Author Archives: Lord William Wallace

Lord William Wallace

Europe or USA: do we now have to choose?

By Lord William Wallace | Fri 22nd November 2024 - 9:59 am

The UK’s image of its place in the world since the Second World War has rested on the claim to act as the ‘Atlantic bridge’, as Tony Blair used to put it.  We were the USA’s closest ally within Europe, and one of the major players, alongside France and Germany, within Europe.  The end of the Cold War weakened that claim, as American attention turned towards the Pacific.  Brexit weakened it a great deal further.  But now Trump Republicans and their British supporters are insisting that we have to choose: follow America, or slide back towards Europe.

The Times on November 16th headlined the statement by Stephen Moore, advising Trump at his Florida base, that ‘Britain must decide – do you want to go towards the European socialist model or do you want to go towards the US free market?’  If the latter, then a free trade agreement would be available to avoid the tariff war Trump is threatening to engage in with the EU and others; if not, no deal.  This wasn’t a surprise; Daniel Hannan had an Op-ed in the Mail three days before, making the case for Britain accepting a trade deal with the USA and the extra-territorial regulations (on food additives and hygiene, etc.) that would go with it rather than moving closer to the EU Single Market.  There are even reports that some in the Trump camp want to extend the North American Free Trade Area to Australia and the UK, to form an Anglo-Saxon grouping (with Mexico as an anomaly) under American leadership.

Brexit was never really about re-establishing British sovereignty.  For romantics like Hannan about the superiority of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ and the ‘special relationship’ which was thought to offer Britain continuing global status it was about following the USA and accepting its economic and social model rather than what was seen to be the European alternative – yielding sovereignty to the USA rather than sharing sovereignty with our European neighbours.  Boris Johnson’s Churchill fixation pushed him towards the idea that Britain and America were and remain ‘special’ partners.  Nigel Farage is an even stronger advocate of Anglo-Saxon solidarity – assuming that the USA will continue to be run by Republican Administrations promoting free markets and a shrunken state.

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Lord William Wallace

Defending Liberalism in a Trumpian world

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 6th November 2024 - 6:36 pm

World politics is going to be rough in the next few years – and British politics will be increasingly difficult, too.  Trump’s victory means that the USA’s role in global affairs will be highly unpredictable.  But we can predict that American influence will not be constructive on a range of global issues, from combatting climate change to managing the world economy and containing conflicts, and is unlikely to be affected by consideration for British or European concerns.  So how do we respond?

Ed Davey’s first response to Trump’s victory was spot on.  We need to defend and promote liberal values and prioritise rebuilding closer relations with our European neighbours.  Neither of those are easy.  Illiberal movements are gaining ground in many democratic countries, including within the EU.  Liberal democracy gains most support when economies are growing, societies are stable and international relations are peaceful.  Even without the added complications of an incoherent and unfriendly US Administration, the challenges of preventing catastrophic climate change, of coping with the mass movement of people that climate change and regional conflicts are already driving, of moving towards a sustainable global economy and resisting Chinese and Russian expansionism would be hard to manage – and harder to persuade the British electorate to share the cost.

There will no doubt be a flood of analyses of why a majority of American voters supported Trump.  But discontent at the economic and social disruption of their lives, and disillusion with the ‘elites’ who – as they see it – allowed disruptive change to sweep from outside through their communities, were major factors.  Those discontents are widespread in Britain as well.  The ‘left behind’ in northern and coastal towns feel similarly abandoned by educated elites and multinational corporations.  You Gov tracker polls show that the answer to the question ‘Are members of Parliament in touch with the public or not?’ has consistently shown around 70% answering ‘out of touch’ and 10-12% ‘in touch’ over the past five years.  Those in the Brexit Referendum who were saying ‘I want my country back’ were expressing a similar sense of loss to Trump supporters who want to ‘Make America Great Again.’

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Lord William Wallace

Are we ready for US election chaos, or for President Trump?

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 23rd October 2024 - 2:22 pm

Liberal Democrats will be hoping that the nightmare of the US presidential campaign will be over on November 5th, with a clear win for Kamala Harris, accepted by Donald Trump, leading Republicans and state and federal courts.  But at present that looks the least likely outcome.  More likely by far will be either a contested result, after chaotic events during the voting and state counts, or a narrow Trump victory with chaotic consequences for US politics and foreign policy.  Either will have major implications for British politics and foreign policy.

The continuing rumble of opinion polls suggests a virtual tie between Harris and Trump, with the outcome dependent on who turns out among the small minority of undecideds.  Challenges to names on voting registers are under way in several states.  Counting may well be disrupted; there were some assaults on election counts four years ago, and the atmosphere has become more fraught since then.  Republican local organisations are ready to use the courts to challenge any contestable declaration or hint of malpractice.  We may not be sure who has won for some time.  And the consequences of a Trump win are as uncertain as the candidate’s utterances have become.  So how should we react to what will be an assault on the principles of liberal democracy and on the transatlantic partnership which has been at the core of the UK’s position in the world since 1941?   

One Liberal Democratic theme, I suggest, must be to remind disillusioned citizens in this country of the importance of constitutional institutions and limited government, and the dangers of sliding down the road towards populist rule.  Britain has just emerged from several years of chaotic government, with a populist prime minister attempting to prevent Parliament from returning from a recess when he had been in office himself for only s few months.  We have witnessed right-wing attacks on our supreme court, an Elections Act that lifted constraints on political donations and restricted the autonomy of the Electoral Commission, and Conservative ministers supporting conspiracy theories about ‘liberal elites’.  We now have a Labour government which has won the most disproportional parliamentary majority since 1832: 63.4% of MPs from 33.7% of the votes cast, on a worryingly low turnout of 58%.  Public trust in ‘Westminster politics’ has sunk to the lowest recorded point since opinion surveys began.  The potential for an anti-democratic backlash, if this government fails to improve both economic growth and public services, is high.

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Lord William Wallace

Defending Liberalism against illiberalism

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 11th September 2024 - 2:30 pm

Liberals are naturally optimistic and reasonable.  We recognise the past struggles to establish open, tolerant societies, the rule of law and accountable government, but too easily assume that those battles have been won.  In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the most optimistic Liberals thought we were entering a post-conflict liberal world.

