Over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, former Lib Dem MP Dr Evan Harris develops some of the points he made at Sunday’s LibDemVoice.org fringe (which you can listen to here) — that while he’s broadly supportive of the Coalition he rejects entirely Nick’s claim that the austerity cuts can be “fair”. Here’s an excerpt:
The progressive wing of the Lib Dems broadly supports the coalition and the agreement underpinning it … The party voted to endorse the coalition agreement, but we did not vote to endorse the implementation of illiberal or unfair government policies that have emerged since. The party must help Nick Clegg and his colleagues resist those by communicating our unhappiness in the same way the Tory right does about some of our proposed policies. …
… he has made one major error: the talk of “fair cuts”. Cuts in public spending on the scale needed (or at least envisaged) are never going to be truly fair or progressive. That is an economic and statistical fact of life. It would be under Labour as well. It is clear that Lib Dem influence will make the cuts fairer than they would be under a Tory government, but it is fundamentally wrong to claim they will be fair. … The party respects and admires Nick but he does not have a blank cheque.
You can read Evan’s article in full here.
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4 Comments
No-one should trust Clegg’s figures. He is the man who said that he thought the state old age pension was £30 a week!
That’s a fair criticism, and it sets us up for another IFS report denouncing the cuts as unfair. Personally, I don’t like the word fair. As Mervyn King has said, there’s nothing fair about the situation, but sorting out the deficit is necessary.
I think what we should be saying is that the cuts will hurt, but we will do everything we can to reduce the pain they cause.
@George
We had an opportunity to make them fairer primarily by not going for the neo cons solution of an 80/20 split between taxes and spending over one parliament. (Even thatcher I think did 50/50) . I can not understand why true a Lib dem with a social conscience would have not at least got compromise in this area.
“whatever the perceived populist benefits of pretended total unity, at the next election we must communicate clearly those coalition achievements that we supported and those we did not.”
Evan is almost entirely right here: I want to see that communication *NOW* and it needs to come now to be truly effective. Media yammering about splits and such is totally ignorable.