Author Archives: Carl Cashman

Without fail at every council meeting, well, at every opportunity they can, my local Labour Party will bring up the Coalition.

They wheel out the same line, each and every time. For them it’s entirely the Lib Dems fault that austerity happened, even more than that each of our members bear a personal burden for cuts made. But they will gladly sidestep the impact of Labour Mayor Joe Anderson – whose legacy is alleged corruption, poor governance, wasted millions and Tory commissioners we’ve just gotten shot off.

Now let me get this out of the way – I’m not an apologist for the coalition, it got some things right, but it got a lot of things wrong. The most lasting damage is that the coalition broke the trust that voters had in the Liberal Democrats, and we’ve lost our status as the non-establishment party, the Greens are mopping up that vote in many of the urban cities in England. We must work on that as a priority.

At my last council meeting, we moved my group’s motion on scrapping the two-child benefit cap.  I was on the end of a condescending lecture from the Deputy Leader about “political choice”, she was referencing the coalition. But I fired back on this because, let’s be honest, now that the Labour Party are in Government they are going to learn a lot about “political choices”.

What was their first political choice? To keep the two-child benefit cap, a decision that Newham Labour Councillor Joshua Garfield celebrated as “Country before Party”. The most bizarre thing is that the King’s speech isn’t a binding commitment anyway – the Conservatives have demonstrated that multiple times – it’s simply an indication of a government’s aims for that coming parliament.