Political parties the world over are often accused of ‘re-fighting the last election’ when they develop their manifestos. This is by way of a plea to all UK LibDems to be mindful of the need to avoid this tendency.
In practical terms this means thinking about the ‘record in government’ we wish hypothetically to be able to put together at the end of 2019, ready for presentation to the electorate in the run up to a 2020 election.
But hold on a minute – that means predicting issues in 2019 and the preceding 4/5 years. Exactly. I will suggest a few.
Constitution
By 2019 the Queen may wish to retire from public life and direct her famous ‘knowing smile’ towards a new constitution. The impact on the UK psyche of the Queen’s stabilising presence over the last 60 years should no be underestimated. For stability clear leadership and a firm grip of where we want to go is absolutely necessary. We must decide on the functions of Head of State, on a constitutional court, and the paradox of parliament’s supremacy. We have had a bit of a leg up on this from the Tories and Labour who opposed even Lords reform against the public mood.
Currency Wars
Privately, senior economists tend to agree that the US Dollar is unlikely to have a ‘soft landing’ as its role as global currency declines (ref: gold price manipulation). We have to decide what to do with Sterling. If we don’t join the Euro we will need some other strategy to deal with the likelihood of wild swings in the value of Sterling.
Export Performance
The days when the UK could survive as a consumption-based importing economy with no net public savings are definitely over. With City income in decline, the UK needs to export its way to a more sustainable balance of payments. The transformation to an exporting nation with net private and corporate savings is unavoidable. We need to be clear on what we have to do to get there.
Health Reforms
We all love the NHS. Sometimes more in theory than in practice. The really dedicated among NHS practitioners know they are working in a dreadful creaking system, which sometimes shores itself up through cover-ups and defensiveness. Recent hospital and employee-gagging scandals, and billion-pound-plus corruption (eg in IT systems) should be telling us something. It will be necessary to abandon comparisons with the awful US system, and concede that there are many other ways to deliver services free at the point of treatment, and many other countries to learn from in this regard (that do not involve an interests-driven campaign of privatisation, overt or covert).
State Reform
Recasting state spending, and reducing some of it, has proven cumbersome and unnecessarily painful with an unreformed and secretive state. (The Tory leadership foolishly went soft on ‘sunlight as the best disinfectant’ and local government reform, so they could depend on civil servants to run the show. There’s lots of hidden and just-legal corruption which wastes hundreds of billions. We need to revive our policies on this and give them coherence & prominence.
Tertiary Education
We will not be able to afford the remnants of class divide any more. The aim should be ‘a nation of experts’….we have no choice. In addition to reforms of the existing institutions/systems, we should try and ensure that no-one is more than 45 mins travel away from relevant low-cost tertiary education, especially vocational.
These may not be ‘Sun page one’ issues. Yet. That is called leadership and ‘agenda-setting’.
* Paul Reynolds works with multilateral organisations as an independent adviser on international relations, economics, and senior governance.
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18 Comments
Manifestos are the Andrex of politics. Only geeks get up themselves about them.
“If we don’t join the Euro….”
Oh dear. I can’t still believe there are Lib Dems who are wanting to jump onto that sinking ship.
Europe is going to be a major problem for us in 2014 and 2015, because there is no sign that the EU is going to be anything other than major negative factor for the UK economy and people’s living standards for the foreseeable future. Being a Europhile party at a time like that is a difficult position to be in. A manifesto commitment to make the EU “not very much worse and possibly a bit less bad than it is now ” is really not going to be much of a clarion call to the voters, is it?
Clairvoyance is just Franglais for Clear Sight & this is a clar-sighted article.
On the currency question I dont think Americas relative decline is absolutely inevitable, it could be stopped if there was a return to the tradition of mass immigration. Immigration of only 5 million a year would keep The USAs position as “Top Nation” indefinitely. America is changing fast & a shift on Immigration cant be ruled out.
The only long-term solution for The NHS is a gradual shift towards prevention instead of cure. The problem of course is that means cutting treatment now in return for benefits in the future, that can only be done with political consensus.
I read that “if…” more as “since we won’t be joining the Euro…”
Europe’s economic problems certainly affect our exports. Leaving the EU would make that problem worse not better, and this is something we have to be very clear about. Brexites* do the truth a disservice by saying that Europe equals economic bad news and leaving it at that.
*Brexite = supporter of Brexit**. Should be a word. **Brexit = British exit from EU. Should be a word.
Ha Ha. I would say that Manifestos, including LibDem ones, are the opposite of ‘Soft, Strong and Very Long’ – ie hard (to believe), weak and very short.
On the question of the EU, we should not swallow the Daily Mail and UKIP propaganda whole – or accept at face value the survey data that uses loaded questions. What about the statistics on the question ‘Would you like to see the UK isolated outside the EU, with a smaller economy, and of necessity cuddling up even more with US over its wars of choice ? ‘ We have two cases to make . First hat the world is clustering into groups and we tragically lose out if we are not in one (ie China/SCO, US/NAFTA, ASEAN, ACN, ECOWAS, EAEC, SADC, GCC, CIS etc). Second, that because of the necessity of the EU we have to overcome all the flaws and vested interests and make it work better. [Unlike the Tories and Labour Party we have a basic common platform for reform with our ALDE partners]. But I agree it is a huge challenge.
Surely the lesson of this parliament is we need to focus less on issues that most voters do not care about, or disagree with us on, e.g. Constitutional reform, Europe.
Our manifesto for 2015 should be concentrated on vote-winning issues, such as the economy. Not least because we may have something to shout about on that score if GDP keeps creeping up.
