miss_s_b: Continual Lib Dem bashing by certain people is beginning to get me down.

miss_s_b (

miss_s_b) wrote,
@ 2011-04-21 02:23 pm UTC

Current mood:	irritated
Entry tags:	libdemmery

Continual Lib Dem bashing by certain people is beginning to get me down.

NB: this post is in response to a person I consider a friend. I hope I can still say that after she's read it...

I can understand people who hate the Tories. I'm from Yorkshire. I can understand the disquiet of lots of members of my party at being in coalition with the Tories; I share it. What I don't understand is what people who claim not to be Labour supporters hope to achieve by continually bashing the Lib Dems when what they are actually objecting to is Conservative party policy which we are actively trying to restrain. What do they hope to achieve by attacking the people who are doing what they want done?

I can understand why Labour supporters are doing it: they are conferring an electoral advantage onto the Labour party by denigrating the option their supporters are likely to choose of the two governing parties. The fact that it's all tribalist nonsense, and when you dig beneath rhetoric you still couldn't slip a rizla between what the reds and blues would actually do in sole power is neither here nor there.

I can understand why some segments of the mainstream media are doing it: the red-blue pendulum suits them very well indeed.

What I don't get is people who claim not to support Labour yet who still trumpet the Labour party's lines; or who claim to be independent journalists but who parrot the memes of the mainstream media.

What would they have us do?

Leave the coalition? 6 months of Tory minority government, followed by an election which the Tories would win outright*? that would be better, would it, for a person who claims to detest the Tories?

Assert ourselves more? Well, I hate to break this to you people, but we're outnumbered 6 to 1. I genuinely think that in terms of actual legislation, we're punching a long way above our weight in government.

The thing that annoys me more than anything else is the continual trotting out of the line that the Lib Dems have betrayed their voters. Exactly how have we betrayed our voters? By doing our level best to get Lib Dem policy enacted into legislation? By preventing the Tories from riding roughshod over as many things as humanly possible? Perhaps it's by getting Lynne Featherstone into a position where equalities legislation is being meaningfully enacted, or by having Julian Huppert on the Home Affairs select committee, making sure that a sensible evidence-based approach to things is actually represented? Or is it, and I suspect this is closer to the truth, that we have betrayed our voters by actually getting somewhere, when a certain segment of our voters would prefer us to just sit on the sidelines and carp, rather than doing something useful?

I'm with Andrew on this one: it would have been a betrayal of our voters to let the Tories govern alone when we had the opportunity to stop that from happening. And we didn't do it.

By all means insult the party's media handling; it's been rubbish, and I've said so myself. By all means tell us that our priorities need to change; I've said this myself too. But when you start throwing round emotive words like betrayal, and "yellow Tories" and all the other gutter sniping we're getting used to now, just be aware that we're going to bristle.

* anyone who doubts this is naive in the extreme: not only are the Tories the only ones with any money left to fight an election, but all they would have to say is "do you really want this incompetent shower back in?" and "they criticise our policies: let them tell us what they would do differently" to scupper Labour. And if an election were held tomorrow, under FPTP, Labour would be the only other party in contention.

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matgb
2011-04-22 03:02 pm UTC (link)

Actually, I agree with you re the 2007 decision--I was working in Cowley St at the time, when Ming was leader, and it became apparent that the reason was solely personal antipathy to Salmond, who is considered by many non-SNP supporters involved in politics to be less trustworthy than anyone else at all.

But that doesn't change that the politics were stupid, for a party committed to democratic constitutional reform to not allow a simple yes/no referendum on an issue they knew the answer to already is daft, it would've killed the SNP to lose that vote but they wouldn't do it due to antipathy to Salmond. Fortunately, both leaders involved are gone now.

Re the national stuff--with you on Fees, the pledge was a mistake in hindsite (my candidate signed it with my support, hey, I'm human too), as what actually happened was negotiating the lowest possible fee increase politically.

However...

I think a bad mistake was made by not insisting on getting at least one big-ticket concession entirely the Lib Dems' way.

They didn't get one. They got 4.

By the terms of the manifesto, of the campaign material, of what Clegg was pushing for throughout the campaign, they got all 4 big policy issues they wanted.

The problem is...

They should have held out for either student funding or genuine PR, and refused to go into coalition without at least one of them

Student funding was never going to be on the table, from either main party, both had committed to much higher fee increases (the Browne review terms of reference were a "cross party" stithc up between them, both would've implemented it in full). Between them, they got over 70% of the vote.

You don't get what you vote for, you get what the majority voted for, and if 70%+ have voted one way (even if pollss say they want something else), trying to force it through would a) be horribly undemocratic and b) cost far too much political capital better spent on other things.

We're getting genuine PR for the HoL (or whatever it's to be called), and the best offer on the table,f rom either party, was AV for the commons.

Plus, there's no way you could get genuine PR in a referendum with the fear of coalition and "instability" and similar.

If you believe in consensus politics, as I do, then you need to prove it can work.

Holding out for two issues, one of which wasn't a key pledge, the other would've been painted as entirely for partisan advantage, would've been a terrible, disastrous mistake, refusal to go into coalition with the only viable partner would've destroyed the idea of consensus politics, relegated the party to being "just" protest votes and made the whole thing pointless.

We'd have lost a lot more support by staying out than going in. Worse, we'd have lost the whole point of existing.

The problem is that the party campaigned on key policy pledges, and got all 4 of them. Most individual candidates courted votes by making a separate, different pledge that wasn't a key issue.

But a lot of people have different priorities, so regardless of what was negotiated, some will be unhappy because of different priorities.

I wrote a lot of election literature during the campaign last year, including leaflets for Jennie in her council campaign and for our Parliamentary candidate, my branch covers a third of a constituency. I know what we were actively campaigning on and what our key big ticket issues were.

We got them. All of them. Some are being phased in, some are subject to referendum, but we got them.

We're also getting over 50% of the manifesto, including a policy Jennie and I personally proposed and helped write. If we'd tried to hold out for your, personal, preferred big tickets, we'd a) been unlikely tog et a coalition ergo not got anything at all and b) even if coalition had happened, they'd have been such big concessions the rest of what the Govt was doing would be a lot more Tory.

They failed to compromise in Scotland on a principle that was worthless, and compromised in London when there were principles worth sticking to.

Arguably, Clegg learnt from the failure in Scotland. And he and Alexander knew that what you say was "worth sticking to" was 100% not politically viable given the way the numbers had stacked up. If they'd got 28%+ and 100+ MPs, yes, worht fighting for, lots more leverage, lots more legitimacy.

But not enough people voted for those principles. Not enough leverage. Not enough political capital.

I, genuinely, think confidence and supply or issue-by-issue would've led to a repeat of '74, and Cameron would almost certainly have won a 2nd election, the mountain to climb had become a foothill, and with the levers of power he could've spent 6 months talking about how disastrously Lsbour had left things.

Even if that wasn't inevitaqble, it was far too big a risk.

This proves coalition is viable, that it's not unstable, that it can be done. That's the biggest single change needed for British politics, ever.

That'd be worth it even if we weren't getting 50%+ plus, all four key pledges, PR for the Lords, referendum on AV, etc etc etc.

Instead we get all of it.

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