The Coalition Agreement stated under paragraph 15 on Foreign Affairs that, “We will work to establish a new ‘special relationship’ with India and seek closer engagement with China, while standing firm on human rights in all our bilateral relationships.”
Labour commentators have speculated that by making a distinction in UK’s relationship with the two Asian giants, India and China, the Coalition may be seeking to pitch one against the other.
I disagree and believe this careful choice of words was used to encapsulate the different historical links UK has had with these two countries and to point the way forwards.
It may sound a challenge, cutting £44 billion from public spending.
But actually, it’s easy.
Not only that, it can be done without hitting the least well off. Without cutting worthwhile public services. And if you’re so minded, you can even drape a “progressive” label over it all.
How to do it?
Simple.
You see, the last Labour Budget contained overall spending totals for the government that mean a cut in spending of £44 billion (using the calculations form the Office of Budget Responsibility). Now, because Labour didn’t publish any departmental spending total plans beyond the current financial year, we don’t know where those £44
Jerry touches on the way the Conservative blue rinse brigade have been a little left behind
It will be some time before the Colonel and Mrs Mads who run the coffee mornings and shepherd’s pie evenings in the Shires will fully come to terms with it all
Then pops up with a rather nice Norman Tebbit anecdote
”You, you little cu*t. I saw you on tv last night asking the government to spend more on pensioners and the Health Service”.
Over at the Daily Mail, Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg writes of the ways in which the coalition government will support families to try and ensure children get the best possible start in life. Here’s an excerpt:
Obsessed with micromanaging daily life from the centre, the last government forgot what families really need. They never understood that it isn’t just parents who raise a child – it’s the whole family, the whole street, the whole neighbourhood. Why they wanted to vet anyone working with children – including parents taking it in turns to collect each others children
It’s Refugee Week, and this year the British Red Cross is focusing on the issue of destitution among asylum seekers in the UK. A recent poll, commissioned by the British Red Cross, found that many people have conflicting, negative opinions and a lack of understanding of the legal definition of asylum:
Although 89% correctly said the definition of an asylum seeker is someone fleeing persecution in their own country, 28% still thought an asylum seeker is someone who has come to this country to illegally look for work.
57% of people thought that asylum seekers were given vouchers to cover living expenses up to £100 a week with 14% thinking the weekly amount was over £100.
In reality, asylum seekers receive accommodation and vouchers equalling just £35 a week. Refused asylum seekers on the other hand, do not receive any support at all.
This year’s Look Beyond the Label campaign is fronted by an interactive viral video featuring Hollywood star Dougray Scott, singer Karen David and stand up comedian Stephen K Amos. The video is hosted on a Facebook application, where people can click “like” to vote for an end to destitution in the United Kingdom. Viewers can also share the application on their own Facebook profiles, write comments showing their support, or click through to read other refugee stories.
Margaret O’Donnell, British Red Cross Head of Digital Media said:
“This year we are asking people to look beyond labels like ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker’ and use their online networks to advocate for an end to destitution in the UK.
“Now, more than ever, people can make their voices heard by taking a stand using social media. Sharing, tweeting and discussing the issues of destitution and asylum, allows people to speak out in their own digital communities to ask for change to a process that results in thousands of people each year living in destitution.”
The connection between standing local election candidates and the AV referendum may not seem obvious at first, so imagine this scenario…
It’s quite likely that the referendum will be held on the same day as local elections, such as the May 2011 local elections.
The arguments over electoral reform will attract to the ballot box some people who don’t usually vote in local elections. If the pro-AV campaign goes well (and it starts with a lead) many of those people will be well disposed towards Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.
And what will they find when they get handed another …
While emphasising Britain’s interest in the Eurozone’s economic success, the Deputy Prime Minister showed he’s economising too:
The top priority, obviously, is tackling the problems with our public finances. Nick Clegg made the point strongly, in his long meeting with Prime Minister Zapatero and his speech to a packed audience of top Spanish movers and shakers, that this was a duty that we owe to future generations and that
At the weekend Liberty held its AGM. Jo Shaw was there…
We are, as our esteemed director, Shami Chakrabarti said on Saturday “a gobby lot”. In that, the Liberty membership share much in common with the membership of the Lib Dems. Both share a tradition of being unwilling to shut up, of asking difficult questions and not necessarily toeing the line which might be expected or helpful for the leadership.
Liberty was formed 76 years ago in response to police brutality against protestors against hunger and unemployment. Police tactics at demonstrations and the politics of dissent are currently high in …
The following data is from MORI’s aggregate polling 6 April – 6 May and shows how levels of Liberal Democrat support and turnout varied across different age groups:
This problem isn’t new to the 2010 general election, though the pattern was less neat in 2005. It does raise an interesting question for the party’s get out the vote efforts though, both in terms of technology and targeting.
