ITV reports Lib Dems open conference with ‘attack’ over Europe, where you can also watch a video round-up.
The International Business Times has a more sombre assessment: Cable and Clegg Attack Tories and Ukip:
The rally comes against a bleak background for the party as polls and by-elections show they are running fourth and there is the real possibility they will be humiliated in May’s European elections, thus the focus on the issue in York.
Yet delegates are still in an upbeat mood. The majority have come to terms with the realities of coalition and the fact that they have finally become a grown up party of government, something they could only dream of for decades.
The Guardian previews the motion on a digital rights: Digital bill of rights needed to safeguard online freedoms, says Lib Dem chief with a rather curious photo of Tim Farron, and some self-referential gloating.
The Lib Dem president will criticise “supine” politicians who have criticised the Guardian for publishing information from the leaked NSA files. Farron will say: “In the UK we have had to endure the sight of senior politicians attacking the Guardian for having the temerity to try and inform the public of what is done in our name. For a prime minister who pretends to be so concerned with ensuring the freedom of the press he has a funny way of showing it.
The New Statesman analyses the mood: Beneath the surface, tensions are growing in the Lib Dems. After quoting from a Lib Dem Voice post it comments:
Indeed, almost everything right now is analysed through the prism of “what it means about the leadership”. Witness the announcement of the negotiating team for potential future coalition talks. Immediately it has been examined for every conceivable signal. It’s a sign of strength that Nick has appointed a team without reference to the wider party. Or else it’s a sign of weakness that Nick has not been brave enough to submit his choices for debate amongst the party at large. And why is the chosen line-up dominated by the left? Or indeed the right? And why now? Is it a distraction technique – get everyone in the party thinking about the general election to stop them thinking about the European elections? The debate seems endless.
The party is going to look confident, assured, positive and passionate on stage this week. But increasingly the debate behind the scenes that will dominate the bar conversation is around one question: after this May’s elections – what happens next?
Meanwhile, the Financial Times is rumour mongering: Danny Alexander tipped to replace Vince Cable in Lib Dem role.
Locally, the Yorkshire Post reports Clegg vows to fight cash-grab on region’s schools.
Behind the scenes, another potential cause of conflict is over the Government’s ongoing review of schools funding, with backbench Tories pushing to end the historic under-funding of many rural schools. That has led to Labour warnings that urban schools in deprived areas will inevitably lose out – and that funding will ultimately move from North to South.
But Mr Clegg said: “That is not going to happen. I won’t let that happen. It has got to be fair.”
And it’s good to see that, according to the York student paper Nouse, students are behaving as students should – by taking part in a protest, although the dress code is rather confusing.
Protesters are encouraged to choose one of five colours to dress in: blue for jobs and fair pay; green for tax justice; red for NHS; public services and social security; black for industrial growth; or yellow for young people and the future.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Have resignations led to a rethink?
High Fell leaflet watch (2)
No, Leave didn't win the Brexit referendum because of Northern working class voters
Two new Makerfield by-election polls gives Burnham 5 and 12 point leads
Geoffrey Payne
Richard Whelan
David Raw
Tom Reeve
13 Comments
Tim Farron was on Newsnight yesterday, but I as not happy with his reaction to the ‘no one is going to listen to you after the lies on student fees’ question.
He just does not get it.
Acquiescing with and not challenging this attack does the Lib Dem prospects no good at all. He needs to forcefully present the benefits of the new system. He is after all the Party President, not just another Lib Dem member. He needs to spell out that the system functions as a graduate tax. He may not like the system; I am not too happy with it myself, but then it is not my job to officially represent the party. Farron excused the policy on the grounds that we do not have so many MPs: this will not do at all.
The Lib Dems just don’t get it. No one is listening to them or wil believe them again after tuition fees. Forget the manifesto pledges. They made it personal by signing pledges with voters with their fingers crossed behind their backs. Everyone knows they were planning to ditch the pledge after the election but they still made personal promises. No amount of side stepping the issue is going to make it go away. Lib Dem councillors around here say it is the only issue that comes up on the doorsteps. I for one will never vote for them again.
Thank you James thompson for making the point for me: that is exactly the attitude that has to be challenged head on. James is making an unwarranted assumption that there was a plan “to ditch the pledge after the election”.
Clearly there were choices in a time of stringent austerity; a formal graduate tax had been put forward as a solution prior to the election; it was looked at, but found to be inoperable. The system that was introduced works, in practice, as a graduate tax for all except those who become very well off (and therefore get higher taxes anyway). The pay off is that we have tax breaks for the lower paid. In a time of austerity it would not have been justifiable to ask the lower paid to fund university fees for those who are likely to become rather better paid.
