Newsnight Scotland are running a series of Interviews featuring the leaders of the main parties in the run up to the 2011 election. Here is the third, the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, Tavish Scott.
Tag Archives: liberal democrats
The Big Ideas?
Broken bridge, originally uploaded by Eva the Weaver
Where have all the big ideas in politics gone? I thought I’d have an opinion on the Scottish Budget that had the first round of voting this week, but there wasn’t anything much to do.
John Swinney has been given less pennies to hand out, and he has arranged them in a form that is more or less the same shape as before but smaller.
Most of the other parties disagreed, perhaps more for the fact that they should look like they disagree (and in Labour’s case purely for the reason that they have to disagree with the SNP) and said that in instead of 10 pennies here and 15 pennies there, there should be 11 pennies here and 14 pennies there.
The SNP are coming to the end of their current administration and feel their hands have been tied by the UK government. The other parties don’t want to offer much at this stage. The Scottish Lib Dems want extra money towards further education, which is good in itself, but doesn’t really make a big difference if I’m honest. Labour want to borrow money to build some things which is just typical Labour and quite worrying for the future – don’t they ever learn – but again, does this change anything?
Which is why the Scottish Green Party are a quite interesting organisation. They reject the budget on their own clear grounds, but that is not my point. They are offering ideas on changing taxes; Land Value Tax is a very interesting idea. They are different when the other parties are the same.
The SNP want independence for Scotland. But what happens afterwards? I’d like to see what they offer that is actually going to be different in an Independent Scotland. I don’t think I’ve seen it yet. I’ve seen the SNP complain that whilst the Scottish Green Party are pro-independence, they don’t campaign about it. But the Scottish Greens have an idea of what should happen in this region of the United Kingdom, and that idea is more important currently than whether it should be an independent region or not.
I hope that all the parties take the opportunity of the coming election to produce some big ideas that will make a difference.
A Simplistic Look at the motivation on Tuition Fees
What are the various parties agendas on higher education? What is the underlying ethos guiding what they do?
I’m not talking about the current fashion for demanding hard and fast cuts “in the current economic climate”. There was no recession when Labour introduced top up fees in 2004.
Let’s take a simplistic look at why each major political party would want to increase fees for students :-
- Conservatives. If you have to pay much much more to go to the best universities, then only the rich will be able to afford to go, and therefore Tory children won’t lose their Oxbridge places to the poor however stupid they might be.
- Labour. The whole point of Labour is to keep people in poverty so they need to work, need the social crux of the Welfare State. What better way to keep even the brightest young person under the cosh? Saddle them with as much debt as possible.
- Liberal Democrats. Well, I can’t think of a good reason here. Care to supply one? I think the better educated, the more likely to be liberal and therefore more likely to vote LibDem ( I did say this was simplistic didn’t I?). That’s one of the reasons that the party policy is to abolish tuition fees (I’d link to the website, but it has been removed). So why are the LibDems raising the fees? Well, they are not. Coalition ministers are. LibDem policy remains the same. The rebels here will be the MPs who votes for raising fees.
One final thought as the whole thing is depressing me. The LibDems should be better than Labour, who had in their 2001 party manifesto
“We have no plans to introduce University top-up fees, and have legislated to prevent their introduction.”
and then proceeded to introduce them.
Is breaking a pledge worse than breaking legislation?
Vince Cable is wrong on tuition fees
The Browne report came out today Vince Cable presented it to the House of Commons stating :-
the Liberal Democrats had accepted that their opposition to graduate contributions was ”simply no longer feasible” in the current economic climate.
I’m not sure which Liberal Democrats he had spoken to but I don’t think many of his party colleague sitting on the backbenches agree as Tim Farron, Julian Huppert and Greg Mulholland have shown.
If he’d been at the Scottish Liberal Democrat Conference on Saturday he’d have seen a very vigorous and interesting debate on tuition fees in Scotland, which are currently not paid by the student. He’d have seen an amendment calling for a fair method of graduate contribution clearly defeated.
There are quite a few reasons for LibDem MPs to vote against this bill to increase the fees
- 54 out of 57 signed a pledge saying they would do just that.
- It clearly goes against the party manifesto, which states that scrapping tuition fees would occur over a 6 year period. It’s one thing to agree to a new thing that is not in a manifesto as it comes from the Conservatives. It’s another to go directly against something you’ve put in your manifesto.
