Author Archives: Mark Corner

Mark Corner

Ed Davey’s bold step

By Mark Corner | Fri 19th June 2026 - 11:58 am

Ed Davey’s call for Labour to drop its ‘torpor and timidity’ and rejoin the single market is welcome and shows the EU’s one consistent supporter in UK politics, the Lib Dems (and the Liberals before them).

The first thing to say is that his statement puts paid to all those ideas about Lib Dems having no policies (beyond mending the local church roof, of course) while other parties at least make it clear where they stand. Really? Is that how Starmer’s Labour Party behaves? Ed Davey is right to say that the Labour Party’s talk of a ‘reset’ just seems like a more polite ‘No’ than the Conservatives managed. But rejoining the single market is clear.

Secondly, rejoining the single market is not rejoining the EU. It was one of the options – often it was called the ‘Norway option’ – that was considered after the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016. The referendum never mentioned what arrangement with the EU the UK should adopt after leaving – that was part of the mess Farage left us with.

Norway was one of the countries that had a referendum on entering the EEC (as it was then) in 1973, alongside Denmark and Ireland. The UK entered without a referendum but then in 1975 voted in a referendum to stay in. But Norway voted in 1973 not to join the EU. Their reasons had a lot to do with concerns about the Common Agricultural Policy and (perhaps more important) Common Fisheries Policy – they have 2,000 miles of coastline to protect. These are probably the two policies that the UK had the most concerns about during its time inside the EU, and they don’t apply to Norway as a member of the EEA (European Economic Area). Agriculture and fisheries are completely excluded from the core EEA agreement. Because Norway is a single market member through the EEA, its farmers and fishermen remain outside of both EU policies. The UK can do the same thing if it rejoins the single market as a member of the EEA.

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Mark Corner

Why community politics matters

By Mark Corner | Thu 4th June 2026 - 2:54 pm

There have been a number of articles in Lib Dem Voice about what the Lib Dems stand for. Tom Gordon MP asked this in what was partly a reflection on the recent local elections in the UK, and others like Peter Black have followed it up. But such discussions too often turn into a wish list of policies people would like the Lib Dems to support or perhaps campaign on harder. What the Lib Dems stand for is best seen in terms of a more general approach to politics, though it does have implications for policies.

In an earlier piece for Lib Dem Voice I referred to Ed Davey’s speech to the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference in March 2023, when he declared that ‘community politics is something our party is built on. It is what sets us apart from other parties.’ The leader talked of candidates being ‘connected to the communities they represent’, ‘hearing their concerns on the doorstep’ (as opposed to making cold calls on a phone) and of ‘first winning their trust – and then ultimately their votes.’

This way of identifying a distinctive Lib Dem approach to politics is often misrepresented as a mere fixation with ‘trivial’ local issues, rather than facing the ‘important’ issues that matter at national level. Hence the Tory leader Keni Badenoch waded in with her own definition of a Lib Dem as ‘somebody who is good at fixing their church roof.’ A pretty positive thing to do, one might think, but Badenoch was again trying to hint at a fixation with trivia – at least when viewed in national terms. ‘They don’t have much of an ideology other than being nice’, she went on. ‘They are like “Fix the church roof, you should be a Member of Parliament”’.

Right. We get the picture. ‘Community politics’ is all about mobilising people to deal with the little things that bother us at local level – holes in the road, bins that aren’t properly emptied, and of course those leaking roofs, while doubtless neglecting the things that matter – like the billions that need to be spent on urgent new military equipment. Tanks, battleships, submarines – these are the important things. At the very least, they’re a bigger priority than getting a team together to mend a leaking roof.

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Mark Corner

What is the best way back into the EU?

By Mark Corner | Mon 20th April 2026 - 12:17 pm

I appreciated Gareth McAleer’s article in Lib Dem Voice on the economic power-up to be had from rejoining the EU, but while I support his desire to rejoin I think a different approach will be more effective.

Economic arguments are always difficult and precision hard to achieve. As the saying goes, an economist is someone who if you ask for a telephone number gives you an estimate. It would be better to say that rejoining the single market will be of obvious economic benefit and leave others to fill in the billions. The alternative view, the Boris Johnson idea that …

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Mark Corner

A Radical Proposal from The Spectator?

