“Progressive Alliance”

I keep hearing about the “Progressive Alliance”, and it never fails to irritate me. In the UK “progressive” is taken to mean “Everyone except the Tories and UKIP¹”. Progressivism is defined (in wikipedia) as:

...a political attitude favouring or advocating changes or reform through governmental action. Progressivism is often viewed in opposition to conservative or reactionary ideologies.

This seems to me a definition sufficiently broad as to be largely useless, Tories could claim the progressive mantle through any legislation they care to enact and liberals could lose it through their opposition to authoritarian measures such as the ID card scheme, and for economic liberalisation.

The problem I’m having here is that Labour only start getting interested in “progressive alliances” when they’ve lost an election, whilst in power they ignore other progressive parties. Labour will only form a “progressive alliance” if they are electorally forced to do so, and otherwise seek Liberal Democrat annihilation.

Since the General Election there’s been a great deal of effort spent by Labour in trying to split the party into Good Liberal Democrats (Social Democrats, who they wish to absorb) and Bad Liberal Democrats (Orange Bookers, who they think the Tories should absorb). The “progressive alliance” is part of this - we should not be playing to this narrative. The truth is that Labour and Tory only get into government when they’ve convinced the electorate that they are close enough to the Liberal Democrat centre ground so as not to be scary.

Ed Miliband can frequently be found “reaching out” to Liberal Democrats but this reaching out is solely about recruitment to the Labour Party and the planned extinction of the Liberal Democrats. I’m a pluralist, as such I value the existence of other political parties – but I see little sign of this respect for the existence of others in the Labour Party.

In opposition their key strategy has been to attack the Liberal Democrats and their policies, rather than the Tories, who they claim lead the Coalition. Labour consistently opposed the passing of the AV referendum bill. Indeed they spent more energy opposing the AV referendum bill than any other government measure². Their campaign for the Yes vote was fatally flawed in that it was largely seen as a platform to attack Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats: every outing of “Labour Yes” involved a ritual statement of how venial the Liberal Democrats were and, if Ed Miliband was involved, a discussion as to why he would not share a platform with Nick Clegg. It looks like Labour are summing themselves up to oppose Lords’ reform as well – both this, and the AV campaign, are “progressive” goals.

There are a number of Liberal Democrats who are keen on the “progressive alliance”, and since I’m an open-minded sort of chap I’m assuming they’re not deranged, but can you tell me – why are you engaged in this? I don’t rule out discussions between our parties but those engaged in such discussion need to be clear what the benefit to us is, because at the moment all we’re getting is another forum in which Labour can abuse us and attempt to divide us³.

Footnotes

1. Technically I should probably put the BNP in here but they’re not a serious political party.
2. At this point Labour normally complain that the bill also contained “gerrymandering” measures regarding the work of the Boundary Commission. However, the current system gives them a 90 seat advantage for parity of votes with the Tories, so it’s substantially “gerrymandered” in Labours favour already. The chances are that boundary fiddling will do little to address this and really the only solution to such problems is to go for some form of proportional representation, neither of the two main parties has the honesty to recognise this.
3. None of this is to say that the Tories are not trying to destroy us as well!

Post-election Reflection 2011

A year into the Coalition and in the aftermath of some rather poor electoral results for the Liberal Democrats I thought I should write down some thoughts from the perspective of a Liberal Democrat of 20 years.

On May 5th the LibDems lost nearly 700 local councillors from an original population of 1751 and 9 of 19 councils, 12 of 17 seats were lost in the Scottish parliament and there was an emphatic "No to AV" in the referendum. At a personal level, I was involved in the campaign for the Cheshire West and Cheshire council, where ultimately we polled 12% of the votes and got 1.3% of the seats. This is a reduction from 4 seats to 1, although in a reconfigured council.

Why did this happen?

The LibDems were in a relatively good position based on the last occasion these council seats were contested, having steadily picked up seats from Labour through the years of Labour government 1997-2010, in particular from 2001 onwards. Our previous standing reflected a popular vote of around 23%, currently our opinion poll standings are around 15%.

In this sense it should not be seen as "electorate punishing LibDems for coalition" rather "former Labour supporters returning to Labour now it's out of power", similarly talk of LibDems being human shields for the Tories is not a particularly useful analysis. Tories and LibDems have different electorates, the Tory electorate is clearly happy with the Coalition, the LibDem electorate less so. Looking at the overall results with the Tories on 38% of the vote, Labour on 37% and LibDems 17%, we're actually above the top end of our current opinion poll ratings with a share of the vote between our 1997 and 2001 general election result.

Also popular in the news is the idea that Nick Clegg must go as leader of the Liberal Democrats, if you rummage around amongst several hundred rather bruised (ex-)local councillors you are bound to find a few who'll agree with this but it is idiocy for several reasons:

• Nick Clegg got strong party backing for going into the Coalition from MPs, the federal executive and a special conference. We all stand with Nick, the idea that he has led the party off at the head of an Orange Book clique is a fantasy built by Labour, familiar with this type of internal schism.
• Our drop in the opinion polls was pretty much inevitable as soon as the Coalition agreement was signed, regardless of anything any leader could have done: we dropped 2 points from the 23% showing at the election almost immediately, and then by mid-late summer were down to 18% even before the tuition fees issue had really hit.
• A new leader at this point would continue to take the blame for simply being in coalition and leave us in no better position at the next general election.

The no to AV result was a disappointment, not because of the rejection of AV itself but because it likely rules out electoral reform for years to come. I thought Nick Clegg struck the best note on this, close to the end of the campaign when he said this was just a small change. I found Ed Miliband's refusal to share a platform with Nick Clegg in support of the Yes campaign deeply unhelpful, listening to him try to justify this having just explained to John Humphries how AV forced politicians to reach out to other parties was entertaining; as was his jaw-dropping hypocrisy in justifying Labour's failure to implement AV in 13 years of government as being because they'd won a 170 seat majority under first-past-the-post - remember this when he bleats about the "progressive majority".

I note that over on ConHome the Tories are trying to claim that Labour made them make Nick Clegg the target for the No campaign. This seems to me a rather spineless statement - they funded the No to AV campaign, they could have called the shots. They should realise how massively they have pissed off a large chunk of pro-Coalition LibDems, and that there will be consequences for this. Going forward we should be looking at each item we have on the Coalition Agreement and asking ourselves: can we trust the Tories to support implementation of this? If the answer is "no" then we should be looking to bargain with something in the coalition agreement that they hold dear and not let it pass until our target has been achieved.