Some places have made very successful use of technology such as text messaging to …
When the Coalition announces its Emergency Budget next week, attention will rightly focus on the Government’s plans to cut the deficit. But the Budget will also be a chance to set out an agenda for a more competitive economy and more productive private sector. With the Office of Budget Responsibility’s revised projections suggesting the UK’s trend rate of growth will be slower than was hoped for this Parliament, it is now more important than ever before to improve the UK’s business environment.
Even while running up huge debts, the last Government felt it necessary to set out an ambitious …
Running Canada a close second as the current country of choice to look at for deficit cutting lessons is Sweden. As I previously looked at the Canadian experience, now it’s the turn of Sweden.
The think tank Bruegel has published a pamphlet from Jens Henriksson about the Swedish experience of turning a budget deficit of over 11% of GDP into a surplus. He was a policy adviser to the Swedish government during this period.
The pamphlet spreads over more than 40 pages, though politically the most important point is made by him right at the start:
is not a paper about how to get rid of the welfare state. On the contrary, it is about how to strengthen the economic foundations for whatever kind of social model that is preferred. The budget consolidation in Sweden was dramatic but it preserved, and in many ways modernised and improved, the welfare system.
As with Canada, Sweden was able to tackle its budget deficit at a time of a much healthier world economy than the one that provides the backdrop to our own current efforts. Even so, it’s worth bearing in mind just how bad the Swedish economy had got:
Sweden experienced negative growth three years in a row between 1991 and 1993, averaging minus two percent. Over three years the debt almost doubled, unemployment tripled and the budget surplus turned into a large deficit. The combined effect of an exploding budget deficit, high interest rates and record-high levels of unemployment was staggering.
The ten lessons Henriksson lays out are:
Sound public finances are a prerequisite for growth. That does not have to mean an aversion to borrowing or major monetary expansion. Henriksson is happy with plenty of the former if the money is wisely invested and Sweden did plenty of the latter, but you cannot just forever put off dealing with public finances.
If you are in debt, you are not free. His underlying point is a sound one: if you are in too much debt then you end up in thrall to the international financial markets. However, becoming debt free is not the only way to avoid this problem; many countries (including Britain) have run manageable debts for long periods of time without running into that problem. So although the exact criteria may not apply to the UK, the basic point does – the less dependant you are on international borrowing to keep the government’s finances afloat, the more freedom you have to do what you want.
The one responsible must put her or his job on the line. The argument here is that this is what gets credibility with the public, financial markets, civil service and political colleagues. If they all know that person X is deadly serious, it then becomes easier to achieve the goals. For example, civil servants may be tempted to try to avoid having to make cuts in their budget and ride out the political impetus to curb the deficit. If they know that they can’t do that, they are more likely to offer up suggestions based on their detailed knowledge of the more obscure corners of the public sector.
Set goals and stick to them. Once again the theme of strong public commitments making the overall job easier features in Henriksson’s list. Here he argues that just as public targets for inflation make controlling inflation easier, so too do they for a deficit.
Consolidation should be designed as a package: “An ad hoc hodgepodge of measures will only have a limited chance of success. Presenting the consolidation measures in one package makes it clear to all interest groups that they are not the only ones being asked to make sacrifices … If a consolidation package consists of both tax increases and expenditure cuts the distributional effect can be fair. When studying the distributional consequences, do not only use the income distribution perspective. There are other dimensions that also are important, such as for instance gender, age and geography.”
Act structurally but be consistent. Perhaps the most surprising recommendation in the pamphlet, this point in Sweden meant a uniform 11% cut from all budgets – a very different approach from the Canadian one of looking at each area of government activity and deciding if it is necessary. The downside of a flat rate cut across the board is that there is no particular reason to believe that the least desirable expenditure is equally distributed across the board. Against this Henriksson argues that only flat rate cuts really get an understanding of the absolute need to find efficiencies seeping in to all corners of the state. It also avoid problems with some sectors feeling they have been picked on unfairly compared to others. In this respect, our coalition government, with its ring fencing of certain expenditure including the NHS, is going for the Canadian model rather than the Swedish one.
Do not leave the problems to the local authorities. Again, this contrasts with the Canadian approach of displacing many issues from the federal government to lower levels. Henriksson’s warning is based on the Swedish experience where local authorities faced a really tight squeeze: “In Sweden it meant that we saw big cuts in schools, healthcare and childcare because they are financed through local taxes. This created enormous political problems.”