By Mark Corner | Thu 12th March 2026 - 8:32 pm

Tanya Park had an excellent article recently in LibDem Voice on the decline of The Telegraph and The Spectator, each displaying what she brilliantly describes as ‘permanent performative outrage’. But I’d like to suggest that occasionally an article comes along in The Spectator that is…. well, a bit radical!

Take the recent article by Michael Simmons, The Spectator’s Economics Editor, entitled ‘It’s a Faustian Pact: Rachel Reeves is giving bankers what they want’.  It begins with Peter Mandelson’s advice to the Chief Executive of the investment bank JPMorgan in 2009, that if he was worried about a pending tax on bankers’ bonuses he should ‘mildly threaten’ the UK government.

Sixteen years on and in Simmons’ view nothing has changed. Last November Rachel Reeves was considering how to plug a gap in the public finances, and the then deputy leader, Angela Raynor, proposed a windfall tax on the banks. Nothing doing. It was small businesses that got taxed instead. Simmons concludes by saying that ‘Peter Mandelson may now be an outcast for this Labour government, but his spirit still haunts the Treasury.’

Why is Reeves so tied to Treasury thinking? Partly because Labour came to power deeply conscious of the Liz Truss debacle. It appeared sensible to keep financial institutions reassured so that they could send the right signals to international markets and ensure that the Labour Party had financial credibility. Otherwise, Reeves might end up as another lettuce, destined to wilt like her predecessor.

As a result the stamp of ‘official’ approval remains intact, but the room for manoeuvre is closed off. Reeves is trapped in her Treasury cage while the radical thinking comes from elsewhere. Think of Daisy Cooper’s proposal to replace the treasury with a growth department.  ‘For too long political parties have allowed the Treasury tail to wag the political dog,’ she wrote. Cue howls of outrage from some within Labour, but this is precisely what Michael Simmons was saying. Think also of the Green resurgence. Yes, much of the ‘eco-populist’ blah-blah that comes from the Greens continues to annoy, but they have ceased focusing on their ‘core’ issues and have focused instead on increasing levels of inequality. The jibe of middle-class self-indulgence about the Greens ceased to resonate in the recent by-election. Hannah the Plumber managed to have an aura of authenticity that Keir the Toolmaker’s son could only dream of.

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Mark Corner

Nudging up closer to the EU

By Mark Corner | Thu 8th January 2026 - 10:54 am

Keir Starmer’s recent call for closer alignment with the EU was welcome. Naturally, he felt he had to add the qualification ‘if it’s in our national interest.’ He couldn’t bring himself to say that such an alignment might be ‘in the interests of the UK and Europe as a whole.’ Like John Major declaring ‘Game, Set and Match’ after securing an opt-out from the Maastricht Treaty, it still suggested an ‘us and them’ approach. But at least it was an acknowledgement that closer ties with Europe could be good for Britain, something that might seem obvious after a decade of post-Brexit economic decline.

The government’s recent decision to re-enter the Erasmus+ programme, discussed in LibDem Voice, was also welcome. But there’s still an ‘us and them’ approach even to the question of youth exchanges. It’s not difficult to detect an undertow of concern along the lines of: Won’t it lead to a flood of young good-for-nothings crossing the Channel and adding to our ‘immigration problem’?

If that seems unfair, consider this article from Politico published last October and discussing last May’s EU ‘reset’ summit and the question of joining the Youth Mobility Scheme. As Politico reported, the Chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, Professor Brian Bell, a professor of economics at King’s College London, declared that it was ‘utterly implausible’ that the government would sign up to a new youth mobility programme. He insisted that ‘many more Europeans would likely come to the U.K. under an uncapped scheme than Brits who would go abroad.’

In the manner of economics professors, he then went for statistics. ‘There are six or seven times as many Europeans as there are Brits. So if the probability of wanting to move is the same for Brits as it is for Europeans, you’d have seven times as many Europeans coming here as leaving in that world. Suppose 50,000 Brits wanted to go every year. The equivalent will be 350,000 Europeans arriving.’