Obviously another election brings another crude pass at Liberal Democrat ministers by Ed Miliband, like a creepy uncle at a wedding party. This is entirely for his own supporters and has nothing to do with the Liberal Democrats, as Ed has said before - he seeks our extinction. We should all bear this in mind when he talks about "progressive alliances".

I don't see the point in believing that we can now go to the Tories for concessions because we have lost some elections, it seems needy and unnecessary to me. Similarly I don't see much mileage in fiddling around with the infantile "getting into bed with" and "marriage" metaphors. Vince Cable and Chris Huhne have prototyped the "cooperating but sulkily" look and, to be frank, it is unedifying.

Liberal Democrats have succeeded in getting policy implemented over the past year in Coalition: in getting the income tax threshold raised, in linking pensions to earnings, in providing some protection to the poorest students through the Pupil Premium, in reducing the 28 days detention without charge to 14 days, in reducing dramatically, (if not entirely eliminating) child detention for failed immigration claimants. There is some interesting analysis by the University of Essex on how much of the Liberal Democrat manifesto got into the Coalition agreement. If you want to see a more detailed comparison here is a document on the Guardian Datablog which analyses, in detail the Coalition agreement. Or there is a document produced by the Party here.

Now is a bloody awful time to be in government, there is no money to spend on cherished schemes, rather an absolute need to cut pretty much the largest deficit in the world, left behind by a Labour government desperately trying to spend it's way to salvation but we're getting on and doing it. It's worth remembering that at this point Labour would have been making 7/8ths of the cuts currently being made by the Coalition (under the Darling plan) - difficult to believe given their current statements.

Despite all of this, it is still the best time it has ever been to be a Liberal Democrat since I joined the party in 1991.

Book Review: The Third Man by Peter Mandelson

A little bit of politics for this book review: “The Third Man: Life at the heart of New Labour” by Peter Mandelson. It’s been a while since I’ve read much politics; I did go through a spell of reading various diaries and biographies (Alan Clark, Tony Benn, John Major, Churchill) a number of years ago but gave up largely because the diarists and autobiographies seemed unwilling to accept they were wrong on anything, and I had a nasty experience with the biography of Gladstone.

I’m sort of fond of Peter Mandelson, I never really bought the Prince of the Dark Arts thing and he seems to be one of the more coalition minded senior Labour figures.

The book covers briefly Mandelson’s early life but the main focus of the book is the personal relationship between Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown from the late eighties all the way through to the 2010 election. Peripherally it is also the story of New Labour: firstly, a switch to a more professional presentational style, followed by the scrapping of Clause IV then it seems to go a bit vague in terms of a guiding policy theme. Mandelson states the central vision of New Labour being of fairness and social justice: but these are ideals I’m sure the Liberal Democrats would cleave to and the Tories would claim the same. Ultimately ideology is not helpful in discriminating between parties rather implementation of policy and no-one is really grasping the nettle of going for excellent implementation.

I’d always assumed that poor press for Labour ministers was as a result of biased media and some mysterious influence from the Tories that I hadn’t entirely thought through. Mandelson makes it pretty clear that the worst press for Labour came from Labour ministers and their hangers-on briefing against each other!

The central theme of the book was how awful the relationship between Brown and Blair was, lasting for many years and seriously hampering a New Labour programme for reform. The origin of this poor relationship is in the leadership struggle which took place following the death of John Smith in 1994. Communication between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor was poor, and they often seemed to be working largely to block each other. This makes hard reading, it’s like the story of a couple trapped in a loveless marriage “for the sake of the kids”. In some ways I find this disturbing: New Labour effectively provided it’s own opposition whilst in government in the sense that it limited their ability to make policy and enforce change on public services. What happens when the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are working to the same agenda?

Clearly as a Liberal Democrat I’m interested in what he has to say about us, the truth is: not much. There seems to be a degree to which Mandelson and Blair held key early members such as Roy Jenkins in high regard, seeing them as something of a lost tribe who had left the Labour party in the early eighties believing it to be un-reformable. He also describes the talk toward involving the Liberal Democrats in government following the 1997 election, eventually floundering because ultimately there was no need to give anything to the Liberal Democrats. It does seem that there was some quiet local arrangements where Labour or Liberal Democrats agreed not to fight too hard against each other at general elections. I suspect things have changed in both parties now, Liberal Democrats and Labour members of my generation and younger joined well after the split so for us the “progressive alliance” is something of an old man’s tale.

What also comes through for me is how grateful Labour should be for our electoral system, in the 1983 election when Labour polled 27.6% and the SDP-Alliance polled 25.4% they still gained 209 seats as opposed to the meagre 23 that the SDP-Alliance achieved. Similarly at the 2010 election, the Conservatives lead Labour by 7.1% in votes but only 48 seats whilst in 2005 Labour led Tory by just 2.8% but gained a 157 seat lead over the Conservatives giving them a firm majority.

Mandelson’s description of the Coalition negotiations following the May 2010 General Election are consistent with the Laws and Wilson books which I reviewed previously. Labour had not made any pre-election plans for coalition, which I still find odd since Peter Mandelson clearly saw the possibility of a hung parliament; the Labour party was split on whether they should make the attempt and ultimately there was a recognition that the parliamentary arithmetic did not add up.

It’s clear that the current theme of “no cuts” from Labour is a continuation of the Brown policy pre-election, Alastair Darling appears to have made considerable efforts to reach a budget which made at least some effort to start addressing the deficit in the final days of the previous government, in the teeth of enormous opposition from Gordon Brown whilst other members of the team such as Ed Balls were keen to make further spending commitments. Brown’s great fear seemed to have been being labelled a “tax-and-spend” Chancellor, who seems to have ended up a “spend” Chancellor and in the long term that does not add up.

Is this a good book to read? It is if you want to know about the personal relationship at the core of the book, and if want to know more about Peter Mandelson. I’m tempted to read Andrew Rawnsley’s “The End of the Party” for a more detached view.

No Merger!

