Rarely, both the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader had reason to be absent from Prime Minister’s Questions today. So it was dear Harriet versus the Cleggster.
As an added twist, it turned into a “Higher Education Special”, in part spurred by the student demonstrations outside parliament as the session was unfolding. There were no less than ten questions on higher education. My, the Labour whips had been busy. Sadly this meant less time for the constituency issues often raised by MPs.
I witnessed the session live via Twitter, where Nick Clegg received a rather jaundiced reception – to put it mildly. When I look back on the video, it seems to me that Nick Clegg did a remarkably good job of what was probably the most difficult parliamentary session of his career. Indeed, he looked terrified beforehand, as Northern Irish questions overan.
Harman started by asking how Clegg’s April pledge to end university tuition fees was going.
Nick Clegg replied that:
..we have stuck to our wider ambition to make sure that going to university is done in a progressive way, so that people who are currently discouraged from going to university—bright people from poor backgrounds, who are discouraged by the system that we inherited from the right hon. and learned Lady’s Government—are able to do so. That is why our policy is more progressive than hers.
Harman said he hoped he’d tell that to the protestors outside and quoted him saying that fees of £7000 would be a “disaster” – so how would he describe fees of £9,000?
Nick Clegg said that there was a consensus that graduates should pay some contribution and added:
The proposals that we have put forward will mean that those who earn the least will pay much less than they do at the moment—while those who earn the most will pay over the odds to provide a subsidy to allow people from poor backgrounds to go to university—and will, for the first time, end the discrimination against the 40% of people in our universities who are part-time students, who were so shamefully treated by her Government.
Harman, rightly, said that none of the Labour party agree with fees of £9000 a year. I think Harman was spot on when she said that this is not about the deficit. It will be cleared by the time the new tuition fees scheme starts. It’s about the proportion of graduate (what she described wrongly as “student”) funding versus public funding. Clegg was rather disingenuous when he referred to a consensus that graduates should pay “some” contribution. The government plans implies 100% graduate funding in some cases and 80-90% graduate funding in many cases. That’s all but getting rid of public funding.
Harman threw an attempted joke in: “We all know what it is like, Mr Speaker. You are at Freshers’ week. You meet up with a dodgy bloke and you do things that you regret. Is not the truth of it that the Deputy Prime Minister has been led astray by the Tories?”
We all know what that is like do we, Hattie? Ummmm let me think. I didn’t actually meet any dodgy blokes in Freshers’ Week, personally. I spent most of my entire year at University trying to find a dodgy woman but, sadly, failed.
Clegg then had an excellent riposte to Harman’s general thrust:
I know that the right hon. and learned Lady now thinks that she can reposition the Labour party as the champion of students, but let us remember the Labour party’s record: against tuition fees in 1997, but introduced them a few months later; against top-up fees in the manifesto in 2001, then introduced top-up fees. Then Labour set up the Browne review, which it is now trashing, and now the Labour party has a policy to tax graduates that half the Front-Bench team does not even believe in. Maybe she will go out to the students who are protesting outside now and explain what on earth her policy is.
All in all, I thought Clegg did an excellent job of outlining the fairness of the coalition’s plan while obviously being on the back foot, due to going back on the promise.
But an emailer to BBC Live called Robert Taylor put it very well: “Nick Clegg is not breaking his promise to the electorate regarding tuition fees; the LibDems did NOT win the election – had they done so they would not have increased the fees thereby keeping their promise.”
Quite frankly, whatever Nick Clegg does or says on this topic, people will always associate him and the Liberal Democrats with “breaking their promise on tuition fees”.
We can argue until we’re blue in the face that it was a daft promise to make in the first place, that Labour introduced tuition fees and increased them, that politics is the art of the possible, that the government plan is progressive and (as John Hemming has ingeniously put it) “a graduate tax in all but name”.
But, whatever we do or say, still the Tuition Fees Albatross will remain around our necks and that of Nick Clegg in particular for at least a generation. So we need to get used to that.
And for Monty Python fans: no, it doesn’t come with any wafers.
All governments promise welfare reform. Very few deliver. In 1997 Labour promised to “cut the bills of social failure” and to “make work pay”. But during its 13 years in office the welfare bill rose by 40% to £87bn. People moving into work can still lose more than 90% of every pound they earn: a punitive tax burden on the shoulders of the poor.
