Watching the Liberal Democrat angst over tuition fees takes me back to 1989, when I was a young, considerably trimmer and clean shaven young Progressive Democrat activist. There had just been an Irish general election, and we had been devastated, dropping from 14 seats to just 6, which in Westminster terms would be like dropping from 50 odd seats to the early twenties, so you can imagine the howls of anguish. But that wasn’t even the worst bit: we were now faced with the nightmare scenario of entering coalition with Charles Haughey’s Fianna Fail, which in British terms was like asking David Owen to provide the final vote to elect Tony Benn prime minister.
It tore the party apart, as there were people who had fled Fianna Fail to form the Progressive Democrats because of Haughey’s corrupt and thuggish no-dissent leadership style, and the idea of going into government with the man was personally sickening to many of them. Friendships were lost, significant resignations occurred, and the party plummeted to, at one stage, 1% in the polls. In fact, given the 3% margin of error, the standard joke doing the rounds in political circles was that the PDs were actually in minus figures, and as such actually owed votes.
Yet, in the 1992 general election, the party bounced back, and won 10 seats. The party stunned the commentariat by being the first ever junior coalition partner to come out of government and gain seats.
What are the lessons for the Liberal Democrats?
1. Tension with your coalition partner is very healthy, especially if it is public. Your job is not to get on with the Tories. Your job is to stand up for your voters, and if that occasionally means getting savaged by Tories, all to the better. Point not only to the things that you achieved, but the things that the Tories would have done on their own if you had not stopped them. The PDs were wiped out in the 2007 general election because voters could not see a reason to vote for them rather than Fianna Fail. David Cameron isn’t a fool: he knows that Nick Clegg has to occasionally go off-reservation to protect his political flank, and as long as the two have a solid personal understanding of where they both stand, a bit of rough play and “shouldering off the ball” in public is permissible.
2. Keep your bottle, and eye on the horizon. Politics is for the long haul. Britain in 2015 could be a different place from Britain in 2010, and it is that Britain you’ll be seeking re-election in. It is painful to see the Nice Party being savaged by some students. But look at it the other way: here’s a tough party that has fashioned a compromise but is also standing up to vandalising thugs who probably don’t even vote. Is the average Lib Dem voter really siding with people smashing up Prince Charles’s car against Nick Clegg?
3. Be selfish. The fact is, the Lib Dem demographic was going to change no matter whom you went into coalition with, and as a party that supports PR, you have got to accept that. You have lost centre-left voters. If you had gone in with Labour, you would have lost centre-right voters. The same happened when we first went into coalition: The purists hit the eject button, defected elsewhere, and are now bitterly unhappy at someone else selling out in some other party. That’s politics. But don’t discount the positives, especially if AV is passed. There are moderate Tories and Blairites (they’re still around, you know) who can now see that the Lib Dems aren’t Citizen Smith in sandals, and will be disposed towards you even as a means of tempering the right of their own party. On the doors canvassing, I used to regularly get loyal FF voters who would transfer to the PDs to “put manners” on their own party. Of course, we have a history of coalition government, but you’d be surprised how quickly an electorate adapt to reality. After all, coalition and minority government are no longer End-of-the-World terms in Scotland.
Of course, even AV won’t save you if your vote is too low to keep your candidates in the race for transfers. There is no hope of PR for the Commons, but getting PR for the reformed upper house needs to be made a Lib Dem priority, as it may be the redoubt from where you (and your voters) can hold out if things get nasty.
In short, don’t panic. You are in government, for Christ’s sake. Your ministers are making decisions that are affecting people’s lives for the better. That is what you all went into politics for, surely?
Jason O’Mahony is an Irish political blogger and former Irish Progressive Democrat activist and candidate.
‘The Independent View‘ is a slot on Lib Dem Voice which allows those from beyond the party to contribute to debates we believe are of interest to LDV’s readers. Please email [email protected] if you are interested in contributing.
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36 Comments
“In short, don’t panic. You are in government, for Christ’s sake. Your ministers are making decisions that are affecting people’s lives for the better. That is what you all went into politics for, surely?”
