Welcome to the twentieth and last (phew!) in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
Traditionally the transport sections of party manifestos contain commitments to various expensive, long-term public expenditure projects. In the current financial climate it is no surprise that the coalition agreement’s transport section is rather heavy on matters of regulation and bureaucracy and rather light on directly spending money to improve transport.
So we have a promise to “make Network Rail more accountable to its customers”, a commitment to “fair pricing for rail travel”, a …
Welcome to the nineteenth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
Although when talking about other parts of the agreement I’ve sometimes being quite critical about the parking of issues with commissions or reviews, the commission on long-term care is a good move. It has a clear remit, has to report within a year and tackles an area which requires policies that have a chance of long term cross-party agreement given the nature of the subject. The failure of cross-party talks prior to the election means the …
Welcome to the eighteenth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
At the time David Cameron started talking about the Big Society, the concept struck me as a mix of traditional community politics and vagueness. Looking at the specifics in this section, there is still a fair amount of vagueness, but the specifics are ones that often touch on themes which our party (or more precisely the Liberal Party) has talked about in the past and rather neglected in more recent years. In other words, it’s …
Welcome to the seventeenth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
The public health section is very brief and rather anomalous as a section on its own, though given the length of the NHS section splitting this area off makes some sense. There is little of surprise in what there is of this section – public health is important (gosh), it should be improved (shock) and the government will be ambitious (crikey). Innovation is also good (well I never).
The details do however give a flavour of …
Welcome to the sixteenth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
The political reform section of the coalition document is the second longest in the whole agreement, beaten for length only by the NHS section. By now the headlines from this section are very familiar:
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Welcome to the fifteenth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
The story of this section in a nutshell is “short term good news, long term uncertainty”. In the short term pensions will get a good deal: “We will restore the earnings link for the basic state pension from April 2011, with a ‘triple guarantee’ that pensions are raised by the higher of earnings, prices of 2.5%”. This is a more generous deal, and sooner, than Labour proposed in their manifesto.
There is also a promise to …
Welcome to the fourteenth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
The national security section is brief, outlining the creation of a National Security Council, the commencement of a defence review and a promise to “deny public funds to any group that has recently espoused or incited violence or hatred. We will proscribe such organisations”. The pledge on deportation is carefully balanced: “Britain should be able to deport foreign nationals who threaten our security to countries where there are verifiable guarantees that they will not be …
Welcome to the thirteenth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
The jobs and welfare section of the coalition agreement is one of the least important – not because the policy area doesn’t matter (it certainly does) but because it says very little beyond, “we want to make the welfare system better”. Quite what better means and whether it can really be done is all down to how Iain Duncan Smith in particular does his job, the choices he makes and the degree to which pensions …
Welcome to the twelfth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
International development has been one of the totemic policy areas which David Cameron chose to show how he was changing the party. As a result, just as a promise to increase spending on the NHS was used to argue that the party was changing in its attitude to public services, so too a commitment to increase spending on international aid was used to argue that the party was leaving behind its ‘nasty party’ roots.
Whatever …
Welcome to the eleventh in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
Unlike the nearly all of the rest of the document, both of these sections lift very heavily from Conservative Party policy, with little of the Liberal Democrat manifesto featuring. However, whilst in the immigration section that means policies which will leave many Liberal Democrats uncomfortable, in the government transparency section this is good news – for truth be told, the Conservative manifesto was rather better than the Liberal Democrat manifesto in this regard.
Our manifesto …
Welcome to the tenth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
If you have been following this series of posts, you’ll be familiar by now with the mix of statements in the families and children section: a strong showing of Liberal Democrat policies, some amenable Conservative policies and then a couple of tricky points.
So we have policies which would happily fit in a Liberal Democrat manifesto such as maintaining “the goal of ending child poverty in the UK by 2020″, supporting “the provision of free …
Welcome to the ninth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
The equalities section continues a theme common throughout the coalition document: if this section was presented to Liberal Democrat conference as the party’s policy in this area, people would be generally pretty happy with it. It doesn’t include everything the party wants, but that is balanced out by it being a list of policies which the government is actually going to put into practice rather than being just a policy motion wish list. Added …
Welcome to the eight in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
Despite the importance of rural constituencies to the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary ranks, DEFRA (Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs) is one of the few government departments with no Liberal Democrat ministers. That makes the wording of the coalition agreement on policy in this area particularly important.
In content it is very similar to the energy and climate change section; that is, a long list of Liberal Democrat policies, with some amenable Conservative ones added …
Welcome to the seventh in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
The ultra-quick summary of this section: a long list of Liberal Democrat policies – and then a bit about nuclear.
The longer version is that however questionable the Conservative Party’s commitment to green issues looked at times before polling day (particularly when Conservative Party conference was expressing its opposition to green taxes), out of the negotiations has come a firm commitment from the Conservatives to back a long, long list of green measures. Many of …
Welcome to the sixth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
Despite the importance of the two areas, these are two of the shortest sections in the agreement, reflecting how there are a small number of dominating issues.
For defence there is the Trident compromise – it will be replaced unless there is a better value for money alternative. What the wording leaves unclear is the extent to which any alternative has to meet Trident like-for-like in terms of destructive power and constant instant availability. Whether …
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