Chris Bowers for Wealden

THE ENVIRONMENT SHOULD BE THE MEETING GROUND OF TORIES AND LIB DEMS

2011-12-18T06:59:00.001-08:00

Oh dear, we’re back to the 80s. And I don’t mean Thatcherism.

In his autumn statement, George Osborne announced a number of measures that betrayed a clear line of thinking: the environment is a luxury issue that’s all well and good but mustn’t be allowed to get in the way of the interests of business. Such as giving energy-intensive industries £250 million to offset carbon costs, and softening EU nature protection laws.

This was very much the line of thinking that made Labour such a slow convert to ‘green’ issues. As the party that had grown up representing the industrial proletariat, it took the view that the environment was a middle class conscience issue that was fine up to a point, but there were more important things to worry about, like the wages and living conditions of workers. This was Labour’s attitude throughout the 1980s, and only changed when the party realised it was alienating environmentally motivated voters.

In the intervening two decades, all the scientific evidence has made it abundantly clear that what is not good for the environment is not good for the economy. The clearest piece of evidence was Nicholas Stern’s report in 2006 that bluntly stated that failure to take the environment seriously would strangle the economy, but there’s plenty of other evidence that makes the same point.

Anyone with a positive mindset would see this as a challenge. The economy isn’t doomed, but it will be if we don’t embrace the environmental opportunities in it. This should be the meeting ground of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats – the environmental awareness of the Lib Dems married up to the business sense of the Tories. It could genuinely be the ‘greenest’ British government ever.

But instead we’re going the wrong way. Business leaders with vested interests (you may wish to call them ‘fat cats’; I’m trying not to make it unnecessary personal) lobby the government for relaxations from environmental rules. In many cases, these business leaders have seen the writing on the wall for years but have decided their short-term profits are more important than investing in environmental research and development, so now find themselves lagging behind and begging for permission to go on polluting.

The car industry is a classic example of this, but by no means the only one.

In 1995, the European Commission said it wanted to set a maximum carbon dioxide emissions limit for the average new car. Very sensible. Its proposal was for 120 grams of CO2 per kilometre by 2005. The car industry screamed that this was entirely unrealistic and unfair. So in 1998 the Commission caved in and allowed a ‘voluntary agreement’ whereby the average new car sold by 2008 would emit no more than 140 g/km.

Guess what? Yup, the car industry as a whole failed to meet its target, despite the fact that some car makers (Fiat, Renault, Peugeot-Citroën) had hit the 120 g/km target. In other words, it could be done! Annoyed that the car industry had asked to be trusted and then failed to deliver, the Commission proposed a mandatory emissions limit of 120 g/km by 2012. At first the automotive industry just said no-one was going to boss it around and pretended nothing would happen, but on this occasion, the politicians did stand up for a binding limit. Once again it was heavily watered down by automotive lobbying, so the new mark is a rather pathetic 130 g/km by 2015, but at least a binding limit now exists.

And guess what? Emissions from new cars are coming down. Why? Not just because they have to, but because Europe’s car makers know that if they don’t reduce their emissions, they’ll find their cars won’t be sellable outside the EU as well as inside. With China and California both introducing emissions limits for new vehicles, any car maker that doesn’t embrace environmental technology will be disadvantaged in the global market place.

Unfortunately, today's owners of second-hand cars are paying excessive fuel and road tax bills, because the car makers were too slow to embrace lower fuel consumption 15 years ago.

This is just one example, but one of many in which industry screams ‘You’ll be putting masses of people out of work’, and then when the politicians stand firm, it becomes clear industry has been crying wolf. It’s happening now with the EU’s decision to subject air transport to emissions trading – you’d think it was limiting airlines to one plane each by the hysterical screaming coming from the aviation industry, when in reality this will add just a few cents to the price of the average flight.

This is why George Osborne should be standing up for environmental safeguards, not capitulating to industry's opposition to them. Even in a recession. In fact especially in a recession. The old saying ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ is especially applicable in a recession, so anything that stimulates reducing polluting and climate-changing emissions is to be welcomed. But how are we going to have a climate of incentives if the Chancellor bails out industries that have refused to see the writing on the wall for two decades?

This is the kind of issue on which the coalition could crack. With the Greens threatening traditional Lib Dem support, the Lib Dems know they have to use their time in government to establish some meaningful environmental achievements, indeed many Lib Dems will insist on that through conviction rather than electoral advantage. It’s something the Conservatives should be able to deliver without any concessions in their own ideology, as a ‘green’ economy will be good for business. It’s a test of whether the Tories really are interested in helping business in the long term or merely helping today’s big industry protect what it has.

IT MAY BE A BIT BORING, BUT IT’S STILL A LOCAL SCANDAL

2011-10-31T08:25:00.000-07:00

I’ve always taken the view that to talk or blog about councillors’ allowances is a real turnoff that’s never going to get people particularly interested. But before you drop off, can I have a couple of minutes of your time to highlight a local development that is actually worth stifling the yawns for?

How would you feel if you discovered that some of your taxes were going to pay people whose jobs weren’t defined? People who might do some work, but you don’t know what they’re doing, or whether they’ve done what they’re supposed to because no-one has set out what it is they’re supposed to be doing?

I don’t want to get too anal about this, and at times you need to give people a certain freedom to act as they see fit within defined limits. But a local Conservative-controlled district council has taken to paying three of its councillors £3,311 per year of taxpayers’ money without saying what it is they’re supposed to be doing. That’s not only wrong, but violates the principle that local government should be transparent and accountable.

Not a lot of people know this, but councillors at district and county level get an annual allowance for their work. It’s in recognition of the fact that they have to do some council work and attend certain meetings during working hours, and therefore may have to forfeit some income to carry out their duties as a councillor. The rate on Lewes District Council is just under £3000 a year, and it’s around £1000 more on Wealden District Council.

Then there are Special Responsibility Allowances. These are given to councillors who take on specific jobs for which there are genuine responsibilities. I have no issue with this in principle – many of these tasks amount to a full-time job, and if you want talented people running your council, you can’t pay peanuts.

But you have to define what special responsibilities you’re paying councillors for. And Lewes District Council currently has three ‘Lead Councillors without portfolio’ who are paid £3,311. This is a scandal.

Guidance from central government and commonly accepted practice states that no councillor should receive remuneration beyond the basic councillor’s allowance for any work that is not clearly defined and can be monitored by the public. So paying money to a councillor without defined responsibilities breaches the principle of transparency of council work.

That’s why I have called on Lewes District Council to allow ‘Lead Councillors without portfolio’ to have the right to sit and vote on the council’s ‘cabinet’, but they should not receive any Special Responsibility Allowance. They could receive a fixed sum for a one-off task, so that the council can make use of some specialist skills from among the pool of councillors, but any such task must be defined so we can know whether the councillor has done the work or not.