In what way are the poor, sick, disabled and jobless lives better? Idealogical attacks on ESA and DLA with draconian work capability assessments. All of us villified as ‘scroungers’. Thrown onto a non existent job market where no employer would employ us, left to rot in poverty. The Lib Dems have shown us what they are and I am scared. It is making me and many othere even more ill. Under this coalition, illness and disability is denied.
Good article Jason.
It provides a much clearer approach to how to work within coalition than the rather muddled one we have seen from our party leadership so far.
Hope they read it.
What Jason fails to mention above is that the PDs were voted into extinction a year after their disastrous performance in the 2007 Irish general election. And If the LibDems become anything like the obsessively free-market PDs in terms of ideology, I certainly won’t be returning.
Re. The (Irish) Progressive Democrats (PDs)…”The 2007 general election, was a disastrous one for the party. The Progressive Democrats lost six of its eight seats in the 166 seat Dáil..[and] …On 8 November 2008, delegates to a special conference in Mullingar voted by 201 votes to 161 to bring the Progressive Democrats to an end.” The PDs are no more. As a voter who was totalled “hoodwinked” by the LibDems, I now eagerly look forward to the LDs facing the same fate as the PDs.
@Jason wrote “The PDs were wiped out in the 2007 general election because voters could not see a reason to vote for them rather than Fianna Fail.”
Perhaps some of the posters on this thread should read the detail before posting comments.
Great advice, Jason.
By the way, how’s the neo-liberal economic model you implemented doing?
LESSON ONE: Your job is not to get on with the Tories. Your job is to stand up for your voters.
Oh dear, they have failed the first lesson.
“Be selfish”??? Well, the LibDem front bench had no problem with that one as they hung on to their ministerial cars and Red Boxes. If the Coalition Agreement allowed for abstentions why was it necessary for the LibDem front bench to vote in favour of trebling student debt?
If the policy was so good why did those NOT on the Govt payroll vote against the proposal?
Jason, I think the Lib Dem Govt does not need any further encouragement to be selfish. They have betrayed so many students, voters and committed Lib Dem Activists who have campaigned on this issue in all sincerity. They should hang theirs heads in shame. As for the desire of the Leadership to move on from the Student Fees debacle, how fickle? As if there were no ongoing consequences to their betrayal. The Lib Dem brand built up over so many years has been severely tarnished. This was their Iraq moment. Clegg having made so much about ‘new politics’ and broken promises before the election is a joke.
“Is the average Lib Dem voter really siding with people smashing up Prince Charles’s car against Nick Clegg?”
Of all the Lib Dem voters I know – average and non average – the answer would have to be “yes”. The means of a tiny minority of protesters may be disapproved of but the sentiment of the majority most definitely isn’t.
As to keeping an eye of the long term those protesters so easily dismissed as they ‘probably don’t even vote’ will be inclined and also old enough to able to vote by 2015.
Some interesting points there. One of the reasons I became a Progressive Democrat was because I was fed up of ideological straitjackets which in Ireland at the time meant being either left wing and anti-business or nationalist and anti-British/foreigner. So hearing phrases like “obsessively free market” or “neo-liberal” are par for the course. They’re easy, lazy slogans, of the sort that the eurosceptics throw at Lib Dems about being slavishly pro-European or obsessed federalists. Truth is, they don’t reflect the subtle reality.
To understand the Progressive Democrats, you need to understand the Ireland of the day, where one government sought to jail people who undercut the national airline in price, and succeeded in actually banning commercial radio because it would provide competition with the state broadcaster. The PDs in government banned the death penalty, introduced the minimum wage, introduced the carer’s allowance, required private health insurers to fund the state health insurer, and removed over 45% of the workforce from the income tax net. Neo-Liberal? If anything, the PDs were not neo-liberal enough, letting public spending soar out of control. Just compare the Irish dole, Irish minimum wage and Irish state pension to their UK equivalent and tell me which country has spent more.
The founder of the PDs, Des O’Malley, was expelled from Fianna Fail because he refused to vote against a bill liberalising contraception. I attended a school, funded by the state, where the local Catholic priest actually came into class to remind us to make sure out parents voted in a referendum in 1983 to ban abortion, and this was a class in which there were two Jewish students in it. The Progressive Democrats, and to their credit, elements of the Labour Party and Fine Gael, were the people who called time on this nonsense.
