you may, of course, remain unconvinced.
If you have other arguments, please make them in the comments. However, be aware that I have a fairly strict moderation policy – genuine discussion gets as much free reign as possible, but derailing and acting in bad faith gets you banned.
It’s Too Expensive
I’ll deal with this one first, because it’s the main plank of the No campaign’s advertising, and it’s simply a lie. They’ve taken advantage of the fact that there appear to be no laws regulating political referendum campaign advertising (as opposed to election campaigns) to simply make up a huge number as the new cost.
It’s Too Complicated To Explain
This one comes from none other than David Cameron, the Prime Minister, who has a first class honours degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford university. Shame that degree obviously didn’t require learning to count. AV is a simple system – it’s a run-off, where the least popular candidates get eliminated, like in X-Factor. Except you rank the candidates in order so you can have an ‘instant run-off’ as they call AV in America. Just keep knocking out the least popular candidates until there’s a definite winner.
FPTP is more complicated, if you’re a voter who wants to influence the result.
Only three countries use AV in General Elections
This is just the argument from popularity. It means we should never be the first to do anything, or even among the first.
AV isn’t a proportional system
No, but neither’s FPTP. However, AV is likely to produce a far more proportional outcome, most of the time, because more people’s votes will count towards the outcome. And it’s far easier to move from AV to a proportional system like STV or AV+ (both of which are very, very similar to AV and would require only minor tweaking rather than a complete overhaul) than it is from FPTP. Anyone who wants electoral reform should choose AV – it’s both an improvement in itself and (if the people of the UK decide it’s what they want) a first step towards an even better system than that.
Nobody likes AV
I do. I’ve dealt with this one here.
I Want To Upset Nick Clegg
If you want to upset Clegg, vote against the Lib Dems in the Council elections at the same time, instead. Clegg, to be honest, isn’t all that interested in voting reform – it’s a big issue for the Lib Dems generally, but his own policy interests have been mostly in the areas of foreign relations (especially Europe) and civil liberties. I’m sure he wants a yes vote, but he won’t be unduly upset if it doesn’t go through.
On the other hand, me, my wife, Floella Benjamin, Eddie Izzard, Tony (Baldrick) Robinson, the leadership of the Labour party, Tony Benn, Colin Firth and my mate Dave (to take a random sample of vocal Yes supporters) *will* be upset if the No campaign wins, while Nick Griffin, Ian Paisley, David Cameron, Simon Munnery and Mark Millar will be upset if the *yes* campaign wins.
But rather than making decisions on major constitutional reform based on which public figures it’s likely to upset or cheer, why not decide based on the issue itself?
I want to end the coalition government
Thought experiment. You’re a Lib Dem MP. Your party’s in the odd position of both being in government for the first time in its history and having the lowest poll ratings it’s had in twenty years. You’ve just lost a huge number of council seats in a horrible local election, *AND* on the same day you discover that people have voted to keep the same unfair voting system which is biased against your party and which you’ve campaigned against all your life. Do you:
a) think “Oh, well now’s the *perfect* time to force a General Election! I like nothing more than losing my seat and seeing my party wiped out for a generation!” or
b) Not do that, and keep your job for at least another four years?
I like strong government
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of strong government – after all, the strongest form of government is dictatorship. I prefer a weak government that’s the servant of the people, rather than a strong one that makes the people its servant.
That said, AV isn’t any more likely to bring in coalitions or hung parliaments. In Australia, they’ve had *one* hung parliament in the last ninety years. In Britain, meanwhile, four of the last ten General Elections didn’t lead to conclusive results, and led to a rerun a few months later, a Labour government propped up by the Liberals, a Tory government propped up by the Ulster Unionists, and now a Conservative/Lib Dem coalition.
What causes hung parliaments and coalitions isn’t a particular voting system, but who people vote for.
The system we have has worked for centuries!
No, it’s worked for just over sixty years. Before that we had a weird hodge-podge system with some seats being STV or AV and others being FPTP.
It’ll help the BNP!
The BNP are one of only four parties against AV – the other three being the Tories, the DUP and the Communists. This is because AV is an anti-extremist system. It helps small parties that can still appeal to something of a broad base (e.g. the Greens), but small parties who appeal *only* to a small, bigoted minority won’t get anywhere, thanks to the need in AV to win the support of 50% of people who express a preference.
Some people get more votes than others
No, everyone gets one vote in each round of counting. Those whose top preference stays in for that round are counted as voting for that person again, while those whose top preference was knocked out get counted for their next preference.
Winston Churchill didn’t like AV
Churchill also didn’t like votes for women, supported sterilisation of the ‘feeble-minded’, held a number of racist views… and, in short, held all the views one would expect of a member of the Conservative Party who was twenty-seven when Queen Victoria died. While in many ways of course an admirable man, his views as to what was a suitable system for the Britain of the early 1930s might not be the best guide to what is best for the Britain of 2011.
Hitler liked PR, Superman doesn’t. Who do you prefer, Superman or Hitler?
This argument from the comic writer Mark Millar on Twitter was apparently intended seriously. He seems to have forgotten that Hitler was a fascist dictator, and one of the defining features of fascist dictators is their lack of support for democratic elections of any type.
Superman remains unavailable for comment as to his views on electoral reform.
ETA: wonderful Yes campaign postcard:
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