Anything less is just a cronyist approach to local government that we should not tolerate.

SCHADENFREUDE AT EUROPEAN WOES IS TOTALLY MISPLACED

2011-08-06T08:33:00.000-07:00

‘Suddenly, the air was thick with the sound of chickens coming home to roost!’ Not my line, I’m afraid, it’s Alan Bennett’s. It comes from his clever if slightly disjointed play ‘Habeas Corpus’. It’s one I’ve quoted a lot over the years, and I’ve been aware of it this past week.

There is a smile on the faces of the Eurosceptics. They believe the chickens are coming home to roost on all things European. The woes of the eurozone have accompanied news that one of the most popular e-petitions on the Downing Street website was one calling for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. And we now even have one of Labour’s most pro-European MPs saying the EU’s institutions are losing credibility.

I wish to issue a very loud call for caution. There are lots of shades of opinion on the myriad issues that carry the ‘euro-’ prefix, including many within the Liberal Democrats. But anyone who wishes the demise of all things European either hasn’t thought things through or is living in cloud cuckoo land.

For a start, there are several euro-issues. There’s the EU, the Council of Europe, the continent of Europe, and the euro currency. All these get treated with the same ‘euro-’ prefix but they are often totally different beasts. Even knowledgeable journalists frequently get the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights mixed up. (One is the EU’s court, the other is the Council of Europe’s – but how many know which is which?)

I have always seen myself on the Eurosceptic wing of the Lib Dems, but even that needs some qualification. As someone who has lived in Germany and Switzerland and thus speaks fluent German and nearly fluent French (and these days a smattering of Spanish), I am totally transnational in my outlook.

But I have for many years been reluctant to concede more powers to the EU, because I feel its institutions are too weak to withstand the periodic pounding they’re subjected to from lobbying by whichever industry is flavour of the month. I also believe in decentralisation, so no more decisions should be taken at transnational level than absolutely necessary.

I have also been uncomfortable with the idea of Britain joining the euro, even when the economics made the case plausible (about 10 years ago – it’s hard to imagine now, I know). I was never comfortable with the idea that one currency can fit both the affluence of Germany and the relative poverty of Greece, to say nothing of the different work ethics in those two countries. Britain being outside the euro has allowed the Bank of England more freedom in setting interest rates.

But does this make me an EU-sceptic? Heavens no! And am I rejoicing at the euro’s turmoil? Of course not. Britain may be outside the euro, but our economy is heavily dependent on trade with mainland Europe, so if the euro suffers, so do we. That’s why the Schadenfreude at the euro’s woes is totally misplaced.

And at one level the EU has been a phenomenal success, so successful that we have even forgotten – or are too young to have known – the problem it solved. The current EU was conceived in the 1950s to ensure that powerhouse economies like France and Germany never had the incentive to go to war again. War in western Europe is now inconceivable. We all got a bit of a shock in the 1990s when Yugoslavia descended into bloody civil war, but one ex-Yugoslav state, Slovenia, is now an EU member, and the other five are queuing up to join.

We see enough television programmes and films, and read enough Sebastian Faulks and Andrea Levy novels, to understand what trauma war can bring. The EU has effectively eradicated the likelihood of war in Europe. For that we should be truly grateful – and utterly contemptuous about the argument that Britain should withdraw from the EU.

WHEN WILL WE REALISE THAT THE PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER TO STOP DISREPUTABLE JOURNALISM?

2011-07-08T05:00:00.000-07:00

I never thought I’d see myself writing this, but the decision to close the ‘News of the World’ is truly terrible.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no liking for the NoW, which has clearly engaged in some disreputable and disgusting activity. But for it to disappear from the landscape is a bit like a rapist and murderer being caught red-handed and then fleeing the country before he comes to trial. No, actually it’s worse than that.

One of the major paradoxes about British society is people’s unwillingness to see just how much power they have over newspapers. If enough people don’t buy them, the newspapers don’t sell and can’t function. We understand our power when it comes to certain consumer boycotts but can’t bring ourselves as a society (I personally don’t buy ‘tabloid’ newspapers) to boycott newspapers.

When Princess Diana was killed in Paris in 1997, the initial reaction was that the paparazzi had hounded her to her death. After a couple of weeks it became clear that this was a somewhat simplistic interpretation of events, yet for the first week or so, that was the perceived wisdom.

So did sales of the newspapers that paid for the paparazzi’s pictures go down? No – they actually went up! We moaned about the malign influence of those beasts in the press, yet we kept feeding them.

One of the most distasteful aspects of the NoW hacking scandal is that it only blew up this week. This issue has been going on for several months, but somehow the victims never registered strongly enough with us for it to become a major story. It’s like we accept that a Premiership footballer or a publicity agent or an actress can have their phones hacked, but once the parents of a murdered schoolgirl or 7/7 victims or soldiers killed in Afghanistan have theirs hacked, then it becomes a scandal, one that brings down a 168-year-old newspaper.

Well, no. Apart from police activity when there is good reason to suspect criminal activity, phone hacking is both illegal and morally wrong, whether it’s a disreputable celebrity or parasitic sportsman whose phone is hacked, or the grieving parents in an awful human tragedy. The NoW scandal was every bit as bad six months ago as it was this past week.

So why has it taken this long to come to crisis? Simple – because people still want to pay a few pence for the news that comes out of phone hacking. The NoW’s sales should have been falling all year, as people refuse to fund the tactics used by the paper to get its stories. But sales have been remarkably solid.

The reason the NoW’s demise is truly terrible is that I suspect this week would have been the first time there would have been something of a consumer boycott. It would have given the whole country a chance to see readers refusing to buy a specific newspaper, and that would perhaps have set a precedent that could be followed.

Whether that was in the back of Rupert and James Murdoch’s mind when they took the decision to close the NoW I have no idea. There are so many elements to this fast-moving story that it’s impossible to keep up. But it’s clear that if a new Sunday emerges from the Murdoch stable to replace the NoW, it will be much harder to associate it with the practices of the departed predecessor.

Nonetheless, in a world where we feel so powerless, this week’s events serve to show that we as a broad mass of the population could have nipped the phone hacking scandal in the bud, simply by refusing to buy papers whose methods of finding stories are clearly below the belt.

IT’S NOT JUST THE LIB DEMS WHO ARE SHORT-CHANGED BY THE VOTING SYSTEM BUT THE WHOLE COUNTRY!

2011-04-25T12:35:00.000-07:00

Something very strange is happening with the referendum campaign, which perhaps explains some of the nastiness and in-fighting that’s currently going on.

We have a situation where one side ought to be streets ahead, but it’s neck-and-neck. When this happens in sport, it’s very exciting, but when it comes to the once-in-a-generation (if not a lifetime) chance to change the voting system, there’s ample scope for despair.

