What Nick can do next...

I contributed recently to a forum on LibDem Voice on what the party should be doing to secure its future. Depressingly - after arguing the success of achieving 70% of Lib Dem manifesto commitments - I was told that my views were unrealistic. Indeed, all the threads from activists were for dropping any hint of supporting a Tory policy and grabbing the nearest thing to a Labour one that could be found in order to bolster a hemorrhaging voting base - currently plumbing the depths at around 10%.

Now I can perfectly understand that Lib Dems should be worried about such figures. What I cannot understand is a party that wants to go in exactly the direction that is hell bent on destroying it. The Lib Dems are being crucified by the Left, not the Right. There is never so much anger as those who think they have been 'betrayed'. But we need to remember that to betray you must first belong, and Lib Dems need to ask themselves - whether its academy's, welfare reform, free schools, elected police commissioners, the NHS or constitutional reforms - Labour now fights on the side of producer interests and against the interests of the people with every major reform being proposed. Despite the fact that most provide an evolutionary fit with New Labour's Blairite agenda, as the man himself has recently pointed out.

Why would the left have such a pull for Lib Dem's? Partly because it's ideology is based on the principles of equality and social justice - concepts so powerful that all parties now subscribe to them - although welfare dependence, poor educational achievement, the lack of opportunity and deeply problematic social structures are now firmly the province of the Liberal centre of British politics and not the old left.  And partly because, for more than a century of great political struggle throughout the world, it offers the promise of a radical alternative to the dominant capitalist model in which we live.

The problem for the left is that when those principles are based not on people, but on building the state and its bureaucratic institutions as the solution to each social problem, then Lib Dems should be leading the criticism - not endorsing it. As Blair says in an interview with Prospect magazine today; caution against the ‘natural inclination of the party to say "we created the state ... we created its institutions, we should be ... defending the way public services are". This position may be a comfortable one, but it is also a losing one'. He should know. He won three consecutive elections. And he is hated by the left for 'betraying' them.

The truth is that the left continue, under Ed Miliband, to offer only a bigger, more centrist and bureaucratic state - where the essentially personal has been lost. We need to start exactly where we have always been - firmly rooted on the centre ground of British politics, putting people and their aspirations first. Start with the brilliant piece by Julian Astle, a director of CentreForum an independent, liberal thinktank, in Monday's Guardian. He points out that the left has always owned the values of equality and social justice, and the right of liberty and aspiration, the modernisers have sought to blend the two - taking base metals from left and right and turning them into political gold. The first point in the discussion 'what Nick can do next' is to stay firmly rooted on the centre ground giving nothing to both the far left and right in the battle for ideas and policy.

Second - and more importantly because this centre ground is also inhabited by a relatively small but intensely bright coterie of both Blairite and Cameron supporters, each some way from the mainstream of their party - Lib Dems must continue to be at the radical edge of this Liberal centrist Coalition. Not the dour, road block which Gordon Brown represented to Blair's swift foil. As Tim Montgomerie - among the most succinct Conservative commentators - noted in a recent article, over the past year, Clegg had appeared to reject the politics of the lowest common denominator, and backed bold reforms. Iain Duncan Smith regarded the Deputy Prime Minister as a decisive ally in his battle with the Treasury in overhauling welfare. The Lib Dems were also radical in switching the balance of educational funding from university to a child's first few years, when investment can make the biggest difference. On other issues, too – such as pensions, local government or lifting the poorest out of the income tax system – there was something exciting about the Coalition, and their contribution to it.

This is exactly the ground that the Lib Dems should be occupying. Indeed it should go a lot further. Come 2015, the electorate need to understand that the Lib Dems not only delivered the Coalition Agreement including more than 70% of their manifesto, but that they drove the Coalition on some of the most important and radical issues of the day, but which enhanced the lives of the British people - a comprehensive package of penal reform turning prisons into adult education centres and giving re-habilitated prisoners a stake in society, a new deal on the two largest areas of criminal activity which blight our society - drugs and prostitution - bringing them into society, re-writing our privacy laws in answer to outdated super-injunctions, the first comprehensive bill of rights setting out responsibilities of the state and its citizens and incorporating a new UK human rights act, Parliamentary reform including obligatory open primaries for the one third of seats that have a safe majority, expulsion for any members convicted of a serious crime, openly elected parliamentary committee's with the power to set and scrutinise the annual budgets for every quango. Lords reform and, yes, the committment to hold a referendum on PR if a further Liberal centrist Coalition were necessary after the next election.

