It would have been very surprising if Nick’s weekly letter hadn’t been on the subjects which have dominated the headlines this week – free schools and energy bills. Although, to be honest, I think it’s the energy bills that most voters are most concerned about and possibly merited a larger proportion of the Letter than they get. Nick makes the case for retaining the green charges which pay for the warm homes discount and home insulation programmes. Ed Davey wrote more about what he’s doing to keep down energy bills on this site last week. The thing is, it’s not as headline-grabbing as a price freeze, but it stands to reason that the more players in the market, the more likely it will be that bills come down. He also flags up the new manifesto website and encourages contributions.
Coalition in crisis. Ministers engulfed by rows. If you’ve read the newspapers this week, you could be forgiven for thinking the government was on the brink of a meltdown. It’s almost a miracle, you’d think, that no blood has been spilt.
So what’s really happened this week on the two big issues in debate: free schools and energy bills? I’d characterise it as honest disagreement coupled with practical determination to work through that disagreement. Doesn’t make much of a headline, of course.
It’s no secret that Liberal Democrats and Conservatives have a different take on how best to run our schools. There’s plenty we agree on: we both believe in school freedom and diversity; we both believe parents and communities should be able to set up new schools; and we both believe Labour’s approach of dictating everything from Whitehall was a mistake.
But as Liberal Democrats agreed at our conference in the Spring this year, our party believes freedom should be underpinned by a core set of basic standards: a parents’ guarantee that teachers will be qualified, lessons will cover the core national curriculum, and school meals won’t be junk. It’s hardly a Stalinist command and control list of orders!
As for energy bills? Well, both parties agree we should do all we can to keep bills down – and we need more competition and easier switching among energy providers to help that happen. That’s exactly what Ed Davey is working on, day-in, day-out at the Department for Energy and Climate Change.
But I will never agree with those on the right who say we should abandon plans to insulate homes and switch to green energy. Not least because home insulation and home-grown energy create jobs now, and are the best ways to keep bills down in the long term. So yes, we will make sure no-one is paying a penny more than necessary, but we won’t put jobs at risk or abandon our green credentials.
You can tell me what you think the right policy is on energy bills, on schools, or on any issue on the Manifesto Website we’re launching this weekend. Now’s the time to put forward your ideas for the next manifesto – the ideas we’ll be fighting for in the next coalition government.
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* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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7 Comments
” There’s plenty we agree on: we both believe in school freedom and diversity”
What kind of freedom/ What kind of diversity? Fundamentalists opening schools? Hard-right journalists setting up Athenian schools in west London? How far do we go? We know that Tories believe in elitism and it’s a grey area whether fundamentalists are acceptable to them but the Liberal Democrats don’t accept these models- traditionally.
“…we both believe parents and communities should be able to set up new schools”
We have community schools and they are run by local authorities and are democratically accountable – but we have helped undermine that idea. So much for strategic thinking.
“… and we both believe Labour’s approach of dictating everything from Whitehall was a mistake.”
Now I know it’s easy to have a pop at the old-style socialists but Blairism has infected the Labour Party and like Nick and David, they believe in academies and in fact won’t abolish existing free schools. They also claim to be in favour of qualified teachers.
And this is the really amusing bit – all THREE parties now seem to believe in a top-down approach to the curriculum, imposed on schools from the DfE and top down performance measures, league tables and crude rankings, endless testing, re-organisation of examinations at break-neck speed with minimal consultation etc etc..
In reality, there is a hair’s breadth of difference on education between all three parties. All have a terminal fear of difference, of local democracy, of teachers being able to teach an appropriate curriculum, according to their professional judgements. All meddle and micro-manage.
Perhaps we should have stuck to our manifesto values and commitments to education from 2010. If so, we might not be in the mess we’re in now with the giant ideological experiment being carried out by the Secretary of State and his SpAds.
Ed Milliband’s scheme is dismissed as naïve and “headline-grabbing”, but it’s a lot more cautious than what Nick Clegg was proposing when he was in opposition five years ago.
Back in 2008, Clegg railed against the “scandalous profiteering” of the energy companies and called on Gordon Brown to force them to give £9bn worth of price cuts to hard-pressed consumers.
Five years later, with the energy companies making vastly bigger profits, and consumers much more hard-pressed, you’d think Clegg would be even more keen on telling the energy companies to drop prices. Not a bit of it.
Last week our company received a £93,400 government grant to help us build a prototype Latent Power Turbine.
If successful this will allow domestic consumers and industry to generate all of their electricity by absorbing heat from the atmosphere whenever the air temperature is above about 5 degrees C.
The capital cost for LP Turbines will be a fraction of the cost of wind power.
The price per unit of energy should be far less than for fossil fuels or nuclear. All these benefits will eliminate the need for carbon/green taxes.
Our chances of success? – At least 50:50.
For details visit http://www.cheshire-innovation.com/Sky%20Tube.htm
Bill, you need to display heat sinks on your diagrams as well as heat sources. As it stands your designs look suspiciously like something that is thermodynamically impossible, and I would be very worried about you getting any grant on that basis. Now maybe this is just a diagram issue, and you have dealt with the thermodynamics. Though I would still have thought that a Stirling cycle engine or a thermocouple would be a more robust way to use low grade heat. There’s not a huge amount of power to generated that way in any case.
The text explanation tends to confirm Joe’s fears.
“School freedom” is highly ambiguous. Assuming it means freedom of schools rather than within schools – freedom from what? In principle Liberal Democrats will favour local organisations not being controlled by larger or more distant units more than is necessary, but what if schools can ignore the local community’s priorities?
As for Labour dictating everything from the centre, yes, that was and is their tendency, but it was the Tories who introduced the national curriculum, before which our school system was one of the most decentralised in Europe, and still through Labour’s thirteen years gave schools far more independence than in some of our neighbours.
Good ideas, but hopefully fleshed out ready to roll out.
Free school dinners = good idea. What about the need to now feed 160 pupils in one hour, instead of the current
uptake at my local Primary of 48? What about the dining tables planning ( capacity of the hall is 120 max.) and
some training, ( serving logistics ) free please, for catering and serving staff?
Just a thought