Once again, rattling around the wires is the idea that the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties should merge. The origins of these mutterings are largely Conservative, for example, Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph, or René Kinzett on ThinkPolitics. I’d like to put a Liberal Democrat view as to why this is utterly implausible.

A key motivating factor for this talk is the low performance of the LibDems in opinion polls at the moment. However, there are two issues here:

Firstly, members of both Labour and Conservative parties see polls in a different light to LibDems. In part because the other parties are programmed to believe in a steady pendulum swing which sees power passing to and fro between them with a period of years. Therefore for them regaining power is largely a matter of waiting for the pendulum to swing. The LibDems do not lie on the pendulum swing, they do not have this expectation. Aside from the national coalition during the Second World War, the Liberal forbearers to the current party have not been in office since 1918. You can see this in action in my immediate post-election blog post, which is characterised by gloomy resignation at another disappointing general election. Broadly the reaction of a long term LibDem to a general election is crashing disappointment. So facing so-called “electoral annihilation” at a future general election the LibDem response is “no change there then”.

Secondly, as my previous post alludes: the opinion polls are not a great predictor of electoral success for the LibDems. Just to give an example: in the 1983 election the SDP-Liberal Alliance got 25.4% of the vote and 23 seats, in the 2010 election the LibDems got 23% of the vote and got 57 seats. This is only a very small rise in the % of the vote since the 2005 election (just 1%) and a drop in the number of parliamentary seats (5 seats). If you want to see some more numbers, go have a look at the wikipedia list of UK elections.

At the heart of this believe that there should be a merger seems to be a problem with counting, one alluded to in the title of this blog; it seems to be in the UK that there is a serious problem with counting parties beyond two. It’s seems to go “Labour, Conservative,……… nope can’t cope!”. This is in no doubt partly driven by the first-past-the-past electoral system which encourages the merger of parties into two blocks (know as Duverger’s Law).

It’s also a mistake to see a major schism forming between a party leadership in government and the rank-and-file membership. A naive view is that the leadership have “gone Tory” at the head of what is essentially a left-leaning organisation. However, I understand this more in terms of the way I see the large company I work in operating. At some level within the company there are discussions about the way forward for the company should be, and at points in time a decision is made as to what the way forward actually will be. At this point everybody gets on and does it, at higher levels the company appears unified – the message from senior management is consistent, at my level I have the opportunity to gripe about stuff but ultimately I have to get on and help execute the plan. What we see in government is, I argue the same, LibDem ministers have argued for their beliefs in coming to a plan: where they have prevailed they support the agreed plan but where they don’t agree they still work to enact the agreed plan – sulking, griping and refusing to support where you did not prevail is not an option.

The other thing to consider is how the LibDem party works: even in the event of a proposed merger by the leadership of the party the likely response of the membership would be a resounding “no” and in the LibDems that means something. And just to be clear on my own position: if there was a successful proposal to merge with either the Labour or Tory parties I’d be off to form the Continuity Liberal Democrats – and I wouldn’t be alone! As Simon Cooke (Tory) accurately points out, any LibDem is free to leave the party and join either the Conservatives or Labour, or the Greens (or no party at all). In the deeply untribal view of this Liberal Democrat they should feel free to do so (and positively encouraged if that’s what they want). But don’t expect to see this happen in any great numbers, at the very least Nick Clegg and David Laws have had serious offers from the Tories to join them in the pre-2010 election past but chose to stay in the electoral unsuccessful LibDems. I’ve no doubt that similar applies to offers from Labour during the 1997-2010 governments.

Finally there is a question of political positioning, ideology if you like. It seems to me that the LibDems are precisely where they should be: on the centre ground and they shouldn’t be thinking of moving from there. Labour and Conservatives have come to power when they have decided to be more like us. You can still find our manifesto on the Liberal Democrat website, largely these are the things I still believe in and these are the things I will fight for, of the Labour manifesto I find no sign on their website.

Viva the Continuity Liberal Democrats!

27 days to power in May

This is a joint review of the books "22 days in May" by David Laws and "5 days to power" by Rob Wilson on the negotiations to form the Coalition government following the May 2010 General Election. The Laws book is his personal account of those negotiations, and his subsequent brief period in office. The Wilson book is drawn more widely, although he is a Conservative MP. The title of this blog post is a search engine unfriendly mashup of the two titles.

The Liberal Democrats started planning for negotiations in the event of a hung parliament towards the end 2009, this was done secretly by Danny Alexander, David Laws, Chris Huhne and Andrew Stunell on the direction of Nick Clegg. Their consensus, pre-election, was that depending on electoral arithmetic a coalition with Labour or a "confidence and supply" with Tories were the best outcomes for the hung parliament regime where no party had an overall majority. However, Chris Huhne argued that coalition with the Tories was better than "confidence and supply". Confidence and supply means that the junior party supports the senior for votes of confidence, and for budgetary votes. Huhne argued that under these circumstances LibDems would get all of the blame for difficult government decisions which they supported, without any say over policy. The Tories set up a similar group approximately two weeks before the election comprising William Hague, Ed Llewellyn, George Osborne and Oliver Letwin. Labour apparently did no group planning, their negotiating team comprised Lord's Mandelson and Adonis (a former LibDem), Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman. The civil service also seems to have been very well prepared to support negotiations and had a strong preference for coalition over other forms of government. There are strong hints that the civil service were deeply concerned at the prospect of a minority government, or a "confidence and supply" agreement would be bad for confidence in the economy.

The 2010 general election gave the Tories 306 seats, Labour 258, Liberal Democrats 57 and other parties 28 seats (including 8 DUP, 6 SNP, 5 Sinn Fein). This would give a Lib-Lab pact a majority over the Conservatives of 8 seats but with 28 votes with smaller parties so not technically a majority. A Tory-LibDem coalition gives 363 seats, with a majority over Labour of 105. Such a pact can take a rebellion (i.e. MPs of the coalition voting against it) of 35, in theory a Lib-Lab coalition could take no rebellion. In practice the 5 Sinn Fein MPs would likely not vote and the SNP would be unlikely to vote with Tories, except if there was something in it for Scotland.

