One of the many great things about our party is its steadfast refusal to bow to media pressure. Take, as Exhibit A, the sweet joy of being a conference rep and voting down the leadership’s preferred policy option. We don’t care that it will be portrayed by the next day’s newspapers, as erroneous as it is inevitable, as a party split.
We are also a truly radical party. Most policies taken for granted today entered the pages of our policy documents long before Labour or the Conservatives sheepishly followed. Come next month I hope that gay marriage will be the latest example of that.
As the Coalition’s lifespan turns from weeks into months however I am becoming a tad concerned. We, and by that I mean not only us but our new friends too, are growing skittish. We are bowing to the media agenda and balking at radical ideas. Look at our party’s opposition to council housing proposals, and the speed with which Number 10 ditched the threat to free milk for some under-fives.
There are 1.8 million families on waiting lists for local authority housing, according to Shelter. In 81 local council areas people can expect to wait more than a decade before they reach the top of the list. In six areas, the wait is over 20 years, and the London boroughs of Barnet and Redbridge both have waits of more than 30 years – in other words, join the queue now and collect your new front door keys in 2040.
Is it really too radical for our party even to consider a policy that says that people given a council house at the age of, say, 25 should not have the automatic right to pass on the tenancy of that house to one of their children, grandchildren, nephews or nieces when they die half a century later? A grandchild may live for another 50 years, stay single but occupy a three-bedroom property, meaning that a council house stays with a single family for a century despite the fact that the actual economic need for housing support may only have existed for a short time. Meanwhile, families in desperate need are stuck in conditions that are temporary, overcrowded, or both.
And despite the hysteria, the consideration that public health minister Anne Milton was giving to the abolition of what remains of the 1946 School Milk Act should have been applauded by progressives. Instead of spending nigh on £60 million on a cup of warm milk for those children whose parents can afford the £4,500 average cost of 25 hours’ weekly nursery-based childcare, she instead wanted to look at both saving money and increasing help for children from the poorest households – often the ones not at nursery with its taxpayer-funded milk.
I have always hoped that we would make it into government, and we are now there. Let us not now throw that opportunity away and become like the timid, craven Labservative governments of the past. We are a radical party, we should be radical in government.
Stuart Bonar was the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Candidate for Plymouth Moor View in this year’s General Election, and blogs at www.stuartbonar.typepad.com
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27 Comments
Stuart – I agree with you on the right of succession issue. But if you’re talking radicalism, how about building enough homes so that we don’t get stuck into this argument about rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, which is what is driving the debate about council tenancies? In other words, why don’t we engage in something that no party has done for over 30 years – and set out an ambitious plan to build the homes for our people that we and they need, creating jobs, tax revenue and well-planned communities in the process?
I would say that arguing about how to divvy up what’s left of a shrinking pool of publicly-owned homes is the defeatist’s answer, not the radical’s.
Agreed; we should at least be pushing for many more policies to be enacted. Most of my friends’ major issue with the Lib Dems in government is that they’re not seen to be doing anything. Let the newspapers report imagined cracks in the coalition, I say, if it means that the public are hearing that we’re actually pushing our policies into the light.
Is the coalition ‘Radical’ ? If so is that radicalism ‘progressive’ and/or ‘positive’.
Well Thatcher was a ‘radical’; Stalin enacted ‘radical’ change on his country’s economy and society.
Radical should never automatically be assumed to be a positive attribute- as those of us who remember being in the Labour party in 1980-1983 remember only too well.
That is mistaking ‘radical’ for ‘revolutionary’ or- more often these days- insurgent.
Whether the moniker ‘radical’ is positive really does depend on both the nature of the ‘radical’ change enacted and what the impact is on ordinary people.
For example: is it disruptive; does it frighten; will it improve people’s lives and their standards of living; is it simply change for change‘s sake at the behest of a small clique who wish to impose their ideological will on the majority etc ?