It’s now clear that the principles of a liberal political and economic order have to be defended against multiple threats.  Our society has become far more socially liberal than our grandparents; but not all are persuaded, and illiberal groups within Britain and outside are doing their best to reverse what has been won.  Our economy is deeply integrated into a global economy which is unstable, grossly unequal and environmentally unsustainable.  Corruption and crime are embedded in the global economy, and spill over into the UK; we have seen some painful examples of domestic corruption in recent years.  Political liberalism – liberal democracy – is on the defensive, across Europe and Asia, within the USA and within Britain itself.

Behind our immediate relief at the disappearance of populist Conservative government, British politics is in a volatile state.  Popular alienation from Westminster is at the highest level yet recorded in surveys.  Local democracy has been shrunk and weakened through successive reorganisations, increasing central control and reductions in funding.  The Labour government has won a massive parliamentary majority on 33.7% of the popular vote, with under 60% of voters turning out – and with efficient targeting by all parties leaving many constituencies without any visible local campaign.  There are now 10 groups in the Commons with 4 or more MPs; yet Labour and the Tories are still acting as if Britain has a two-party system.  It’s possible that the next election will see right-wing reaction against Labour constitute a major political force. Reform won 14% in July from almost a standing start.

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Lord William Wallace

We should be setting the agenda, not following it

By Lord William Wallace | Mon 2nd September 2024 - 1:45 pm

After such a successful national election campaign, led by a coherent leadership team, I hesitate to disagree with Mark Pack’s August Report (LibDem Voice August 20th) on ‘the New Political Landscape’. But I don’t agree that in the first year after a decisive election our party’s campaign themes should be driven primarily by what the polls tell us about public priorities and what voters want to hear. Political parties should aim to set the agenda when they can, not simply respond to existing public anxieties.

A political party has to appeal to three different audiences: to the wider public, directly on the doorstep, through leaflets and postings, and indirectly through the access we hope to gain via the respect of professionals in the media; to the small proportion of UK citizens actively interested in political issues, who we hope will be persuaded to join us and contribute actively (and financially) to our campaigns; and to the even smaller group of commentators on politics in written, broadcast and social media, who summarise and interpret partisan politics to the wider public.

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Lord William Wallace

What’s our line on public spending?

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 14th August 2024 - 11:55 am

What should be our overall party line on taxation and public spending? We have a new government that came into office promising not to raise any of the major revenue-raising taxes. It claims that it has now discovered far larger holes in public spending plans than it had expected. The reality is that the Conservatives and their media allies managed to focus attention in the run-up to the election entirely on the level of taxation, without addressing what that implied for public services and long-term investment.

So Labour are now stuck. They knew well before the election (as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and even the business pages of the Times were telling them) that government spending projections were unreal, that maintaining Tory plans would necessitate cuts in core programmes, and that Jeremy Hunt’s reductions in national insurance were almost criminally irresponsible. But they didn’t dare to be honest with the voters, for fear of the Tories branding them as a ‘tax and spend’ party.

We have been here before. Tony Blair similarly promised before the 1997 election not to raise overall rates of tax. We Liberal Democrats were braver, promising ‘a penny on income tax’ to raise the quality of education. I was then chairing our manifesto group, and vividly recall a Labour adviser telling me that we were mad to do so; ‘voters will never support a party that talks about raising taxes.’ But voters don’t want to vote for cuts in schools, health services, police numbers, courts and prisons either. It turned out to be the most distinctive theme of our campaign.

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Lord William Wallace

What our new MPs bring to the political debate

By Lord William Wallace | Mon 5th August 2024 - 11:35 am

Liberal Democrats who are frustrated at the modest media impact of our 72 MPs in the first month since their triumphant election should remember how long it takes to recruit new staff, discover the intricacies of parliamentary life and the surrounding media, put their diverse skills to effective use, and decide which specific issues they are going to make their own. In the last Parliament our 11 MPs had to cover the full range of issues thrown at them, with a skeleton supporting staff, with each by-election winner making a welcome difference to the load. When our Lords group met together with our new MPs, Ed Davey generously thanked us for the policy support and advice we had provided (with our larger numbers, though very limited staff) in combatting Tory legislation in the past 3 Parliaments. A much larger Commons Party, with significantly-increased staff both in MPs’ office and attached to the Whips’ Office, will transform our capabilities.

Few of us will yet have discovered the wealth of experience and expertise our new MPs bring to their new, fulltime, responsibilities (I’m still discovering constituencies that I didn’t realise we’d won…). Clearing some papers today, I discovered a memo on the government’s data strategy that Tim Clement Jones and I had written four years ago with a Liberal Democrat expert called David Chadwick – and realised that I’ve already met our new MP for Brecon and Radnor, and that he’s an established expert in a delicate field of public policy. A rapid look through our MPs’ short biographies shows a wealth of local Council experience, with all that provides for grappling with issues of social care, public services, environment and housing. I see that Gideon Amos, our Taunton MP, is also an architect and town planner by profession.

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Lord William Wallace

English Devolution, or local democracy?

By Lord William Wallace | Thu 25th July 2024 - 6:26 pm

Labour promised as it came into government that it would bring in a ‘Take Back Control’ Bill to return power from Whitehall and Westminster to local communities across England.  If it actually moves in that direction, it will deserve heartfelt support from Liberal Democrats.  But the indications of what is intended provided in the King’s Speech debate and the accompanying Briefing Note are not encouraging.

The English Devolution Bill, we are told, defines local leaders as mayors of Combined and Combined County Authorities.  ‘Mayors are critical to delivering economic growth and will be vital partners’ with central government.  The Bill will put ‘a more ambitious standardised devolution framework into legislation’, modelled on the devolution deals negotiated with existing metro mayors in Manchester, Birmingham and elsewhere.  And ‘the Government will establish a new council of the nations and regions’, in which ‘the mayors of combined authorities’ will represent English interests.

‘New powers for mayoral combined authorities’ may be a step forward from micro-management of regional and local government from the Treasury and other Whitehall Departments.  But it’s not democratic local government as Liberals understand it, nor would it provide the regional counterweight to London which we have long called for.  Labour appear to be following their Conservative predecessors in wanting to replace democratic local government, within reach of the people whom it serves, with strong mayors with limited democratic scrutiny while in office who will carry out centrally-funded strategies within tight national guidelines.

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Lord William Wallace

Didn’t we have a good national campaign!