Paul Reynolds
“I would say that Manifestos, including LibDem ones, are the opposite of ‘Soft, Strong and Very Long’ ”
Don’t know about that, but in PR terms the parliamentary Lib Dems have being ‘going to the dogs’ for years. DCam’s little lab puppies! 🙁
For me the biggest issues into the future are tackling global warming and dealing with nuclear proliferation. I also wonder how poverty is going to be tackled, noone seems to want to do it these days. Are we turning into a seige society with riots happening virtually every year?
@Geoffrey – the riots had nothing to do with poverty .. unless you define poverty as not having the brand of designer trainers you want.
@Simon: The riots had everything to do with poverty – if people feel isolated and cut off from mainstream society, while at the same time seeing others who (thanks to the media) appear to have everything, then we will become disenchanted and disconnected from society. The riots were a symptom of much deeper social issues within our society and to just disparage them as you have done is wrong, both morally and as a way of dealing with these problems.
As for the article, I see a back-door justification of privatising the NHS; yes, the results of that have been great so far and the electorate love for it, whilst the Scottish system is falling apart. >>
then they will become…etc (Freudian slip of the century, considering I was living in another country at the time haha)
While there may be constitutional issues to address in 2016 there is no real likelihood that the Queen will retire. The idea of reforming the whole system of government and including this in a manifesto for 2015 is silly. We have some priorities for constitutional reform and these are unlikely to have changed by 2015. As someone elsewhere has stated we need to push the idea of STV for local government. Also we need to decide how we want local government to be reformed or providing the structure for local government to reform itself so it can find its own local solutions because of the problems caused by austerity. Local Government finance will also need looking at. Hopefully we will include Land Value Tax in our manifesto as well as giving local government the freedom to set their own Council Tax rates.
The idea of a fixed currency should be confined to history. It failed before the Second World War and failed again afterwards in 1970s. The Euro has failed and we should be learning the lesson of history and supporting an independent Sterling.
A balance of payments problem needs to be avoided but how to achieve more exports is the problem, having an independent Sterling may help but the idea of being a manufacturing nation is absurd. Therefore I agree with Paul Reynolds that we need to consider how to get there.
The NHS needs some time without reform. We should only enable it the space to reform itself with bottom-up reforms. @ Paul Barker – “The only long-term solution for The NHS is a gradual shift towards prevention instead of cure.” There will always be a need for cures and treatments not everything can be prevented. Prevention can only really be encouraged and not forced.
Reducing secrecy would be popular. The expansion of higher education would also be popular but there is still the problem of how it is paid for and how to get the disaffected and disconnected to take up educational opportunities.
However Paul Reynolds does not mention unemployment. Once all main parties had full employment as an economic aim and we need to consider how to achieve this. Also Paul does not mention poverty as Geoffrey Payne pointed out. We need to set out how we achieve the reduction of poverty.
Thanks Geoff and Amalric.. I chose some issues that stand out. Previously I have set out my (somewhat De Soto-esque) proposals on poverty reduction in LDV and elsewhere… including asset-based approaches to longer term poverty reduction. It might sound like an obscure point on LDV but these types of poverty reduction approaches underly the eztraordinary. emerging peace agreement with the FARC in Colombia. Here there are lessons also for how we redefine the econmic system after the Western economic crisis … and indeed after the death of state socialism . It doesn’t really have a name yet but I call it Egalibertarianism
All excellent points … many more could be added e.g. defence. Particularly agree on the need to re-cast the state, and re-orient the economy. Coming from Southampton, and now living close to the A34, I am always so proud to see our exports of vehicles, electrical equipment etc. on their way to foreign markets.
We certainly need to mention Police and Crime Commissioners, and I suggest reforming the system to make it more democratically accountable and less open to Cronyism.
Electoral reform we need to restate our commitment to Single Transferable Vote, a system that would enthuse, motivate and would win a referendum!
I can think of one liberal idea whose time will have long since come by 2020, and it’s about time we started saying it.
Legalise cannabis. Shut down the vast criminal empire that distributes it now, and use those profits to benefit the British taxpayer instead.
By 2020 I would be astonished if this hadn’t happened in Canada and half a dozen more US states. I can see France, Germany, Belgium and Denmark going this way before long too.
Surely I can’t be the only Liberal Democrat who believes that the law as it stands is outdated, irrelevant and nigh on unenforceable?
On the E.U. Debate – if only we could successfully put across some POSITIVE reasons for being part of the European Union that people can identify with e.g. Economic, Environmental ,Security, Social and Travel we might be able to get our message across…….
Paul Reynolds, how dare you steal my term “egalibertarianism ” before I had even coined it!
The author says:
“We all love the NHS. Sometimes more in theory than in practice.”
“but how does it work in theory?” sounds more French than British. I am merely an American but, as we creak along toward a replica of your system I hope my countrymen take note of its failures. I hope you all, too, can recognize when a system needs to be melted down (or rather, liberated) in favor of a new paradigm. And that distributive justice need not entail paternalistic social management from “above.” Health is the most personal, intimate and private matter imaginable, and I cannot ever imagine entrusting mine to government bureaucrats. “privatisation” is entirely appropriate for something inherently private to begin with; not appropriate for things inherently public (such as public infrastructure, prisons, armies, water, etc) the Land Value Tax campaign should have much to say about how the economy could be liberated from monopoly so as to provide the prosperity and breathing space to have a truly free market — as opposed to monopoly — in health care.
“State reform” — the first reform to the state is to get rid of a lot of it. Like trash (or rubbish, as you call it), we must have some, but woe to you if you let it pile up in every nook and cranny of your house. However, I am afraid the only way to take out the trash from government is to have somewhere else for displaced bureaucrats to go to live more remunerative and purposeful lives. That is called the free market, civil society, or the voluntary sector of society — the part flattened by the weight of too much government. good luck to you all