I understand your bitter disappointment about tuition fees. But the fact is, the mistake was making the promise in the first place. There seem to be some Liberal Democrats who believe that “Proportional Representation” is a secret code for “Lib Dems getting whatever we want”. It isn’t. Its means a politics where Lib Dem voters and Tory voters and yes, even BNP voters get their voices heard, and where the people who hate your guts get the same equal say as you do, and that means that for 23% of the vote you don’t get your own way on everything. You get your own way on somethings, and I still think that’s better than spending an eternity on the outside looking in.
” the mistake was making the promise in the first place.”
This is just about the only piece of your argument from which I dissent. The promise/pledge was both sensible and affordable. The present proposal is going to involve a considerable amount of state money being wasted on a complicated bureaucracy trying to enforce a system which will be reasonably easy to avoid paying back if that is how you are so-inclined. It is being brought in, in my view, mainly as a cynical means of trimming down the number of undergraduate courses (and students on them) in a very random manner rather than setting about this necessary task in a considered and rational way. The new fees-repayment system will turn out to be, as John Hemming has explained well, effectively a graduate tax, only one which is being administered by banks rather than by Her Brittanic Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
There are inefficiencies in all government systems, however, one of the least inefficient systems is to pay for Higher Education out of the EXTRA taxation which one levies on the higher-paid. Having the odd self-made millionaire and a few uneducated Lottery winners in there, paying this extra, along with the graduates whose qualifications have made them wealthy, is not a particular problem, as i see it. It also involves those of us who have already got our degrees paying towards the problem which is NOT just a problem of the generation to come. I do not mind chipping in my own bit, even though I actually spent years self-financing my way through my undergraduate BSc.
I do believe that the final days rush to the Coalition agreement was rather unworldly. It is difficult to see how any MP (let alone a leader) could toss aside the importance, in a democracy, of a clear promise to the electors and not insist on reflecting this properly in any coalition agreement, whether this was for genuine moral and/or ideological purposes or purely from an electorally-pragmatic point of view.
Tony Dawson
“This is just about the only piece of your argument from which I dissent. The promise/pledge was both sensible and affordable.”
Something Tim Farron said on Any Questions. He said that he signed the pledge because he thinks raising fees is wrong. He honoured the pledge because he thinks raising fees is wrong and breaking a personal pledge to his voters is wrong. “Free” student tuition is expensive to the state but that doesn’t mean it is wrong to believe in it.
We had a pice on here about the most successful election posters of all time.
I’m seeing a poster of Nick Clegg holding a tuition fees pledge with “Can you trust this man?” beside it.
It should do very well.
Whilst the tuition fees policy may not be ideal, the Conservatives may well have gone further and not considered lower earners in the same way. Pity about the Progressive Democrats, but Liberals have a much deeper history.
This polling by Lord Ashcroft is also a must-read for LibDems – indeed I’d suggest it’s worth an LDC discussion thread?
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/files/11122010_what_future_for__the_liberaldemocrats.pdf
but i thought the irish pds were an irish version of thatcherism? nothing wrong with that and it gave the irish people a choice rather than the 2 civil war parties and the centre left labour. the problem is the british libdems are split between the clegg orange bookers,similar to your pds and the traditional centre left libdems of old.
“There is no hope of PR for the Commons”
Wait, what? But Danny Alexander just said that we are getting a referendum on PR out of the coalition – don’t tell me he was misinformed? Then again, maybe he was just spouting more blatant lies to win support.
*sigh*
(it’ll be up on the iPlayer soon, 40 minutes or so in – have a look for yourself)
Point 1 is the one Clegg needs desperately to get his head around.
Be different from your Coalition partners.
It is extraordinary that Clegg hasn’t got this yet. His strategy is to hug the Tories closer and closer still.
He may just be able to turn around the horrific situation (and be under no illusions – the Party is in a dangerous situation) he has put the party in if he begins, today, to define the Lib Dems separately from the Coalition. And that doesn’t mean lightweight lists of supposed policy ‘victories’.