In that context Nicholas and Simon I would assume have very different desires for their self-professed ‘radicalism’.
First, let me say thanks for taking the time to read my post and comment on it.
Dominic – I agree with you, although I think the emphasis should be on bringing the huge number of empty homes back into use, rather than building new estates and towns. I was very pleased to stand as a candidate in the General Election on our ambitious platform to bring shedloads (I forget how many) of empty homes back into occupation, with an inducement for them to be used for social housing. I appeared on a hustings panel organised by Shelter and, if I do say so myself, the Lib Dem policies were easily the most far-reaching. And as someone in his 30s utterly priced out of the housing market, I fully understand that there are not enough homes, social or otherwise.
Nick – I think we can keep our radicalism not just by publicly opposing proposals from Conservatives – but through getting more of our ideas adopted and enacted by the Coalition. We have achieved a great deal, much more than we get credit for, but we need to keep it up – and there’s a job there for us as the grassroots… keep those new ideas and new policies coming through.
Rob – I get your point. Choose another word if you wish. I just mean that we shouldn’t be afraid to be ambitious. We should not be afraid to change the rules that apply to council housing so that we can find homes for the 1.8 million families who are waiting for one. And, sure, as Dominic suggests, build new homes and bring empty properties back into use too.
We shouldn’t be afraid to say that the money spent on milk in nurseries could actually be better spent on helping families in the greatest need.
We shouldn’t run away from these or other issues.
Hi Stuart,
I stood in Islington and know about our empty homes policy. it was a good policy as far as it went, but actually did little for London, which has the lowest ratio of empty homes for about 30 years. Most of those that remain are very hard to reach for local authorities or are second homes for wealthy people (Kensington and Chelsea has the second highest rate of empty homes of the London boroughs, and i’m sure they’re not on no-go estates). So the policy was pretty rubbish for the city with the greatest (i think) housing need in the country. London has 82,000 empty homes and 353,000 households (or roughly a million people) on waiting lists. How did our policy solve that? And how likely is it that even half of those homes could really be brought back into use?
There’s also the issue that a billion pounds might be better spent building ten new blocks of flats than chasing the foreign-domiciled owners of various individual buildings across a myriad of local authorities, which, even if successful in purchasing and converting empty properties in areas of housing need (unlikely), would leave councils with little bits and bobs of new homes all over the shop, adding to the administrative burden of looking after them all (after all, it’s cheaper to maintain a new building with 10 flats than to maintain ten flats across a large area with different building ages, qualities, construction materials and neighbours).
Borrow to build a new generation of homes for all. If we did that, we’d wrongfoot Labour, boost the economy, make life better for tens of thousands of families, and deserve to be re-elected.
Isn’t this just a 6th form debating society style ruse to potray your opponents as not “radical” or “afraid” ,” run(ing) away “, “skittish” ” bowing to pressure” and “balking” when really what you mean is that they just don’t agree with you?
The problem with 6th form society debating tricks is once you’ve been taught them they are easy.
So tell me Stuart , what is “radical” about rolling over when a multi millionaire Tory Prime Minister uses saloon bar style, ill informed remarks at a public PR stunt to trample over hard won tenancy protection for newly bereaved widows and orphans in social housing?
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Stuart, I’m broadly with you, but I too struggle with words like ‘radical’. Is it a badge of honour, or an insult, for Left, Right, both or neither, depending upon the policy, the proposer or the commentator? In other words, does it really mean anything?
Another word I struggle with is ‘reactionary’. It seems to be a term of abuse usually directed at the Right from the Left, but does it really mean anything? Literally reacting to a situation /proposition seems completely neutral to me!
“Is it really too radical for our party even to consider a policy that says that people given a council house at the age of, say, 25 should not have the automatic right to pass on the tenancy of that house to one of their children, grandchildren, nephews or nieces when they die half a century later? A grandchild may live for another 50 years, stay single but occupy a three-bedroom property, meaning that a council house stays with a single family for a century despite the fact that the actual economic need for housing support may only have existed for a short time.”