The real tragedy, however, is not the cost of the welfare system. It is the price paid by the most disadvantaged, too often condemned to a life on benefits. Nearly 1.9
“Appalled and embarrassed” – that is how Liberal Democrat peer and Constitutional Affairs Spokesperson Paul Tyler described his reaction to the attitude and behaviour of some members of the House of Lords:
I have been appalled and embarrassed by the number of Peers, even including a few former Cabinet Ministers, who use the place as a convenient private club, with good parking and subsidised catering. They never speak or even ask a question, let alone contribute to a debate.
His comments were made when discussing the publication of the Consultation on Members Leaving the House, which looked as the views of peers as part of a review to identify options for allowing people to leave the House of Lords other than through death or misconduct.
As Paul pointed out, with the use of block capitals, underlining and an exclamation mark, there are 79 peers who did not turn up (let alone speak or vote) even once in the 2009-2010 Parliamentary session. There are some very rare cases where long-term non-attendance in justifiable, and in the past some peers have spoken out over the lack of an option to retire if their health is no longer up to attending. Yet the overall picture, especially when you extend the figures to include peers who almost never turn up or who turn up but do not participate, is of large numbers who do not carry out the role of being a Parliamentarian in even the most minimally reasonable way.
There are also practical problems about the sheer size of the Lords, as Paul also commented,
The case for reducing the number of Peers is compelling: increasing costs, not enough room for all to get into the Chamber or have desks, excessive size compared with the Commons and (most persuasively) “damage to the credibility of the House occasioned by the large number of members who take no active part in proceedings.”
Lovely dining club – with a Parliament attached
So with Lords reform in the air and promised in the Coalition agreement, you might expect peers to be thinking sensibly about how to leave behind the idea that the upper house is a lovely dining club, great car park and a mark of social distinction – with a Parliament attached.
Alas, not everyone – for the suggestions made by some of Paul’s fellow peers show how out of touch many of them are with the idea that Parliament is a place to work on holding the government to account and governing the country:
In the circumstances I cannot take seriously some of the suggested remedies to this serial non-attendance. Giving retiring Peers “dining rights”, let alone offering the opportunity to speak but not vote, seems totally inappropriate. As for the idea that they should be awarded an honour “on the lines of the armed services’ Long Service, Good Conduct medal”, or that their “life peerage might be converted into a hereditary peerage”, I can only suppose that somebody was taking the mickey.
Yes really: there was the suggestion that the ‘reward’ for not turning up and doing a job in the Lords should be to be given a medal. The Order of the Free Car Park perhaps?
Paul’s pugnacious attitude towards the views of other members of the Lords is very welcome, especially as there is a very strong rearguard action being fought by many members of the Lords against having democracy in the Lords. Or if there really must be democracy having it in as weak and diluted a form as possible – and certainly not moving any time soon to the idea that all members of the Lords should have to do a job of work there.
The political debate within Parliament and within the coalition on this is finely balanced at the moment. It may yet tip either way, as the report last week in the The Times illustrated when it talked of how:
A 300-strong mini Senate would replace the House of Lords under plans being drawn up by Nick Clegg. However, the Deputy Prime Minister is facing setbacks as he tries to deliver constitutional reform. He is having to surrender the Liberal Democrat ambition of a wholly elected Upper House amid stiff resistance from peers in all parties and will struggle to ensure that a reformed second chamber will be mainly elected.
Superficially that sounds a bad news story (and contrasts with the tone of The Times in August – “Absent peers face sack … The least active and least effective peers could be ejected at the end of each Parliament”). However a much smaller house would also up the pressure to only have minimal ‘grandfathering’ – that is letting existing members of the Lords continue in place without having to face elections – as otherwise it’d be a house dominated by the unelected.
As on so many other issues in the Coalition, it is not a simple case of Lib Dems versus Conservatives, because Cameron has no great love of many of the ranks of the Tory peers. In this case it is more a case of MPs versus peers, with honourable exceptions on the peers front including many Lib Dems such as Paul Tyler.
People such as Paul deserve our full support in those debates.
