This is the fifth diary in which I have looked at the UK general election set for May 6. The first two covered the rules under which the election is being held. The third and fourth looked at the Labour and Conservative manifestoes (platforms), which came out Monday and yesterday respectively. Today, Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats, have issued their manifesto.
Tomorrow, the leaders of the three big parties will hold the first ever TV debate in a British election on ITV1. I am still trying to confirm that you can watch it outside the UK on ITV's website. If so, it will start at 3:30 pm Eastern, 2:30 Central, 1:30 Mountain and 12:30 Pacific. If not, C-Span says it will run the debate Sunday night at 9 pm Eastern.
Before we get to the Liberal Democrats’ policies, some confession of possible bias. While I was a graduate student at the London School of Economics from 1981-1984, I was a member of the Union of Liberal Students. In those days, the Liberal Party had an alliance with the Social Democratic Party, which had split off from Labour on the grounds that Labour was too left wing (Google Militant Tendency and I think you’ll agree that it was). Some 22 years ago, the SDP and the Liberals merged to form the Liberal Democrats.
The great thing about being politically active in London with the Libs was that their MPs kept in close touch with our group. During that time, I met and got to know David Steel (now Lord Steel, the first Convener of a Scottish Parliament in 300 years), Paddy Ashdown (now Lord Ashdown, formerly a member of the Special Boat Service, their Navy SEALs, the only political leader to have been trained to kill – although Mrs. Thatcher learned to do so on the job), and a great many others. In short, this is the party many of my friends not only support, but the banner under which they fight elections.
The LibDems are different because they haven’t had real political power for about 65 years. There was the Lib-Lab pact of the 1970s, but apart from that, Liberals and later LibDems have tended to focus on local issues, Europe, and “fringe” ideas like the environment in the 1960s, nuclear disarmament in the 1960s to today, proportional representation, a written bill of rights and constitution, and so on. What they come up with is often taken over by the Tories or Labour. As one local councilor said to me once, “I’d rather the Liberals get credit for the right idea, but so long as the right bills get passed, I don’t much care who did it.”
OK, enough of that. What will the LibDems fight for this time around? Their manifesto points to a single word: “fairness.”
The Liberal Democrat philosophy is built on a simple ambition: to distribute power fairly among people. From that goal of fairness spring the four priorities which form the backbone of this manifesto. Each will redistribute power of a different kind, be it economic, social, political or financial. Each will change Britain for the better.
Those four changes are spelt out in detail in this manifesto. They will make Britain the fair country people want it to be. They are:
* Fair taxes that put money back in your pocket.
* A fair chance for every child.
* A fair future, creating jobs by making Britain greener.
* A fair deal for you from politicians.
Well, who’s against that? What does it mean in practice?
On the economy, it means not taxing the first £10,000 a person earns (which takes a lot of the poor off the tax rolls) paying for it with a "mansion tax" of 1% on properties worth over £2 million. The party’s opponents say that the income tax shifts can’t be paid for. It means swapping the council tax with local income tax (more progressive). It means setting business tax rates on site values rather than rental values and making small company tax relief automatic. It means capping pay increases at £400 for all public sector workers for two years and maybe longer. The LibDems believe they can save £15 billion by doing things like scrapping national ID cards and retiring the Trident submarine nuclear deterrent. It means flexible working arrangements extending to all employees and name-blind job application forms to reduce sex and race discrimination in hiring.
Looking at schools and family policy, the LibDems want the Independent Educational Standards Authority to oversee and restore confidence in exams (they’ve been tinkering with their college entrance exams for decades, and everyone agrees that the current system stinks on ice). They want to reform school league tables and they want 14 to 19-year-olds to go to college, rather than what we would consider high school, if it suits them better. They want to phase out university tuition fees within six years and abolish fees for final-year students immediately (university education in the UK used to be more or less free, and my friends were given government grants for living expenses). They want a “pupil premium” of £2.5 billionn given to head teachers (principals) in England (Scotland has a difference educational system), aimed at disadvantaged children; the average primary school class size could drop to 20 pupils. The LibDems also support shared parental leave from work (extended to 18 months over time), the right for fathers to attend ante-natal appointments, and the right for grandparents to request flexible working hours.
On health, the LibDems’ policies apply only to England as Scottish Healtcare is run from Edinburgh. First, they want to cut size of the Department of Health in half, by abolishing or cutting budgets of quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations, meant to be teams of technical experts to solve policy problems, but in fact, are jobs for political pals) and dropping Strategic Health Authorities. They also want to limit the pay of top NHS managers to below what the prime minister gets. The LibDems promise to drop Labour's personal care at home and divert cash to give one week's respite for one million carers, and they appear to oppose the Tories’ private insurance scheme for elderly care. They will link payments to health boards and GPs more directly to illness prevention measures. Dementia research gets a boost with more counseling for people with mental health problems. Finally, they want to integrate health and social care, so people can stay in their own homes longer rather having hospital or residential care and will do so by limiting bureaucracy.
The big set of issues for the Liberal Democrats is political reform. Here’s a party that won 22.1% of the vote in the 2005 election and got 62 seats (less than 10%), and historically that was the fairest apportionment. The LibDems want more proportional representation replacing the first-past-the-post system (whoever gets the most votes gets the seat, even if that isn’t a majority) with the single transferable vote. In addition, they want to cut the number of MPs by 150 (compared to the Tories’ 10%, about 60 seat cut), introduce fixed-term parliaments, and replace the House of Lords with a smaller, fully-elected upper house. The LibDems want to lower the voting age to 16, let voters recall MPs who break rules, and require all MPs, Lords and candidates for those bodies to pay UK tax (a Tory donor has been a tax exile for years despite promising to become a UK resident for tax purposes – Lord Ashcroft). They want to give more power to the Scottish Parliament and turn the Welsh Assembly into a true parliament, with greater powers to pass laws. The single most important thing in this area is to establish a written constitution for the UK.
Other plans and proposals are to pay the armed forces more, bringing the level of starting salaries equal to those of the emergency services; invest £400 million in refurbishing shipyards to manufacture offshore wind turbines; cut rail fares, force train operators to ensure regulated fares fall behind inflation by 1% per year and reopen regional rail lines (paid for by cutting roads budget). The party promises: to require new coal-fired power stations to be accompanied by the highest possible level of carbon capture and storage; to reject new generation of nuclear power; to cancel plans for a third runway at Heathrow and other airport expansion in south-east England; to end hidden charges in airline pricing; and to split up the Royal Mail and Post Office, keeping latter in public ownership while selling off 49% of Royal Mail, dividing rest between government and employee trust.
Probably won’t be a diary tomorrow, as I have a job and it gets in the way of this sort of thing. Friday, I will try to handle the debate – over the week-end if life otherwise intrudes.