The answer to the question 'what Nick can do next' is stay radical, stay Liberal and stay at the centre. I really don't think it unrealistic to believe this Coalition is capable of a great deal more. As Julian Astle points out, a majority of the British people are moderate voters unconvinced by the partial solutions traditionally on offer.

The LibDems are being crucified by the left, Mr Cable, not the right...

As Vince Cable condemns the Tory attacks on Nick Clegg, he should be asking himself who exactly are his real enemies. In a perceptive blog, James Graham notes

A lot of Labour politicians are hellbent on a strategy that is about destroying the LibDems, even if it means effectively letting Cameron off the hook. There's no getting away from the fact that the LibDems are now seriously weakened, but what has that gained Labour? Look at Scotland. Labour let the Tories win the popular vote in England, which is an absolutely extraordinary failure.

You only have to read Polly Toynbee - doyen of the left and herself a former SDP member - to understand where such vitriol is coming from:And this is a view increasingly found across the left of British politics. The LibDems should never want power. Their job is to be a Labour party mark two - a chill out room for the main Labour event. A pale shadow of top-down, centralised, sclerotic socialism - but without the war in Iraq.

How badly they misunderstood the nature of their swelling support: they were a safe haven for voters not wanting tough choices, nice people with apolitical instincts, trusting Clegg's promised "new politics" would keep their votes clean from contamination. Had the Lib Dems stood apart and stood their ground, loudly opposing Tory plans, objecting to the savagery of the budget without quite bringing down the government, they might have kept their virginity.

In a well argued piece for Saturday's Guardian called The left is practically defined by people who hate Nick Clegg, Andrew Brown points out that on student fees - a cause seen by the left as the the LibDems greatest betrayal despite having been originally introduced by Labour against a manifesto committment 

the outcry against them comes from people who see themselves losing a privilege they had considered as a right. There's a word for that, and it's not "liberal"

He continues,

hatred of Clegg is concentrated on the fact that he betrayed some of the policies he ran on; but he did so because the country voted against them. That's democracy. Sometimes the majority is wrong. Sometimes it disagrees with you. But the majority still gets to decide, as the Lib Dems, in coalition, have discovered. There's no reason whatever that a party with 23% of the votes should get 100% of its programme through. The people who think it should are not being democratic.

As Olly Grender wrote in a piece entitled Don't Vote Against AV because you hate Nick Clegg, a week before the referendum 

both David Cameron and Nick Clegg will still be in the same jobs next week. A vote for or against AV won’t change that

It was published in the New Statesman and aimed squarely at the left - not the right.

The unpalatable truth, Mr Cable, is that the LibDems are being destroyed by the left. Just as Islam reserves the ultimate punishment for apostacy, the LibDems are being crucified by the left. Not the right.

Hammering the LibDems

We believed, perhaps a little over-optimistically that the British people would understand the difference between compromise and betrayal says Paddy Ashdown after a night of fierce defeat for the LibDems in local elections up and down the country. We have yet to see any referendum results, but the omens do not look good. The party's eighty-year dream of electoral reform looks like remaining excatly that.

And the Conservative party that so meticulously negotiated, designed and forged that same national Coalition? Not a scratch. It seems that somewhere between goose and gander, equality has disappeared. Indeed the electorate have completely lost the plot.

The Coalition agreement generously awarded fully 70% of the LibDem's election manifesto and an estimated 60% of the Tory one. Not only were 59 LibDem MP's openly welcomed into every department of state as fully integrated Coalition partners - whilst many of the 312 Conservative MP's had to put ministerial careers on hold - a 'quad', comprising both Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander, was set up to scrutinise all legislation before the Coalition made any policy committments. This, as with so many other inclusive and fully collegiate measures directly reflected the way this Liberal Conservative Coaltion was to be conducted. As well as destroying Labour's 'thick of it' macho political culture, the LibDems are given respect. Their views are valued. Their policies given far more weight than their numbers would suggest.

So when the junior, seemingly more progressive partner, is destroyed by the electorate whilst the major partner actually gains councillors, you have to ask why.        To be continued...

Parris on LibDems...

