The media hysteria over the Lib Dems abandoning their pledge to scrap tuition fees is both baffling and concerning. After all Vince Cable’s comments that “the road to Westminster is covered with the skid marks of political parties changing direction" is absolutely true. Here is a list of Labour’s post election U-turns in the last parliament alone.
Before the election, Nick Clegg outlined the four cornerstones of the Liberal Democrat manifesto. Let’s see how they have done.
1. Fairer taxes for all (Pledged to raise the rate at which people start paying tax to. £10,000)
The tax allowance has already been increased by over a thousand pounds and is committed to incrementally reaching £10,000.
Not a bad start.
2. A fair start for children
Clegg announced last week the government will be providing 15 hours a week of free pre-school education a for two-year-olds and introducing a pupil premium to increase funding to disadvantaged children.
That’s two for two.
3. Fair, transparent and local government
Well, plenty to be ironed out there, but plans to be able to recall MPs and a referendum on electoral reform seem to be going ahead.
4. A Fair and sustainable economy
Probably a swing and a miss on this account – but it has only been 5 months! This is probably the weakest and least concrete of the four key pledges anyway. It would be hard to make a case that they have failed or succeeded on this, even in the long run.
So all in all, three out of the four key election pledges have been acted on already. Not bad for a party with 57 MPs.
In reality the Lib Dem’s have been able to wield an extraordinary amount of power and leverage for such a small party. In years past people have often said that voting Lib Dem was a waste of a vote even if you agreed with their policies because they would never be enacted anyway. This parliament has proved this conventional wisdom wrong.
The most infuriating thing is the apparent inability of any Lib Dem’s to make this point to a general public unable to grasp the nature of coalition government and cabinet collective responsibility.
Additional: Admittedly pupil premiums and some elements of constitutional reform were in Conservative manifesto, but they were stolen from Lib Dems and pupil premium especially would probably have come under pressure as the scale of the cuts departments needed became clear.
ReplyDelete