@Jason O’Mahony 11th December 2010 at 6:57 pm
Much of what you say in sensible in an Irish context and I acknowledge the advances that PDs made – but just like here those advances are being cut-back and destroyed and the people that are suffering most are the ones who didn’t cause the economic problems and probably gained the least in the boom times.
However where I really take issue with you is your assertion that: ‘The big mistake’ was making the tuition fee pledge in the first place. The pledge could only made because it reflected party policy and still does – so do you believe that LibDem party policy on tuition fees is a big mistake. If you do, then fair enough you’re entitled to do so, but from what I can see a helluva lot of LibDems still believe in the policy which in many ways is a fault-line indicator between different wings/factions in the LibDem Party.
You also state re the benefit of coalition: ‘You get your own way on somethings, and I still think that’s better than spending an eternity on the outside looking in’. Yes I can see the attractiveness of that to a party which seemed to be eternally cast in a minority opposition position. But I think you have to remember that the Tory core definition of National Interest is, I would postulate, is far different from that of the LibDem Party and this will become more and more obvious as time goes on.
I also happen to think that there isn’t a single LibDem minister with the ability to prevent Cameron subtly destroying the LibDem Party bit by bit – I’ve always been convinced he’ll ditch them probably 12 months before an election, with a manufactured crisis and spend the war chest to get the Tories elected without the LibDems being able to claim credit for a resurgent economy which a helluva lot of analysts now appear to be saying was never as bad as Osborne claimed.
Should that come to pass then the LibDem party won’t actually have to spend an eternity on the outside looking-in as they will be no more although a good percentage of their Ministers will find a comfortable home in Tory seats but before they get too comfortable with the ministerial lifestyle, I predict they will end up as Tory backbench lobby-fodder which is just about what they deserve lol.
Not only is this correct but the first point requires some legislative modifications to implement immediately. I propose the following racial thesis: the reason many people believe politicians are liars is because politicians are liars. One reason they lie is because the doctrine of ‘cabinet collective responsibility’ requires ministers to lie about their own oppinions and the compromises which are necessary in politics and to pretend that in fact the compromise policies they have ended up with are, in their opinion, the best things since sliced bread. The original reason for this doctrine was to prevent bad PR in the form of the press using skeptical remarks of minister to drum up support against it. Yet there are at least three reasons to be rid of it.
a) It is strongly contrary to most people’s moral intuitions. Remember how shocked people felt when Thatcher sacked Francis Pym for being honest about his opinions (despite voting for the government) on Question Time? Well there is, as it were, such a thing as ‘the sacking inherent in the system’ so long as the doctrine of CCR is used to force ministers to toe the line.
b) It is contrary to our party’s interests. As above, our party’s interest is clearly to allow dissent within the coalition to be a known public fact. People might not have been more forgiving, but would have been more understanding, of LibDem behaviour over tuition fees if LibDem ministers felt at liberty to say explicitly ‘this is not my preferred policy and I’m not very happy with it, but there is a plausible case that it is more progressive than the status quo left by Labour and it’s something we need to swallow in order to get Tory agreement on other things which are demonstrably more social mobility promoting such as the pupil premium and the income tax threshold rise which the Tories would never have accepted without LibDems in the government.’ As it is, with LibDem MPs being effectively forced to do PR for the majority Conservative coalition they do so at the cost of severely hurting our standing with the public who do not, in the internet age, find it hard to locate statements which flat out contradict the excuses given for the compromises able to be offered within the bounds of CCR.
c) It has extremely negative effects on public confidence in politicians. Due primarily to the problem of demonstrable hypocrisy which exists between statements offered by ministers to support government policy and those they made prior to entering government the public quite rightly views those former statements as duplicitous, eroding confidence in elected officials. This is pernicious in and of itself but particularly pernicious at a time of economic crisis when difficult decisions need to be made and people need a certain amount of faith that decisions are being made with the earnest best interests of the public at heart. When the LibDems entered the coalition confidence was high in some sectors that in doing so they would help provide a check on the Tories. I believed that was the case, and I still believe it. But it is hard to convince a public when they hear no word about dissent and daily see notable and admired social liberals such as Vince Cable offer explanations for the merits of controversial policy decisions which make it sound as if they’ve had brain transplants some time soon after the coalition agreement was signed. Any explanation you might offer them, that in fact Vince is still Vince and has reservations which conventional restrictions on the actions of ministers prevent him expressing, fall on deaf ears because ordinary people cannot understand why politicians would – in effect, voluntarily – submit themselves to such a policy of enforced counterproductive and blatant duplicity.