If (the LibDems) had joined Labour in a Lib-Lab Coalition, they'd now be having the mirror-image row with supporters who objected to propping up Labour. There's a reason for this tiresome symmetry. If you run a party that strives to attract disaffected supporters from Left and Right, you're forced to leave you're overall compass blurred. In opposition, this will maximise your vote; in government it will maximise the sense of betrayal felt by your supporters and MPs writes Matthew Parris in today's Times.

The wisdom of Peter Kelner

Isn't there a flower at Kew gardens that lives for two or three hundred years without flowering, suddenly flowers, gives off a terrible smell and then dies? asks Peter Kelner - president of YouGov, a supposedly independent polling organisation - gleefully likening it to the future of the LibDems on this week's podcast from Guardian politics.

I well remember the same Peter Kelner almost crying on election night in 1992 as his polls - having predicted victory for Neil Kinnock - proved wrong and his beloved Labour party faced five more years of opposition.

He continues if I were Nick Clegg I would regard my time as Deputy Prime Minister as a fixed-term five year appointment and ponder life outside British politics after 2015.

Its nice to know that after all these years there's still plenty of balance from YouGov then...

The LibDems need to take the argument to the people, not abstain from it

LibDem talk of abstaining or voting against increased tuition fees is just wrong. If you believe in something, then you need to take it to the people and argue why it is right. And this proposal for university funding is right in so many ways.

Firstly it puts the funding of our universities on a stable and sustainable basis for their long-term future, something which successive governments - unwilling to make courageous decisions that require robust and intelligent arguments - have ducked over many years. This proposal allows us to build and sustain world class, research-based universities which are essential to the country's future.

Secondly, it is not about tripling the cost of higher education as so many naive freshers seem to think. The cost of university education is not changing. We are simply deciding how that education should be funded. Whether it should be from general taxation by all taxpayers irrespective of means, or increasingly by students, who are substantial and lifelong beneficiaries of a university education, not least in their earning abilities.

This proposal goes to the heart of a fair society. It is about students accepting greater responsibility for their good fortune by shouldering a higher proportion of the funding from their enhanced earnings. Starting above £21,000 per year. Well above the pay of dinner ladies who currently pay for the university education of our largely middle class children.

Both students and the Labour opposition are on the wrong side of this argument. Not only are these proposals fairer - ensuring that those 'with the broadest shoulders' provide proportionately more funding - they are also progressive. Far more progressive than the current arrangements introduced by Labour. They enhance the participation of poorer students, cover part-time courses and ensure that as tuition fee's move towards their highest permitted levels, wider engagement is actively sought. 

Like so much else that is now being re-evaluated of Labour's thirteen years of expensive, centralised, statist orthodoxy, the most we can say is that they may have had the right intentions. But lazy, self-righteous hysteria against anything proposed by this Liberal-Conservative Coalition who represent 59% of the electorate, is worth fighting. Not abstaining from.

Simon Jenkins gets it

Coalition means not getting what you want, let alone what in a rash moment you promised. It means finding a line of least resistance through the mess of an indecisive assembly. It means making the alliances all centre parties must make if they are to enjoy power says Simon Jenkins in an excellent article in today's Guardian.

And if you wade through the reams of comment beneath, you quickly realise that the left just don't get it.

Compromise shouldn't mean selling out and appearing more tory than the tories being a typical example. Oh dear. Lets try again. Compromise means the settlement of differences in which each side makes concessions...

Politics, tribalism & coalition

'Britain's political tribes are determined as much by emotion and prejudice as any absolute sets of policy' writes Julian Glover in tomorrow's Guardian. In a thoughtful piece which demands reading, he suggests 'the old world has been blown inside out. the people who never had power suddenly have lots of it, and those who assumed it was theirs to keep can only complain'.

And how they do.

'This mindset does not judge the coalition for its actions but condemns (where have you heard that before?) the fact that it exists. The fury - far beyond the scale of anything the LibDems expected - is rooted in a hostility to pluralism that regards Conservatism as something approaching an evil, and any LibDem associated with it an unnatural compromise. Presumably, the only acceptable outcome would be ceaseless Labour rule'.

'Riled, Lib Dems are making a poor job of defending themselves. They are embarrassed to speak confidently – not so much because of the deal they did, but because they never presented themselves as deal-makers. Instead, they presented themselves as tellers of fantastical truths, signing pledges on tuition fees the leadership never thought they'd need to return to. That was the worst of the Lib Dems: indulging an unworkable policy that amounted to an unaffordable middle-class subsidy dressed up as principle.'


