In the conclusion to his book ‘The Future of Politics’ published in 2000, Charles Kennedy stated
It will not be possible to categorize the voter of 2020 as a socialist, or a conservative. Instead, the voter of 2020 will be a variety of things: internationalist, green, committed to properly funded public services, technologically aware and liberal. That could make the voter of 2020 a natural Liberal Democrat supporter – but only if he or she hasn’t lost faith in politics altogether.
He believed that politicians have to restore a sense of idealism to politics, but that first, we have to know what our ideals are, and re-define our basic principles. Charles made clear that his key principle was a firm belief in liberty. As we consider electing a new leader, I would urge both old and new members to read this book before voting. I read it when it was first published, and have just read it again, following his tragic death.
There is much in the book that is as relevant today, as when it was published in 2000. It was three years into a ‘New Labour’ government under Tony Blair, and the government was already beginning to lose trust with the public, after all the initial euphoria of 1997. Charles emphasised that,
We need to change the way in which we go about our politics, to restore a sense of faith and trust in the political process. A crucial element in this, I believe, is to uphold the principles of integrity and honesty in office.
There is no doubt in my mind, that breaking our collective pledge on tuition fees was a major factor in our loss of support in every election since. The public had lost trust in our integrity, after party television broadcasts about broken promises, rather than promoting our core values. People may argue that it would have been different if all Lib Dem MPs had abstained, as was supported by Party Conference, or as to which group voted for or against the increase in tuition fees to ‘compensate’ for the decisions of the other group.
Whatever you believe, four of our present eight MPs did vote for the increase, and four voted against. In choosing a successor to Nick Clegg, we need to bear this in mind. We need to take heed of the principles that guided Charles Kennedy, in the book that will remain as a valuable contribution and reminder of his 32 years of outstanding service to his constituency, to Scotland, and to our party.
* David Murray is a long-time activist. He joined Liberal Party in 1966 and was elected to Cambridge City Council in 1970. When he moved to Shropshire he was elected to Bridgnorth District Council 2003 -2009 as well as 5 Town & Parish councils. Has held most positions in Lib/Lib Dem local parties, has twice been Policy Chair of the West Midlands Region, and is a member of ALTER.
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37 Comments
Thank you, thank you David – you hit the nail on the head spot on. I too look forward to the future and would ask that we set up a Scholarship in memory of Charles so that his name will continue to inspire aspiration and above all steadfastness in many generations to come. I remember a busy afternoon in 2006 going out to call my next patient from a heaving waiting room when suddenly they were on their feet and looking towards the TV in the corner of the room with sounds of horror and “no”, “he is the best” and “he is definitely ours”. It took a few minutes to glean that it was news coverage of Charles resignation as Leader. That moment had a huge impact on me as I realised how people really identified with him and respected him. The world of politics is often unforgiving but every now and again someone comes along and inspires courage, understanding , empathy and we all respond. We should try and hold what Charles had and distribute it into the future.
David Murray is right with the following comment;
“We need to change the way in which we go about our politics, to restore a sense of faith and trust in the political process. A crucial element in this, I believe, is to uphold the principles of integrity and honesty in office.”
This is a bit difficult for us when one of our remaining eight MPs is under formal investigation
Very nicely put. I’m afraid that I’m ignorant of which of the current Lib Dem MPs voted for and which voted against – could someone enlighten me please?
Voted for the tuition fees rise: Nick Clegg, Alastair Carmichael, Norman Lamb, Tom Brake
Voted against the tuition fees rise: Tim Farron, John Pugh, Mark Williams, Greg Mulholland
Jamie Stewart 5th Jun ’15 – 4:35pm
Having spoken in an election broadcast of “an end to broken promises”, the very public tuition fees pledge should have been a double red line.
Little point in crying over that particular bowl of spilt milk but with reference to how we failed to spot (and ignored the warnings of) the juggernaut coming towards us and crucially how this affects the future prospects of the party, the following may be of some relevance … “Following the 2010 General Election, Norman served first as Chief Parliamentary Advisor to Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister”.