And neither can I. If we really believe in ‘The New Politics’ we need to drop this absurd doctrine, neither built for nor fit for the age of coalition government.
Best,
Duncan Crowe.
@Econ-Jon – You write “However where I really take issue with you is your assertion that: ‘The big mistake’ was making the tuition fee pledge in the first place. The pledge could only made because it reflected party policy and still does – so do you believe that LibDem party policy on tuition fees is a big mistake. If you do, then fair enough you’re entitled to do so, but from what I can see a helluva lot of LibDems still believe in the policy which in many ways is a fault-line indicator between different wings/factions in the LibDem Party.”
As someone who believes both that signing the pledge was a mistake and believes in the party’s position that Higher Education should be funded through general taxation I believe I can explain.
As we have learned the public at large draw a distinction between extra-manifesto pledges and manifesto promises. I am not going to defend this distinction, because I do not feel it is in fact philosophically sound, but nevertheless it is a demonstrable fact that a large number of people – those currently talking about being betrayed by the LibDems or having their votes ‘stolen’ – DO draw such a distinction and we have to take that seriously. To these people signing a pledge is significantly either because (a) the pledge being over and above the manifesto promises which are offered en masse and with the possible exception of the four headline policies are afforded equal status, the pledge highlights a particular issue as being of strict significance and it is certainly ture that in areas of high student numbers the existence of the pledge was used as a prominent piece of the election campaign material and/or (b) because while people can comprehend the notion that manifesto promises might not need to be honoured when in government due to the need either to compromise or to deal with ‘events, dear boy’ the pledge appeared to describe behaviour to be engaged in by LibDem MPs whether they were in government or in opposition. Given it was forseeable that we would have to compromise on our pledge as part of a coalition agreement with either the Brown-report setting-up Labour party or our ideological opponents the Conservatives – and I offer as evidence the fact that Danny Alexander /did/ forsee it – these facts about both the public and the political realities combine to make a strong argument against signing ANY extra-manifesto ‘pledges’. At least as a party en masse; individual MPs can sign but only on the understanding that by doing so they carry an (unnecessary?) risk of having to either honour their pledge at the possible cost of government office or renege and incur the wrath of whomever afforded the pledge signifance.
There is an additional issue in this case that it was an NUS pledge. There are two reasons this was absurd. (a) Because the NUS is a branch of the Labour party, both de facto (given the number of former Presidents who become Labour MPs) and de jure given the relationship between the NUS and the TUC and the TUC and the Labour party. It is absurd to court the votes of a branch of another party both in general and especially when there is a risk we will have to renege on it. If it was thought that the NUS’ reaction would be as sympathetic and understanding as when the Labour party (on weaker justification) neneged on their own Higher Education funding pledge then the people doing such ‘thinking’ are either unfamiliar with party politics or with the NUS, which is not exactly a great bastion of principled centrism. (b) The NUS as an organisation supports a policy which (in addition to arguably being regressive compared to the policy the coalition has just passed) is in contradiction to the aforementioned LibDem position on Higher Education Funding. The NUS both wishes to racially cut student numbers and to fund Higher Education via a tax on graduates. Neither of these are compatible with voted upon LibDem views on Higher Education. Taking a pledge offered by an organisation merely because you happen to agree upon the explicit wording of the pledge, when you disagree about the wider policy issues related to that pledge is absurd political behaviour. It would be like signing a pledge saying ‘We pledge to end conflict in the Middle East’ when we wish to do it by working towards a two-state solution and Hamas wishes to do it by the destruction of Israel.
So to restate: Higher Education should be funded through general taxation. Politics requires compromise. We should never have signed the NUS pledge.
Ieland needed, and still needs, a liberal alternative to the old fashioned civil war/left-right politics.