As a sports journalist, I rather enjoy watching an inferior player or team fighting against much more gifted opposition through determination and clever tactics. It’s part of the romance of sport. But I get absolutely no satisfaction out of the way the No campaign is cynically trying to defend the indefensible interests of yesterday’s politicians.

The latest opinion polls say the No campaign is slightly ahead of the Yes campaign. The number of Don’t Knows is high enough for the result to be still very much in the balance, but the fact that it is in the balance is the shock for me. The Yes campaign ought by rights to be absolutely home and dry by now, yet it has been fighting a rearguard action all the way, and is by no means guaranteed victory.

Let’s get back to basics. Why do we vote? Answer: to have people making decisions on our behalf who reflect our general view of how we should be governed. Therefore, our representatives have to be in rough proportion to the public’s general views.

Do our representatives need to be 100% proportional? Answer: not absolutely 100%, because a secondary requirement of representation of the people is that it has to provide viable government. So, for example, you have the system in Germany which is proportional, except that any party getting less than five per cent of the overall vote has no representation, so you cut out all the tiny parties that can make governing such a mess. But it mustn’t get too out of kilter.

And our system is badly out of kilter. When Margaret Thatcher got her biggest majority (144 seats) in 1983, she did it on less than 44 per cent of the votes. When Tony Blair was elected for a third term with a majority of 66 in 2005, he got less than 36 per cent of the votes. Is that right? It’s not just the Lib Dems who are short-changed by the current system. It happens to take an average of 120,000 voters to elect a Lib Dem MP, as opposed to 35,000 for the Conservatives and 33,000 for Labour, but don’t think we’re the main ones who are disadvantaged – the whole country is!

Does the present ‘First past the post’ or the proposed ‘Alternative Vote’ provide the desired system? Answer: no. The right system for a modern democracy would be proportional, and neither is that. But experience has taught us to favour the evolutionary over the revolutionary, and we have got rather attached to our constituency-based way of electing MPs, so the AV system being proposed is a constituency-based step that is a little more proportional. It won’t make a massive difference, but it’s the right evolution.

I pride myself on being a bridge-builder, on seeing the other person’s point of view, even if I disagree with it. But I cannot find a single convincing argument for the current ‘First past the post’ system. The No lot said they would fight a positive campaign highlighting the virtues of FPTP. Positive? – my foot! All they’ve done is denigrate others, including the audacious step of accusing Nick Clegg (who appears in all the No literature – is that positive?) of breaking his promises, when what he did was compromise a Lib Dem pledge to form a coalition government. It’s breathtaking, yet perhaps not surprising when there’s nothing to defend FPTP with.

This is why you have to take your hat off – in a very perverse way – to the No campaign, for making it still a contest. This should be a 65:35 win for the Yes campaign at the very least, yet the No lobby seems to be slightly ahead. I sit here thinking ‘Surely the British people cannot fall for this’ – yet I fear they might.

The No campaign has coined a lot of sporting metaphors in recent weeks, I guess because ‘first past the post’ comes from sport. Yet most sport is more akin to AV than FPTP. An Olympic final follows heats, in which the weakest drop out, leaving the strongest in the final round. Even television programmes like The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing work on AV – if they didn’t, the winner would be chosen in the first programme with about 15-20% of the vote. And they say the British people can’t understand AV!

The best sporting analogy for me comes from last year’s football world cup final between Spain and the Netherlands. Spain had all the talent, and tried to play beautiful football, while the Dutch knew their only route to victory was in a cynical, physical approach that hacked down Spain’s gifted players. Justice just about prevailed with Spain getting a winning goal six minutes from the end, but it was excruciating to watch.

I only hope the Yes campaign can get a winning goal six minutes from the end. Anything else and you really would have to say people have a death wish when it comes to choosing their politicians.

A LITTLE MATURITY NEEDED – NOT HYSTERICAL INDIGNATION

2011-02-13T08:26:00.000-08:00

Journalists, eh! We’ve all had a moan at the media. We love them, we hate them, we love to hate them. I’m the same, and I am a journalist.

As a result of our love-hate relationship with the fourth estate, I’ve become moderately relaxed about things that get written in the papers, but something published the day after the Commons debate on whether prisoners should get the vote really got my blood pressure up.

It was the lead story in the Daily Express. Under the headline ‘Britain in the EU: this must be the end’, the paper launched into a tirade against the European Union, saying the vote by MPs against giving voting rights to those in prison should be a launch pad for Britain leaving the EU.

What utter ignorance! There is a fundamental flaw at the heart of that analysis that beggars belief.

The ruling that said Britain should allow at least some prisoners the right to vote came not from the EU but from the European Court of Human Rights. This is a Strasbourg-based court that monitors compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights. The EU does have a judicial arm, but it’s the European Court of Justice and it’s in Luxembourg (the EU’s parliament is in Strasbourg).

In other words, it’s a totally different court that has nothing to do with the EU. What the Daily Express has done is as fatuous as suggesting that British Gas and British Airways are the same thing because they both begin with ‘British’ and they’re both based in London!

Of course, the Express journalists and editors almost certainly knew this. They will have taken a simple decision: we don’t like the EU, we can whip up a little hatred with the ECHR ruling, so why let the facts get in the way of a good story? It’s a disgraceful way to supposedly inform people, and the Express doesn’t deserve to be called a ‘newspaper’.

I personally don’t think the issue of prisoners getting the vote is a big one. I see no signs that prisoners are pining for the right to vote, and there are bigger problems to be addressed in the realm of penal reform. But there is a bigger issue here.

That is that we cannot pick and choose which parts of human rights we support for others and which we reject for ourselves. Britain signed the Convention as a way of showing it wanted respect for basic human rights the world over. Of course the biggest concerns are those in developing countries, where human rights are frequently violated. But if we say we don’t like the ECHR telling us that our laws contravene basic human rights, what right do we have to lecture even the worst tin-pot dictators on improving their human rights records?

It’s not as if the ECHR has told us what we have to do. It has just said the situation in which anyone behind bars forfeits the right to vote is not consistent with the human rights Convention. That means it's still up to us to decide what we want to do. I would like to see some wording of a revised Act that allows those prisoners to vote who are clearly candidates for rehabilitation, as distinct from those who are behind bars to protect society from them.

How that is done must be left to the lawyers. But we need to be mature about this and actively look for a civilised rewording of our own laws – not get all indignant and seek scapegoats in an institution that has nothing at all to do with this particular issue.

CAN THE LIBERAL-MINDED FIND A LITTLE GOODWILL THIS CHRISTMAS?

2010-12-19T12:04:00.000-08:00

‘We don’t do God’ Alistair Campbell famously quipped about New Labour’s approach to anything religious. It was a very pragmatic stance, given that Britain is largely a secular society these days, albeit with a still established Church of England. And it also helped keep Tony Blair’s somewhat messianic Christian views in check.