Stephen Hesketh “tuition fees pledge should have been a double red line”
You hit the nail on the head. The only stock in trade of a political party is the trust of voters. We now have a mountain to climb. Anyone who participated in the tuition fee debacle is clearly unfit to lead us.
In 10 years time no one is going to be talking about tuition fees. They might be talking about broken communities, the end of the welfare state, and the deaths that followed decisions made by DWP, though. The party has far more around it’s neck than a single pledge and needs to remember this – Charles Kennedy voted against supporting the austerity-government, remember. Whichever leader is next has a very big job on their hands, but the party has to be ready and actually willing. I see far too many coalition supporting comments to think that the LibDems of Kennedy’s day are back just yet. (But give us time!)
@Samuel Griffiths “In 10 years time no one is going to be talking about tuition fees”
You obviously don’t get it. The trust Clegg destroyed will take a generation to recover. In 1991, almost 25 years ago, Gerald Ratner wiped £500 million from the value of his company with one word- “crap”. This is still remembered. Tuition fees was our party’s own Gerald Ratner moment, and in 20 years time people will still remember.
Samuel Griffiths 5th Jun ’15 – 10:09pm
You may be right that in ten years time no-one will be talking about tuition fees but that rather misses the point. It’s not, and has largely never been, solely about the tuition fee pledge per se. People may well forget the specific issue but they will still associate the Lib Dems with ‘untrustworthy’ etc. It’s always been about trust, because the Lib Dems made that their Unique Selling Point – ‘trust us, we are not like the old parties’ . Let’s hope the new leader can regain the voters’ trust, in the way that Charles Kennedy did.
Of course that assumes that in ten years time the university fees issue will somehow be resolved and everything will be perfect . I’m not convinced myself, it seems to me that the new system is just so many chickens waiting to come home to roost.
A good piece from David there. It’s nice to see him making the link between tuition fees and what happened to our support- a big issue the Lib Dems face is how to respond to that mistake. So far we haven’t come up with one.
@SamuelGriffiths
I suspect some Tories said the same about Poll Tax in the early 1990’s or removing free school milk in the 1970’s. People still talk about both of those and pretty much every young person who wasn’t even alive at the time has some awareness of at least one of them. Tuition fees are, as David Cooper very aptly said, our Ratner moment.
In 10 years time people may be looking back to 2010-2015 as a golden age of cheap higher education, I fear… But then I am a bit of a pessimist!
I think David Murray is spot on about the pledge, as was Charles Kennedy.. I did not resign in 2010 (after some correspondence with Simon Hughes) because I disagreed with the tuition fees policy (even though I did, and still do – graduate tax for me and we should back the NUS and endorse it as policy).
It was we had broken the golden rule of politics, which is to keep your promises to your own electorate, whatever they may be. Voters expect that and respect that, even if they disagree with you on the issues. They care about that far more than they care about party loyalty… It was the fact that the tuition fees pledge had been made to voters in each constituency that made it so powerful, and then so toxic when broken. Everyone could see that it was within the power of each individual MP to keep that pledge, whatever the circumstances (and abstaining was NOT keeping the pledge, by the way) Voters did not care about the wording of some coalition agreement reached in private with the Tories. They cared about the very straightforward and public promise, and rightly said “if we cannot trust Nick Clegg on this, what CAN we trust him on?” Apologising for making the pledge but not for breaking it was just the last straw…
Resigning after 23 years of membership and after being raised by an active Liberal was very painful for me. Discussions about Liberalism were frequent in my teens.. I could not believe that MPs that I had looked up to and in some cases campaigned for would behave like that… I was abroad when the coalition was being agreed. I thought it might well spell disaster for the Party anyway, but I was aghast when it emerged that the tuition fee pledge had been sacrificed…Well, I have kept my own personal pledge not to lift a finger to help the Lib Dems while Nick Clegg was leader. And now I am back, ready to vote for Tim Farron and get back involved…
The Lib Dems need to be targeting “the real middle” – people earning between £20-30,000 per year. I am seeing too much focus on ideology and some senior people, such as Paddy Ashdown and Sal Brinton, need to make an intervention, because I think Farron and Lamb both have the wrong ideas, as nice as they are personally.
