It’s an unnecessarily well-kept secret that the Liberal Democrats have already achieved much in Government since the General Election.
Despite the Guardian saying today that “the Liberal Democrats have rushed out a checklist of 67 party manifesto commitments already or nearly achieved in eight months in office” it’s not that easy to find the checklist online, nor to understand why the newspaper used the word “rushed” when the party has waited two thirds of a year before compiling and releasing it in a low-key way to Lib Dem campaigners.
Nonetheless, the list is impressive, and deserves to be shared widely. So I’m publishing it below, but first, the preamble:
The Liberal Democrats have been in government for only eight months, but we have already implemented many of our manifesto policies.
Below is a list of these policies and what we are doing to make them happen. The list does not even include those of our policies that are in the coalition agreement but have not yet been implemented – so this list is just the first part of a long line of Liberal Democrat policies to come.
The list is organised according to each section of our 2010 manifesto, for ease of comparison. However in some areas, such as environmental policy, it made more sense to group it together in one section, so it will not always be completely true to the original structure.
This document is a striking illustration of the influence the Liberal Democrats are having in government.
Lib Dem Achievements in Government
Document also available on Scribd here.
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12 Comments
The claim that an extra £900billion is being invested in cracking down on tax cheats is a good example of how you are being conned.
In fact, HMRC’s budget is being cut quite substantially. There will be less money to clampdown on tax cheats, not more. These documents are for the gullible.
There’s too much there to waste time on, but it’s claptrap. Deliberately ambiguous language to hide the Royal Mail privatisation and the fact that the Pupil Premium is not new investment but rather comes from shifting around existing funds for example.
Do one without those policies that the Tories and Labour also planned. And then do one with some honesty, if that’s possible for your party.
Oh look, more comments from Labour trolls where the assumption is that the baseline should be funding levels continuing at the same level as before, flying in the face of even the Labour party’s plans before the election.
Yes, the HMRC budget, schools budget, and any number of other budgets are being squeezed, and therefore “new” money which is spent as a result of Lib Dem influence within the government is indeed set against a context of falling spending. And? We all know that. We accept it not because we are gullible, or dishonest, but because it is quite clear to anyone thinking seriously about the situation that spending restraint was going to be the order of the day whoever was in government. The point is what your priorities are.
Well if the LibDems are the ones responsible for all these policies being enacted that means there’s nothing left for the electorate to blame the Tories about so the LibDems will need to carry the electoral backlash on their own.
I won’t bother to list all the areas where the poor, ill and disadvantaged are going to be hammered because I’m not sure that there’s that many left in the LibDems that are interested in these groups because they appear to be viewed as economically inactive.
But the power of self-delusion is strong and I noted in the victory list the no like for like replacement for Trident in this Parliament. Well, there never could have been because the replacement programme will take 20 years so you’ll actually be able to claim there won’t be one in the next Parliamant either so there’s one for your next Manifesto.
All that you have secured as a sop is that the announcement of the Trident like for like replacement won’t be announced in this Parliament. The design and preparatory work has already started and is being funded under the ‘Initial Gate’ mechanism and Trident will be replaced with a like for like system on time whether I or the LibDems like it or not – that’s the reality and it’s a great pity the party parly leadership still seems to have a difficulty in telling the truth or disguising it with smoke and mirrors.
You are understandably – and justifiably – keen to point out the successes that have already been achieved by what is still a fledgling Coalition Government. As you point out, a number of the specific measures set out in the Lib Dem manifesto have, unsurprisingly, found their way into the Government’s plans. Some of these might well have found their way into the programme of a majority Conservative Government; no doubt others would not.
At the same time of course, there are many other aspects of Government policy that are far removed from the pre-election stance of your party. No doubt the same could be said of the Conservatives. Many of the former are likely to be much less attractive to prospective Lib Dem voters than those to which you draw attention in this post.
But this is the very essence of coalition politics. And your party and its predecessors have campaigned in favour of of this for at least three decades. The current programme – both sweet and sour – has been jointly crafted by ministers drawn from both parties in the Coalition. It is not a case of colouring the attractive bits gold and the unpopular elements blue. All of the policies, quite properly, bear the imprint of both of the partners in the relationship.
The merit or otherwise of the current Government cannot sensibly be judged on the basis of whether or not the manifesto ‘commitments’ of the two ‘sides’ can be ticked off on a list of ‘promises kept’. What the country needs is a Government that is able to make sense of – and respond purposefully to – the challenges that actually emerge while it is in office – not those that might have emerged if the real world had been kind enough to conform to the pre-election assumptions. This has always been the case but the realities of coalition politics has brought the disconnect between pre-election wish lists and post-election reality into sharper focus.
By virtue of its make-up, the current Government has been forced to think afresh about how to deal with the issues and events it finds itself facing. Ministers are no longer compelled to adhere slavishly to neatly packaged, pre-election ‘pledges’ that, with the best will in the world, are focused more on winning votes than on dealing with the messy reality of real-world government. Not only that but, in addressing these challenges, the Government is able to draw on the talents, ideas and perspectives of people from both parties. This should be something to celebrate and draw strength from, not a cause for apologies, excuses and disclaimers .
If the PR/coalition project is to survive, the Lib Dems in particular need to talk up the merits of coalition politics, explain its implications and own its results – the good, the bad and the ugly. In coalitions …
… it’s the quality, values and general stance of a party’s candidates that are relevant at election time, not specific (and essentially meaningless) policy ‘commitments’.
… (despite current rhetoric) compromise is not the name of the game – the differing values of the two parties are not open to compromise.