But what does the liberal-minded member of society who wishes to respect both believers and non-believers do about Christmas? There are some who don’t even want the term ‘Christmas’ to be used. I disagree – to me it’s a perfectly legitimate term, whether you choose to celebrate Christmas in a Christian or non-Christian way. But it does raise some interesting ethical questions.

For many who don’t regularly go to church but who find comfort in attending a church service at Christmas, what does ‘peace on earth and goodwill to all men’ actually mean? Is it just a ritualistic phrase that gets forgotten the moment one comes out of the church? Or does it indicate a willingness to be a bit more charitable towards fellow human beings?

I found myself wondering this in the light of the particularly vitriolic things people have been saying about the Liberal Democrats over recent weeks. There is a real anger in some of the comments that have been made – some of them by very eloquent and intelligent people – that it has made me wonder whether we have missed something.

I do think that the Lib Dems have picked up a lot of support over the years because we haven’t been in power nationally, so have never had to make ourselves unpopular with difficult decisions. Now we’re getting our hands dirty, people find it easy to see us as no different to the other two parties, and having hoped we were different, they get extra angry.

In addition, we have come to government at a time when some really heart-breaking decisions are necessary. To carry these through, often in the face of some serious personal abuse, requires a resilience that sometimes makes people think we don’t care. When administering some horrible medicine to a child, we accept the old adage ‘you have to be cruel to be kind’, yet we accept it less when applied to the national economy. The result is that those associated with power become the scapegoats.

Yet Liberal Democrats haven’t changed just because the party is in a coalition government. We still believe in promoting a fairer society, however many difficult cuts in finances we have had to sign up to. We still believe in looking after the weakest, in promoting an absence of discrimination, and working towards forms of governance that are rooted in cooperation rather than benign despotism.

As one of the many members of society who is uncomfortable with traditional religion but who thinks deeply about various aspects of spirituality, I find myself hoping people will invoke the spirit of Christmas to become a little more charitable towards a form of government that might yet prove to be the best thing for this country, especially at this time. I wish the coalition we Liberals have waited so long for had happened at a less daunting time economically, but you have to deal with what is, not what you’d have liked best.

That’s why I ask people who have been well disposed towards the Lib Dems, but who find their faith in us seriously challenged at present, to offer us a little goodwill this Christmas. It’s a steep learning curve for all of us, with some nasty decisions along the way. It may all go haywire, but even if it does, I hope people will recognise the good intent behind the political machinations. And if those with doubts are willing to hang with us for a while, there may be something at the end of the rainbow that’s worth a lot more than a fictitious pot of gold.

Do have a very happy Christmas, however you choose to celebrate it!

TUITION FEES – WE SIMPLY COULD NOT CONTINUE LABOUR’S POLICY OF DOING MORE FOR RICHER PEOPLE AND LESS FOR POORER PEOPLE

2010-12-12T14:26:00.000-08:00

Few people like to criticise their own profession, so it goes against the grain for me – as a journalist – to conclude that the media has behaved pretty despicably over its reporting of the tuition fees issue. But I feel no other conclusion is possible.

OK, so we as a political party haven’t covered ourselves in glory over this one either, but the blatant misinformation emanating from even some of the more respected political reporters doesn’t reflect well on them.

Too many have delighted in talking about the Lib Dems’ ‘U-turn’ (or ‘dramatic U-turn’ or ‘spectacular U-turn’ – why be happy with a slight misrepresentation when a melodramatic one will do?). A U-turn is when you change your mind, which to me isn’t a crime, but that’s beside the point because it’s not the case here – this is a concession to enable a coalition to be formed, but of course that doesn’t make for such a good story.

It’s all part of a vicious learning curve for us Lib Dems, who have enjoyed – in the words of our ex-cabinet minister David Laws – ‘the joys of easy opposition’ for too long. We’ve been in power at council level, much of it in coalition with Labour and the Conservatives, but now we’re in power (jointly) at national level, and taking all the flak for it.

The result is that people who voted Lib Dem at the general election because of our tuition fees stance feel betrayed by us, when actually they have achieved something with their vote.

Both Labour and the Tories went into the election advocating a fee-based university funding model, while we fought for the principle of no tuition fees for first degrees. Realistically, we were always going to have to compromise on that with just 23% of the vote, but we have used what leverage we got from our voters to argue for university education to remain free at the point of learning, and for the payback mechanism to kick in only at a graduate's salary of £21,000. That’s a major concession that wouldn’t have happened if the Conservatives (or Labour for that matter) had been governing on their own.

But that has barely been reported, with the result that children from lower-income families could be scared off from going to university. Don’t blame us for that – blame the media for a scare campaign perpetrated because they were happier taking cheap shots at the coalition than in reporting the issue accurately.

But by far the biggest omission from the media reporting is one that goes to the heart of why we are a progressive party.

When money is tight, you have to decide where to spend it and where not to. The same government department that deals with higher (university) education deals with further education, and there are a lot more of our youngsters who need help at 16 than at 18. Many who leave school at 16 have a reading age of 11, so further education is something of a safety net for them. The further education sector also embraces a lot more children from lower income families than the higher education sector.

So, after 13 years of watching the party that supposedly represents the least affluent presiding over the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, we now have a Liberal Democrat business secretary, Vince Cable, who has decided to put what little money he has for post-16 education into those who, by and large, need it more, and to ask those who, by and large, need it less to pay something back when they’re earning enough to do so.

Yet we’re taking stick for this, not just because of the media, but because the student body is eloquent and loud enough to make its case more powerfully than those who stand to benefit from further education at age 16. But that doesn’t mean what we’re doing is wrong.

I don’t like the package of higher education funding that was agreed in the fractious Commons vote, even though I’d have voted for it if I’d been an MP. I hate the way higher education is going to be ‘marketised’. But faced with the choices, I think the Lib Dems have pushed the government in a socially progressive direction, which is what our role in government should be.

THIS IS NOT A BETRAYAL – IT IS A REWARD FOR STUDENTS WHO VOTED LIB DEM

2010-11-15T02:29:00.001-08:00

You may have difficulty believing this, but I was actually pleased to see the students demonstrating on the streets of London. No, really. I wish they had been demonstrating about something slightly more altruistic, but it was encouraging to see them.

Call me a 1970s romantic, but to me the student generation needs to be on the streets more often. When I was at university, there were demonstrations every month, some of them quite small, but some massive – I was among 300,000 who turned out in Bonn in October 1981 to protest against the threat of nuclear missiles, and a similar number turned out in London two weeks later.

I said in the general election campaign that we must stop being a society that only values adults of working age. We dismiss the fresh ideas of children as much as writing off the wisdom of the grey-haired generation. And the student generation has a role to play in challenging the orthodoxy of the establishment – you can’t take everything the students say at face value, but if students aren’t challenging those with mortgages and those in power, who is going to? It’s a measure of a vibrant society.