- It’s already part of the coalition agreement that LibDems could abstain from this
- It goes against liberal values to provide education for all irrespective of background
- It will increase the debt of students (or more likely put poorer people off going to university) at a time we are being told that the cuts are necessary as debt is bad.
I’m hoping that the vast majority of Liberal Democrat MPs vote against this. The explanation is that the country and the universities cannot afford not to do this. Instead, we should concentrate on quality not quantity, reduce student numbers if necessary, make A Levels harder so you don’t have the ludicrous position of nearly everyone getting 5 As. Instead provide better alternatives to university should as apprenticeships.
Feel the benefit?
Do you get the idea that the Conservative Party have yet to work out what they are doing? On the one hand they introduce an idea, cutting child benefit for higher tax payers, that isn’t designed to impact the poor. Yet they manage to manage to mess it up by making it means tested against single parents rather than a family household, giving Labour an easy target to attack.
And where did this idea come from? Not their manifesto, where there isn’t a sign of it, nor from their coalition partners, who seem to be quite surprised by it.
Then, they bring back their married couple tax break, universally disliked by all the other parties (the LibDems going so far as to specifically exempting themselves from having to vote for it in the coalition agreement), whilst also talking about completely overhauling the welfare system in the future.
Why not stop announcing all the ill thought out, half baked ideas now and wait to produce the complete new system when they’ve worked it out?
Is it because if they keep quiet it’ll start to look like all the good ideas from this government have been coming from the Liberal Democrat ?
Voted and waiting for the result
Today, I went out and voted in my local constituency, basing my decision on a large number of facts.
But I’d long since come to the conclusion that the only party to offer electoral reform, libel reform, full backing to remove the heinous Digital Economy Act and tax reform were the Liberal Democrats. It helps that they are a party that was against the illegal Iraq war, didn’t lead us into the worst recession in my lifetime and are not a party that wants to give the rich even more of an advantage over the poor – a party that would cut twice as hard to save £20 a month in council tax for their middle class voters.
I went to the local hustings in Linlithgow and wasn’t impressed by either Tam Smith (SNP) or Andrea Stephenson (Tory). Michael Connarty came over very well, but one moment summed him up. Whilst Stephen Glenn was explaining that Connarty voted for the Digital Economy Bill, Connarty gave an enthusiastic nod and a thumbs up.
This is despite telling other bloggers that he was against the idea, and not even attending the debate. It is unlikely he really understands the implications of the DE Act at all.
However well he comes across and performs, he is a party man, and the New Labour Party is driven and whipped by the likes of Peter Mandelson.
As of now it is 20:20 and there is still over an hour and a half to vote. Should you randomly cross this post before heading out to vote, bear these words in mind.
Digital Economy Bill passed by House of Commons
Nice breakdown of the voting in the Digital Economy Bill from Alix Mortimer :-
Of the 189 Aye votes, I make it 185 Labour and 4 Conservatives. Plus the two tellers were Labour.
Of the 47 Noe votes, I make it 23 Labour rebels, 16 Lib Dems, 5 Conservatives and 3 others (DUP, PC, Ind). Plus the two tellers were Lib Dem
Alix points out that the Tories were largely absent with only 9 voting. The Labour MPs (and what appears to be normal for them) voted like sheep with the very notable exceptions of the likes of Tom Watson and Falkirk’s Eric Joyce.
The flaws in the Bill could probably have been fixed had it gone through the usual process and not the wash up. One cannot help think that the government knew exactly what they were doing with the timing of the Bill and wanted the bill to be this flawed. Lord Mandelson wasn’t likened to Darth Vader in the Commons for nothing.
Of particular interest to me was that Michael Connarty voted in favour of the bill and is therefore one of the party sheep. I suspect he knows very little about the internet and should have deferred to experts like Tom Watson or someone like Eric Joyce who took the time to learn about the problems in the bill after getting many emails, tweets and letters about it. My MP simply ignored me. He was around for the second reading of the bill, but his main contribution to the debate was the bring up spurious points that looked like delaying tactics to me (trying to pick a point of history about enclosures against Tom Watson? fine if the Bill had the time it deserved but not if there is only an hour).
The other point was that only 18 LibDems were there to vote against the Bill (16 noes and 2 tellers ?). Not that it would have made a difference but where were the rest? I’m assuming that this is another consequence of the timing of the Bill, but it would be nice to have it confirmed.