Unfortunately the PDs were never the answer. They were never treated as a serious force in Irish politics, never secured a solid third place position to build upon, and I for one cared little for their demise.
I would therefore question any attempt to correlate the PDs and the LDs – let alone the Irish and British political systems. Some helpful broad learnings there nonetheless.
Spare us ‘liberal alternatives’, they only appear to create widespread confusion, not least amongst lib dem voters still unclear ‘who’ or ‘what’ they are or stand for! Simply claiming to be ‘progressive’ at any opportunity as though this makes them enlightened individuals able to demonstrate intelligent lines in reasoning and thinking is now becoming tiresome. We have listened to your progressive thinkers from Simon Hughes to Nick Clegg and how full of contrite patronage and whimsical excuses they are! Thank goodness Ladbrokes knows the odds on you being able to ‘pretend’ much longer puts the election in 2011 at 4 to1!
@Jason O’Mahony
Thanks for an excellent article. A lot of food for thought.
@Duncan Crowe @1:20 pm
Some good arguments against joint cabinet responsibility within a coalition. Personally, I wouldn’t want to get rid of joint cabinet responsibility altogether, but I would like to see it qualified. Where Lib Dem MPs signal that where they’re not completely happy with the policy, without being too explicit. Even subtle signals of disagreement would be blown out of all proportion by the media. But, as Jason says in his article, that might not be such a bad thing.
I think if you do away with joint cabinet responsibility completely, it could seriously undermine the coherence of the government. However, there’s nothing to stop Tim Farron from openly talking about those disagreements (as he has promised to).
And, I think, in the twelve months before the election there will be deliberate efforts by both the Conservatives and us to put clear blue and yellow water between us.
@John Mc
Didn’t see the interview you are talking about, but there’s a good chance that the House of Lords will end up with elections under STV. On the other hand, it could have been a slip of the tongue.
Would Jason perhaps wish to elaborate on what happened to the PD’s more recently, or maybe the reputation of the once darling of the PD’s and former leader, Mary Harney? We could discuss the state of the Health Service in Ireland and how private company influence, that the PD’s championed, has ‘benefitted’ the country. Or how they opposed same sex marriages, lest they lose some of their more conservative support.
I think that may prove far more beneficial with regards to what are the lessons for the Liberal Democrats then all the back slapping nonsense Jason is talking about.
What is tragic is that the things the Lib-Dems HAVE been insisting on to try to move towards creating a fairer solution to our economic ills have been totally eclipsed because of…a pledge. There is nothing wrong with making a pledge when one is showing an intent, and abolition of fees remains the intent, as I understand it. What is wrong is in making it a a time when people find it easy to blame others and in this case
it has given a fantastic excuse for the left to villify a the Lib-Dems who have consequently become scapegoats.
Meanwhile indirect tax, which everyone pays, even if they’re non-taxpayers, is soaring and the people who got us into this mess are looking forward to bonuses, and maybe picking up a few houses on the cheap……
Rock (I’m not sure whether that is his/her first name, surname, or whether he/she is one of those people willing to express strong opinions but being surprisingly shy about actually identifying themselves with those same opinions publicly. I could, of course, be mistaken) raised a question about the demise of the PDs. As I expressed in the post, the party collapsed primarily because of a failure to differentiate itself from the senior coalition partner, a situation I warned the Lib Dems against getting into. As for Ireland’s health service, the PD approach to healthcare was so rightwing that health spending went from €6 billion in 1997 to €14 billion in 2008, leaving Ireland with some of the best paid consultants, doctors and nurses in the EU. The Thatcherite bastards. The party did create the National Treatment Purchase Fund, which allowed for public patients to have access to private sector treatment, with the cost met by the state, an example of common sense use of right wing methods to deliver left wing aims. Perhaps the nearly 200,000 people treated by the NTPF were horrified at their lack of ideolgical purity? I don’t know. But I do know they got private sector treatment free of charge. As I said before: I don’t have much time for Voldemort-style obsessing with political purebloods. The policy worked, and 200,000 people were better off for it.
The party did vote against a Labour party bill to legalise same sex marriage, because the government was on the verge of introducing its own civil partnership bill, which it did, and which the remaining PD deputies voted for this year. I’ll admit, I was very disappointed that they didn’t vote for the Labour bill.