By Lord William Wallace | Sat 6th July 2024 - 12:17 pm

Few of us dreamed that we could come out of this election campaign with over 70 seats.  The willingness of Liberal Democrats across the country to travel to target seats, the high quality of the local campaign organisation when we got there, determined efforts to raise more money than most local campaigns have ever thought of before, all helped to maximise our gains.  But we must also give full credit to the high quality and sustained consistency of the national campaign.

I expect that many Liberal Democrats – naturally argumentative, with strong opinions of our own – have had their doubts about aspects of our national strategy over the past year or more: a focus on sewage and water pollution rather than Europe or Liberal values, a ruthless approach to target seat selection and to the demands placed upon them, stunts and photo-opportunities that attracted attention but didn’t seem sufficiently serious. 

Well, the results have justified the hard discipline our central organisation imposed.  Concentrated campaigning harvested tactical votes and used our limited funds effectively.  Ed Davey’s standing in the polls rose as Sunak’s fell; he was seen to be the most human and approachable of the three main party leaders.  And as to sewage: the issue of water pollution ‘cut through’, as the phrase goes, to a point where much of the Thames Valley has turned orange.

Liberal Democrats outside London may grasp only with difficulty how much smaller our professional staff is than those who have thronged Conservative and Labour headquarters in their hundreds: extensive media and digital teams, multiple fundraisers, ranks of policy advisers, organisers for national and local campaigns.  Our headquarters has unavoidably remained small, within our limited budget – with its staff probably paid a good deal less than elsewhere, and helped by volunteers.  I think I have had half our media team in my Lords office once or twice – and it’s not a large office!  

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Lord William Wallace

Look after your candidate

By Lord William Wallace | Tue 25th June 2024 - 10:50 am

This is a long campaign, with more than another week to go. We’re no doubt all getting a bit tired, but keyed up by the feeling that things are going very well in our target seats, and that Ed Davey is coming across as the most human and likeable of the contending leaders. But don’t forget the strain that an election places on parliamentary candidates. All of us need to care for our candidates, make sure that they eat regularly and sleep enough, are supported by others when campaigning – and thanked and cherished when the campaign ends.

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Lord William Wallace

William Wallace writes.. .Tax Cuts versus Public Investment and Services

By Lord William Wallace | Fri 14th June 2024 - 9:38 am

The Conservative Manifesto confirms that they have dug in on tax cuts as their core offer to the voting public.  They know that this is an illusion, on which they would not be able to deliver if they won.  Opinion polls show that most of the public don’t think it’s realistic.  An IPSOS poll in early June found 68% of the public describing public services as ‘underfunded’ – confirming similar responses in multiple polls over the past year. 

Labour have been so frightened of the Daily Mail that they have committed themselves to holding almost all major sources of revenue to current levels.  They promise instead to fund increased spending out of future growth – a dubious prospect when UK growth is currently minimal and the global economy is being hit by wars in Ukraine and Israel and by the threat of a China/US trade war.  This has made the campaign so far surreal, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies (and the Institute of Government, and BBC Verify) pointing out the widening gap between promise and necessity, and with both major parties refusing to engage on where future cuts must fall.  Happily our manifesto has focussed on fair tax rather than low tax, and received compliments from the business pages for daring to do so.

Any of you who may be going to meetings with Tory candidates in the next three weeks can have a field day over the gap between rhetoric and reality.   Sunak’s party have promised to raise defence spending by 0.5% of GDP, and attacked Labour for its more cautious half promise.  Given the re-emergence of Russian threats to Europe and the current weakness of UK armed forces, such an increase is irresistible. So ask the Tory candidate what other budgets they will cut to fund this significant increase?  Education, when teachers are leaving in increasing numbers, universities in danger of bankruptcy, and apprenticeships less than half of what our economy needs?  Justice and prisons, which are already buckling from court delays, prison overcrowding, and probation understaffing?  Local government, where budgets have been squeezed to the point where key services are disappearing?  Or maybe the NHS, of all things?

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Lord William Wallace

Campaigning – and thinking about what we are campaigning for

By Lord William Wallace | Thu 6th June 2024 - 10:04 am

Most readers of LibDem Voice, now that the election campaign is under way, will be opening its messages as they come in from leaflet delivering or canvassing.  So far the weather has been good, and there’s been real advantage where we’ve managed to be the first on the doorstep to voters disillusioned with politics and parties.  In spite of the growth of social media and the internet, face-to-face discussion remains key to winning  voters’ support.

Voters are much less willing to come out to public meetings than they were a generation ago.  In the 1979 campaign, when I was mainly working on policy in Liberal HQ, I spent a long weekend driving from village to village in the Skipton constituency, as the warm-up speaker to usefully large groups of people gathered in village halls to hear Claire Brooks, the candidate, when she arrived; as you can imagine, she got later and later as the evenings went on.  Now contact has to be doorstepping, or electronic, or by phone, or by personalised leaflets wherever possible.  Helen and I have just finished hand-addressing our first chunk of envelopes for a target seat. Like other older readers (no doubt), I’ve been banned from the frenetic leaflet-delivery and canvassing that used to mark my campaign participation; now I’m a backroom helper.

It’s a characteristic of the Liberal Democrats that everyone mucks in on tasks like this.  I recall folding leaflets with 8 others round a large dining room table in Sheffield a campaign or two ago, and reflecting that everyone at the table had at least a doctorate, including the lady in a headscarf who had collected me from the station.  Yesterday we were writing with a committee member of the National Liberal Club, and someone who explained ‘I’m not actually a Liberal member; I’m a tactical voter.’  We also serve, who only sit round and fold leaflets or write blue envelopes.

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Lord William Wallace

Parliament’s second chamber – and the weakness of its first

By Lord William Wallace | Fri 26th April 2024 - 9:46 am

The House of Lords is indefensible in its current form of appointment patronage and bloated size.  Yet the failure of the Commons to check the way the executive governs or to ensure that Bills presented don’t become law until that make sense has made the current Lords, flawed as it is, essential to British democracy.  Yes, that’s deeply paradoxical: an appointed chamber standing up for democracy against ‘the elected House’.