This electoral maths suggest to me that the only real choice was what form the agreement with the Tories should take: no agreement - likely leading to a new election, "confidence and supply" or full coalition. Coalition with Labour looked really hairy in terms of numbers of seats but there was a lot of enthusiasm in the Liberal Democrats and some enthusiasm in Labour for this. The generation of LibDem MPs who had entered the parliament opposing Tory governments (Paddy Ashdown, Vince Cable, Charles Kennedy, Don Foster etc) were particularly keen. Gordon Brown was keen to form a coalition, and from the Labour team Mandelson and Adonis. Clearly from a negotiating point of view the fact that a coalition with Labour was feasible was a strong card to play.

Steve Richards, in The Independent, prefers to characterise the Coalition agreement between LibDem and Tory as the result of a take over by Orange Book Liberal Democrats, against the will of the party. This seems to misunderstand the internal workings of the party: both the parliamentary party (Commons and Lords) and the federal executive were consulted at the time on how negotiations should progress. They also voted on the outcome, as did the wider membership at a special conference held shortly thereafter. Many of these would be people just like me who would have been nervous of coalition with Tories, and many would have initially preferred coalition with Labour. However, ultimately all of these groups voted emphatically for coalition with the Tories. One striking thing in the whole process was the amount of time the LibDems spent on internal consultation - Labour apparently did none of this, and in the Tory party it was cursory and ad hoc.

Lord Adonis has disputed David Laws assertion that the Labour team were disengaged and unhelpful in the negotiating process, and largely supported the Richards view of an Orange Book take over. Laws has responded to that accusation. Personally I'm happy to accept David Laws view of the Labour stance in negotiations: the external signs from Labour were that there was a substantial lack of will to form coalition in the parliamentary party (Blunkett, Reid, Burnham, Darling apparently all against), and that little or no preparation had been made to try to negotiate a coalition should the opportunity arise. Why was this? Was it an oversight? Did they feel formation of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats was so trivial as not to require any preparation? The accusation that the Labour negotiation team may have been split flies because it is so self-evidently plausible. My view is that the Labour party as a whole were tired of government, could not face coalition with a non-existent majority and could not face the prospect of implementing the cuts required (and promised by them too) to address the deficit. There's no doubt that for some of them coalition with any other party, except with the most supine partner was anathema.

David Laws book is the one to read for LibDems or those wishing to understand LibDems better, the Wilson book is better for a more rounded view of the formation of the coalition. His tone with regard to his dear leader is somewhat grating but I'm sure others would say the same of the Laws book. A full account of the negotiations from the Labour perspective would be useful.

A vignette that I've not seen reported elsewhere: George Osborne offered David Laws a post in the shadow cabinet in 2004 and a cabinet post, were he to defect. Laws refused.

This makes me angry

This makes me angry:

Instead nice, gentle Nick Clegg has secured the position of Britain’s most hated man. He has been burnt in effigy by student rioters. Police have told him that he must no longer cycle to work for fear of physical attack. Excrement has been shoved through the letter box of his Sheffield constituency home, from which his family may now have to move for safety reasons.

Peter Oborne in the Telegraph

I can hear the Labour apologists winding themselves up for response already: "Was his family in residence when the shit was pushed through the letter box? Have you got a crime number for that? It's terrible, but you know he betrayed the people who trusted in him. Moving out of the home is just theatrical." The president of the National Union of Students, Aaron Porter, Labour party member, decries the "betrayal", the breaking of a pledge. Anyone like odds on how likely it was that he voted for the Liberal Democrats? Let's face it: he didn't, he didn't vote for the party that he's excoriating for not implementing the policy he didn't vote for, the only party to oppose tuition fees. All those Labour folk, talking of the "betrayal", they didn't vote against tuition fees either. "Satirical" they say of David Mitchell advocating pissing through Nick Clegg's letterbox , it isn't satirical if someone's actually done it.

As the riots progress an army of armchair revolutionaries bemoan the violence of the police, as buildings are smashed up. "The police should simply keep the protesters moving on, so they don't cause any trouble". "The police are stupid", they say, "I could manage a large crowd of protesters, some intent on violence, much better than them. That's why I'm sitting here tweeting about it." "The police van was bait, because every right-thinking person when they see an unattended police van thinks: "Fuck me, I better smash the crap out of that"."

I used to think it was the Tories who felt power was their divine right but now I know it's Labour. Len McCluskey, leader of Unite, a Labour affiliated union calls for demos to topple the government, speaking approvingly of the poll tax riots. John McDonnell, Labour MP, says:

I know the Daily Mail will report me again as inciting riots yet again. Well, maybe that is what we are doing.

Beaten in an election, they use weasel words to get people out on the street smashing stuff up. "These cuts aren't what people voted for, they voted, but they didn't vote for this. They really meant to vote for Labour, the party who repeatedly reneged on promises to introduce fairer voting. The party who said they were going to reduce the deficit by making cuts, but now only have a blank piece of paper; who can magically make the deficit painlessly go away."

For the first time in 60 years Liberal Democrats are in government, they are in government at a time when the country faces the largest budget deficit it has had in many decades, it is a crap time to be in government. They are taking hard decisions that Labour would not have the guts to take. For some this is a "betrayal", they'll happily contribute to an atmosphere that means a family gets shit pushed through the letterbox of their home, and a columnist in a respected paper can applaud it.

But more than ever before I am proud to say "I agree with Nick".

Tuition Fees

Since I am repeatedly in the position of discussing tuition fees on twitter, I thought it helpful to put down my thoughts in one place without the 140 character constraint.

I'm in favour of supporting universities, and students, via general taxation because the benefits of university education are public: they benefit all of us. I, along with many others, benefited directly from a free university education 20 years ago. I, along with other people and companies, currently benefit from university trained lawyers, nurses, doctors, engineers and so forth, regardless of my own education. I believe that the higher education system should be reformed to separate teaching and research, and also that we should consider all post-18 training in the context of any reforms to university education i.e. we should not distinguish between plumbers and physicists - they are equally valuable. As I watched water freely flowing from a burst pipe last winter, I strongly believed the former more valuable than the later.

The Liberal Democrats have been very tied up over tuition fees because they signed a pledge to vote against tuition fees, largely it has been asserted that the pledge on fees indicates that it takes priority over all other manifesto pledges. In retrospect it would have been wise not to make such a pledge which could so easily invite such a distinction. In their defence I think it illustrates that LibDem MPs did not anticipate fully finding themselves in Coalition government, unsurprising given the last 60 years of elections. Nick Clegg did attempt to persuade the party to scrap this pledge towards the end of 2009, which would have been a politically wise move. It's worth noting that the LibDems could fulfil their pledge to the letter if they were in opposition, or in a looser electoral pact, in neither of these cases would they be able to influence the policy of the government so their opposition would be entirely decorative. No doubt many believe that LibDems should have given up Coalition government on this issue, that would have been stupid and pointless.