Whether I would have chosen this system in the circumstances is irrelevant (I would have been very tempted to have changed nothing – but that would have been a party political manoeuvre), the point is that there are positive aspects of the new system and the party has been damaging itself by not selling these positive features. Nick Clegg and Vince Cable made a belated start last week but it certainly requires the likes of Tim Farron to put forward a robust case too.
So why didn’t they say that during the 2010 election campaign then. It is the Lib Dems that made is a large part of their campaign no one else. It is well documented that senior Lib Dems did not want the pledge and tried to get it changed. They could have insisted on a freeze during coalition negotiations, but they went for the tripling of fees without a thought to the thousands of students motivated by their pledge into voting and campaigning for them. I know many sixth formers who couldn’t vote who went out and canvassed for them and now feel let down by Politics. And we all remember Nick’s “no more broken pledges” video before the election with “no tuition fees” highlighted. And now we’re supposed to believe it when they say “we mean it this time”. I asked my Lib Dem candidate which pledges she will sacrifice for a seat in Govt this time and she shrugged her shoulders and walked away.
It appears to be Martin who doesn’t get it.
It doesn’t matter whether the new system is “better” (which is highly arguable in itself) the fact remains in 2010 as far as the electorate were concerned the LDs tuition fee pledge was as close to a red-line as anything else they offered, being the only policy which was double-locked with both a manifesto pledge and a personal pledge. If that could be so easily discarded then why should the electorate trust the LDs to keep any of their weaker promises contained within a future manifesto, particularly when the only reasonable chance of enacting of them is after going through a second coalition negotiation with an as yet un-identified second party? How do you even begin to rebuild that trust?
We’ve all seen the photo taken of the LDs coalition priorities and tuition fees weren’t even mentioned and as has been reported the negotiation team were instructed to waste no political capital trying to even defend the pledge in the event of a coalition (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/nov/12/lib-dems-tuition-fees-clegg) so it is quite reasonable to suggest the pledge was internally ditched before the election was even fought.
As someone who works at the coal-face in HE I have to say the new system itself is a shambles, a slow-motion car-crash which still hasn’t reached its terrible climax, so having senior LDs claim how “brilliant” it is would only further compound the dreadful political mistake of breaking the pledge in the first place.
@James thompson
“Lib Dem councillors around here say it is the only issue that comes up on the doorsteps.”
Really? Where is it that you live? In the case of my “around here” that certainly isn’t the case. I remember one particular household who raised it two year ago (and I suspect there were a couple of others who raised it, but which I don’t recall), but this year (so far) no-one has raised it with me as an issue on the doorstep.
The “Pledge” was stupid & Illiberal & we have been , partly punished for it. Most of the punishment is for the far worse crime of not sticking to the Voters script. We were supposed to be nice, cute, wacky & fun. By behaving as a serious Party of Government we have messed with the Voters heads & generally freaked them out, no wonder they were cross.
Its very hard to guess how the minority who vote in May will behave but its unlikely to tell us much about 2015. Can I point younger readers to 1989 when we got 6% in The Euros. We were going to be replaced by The Greens. Come The General Election we got 18%.
Simon Shaw – my around here is Liverpool. I work in education in the poorest ward in the city and I have seen many young people put off going to university because of the fear of £35,000 debt. That is all they see. No matter how much I try to extend the virtues (albeit through gritted teeth) they do not want to be saddled with debt. I have arranged meetings, taken them to campuses, had guest speakers in, etc. and all they see at the end is £35,000 debt minimum. I know you will point to national figures that show differently, blah, blah, but these young people have not gone to University precisely because of LD lies. They are the same young people who are totally put off politics because, like me, they believed Clegg and his new brand of politics before the election. And to simply say, “well we have grown up now…..” is an insult.
Whoever got into power in 2010 was going to be unpopular. I think the lib dems have allowed themselves take a lot of the flak that would normally been aimed a senior n Tories. Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander have been too ready to explain conservative policies for a prime minister minister who doesn’t want to be on TV, to the point where I wonder what Cameron actually does.
James Thompson
I asked my Lib Dem candidate which pledges she will sacrifice for a seat in Govt this time and she shrugged her shoulders and walked away.
One of the ways this pledge could have been kept to was massively slashing the number of university places. Would that have been better? The Liberal Democrats made sure that loans were available to everyone, and would not need to be paid back until income reached a particular level. In practice the effect is not highly different from what a graduate tax would be like. The fees are what a university place costs. Had it all been paid for by direct government borrowing, that money would STILL have to be paid back, by future generations of taxpayers, so much the same people.
If I’m arguing my position and I’m in a minority, obviously I can’t get everything I want, so if I can compromise and drop something I want in a way that actually in practical terms makes little real difference, I’d have to consider it, and that might be better than getting something which in pure legal terms is what I said I wanted but is actually contrary to my wider aims.