We’ve just seen with the Rwanda Bill the Commons voting repeatedly to allow the government to declare that Rwanda ‘is a safe county’ without reference to evidence or changing circumstances.  Cross-benchers in the Lords, led by retired judges and distinguished lawyers, insisted that it is an offense against the rule of law to legislate that what we say is true whatever the evidence suggests.  On Monday the Lords, reluctantly, backed down, after sustained cross-party cooperation in resisting in which Liberal Democrats had played an active part.  30-40 Conservative peers had refused, in the more loosely-whipped Lords, to vote against amendments to what they accepted was an unworkable Bill.  But after the longest series of ‘ping pong’ exchanges that Parliament has seen for many years both crossbenchers and Labour accepted that the government had to prevail, and Liberal Democrats could do no more..

Parliamentary democracy is supposed to be about representative institutions (and courts) carefully limiting the power of the executive.  But the Commons provide almost no effective checks on executive power, as opposed to the theatre of staged confrontation that is Prime Minister’s Questions and major debates.  The size of the government payroll has steadily increased over recent decades.  Junior ministers have spread, moving from one post to another before they’ve finished learning their brief, to a point where most Lords ministers are now unpaid – since there’s a statutory limit on paid ministerial posts.  Parliamentary private secretaries were limited to senior Cabinet minister 50 years ago; they’ve proliferated, attracting ambitious MPs who hope that loyalty will bring promotion.  Trade envoys, deputy chairmen of the party, ‘tsars’ with allocated tasks, all subject to dismissal if they disobey the whip.  The Labour opposition maintains a shadow team almost as large, which means that in total almost a third of the Commons behave like front-benchers rather than concentrating on holding the government to account.

Worse than this, the government whips have adopted the practice of blocking MPs who are expert but potentially independent-minded from appointment to Bill committees.  The result is that government bills sail through the Commons at speed, often unamended and as often with significant sections unexamined due to ‘guillotines’ on time allocated.

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Lord William Wallace

Are we part of ‘the Deep State’?

By Lord William Wallace | Tue 23rd April 2024 - 10:00 am

If you have been reading reviews of Liz Truss’s self-justifying new book, you’ll know that she was defeated as Prime Minister by the sinister forces of the bureaucratic deep state. Michael Gove has for years called the same phenomenon ‘the blob’.  Others on the populist and irrational right call this ‘the liberal conspiracy.’  In the House of Lords some weeks ago, Peter Lilley began to attack the ‘liberal conspiracy’ that was preventing honest Conservatives from following ‘the will of the people’, and became almost incoherent when our benches began to laugh.  He clearly believes that these conspiratorial forces are real, and powerful.  How many of those in the Telegraph and Mail and on social media who write profusely about this actually believe in what they allege, as opposed to using it as a convenient way to attack ‘the Guardianistas’ and the reasoned consensus, is hard to tell.  But there’s no doubt that the message does convince some of its listeners that democratic institutions are biased against them, and that only their populist heroes can represent the pure people against the corrupt establishment – to which you and I all, according to them, belong.

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Lord William Wallace

It can only get nastier until the election

By Lord William Wallace | Fri 12th April 2024 - 5:26 pm

It’s not surprising that polls suggest that many young people in the UK now despair about democratic politics. The partisan Westminster debate has become more and more negative. Prime Minister’s Questions have been getting worse week by week, throwing insults across the floor.  The Conservative Party has run out of positive themes to appeal to the public, and is falling back on attempts to discredit all of its opponents.  The right-wing media are in full hysterical mode, while conspiracy theories, culture wars and ideas about ‘Christian nationalism’ flow from across the Atlantic along with American finance to support Tory factions and think tanks.  And the Labour leadership is sufficiently intimidated by the right-wing media that it is responding cautiously and nervously – as are we.

I am as frustrated as other party members by the apparent timidity of both Labour and our own party leadership in the face of this right-wing onslaught.  But I’m also painfully aware of the ruthlessness and effectiveness of media monstering, and the closeness of the alliance between Conservative HQ and the right-wing media.  As soon as the Post Office scandal hit the headlines, CCHQ set out to pin the responsibility on others.  The Mail responded by going for Ed Davey, supported (of course) by the Telegraph and GB News – with the Standard giving him a frontpage monstering a few days later.  If he’d apologised immediately that would have fed the attacks and maintained the front-page coverage.  There’s nothing fair about tabloid press campaigns.

Conservative researchers have combed through cases Keir Starmer had any involvement with as Director of Public Prosecutions, hoping to find some dirt to throw – so far without much success.  So their press attack dogs are doing their best with Angela Rayner’s council house sale.   The Mail has given this front-page treatment several times in the past fortnight.  It’s an indication of what the Conservatives get away with that the allegations on Rayner taking advantage of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right-to-buy’ on her council house came from Lord Ashcroft, who has avoided paying infinitely larger sums in tax through offshore havens like Belize.

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Lord William Wallace

Which dangers to democracy threaten most?

By Lord William Wallace | Tue 12th March 2024 - 9:54 am

‘Democracy’, Boris Johnson wrote in his weekly Daily Mail; column on March 8th, ‘is always more fragile than you think.’   But what are the most direct threats to British democracy which we face at present?

For the Prime Minister, Michael Gove, many other Conservatives and the right-wing press, the most urgent threats come from Islamist terrorism and disorder on the streets.  Pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London may have been non-violent but are seen to be intimidating; climate-change activists have blocked streets, and put banners on the Prime Minister’s constituency home.  Gove will be issuing a new definition of extremism later this week, which is expected to focus on Muslim organizations and direct-action groups for ecological issues; how far it will also flag up right-wing extremists remains contested within the government and the right-wing media.

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Lord William Wallace

Following the ‘five families’ of the Conservative Right

By Lord William Wallace | Sun 21st January 2024 - 8:40 am

As the Tories continue to tear themselves apart, have you checked whether any of your local Conservative MPs belong to any of the factions of the Tory Right, scheming and plotting so actively that moderate Tories have dubbed them after the mafia families of southern Italy?

 There’s no point in putting on leaflets that many Tory MPs have lost touch with reality.  But it’s very useful to do some quick research on which groups particular Tories belong to, what they stand for (and against), and what they’ve said about key issues.  Even the right-wing press has concluded that that ‘plenty on the government benches are living in a dream world’, as Harry Cole commented in the Sun.  The Times parliamentary sketch on a December Commons debate Rwanda protested that ‘many of the contributions to the debate were fantastically unhinged.’  Peter Lilley, a member of the ‘Common Sense Group’, insisted in the Lords the other week that Britain is being run, and ruined, by a liberal conspiracy of which our party – together with the BBC, the universities, lefty lawyers and the like – is an active component.  He believes that passionately; he shouted it across the chamber at us.