Politically I believe the appropriate response to not being able to fulfil the pledge is to say that the LibDems are sorry they did not receive a sufficient electoral mandate to enable them to fulfil this pledge and other manifesto pledges in coalition government. I note that more experienced government parties, such as Labour, have found it easy to brazenly ignore their pre-election pledges on tuition fees, twice, without little protest from the Labour dominated National Union of Students.

The discussion on tuition fees is made in a context where, in Liam Byrne's words "there is no money", all of the major Westminster parties proposed to address a large deficit mainly by making cuts to government spending, rather than raising taxation. In light of this, and the Browne report, making a bid for even flat central funding in the higher education sector was always going to be an uphill struggle.

I estimated previously that tuition fees could be replaced by an increase of 2p on basic rate tax, or 8p on higher rate tax and the Greens have proposed 4p on corporation tax to fund higher education. Those are tax increases of 10%, 20% and 15% respectively.  Clearly combinations of these three elements would also work. However, it must be recognised that higher education will always be in competition with other claims on the public purse. If you had £7bn to spend would higher education be your first priority? Or would it be schools, benefits, hospitals or tax cuts?

The scheme proposed by the Coalition does shift paying for university education further from general taxation. However, I believe Vince Cable has done a fair job of adding LibDemery to the Browne report, commissioned by Labour. In particular covering part-time education, capping tuition fees, and attempting to make repayment progressive. The principle difference to a pure graduate tax is that a tuition fee is stated, if not paid up front. A large number of people seem keen to imply that tuition fees will be payable up front, which they are not, and simultaneously claim that poorer students will be put off applying - perhaps because they have been repeatedly told fees will be payable up front.

As for what LibDem MPs should do when presented with the relevant parliamentary bill. It's quite clear that backbench LibDem MPs should abstain, those that vote against are free to do so but should suffer the consequences in terms of party discipline. Government ministers are in a less clear position, the Coalition agreement does allow for them to abstain, however particularly in Vince Cable's case, where he was heavily involved in developing the proposed legislation and feels happy with the results, it seems to me he must vote in favour - anything else just looks strange. There is a logic for all Liberal Democrat government ministers voting for the tuition fee proposals, this would be the case in a simple, one-party majority government.

In a coalition government, the policy of the component parties is not the same thing as the policy of the government. I tentatively believe the LibDems should retain an ambition to fund higher education from general taxation, I struggle to see how this policy will be implemented in the next 10 years but I do not feel this should rule out LibDems holding it as a policy. I believe, in future, the LibDems should avoid, like the plague, making pledges in the form that they made on tuition fees. They should also apply a disclaimer to their manifesto that they will negotiate to implement what they can from the manifesto but only in majority government will they pledge to deliver all policies.

A Coalition candidate for Oldham East and Saddleworth?

Following the news that Phil Woolas has lost his seat of Oldham East and Saddleworth for knowingly lying about his opponent, Graeme Archer has proposed on Conservative Home that the Coalition should put up a joint candidate selected in an open primary. Much as I respect Graeme on this I disagree, although I should point out this is a cautious rather than an emphatic rejection.

The function of a by-election is to selection an MP to represent a constituency in parliament, at a General Election this selection – repeated across the country – amounts to a decision on who should form the government. The General Election this year demonstrated that decision may not be clear.

Speaking from the point of view of a Liberal Democrat, potentially giving up the race in this seat would be damaging – it plays directly to the idea that the Liberal Democrats have been subsumed into the Tories. Should the LibDem candidate win in the Open Primary they would, almost inevitably be seen as the Coalition rather than the LibDem candidate. The great risk that the LibDems face during the Coalition is that as a minority party in a coalition they will be electorally damaged at the next General Election – this is observed in coalitions across Europe.

Successfully contesting a three-way election would illustrate how by-elections under coalition work, something that has been demonstrated already in the Thirsk and Malton by-election held over the summer. Furthermore it would help maintain the separate identity of the Liberal Democrats. I can join the Tory Party whenever I want, but I don’t want to – it is so blinding obvious to party members that the merger of the two parties is undesirable that amongst party members it is not even worth talking about. The public, and commentators need convincing of this.

From the point of view of the Coalition the situation is less clear cut, offering a combined candidate does demonstrate the joint nature of the Coalition, and the opportunity to argue the Coalition’s joint platform. However, at this point in a Government it would be difficult to see the by-election as a true referendum on their joint record, there are better ways of doing this than a by-election in a single constituency under special circumstances.

From a more practical point of view, as Tory Radio points out, it is more than likely that a faction within the losing party of the Open Primary would put up their own candidate.

Rather playfully I will point out to Graeme that the Open Primary followed by election scheme contains elements of an ad hoc election by alternative vote in the sense that there are multiple rounds of voting with candidates dropping out at different stages.

100 days later: A Lib Dem view

I woke this morning to the sound of a bandwagon rolling past, grabbing my keyboard I jumped aboard. It is 100 days since the Coalition formed following the General Election. For people wedded to the decimal system of counting 100 is a nice round number, for programmers of a certain generation 128 is preferable. Perversely the Marquis de Sade chose 120 days, but I can't wait 20 days.

As a member of the Liberal Democrats for 20 years, I thought my opinions on a 100 days of partly Liberal Democrat government might be interesting to at least a few people. You can see my previous political postings here, to get a bit more context.

Things I'm pleased about:
Pupil premium; a rising lower tax threshold; increased capital gains tax; Ken Clarke sounding like a liberal on prison policy, an end to ID cards and over-enthusiastic lawmaking for every occasion; some hope of constitutional reform both in the Lords and for general elections;  no changes to the married tax allowance;

I'm also pleased by the very existence of a coalition government, it seems far more healthy to me that government is composed of members from two parties representing a majority of voters in the country, rather than one party who through a quirk of the electoral system has scraped in with a majority of seats based on a minority of votes. Far better coalition than more opposition where our influence is minimal.