'Oppositionalist purists will rant against the compromises of power. Nobody knows better than the LibDems how easy that is to do. But they've taken the decision to stop copping out. The neurotic rage of those who still want to is entirely predictable.' Brilliant.

Coalition, compromise & wish-lists

Interesting discussion on the Guardian's Politics Weekly podcast today - given that coalition government is likely to become more common under AV and other more proportional systems, should party manifesto's be merely wish-lists? To be used only to select policies that will withstand the compromises inherent in coalition politics?

Quote of the day

'if form filling and box ticking brought equality, Britain would be a utopia'

Lynne Featherstone at the LibDem conference.

Liberal Democracy

I still find it incredibly difficult to see how the LibDem's can achieve anything approaching their 23% general election poll ratings anytime soon. But if a third of that total were disaffected Labour voters now returning to the fold, good riddance - 'shifting sands' they may be, but the LibDem's hold no debts.

Mary Ann Sieghart, writing in today's Independent, suggests that everything necessary is already in place and that time - as with broken bones - will heal everything.

It may need some help. Beyond doubt now is Nick Clegg's feeling that being a short-term protest party for the left is no longer viable. If you didn't like the Iraq war or ID cards or 42-day detention without trial, or the loss of civil liberties or too many other top-down authoritarian bullying initiatives to mention here, then why did you vote Labour?

Certainly, the tone from the left has begun to change. Both Polly Toynbee and Jackie Ashley, after months of ill thought out visceral hatred towards the 'traitorous' LibDems (following years of cosying up we note), have begun to recognise that coalition government means compromise and co-operation, not ideologically-driven utopianism. That way only hatred lies - and we've had thirteen years of that.

Perhaps we'll start to hear the backstory - the principles behind the 'orange book' or the surging tide of bottom-up localism espoused throughout this party. The deeply held priciples of personal liberty, international co-operation and 'fairness' that pervades all Liberal Democrat policies in the public sector.

The left of course, would have us believe that before the 1997 ascendancy of New Labour, there were no schools, hospitals or welfare. Just broken people floating around in dirt, poverty and injustice. All provided by Margaret Thatcher and the wicked Tories.

Funny how they won four elections in a row and 18 years in government then...

Quote of the day

Great quote from Nick Clegg at the LibDem conference today: 'You cannot build social justice on the sands of debt'.

Packing the electorate

Looks like we're nearly at save the LibDem's time. 55% of Conservative voters now accept the need for an electoral pact. Certainly the Conservative Whigs owe a great deal to the Liberals - if not the Democrats.

Personally I'm amazed at the plummeting electoral fortunes of a junior partner which has managed to introduce quite so many manifesto commitments within weeks of coming to power - far more than Blair's 1997 steroidally obsessed regime. An electoral pact may well become necessary.

But probably only once a referendum on AV has been lost...

Calmly Radical

The summer recess is here and politics is going away on holiday.

'Better than the last lot' was Jeff Randal's verdict. Not difficult really - and what a relief after the forces of anger, hatred and deceit finally left the stage.

So how have they done? Radical, that's for sure.

Eight short weeks into a government program scrambled together whilst assembling the first national coalition in half a century, and the government has embarked on the most radical reform program possible: halving Labours profligate borrowing, deep reforms in welfare, education, the NHS, policing, prisons, and immigration as well as constitutional changes the like of which we have not seen since women's suffrage in the 1920's.

And Labour always told us Cameron was policy light. Naughty Labour.

The most obvious change though has been in attitude. A quiet determination to apply real solutions to pressing problems, with calm and curtesy. None of the frenzy that characterised NewLabour and its spin machine.

And yet the big loser - at least in polling terms - appear to be the Liberal Democrats. The latest polls show them languishing at around 15%. So what, in policy terms, did the LibDems actually secure?

They agreed and are implementing the necessary deficit reductions from their own manifesto. They have secured constitutional reform including AV with a referendum set for 5th May next year. They have secured - through Michael Gove's educational reforms - the 'pupil premium' of their manifesto. They are set to take out a tier of buraucracy - strategic health authorities - from the NHS as outlined in their manifesto. They have secured a prison reform program that was widely criticised in the leader's debates during the election campaign. And perhaps most significantly, the tax threashold was increased towards their much publicised objective of £10,000 in George Osborne's emergency budget. Not a bad haul for a party providing just 59 of the 365 coalition MP's.