My problem with the recent demonstrations is not just the violence (that cannot be condoned, however much it generates news coverage), but the failure of the protesters to see the big picture. They are taking refuge in saying the Lib Dems have sold out on higher education, that they feel betrayed to have voted for us and now face higher tuition fees, and there is now an official NUS campaign aimed at ousting certain Lib Dem MPs.

When Lib Dem MPs vote for the package of measures that will see tuition fees remain in operation and at a potentially higher level than they are now, this will not be a betrayal. To see it as such is to fundamentally misunderstand coalition government.

Yes, the Lib Dems campaigned for the abolition of tuition fees for first degrees, to be brought in over six years. We did so because we believe strongly in the need for society to support a certain amount of learning beyond the age of 18. The problem was that we got 23% of the votes, so we couldn’t form a government.

Fortunately, neither of the other two parties – who said nothing about abolishing tuition fees – could form a government on their own. So we have gone into coalition with a party that got 37% of the votes. It wants to keep tuition fees and would have done so big-time if it had been in government on its own (as would Labour).

What we did was negotiate to take the edges off the package. Bolstered by the fact that lots of students voted for us, we secured three important concessions: a cap on tuition fees that was not recommended in Lord Browne’s report, a payback scheme that isn’t just a tax but goes to the university that did the student’s teaching, and a starting threshold for that payback scheme of £21,000 a year.

That is the reward for all those students who voted Lib Dem because of our promise to abolish tuition fees. With 23% of the votes, that’s quite an achievement, and it wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t in government.

The waters have been slightly muddied by the fact that most Lib Dem candidates, me included, signed the NUS pledge saying we wouldn’t vote for tuition fees. The fact that those elected to parliament will now vote for the package that includes tuition fees has fuelled the ‘spectacular U-turn’ hyperbole of some journalists. But this isn’t fair.

In a mature democracy, you campaign on what you will do, and if you don’t get a majority, you form a coalition based on certain compromises. Voting for tuition fees is a Lib Dem compromise in the current coalition (and whether the Lib Dem leadership anticipated using this issue as a bargaining counter before the election is immaterial). Yes, Lib Dem MPs will hold their noses when they vote for tuition fees, but Tory MPs will hold their noses when they vote for the referendum on electoral reform. It’s all part of coalition government.

The problem is that we don’t exactly know what a majority Conservative or Labour government would have done, not just on tuition fees but on a range of other issues. That’s what people need to remember when they start blaming the Lib Dems for a whole load of things that weren’t in our manifesto.

A LITTLE LATERAL THINKING ON THE HORRENDOUS CUTS

2010-10-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

This has been a truly horrible week. Even those of us as fortunate as me, who are in a comfortable enough position to soak up much of the impact of the cuts, recognise the hardship that this week’s Spending Review will cause and the potential damage to the fabric of British society.

But rather than give another critique of the review (there are enough in circulation already), here instead are a few thoughts that go beyond the graphs, tables, claims and sound bites that have dominated this week’s crushing set of spending cuts.

• Every now and again I wonder ‘Are such deep cuts really necessary?’ And then something strikes me to hammer home that they are, such as the fact that the government has had to borrow an extra £400 million every day since May, because for every £300 coming in we are spending £400; or the fact that we’re spending £120 million a day on debt interest payments that could be used to build a school every hour or triple the number of doctors. We just can’t go on like this.

• When the Daily Mail goes on a rant, as it did the day after the Spending Review – lamenting the regional growth fund as ‘a sop to Vince Cable’, the national scholarship fund as ‘a blatant bribe to Liberal Democrat MPs not to cause trouble over university funding’, and blaming us for the rise in international development aid and the Green Bank – you know we’re acting as a useful counterbalance to Tory instincts.

• Has any think tank or other institution done a proposal for taxation and services based on starting from scratch? I mean, like saying ‘Right folks, we have 60 million people on this north-west European island, what services are we going to provide and how should we pay for them through taxes and charges?’ Might be a useful point of reference.

• Why do we continue to have such difficulty taking relatively small sums off the truly stinking rich and diverting them to socially justified projects? Given that a drop in the ocean for some of our wealthiest citizens would make a massive difference to some social initiatives, we must be missing a trick somewhere.

• At risk of criticising my party’s part in the coalition (I), I wish we would stop blaming Labour for the mess. Yes, Labour did make a mess of things (Gordon Brown will go down as a truly disastrous chancellor), but it wasn’t just Labour. The banks had a big part to play, and let’s face it, so did the rest of us by building up massive debts on credit cards because we wanted things we simply couldn’t afford.

• At risk of criticising my party’s part in the coalition (II), I wish rail travel hadn’t been made even more expensive compared with car driving than it is already. Fair taxes on motorists should be based on urban congestion charging (where there's some reasonable revenue to be earned), because that way the people you make pay are those who have the best alternatives to driving, and you respect the lack of choices for those in rural areas. But that option has been spurned in favour of further cuts to rail subsidies.

It will be horrendous to see the cuts become reality over the next few months, as we see things that have been built up over years struck down in months because the funding has run out. But failure to tackle the deficit won’t help our democracy in the long term, so reluctantly I have to accept that the cuts are necessary. I also believe they’re fair, though like everyone else, that hope will only be tested over time.

HOW MODERN IS THE NEW LABOUR LEADER REALLY?

2010-09-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

I was obviously pleased, but also relieved, to hear Ed Miliband say he personally would be voting ‘Yes’ in the fairer votes referendum in May.

You could say he could ill have afforded not to, after the way he was elected. If you’d been rescued off a mountain top by a helicopter, it wouldn’t look good if you then railed against helicopters in your first statement after being rescued, would it! Or if you railed against your country’s diplomats after they’d got you out of jail in a tin-pot dictatorship.

Ed Miliband came second in most rounds of the Labour leadership election, but when all the second preferences were counted, he won, because he had the greater all-round support of the three constituencies that make up the Labour party: members, MPs and trade unions.

What would now be appropriate is for the new Labour leader to go beyond what he would do ‘personally’ and recommend a ‘Yes’ vote to his party. He has clearly made certain noises that distance himself from the New Labour years – including recognising what we have said all along about the Iraq war – but how modern is he really?

Is he willing to take the plunge and say a modern Labour prime minister either has to be elected by an absolute majority of the voters, or has to govern in coalition with another party? Because that’s what a truly modern party leader must surely now recognise.

This is why it doesn’t worry me whether Miliband takes Labour to the left or not (whatever ‘left’ means in this politically post-modern era). In fact I’d be quite happy if he did, and not for any reasons to do with electoral arithmetic.