There we are. According to the Chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, which certainly has considerable influence on ministers, net migration ‘could be 300,000 up in the first three years of the scheme, when you’re getting the new cohorts arriving, and you’d have a 900,000 additional people in the UK, once you got steady state, and that would be a big effect on net migration.’ ‘New cohorts’ – it sounds like Caesar’s armies crossing the channel two millennia ago. Suddenly the chance to share experiences with different parts of Europe has become a threatened invasion.

These figures, as the article makes clear, are highly questionable. For one thing, there are currently more European citizens leaving the U.K. than arriving — 95,000 a year in net emigration, according to the government’s own statistics. Doubtless part of the reason is that they’re fed up with being seen as invading cohorts. For another, such movements are never simply a matter of the size of the populations on each side of the Channel. Between 2014 and 2020, Erasmus took around 113,000 British students, while the U.K. hosted 190,000 EU students through the programme. That’s a ratio of less than 2 to 1, not 7 to 1. In any case, a Youth Mobility Scheme could be drawn up which will agree a cap on numbers.

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Mark Corner

Labour must listen to Sir Ed Davey on electoral reform

By Mark Corner | Tue 11th November 2025 - 11:54 am

There are many things that Labour and the Liberal Democrats may disagree about, but on one issue they are of one mind – a Reform government would be a disaster for the UK. It might even mean the end of the UK.

You would think that when the BBC reported recently that Davey wants to work with government on electoral reform the Labour government would have embraced the idea. After all, Keir Starmer supported electoral reform during his bid to become Labour leader in 2020. True, he then seemed to lose interest in the idea, and it never appeared in Labour’s election manifesto of 2024 (Labour winning an overall majority was more likely then than in 2020), but surely some awareness of his ’loveless landslide’ and the prospect of losing heavily in the next general election might encourage him to change his mind?

It seems not. As the BBC article reported, the government did not back Sarah Olney’s Lib Dem bill aimed at introducing proportional representation last year, even though it passed the first parliamentary stage with a majority of two, largely because more Labour MPs backed it than opposed it. The government simply denied the bill the parliamentary time to proceed. Once Starmer saw that a majority of his own MPs supported electoral reform, he decided that the best thing to do was to prevent it being discussed.

The problem is that the same system that gave Labour its landslide supported by only just over one third of voters, could give Reform a similar majority at the next election. And surprise, surprise, Farage, a longstanding supporter of PR has started to change his tune.  Of course he has, just as Starmer changed his. The prospect of the nearest to absolute control a democracy can offer is too tempting for either man to resist.

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Mark Corner

When Newton Ferrers Mums outface Whitehall

By Mark Corner | Fri 19th September 2025 - 8:55 am

 Some thirty years ago (according to his famous Diaries) Alan Clark MP, at the time a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, was sent to Truro in Cornwall to beef up support for the Conservative candidate in a by-election caused by the tragic death of local Liberal MP David Penhaligon in a road accident. Clark complained that despite Truro being ‘natural’ Conservative territory, the candidate he supported was likely to lose (indeed he did). This produced a lament in the Diaries about the way the Liberals got ‘dug in’ by working hard in constituencies (his visits to his own constituency in Plymouth from Saltwood Castle in far-off Kent were notoriously infrequent) and once dug in were very hard to dig out! They geared people up on local issues of limited importance, Clark claimed, and made them feel that they were able to challenge the establishment and take on the world. Hence the reference to the Newton Ferrers mums.

 What Clark lamented in Liberal (about to become Liberal Democrat) behaviour has been a feature of the party’s commitment to community politics for a long time. In a speech to the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference in March 2023, Ed Davey declared that ‘community politics is something our party is built on. It is what sets us apart from other parties.’  The Lib Dem leader talked of candidates being ‘connected to the communities they represent’, ‘hearing their concerns on the doorstep’ (as opposed to making cold calls on a phone) and of ‘first winning their trust – and then ultimately their votes.’

Of course, it can be said that this is what all politicians say, whatever party they represent. But it isn’t. Keir Starmer caused some criticism in The Guardian a couple of weeks back, when he talked of focusing on ‘delivery, delivery, delivery,’ as if he was managing a company that was trying to deal with angry customers who found their deliveries behind schedule. The electors had been turned into passive recipients of goodies from their elected representatives.