He called for a united response to “a financial crisis that has changed the world” and proposed “four levers for durable, lasting prosperity”:
Openness in trade; more flexible labour markets; greater investment in infrastructure; and a workforce equipped to thrive in the green, digital economy of the future.
Towards the end, he touched on UK university tuition fees and outlined the proposed reforms:
The UK is already blessed with a world-class university sector. But we need to secure it for the future…
One of the lasting legacies of the Liberal Democrats in power will be the efforts to push through what has been named the ‘Freedom (Great Repeal) Bill’.
Returning to conference as Deputy Prime Minister in 2010, Clegg triumphantly declared that “In November, we will publish a Freedom Bill to roll back a generation of illiberal and intrusive legislation.”
The Liberal Democrat draft addresses some of the most obvious anti-campaigning laws. For example it proposes …
Immigration was one of the issues on which Nick Clegg and David Cameron repeatedly clashed during the general election, so it is no surprise that it has continued to be a source of tension in the coalition. More surprisingly, the fault line in the coalition has not been a simple Lib Dem versus Conservative because many Conservatives are persuaded by the pleas from universities (that they need high fee paying foreign students else the funding higher education would be an even bigger political problem) and from business (that many firms in the UK cannot get the right skilled staff except through immigration).
Last week I talked about the role reversal facing the Liberal Democrats, with the party’s traditional stronger record at political tactics than strategy having been flipped around. In that, and the subsequent post Part 2 of the Nick Clegg reshuffle, I highlighted some tactical communication needs the party must get better at. Given my own habit of pointing out that people should not just criticise but should also offer solutions, here are my own suggestions.
Middle-ranking ministers need to communicate more
The large majority of Liberal Democrat ministers are not in the Cabinet. However, the departmental communication structures are set-up to …
No. I don’t like Vince Cable’s announcement today on higher education either.
Nevertheless, Party Policy is clear: we want fees to go. This means that we don’t need to spend a six figure sum on a special conference just to repeat ourselves. Or to say we’re cross with Vince. Nor is there any need of a grand public statement in the Guardian letters page. Or a row at Federal Policy Committee.
FPC is still asking itself what it is for. On the one hand, it must get on with developing new Party policy – but with sharply limited resources. On the …
The Market Research Standards Board (MRSB) has cleared YouGov of all the complaints made about its polling of 16-19 April during the general election – but in so doing has raised a big question about what now counts as ‘ethical’ polling. The MRSB’s ruling gives the green light to pollsters asking questions on behalf of their clients which contain false allegations about a person, even if those allegations have not previously been made in public.
The Market Research Society Code of Conduct (to which YouGov subscribes, along with other British political pollsters), states that “researchers shall be … honest” and …
In the light of today’s news that 3.5 million voters are missing from the electoral register, and in view of the forthcoming boundary changes based on the number of voters on the electoral roll as it stands next month, a timely email reminder today to Liberal Democrat members from Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes:
I’m sure you will agree that we as Liberal Democrats need to play our part in helping to ensure that everybody who should have the right to vote is in a position to exercise that right come next May.
The actual quote from Nick Clegg pertains to the cancellation of the Sheffield Forgemasters Loan, as follows:
Yes, people are very angry. You don’t have to tell me. I’m getting dog excrement through my letterbox. People are spitting at me. But this loan was one of the biggest commitments, the money has to be borrowed
Over the summer Nick Clegg shuffled round his special advisers having had the benefit of several months experience seeing how government works from the inside. Now it’s the civil service side of his team which is being adapted:
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister, has moved to boost his firepower inside Whitehall by appointing Chris Wormald, the head of the economic and domestic affairs secretariat in the Cabinet Office, as the head of his office.
He is also considering expanding the deputy prime minister’s office by appointing what would, in effect, become his mini-policy unit inside the Cabinet
Fluff over substance I have a confession. While I have reservations about the current policy on social housing, that’s not what this piece is about. Andrew Stunell has written compellingly about our policy as has Dominic Curran.
All I’ll say is that successive Labour and Tory governments have failed abysmally over the last thirty years to invest in affordable housing. They’ve helped exacerbate social and community division, inflate housing price bubbles and distort the economy and our attitudes to wealth. Unwittingly or not, they are the architects of the ghetto. So
Look, for instance, at the policy writhing on tuition fees of the main party in power. On Monday, I chaired a meeting at the University of London on the future of higher education. David Willetts, the universities minister, ran the gauntlet of students shouting “F*** the fees” with the look of a man who knows that he is to this generation of uppity students what Keith Joseph was in my youth: permanent quarry.