This is not in fact entirely accurate. Despite what has appeared in the media in the last week it is not actually the case that council and social housing tenants have an absolute right to pass on a specific house or flat to any relative. The rights of succession are not quite as generous as some people have been claiminig.
For more information see:
http://www.parliament.uk/briefingpapers/commons/lib/research/briefings/snsp-01998.pdf
Yet another ostrich propaganda technique, I fear.
We should support the coalition, because we wouldn’t want to give any ground to those annoying Labour trolls who attack us. We should support the coalition, because well, look at all the little concessions we won, like a rise in capital gains tax rate and er um. We should support the coalition, because of all the unspecified marvellous Lib Demmy things we are going to do in the future.
And now – We should support the coalition, because we can take some Tory policies like milk-snatching and reducing council tenants’ rights, and we can re-spin and re-brand them. Never mind the obvious fact that the Tories’ motivation is quite clearly based on their contempt for the lower classes. If we use some clever sophistry, we can make these policies look good. So, milk-snatching would be a good thing if we took the money we saved and used it to help the poor even more than they would have been helped by getting the milk, wouldn’t it? Hey presto, spin operation successfully completed, bad transmuted into good. Right-wing policy rebranded as progressive.
Well, you are successfully kidding a lot of Lib Dem members, who desperately want to believe that we are in the right, that we are entilted to sacrifice a few-odd principles for the sake of power. You are not kidding the voters, whose eyes are more open, and who can recognise an ostrich when they see one.
Dominic – thanks for replying. I guess there needs to be different solutions in different areas. I think many areas, esp outside the hotspots, will have enough empty properties that can be renovated – or at least the remaining need for new build homes will be minimised. I’m not sure, for example, how many empty properties in Plymouth (my home city and where I stood at the election) are owned by foreign billionaires, certainly fewer than in Chelsea or Westminster. The post just put up here on LDV by Patrick Murray (http://ldv.org.uk/20682) is an excellent and thoughtful piece on this very issue. Maybe our old friend Land Value Taxation also has a part to play.
David – you do me a disservice, sir. I thought that I was at least at an undergraduate debating society level. Seriously though what is rather simplistic is to portray any proposed change in council house rules as an attack on widows or a plan to put all firstborn to the sword.
Peter – Rob also didn’t like the word. Again, I see the point you’re making, and you’re right, of course, on the meaning of the word. As I said in response to Rob, I mean we shouldn’t be afraid to be ambitious. I hope that form of words works better for you.
Mark – thanks for the link, but I had actually reading that briefing before I wrote my piece. What I wrote conforms with the information in Section A (on page 2) of that document, I think. My example was deliberately at the outer reaches of what is possible because I wanted to make the point that it is wrong to reject the idea of any reform.
David – are you on the Labour press office’s email list? You sound like you’re just trotting out their “lines to take”.
You know, it’d help if you’d actually read what I wrote. 1.8 million families are waiting for social housing; some will wait for nigh on a third of a century. You might think that progressive, I do not. If freeing up social housing more quickly helps to home families trapped in cramped, temporary accommodation then I’m in favour of it.
Why do you think that spending £60 million of taxpayers’ money on milk that mostly goes to children whose parents can afford expensive nursery places is better than targeted help? You might as well say that Jobseeker’s Allowance should be abolished and shared out equally amongst us all, employed and unemployed.
Stuart, you’ve found me out. I have to tell you, Ed and David and Ed were all clustered around the screen when your posting hit the World Wide Web. They were pretty shaken, I can tell you. They temporarily abandoned their leadership campaigns and spent hours drafting a rebuttal, which they then rushed out to, er, me. Gosh, I’m now feeling almost as self-important as you are!