 Where politics is concerned, the voter is a citizen, not a customer. It may be an advantage that Lib Dems, unlike Labour and the Conservatives, have never had a natural constituency (at least since the time of the nonconformist conscience) to which they could ‘deliver’ when they were in power. They have had to build up support in the way Ed Davey describes. 

  Nowadays there is also Reform to reckon with. As John Curtice pointed out in a recent analysis for the BBC, Reform appeals to those who, like the Brexiteers a decade ago, feel threatened by changes in society they cannot handle. Foreigners are undesirable, some sexual orientations are undesirable if they’re even possible, refugees are deceiving at best, dangerous at worst and climate change is an invention of woke scientists. Meanwhile speeches emphasise the ‘destruction of Britain’ and the ‘erosion of Britain’ (Elon Musk), offering a constant litany of all things bad so that people can convince themselves that everything is hopeless. It is at this point that the would-be dictator inserts himself as the ‘deliverer’ who will put things right. Stay passive and watch what I can do with the power you give me. It is a technique perfected by Trump. Elect me and I’ll end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. Then everyone can sleep safely in their beds. Be nice to me with your royal pageantry and I’ll deliver you a nice deal on tariffs.

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Mark Corner

The case for taxing the super-rich more

By Mark Corner | Thu 10th July 2025 - 10:46 am

Chris Perry is absolutely right to suggest in Lib Dem Voice that ‘Widening income inequality and increasing poverty are the great social evils of our time.’ But part of addressing the issue has to involve imposing an additional tax ‘burden’ on the very rich.

In the run-up to the General Election last year Ed Davey defended the Lib Dem proposal to raise an extra £5.2bn from capital gains tax, with a new rate of 45 per cent for gains of more than £100,000:

Most people will pay the same or less. If you are very, very wealthy — 0.1 per cent of the population — you will pay a lot more tax. Multimillionaires and billionaires will pay a lot more.

More recently, Lord Kinnock, who was Labour leader from 1983 to 1992, suggested that imposing a 2% tax on assets valued above £10m would bring in up to £11bn a year.

The refusal of Keir Starmer to rule out a wealth tax in Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, July 9th (whereas Rachel Reeves did rule out such a tax in 2023 before Labour came to power) suggests that it is at least being seriously considered by the government. It should be.

Opponents of such a tax stress that ‘wealth creators’ should be encouraged, not discouraged (but they will still keep huge amounts of money – and not all of them created their wealth), that if they are subject to higher taxes, they will flee the country and apply their talents elsewhere (Really? So all CEOs want to live in the USA?) and that if they are taxed too highly, they will find ways of avoiding tax altogether (they already do – which is why the Lib Dem manifesto last year put so much emphasis on dealing with tax evasion). It’s even been argued that cutting taxes on the very rich will supercharge the economy and lead to increased growth which can then be spread to all. Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ uses this argument, and we will see where that leads him when people cease to be distracted by his foreign policy ‘initiatives.’ Liz Truss tried it three years ago with her own tax-cutting budget. And we saw where that led her. It spooked the markets and effectively ended her tenure as Prime Minister.

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Mark Corner

Electoral Reform must be a priority now

By Mark Corner | Thu 8th May 2025 - 11:55 am

When the Labour Party won its ‘loveless landslide’ in 2024, its interest in electoral reform became conveniently weaker. By the time that Labour had won a huge majority at the last election, The Guardian’s Peter Walker was reporting that ‘the leadership could barely be less interested’ in electoral reform, even though there was and still is significant support for it within the Labour Party. 

What about one year on, as the dust settles on the recent local elections? The results show that five parties are now competing and winning significant support. Will this lead to a different attitude towards electoral reform on the part of the Labour leadership? 

Probably not. There are already three arguments being used to suggest that nothing much has changed. The first is that Reform will have responsibility now. They’ll have to run some councils. People will then see how useless they are. I have no truck with Reform’s policies, but this is not a case of the lunatics taking over the asylum. The idea that Reform are no more than a bunch of nutters and bigots, often with a dodgy criminal past, will not do. It is more likely that as with other extreme right-wing parties, for instance in France and Germany, their influence will linger, and they will continue to have a base of support. The right approach is to take them seriously while being firmly opposed to their policies. And that means not having an electoral system where they might be able to take complete control with no more than one-third of the vote.