Yet his message, through clenched teeth, was that fees would still be capped under
Last week Nick Clegg and the Institute of Fiscal studies squared up over the issue of whether the cuts proposed in the Comprehensive Spending Review are fair.
It is a debate which strikes at the heart of Lib Dems in the coalition government and it will determine the shape of politics in this country for next decade.
For the first time ever the Treasury included an impact analysis of the announced changes within the CSR, the effect of pressure from Lib Dems. These were calculated according to the sections of society that will bear the burden of the changes (ie how …
Yesterday in Parliament Adrian Sanders and 22 Conservative MPs voted to reduce the maximum number of ministers allowed in the Commons in line with the forthcoming reduction in the number of MPs:
If the number of constituencies in the United Kingdom decreases below 650, the limit on the number of holders of Ministerial offices entitled to sit and vote in the House of Commons referred to in section 2(1) must be decreased by at least a proportionate amount.
Reducing the number of ministers is something I’ve supported …
During the Conservative Party Conference, George Osborne announced a simple change to child benefit. He took a difficult and historic decision to remove payments to households with at least one higher rate taxpayer, saving an estimated £1 billion of public money from going directly to the highest paid 12% in our society.
In what turned out to be my last blog post, I railed – somewhat hysterically – against the reaction to this modest cut. It was clear that the right wing press would oppose such a move. But what was less clear, and more galling, was the way the …
Here is Nick Clegg’s email to party members about today’s spending review. What’s notable about the content is the strong continuation of the ‘love everything the coalition is doing in public’ line – rather than talking up what is being done differently because Liberal Democrats disagreed with Conservatives.
Notable also is the continuation of Nick’s strong emphasis on the importance of early years education. It is an issue that he has consistently spoken passionately about being one of his priorities even though, as recent events have shown, the party more widely has often preferred to place a great emphasis on other …
I was also supportive of many of the actions taken in the early days of the government including the decision to focus more heavily on reducing the deficit. I broadly accepted the arguments that the government as a whole have used to justify this.
I have not blogged myself since the start of August but have found myself in mid-October …
The issue of tuition fees has raised a more general challenge the party needs to get its head round. This one’s been bubbling away quietly since the Lib Dems entered the Coalition and we seem no closer to an answer now than we were then.
Are our Government ministers bound by party policy?
When one of our ministers is formulating what the UK Government should do on a specific issue, or setting out the Lib Dem bargaining position to get the best final deal, how far should that minister be reaching for a party policy document rather than using their own …
Michael Collins, a lecturer in twentieth century British history at UCL, has predicted at Open Democracy–Tuition fees just the beginning of Lib Dem troubles that the “SDP contingent” in the Liberal Democrats faces an existential battle with “coalition Liberals” over the future of the party.
Collins’ fantasy Lib Dem politics isn’t very convincing but there are a growing number of matching accounts, which mirror his portrayal of Liberal Democrat division, include accusations of unprincipled behaviour and go on to predict the party’s demise. It seems reasonable to respond to Collins’ account of ‘Lib Dem troubles’ with a little history and …
This video, filmed at the Lib Dem 2010 Autumn conference in Liverpool, contains interviews with Chris Huhne and Vince Cable about how conference is different now the party is in government, plus interviews with members, a look at why organisations hold fringe events and a tour around the exhibition area with interviews with one internal and one external organisation about why they have a stand in the exhibition area. Presented by Greg Stone and Jonathan Wallace.
Sorry Nick. Sorry Vince, I can’t find the figures that back you up
Both Nick and Vince have claimed that there was no option but to reverse their pledges on tuition fees. The public sector finances were in a far worse state than they expected and they had no option.
That would be a justification that would be just about sellable to people. A promise made in good faith which became unsustainable due to information not known about at the time could be legitimately broken.
The problem is, I can’t really find much that backs that claim up.
The publication of the Browne report earlier this week has received a lot of backlash from the public but what angered me and many other members the most was the positive response it got from Nick Clegg and Vince Cable.