Reading some of the posts on this and the article itself I’m reminded of the phrase ‘head in the sand’.. something which seems to be an unofficial policy atm.
If the Party continues as it is without some drastic action very soon the Party is heading for some very dark times indeed and that is something I would not wish to see, however if this suicidal attitude does not change, it will be deserved.
I don’t think this is the place for a major discussion of healthcare in Ireland, but I have a couple of issues with the NTPF. It is hard to argue with its benefit for the patient; patients are treated sooner than they would be otherwise. But from an economic point of view, it is just plain wrong. Patients are seen privately to avoid long waiting lists, often by those well paid consultants you mention who are on the HSE payroll & then paid again when patients are seen under NTPF, all the while shifting income away from the HSE and into the private sector. Why isn’t that money being spent on making the health service and more specifically underperforming hospitals more efficient so that it and they can bring down the waiting lists, instead of lining the pockets of those well paid consultants even further? The NTPF was (and is) a short term, populist solution that when the inevitable cuts are made in its budget, will leave those on future waiting lists no better than those on them before it was introduced. Very progressive, wouldn’t you say? And the 14 Billion you quoted earlier in your post leads me to my next question; if spending has been raised to 14 Billion under the PD’s, why does the NTPF still need to spend 100 million euros of taxpayers’ money a year to carry out operations that should be done in the public sector?
The reasons the PD’s are extinct are not for the reasons you state. It’s because of people like Michael McDowell, and the PD’s stance as a liberal party who were anything but. I’m no Lib Dem fan, but any comparisons with the PD’s will do them no favours with anyone who has even the passing interest in Irish politics.
Rocky (Thanks for the clarification):
You argue that whilst you accept that the NTPF has actually helped people, the money should be spent on public services. But it is! Those services are available and free to the public, just provided by a private provider. Your objection seems to be an ideological one, which is fair enough, but as I said, I’ve no interest in the rigid ideolgies of the free market fetishists or the socialist purists. The NTPF works, and I don’t believe in sacrificing those 200,000 who have been treated by it to further waiting just because it doesn’t suit someone’s ideological checklist. You seem to believe that an extra €100m in spending will be that vital tipping point that will transform the HSE and permit it to treat the 200,000 people quickly. I’d prefer to go the other way: Transform the HSE in parallel with the NTPF, and let the NTPF die out from lack of business. After all, if the public sector is transformed, there’ll be no need to buy in services, will there?
Spending did increase to €14 billion. Did the massive increase in spending result in a massive increase in healhcare efficiency. No, it didn’t, and that was the PDs fault, I agree. But that was because the PDs were not vigourous enough in pushing public sector reform, which goes to prove my inital point that they were nowhere near the right wing freemarket diehards that has been alleged here.
You said you are no fan of the Lib Dems. Well I am, and I tried, with others (and failed) to turn the PDs into a comparable party. The point of the piece was to share some of the experience we had in coalition, and also to point out the (in our case fatal) pitfalls.
Same sex marriage would almost certainly be a free-vote ‘conscience issue’ in the UK. Maybe Ireland doesn’t ‘do’ conscience votes. But for a supposedly “liberal” party apparently to whip its MPs to vote an illiberal way on a conscience issue for partisan reasons should certainly call its liberal credentials into question. There are times, when a party in government should publicly distinguish itself from its coalition partner, and even to vote in the opposite way to it. If the PDs were not prepared to do so even over an issue of moral principle, it’s no wonder they died.
In other world stuff what the electorate think – enjoy your pieces of silver.
Jason,
The reason I object to the NTPF has noting to do with any rigid ideology as you assume, as I simply don’t have one regarding healthcare. I do have, as a healthcare professional in the NHS and as the Husband of a senior Nurse who has worked the majority of her working life in the Irish public healthcare system, an idea of what works and what doesn’t & what benefits the public reagrding healthcare and what are short term fixes to problems that need more then an Elastoplast.