I see my vote as delegating my views to the Liberal Democrats based on their manifesto, if they were in government alone I'd expect them to attempt to implement the entire manifesto (even if I didn't like all of it). In coalition I expect them to negotiate using that manifesto as a basis, the fact that the entire manifesto is not being implemented is a result of them not achieving an overall majority. The inability to implement the entire manifesto is a fact of electoral arithmetic.

Things I'm not so pleased about:
fatuous comparisons of civil servant pay with the Prime Ministers pay; ostentatious "dipping of hands in blood" following the Budget, at times it felt like the only people cabinet ministers defending it were Liberal Democrats; David Laws' rapid exit from government; Trident - I'm not particularly anti-nuclear but now was the perfect time to get shot of a piece of Cold War willy-waving.

As far as the economy is concerned, I believe we'd be in approximately the same place as we are now regardless of which party was in government prior to the election. The logic of this is also that regardless of who would have won the election they would have ended up doing approximately the same thing now (or in the near future): cutting government spending fairly dramatically. Arguments about timing are largely political; economics, it seems to me, is a "science" too imprecise to tell us much about the future and the fervent calls for cuts now, or cuts later are largely political. There is some marginal argument about the scale of the cuts, but given a Labour government we would be facing cuts of broadly the same magnitude.

I suspect there is a lot of departmental spinning going on at the moment: they've been asked to make fairly large cuts and they're leaking the ideas for cuts that they know will be politically the most unpalatable in order to give themselves some leverage for the spending review.

There's much enthusiasm about the LibDem's apparent problems in the polls, however they're generally at levels comparable with the last 10 years or so (see the Guardian Datablog). They are only low if you compare them to the heady heights of the election campaign which were quite evidently wildly inaccurate - the only accurate poll was the exit poll. I suspect a LibDem party in coalition with Labour would find itself in very much the same position.

It's worth highlighting again the inequity of first past the post system: plug the latest opinion poll into the BBC's calculator: (Lab:37% Con: 37% LibDem: 18%) and you get (Lab: 336 Con: 244 LibDem: 42). Labour get a 92 seat advantage over the Tories for an identical percentage of the vote and they get  8 times the number of seats as the Liberal Democrats for twice the vote. The Electoral Reform Society did a report for "Conservative Action for Electoral Reform", on this subject - interesting conclusion is that equalising constituency size doesn't really address the problem.

After the General Election the Liberal Democrats had three options: one it seems was unworkable, one was simply lazy, we chose to do the other thing. The only principle the Liberal Democrats have given up is the principle of not being a party of government.

A brief return to politics - the Budget

Following on from my pre-Budget "Sceptical look at the economy", I thought I'd return to politics and the Budget.

The financial position seems to be largely what was expected before the election and the size of the proposed cuts seems consistent with the scale of cuts in Spain, Greece and Ireland.

What I would have done? I suppose I prevaricated in my last post on what I would have done in the recent Budget. To be a bit more explicit: I would have put probably something like 3p on basic rate tax, lifted the lower threshold of basic rate and brought down the threshold to the higher rate. And looked to cutting something like 15% across government spending with no ring-fencing. I may have put up capital gains tax a bit more at the higher rate and not reduced corporation tax - but to be honest these measures don't bring in much cash anyway. As for benefit cuts, I'd probably have gone for means-testing things such as child benefit, winter fuel allowance and so forth. My impression is this would approximately fill the appropriate gaps (but I haven't done any calculation).

But then nobody voted for me, and the Liberal Democrat experience is if you offer the voting public an increase in income tax they say how great this is, and how they'd really love you to spend the money where you've said you'll spend it, and then vote for someone else who has promised not to raise income tax. Of the national parties the Green Party manifesto was the only one to imply they would not make any cuts, but increase overall taxation to cover the structural deficit; electorally the Green Party didn't do that well in the General Election with about 1.0% of the vote.

As it stands the Budget was somewhat different from my preferred option. There are a few mitigating factors but I'm not convinced that VAT rises are a good way to raise tax (it has been suggested that they are better than income tax rises because they do not fall on essentials and they are "voluntary" to a degree, which income tax rises most definitely are not). It seems rather notable that there was much symbolic "dipping of the hands in the blood" by Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and Vince Cable, you'd have though the Tories would have been a bit more forthcoming about defending a budget in which they were the majority partner and which largely matched their electoral commitments.

The Labour Party has started pointing out that this is a very political Budget, that's true, and so was their idea of defering cuts into next year. For the Opposition this has the positive political benefit of not needing to be clear about what you would do until well after the General Election (and not even then) and allows you free-reign to criticise cuts by the incoming government without proferring an alternative because obviously you'd be doing this next year when things would have become magically better.

I've come to the conclusion that macroeconomics is almost entirely about politics, and the vehemence with which economic opinions are presented leads me to believe that everyone realises they don't actually know what they're talking about and that by shouting loudly they can get away with it. Presumably MP's and ministers feel they have learnt to run the economy through the odd lecture course on the infamous Politics, Philosophy and Economics undergraduate degree course at Oxford. It seems notable that prior to the election the global consensus appears to have been for "economic stimulus" and after it is for "deficit reduction" (with the exception of the US). I'm not clear how this has happened, because I can't believe it's entirely driven by the UK election.

Inferring what the voting public want from elections and opinion polls is always a tricky business but the evidence seems to be they're happy with the Budget and it's pretty much what they expected. I suspect the reason for this is that the majority of them will be in the private sector and over the past few years the companies they work in would have laid people off, been on pay freezes and, over a longer period, treated employees less generously in pension terms but this largely hasn't happened in the public sector. The same opinion poll shows fairly good support for maintaining the state pension whilst "cutting benefits for those of working age". 

The Office of Budget Responsibility is pretty upfront in saying it's estimates for GDP growth are subject to large uncertainty (see p10 of this report, and also Annex A on how figures are derived - hat-tip to Christopher Cook for that). The biggest problem seems to be that recession are utterly unpredictable. I'd be interested to see similar analysis for unemployment figures - can't help thinking they're not going to be good.

My useful pieces of contextual information for the day: UK employed population is about 30million, of which about 5million are in the public sector.

Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government!