The second argument (perhaps unsurprisingly) looks away from our European neighbours to go further afield. See what’s happened in Canada and Australia, it says. Centre-left parties were written off there, but look at Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese, who both won recent elections. Yet these elections took place in very different circumstances. Carney’s victory, for instance, involved challenging Trump and being prepared to retaliate where appropriate. Not exactly the way Starmer deals with Trump.

 The third argument used to suggest that it will all soon be ‘business as usual’ again is that these five parties, like globules in a 1970s lava lamp, will end up recombining, Reform joining up with the Tories, perhaps the Greens with Labour or the Lib Dems. I think this is very unlikely. The five parties are now well-organised throughout the country and will not hesitate to put up their own candidates in future elections. I would also argue that there are still significant differences of policy between them.

 For these three reasons, I fear that the Labour leadership will not take electoral reform as seriously as it should. Might it change its mind as we get closer to 2029 (as it has before on this issue)? It might, but even if it does change its mind, will it legislate to reform the voting system? Or will it end up promising to have another Commission looking yet again into all the alternatives and making recommendations to be implemented after the next election – which may become a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted?

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Mark Corner

Returning to the Single Market          

By Mark Corner | Fri 28th March 2025 - 2:46 pm

In his recent speech to the Lib Dem Spring Conference, Ed Davey reminded us of one way in which the Lib Dems stand out from other parties. He said the Lib Dems were ‘The only party that has consistently opposed the Conservatives’ damaging Brexit deal from the start. The only party arguing for a new deal with the EU, with a Customs Union at its heart – putting us on a path back to the Single Market.’

In this as in so many other areas of policy, the Lib Dems have the courage that Labour lacks. Returning to the Single Market might seem like too bold a policy, but in fact it is essential to the future of the UK.

It is essential to its economic future. As Rachel Reeves struggles with a terrible economic inheritance from the Tories, Brexit remains a part of that inheritance, though it is one she keeps rather quiet about. The dreams of economic prosperity free of the rules of the Single Market, mopping up lucrative trade deals with Australia, India and the USA (Trump’s America? Really?) and turning the country into some kind of Singapore-on-Thames have faded away. Instead, the UK must struggle with new rules and regulations interfering with the business it tries to do with its nearest neighbours now that it’s out of the EU. There’s a clear cost in terms of growth – just ask Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England and now Prime Minister of Canada.

Returning to the Single Market is also essential to the UK’s political future. The problems managing trade across a land border with Ireland, a country which is part of the Single Market, have not gone away.

Thirdly, a return to the Single Market will help the future of Europe. A larger Single Market will be a more effective negotiator and will be in a stronger position to resist the threat of a present or future tariff war.

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Mark Corner

This Government needs help from the Lib Dems                    

By Mark Corner | Fri 31st January 2025 - 11:45 am

The Liberal Democrats, and the Liberals before them, have not had much time in power over the last century. 1906 was the last time a majority Liberal government was elected, though it has been the junior partner in coalition governments since then. However, the Liberals were certainly the party of ideas in the last century. The Labour welfare state established after 1945 owes a debt to the programmes of that 1906 government, and to the highly influential report on welfare reform written during the war by a Liberal, William Beveridge.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes was a Liberal, listened to by Liberal leader Lloyd George in the 1920s, who produced the radical manifesto ‘We can Conquer Unemployment’ for the 1929 election. It may have been ahead of its time then, but the ideas behind it were later implemented by both Labour and Tory governments in the generation after the War.

It is just as vital for the Liberal Democrats to be the party of ideas in this century, because ideas are in short supply.

The Labour Party fumbles along after its loveless landslide victory, much as the Labour-led government did in 1929, facing an economic crisis it doesn’t know how to cope with. It wants to spend but feels it can’t. That way lies Truss and another lettuce, it thinks. When it comes to taxes, it is afraid to raise the right ones and will get less than it wants from the wrong ones. Its hope is to produce growth, because that is the painless way to redistribute money to the less well-off, but it is afraid to talk about an essential precondition of growth, which is a return to the EU single market. It is full of big talk about an English Silicon Valley and the opportunities provided by Heathrow expansion, but it knows that even if these were measures to produce growth (which is highly debatable) the results will not be seen until long after the next election. Does Labour really want to campaign on the basis of: ‘We’ll be able to help the NHS properly when we’ve got more flights in the 2030s’? Meanwhile it stalls, blames the fading memory of its predecessor and in truth has no idea of what to do.