To me – and I’m speaking more as a democrat than a Liberal Democrat here – a modern electoral system needs to have three main parties: a party fundamentally representing the haves, a party fighting for the have-nots, and a free-thinking party not beholden to any group of people which can bring ideas to the political table that the other two parties can’t. If there are a number of fringe parties contributing ideas (like the Greens and Ukip), fair enough, but the basic system revolves around those three entities.

It means the political system would always be open to Lab-Lib, Con-Lib and even Lab-Con coalitions (the latter a fairly unlikely scenario but the ultimate guard against the Lib Dems becoming too arrogant). It’s worked that way in numerous other developed nations, including some with economies much more successful than ours has been.

Will Ed Miliband be up to this modern role? His initial party conference speech suggests he might. His non-Labour political idols were all Liberals, and while he attacked the Lib Dems in the campaign, he declined to go for the cheap cheer of attacking us in his leader’s speech. It will be interesting to see how Labour develops under him.

On that subject, an afterthought. As the elder of two siblings, my heart genuinely feels for David Miliband, and I think he’s done the right thing by taking a break from front-line politics. But I don’t think he should go too far.

While I believe Labour has got the leader it really wanted (thanks to a voting system that allows for second preferences), I can’t help wondering whether, in 18 months, Ed will have run out of steam and become his party’s Iain Duncan Smith – a fundamentally decent and well motivated guy who just doesn’t connect with voters. It’s just a hunch, and I may be wrong, but we may not have seen the last of the elder Miliband in the Labour leadership.

TRUE PROGRESSIVES MUST BE HAPPY THAT THE LIB DEMS ARE IN GOVERNMENT

2010-09-15T04:38:00.000-07:00

Labour supporters have a lot to think about at the moment, what with electing a new leader and trying to work out what their party stands for. Well, I’d like to give them something else to think about – what type of Labour supporter are they really?

To me there are two types of Labour supporters in the current British political landscape.

One is the ‘win at all costs’ person who wants to see Labour re-elected with a massive majority and doesn’t really care who gets trampled underfoot in the process. The other is a truly progressive person who is in it because they care about those members of society and the wider world who can least look after themselves.

Of course, those in the first category will lay claim to the motivation of the second category, but the distinction is important because it indicates how they view the Liberal Democrats and our role in the coalition government.

To the ‘win at all costs’ Labour supporter, our presence in government is a massive irritant. Without us, a pure Tory government would be much worse than the current government is, so the chances of its being so unpopular in 2015 that Labour gets back with a thumping majority are great.

To the genuinely progressive Labour supporter, having the Lib Dems in government is a good thing, because it means that Labour’s years in opposition – at least the first five of them – are spent without the extremes of Thatcherism that happened in the 1980s, which did so much to limit Labour’s room for manoeuvre when it finally got back in 1997.

A lot of people have made the point that the Lib Dems are much closer to Labour than the Conservatives, so a red-yellow coalition would have made more sense than the blue-yellow one we have now. Assuming we are indeed closer to Labour (and it is only an assumption, though probably largely correct), does it really mean a red-yellow coalition would be better?

Surely it is a lot more use to the progressive cause for the Lib Dems to act as a brake on a Conservative government than for us to coalesce with Labour? If we were in coalition with Labour, there would be a risk that we’d be seen as just another sub-section of the Labour party, a bit like the Fabians, or the Christian Socialists. I’m not saying we shouldn’t one day work with Labour, but there would be bigger issues of protecting our distinctive identity.

This is something that all people from the progressive wing of British politics should recognise. It’s why the truly progressive Labour supporter, who would rather we were in coalition with Labour than the Tories, needs to feel quietly grateful that there are Lib Dems in government. And why Labour-leaning Lib Dems should recognise that we are probably doing a more effective job pulling the Tories back from the right than if we were in coalition with ideologically more like-minded people.

For make no mistake, we are restraining the Conservatives from their natural instincts. There are plenty of Tories who loathe David Cameron because they see his deal with the Lib Dems as holding back pure Conservatism.

True, we’re having difficulty getting that message across, and in that respect it is an uncomfortable time to be a Lib Dem. But it doesn’t mean what we’re doing is wrong, or that we should allow our restraining influence to be belittled just because we’re the junior partners and therefore have to accept things we didn’t campaign for (many people forget that the Tories polled 37% while we polled 23%, so the Tory agenda will dominate).

No-one likes the cuts we’re seeing now, and it’s worrying to see certain aspects of them, especially those that hit poor people very hard. But the true progressives will recognise that having Lib Dems in government is of benefit to the country, and that doing the right thing is justified, even if there is an electoral price to pay. And it could be that doing the right thing means the electoral price won’t be as high as many fear at present.

OK, TIME FOR A REALITY CHECK

2010-07-30T06:16:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of stories doing the rounds about disquiet within the Liberal Democrats over the state of the coalition. The disquiet exists, but runs nowhere near as deep as is sometimes played up in the media. And it has to be set against some clear realities.

Reality check 1 – there was no choice for the Lib Dems after the general election

With the arithmetic produced by our crazy electoral system, there was really no choice but to accept David Cameron’s offer of a coalition. The maths wouldn’t have made a deal with Labour work (Labour didn’t want it anyway, whatever Gordon Brown may say), and if we’d sat tight in splendid opposition and let the Conservatives form a minority government, we’d be facing a second election this autumn which would almost certainly have delivered an overall Tory majority. Then we’d be no better off, and people would be wondering what the Lib Dems were for.

Reality check 2 – things would have been equally bad under a Labour government

Despite the collective amnesia engulfing Labour which convinces them that nothing bad happened before 7 May, Labour would have faced the same economic situation and would have had to take equally brutal measures. Ed Balls has even admitted that Labour’s election pledge to halve the national deficit in four years was unachievable. Any current boost to Labour is simply down to it not being the party that’s doing the dirty work.

Reality check 3 – the current government would have been a lot nastier without the Lib Dems as part of it

To Lib Dems, the government seems a Tory one that’s using our support and doing its own thing anyway. But many Conservatives feel the opposite – that the Lib Dems have too much influence. The reality is that it is a Tory-led government with Lib Dem influence, and that influence is measurable in several ways. We will achieve our aim of a £10,000 income tax threshold by 2015, we will get a referendum on a step towards a fairer voting system, we will get our ‘pupil premium’. There are fringe benefits too, like the renewal of Trident not being funded from general taxation, and the flowering of moderate Tories like Ken Clarke, whose liberal slant to his work as justice minister could never have happened if the Tories ruled alone.

Reality check 4 – all parties lose support when in government and gain it when in opposition

We have been in opposition for 65 years, during which time you pick up a number of supporters. But opposition is a lot easier than government, and when you’re responsible for issues rather than just commenting on them, you lose some of the people you picked up in opposition.