David,
Actually, I am not quite so pessimistic about things as you, provided we elect Tim Farron… I think the electorate have given us a thorough kicking, and will be prepared to consider coming back provided there is a clean break. Whether they actually come back will depend on whether we can enthuse people with the Lib Dem brand again, and whether we have some good luck in getting a winnable by-election, perhaps….
The biggest problem is that we have lost what had become one of our best constituencies – students and recent graduates. They care about the issue and not just the pledge, and certainly have not forgiven us for the £9000 fees. We are out of line with most of the rest of the world on the cost of Higher Education, and need to think about this urgently
Commenting here runs the risk of giving this stuff legs, but if tuition fees really were still the same issue in five years time, then a distinction between Lamb and Farron would be utterly inconsequential.
What would be needed is a fully worked out policy, presumably one that repudiates the present system, one that spells out the tax hike or substantial cuts that can pay for University education and living expenses. And please, if you do think a graduate tax is the answer, do show an adequate understanding how the present system works (including that it provides a mechanism for taxing graduates who move out of the country).
However, in my personal opinion, it would be court continuing calamity to commit Lib Dems to be banging on about tuition fees throughout the next five years. I did not like the introduction of the new system, but the worst error was that those immediately connected to the introduction of the new system utterly failed to stand up and strongly advocate the system’s virtues. – especially the fact that it is a graduate tax (for all except future very well paid graduates). I am sure that if this issue had been a problem for the Tories, their politicians would have been brazenly asserting the benefits of the system.
Nonetheless, it really is too obvious that within the next five years the issue will move on to difficulties in sustaining the finance for the system. Lib Dem policy will need to be prepared how to respond to these issues as they arise.
Tuition fees are an interesting point. We were hung out to dry, not on our manifesto, but on the NUS pledge. Apologising for making this promise, instead of apologising for breaking this promise, amounted to a full admission by Nick Clegg that he never intended to keep it – something we know was pretty much the truth. How many time did Clegg’s camp come to conference to try and overturn our commitment to universal free higher education?
Nick Clegg was buffeted about within the coalition, because of his lack of any clear ideological commitment to the beliefs held by the majority of Lib Dems and in particular to the universality of public services, like access to the law and higher education as set out in the Beveridge proposals.
My personal view, in considering Nick Clegg’s record is summed up by Cromwell’s words following the second Battle of Newbury:
” I would rather have a plain russet-coated captain who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else”.
For me Nick Clegg is like the rich man who wanted to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Nick wants to enter the Kingdom of Social Justice, but can’t quite give up the privelidges to which his peers are accustomed.
So in summary, moving forward to abolish tuition fees is the only way in which Nick Clegg’s record would be cut loose from the Lib Dem’s neck. The financial prospects for delivering such a policy would require economic recovery and higher taxation. We are far in time from that day, but we have in the past successfully advocated a penny on income tax for education and we should be prepared to defend the social realm which benefits the overwhelming majority who depend on state education and the NHS.
@Richard Coe “moving forward to abolish tuition fees”
Just how do we do that? Make a pledge?
Martin,
As far as I can see, the mechanism for reclaiming the fees from those who move out of the country appears to be “If you choose not to pay, don’t ever come back or we will really hit you!” We could do the same with a graduate tax if we wanted (although I am not sure it is desirable or necessary). The good thing about a graduate tax is that it is not a debt and does not increase like the loan. What is more, in our efforts to make richer students pay more (ie make it like a graduate tax) we penalised people who pay of the loan early, which is just a bit daft! The Tories will get rid of that by making it more expensive for everyone, I predict…
In 2010 I would have brought in a retrospective graduate tax for everyone before the fees era (maybe at 2%) That would have raised significant money, would have affected most MPs, and would have been fair. Instead we made a policy that actually increased the deficit despite being hidden behind some arcane accountancy practice… And gave universities a big windfall that they have been busy spending on everything except staff salaries (apart from Vice-Chancellors and marketing executives, of course!)
