Julian Astle, a Director of CentreForum, has an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph about the party’s attitude towards the state and cuts:
There aren’t many Liberal Democrats who went into politics to shrink the state. It is true that many Liberals, like Conservatives, are sceptical about the ability of big, centralised bureaucracies even to function efficiently, let alone bring about social and economic change. But this scepticism leads them to policy conclusions quite distinct from those advocated by small-government Tories.
The primary goal for Liberals is not to reduce public spending per se, but to devolve public spending and other decisions to the lowest level possible – to individuals, families, communities and local councils.
For those on the Left of the party, the emphasis is on reinvigorating local democracy and community politics. For those on the Right, the focus is on using market mechanisms – choice and competition – to give people more power in their everyday dealings with public service providers. But for all Liberal Democrats, the aim is to reinvent, not to reduce, the state.
You can read the full piece here.
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15 Comments
A genuine question to Julian or anyone else.
I have just read in the Guardian that the budget has agreed to cut unemplyment benefit by 10-% after one year. ??
Can anyone clarify the details and whether this is true ?
The implication of this woule indeed be that we are allowing the state to be re-invented as a harsh agressive bigoted instiution that believe the unwaged poor are scrownging feckless scum that deserve to be punished.
The amount of money even saved by this would be small so what other conclusion is there to come to .
But before I continue can anyone confirm if true as this was something that seemed initially to be largely ignored by the press.
Please note I do not use a nic name and I am a Liberal Democrat member .. a very worried one .
“I have just read in the Guardian that the budget has agreed to cut unemplyment benefit by 10-% after one year. ??
Can anyone clarify the details and whether this is true ?”
It’s Housing Benefit that will be cut after a year’s unemployment (from 2013). Don’t ask me why.
But the state is being reduced.What a strange article.
This is a big Question about the budgets fairness
I have never been unlucky enough to have to claim either housing or unemployment benefit but I imagine the effect on someone in genuine need having their benefits reduced is disproportionately worse than someone like me suffering higher capital gains tax or a higher income tax rate.
This sort of thing won’t bother your average tory but liberals!!!
“The implication of this woule indeed be that we are allowing the state to be re-invented as a harsh agressive bigoted instiution that believe the unwaged poor are scrownging feckless scum that deserve to be punished”
That seems a bit of a leap.
The benefits system is an important safeguard, no liberal would disagree. But you would need to be blind not to see that there are some people who are on the dole by choice. Allowing that is neither in those people’s nor in society as a whole’s interest. It is certainly not something a liberal would be happy about. A 10% cut after 12 months seems to me a reasonable balance between encouraging people who COULD find work to do so without unduly harming those few that genuinely cannot.
“This sort of thing won’t bother your average tory but liberals!!!”
And, of course, that’s precisely why this will be far more damaging to the Lib Dems than the Tories. No doubt it will harm Tory popularity to some extent, but it will strike right at the heart of Lib Dem support.
That’s why Nick Clegg is such a perfect human shield for David Cameron. Come the next election, no matter how unpopular the government is, at least the Tories won’t have to worry about losing seats to the Lib Dems, because the Lib Dems will be _more_ unpopular than them. (That’s in the absence of an electoral pact between the parties, which I think will be very much on the cards.)
This is essentially a tory government whichever way you cut (no pun intended) it
Two new polls show a rather steep drop in Lib Dem support-largely at the expense of a Labour rise.The Tories get credit for being tough, Labour gets credit for fighting savage cuts, Lib Dems get the blame for being hypocrites.Don’t blame the messenger.
On the whole this is a welcome clarification of the Lib Dem position by Julian Astle. One of the questions being asked by Labour is whether the cuts agenda being supported by the leadership of the Liberal Democrats is to do more with ideology rather than a desire to cut back on the size of the state. Many of us find the idea that we should cut the state by 1/4 to be very alarming and completely nonsensical.
Julian Astle gets it as far as I am concerned in terms of understanding the critique of the state from both the left and the right of the party. I am reassured that Julian, who is more familiar of the right of the party than I am does not want to reduce the state as dramatically of George Osbourne appears to want to do. The obvious question is will we let him?
The danger in cutting the state is that those who will be hit the hardest will be those on low incomes. That in turn will potentially lead to social problems in which the only solution would be to spend more money. In other words a false economy.
