Tag Archives: coalition agreement

The coalition agreement: public health and schools

By Mark Pack | Published 4th June 2010 - 12:40 pm

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 …

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The coalition agreement: political reform

By Mark Pack | Published 3rd June 2010 - 12:25 pm

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:

  • Fixed-term Parliaments
  • A referendum on the alternative vote
  • The ability for voters to force an MP to face a special by-election if they have been found guilty of serious wrongdoing (“recall”)
  • A “wholly or mainly” elected House of Lords, using proportional representation
  • Any petition that gets

…

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The coalition agreement: pensions and older people

By Mark Pack | Published 2nd June 2010 - 5:45 pm

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 …

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The coalition agreement: national security and the NHS

By Mark Pack | Published 2nd June 2010 - 10:20 am

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 …

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The coalition agreement: jobs & welfare and justice

By Mark Pack | Published 1st June 2010 - 12:20 pm

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 …

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The coalition agreement: international development

By Mark Pack | Published 31st May 2010 - 3:20 pm

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 …

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The coalition agreement: government transparency and immigration

By Mark Pack | Published 31st May 2010 - 10:20 am

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 …

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The coalition agreement: families & children and foreign affairs

By Mark Pack | Published 30th May 2010 - 6:20 pm

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 …

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The coalition agreement: equalities and Europe

By Mark Pack | Published 28th May 2010 - 10:20 am

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 …

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The coalition agreement: environment, food and rural affairs

By Mark Pack | Published 27th May 2010 - 7:01 pm

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 …

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The coalition agreement: energy and climate change

By Mark Pack | Published 27th May 2010 - 12:45 pm

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 …

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The coalition agreement: defence and deficit reduction

By Mark Pack | Published 26th May 2010 - 4:45 pm

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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The coalition agreement: culture, Olympics, media and sport

By Mark Pack | Published 26th May 2010 - 12:20 pm

Welcome to the fifth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.

It’s rather a mouthful of a title for this section, but it reflects the diverse remit of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Almost inevitably it is made up of a disparate shopping list of policies without any clear thread running through them.

The list includes the not exactly controversial (Make a success of the Olympics! Make a success of other sports events! Try to get more sports events!) through supporting the status quo …

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The coalition agreement: consumers and crime

By Mark Pack | Published 25th May 2010 - 3:31 pm

Welcome to the fourth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.

A brief section on consumer protection offers a handful of positive policies – such as strong consumer protection, more pressure on credit card companies to keep their customers fully informed and clearer food labelling – which could have featured in any party’s manifesto. There is also the well meaning but fantastically vague promise to “take forward measures to enhance customer service in the private and public sectors”. Make of that what you will…

The crime …

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The coalition agreement: communities and local government

By Mark Pack | Published 25th May 2010 - 10:20 am

Welcome to the third in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.

Traditionally Liberal Democrats and Conservatives have far from seen eye to eye over local government with devolving liberals and centralising conservatives taking fundamentally different approaches. However, this policy area offers a classic example of Cameron’s move to take his party towards a liberal centre-ground creating some genuine overlap in outlook where very little existed before. Large parts of the Conservative Party’s general election manifesto on devolving power could have been taken from previous Liberal …

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