Reality check 5 – the Lib Dems (and previous incarnations) have been unpopular before and have always bounced back

We were unpopular during the Lib-Lab pact of 1977-78, we were hammered by the Greens in the 1989 European elections, and we were down to 11 per cent in the opinion polls three years ago. We always bounce back because there is always a place for a third force alongside the parties representing the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ – a place for imaginative ideas that aren’t beholden to an orthodox or proletarian ideology.

The next couple of years won’t be easy for the Liberal Democrats. I fear we’ll lose some very good councillors next year because of a backlash against our role in tackling the deficit.

But I went into politics to try to change things for the better. At the election we got 23 per cent and the Tories 37 per cent. If we go into government with them, we have to play the junior role, but we’re still achieving things. That’s why we need to hold our nerve – and leave a dignified return open for those people who are leaving us now.

DON’T BE DISTRACTED BY THIS DISGRACEFUL OPPORTUNISM

2010-07-14T03:06:00.001-07:00

It takes a fair bit for me to scream at the television (yes really, I gather some people do it constantly), but I found myself yelling at Ed Miliband on Question Time the other week.

He was commenting on the coalition’s spending cuts, which is all fine and good – that’s his constitutional job, after all. But what got me yelling ‘That’s disgraceful!’ at the set was his comment ‘and the British people will show what they think of these cuts at next year’s council elections’.

If ever there was a case of bringing democracy into disrepute, this is it. The contempt he has for local government encapsulated in such a brief statement is breathtaking.

Next May’s local council elections have nothing, repeat nothing, to do with national politics. They are a vote on who runs your local council, in our case Wealden District Council. Is the council well run financially? Is it well run democratically? What is one party offering by way of a local programme for the next four years? How does that compare with what another party is offering? These are the questions that should take centre stage at council elections.

OK, a bit of realism here. I know there are a lot of people who vote in council elections on the basis of national politics. A lot of people don’t know who runs their local council, indeed many don’t know the name of their council – it’s easier just to blame everything on ‘the council’. Many even think the MP is the leader of the local council.

This situation isn’t helped by the demise of local media. Because of financial pressures, local newspapers are often run these days with one news reporter, who’s looking for the granny-rescued-by-the-fire-brigade story rather than scrutinising the local council. But that’s no excuse to encourage local elections to be run on national issues.

There are some brilliant councillors – of all parties – who put in four years of hard work, stand for re-election, and are then unceremoniously dumped because their party nationally isn’t flavour of the month. This is a tragedy for good local decision-making – a tragedy that’s being fed by Ed Miliband’s cavalier attitude, just because it suits his purpose to attack the coalition for doing the dirty work it has to do.

There could be a second ulterior motive to Miliband’s skulduggery. Next May’s council elections will probably feature another vote, the eagerly awaited referendum on changing our voting system.

Could it be that Miliband the Younger is trying to get people to protest about the coalition through voting against the move to a fairer voting system? After all, the chances of his party getting an overall majority would be somewhat reduced under the Alternative Vote system, but deep down he – like every other Labour and Tory politician – knows there is no moral defence of the current first-past-the-post method.

Any government formed after the 6 May election would have had to take the harsh decisions the coalition is taking. And yes, it will be unpopular for a time. But if anyone uses that as an excuse to sacrifice hard-working local councillors working on local issues, and a long overdue tentative first step at reforming the voting system, they will be guilty of the most disgraceful opportunism.

PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS ARE ESSENTIAL TO GOOD GOVERNMENT – AND MUST REMAIN PRIVATE

2010-05-20T03:25:00.000-07:00

It was a relief to find that the ‘new coalition’ was eventually supplanted by other stories at the top of news bulletins. I wish it hadn’t been the violence in Thailand, as that’s a truly awful situation which is tearing apart a wonderful country, but that then made way for Lord Triesman’s demise at the Football Association.

Some people laugh at the Triesman fiasco, but I don’t, and it has nothing to do with football. In fact it has a lot to do with the coalition.

There was a lot of talk at the election (much of it from me!) about the need for a new politics. And I find it great that we have a form of government that no-one had thought would come about. But for it to work, you need some valves in the system that release the pressure, as well as space to think creatively.

Much releasing of pent-up tension and resentment, and much creative thinking, come in quiet discussions where you can think the unthinkable and speak the unspeakable. Some know it as brainstorming, but the name isn’t important. What’s important is that you can say what you want, so that what you eventually say in public is measured and reasonable.

We’ve all done it. We’ve let off steam privately about a boss or colleague, even a member of our family with whom we have to get on but who privately drives us up the wall, only to moderate our stance in public. Or we’ve said to a friend or relation ‘This is probably a mad idea, but …’ And it often is a mad idea, but occasionally it proves to be inspired.

All this is fine and dandy as long as these conversations remain private. But what happens when they become public? There are two ways to go – either you clam up and say nothing to anyone, or you get the world to recognise that the conversation was private and don’t give the person who has made it public the satisfaction of having embarrassed you.

This is why I’m worried that David Triesman had to resign after being betrayed (there really is no other word for it) by his dinner companion. I have never met the man and have no idea whether he holds some weird views or has alienated people in his entourage, so I don’t know about any underlying motives.

But what I do know is that his conversation with Melissa Jacobs was private and should have remained so. As head of the FA’s bid to bring the 2018 world cup to England, Triesman had to think around all elements of the bid, including elements he would never have dreamed of expressing publicly. If he hadn’t wondered about vote trading or even influencing referees, he wouldn’t have been the right man for the job.

That’s why the Mail on Sunday should never have published the story. Once it had, the FA was in an awful position – it should really have stood by its man, but it knew that would have virtually killed off England’s bid.

You can be sure that there are conversations going on now in Lib Dem and Tory circles which involve a lot of letting-off of steam and thinking the unthinkable. These conversations really are vital, and if we make them impossible to have because of the fear that they will get out, then we really will make this country ungovernable.

LIFE FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS – AND POSSIBLY THE COUNTRY – WILL NEVER BE THE SAME

2010-05-12T00:29:00.000-07:00

It became clear on Saturday that the result of Thursday’s general election had changed the nature of the Liberal Democrats for good.

For years we have struggled to gain a degree of influence, developing policies that we felt were right for Britain – in the sense of being socially just and environmentally geared to the future. And we knew that when we got a hung parliament, that would be our chance.

To build up to that, we developed a broad voter base, effectively made up of three groups of people: pure Lib Dems who support us for what we stand for, Tory sympathisers who will vote Lib Dem but never Labour, and Labour supporters who will vote Lib Dem but never Conservative.

From the moment we got into the situation where we had to choose between a deal with the Conservatives, a deal with Labour, or remaining in opposition – a situation we had longed for – one of those three groups was going to be seriously cheesed off.

Over the weekend I got lots of emails from Labour supporters saying ‘Don’t do it’. On Monday night when we heard the Lib Dems were talking to Labour, I got some from Conservative supporters saying ‘Don’t do it’. And yes, I got one from a lifelong Liberal saying we should remain in opposition – I guess that confirms the view of some historians that liberalism is a movement rooted in opposition that finds government difficult.