… instead, coalition members work together to develop and enact what they consider to be the best available ways of delivering the coalition’s purpose (in this case effective government of the UK) in the light of the actual issues and events that they face in practice.
… members, by definition, don’t agree on everything; and, more than that, they have many things on which they actively disagree – otherwise they would be members of the same party, not part of a (formal) coalition.
… it helps (as always) if people get on well together, but it is irrelevant whether they do so or not ; the only thing that matters is the quality of people’s contribution – and that they don’t undermine the relationship by ill-guarded comments!
As your party’s many years in opposition will have taught you, it’s easy to snipe from the sidelines (as some respondents to your post are already doing). It’s a different game altogether to have the power to make real choices about how to allocate limited resources amongst ‘equally deserving’ causes. So, rejoice in the Lib Dem’s contribution to Government policy-making if you wish; but beware of doing so in a way that undermines the broader objective of winning over the non-Lib Dem electorate to the merits of collaborative, coalition politics.
If the party supported by sniping, moaning hypocrites like Mike (The Labour One) and EcoJon hadn’t ruined the public finances while it was in office by running up a massive government deficit, we would be implementing a whole load more of our promises.
Heavens, those leaving comments on LDV are unconvinced. I am surprised.
@Andy Hinton: Nonsense. Your party has repeatedly claimed that it is new money, when it isn’t. It’s a con. You can’t make a song and a dance about having provided ‘new’ money, and when it’s pointed out that it isn’t new money say that ‘oh it would be if *blah blah blah*.’ Your party made the claim, and it was a false one.
Would the banks not have failed without Labour? Would there have been no recession? The structural deficit would have been dealt with under Labour’s plans easily enough, as even the likes of Fraser Nelson have admitted, without the extra cuts you and the Tories want.
@Robert C: 1) You would have let the banks fail then?
2) It is nonsense that these cuts have to be so deep in order to deal with the structural deficit. It simply isn’t true- to my knowledge we’ve had three Nobel prize winners in economics come out against the severity of the cuts and a number of mainstream think tanks.
Listen to yourself. ‘We want to fulfil more promises but’ isn’t a valid answer to ‘the promises you claim you’ve kept really aren’t’. You shouldn’t be claiming to have fulfilled all of these promises when the facts don’t fit that narrative.
@Andy Hinton
How do you manage to make so many errors in such a short post?
Firstly, I have never been a member or supporter of any political party. I have always voted for the people and policies at the time – never a party.
Secondly, that you assume Labour indicates a certain phobia leading you to make incorrect assumptions. Why not UKIP or Scottish Nationalist or Tory or Green Party or Plaid Cymru?
Thirdly, according to Danny Alexander, £1 spent on pursuing the tax cheats will bring in around £15 revenue (a fantastic return on investment) and there’s an annual mountain of £42 billion to pursue. No other measure will have such a big impact on the deficit. But, you say it’s all about priorities. Hmmm.
Apologies don’t bother me, but will you acknowledge your mistakes? It may help you in future.
Helen thanks for publishing – needs to be got out to as many people as possible.
Not surprising it has got such a strong reaction here from labour trolls – they can’t bear to be reminded of our achievements in government.More in 6 months than there lot manageed in 13 years and no illegal wars either.
@ Mike (The Labour One).
I am talking about the PUBLIC FINANCES. Gordon Brown was quite right to intervene in support of the banks – as suggested by Vince Cable. Without functioning banks, the economy collapses.
The fact that there is a massive 11% of GDP deficit seems to have passed you by. If we had no plan to cut that at all (the approach Labour seems now to be adopting by opposing every single cut), then the financial markets would be trampling us like a herd of stampeding cattle. That is why I am so angry with Labour supporters: their sheer opportunistic denial of the need for financial responsibility. They are simply riding a wave of discontent without any proposals as to what they would do.
I think we should return the favour by publishing an alternative Labour budget, showing what a disaster their approach would cause by allowing a fiscal explosion.
@Robert C: You’ve been sold a pup. The deficit doesn’t require cuts quite so harsh- read this article by Fraser Nelson, it sums up where we found ourselves in relation to the deficit after election.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/6080418/osbornes-headache.thtml
‘The below chart sums up the extraordinary announcement from the Office for Budget Responsibility. George Osborne did his best to maintain the “things are worse than we thought” line but the reverse is true. Unemployment, inflation, the deficit – everything is better than not only the Treasury forecast but better than the market had been preparing for.’
‘ His plan was conceptually fine: that he’d create an external agency, which would demolish Brown’s Potemkin Village and show the full unvarnished truth. But the OBR has made its first announcement just as the economy is on the turn. Manufacturing, house prices, gilt yields – on almost every metric you can think of, things are not as bad as had been feared. What jumped out at me was that the OBR says that on current government policy (ie, without Osborne’s recent £5.7bn of cuts, on the Darling trajectory) the structural deficit would be reduced from 8% now to 2.8% in 2014-15. That is to say, Osborne’s manifesto pledge – to eliminate “the bulk” of the structural deficit – would have happened under Darling. So no extra cut, or tax hike, is needed to meet this pledge.’
We have had three Nobel prize winners come out strongly against the severity of the cuts and a number of think tanks. The NIESR, not a leftist organisation by any stretch of the imagination, has said that the cuts will harm deficit reduction by reducing growth and therefore tax revenues, and recommends *half* the cuts, less than even Labour had planned, as the best way to get the deficit down. That is without even thinking of the social impact- purely going on what is the best way to get the deficit down, these deep cuts are a bad option.
The deficit isn’t overspending, it is also a result of a diminishing amount coming in due to the recession. Well deep cuts are the best way to slash your tax revenues and make this situation worse.