The Spring Conference of Liberal Youth was held in the lovely city of Leeds, thanks to a successful bid submitted by our branch, Leeds Liberal Youth. I have to admit, I was a Conference virgin, having not been to either a Liberal Youth nor a Federal Conference before (rather stupidly electing not to go to the 2011 Conference in Sheffield). But, with a Conference taking place in my proverbial back yard, I felt I was obligated to go. That, and I was part of the host.
Lib Dems
Lords reform and constitutionality
Some amusing news from the ermine chamber this week: 76% of peers, including 54% Lib Dem peers, would see reform of the House of Lords unconstitutional. The first thing is that the number of Lib Dem objectors, including Lord Steel, is depressingly too high: Lords reform has been Liberal and Liberal Democratic party policy since before proportional representation was added. The second thing is that this is complete bollocks.
My friend over at Legal Fiction has posted, from a legal standpoint, why this is not the case: most importantly, the use of the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 to override the Lords with the Hunting with Dogs Act (2004) was seen as constitutional by the Law Lords. That, and Parliament has the right to pass nearly anything it wishes (with the exception of laws that violate treaty agreements). But there is a societal aspect too.
What next for the coalition?
Well, Thursday was an absolute disaster. Losing a third of our councillors and the AV referendum 62-38. So where did we go so wrong?
The meltdown was inevitable. It’s pretty much a “midterm effect”: after a realigning election, the new government suddenly becomes a lot more unpopular because they can’t sweep away the cobwebs they said they’d get rid of. This happened to the American Democratic Party in 1994 and 2010, but not to the Republicans in 2002: because 2000 was a steady hand-over instead of the landslides of ’92 and ’08. A new liberal force in politics was bound to be unpopular once it started to govern: some promises have to be broken, after all, if you need to govern properly.
The deficit and all that.
(Note, January 2013: This post was written when I was more naive to economic circumstances. It is best read in a perspective from before the cuts starting. It is kept in the purposes of transparency and does not accurately reflect my current thoughts on the matter.)
Belt up, this is going to be a big one.
So yeah. That march a couple of weeks ago. At a generous estimate, 400,000 marched against the government’s spending cuts. And while I sympathise with them, I also think that it was just a waste of time due to how it ended up.
Boundary Review
The Electoral Commission has outlined rough plans on where the reduction of MPs from 650 to 600. As expected, traditional Labour strongholds will lose seats. But is it “gerrymandering”, as Labour have alleged?
Not exactly. It’s an undeniable fact that the current system, as is, is horribly skewed towards Labour. The 2005 election, for example, gave Labour 90 more seats than the Tories in England, despite losing by 0.3%. Labour also enjoy their concentrated support in inner-city areas, which allows them to win a lot of urban seats (and the reverse for the Conservatives, in business districts and rural areas). This creates a squeeze on smaller parties with even support, such as the Liberal Democrats, but also the Greens and UKIP.
Why does the skew exist? Well, there’s several reasons for this happening:
A customary Mark Twain reference.
Damn you, Mark Cole, for doing the title I wanted to do first. Even so, I was up tonight waiting for the by-election result with bated breath… and we lost by 3,000 votes. It’s actually not bad, if you think about it. The Lib Dems are riding on 8-10% in the daily YouGov polls, but we still make a decent showing at the first major poll, to the point our share in the vote rises just ever so slightly. Tim Farron was right to call this a “score draw”.
Because, really, Debbie Abrahams didn’t win because she was a good candidate. She isn’t. Colne Valley, depending on the time of the week, is the next constituency over from me, and she didn’t really have a support base; indeed, I saw more support for the Lib Dem candidate (which was dwarfed by the support for the Conservative candidate and eventual winner Jason McCartney). She also fantastically crashed on polling day taking a Labour seat into third (although, admittedly, Colne Valley is a three-way marginal).
Betrayal or pragmatism?
One criticism I often come across when talking about politics, and/or the Liberal Democrats, is that Nick Clegg supposedly “betrayed his principles for a shot at power”. I’ve come across that exact line several times. But was it really a betrayal? I don’t think so. Of course, the Liberal Democrats in the Conservative-led coalition are proposing policies that they probably wouldn’t do in a Labour-led coalition, and are having to alter their policies on things like tuition fees. Even so, coalition with the Conservatives was pretty much inevitable come 10:02pm on 6th May.
e-Petitions: bad for democracy?
So, the Coalition have announced the return of the e-Petitions system previously in effect under Blair and Brown, with one clear change: petitions will be more readily be debated by Parliament. This is touted as a welcome change, where very few, if any, petitions under Labour actually changed government policy. The most notable one that did was a 2-million strong petition against the proposed system of road pricing in 2007, where Blair changed from “we support this” to “we still support it but we admit we’re not going to enforce it”. But with any sort of public consultation like this, it often falls by the wayside because of people being just uninformed on issues, such as a 250,000-strong petition to oppose a supposed “mega-mosque” in the London Borough of Newham that hadn’t even been proposed. And then there are the silly ones, like a 50,000-strong petition to make Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson the Prime Minister. Under the proposed rules, Parliament would probably have been forced to debate the latter two with a hard and fast rule of 100,000-supporters-means-debate-in-Parliament, wasting time that should’ve been spent passing actual laws.
Labour and Tuition Fees: An Addendum
Today’s the day that MPs will vote on whether to raise the cap on tuition fees. And, as they have been doing since Browne was published, Labour are currently digging into the Lib Dems for not caving into them breaking the NUS pledge. Including Tom Harris, MP for Glasgow South, who as you may recall, voted for the HEA2004, to which I challenged him on Twitter:
Labour and Tuition Fees
I’ve been tempted to blog for some time about things but haven’t quite got around to it. But Harriet Harman’s comments at PMQs last night really ired me for some reason. I’m a paid-up member of the Liberal Democrats, and a student, but I’m not going to leave the party on the issue of tuition fees. There has been a lot of misinformation about the tuition fee debate, most of it from Labourites (still) trying to besmirch Clegg for caving in to the wrong party (but that’s for another post), or from people who believe the first set of people while not verifying for themselves.