The European Research Group is the oldest of these factions: the Brexit dinosaurs, still fighting to cut further links to Europe.  Mark Francois is now its chair, Jacob Rees Mogg, Steve Baker and Suella Braverman having gone into (and out of) government. Francois was nicknamed ‘Corporal Francois’ when a junior defence minister; it was not meant kindly.  Since the Referendum the ERG has campaigned for the hardest possible Brexit. Nine of the 40+ MP subscribers to its shared research team were appointed to Liz Truss’s Cabinet. Six were retained in Sunak’s Cabinet, although Braverman has since resigned; Chris Heaton-Harris, who opposed the Northern Ireland Protocol, now struggles as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to reconcile conflicting pressures.  The group condemns ‘foreign courts’, and demands that we leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Northern Research Group – deliberately modelled on the ERG, with funds for research support – is larger, and has the most practical agenda: to strengthen the voice of the large number of northern MPs in the southern-dominated Tory Party, and in particular to support Boris Johnson’s Levelling-Up promises.  Jake Berry, MP for Rossendale, was its chair and driving force until briefly made a minister in Liz Truss’s government, when John Stevenson, MP for Carlisle, became chair.  54 MPs signed a letter in support of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ in 2021. But its influence has shrunk; Levelling Up was never funded, northern infrastructure continues to deteriorate, the Conservative Government is still run from southern England.

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Lord William Wallace

William Wallace writes: Why we should be wary of Lib-Labbery

By Lord William Wallace | Thu 4th January 2024 - 10:30 am

Labour strategists are warning their party not to take it for granted that they will sweep into power in the coming general election with a large majority.  They point to earlier campaigns, in the UK and elsewhere, during which substantial initial poll leads have evaporated, to leave either no overall majority or even a surprise victory for the incumbent government.  It looks extremely unlikely that the Conservatives can recover that far; but it may be wise to reflect on the possible implications of Labour failing to win a comfortable majority.

Many of us, while desperately anxious to see the back of this dying and faction-ridden Tory government, will nevertheless lack confidence that a majority Labour government would offer sufficient political and economic change.  But we also need to be cautious and suspicious about how Labour would behave if it were to emerge without a clear Commons majority.

Those of us with long memories recall how difficult and frustrating cooperation with Labour has proved on previous occasions when they have needed third-party support.  When Harold Wilson won a bare majority in 1964, Jo Grimond – committed to ‘the realignment of the Left’ and to reasoned cooperation between politicians of goodwill – offered support.  Wilson responded warmly when opinion polls looked bad for Labour in the Spring of 1965.  When they turned back in Labour’s favour that summer, he ridiculed the Liberals in his speech to Labour’s conference, and went on to secure a clear majority of MPs in the 1966 election.

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Lord William Wallace

Economic dishonesty, political irrationality

By Lord William Wallace | Sun 3rd December 2023 - 12:15 pm

Ahead of the Autumn Statement the Financial Times quoted former Chancellor Philip Hammond as saying: ‘the politician who is honest about the situation probably gets voted out.’ Jeremy Hunt was less dishonest than the irrational right-wingers on the benches behind him who called for substantial tax cuts, but he gestured towards them in the ‘cuts’ he offered, his reiteration that ‘Britain is a low tax country’ and his claim that cuts in taxes (and therefore in public investment and services) is the surest path to economic recovery.

There’s a remarkably wide gap between our partisan debate and what expert economists and think tanks (apart from the Tufton Street standard-bearers of economic liberalism) are saying about the UK’s economic and political priorities. The Institute for Government Public Service ‘Tracker’ for 2023, just published, states bleakly that we risk spiralling down a ‘doom loop’ of cuts, unable to reverse ‘the consequences of successive governments’ short-term policy making, with decades of under-investment in capital having a serious impact on the productivity of public services… and many services are experiencing a full-blown workforce crisis.’ The Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation have pointed out that Hunt’s future ‘headroom’ on which he rests his case for some tax cuts now implies future cuts in public services that no government would be likely to approve. On the business pages CEOs insist that an increase in public investment is needed before businesses will increase their domestic investment rate: the private sector needs better public infrastructure to invest, particularly in our poorer regions.

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Lord William Wallace

Don’t call it proportional representation

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 25th October 2023 - 2:02 pm

Most Liberal Democrats care passionately about electoral reform.  Most voters don’t begin to understand what it’s all about.  So how do we catch their attention, let alone their support?

Let me make some suggestions about how to gain public attention.  First, don’t talk about ‘proportional representation’ or ‘electoral reform’.  Say ‘fair votes’, and ‘a more democratic system’.  If we mention the choice between STV (the Single Transferable Vote) and the Additional Member System (AMS) eyes will glaze over.  Tell them that Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic use more democratic systems.  The choice for fairer voting lies between the Irish and the Scottish systems; both are already in use and easy to understand.  Putting it this way makes it harder for Conservatives to argue, as ministers did when removing the Supplementary Vote system for electing mayors in the Elections Act in 2022 that even that half-baked form of the Alternative Vote (proportional when there is only one person to be elected) was ’too complicated for voters to understand’.  If Scots, Irish and Welsh voters can manage this, it’s absurd to argue that English voters can’t.

Second, link it to the broader issues of Westminster’s toxic culture and popular disillusion with the style of our national politics.  Both Sunak and Starmer attacked the close world of the UK’s over-centralised Westminster politics in their conference speeches this year – though neither suggested they were going to do anything much to change it. Ask your Tory and Labour counterparts if they are happy about the way Westminster has worked in recent Parliaments (Sunak said it’s been awful for 30 years) and how they propose to improve the way government and Parliament operate.  Changing the way politicians are recruited and elected is central to opening Westminster up.

Third, recognise that changing the way our political leaders are recruited is only a part of the reforms that are needed to open up UK democracy and regain public trust.  Tighter controls on party finance, loosening the government’s control of parliamentary business, reinvigorating local democratic authorities, reconstituting the second chamber, would all contribute to transforming British government and politics for the better.  The strongest case for electoral reform is as part of a broader programme of constitutional reform, not as a project on its own – as it was presented in the Alternative Vote Referendum in 2012.  Not all of those changes can be introduced within a short timescale, of course, nor without carrying a disengaged public with them.  If we want electoral reform to last longer than the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act has done (enacted in 2011, repealed in 2022), we need to build a groundswell of public support.