As a university lecturer, I too work “at the coal-face in HE”. What disappoints me most is that despite this debt now being in their name, so few students take what they are paying for. I had hoped it would result in higher attendance, more willingness to engage in the work and take up the feedback that is offered. Sadly, no. As I suspected, for most students it’s “funny money”, they don’t really see the debt, they don’t really think of it in terms of real money, and with the eternal optimism of youth, they all think they’re going to do well and get well-paid jobs anyway.
I have not heard from anyone who opposes the student fees and loan system just HOW they would pay for it instead. THAT is the reality of being in government, if you want to pay for something, you have to say how, you have to put together a budget. Personally, I would have had full subsidy of universities paid for by a much higher inheritance tax – not sure how high it would have to go to cover it, but it makes sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to many others, who seem to regard inheritance tax as an outrageous thing. Especially Tories, who are at their core the Non-Workers Party, the party which defends wealth obtained by owning things rather than wealth obtained by work. It would have been breaking THEIR pledges to have paid for university funding in this way, and the British people voted to have five times as many of them in Parliament as Liberal Democrats.
I’m sorry if I’m too logical about this, because I do appreciate how bad the whole tuition fees thing looks. Here’s another aspect I find illogical. There’s all this big moaning about young people taking up £35,000 debt – so why no such moaning at the much BIGGER debt increases young people have to take up if they want a home of their own thanks to house prices going up and up and up, pumped up by Labour just as much by the Tories? A jump in average house price of £35,000 which amounts to just the same debt imposition goes with hardly a comment.
@Matthew Huntbach
“Here’s another aspect I find illogical. There’s all this big moaning about young people taking up £35,000 debt – so why no such moaning at the much BIGGER debt increases young people have to take up if they want a home of their own thanks to house prices going up and up and up”
You probably would hear moaning if the LDs had broken a solemn pledge and election promise and introduced a system where the government borrowed money billions upfront so that wealthy bankers could buy a £35k house for £35k in a year or two but nurses and social workers would have to fork out £100k for the same house, spend 30 years servicing that debt and at the end still having never fully paid it off with an estimated 40% written off as the RAB charge continues to rise. You talk about it it being like a graduate tax, and for low and middle income earners it is the equivalent of an additional 9% on all their earning above the threshold which they’ll pay for the majority of their working lives, regardless of whether they actually financially benefited from their degree. In contrast once you earn enough money that “graduate tax” begins to taper off eventually tending to zero, rendering the system highly regressive. The apparently so-called “lucky ones” are the ones who never ever earn above the threshold and instead have this looming growing pile of debt hanging over them for most their adult lives acting as a huge disincentive to ever earn more and effecting their ability to ever get a mortgage.
Furthermore to comply with the system the “house-builders” (aka the Universities) have to jump through all sorts of hoops without actually seeing any additional cash and while the exclusive Russel Group “house-builders” who tend to cater for the wealthy house-buyers will see a small trickle of additional cash to further entrench their advantages the less trendy Million+ “house-builders” who tend to cater for poorer and mature students have seen their funding slashed making them fall even further behind and so are having to close departments and face possible bankruptcy which will ultimately close that avenue altogether.
You asked for alternatives, rather than a complicated pseudo-graduate tax which works out over 30 years as a constant 9% for a nurse and approaching 0% for a millionaire, how about a simple graduate tax of say 5% on all earnings over the threshold without any of the expense, confusion and unintended consequences of a variable fees systems and Byzantine repayment scheme?
It is well documented that senior Lib Dems did not want the pledge and tried to get it changed
This is the key point. It’s not whether the new system is better or worse or all that was achievable. It’s not even about whether it was what a Lib Dem majority government would do.
When it comes down to it politics is about trust: who do you trust to run the country? Policies are ultimately all hostage to fortune, and voters understand that. They understand that parties don’t choose the results of elections, and coalitions might require compromise.
But to promise, in order to gain votes, in public something you know and admit in private at the same time that you will not deliver is just dishonest.
If the Lib Dem leaders had honestly meant to vote against any raising of tuition fees but had to give that up as part of the coalition negotiations, people would understand.
But they knew even as they said it, before the election, that they were lying, and they had tried to get out of saying it but, when it came down to it, they wanted the votes and so they promised something they knew they would not deliver.
And that’s your problem.
I hate the supposed juxtaposition that Mathew Huntbach and his like come out with in reference to financing our pledge on tuition fees.
Now, just to remind people, this is what happened. The coalition government took away a huge chunk of grants to universities and told them that they would have to make up the shortfall (including any raise in funding) by telling them they would have to raise the fees.
Mathew Huntbach and others who agreed with reneging on our solemn pledges to our young people would have you believe that the choices were either the government position or “massively slashing the number of university places”. Now forgive me if I’m wrong (and I often am), but didn’t we go through the general Election with the promise that all policies and pledges were shown to be paid for? and when I say paid for I don’t mean paid for by slashing the numbers of places.