As stated, it would be folly of me to argue that the NTPF has not benefited patients on waiting lists, or that the money has not been spent on the public. It has, pure and simple. What I would argue is whether the money spent on it was the best use of that money, and whether the same outcomes could not have been achieved (200,000 patient’s treated) without the need to divert public funds to the private sector, especially when spending was increased as much as it has been in Ireland.
The 100 Million Euros is not, of course, the tipping point that would mean the HSE would suddenly transform itself into the uber efficient system it should try to be. It does, however reflect very poorly on the PD’s (and on FF, to be fair), that it is still needed to be spent after so many years in Government, and will impact those very people that you tried to help as when the budget is cut, less people will be treated and the HSE will not be in a position to absorb the extra, because the parallel transformation of the HSE alongside the introduction of the NTPF which you seem to advocate and which was implied would happen when introduced, and to which I certainly wouldn’t have objected too, didn’t take place on the PD’s watch. The fact that there are numerous examples of hospital beds and theatres laying idle, while public money is spent treating public patients in the private sector at a higher rate then would cost if done ‘in-house’, is a woeful indictment on the Government, and certainly nothing to cheer about.
Which leads me to another point: Why do you assume that only right wing freemarket diehards would support or want reform in the public sector? I am as far away from right wing as I think you can get, and if we want to play the silly game of pigeon holing each other, would say I am left wing, yet I can see that clear and cohesive reform throughout the public sector in Ireland (as in England) needs to take place. Furthermore (and more importantly), I believe the wider Irish public understand that reform needs to take place to ensure that taxes are spent as efficiently and wisely as possible. The HSE is overmanned, too management heavy and inefficient, and reform does need to take place. Yet that reform can take place in many ways, and by implying that the only reform the PD’s would have been able to do would be the type that would be welcomed by right wing freemarket diehards does give the game away slightly. My dislike for the PD’s has nothing to do with any ideological opposition, and everything to do with their incompetence.
I am no fan of the Lib Dems, but I believe that under our system, a strong third party is necessary. I do not want the Lib Dems to be wiped out, or absorbed into Labour and Conservative as I genuinely think that would be a disaster for politics in Britain, and I am someone who has never voted for them. At the last election, the Lib Dems really did stand on a progressive, liberal mandate, which is one of the reasons why there is so much anger from some of those who voted for them. The PD’s, in contrast, were neither liberal nor progressive in their policies, and that is why there was never the ‘betrayed’ outcry in Ireland that we hear in Britain now. The only similarities are that they were (or are) both junior partners in a coalition Government. On that premise, the Lib Dems would do just as well in getting advice from the Irish Labour party or the Greens.
The biggest mistake that the PDs made was to do a preference deal with Fianna Fail. If part of the point of the PDs was to provide an alternative to the two old Civil War parties, then it was extraordinarily self-defeating of the party to align itself semi-permanently with one of them. This is a large part of why in the end “voters could not see a reason to vote for them rather than Fianna Fail” as Jason wrote. The PDs should have kept their coalition options open.
Deals around preferences (in a system that allows for this) only make sense for the smaller party if its voters can be assumed to vote for the other party anyway, and if the smaller party has a strong distinctive identity and tradition.
These seem to be true for the National Party in Australia (in alliance with the (conservative) Liberal Party). Neither applied to the PDs, and the first does not apply to the Liberal Democrats, whose voters are traditionally evenly divided between the other two parties.
The Progressive Democrats went out of business and ceased to exist as a political party. The weren’t exactly in our Social Liberal territory either.
I can’t claim to expertise on this, but I suspec the PDs’ hand was forced by electoral arithmetic. There was never an occasion when Fine Gael + PDs would have had a majority. The only occasion when the PDs might have been part of a Fine Gael-led coalition was in 1992, but Labour wouldn’t treat with the PDs and ended up going into government with Fianna Fail. (Incidentally, Jason, whatever the reality about PD policy, they did get themselves a reputation as being economically right-wing, which is presumably why Labour wouldn’t join a coalition with them.) In many ways, a Fine Gael/PD coalition would have been the most natural alignment had the numbers in the Dail ever stacked up.
Interestingly, although their last period in coalition ended very badly indeed, in both 1992 and 2002 the PDs increased their parliamentary strength after being in coalition, presumably because they were indeed perceived as having given Fianna Fail some manners