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Lord William Wallace

William Wallace writes: Making the case for Constitutional Reform

By Lord William Wallace | Thu 12th October 2023 - 9:44 am

Rishi Sunak has told the Conservative Party conference that British politics are ‘broken.’  That will make it more difficult for his party to resist changes in the way we do politics – constitutional reform, as we nerds put it.

It was the Conservatives that broke British politics, of course – or rather, populists inside and outside the party, cheered on by right-wing media (and American and Russian encouragement and funding) that swept aside established conventions on political behaviour and governmental restraint.  A major new report on political reform, jointly published by the Institute for Government and the Bennett Institute for Public Policy in Cambridge, notes the breakdown of constraints on executive behaviour, attacks on judges and the rule of law, attempts to bypass parliamentary scrutiny and the steady erosion of local government that has characterised the past eight years.

Four prime ministers since 2015, seven chancellors of the exchequer, nine secretaries of state for education – constant ministerial churn, changes in policy announced without much preparation or consultation and then reversed by the minister’s successor.  This single-party government has given Britain an object lesson in incompetent government.

The Conservative conference demonstrated how ungovernable the Conservative Party has become.  Liz Truss peddled her free market nonsense to a packed fringe meeting.  Ministers attacked policies that no-one had yet put forward. Danny Kruger, representing the American-influenced evangelical right wing, channelled conspiracy theories about the threat that climate change efforts were intended to bring ‘world government’.   Nigel Farage swanned round the conference, wearing his GB News pass: not a delegate, but a highly visible presence, benefitting like other right-wing populists from generous GB News funding.

Keir Starmer in his Labour conference speech almost echoed the prime minister.  ‘Our politics feels broken’, he declared; ‘we must win the war against the hoarders in Westminster, give power back and put communities in control.’  But beyond a reference to strengthening local government, he has said nothing specific about political reform beyond making it clear that he is opposed to changing the voting system.  He gives every impression that he intends to govern within the same centralised, executive-dominated structure the Conservatives have used and abused, with only minor adjustments to improve relations with the UK’s three devolved governments.

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Lord William Wallace

How rotten is our democracy?

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 13th September 2023 - 11:49 am

This is the question Isabel Hardman poses at the beginning of her review of Chris Bryant’s new book, Code of Conduct: why we need to fix Parliament – and how to do it.  Hardman’s own book, Why we get the Wrong Politicians (first published in 2018 and updated for a paperback edition in 2022) had already covered much of the same ground – on the ‘toxic culture’ of Westminster politics, the power of the whips over individual MPs, the neglect of parliamentary scrutiny of government legislation and decisions in favour of efforts to become ministers, and above all the strains on personal relations and family life.

Bryant – chair of the Commons Committees on Standards and Privileges until this month – writes in an easy, personal style, but his underlying anger at the corruption and the toxic culture of Westminster politics is evident.  He starts with the Commons’ handling of Owen Paterson’s censure for ‘paid advocacy’ for companies which were paying him more than £100,000 a year. 250 MPs voted to reject the Standards Committee recommendations, with support from Johnson as prime minister and Rees-Mogg as leader of the House.  ‘I felt that Parliament itself was on trial’ in that vote.

In the context of historical comparisons with past parliamentary scandals, he concludes that ‘this is indeed the worst Parliament in our history.  More than twenty MPs have been suspended or have left under a cloud.  Rules have been flouted… Ministers have lied and refused to correct the record…’  There is ‘a widespread sense that politicians believe the rules don’t apply to them.’

He sees ‘something rotten’ in the structure of the Westminster system, with far more ministers than in comparable democracies, dependent on prime ministerial patronage.  Unchecked prime ministerial power allows corruption to spread through PPI contracts, through the allocation of levelling-up funds and through the appointment of friends to paid public offices.  He details the lies Boris Johnson as PM made to Parliament, the bullying habits of government whips, the conflicts of interest that arise through moves from ministerial office to private directorships and consultancies.  He reports the massive outside earnings that former ministers and PMs make – noting that in the first three months of 2023 Johnson registered £3,287,293 in outside earnings.

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Lord William Wallace

William Wallace writes: How rotten is our democracy?

By Lord William Wallace | Thu 7th September 2023 - 9:05 am

This is the question Isabel Hardman poses at the beginning of her review of Chris Bryant’s new book, Code of Conduct: why we need to fix Parliament – and how to do it.  Hardman’s own book, Why we get the Wrong Politicians (first published in 2018 and updated for a paperback edition in 2022) had already covered much of the same ground – on the ‘toxic culture’ of Westminster politics, the power of the whips over individual MPs, the neglect of parliamentary scrutiny of government legislation and decisions in favour of efforts to become ministers, and above all the strains on personal relations and family life.

Bryant – chair of the Commons Committees on Standards and Privileges until this month – writes in an easy, personal style, but his underlying anger at the corruption and the toxic culture of Westminster politics is evident.  He starts with the Commons’ handling of Owen Paterson’s censure for ‘paid advocacy’ for companies which were paying him more than £100,000 a year. 250 MPs voted to reject the Standards Committee recommendations, with support from Johnson as prime minister and Rees-Mogg as leader of the House.  ‘I felt that Parliament itself was on trial’ in that vote.

In the context of historical comparisons with past parliamentary scandals, he concludes that

This is indeed the worst Parliament in our history.  More than twenty MPs have been suspended or have left under a cloud.  Rules have been flouted… Ministers have lied and refused to correct the record…’  There is ‘a widespread sense that politicians believe the rules don’t apply to them.

He sees ‘something rotten’ in the structure of the Westminster system, with far more ministers than in comparable democracies, dependent on prime ministerial patronage.  Unchecked prime ministerial power allows corruption to spread through PPI contracts, through the allocation of levelling-up funds and through the appointment of friends to paid public offices.  He details the lies Boris Johnson as PM made to Parliament, the bullying habits of government whips, the conflicts of interest that arise through moves from ministerial office to private directorships and consultancies.  He reports the massive outside earnings that former ministers and PMs make – noting that in the first three months of 2023 Johnson registered £3,287,293 in outside earnings.