As said above, the system is almost certainly unsustainable because of the hugely optimistic assumptions about the default rate. So it is going to come back very soon and we had better have a policy ready. Under the circumstances, backing the NUS policy (without making any pledges to individual electors) might be sensible
BTW developing a policy that is more popular and workable is a big difference from “banging on about it”
How about a policy that lifelong education will be free at the point of delivery to the user and funded by a progressive taxation system including non-graduates? Anyone who signs up for a course gets it paid for through central or local funding. The costs are raised by taxation ( income tax, VAT, IHT, LVT, “Mansion Tax” and others.) that is structured in a progressive way. The benefit of such a policy is that anyone who is motivated to educate themselves is not financially penalisesd or taking on a debt and society as a whole pays for the benefits that society as a whole gets from having an educated population. Impossible? Well, it was largely how education in England was paid for until the 1990’s and the majority of MPs and virtually all the Lords had their educations paid for that way. Sometime in the 1990’s it seems to have been decided that education should be treated as a luxury commodity that only benefits the recipient. The roots of this problem lie in a resentful anti-intellectualism that is prominent in the thinking of the English of all classes. I speak as an English person. They do things better in other parts of Europe.
You still on about tuition fees? You have been “conditioned” just like the public- by constant repetition. It’s the way the other parties media used to destroy us, It will never be explained properly unless we have a big daily behind us.
@David Cooper the electorate is unlikely to forget about tuition fees when you keep going on about them.
@Ed Shepherd sometime in the 90s Tony Blair decided that 50% of pupils should go to university rather than the 15% or so it had been. At that point the strain on the public purse became obvious.
@TCO
“sometime in the 90s Tony Blair decided that 50% of pupils should go to university rather than the 15% or so it had been. At that point the strain on the public purse became obvious.”
You’re wrong on two counts. For one thing, Blair’s target was for HE education in general, not just people attending university.
More significantly, all the substantial growth in HE participation actually took place during the last ten years of the Thatcher/Major government, in which time participation rates more than doubled. During Labour’s period in office, HE participation barely increased at all, so much so that by 2008 it was estimated that Blair’s target would take another 100 years to achieve.
@Stuart there’s a crucial difference between HE and University attendance. HE students tend to live at home more and self fund to a much higher degree; the sort of vocational courses that the old polytechnics and HE colleges used to offer often as night classes or day release or sandwich courses. So the balance of public funding was much different.
So my point is still valid; there was a much lesser burden on the public purse and z much higher degree of self or employer funded courses.
David Cooper and Sammy O’Neil: Whilst I think you are both correct, I don’t think you entirely understand the fallout that the last 5 years has had in regard to public services. Future generations may very well be far more interested in the LibDems who destroyed their NHS and brought in private healthcare, than they may be the fact University is more expensive. Of course, none of us can tell the future and there are plenty of chances to avert the Tory agenda, but we do need to keep some perspective. Clegg and friends lied, and on the doorstep we heard a lot about it. But tuition fees weren’t the only thing that the party lied about and in focusing on that single issue it often feels like we’re ignoring the rest – which i feel will be more punishing.
Samuel Griffiths:
The NHS has been “destroyed”? – Really? When did that happen?
Incidentally what was the first and only private NHS Hinchingbrooke Hospital. Who ensured that this hospital was run by a private organisation? Was it Jeremy Hunt, Andres Lansley or Andy Burnham? Sorry, I cannot supply a Liberal Democrat name because there was not one. But to give you a clue the Health Minister in question did and does belong to a party whose name begins with an L.
I joined the Lib-Dems mainly because it was the only party consistently to support our membership of the EU and European Community; not much mentioned in the election campaign or on these pages. But it was also a people-friendly party. I went once on an AUT organised mass lobby of MP’s. Can’t remember now much what it was about but I do remember that, while queuing outside the Houses of Parliament, waiting to get into our various MP’s offices, my MP, bluff Yorkshire-man Richard Wainwright, came along the queue and picked out all of his constituents to take inside with him. This was pretty impressive, especially to non Liberals.
Nick Clegg didn’t/doesn’t have that sort of personality. Pity.