The Liberal Democrat party and the Digital Economy Bill
One of the most important issues to me in this coming election is the attitude of candidates and parties to the Digital Economy Bill proposed by Peter Mandelson which
imposes obligations on internet service providers to reduce online copyright infringement, and allows the Secretary of State to amend copyright legislation to the same end
Quite the illiberal bill as described by Cory Doctorow, who concluded it “consists almost entirely of penalties for people who do things that upset the entertainment industry” You could say it was almost typical of New Labour’s Nanny State legislation, but it was almost breathtaking in the way it could create the power to add any penalty or change it liked without it having to go through parliament.
On the internet, it was clear that most Liberal Democrat members and supporters were against the bill so it came as a big surprise when the Bill went before the Lords and Liberal Democrat peers appeared to make matters worse
This caused the Liberal Democrat Party members go into action to sort matters out, Julian Huppert and Bridget Fox created an emergency motion at the party conference that declared
Conference therefore opposes excessive regulatory attempts to monitor, control and limit internet access or internet publication, whether at local, national, European or global level.
The main worry since then is that the Bill would be passed in the “wash up”[1] and this morning there was growing concern on Twitter (@alixmortimer and @hashbangperl) that the Lib Dem front benchers had gone quiet on it and seemed to be supporting the Bill. The concern was that despite the party members actions, that the had achieved nothing.
Two posts caught my eye, Lib Dems fiddle while the Net burns and Are we the party of empty rhetoric? and the concern was the party couldn’t move fast enough in the world of blogs and Twitter.
Yet the fears appeared to be unfounded and whilst it still doesn’t go as far as it could, Bridget Fox later today announced that
And I’ve now had a response through from Don Foster MP and the DCMS team, the full text of which is on my blog here.
Now it’s perhaps not the response as the Open Rights Group would have written it; but then I’m in favour of LibDem positions being written, well, by Liberal Democrats.
It’s a long text, setting out why our MPs feel parts of the Bill – on areas such as Channel 4 and regional TV – merit support; and why they want to balance internet freedom with support for the creative industries. So there is no commitment to vote against the Bill as a whole. But, unlike Labour and Tory front benches, the LibDem DCMS team do acknowledge that further debate is definitely required. “The controversial parts of the Bill will need to be scrutinised and voted upon by the next parliament before they can be brought into law. Liberal Democrats MPs would not support these sections of the Bill without this process.”
Indeed, I know full well what my Liberal Democrat candidate, Stephen Glenn, thinks of the Digital Economy Bill. It is clearly stated on his blog. I wrote, to my MP Michael Connarty to urge him to give the Bill proper scrutiny and not have it rushed through, but he has yet to respond.
It is very interesting to me (as someone who is new to politics) how the Liberal Democrat party works. In public, taking criticism on board and having party members (non-MPs) help create party policy. It is hard indeed to imagine the Labour party working this way. Whilst Tom Watson MP is clear and certain in opposition to the Bill, he will never have a chance to change Labour’s stand on this bill.
Linlithgow and East Falkirk Candidates
A summary of the candidates confirmed for the Linlithgow and East Falkirk UK Parliament constituency General Election in 2010
Andrea Stephenson (Conservative Party)
Michael Connarty (Labour Party)
Richard Boyle (United Kingdom Independence Party)
Stephen Glenn (Liberal Democrats)
Tam Smith (Scottish National Party)
Conservative candidate, aged 29 and lives and works in the Lothians. Andrea is involved in working with elected representatives and the public as an Operations Co-ordinator in the political field.
Michael Connarty is the sitting MP for Labour with a majority of 11,202. He, according to his website, “believes that speaking up for all of his constituents is the first duty of an MP”. Michael has been an MP since winning the Falkirk East seat in 1992.
Richard Boyle is the UKIP candidate. There is no information about Richard Boyle on the internet (yet?).
Stephen Glenn
Twitter : stephenpglenn
Stephen Glenn was the Liberal Democrat candidate in Linlithgow and East Falkirk in 2005 receiving 7,100 votes. Stephen is a strong local voice and has been standing up for shopkeepers, local transport provision, St. John’s Hospital and environmental concerns. He also runs a very successful blog.
Tam Smith
Twitter : tamsmithsnp
Tam Smith is the SNP candidate and has been a leading member of the Linlithgow SNP party since the 1970s and a West Lothian councillor. If elected, Tam “will be your local champion – putting the interests of Linlithgow & East Falkirk first every time”