His remedies come close to Liberal Democrat policy.  ‘We need to look at the underlying structural problem in our British way of doing politics…the “Winner Takes All” system is at the core of our problems.’  Our voting system, combined with the government’s control of parliamentary business, leaves limits on executive authority dependent on the self-constraint of ministers – and that has broken down in the past seven years. ‘Parliament needs to rediscover its backbone and reassert its freedom.  Good government and better decisions depend on the proper exercise of power.’

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Lord William Wallace

William Wallace writes: Michael Steed, his Liberal history

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 6th September 2023 - 6:58 am

Liberal Democrats in Kent, Yorkshire and Manchester in particular will remember Michael Steed as a candidate, councillor, and activist on many issues over more than 60 years.  Others will recall him as party president in 1978-9, as a regular attender of party conferences in spite of being wheel-chair bound by a neurological disease that resisted precise diagnosis, and latterly as an active member of the Liberal History Group and of its journal’s editorial board.

Michael grew up on a farm in Kent, went to a local independent school, and took six months before he went to Cambridge University in 1959 to work on the continent, coming back a convinced European and internationalist. After narrowly losing election to the presidency of the university Liberal Club he became president of the Union of Liberal Students (then a separate organization from the Young Liberals).  There he cultivated closer links with ‘the World Federation of Liberal and Radical Youth’ and its Swedish president, Margareta Holmstedt.  They married some years later, and set up home in Todmorden.

He was, however, always as much of a scholar as a campaigner.  He was a student of David Butler at Nuffield College Oxford from 1963-65 (alongside Alan Beith), and then for many years a lecturer in government at Manchester University.  As a student he already demonstrated an astonishingly detailed knowledge of parliamentary and local government elections.  He contributed the statistical appendix to the Nuffield election studies through many elections, in later ones in cooperation with John Curtice.  Teaching about the British constitution and commitment to political and electoral reform linked his professional and political lives.

Michael was on the radical wing of the 1960 Young Liberals, becoming vice-chair of NLYL’. He campaigned on apartheid in South Africa, on gay rights and on joining the European Community. He fought his first parliamentary campaign in the Brierly Hill by-election in 1967, gaining less than 8% of the vote. From his study of constituency histories and results he then decided that Truro was one of the most promising prospects, and travelled down to fight it in the 1970 election – disappointingly coming third.  He came closest to entering Parliament in the bitter Manchester Exchange by-election in 1973 – a safe Labour seat, almost entirely council housing, where Labour reacted furiously to what councillors saw as a Liberal ‘invasion’, in the wake of by-election wins elsewhere.  After an enthusiastic campaign in a seat that had had no Liberal activity (and which Labour had taken for granted) he gained 36.5% of the vote.  Typically, he afterwards wrote an academic article which noted that the real winner had been the 56% who had not voted.

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Lord William Wallace

Taxing and Spending

By Lord William Wallace | Thu 3rd August 2023 - 11:58 am

It’s astonishing that leading Conservatives are still getting away with calls for tax cuts before the coming election without any challenge as to where they will cut spending to pay for them.  Our economy is flat-lining, our public debt rising, our population ageing, our young children smaller than their counterparts across the Channel, our schools and health services losing workers to higher-paid jobs – and yet serious Conservatives think we should cut taxes and spend less?

Paul Johnson’s just-published Follow the Money: how much does Britain cost? is a clearly-written guide to Britain’s dilemmas on public spending, and the failures to invest sufficiently in public infrastructure and services in recent decades. He’s been director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (a body respected by all except supporters of Liz Truss’s economic strategy) for many years, and before then served in several government departments, so he knows what he’s talking about.

He sets out how progressive cuts in defence spending since the end of the Cold War in 1989-90 have funded rises in welfare spending.  Without going into details on the defence budget, he underlines that defence spending is more likely to rise than fall further: the Ukraine conflict has shown has stretched the UK’s stores of equipment and ammunition have become.  He doesn’t remark that rising North Sea oil revenues in the early 1990s (and the one-off gains from privatization) allowed Margaret Thatcher to cut taxes without deep cuts in services – though in retrospect she would have been wiser to accumulate oil revenues in a sovereign wealth fund, like Norway, or allocate them to improving the UK’s infrastructure.

North Sea oil revenues are now running down; and privatization has long since run its course.  So any government is faced with hard choices, about the level and distribution of taxation and about priorities in public spending.  ‘There are no easy solutions to the problems we face.  Tax cuts do not pay for themselves.  Debt cannot rise forever.  Spending implies taxing.  Economic constraints are real.’  (Tell that to Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.)

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Lord William Wallace

Why we should defend the BBC

By Lord William Wallace | Sat 29th July 2023 - 9:18 am

The ‘Huw Edwards affair’ has been another round in the long-running Murdoch press campaign against the BBC.  The exact details behind the charges against him as published in the Sun remain unclear; the Sun has now retreated from its initial story, and the police have said that there is nothing to justify pressing charges.  The Times fired off shots in support, listing the highest salaries of BBC presenters with a disapproving commentary – not noting the remarkably high fees that Talk News, owned by the Murdoch press and promoted ad nausea in the pages of the Times, pays to right-wing MPs and chat-show hosts for doing a few hours’ work a week.  Other papers have hinted at the not so defensible private behaviour of Dan Wootton, a former Sun journalist now with GB News and Mail Online, on which the Murdoch press has remained silent.

 The BBC attempts to hold together debates within the British national community.  The Murdoch press, from its first incursion into British media nearly 50 years ago, ha been a disrupter and divider.  Rupert Murdoch has also seen himself as a political player, expecting political leaders in Australia, Britain and the USA to court him for his support – or, at least, to moderate his opposition.  Tony Blair travelled to Australia to meet him; Keir Starmer has reportedly met him twice this year.  The aggressive style of the Murdoch media has made British politics more raucous.  But it’s in the USA, without a well-funded public broadcasting network, that it has had the deepest impact.  Fox News has given voice and encouragement to the populist right, to climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists and closet racists, preparing the ground for Donald Trump to make a successful run for the Presidency while dismissing as ‘fake news’ the evidence-based policies he was rubbishing.

While all active and fit Liberal Democrats were out delivering leaflets or knocking on doors in Somerton and Frome the BBC showed its quality in the underlying message of the opening concert of the summer Proms.  Dalia Stasevska, Finnish but born in Kyiv, conducted a concert of mainly Nordic patriotic music, Sibelius and Grieg, as well as a new commission from a Ukrainian composer.  It carried a strong implicit message of British solidarity with Ukraine and of the links we have with countries on Russia’s western border.