(Now I’ve reached these dizzy heights in the Labour hierarchy, I’d better keep quiet about my Alliance / Lib Dem membership since 1981, hadn’t I?)
David – chill out, mate
It strikes me, that what you make of the coalition largely comes down to whether you’re willing to look at each argument and judge it on its merits, or whether you’re pre-minded to judge every action remotely linked to the Conservatives as the dark satanic masochism of a constructed poor crushing bogeyman. Labour of course don’t see the good in anyone, don’t trust them to do anything for themselves, and believe state control and nannying is the only way to possibly achieve anything; they don’t think anything good comes from anyone but the Labour party, so it’s no surprise which way they go…
Andrew – i must disagree with you. If anything, it’s the Tories who see everyone as dole scroungers, criminals and greedy etc. I would say that most Labour party members, like most libdem party members, are motivated by the idea that people are fundamentally good, if only they were given the chance to show it.
Stuart – much of the “milk money” surely goes to Sure Start schemes (which are used by many parents who cannot afford private nursery fees), and there is also a government grant that pays for ALL children over the age of 3 to attend nurseries for 2 sessions a week, essentially free of charge.
And of the parents that do pay private nurseries, many (most?) do so because they need both parents to work, to pay the mortgage etc. It’s not a case of being “able to afford” private nursery fees, more a case of having to bring in two wages to afford to pay the mortgage, and hence having to pay childcare costs.
It’s this sort of simplistic, non-evidence based thinking (about using the milk money to help to”poorest families”, even though many of them are already benefiting from the milk money itself) that dogs the Lib Dems and leads to the recent poll showings.
The word “radical” means “pertaining to the root”. In politics it means a willingness to question assumptions and seek the deep causes of some problem, rather than just apply surface measures to alleviate it.
Fiddling around with the rules for transmission of tenancy of the remaining council houses is not radical. A radical approach to solving housing problems involves looking much more deeply at why the distribution of housing is so much not according to need. A radical approach to housing involves such things as questioning the concept of the “housing ladder” and of home-ownership being an untaxed cash-cow.
Anyone who is willing to ask the same question about transmission of private ownership to heirs that is being asked here about council tenancy (and the private ownership transmission is automatic, while as Mark Morris notes, transmission of council tenancy is only in some circumstances) is truly “radical”. Anyone who is not willing to ask that question is not radical, because they are unwilling to go to the root of the problem.
“It strikes me, that what you make of the coalition largely comes down to whether you’re willing to look at each argument and judge it on its merits, or whether you’re pre-minded to judge every action remotely linked to the Conservatives as the dark satanic masochism of a constructed poor crushing bogeyman.”
Hmm. It seems to me that the Lib Dem party line is to look at each and every Tory argument and find something good to say about it. The pro-coalition propagandists who write for the Party on this site vary in their tone and some are less offensive than others – for example George Kendall allows himself a limited amount of honest dissent before coming down in favour of the coalition – but their overall aims are pretty clear. We are to be brought into line. Well, what I am trying to do is to stop that happening. I may sometimes be a bit intemperate about that, but that’s because I hate to see my party ally itself with a bunch of neocons. Stuart Bonar thinks I’m being hard on him because he couched his argument in rational terms, but that doesn’t automatically make him right. In my view, his is a desperate effort to make a sow’s ear look like a silk purse in order to defend the coalition.
“Labour of course don’t see the good in anyone, don’t trust them to do anything for themselves, and believe state control and nannying is the only way to possibly achieve anything; they don’t think anything good comes from anyone but the Labour party, so it’s no surprise which way they go…”
Well now Andrew Tennant, do you really believe that ludicrously overheated statement? Who’s being a little bit one-sided there? Of course I do to some extent share the view that Labour place excessive faith in the goodness of state power (otherwise I don’t suppose I’d be a Lib Dem), but it does no good to see your opponents in terms of such crude caricatures. If we’re rational about it, Tony Blair’s revolution got rid of much of Labour’s excessive faith in the State. Indeed, in the good old days BC (Before Coalition), when we had our own brains to think with, we were often to be found opposing Labour’s undue cosiness toward the private sector, for example in academy sponsorship, PFI schemes etcetera. But now of course we must suppress any such objectivity and join with the Tories, the Daily Mail and Rush Limbaugh in ruthlessly slagging off anyone to the left of Camerlegg!