So what should it do? There are plenty of suggestions that can be made, but let us take one example, which is very clearly Liberal Democrat policy. It should introduce a system of free personal care and raise the pay of care workers so that there is a specific minimum wage for those in care work. This is a policy which Lib Dem leader Ed Davey has laid stress on and campaigned on in the general election last July. It would be a truly radical policy, one which made personal care as much as medical treatment free at the point of delivery. If that could be delivered, it would be a development almost as significant as the founding of the National Health Service itself.

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Mark Corner

The case for restoring your railways

By Mark Corner | Fri 6th September 2024 - 7:04 pm

On September 4th The Independent ran a story on the problems that have beset the HS2 railway project to connect ‘major cities’ in England. It reported that the figure for total cost of the project, was something like 67 billion pounds, one new station at Birmingham alone costing half a billion, an extraordinary figure even if one accepts that it is spread over 15 years.

But now let’s take another figure, another one of half a billion, the Restoring your Railways Fund which for the same amount as that new station at Birmingham would help to breathe new life into several new railway lines and dozens of new stations. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has decided to scrap it. She won’t save 500 million – probably something more of the order of 100 million – but this money was designed to restore several small lines that were closed during the Beeching cuts sixty years ago. Compared to the cost of HS2, the savings are minimal, and it’s hard not to think that Reeves has just done it in order to demonstrate that she’s not going to repeat the over-spending of the previous government.

These railway lines were designed to connect not major cities but small towns across the country. Yet their importance should not be under-stated. I would recommend anyone who doesn’t feel that such lines can be important to look at the website of one that because it’s nearly finished has escaped the Reeves cuts, the Northumberland Line. Look at the stories of the construction work, the extra roads, bridges and pathways built, the meetings with local communities, schools and civic associations, the enthusiasm of local businesses for the opportunities provided and the sheer excitement at what is effectively only restoring a line still used for freight to passenger use, and you get a sense of how far communities have been invigorated by a sum of money which in the case of HS2 would do no more than pay to modify the platforms to fit the height of the new trains.

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Mark Corner

A Tale of Two Polls

By Mark Corner | Thu 11th April 2024 - 9:02 am

There have been two much-publicised polls in recent days which have produced headlines in the press for their common message that the Conservative government is in deep trouble. A Survation Poll suggested that there would be just 98 Conservative MPs after the next election. The other, a YouGov Poll, suggested that the Conservatives would win 155 MPs. Quite a large difference, but in either case adding up to huge Conservative losses, and that is what the media have concentrated on. If they’ve mentioned any other party, it has been the Reform Party and its effect as a ‘spoiler’ of the Conservative vote.

What was much less commented upon was the fact that these two polls, both published at the beginning of April, and both based upon interviews conducted during mid-March, were widely divergent in their estimates of how the third and fourth parties (in terms of seats in the House of Commons) would fare. The YouGov poll suggested that the SNP would win 19 seats, a substantial loss compared to 2019, while the Lib Dems would win 49, restoring them to third-party status. The Survation Poll, on the other hand, had the SNP maintaining third-party status, losing only 7 seats (from 48 to 41), while the Lib Dems, despite doubling their seats to 22, remained very much in fourth position.

It might be thought that the massive discrepancy over the projected seats for Lib Dems and the SNP in these two polls would arouse some interest in the media. Yet it hasn’t. The only thing that hit the headlines was the coming Labour landslide (of which the politics guru John Curtice appears to be 99% certain now) and the huge Tory losses. No one pretends that these aren’t the main finding of the two polls, but the question of who comes third and fourth matters too.

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Mark Corner

A taxing question

By Mark Corner | Fri 29th September 2023 - 7:50 pm

The UK needs to spend a lot of money in order to deal with its collapsing public sector. There are daily reports of crumbling schools, poor transport infrastructure, shortages of staff and beds in the NHS and so on. Any new government is going to face the problem of where the money to restore public services will come from.

