Writing over on the Huffington Post, Lib Dem Voice’s Mark Pack has been taking a look at the party’s plan for the next year:
The plan of senior Liberal Democrats is to focus heavily on delivering and communicating the four priorities from the front page of the party’s 2010 manifesto:
- “fair taxes – that put money back in your pocket
- “a fair future – creating jobs by making Britain greener
- “a fair chance – for every child
- “a fair deal – by cleaning up politics”
On taxes, this year has already seen a big step towards the £10,000 income tax allowance and moves to cap tax breaks for the very richest. The next few months must see action to match the rhetoric on tax avoidance and evasion. Early signs show promise – especially the news that RSM Tenon is closing its specialist tax division saying that rule changes means there is no longer enough of a market for its services.
Across jobs, the economy and education, again the story will be of implementation – making the Green Deal and Green Investment Bank a success, implementing banking reform and ensuring the Pupil Premium works. It is no coincidence that on being promoted to the Cabinet Ed Davey picked as one of his special advisors Chris Nicholson, someone with long experience of policy implementation.
It will be a case of implementation, implementation, implementation for the party’s ministers and repetition, repetition, repetition for the party’s campaigners.
Read Mark’s post in full here.
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6 Comments
A message needs to be believable, and I think there are flaws in this one:
Everyone knows that tax is something that is taken away from them. So taxes that “put money back in your pocket” just looks like a con
Fairness is something about equality, so how does green come into it?
Ok on children, but does this mean you have given up on adults? All voters are adults, remember?
No-one really believes that politicians are going to clean up politics, do they?
This is so vague that it is almost meaningless and says nothing and oozes no ambition whatsoever. I mean, everyone wants fair taxes. Everyone wants a fair future, a fair chance and fair deal. It’s like saying “We LibDems believe the sky is blue, and we’re sure everyone agrees with us on that.” But what, exactly, are our “leaders” going to do? Where are the plans? And further, after tuition fees, the NHS “reforms” and taking money from the disabled to give to the mega-rich, why should we believe anything those at the top of our party say they will do? Why should we believe the Tories will let us have ANY kind of influence when they are now so keen on voting down anything in the Coalition Agreement that they don’t like, while we voted for EVERYTHING we don’t like? I don’t know about everyone else, but I’ll never believe a word from those at the top of our party until they’re replaced by people we can trust who actually hold LD values: people like Vince Cable, Charles Kennedy and Tim Farron.
Looks like 3 more years of being used and shafted by the Tories, followed by electoral collapse and 10 MPs at the next election if we’re lucky. But, hey, I’m sure Clegg, Alexander and everyone else currently at the top will tell us how everything that went wrong in coalition was actually Labour’s fault and nothing to do with their newfound Tory “friends”.
Simon Bamonte 16th Jul ’12 – 5:09pm – Respect for your comment Simon. It’s as though everyone in “government” is against the disabled, sick, dying, unemployed, youth and elderly but can’t find anything wrong with the elite including the gang of crooks in The City who are very, very comfortable but responsible for so much damage – without being punished at all. What happened to Project Merlin? Could you ask Vince?
The conviction with which Simon and others speak so vehemently is clear evidence that the leadership need to work at getting the message across, (its not us minions on the ground with Focus!). The media are screwing us constantly, otherwise we would have a better public understanding of the facts behind the scurrilous headlines. Whilst its good that we were not cosy with Murdoch, that’s probably because we would not play his game, but somehow the media must be made to be more honest.
Someone really needs to get their head round how subjective the word “fair” is. And then stop using it. “Fair taxes”, for example, could be used to justify anything from the poll tax (isn’t it fair that everyone pays the same for equal access to local services?) to punitive inheritance tax (isn’t it fair that we all start off from nothing?) to no tax at all (isn’t it fair that I decide which public services I think are worth supporting, not some bureaucrat?). How can the public know what you stand for, if it’s expressed in such woolly terms?
Quite agree about use of “fair”. It’s true that everyone wants “fairness”. It’s only useful as a term when you’re identifying specific issues as “unfair”.
For example, the pre-election trope about the unfairness of venture capitalists paying less tax than their cleaners because of the different rules for Income tax and Capital Gains Tax: that was specific, and made sense to people. Saying “we believe in fair taxes” invites the curled lip of public cynicism. I think the problem is that our leadership don’t dare say “tax cuts for the low-paid”, because it immediately reminds people of benefit cuts for the even lower paid and tax cuts for the very well paid; and they don’t dare say “tax rises for the rich” because that sounds too Labour… So they end up saying something that means nothing at all…