Be honest to citizens and financial markets: “Never say that it won’t hurt. Never say that it is peanuts. Having been honest about the effects will not make it much easier, but being dishonest can lead to disaster. This will help ordinary people to plan ahead and to limit shocks.” The comments of Cameron, Osborne and Clegg neatly fit this lesson.
Stick to one message. Tackling a deficit is not simply about producing a list of items to cut or taxes to raise; it’s also a communications challenge to bring the public with you and to win confidence from the financial markets. That makes mixing in tax cuts with the rest of the package tricky: “At one time the government decided to cut down on expenditures to finance a tax cut in VAT on food. The result was that people became furious. ‘You are not cutting down because you need to. You are cutting down because you want to’. That was an impossible argument to handle, since the message was budget discipline, but the action was .” On this point (and the linked argument against making any spending increases, even small ones in popular areas), the coalition government is taking a very different course from Sweden – looking to use tax cuts and targeted spending increases to garner wider support for the tough measures and also because they are justified in their own right.
Stick to it. Once you have sorted out the deficit, make sure you reform the systems that caused the problem in the first place.
Overall there are many similarities between Sweden’s approach and the current British one, but also some notable differences – no across the board percentage of cuts and a mix of the tough measures with tax cuts and spending increases. On both those fronts the British approach looks to better suit our circumstances, provided that the rest of the package delivers the necessary financial changes. Whether or not that is the case will be much clearer after the forthcoming budget.
You can read the full pamphlet from Jens Henriksson here:
Racism is still stopping Britain’s ethnic minorities from entering the best-paid professions despite them having a stronger work ethic and greater drive than white Britons, a report released tomorrow claims.
The report, funded by the government and compiled by charity Business in the Community, whose president is Prince Charles, says too many ethnic minority Britons feel prestige jobs in the law, banking, media and politics are closed to them.
It finds “blatant racism”, including taunts about being terrorists, is still closing doors and warns that the government and business must take tougher action.
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 173rd weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the seven most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (6th – 12th June, 2010), together with a hand-picked quintet, normally courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.
Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox – just click here – ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.
As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:
Transport for London has announced that it’s lifting all restrictions on the commercial use of its data. The move could fuel an explosion in mobile apps that need access to the datasets, making them more attractive to developers who want to charge for their apps.
Currently, TfL offers up a selection of datasets, including live traffic cameras, Oyster card top-up locations, pier and station locations, cycle hire locations, and riverboat timetables. Some new data has been issued, including live tube travel info and departure boards, and the transport giant also plans to release further information on bus stops,
I see you’ve been speaking out today defending Labour’s record over the Vetting and Barring Scheme.
So I hope you don’t mind me raising again my own experience of trying to raise concerns with the Labour government over one particular detail of the scheme it introduced.
I emailed Sir Roger Singleton on 14 September about my concerns with the way the Independent Safeguarding Authority’s guidelines state that if someone has been found innocent in a court of law that does not mean they could have been completely innocent. Particularly given the many issues about the ISA’s
The Lib Dems’ Federal Policy Committee (FPC) operates under the Chatham House Rule: you can repeat what was said, but not who said it. But often what happens at FPC goes completely unreported.
In some cases this is understandable, people throwing their toys out of the pram isn’t something we really want to report (oh not that often, honest!), and sometimes it is just because we are discussing issues (such as the manifesto) that we quite rightly want to keep under wraps until it is launched.
But someone (who of course will remain nameless) made the point at last week’s …
When should the Government’s promised referendum on AV be held? That’s the question causing a fair amount of debate at the heart of the coalition.
From the simple good governance point of view, the answer is as soon as possible – because the sooner it is held, the more time there will be if AV is passed to get the law and then the administration right in good time ahead of the next general election. Late changes to election rules have been the bane of the electoral system far too often in the last decade.
Video of Nick Clegg’s speech to the Institute for Government also available here.
This morning Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg made a speech on the economy (above) at the Institute for Government, putting the case for cutting debt sooner rather than later. He said that the debt crisis in Europe and Labour’s “terrible legacy” necessitated urgent action:
The choices that were available to us just two months ago are no longer available. We have to take action now so that we can still be in control of our future.
This evening, Nick emailed Liberal Democrat members with this summary:
Today, the Social Liberal Forum has published an open letter to Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander expressing our concerns prior to the emergency budget which will be unveiled next week. By coincidence, Simon Hughes, Malcolm Bruce and Lord Oakeshot are reported in the FT today expressing similar sentiments on capital gains tax.