I think this will be my final political blog post for a while. I've written quite a few over the past month: I started with an explanation as to why I was a member of the Liberal Democrats here. I hunted out some data on the occupations of MP's and made a graph here (what a lot barristers!). Then I wrote a blog post about the statistical errors in opinion polls, which I think was a little prescient (latest reports suggest that the voters that didn't turn out were predominantly LibDem - hence biasing the pre-election polls). Approaching the finishing line, I wrote a post on my plans to stay up late on election night, followed by a post on my crashing gloom of the night itself. Then I made a post on what it might mean as the negotiations for coalition continued.

This post is about coalition, and a look at the debris of the election. My friends at work from Labour and Conservative tendencies called me a "turncoat weasel" today (in a friendly manner) so I have illustrated this post with a picture I took of a weasel.

First up, my take on the agreement between the Liberal Democrat and Conservative Party: remind me not to negotiate with Nick Clegg for anything, I think he's played a blinder on this one. The agreement contains a mix of LibDem and Tory policies, and five positions in cabinet. It's quite clear that the LibDems are a junior partner, but then that's what you'd expect. I'm also pleased Nick Clegg did what he said he would do before the election: go to the party with the largest electoral mandate in the first instance.

Despite the massive apparent differences on Europe, I suspect it won't be a big problem for the coalition. Liberal Democrats have a principled view that power should dissociate to the appropriate level - some things are best handled at a local level, some at a national level, and some to the European level. My guess is that over the next five years there will not be another major treaty moving power towards Europe, and joining the Euro in the next five years, as we all crawl out of recession, would be unwise as far as anyone is concerned. Perhaps David Cameron will value a coalition partner who has not isolated itself in Europe.

I'm wondering whether the Labour Party are trying to take the mantle of "the nasty party", in the background to David Cameron's speech in Downing Street could be heard a chant of "Tory scum". David Blunkett described Nick Clegg as a harlot, amusing coming from an adulterer. And this morning Nick Cohen, left-wing columnist for the Observer and various other places, tweeted:

Here's my writing sorted out, Will crucify every fucker who voted Lib Dem, one by one, in the national press. Better you had voted Tory.

I suppose I should proviso this last one, on the whole I don't believe a single tweet means national news, perhaps Cohen was joking, perhaps he was tired and emotional. But it picks up the tenor of quite a few of the tweets I've seen from Labour supporters today.

Maybe this is why I'm a natural Liberal Democrat, I feel nothing like a visceral hatred for either of the two other main parties. I believe that people are largely in politics for the right reasons, I may think they are wrong but I don't question their faith in what they believe is for the best. Getting a glimpse of how elections work via twitter, I see just how much work is involved in getting elected as an MP (at least in a contestable seat).

It's tickled my fancy that much of the discussion of the last few days has centred around the percentage share of the vote that a different alliances would get, that's lovely and I agree entirely with that line of argument but your past record: opposing proportional representation, tells me that you're a hypocrite if you raise it just now.

I'm still glad I voted Liberal Democrat, I didn't vote Tory because of the social conservatives, Margaret Thatchers "no such thing as society", Michael Howard's blind faith in market solutions, isolationism in Europe, Peter Lilley and his little list, John Major's denial of support to the Iraq rebels after the first Gulf War and the moves of senior Tories into directorships of companies benefiting from their privatisations. The Tories claim to have changed, perhaps they have, perhaps the LibDems will reinforce that strand.

I hope the move for fair votes takes off, in a sense this is one of the key things I'm after long term in politics. Democracy is important, when I go to the ballot box I want my vote to count just as much as yours. Sorting out the deficit is ephemeral, fair votes will be a lasting legacy.

Perhaps the coalition will fall apart before the end of its term, perhaps the LibDems will suffer for this coalition in the next election (there's some suggestion that this happens to smaller coalition parties). But for the first time in 70 years people who call themselves "liberal" are in government.

May you live in interesting times...

It turns out that a chunk of my audience for my last blog post were my colleagues at work, they thought it a bit of a gloomy rant. These days I'm a bit more perky: in contrast to every election since 1974, this time the Liberal Democrats (my party) have something to be cheery about following the despair of election night! Usually post-election we are most definitely not in government, returning wearily to our constituencies to prepare for more time in opposition. This time it's different!

Watching the comments on twitter as events have unfolded has raised a few questions, and clear misconceptions which I thought might try to address from my point of view as a long (21 years) term party member.

What are the Liberal Democrats?
Some Liberal Democrats were carried over from the old style Liberals, some Liberal Democrats split off from the Labour party as the Social Democrat Party, since 1988 they were simply Liberal Democrats. I've always been a Liberal Democrat but my political origins are probably closer to the soft-right of the Tory party. I've never been tribal Labour (or Tory) for that matter. It's fair to say that the majority of the Liberal Democrats are left of centre, but we're in the party for a reason - we don't want to be in any other party.

What is coalition government?
The way people talk you might get the impression that the Liberal Democrats in coalition would simply be there to prop up their coalition partners. Labour seem to view this almost as a right, that the Liberal Democrats are a little turbocharger for those elections where they didn't quite win in their own right. Consequently they believe that a LibCon coalition would simply prop up a Tory government with a Tory agenda. This misses the point of coalition entirely, why on earth would we sign up to such a deal? The point of coalition is to get at least some of your agenda implemented, if you're not in the governing coalition then none of your agenda is implemented.

Proportional Representation
A lot of the discussion at the moment is around proportional representation, personally I think it should be around the economy first: massive deficits don't get reduced by themselves. I don't intend to discuss proportional representation properly here, but simply highlight three systems:
The pure Alternative Vote system is the one proposed by those that don't actually want proportional representation, it doesn't actually provide a proportional output. The Jenkins Commission, set up by the Labour government following the 1997 election, recommended Alternative Vote plus top up (AV+). In AV+ there are constituency elections with a top-up from party lists that provides proportionality, the benefit here is that there are still relatively small constituencies. The output should be pretty proportional. The Electoral Reform Society prefers Single Transferable Vote, this provides broadly proportional output, but requires the use of large constituencies to work.

Labour and Proportional Representation
Labour's new-found enthusiasm for proportional representation leads to hollow laughter amongst Liberal Democrats. For why? Go have a look at the evolution of the Labour commitment to a referendum. Basically a referendum was promised at the 1997 election, this referendum never happened and although it remained in the manifesto for subsequent elections the commitment became ever weaker. You can see why Liberal Democrats don't trust Labour on proportional representation.

