Author Archives: Peter Wrigley

“For a Fair Deal” is the party’s pre-manifesto policy paper, to be debated at the Brighton Conference. You can read it in full here.

You’d think that, after 13 years of Tory misrule, and with the clowns in charge of the asylum for the past four, an opposition policy paper for the next election would be suffused with anger, outrage and frustration. Instead, this paper, to be discussed at conference, reads like a bland wish-list from some nice people. But, there again, maybe the working party has judged the mood of the electorate better than I. Look …

Liberal Democrats did well in the local elections and talk of our holding the balance in the next parliament is in the air.

In this article I don’t wish to argue for or against becoming a partner in the next government, or supporting it with confidence and supply, or commenting from the side-lines.  My purpose is to urge the party to prepare for the possibility and suggest some ground rules which might avoid the disappointments (to put it mildly) which followed from the 2010 arrangement.

They are:

1. Whatever is offered, and by whom, we should make it clear that we will take

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I was born in 1937 so lived through the War, though I don’t remember much about it. I suppose I had a deprived childhood in material terms (sweet ration only 2oz a week; second-hand toys, if any; Fair-isle pullover darned at the elbows, short pants patched): but so did everybody else so it didn’t really matter.   I had a loving family and I was never really hungry.

In my post-war formative years my generation was proud of the leading role our country and armed forces had played in defeating fascism, and continued to play as one the “top nations” in founding the UN and establishing an international economic system designed to create a more peaceful and prosperous new world.

We believed our country had, through adventurous exploration and deeds of derring-do, built a worldwide empire which we were now preparing for self-government and independence based on the admired Westminster system as established by the Mother of Parliaments.  Justice, based on Magna Carta, was dispensed with the scales tipped in favour of the defendant. Our universities were internationally admired and, having given the indusial revolution and railways to the world, we continued to be at the forefront of innovation, having discovered penicillin and invented both television and the jet engine. The BBC was a source of impartial information and a vehicle for both light and serious culture and entertainment which was admired throughout the world.

What was not to like?

Yes, I know, that summary contains a lot of rose-coloured simplifications, not least the importance of the part we had played in the defeat of fascism compared with that of others, especially the USSR.  But that was the over-all story as we understood it.

Half a century later the story is different.

In addition to the obvious inadvisability of scrapping and restructuring the nation’s arrangements for maintaining public health in the middle of a pandemic, the creation of the new National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP) opens several cans of worms.

First Public Health England (PHE) itself.  It was created by David Cameron’s government as a result of the Andrew Lansley  “reforms “of the NHS in 2012.  These were hugely controversial, and bitterly opposed by Labour, who saw them as a means to facilitate yet more back-door privatisation of the NHS. Be that as it may, it is, or rather was, a Conservative creation, their own and no-on else’s.  If they think it needs to be scrapped after less than eight years of operation, then this demonstrates that Troy ineptitude is not confined to the current amateurs.

In 2012 we Liberal Democrats were in coalition with the Conservatives, and we voted for these “reforms.”  The decision was not taken easily, and I understand caused great anxiety to our members in the House of Lords, who were eventually won over by the Labour Peer, Lord Warner.  He was a former health minister in the Blair/Brown governments and assured our Lordships that the “reforms” were all right.  It later transpired that Lord Warner had financial interests in BMI healthcare, which owned 54 private hospitals and clinics in the London area.

The problem this episode exposes is that we Liberal Democrats did not then, and do not now, have the financial resources to employ sufficient researchers and experts to give reliable and impartial advice, and often need to rely on tainted advice such as the above.  Along with Proportional Representation, when we next have influence on the government we need to include the adequate and independent financing of political parties so that all parties have the resources to subject the government of the day to informed scrutiny.