Although the report does contain some positive points, there are a few dangerous suggestions which threaten the futures of thousands of prospective students. One such suggestion was to get rid of the cap on fees. This will inevitably lead to many courses costing around £7,000 per year with some so-called ‘elite courses’ possibly costing up to £36,000 for …
Just as plays have a classic three-act structure, so too do tricky political decisions: first you rule out a potentially popular alternative, then you put out the bad news and finally you sweeten the pill as you try to avert people’s worst fears.
Earlier today, Nick Clegg sent the following letter to all Liberal Democrat MPs:
Like you, I am painfully aware of the pledge we all made to voters on tuition fees ahead of the General Election. Departing from that pledge will be one of the most difficult decisions of my political career. It means doing something that no one likes to do in politics – acknowledging that the assumptions we made at election time simply don’t work out in practice. With the benefit of hindsight, I signed a pledge at a time when we could not have anticipated the full scale of …
By Stephen Tall
| Mon 11th October 2010 - 11:57 am
The publication of the Browne Review into university funding has been brought into even sharper focus for Lib Dems by Vince Cable’s email to party members over the weekend ruling out a ‘pure’ graduate tax to replace tuition fees.
This has sparked vigorous debate, both here on Lib Dem Voice, and beyond, with Lib Dem MPs coming under pressure to stick by their pre-election pledge to oppose any increase in tuition fees.
Some of this sound and fury has been overdone. None of us has yet seen the detail of the funding proposals being brought forward by Vince Cable, which …
Paul Walter has spotted an under-reported point in the child benefit coverage of the past few days: that payments for children aged 16 to 18 were originally intended to be stopped, but that this plan was dropped after Nick Clegg intervened.
Paul spotted this in a “deep trawl” of the Telegraph:
The controversial decision to “pre-announce” the child benefit decision was made 10 days ago by the key Conservative power-broking trio of David Cameron, Mr Osborne and William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, it is understood.
A couple of days later they informed Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, and his party
By Stephen Tall
| Sun 10th October 2010 - 11:35 am
Ah, the Daily Mail and its stable-mate the Mail on Sunday: bastions of enlightened reason and liberal decency. Or something. Today, the paper takes it upon itself to scream ‘Hypocrisy’ at Nick Clegg.
Not on grounds of policy, but because of the options Miriam and he are considering for their eldest child’s school, including a voluntary-aided Catholic school in London, the Oratory: as the Mail so subtly fulminates, ‘Nick Clegg is an atheist whose party doesn’t believe in school selection. So where does he want to send his sons… the same exclusive Catholic school as the Blairs’.
You can gauge the extent of the Mail’s self-righteous fury from the comparison of Nick Clegg to Tony Blair. The only thing missing from the usual Mail checklist-of-outrage is the accusation that Nick Clegg causes cancer. Next week, perhaps.
What do the Mail’s online readers make of the paper’s tirade? Here are the top three ‘best rated’ comments so far submitted:
Why is atheist Nick Clegg considering sending his son to an exclusive Catholic school?
erm – his wife is Catholic.
– Paul, Richmond, 9/10/2010 23:39
Well here we are, in the cockpit of history. The Today programme yesterday reported that David Willetts had been yanked back from the Conservative Party conference to negotiate with Vince Cable over student fees, looking for a deal before the Browne Review delivers its report.
What kind of deal is possible? This is a crucial question not just for Liberal Democrats but for the whole country because Nick Clegg holds a powerful hand and the way he plays his cards may shape the future our universities and the role they play in this country for a generation.
George Thomas Reform and Conservative's opposed the nation of sanctuary policy in Wales which aims to improve integration. These parties, and those who understand and the pol...
Jana @Nick Baird
I think the explanation is more likely down to misunderstanding the difference between the rate of migration and the number of migrants in the coun...
Nick Baird Part of the problem preventing sensible discussion about immigration is that thanks to scaremongering by the right wing press and political parties, the British...
Dennis Delice Completely agreed! Liberal Democrats have to realise the importance of positive freedom too. Scepticism of any involvement of state to achieve liberty is mislea...
Rob Heale Surely people can't have real choices and freedom if they live in poverty. They won't have the decent home or the resources needed to exercise their rights. Soc...
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