Category Archives: Op-eds

Bournemouth 2009’s big dust-up hurtles towards us on Tuesday morning – the debate on A Fresh Start For Britain: Choosing a Different, Better Future. And, as is ever the case when a paper taking the whole of our policy and priorities in the round comes up for debate, rather than taking in the big picture, everyone’s focused on just one relatively tiny issue that barely appears in it: last year, tax cuts; this year, tuition fees.

Just to confuse matters, when people address A Fresh Start For Britain, there are actually three separate publications they might mean – the motion printed in the Conference Agenda, the pdf / website which was launched in July with the key commitments, and the, er, other bits stuffed in at the back of the policy paper which no-one outside of the Conference hall will ever see. The most important bit is the version published on the website, because that’s the bit that’s the actual cast-iron policy for the General Election Manifesto: everything from page 10 onwards in the full paper comes with the caveat that it may be dumped in the run-up to the General Election (and so, implicitly, why bother?). This positions the Liberal Democrats as making the tough choices up front about public spending that the other parties are petrified of admitting out loud. The reason why people are furious about tuition fees is, of course, because that’s in the back end, and it’s the bit of the back end that Nick’s been drawing attention to in interviews, to prove we’re serious about tackling the economic black hole by saying we can’t afford something we really like as well as cutting back Labour projects we never liked in the first place. But there’s a lot of other stuff there that you should argue about cutting or not, too.