The SLF letter covers a lot more ground than CGT including socio-economic inequality, income tax and VAT. But it is a fundamental issue which, more than anything else, will determine the future direction of the coalition. For the past month, Tory backbench MPs and the rightwing press …
To the untrained eye, it may appear that one of these creatures is rather more dangerous than the other and therefore that it may make sense to have rules about keeping one of them which shouldn’t apply to the other:
However, to the keenly trained eye of a Cornwall County Council officer, it’s a different matter. For, as Alex Folkes reports,
Cornwall Council is forcing a woman who runs a rescue centre for pet tortoises to apply for a zoo licence if she wants to
We political activists all have our creeds – the various strands of liberal, conservative, labour and other political thinking that our opinions stem from.
And most of us, whatever our politics, believe that the evidence also backs us up. Remarkably, my views on policy both stem from my political philisophy and are supported by the available evidence.
Even more amazingly, my political opponents believe the same is true for them. What are the odds?
Needless to say, this is absolutely not confirmation bias – no way! That’s the psychological failing we pretty much all fall prey to at least some of the time …
A common thread running through the Press Complaints Commission’s defence of its work is that it has been primarily created to deal with individual complaints, rather than being a regulator whose role is to improve the press overall. That’s why, for example, the PCC emphasises the proportion of complaints made to it which are concluded with the complainant happy with the outcome rather than, for example, focusing on how widespread certain practices are and whether they are increasing or decreasing.
To give an example: if a blogger were to complain to the PCC about a newspaper taking their work and reusing …
Rather than telling us anything particularly useful – certainly in terms of the outcome of any future elections – these last two are notable more for the pollsters finally leaving behind a run of six post-election polls all of which had the Lib Dems firmly planted at 21%.
This is a man who was “turned on” – yes, turned on – to the green agenda during a visit to Tanzania with The Economist more than 30 years ago. Ten years later, in a book of his published articles, he declared that it “was going to be the dominant issue in our time, in terms of the potential threat to our existence”.
“I can genuinely say that I’ve been committed on the green and climate change agenda for a long time,” he explained. “I’ve always thought what we desperately need to do is combine the commitment which so
Catching up on some political reading after the election, I’ve been reading (or rather listening to) Vince Cable’s The Storm. It’s an enjoyable and easy to follow account of the economic crash, light on jargon but not dumbed down in quality of argument. It does at times feel like it was written rather in a rush (as Vince Cable himself concedes) and partly as a result is more a selection of interesting accounts of different aspects of what’s happened to the economy laid out end-to-end rather than a book with a clear thread of argument running all the way
This is the last of four maiden speeches presented here this weekend for the interest and comments of our readers.
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me to make my first speech to the House. I congratulate all those who have also made their first speeches today. I am very struck, and a bit awestruck, by the erudition that they have all displayed. As the Member for Redcar, I am proud to be the first Liberal to represent the area since 1923 and also very pleased to hear this afternoon’s debate about potential voting system changes, which might do …
Yesterday we brought you maiden speeches from Stephen Gilbert and Michael Crockarty; here today we have Stephen Lloyd and later we will have Ian Swales. We are reposting maiden speeches here for the information of our online community, so that people can read and comment on what our MPs choose to use as their first words in Parliament.
I am grateful for the opportunity to make my maiden speech this evening. It has been a privilege to listen to so many of my colleagues making their maiden speeches. I mention particularly the previous three speeches-from Mark Reckless, who has deep …
The little-used but contentious Labour legislation allowing terror suspects to be detained without charge for up to 28 days could also be scrapped. “The question I would ask is this: how many times has 28 days been used?” said Warsi, who also has a cross-Whitehall brief on community issues.
A review could recommend changes in July. “Of course you have got to protect your country. But we have also got some very clear principles of natural justice. We have principles that people should know the charge against
Chloe A huge mistake by Burnham. Opening the EU's pandora box will sap the energy from this government . Everything will be overshadowed by that question....
Big Tall Tim An excellent article Victor on the great work you are doing. It's a great shame people like David can't give credit where credit is due....
Scott Rennie Couldn’t agree more Karen. It’s the best speech in a generation, and more importantly an opportunity to build common cause on things that matter to us, like...
Nigel Jones I too thank you for this interesting article. Community has been in decline for decades in most parts of the country, but this seems particularly the case where...
David Le Grice All whilst playing second fiddle to the Green party of course. And credit for toppling Labour goes almost entirely to them.
Something that was completely avoid...
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The disturbing folklore behind Alan Garner's stories
The geography of Liberal Democrat potential (LDN#214)
The sun still shines on PM Burnham
Farage fails the cool, calm leadership test
Chloe
Big Tall Tim
Scott Rennie
Nigel Jones
David Le Grice