Integrity is hugely important, which, regrettably, means reining in some of the supposedly “brilliant” ideas of some staffers.
I vaguely remember a French company trying to sell what was allegedly bottled tap-water and undermining the sales of their other product/s.
@TCO
I know there’s a difference between “university” and “HE” – confusion of the two was one of the two errors I pointed out in my previous post!
I’m afraid your point is not valid, because university admissions rose significantly throughout the last Tory government and very little afterwards. See page 5 here :-
http://www.ifs.org.uk/wps/wp1004.pdf
Stuart is absolutely correct. There was a huge expansion in university admissions in 1992. I remember this as I started work at a university at the time on a Teaching and Learning Technology Programme project specifically trying to help cope with the huge expansion in numbers.
Phyllis
Stuart is absolutely correct. There was a huge expansion in university admissions in 1992
Indeed, and if one is going to take the positions that university places should be heavily subsidised directly by the state that must inevitably mean higher taxes. Just as, with lifespans greatly increasing, and many more people living to extreme old age than used to be the case, if we want an NHS providing health care free of direct charge, that must inevitably mean more state spending, because older people do require more in the way of maintenance spending to keep going.
Yet these obvious points just haven ‘t appeared in political discussion. We are still getting this line that all the Liberal Democrats needed to do was wave their hands and that would pay for direct state subsidy of universities, therefore the Liberal Democrats are bad people for not waving their hands. We’ve been going on about this for five years, the “nah nah nah nah nah”s have managed to destroy the Liberal Democrats over this issue and handed our country back to permanent 100% Tory control, and yet STILL the “nah nah nah nah nah”s won’t admit that the real issue was that there was no way the Tories would have agreed to the level of taxation required to fully subsidise universities, and THAT was the issue, and that the only way to resolve it without reversing that expansion was to trick the Tories into agreeing to disguised government borrowing and very generous repayment and write-off conditions for student loans that actually meant they paid off less is real terms than Labour would have them pay.
Matthew. When a person makes a personal pledge to do something and signs it to great fanfare, all the while saying ‘vote for me because unlike the candidates from the old parties, I will not break my promises’ then it is a question of their personal integrity. Charles Kennedy recognised this. So did Tim Farron.
Me
the “nah nah nah nah nah”s have managed to destroy the Liberal Democrats over this issue and handed our country back to permanent 100% Tory control
I mean this. The reversal of decades of hard work by the Liberal Democrats and Liberal Party before them in building up an opposition in the Tory heartland and winning seats there is a huge tragedy, and it may well mean we have almost perpetual Tory government from now on. I do not think those who jeered “nasty rotten Liberal Democrats, nah nah nah nah nah, we want to see you destroyed” realised what they were doing. Now they have what they said they wanted.
When I look across the south-east and south-west and see it all blue again, I despair. My life’s work is ruined, what I joined the Liberals to achieve has been smashed to pieces. And YOU, “nah nah nah nah nah”s, YOU did that.
Labour hasn’t a clue how to win in the south. Already we see it supposing the way to do that is to become more like the Tories, to adopt what we on the left of the Liberal Democrats call “Orange Booker” policies, and we KNOW that is NOT how to win votes in the south. So, “nah nah nah nah nah”s, that’s the next thing you’re managing to do – turn the Labour Party into what you criticised the Liberal Democrats for becoming.
Matthew, “….and THAT was the issue, and that the only way to resolve it without reversing that expansion was to trick the Tories into agreeing to disguised government borrowing and very generous repayment and write-off conditions for student loans that actually meant they paid off less is real terms than Labour would have them pay.”
The huge flaw in your argument is that Clegg has never claimed that the Tories would not agree to the Lib Dem policy., not even during the “\=Sorry” video. Nor has any other pledge-breaking MP. We’ve had lots of leaking of Cabinet discussions by the Lib Dems but at no time has Clegg or anyone else claimed what you are saying. I deduce from this that this is your assumption, but it has no basis in fact at all.
@Matthew Huntbach Labour are adopting Orange Book policies? I’ll be off then 😉