I had been arguing until now that we should continue the stimulus until we have enough growth that we could pay back the debt without having to implement such painful cuts. The problem with that is that a stimulus cannot work in one country alone, certainly not the UK. Ideally we should be cooperating with Barack Obama and try to persuade Germany to continue their stimulus. However they also have a right wing government and there is no reason to think we could persuade them to change their policy. We are not going to do that with George Osbourne as chancellor in any case, but this leaves us simply with no options; without a stimulus and with demand being taking out of the economy, a recession now seems very likely.
A recession of course means less revenue in which to pay off the deficit. Then what do we do? Stimulate, or cut back more?
On the issue of housing benefit cuts; only a few people on housing benefit will be hit by this. I am not saying the policy is a good one, but the idea is to get claimants to move from expensive accommodation to cheaper accommodation where they will get paid the full amount.
“I am reassured that Julian, who is more familiar of the right of the party than I am does not want to reduce the state as dramatically of George Osbourne appears to want to do. The obvious question is will we let him?”
You’re already letting him, aren’t you? Those plans for 25% cuts in everything but health and international development were in the budget statement, which apparently has the support of all the Lib Dem MPs, with the (possible) exception of Bob Russell.
The disappointment to me is not that Clegg, Laws & Co are going along with this – I never expected much better of them – but that virtually the whole parliamentary party is doing so as well.
@ Benjamin
If a guy has been looking for a job for a year (he has to show the benafit office he has been looking ) on what basis does he need an extra incentive. Any adjustment in very low benafits after this time can only be seen a some kind of colletive punishment.
“But you would need to be blind not to see that there are some people who are on the dole by choice”
There are one or two perhaps but the fact that you turn this into a major arument is part of a widespraed and in my opinion rather bigoted scapegoating mentality that is avoiding the real problem that is lack of jobs combined with the rediculous high marional loss of benafits when someone returns to work.
Why after all would anyone go through in depths interrogations from a Job Centre for a basic payment of £65 per week ???
George Osborne and Mao Tse-Tung have much in common. They both govern on the basis of a Five Year Plan.
What’s wrong with that? Simply that economic circumstances always change within months, and all governments that are not prisoners of a rigid ideological perspective are able to recognise that. They listen, learn, and adapt. A pragmatic government might end up deciding to get rid of the deficit much faster – or alternatively, it might let it grow even larger. A pragmatic government would do whatever looks most likely to work, in the (inevitably) very different and unpredictable economic circumstances that we shall see developing over the next few months and years.
Osborne’s Five Year Plan gives him away as an ideologue whose aim is to shrink the state. It is not about necessity. That is a cloak.
Julian Astle may have a different, more truly liberal and humanitarian, philosophy of “reinventing” the state. Or he may just be dissembling. I don’t know. And I’m afraid I don’t very much care. Because Astle is not running our economy. Osborne is!
Housing Benefit is a major drain on the public purse. It has ballooned in the past three decades because where people who were on low income would most often be housed at cost price in council housing, now they are often housed at much higher rents in privately let housing. This is a direct consequence of the “right to buy”. Housing Benefit therefore is really a direct transfer from the tax-payer to “buy to let” merchants. It does not help the poor. It has the consequence of pushing up private rental and house prices in general. So it hits hard those who are poor – it makes their rent higher if they rent, it pushes house prices beyond their reach because buy-to-let merchants use it to guarantee their income and bid more. It creates a poverty trap because those in expensively rented housing with the rent paid by Housing Benefit find it isn’t worth working because what they earn is taken away by a balancing loss in Housing Benefit, and they are never going to be in a position to earn enough to pay all the rent without using Housing Benefit.
It is one thing to take benefit away from people refusing work and another altogether to take it away from people who cannot find work. This nonsense about cutting housing benefit to “encourage” people to “find work” is nonsense. After one year ALL of the unemployed HAVE to participate in the Conservatives forthcoming Work Programme and so will be FORCED to look for and to accept work; why then under these circumstances must such unlucky people have to be punished further by cutting their Housing Benefit by 10%. Some of the people affected will be in their fifties and sixties and may struggle to find employment after having been made redundant or after losing their jobs for other reasons. In fact for many people in their sixties it may be impossible for them to find work at all.
This heinous and cruel policy has nothing to do with enlightened Liberal Democracy.
It is indiscriminate and potentially incredibly damaging to the innocent and the guilty alike.
The Liberal Democrats should not support it and will be damned if we do.