The question of how to pay for better public services is a much more acute one today than it was a generation ago when Tony Blair came to power. Partly because of this, the present Labour Party sounds almost fatalistic in its lack of ambition. The Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, talks of funding additional expenditure out of economic growth – but what growth is she talking about? She may well not inherit any growth at all if and when Labour comes to power. So Labour ministers avoid talking about any new spending commitments at all. ‘Wait and see till we’re in government’ tends to be their approach. Is that why we’re meant to vote for them? So we can wait and see what happens if we do?

In fact, it is difficult to see how a future Labour government, whatever the extra money brought in by measures like going for the non-doms, can afford to do very much. It is already giving up ending the two-child benefit cap, watering down its plans for a green revolution and refusing to say that it will spend more on education. But to be fair to Labour, what choice does it have? Isn’t the question of where money for new spending is going come from a real one?

Should the Lib Dems revisit a policy which they were the only party to advocate in 2001 (and which arguably did no harm to their electoral chances at the time), namely a small increase in the basic rate of taxation? As the recent Lib Dem conference recognised, there is a problem here. In 2001, when people were doing relatively well, promising to raise taxes a little was acceptable to a lot of people. In 2023, when there is arguably a more urgent need to spend more and public services are in a state of collapse, it is easy to understand why people might see an extra tax burden as the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Haven’t they just had to deal with inflation and rising mortgage rates? Is the government really going to take away even more of their money? It’s when a tax rise is most needed that it’s least acceptable.

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Mark Corner

The Real Problem with Constitutional Reform

By Mark Corner | Thu 26th January 2023 - 9:30 am

Despite being a Labour MP, House of Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle is opposed to Labour’s plan to replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber. His view is that it would undermine the authority of the House of Commons. This has always been the problem with attempts to reform the Upper House. Change it into something democratic and accountable, and you are bound to ask why it doesn’t have more power. Leave it as a Ruritanian collection of robed elders, and you can defend putting limits on what it can do. For Hoyle it has a part in ‘tidying up bills.’ Like the cleaners, it plays a useful role that should not be criticised.

This will not do, but Labour’s plans for reform (so far lacking detail) may not do either. The trouble is their view of devolution, which has been focused on giving power away rather than sharing it. Yes, giving power away may be necessary to avoid too much centralisation. But often the most important thing is to allow authorities outside Westminster to participate in joint decision-making.

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Mark Corner

The Independent View – A way forward for the Liberal Democrats

By Mark Corner | Mon 28th December 2020 - 9:02 am

Political parties need distinctive policies. The Liberal Democrats had them in the 2005 election, with their own policy in foreign affairs (opposing military intervention in Iraq) and their own policy at home (supporting modest tax increases to pay for public services, something Labour had run away from ever since it lost the 1992 election).

Five years later, the Liberal Democrats went into Coalition government. That wasn’t a mistake in itself, but Nick Clegg did not insist upon one of the three ‘great posts’ – Chancellor, Home Office or Foreign Office. Compare the moment when Germany’s Greens went into coalition with the Social Democrats. Joschka Fischer became the Foreign Minister and had a clear impact on German foreign policy. As Deputy Prime Minister, Clegg may have had the effect of modifying government policy and making it less ‘excessive’ – like other deputies before him (Whitelaw? Prescott?) – but having a general watering-down effect on government policy does not mean giving it a distinctive flavour. Fischer was able to make a policy area his own (up to a point) and the Greens didn’t suffer too much electorally as a consequence. Clegg, despite some achievements, was not associated with a specifically Liberal vision and was punished heavily in 2015.

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    I am stunned by the hostility to the green party which indicate to me that Lib Dems just don't get it. Bristol is mentioned, a City where the Lib Dems had 38 c...
  • Matt Wardman
    I think Iain makes an interesting challenge, but we are not in a position to judge Labour nationally. 1 - We cannot expect to see "change" work through in le...
  • expats
    David Raw 23rd Jun '26 - 10:13am... David, If memory serves Trump's, "No Churchill..." remark was because of Starmer's refusal to join Trump's Iran war... ...