Andrew & Dominic – I think that supporters of all three parties (our own is not exempt) would be much better off being a little less partisan. And given that we are a party that believes in PR, which would almost certainly guarantee permanent coalition government or at least hung parliaments, it is Lib Dems more than others who should show the maturity to cope with the realities of being in coalition.
Paul B – do you really think that £60m is best spent on a free, daily glass of milk for some children? And, sure, some of those children will be on free places (the entitlement isn’t much – 12.5 hours per week for 38 weeks of the year for three & four year olds only), but many of the children from the poorest families won’t make use of those free places. I just don’t think it’s so terrible to instead use that untargeted money on targeted help for those most in need.
Matthew – you misunderstand my argument. My two examples are meant to illustrate how un-radical the Coalition is being. I am not arguing that doing those things (tweaking tenancy rules and swapping free milk for targeted help) would, on their own, represent the outer limit of radical thought – merely that not doing them, running away from the issues, displays a worrying timidity on the part of both parties.
Stuart – of course you are right to say that we should all be less partsan, and i would add, more mature. But spend a day on the Conservative Home website, as i have done during these slow august days, and tell me at the end you don’t want to take out most of the comment-makers and slap some toelrance and education into their narrow little minds.
Dominic – yes, I know exactly what you mean 🙂
David Allen
Hmm. It seems to me that the Lib Dem party line is to look at each and every Tory argument and find something good to say about it.
I’m happy to agree with this. I’ve accepted and defended the coaltion as the only viable option after the 2010 election, I can even accept that our negotiating strength in it is quite weak so we can’t execpt that much out of it.
I’m not happy, however, about the way our party high-ups are churning out the message that we’re all ecstatic that a few of them have comfy jobs and that lots of wonderful LibDem policy is getting through. It isn’t working – it’s just giving ammunition to our opponents. We ought at the top to be much more honest and say this is an arrangement made out of necessity, we’ve done it because we had to because that’s how the people of our country foolishly voted, we can maybe get a few liberal things out of it – mostly those things that don’t hit the wealth of the rich – but what this governent is doing just isn’t what we would do if we were governing alone or were the senior partner or even were still the junior partner but with more clout due to more support in the country and a less twisted electoral system.
UniversAl benefits, if properly administered, can ensure that everyone who is entitled to a benefit recieves it. A cost of this, unfortunately, is that some people will abuse the sustem. It is easy to quote an example of the absurd or underserving but these cases are the price we pay for reaching the people who need help most. Simplifying the system will have the paradoxical outcome that more people, deserving claimants, will apply. The outcome could be higher not lower expenditure.
charliechops1 – I agree with you, absolutely. The problem with the free milk however is that it doesn’t go to everyone. It goes to under-fives in nurseries. Given that most nursery provision is paid-for, and expensive (as pointed out in the comments, above, there is some, limited free provision) it is more likely therefore that this free milk is not going to the children of the neediest and poorest, who will most likely be at home with Mum.
That said, absolutely I agree with your point about universality.
What would be really radical would be to implement policies that substantially reduce our contribution to global warming, that changes our voting system to one which is proportional, which reduces the gap between rich and poor, improves public services and disperses more power away from the centre and more towards local government and communities.
With this government the good news is it’s delivery on civil liberties (albeit with the important exception of the monitoring of benefits claimants).
You can certainly argue that the policy of slash and burn of the British state is radical, but I fear that it is done too quickly and with little thought about the long term consequences, and whether these savings really are savings.