I'd like to present a slightly heretical opinion for a Liberal Democrat: an absence of a commitment for a referendum on proportional representation should not be a deal breaker. My reasoning: I don't believe either Tory or Labour party could currently deliver a majority in parliament for such a referendum. It is possible that a referendum would not require a parliamentary vote, but let's assume it does. A commission on electoral reform means that at least the Tories will have to start thinking about it on their own terms, something they haven't been doing, even if it is a self-evident kick into the long grass. The next time there's a hung parliament we will then have fruitless electoral reform documents from both Labour and Tory parties, but here's the good thing: that means that they can't really ask for another one. Furthermore there appears to be a groundswell of opinion in favour of electoral reform, and I don't think it's party political. Over the coming parliament, and at the next election I really hope this groundswell is directed into contact with politicians, we shouldn't be hearing "This isn't an issue on the doorstep" next time.

Under proportional representation coalition government is likely to become a fact of life so a successful Lib-Con coalition in the absence of a deal on PR would be worth having. I must admit the green shoots of coalition are promising. Rather than a pointless exercise in taking chunks out of each other we are starting to see politicians talk about what they agree on.

In a way we have nothing to lose, what's the worst that can happen? Things fall apart and an election is called where we lose some percentage share of the vote leading to a reduction in seats - unpredictably fewer due to first-past-the-post system. We'd still be an opposition party with little power in parliament, so in a place broadly similar to the one we found ourselves in before this election campaign. What's different now is that there is a broader movement for electoral reform, that may be the thing we won at this election.

In posting this now (5:30pm on Monday 10th May) I am very aware that I may be overtaken by events!

Footnotes

• The Jenkins Commission Report
• Ministry of Justice: Review of Voting Systems: the experience of new voting systems in the United Kingdom since 1997
• Vernon Bogdanor's report on referenda

I was up for Evan Harris

This is a graph that shows you the number of seats (actual seats) each of the three main parties will get*, and the number of seats (proportional seats) they would get under a pure proportional system. You notice for the Labour and Conservative parties the number of seats they actually get is more than the number of seats in proportion to their votes, for the Liberal Democrats the opposite is true and by a very substantial margin.

When Liberal Democrats went into the polling stations yesterday they were given a single polling card, their Labour and Conservative comrades had three. Look them in the eye, ask them:

What is it about you that makes your vote three times more powerful, three times heavier, three times more important than mine?

What is special about you but not about me?

Explain to me how this is fair.

Explain to me how this is democracy.

To put it another way, every Labour or Conservative seat requires about 33,000 votes to win, a Liberal Democrat one requires 100,000 votes. We are the Great Ignored.

We have come to accept this inequity, it's happened in every election since the early 80's. As a country we just accept it as part of the way things are. It's the defining feeling of being a Liberal Democrat, seeing the overall share of our vote creep up election by election and receiving the same feeble, disproportionate harvest in seats. The sinking feeling in the middle of the night that, no, of course there has been no breakthrough. It's not because we perform poorly, it is because we have one polling card each, the others have three.

In 1997 the defining moment was Michael Portillo losing his seat to Stephen Twigg. My defining moment for this election was seeing Evan Harris lose his Oxford West and Abingdon seat. "I was up for Evan Harris", I had a tear in my eye.

Footnote
*This is based on the exit poll (see entry at 23:11), which looks consistent with the results of the actual election as of 10:30am May 7th which are Conservative 291, Labour 247, Liberal Democrat 51 616 of 650 seats declared. Under pure proportionality UKIP would receive 20 seats, the BNP 12.

Why I'm voting Liberal Democrat

In a change from usual service I'm writing a political blog post, to cut to the chase: Vote Liberal Democrat! This post tries to explain why.

I've been a member of the Liberal Democrats since I was an undergraduate at Bristol University, 20 years ago. As a student I attended a party conference, did a bit of canvassing and I was also a "teller" a couple of times. Since then I've been in cover, very deep cover, I pay my monthly membership and a bit extra at election time and that's pretty much the limit of my activism.

As a casual Liberal Democrat I don't keep a close eye on party policy, essentially I rely on them being my sort of people and doing the right thing, it's with some relief I can report that I agree entirely with Nick Clegg in his interview with The Observer this week. The whole interview is well worth a read, but I'll pick up on one point: there's a real value in a hung (or balanced) parliament with no party in overall control. Reducing the national debt will be a priority for any incoming government, this is likely to be at least a bit painful and I think it's very obvious this is better done with a government that holds representatives from more than the 40% or less of the popular vote that a majority government is likely to get.  Many other issues will be with us for years to come: care for the elderly, climate change, pensions, the shape of our democratic systems. The solutions that politicians come up with should be robust, and have cross-party support, on recent evidence they need to work on this cooperative aspect of politics. Across the world and the UK, in devolved government and European elections we use a form of proportional representation, the sky has not fallen in. I'm fed up with the "smack of firm government" that first-past-the-post gives us.

The expenses scandal has had a big impact on politics in the last year, the Liberal Democrats came out well on this with relatively few outrageous claims and a very definite plan on how to address the problem which unfortunately was not picked up by the other parties. MPs had an expenses system which begged to be abused, I'm sure that with the same system at the place I work we would see a similar range of behaviour.

I've written in the past about the science policies of the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative parties based around a debate organised by the Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK. In summary, science has done fairly well by Labour over the last 13 years, with a noticeable wobble at the end over the science advisers, particularly on drugs advice. The Tories seem rather uncommitted to science, and look like they would do no better over science advisers. In the Liberal Democrats we have a champion in the form of Dr Evan Harris, who I really wish was my MP. He has done sterling work on the Science and Technology Select Committee, as well as campaigning on libel reform.

I vote in the City of Chester constituency, pragmatically there is absolutely no point in me turning out to vote. It will have no effect on the outcome, come May 7th not one particle of an MP in parliament after will have my electoral support.

Often party X will tell Liberal Democrats to vote for them to prevent party Y getting in, my response is in the form of an analogy: if I want chocolate cake for pudding the offer of an apple or a plate of cheese and biscuits will not satisfy, and may cause offence and derision. Vote for chocolate cake, vote Liberal Democrat!