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Lord William Wallace

Young Liberals, youthful radicalism: remembering Peter Hellyer

By Lord William Wallace | Sat 8th July 2023 - 1:00 pm

For most current members of the Liberal Democrats, the tensions within the Liberal Party in the late 1960s and the different ways we responded to the student revolts of 1968, the Vietnam War, the apartheid regime in South Africa and the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which ended in the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, are all ancient history.  For those of us who were Young Liberals then, however, this is a key part of what shaped our approach to politics.  A phone call last week from Hisham Hellyer to tell me that his father Peter had …

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Lord William Wallace

What’s our line on the Charles Line?

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 14th June 2023 - 12:16 pm

Few Liberal Democrats in England’s south-east will be aware of the depths of resentment in the north at the long-term imbalance between infrastructure around London and in and around the cities of northern England.  I’ve lived both in Yorkshire and London for the past 40 years, moving to work in London while staying engaged in politics in the north.  My own resentment has grown, as the last Labour government cancelled the metro tram schemes planned for Leeds and Liverpool and the trans-Pennine link remained as slow and unreliable as when I had first travelled on it in 1967, while the work on the Elizabeth Line was sustained and has now transformed transport connections across the Home Counties.

Boris Johnson’s expansive rhetoric on ‘Levelling Up’ briefly raised expectations that at last government would invest in revitalising the north.  Realization that ‘levelling up’ has in practice meant only small pots of money for tarting up high streets and restoring local buildings has deepened cynicism about London’s neglect of the former industrial north.  So the conference in Doncaster last Friday of the Conservative Parliamentary Party’s ‘Northern Research Group’ was worth noting.  Johnson’s easy promises helped the party to win all those ‘red wall’ seats.  If voters now feel betrayed, the Conservatives will lose them all again.

George Osborne, a powerful proponent a decade ago of the idea of a ‘Northern Powerhouse’ recanted his commitment to austerity, which had led to cancellation of the eastern leg of the HS2 rail line and a determined Treasury resistance to a new line across the Pennines between Leeds and Manchester.  He noted that the Treasury had wanted to cancel the Elizabeth Line on several occasions, that it had taken over 30 years from proposal to completion, but that the outcome is proving transformative for the already-prosperous London region.  Conventional cost-benefit analysis has not taken into account the transformative effects of new rail links across the north.  Bits of electrified line, localised improvements of junctions, have left the journey from Liverpool to Leeds, Hull and Newcastle far slower and awkward than between Reading and East London.  

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Lord William Wallace

 Why Westminster desperately needs reform

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 31st May 2023 - 9:38 am

 Target seat parliamentary candidates don’t have much time to read books.  But they ought to find time at some point before the election to read How Westminster Works…and Why it Doesn’t, by Ian Dunt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2023), to warn them how dysfunctional they will find Britain’s Parliament and government have become,

Some Liberal Democrats will be familiar with Ian Dunt from his previous book, How to be a Liberal, which came out in 2020.  His analysis of Westminster, based on extensive research and interviews with current and former parliamentarians, staff, civil servants and outside observers, is devastating.  Parliamentary sovereignty, he argues, is a convenient myth that covers executive dominance – which has become more dominant in recent years, above all under Boris Johnson’s prime ministership.

Political reform is not an issue that excites most voters.  Dunt attempts to explain how repeated failures in policy outcomes are affected by the constant changes in ministerial posts, the weakness of parliamentary scrutiny, the adversarial culture of the Commons and the increasing control by central party machines of the recruitment of candidates who are assisted into safe seats.  He includes two case studies to illustrate how policy disasters emerge out of the concentration of power in too few, often poorly-qualified, hands: Chris Grayling’s privatisation of the probation service, pushed through against strong advice from experts, and the evacuation of British and local Afghan staff from Afghanistan, by a Foreign Office which had run down its relevant expertise and ministers who only paid intermittent attention to its urgency.

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Lord William Wallace

The Coronation as a symbol of national community

By Lord William Wallace | Fri 5th May 2023 - 11:40 am

History and ritual are much closer concerns for Conservatives than for Liberals.  Faith, for many Liberals (and Socialists) is a positive turn-off.  So the Coronation will leave many of our active supporters cold.  But it shouldn’t.

Shared memories, myths and rituals construct a national community and hold it together. Shatter them, and the community falls apart.  Politicians try to reinterpret them to support the messages they prefer – which is why arguments about history are contested so vigorously, and why we should engage actively in debates about history and national identity.  The argument about Brexit was partly about whether we see ourselves as a European country, one among several European states with shared histories, or as an exceptional (and Anglo-Saxon) state with a global reach and a moral mission.

I have a particular perspective on all this.  I became a chorister at Westminster Abbey in 1950, when Britain was still the centre of an empire, believing itself to be a Great Power in spite of acute economic difficulties.  I sang at George VI’s lying-in-state and at the Coronation in 1953.  And I’ve remained involved in the Abbey since then, observing how ceremonial and ritual is carefully adapted to our changing national community.

In 1953 deference and social hierarchy were central. 1000 peers and peeresses filled the transepts. Dignitaries from ‘our’ dominions and colonies sat in the stalls below the choir gallery.  Apart from the Queen herself, the ceremony was conducted entirely by men (white men, of course).  The only non-Anglican minister of religion involved was the Moderator of the Church of Scotland; the Cardinal Archbishop sat in a gallery outside to observe the procession.

On the 50th Anniversary of the Coronation, the Cardinal Archbishop read the first lesson, while representatives of nonconformist churches sat behind him in the Sanctuary and leaders of ‘Britain’s other faiths’ sat in front.  The 60th anniversary service included a procession representing public service from across our national community.  Scouts and Guides, petty officers and NCOs were in the front; I walked in the back row, in peers’ robe, with a high court judge.  Just in front of us, in her reflective yellow jacket, was a school crossing keeper.  And it was her photo that was splashed across the papers the next day – a familiar figure with whom those watching could identify.

A great deal of care has gone into the symbolism of this Coronation, to show an image of Britain that relates to the diverse community we now are as well as to the traditions on which our state is based.  Some older people will think that the changes have gone too far.  Many younger people may think the whole thing is an echo of a past we should forget. The politics of striking a balance between continuity and change – a central issue in any democracy – are never easy.

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