I don’t subscribe to that view. I believe we are in this game to improve people’s lives, and this was our chance. Nick Clegg and the rest of us campaigned for a package of policies, highlighted by four headline aims (fairer taxes, ‘green’ jobs, more money for education, and cleaner politics), and was unremitting in his insistence that people should vote for what we stood for, not who our possible partners in government might be.

The Con-Lib deal that has been agreed as the basis for the new coalition has concessions on all four fronts. The biggest is a Conservative commitment to raising the income tax threshold to £10,000, albeit phased over the next few years. That is a genuinely Lib Dem initiative that would never have happened with a majority Tory government – nor even with a majority Labour government, despite it being something I believe Labour should have been advocating.

Other concessions include the ‘pupil premium’ we’ve been pushing for, and an environmental boost to the economy – for those of us dubious about David Cameron’s ‘green’ credentials and worried he might abandon the environment once in power, our presence could well mean something. And there will be political reform, even if it may not go as far as some of us in the Lib Dems want.

So am I happy with this deal? – not totally. Am I happy to accept it? – yes. Is that a contradiction? – I don’t think so.

As a child getting the hang of politics, I knew I was not a Conservative before I knew whether I was pro-Labour or pro-Liberal. I still feel that way, to the point where I am uncomfortable doing a deal with the Conservatives. I suspect Cameron is a moderately decent guy, but George Osborne leaves me cold, as do plenty of others in the Tory ranks, from grandees to young Turks. To that extent I fully understand the feelings of those who oscillate between Labour and Lib Dem who feel let down by this deal (even if I wish some of those who had written to me to express their views had been a little less abusive).

But what was the alternative? The parliamentary arithmetic meant a Lab-Lib deal could only happen as part of a ‘rainbow alliance’ that would have been messy and could have faltered the moment an MP or two fell ill. And would we have gained by staying in opposition under a minority government or a grand coalition? – people would have said we just couldn’t decide, and would have wondered what the point of the Lib Dems was.

There are those who have accused Nick Clegg of being duplicitous over the negotiations, most notably Malcolm Rifkind, who said Nick’s negotiating has been straight out of the Robert Mugabe school of government. I met Rifkind when he was transport secretary and found him a gentle and level-headed man, but he’s gone off the deep end here.

His remarks are grossly unfair. Nick always said the party with the biggest mandate had to have first go at forming a government, but once it became clear negotiations with us had got bogged down, he had to talk to Labour. Failure to do so would have led to a longer period of post-election instability that would have led to uncertainty on the currency and stock markets.

More importantly, the fact that the Lib Dems talked to Labour and found a deal couldn’t be done should make the coalition we’ve got more palatable for everyone. Of course some Labour spin doctors will try to say we’ve abandoned socially progressive politics, but that is just a self-serving way of trying to swell Labour ranks with disaffected Lib Dem supporters.

I don’t know how it’s going to end, and yes, I am apprehensive about it. But I entered politics in the hope of improving not just the society that has served me personally so well, but also the mechanisms by which we do business. That inevitably means cooperation, a word I used a lot in my election campaigning, and the Con-Lib deal is the first exercise in that cooperation.

No-one would bat an eyelid if we had a war on and formed a coalition. Because the threat is economic and environmental rather than military, the need for a coalition seems less clear-cut. But it’s a massive threat and, following Thursday’s vote, this seems the best and most optimistic way of proceeding.

All I would ask is that people who have been well-disposed towards the Lib Dems give it a chance before rushing to judgement.

WHAT CAN WE REALISTICALLY EXPECT FROM THE NEGOTIATIONS?

2010-05-10T03:02:00.000-07:00

First up, a massive caveat: I know no more than anyone else about what’s going on in the Conservative/Lib Dem negotiations. I may be a candidate – or ex-candidate – but I have no more information than the 50 million other people who are following developments through the media.

What I can say is that I’ve had a number of comments from people who voted for me who are very angry about the possibility that the Lib Dems will do a deal with the Conservatives. As I have an email address for the specific purpose of passing on comments to the party’s high command, I have been able to report the broad sentiments, and I can say the Lib Dem negotiating team is well aware of the strength of feeling among party members and Lib Dem voters.

But like most things of political importance, it isn’t quite as simple as it may seem. And there are two things that are central to this.

Firstly, I hope people can now see why Nick Clegg and all of us who stood for the Lib Dems were so reluctant to answer the question “Which party will you side with in the event of a hung Parliament?”

The answer we gave constantly was “Please vote for our policies, not for a possible coalition.” I dressed this up differently. On several occasions I told people “It’s like meeting a new person and instead of saying ‘Who are you? – tell me something about yourself’ you say ‘Tell me who your friends are, or might be?’”

We stood on our four main platforms – fair taxes, a better deal for education, a boost to the economy through creating ‘green jobs’, and cleaning up politics – on the basis that, if there was a hung Parliament, we would use those four issues as our bargaining counters so Lib Dem votes turn into real action. That is what is happening in the current negotiations, and if people want politicians to do what they say they’d do, no-one can hold the current negotiations against us.

Of course the big question is: what can we reasonably get from the Conservatives? To me, and to many other Lib Dem voters, a fundamental issue is meaningful electoral reform, but can the Conservatives deliver it? I suspect David Cameron would be willing, as I sense he sees it as part of bringing his party into the 21st century. But could he take his party with him? Probably not.

Which could then throw us into discussions with Labour, and also the Scottish, Welsh and Ulster parties, given that ‘Lab + Lib Dem = minority’. After all, Gordon Brown is promising an immediate referendum on electoral reform, albeit with the discredited Alternative Vote system.

But – and this is my second central issue – could Labour deliver meaningful electoral reform? There are plenty of Labour MPs who are no keener on ditching the first-past-the-post voting system than the dinosaurs we know inhabit the Tory ranks. Given that a Lab/Lib/nationalists alliance would only just have a majority, it would only take a handful of rebel Labour MPs to kill off proportional representation.

I am desperate to see PR happen. I remember the discussions in the 1970s about it, and want Nick Clegg to use all his current power to get PR. But some of the media commentators are assuming his power is greater than it might be.

That’s why the best thing everyone – Lib Dem voters, sympathisers, and party members – can do is to be patient and trust the negotiating process. It’s not a nice feeling, but it’s the best and most respectful thing we can do in the circumstances.

[Written at 10.30am, Monday 10 May 2010]

IMMIGRATION – WE HAVE TO START FROM WHERE WE ARE, NOT WHERE WE’D LIKE TO BE

2010-04-30T01:37:00.000-07:00

It’s fair game to have a go at politicians at present. You can criticise them for everything from MPs’ expenses to not giving full and honest answers. But there’s a missing element in all this.

The public needs to play its part too. If it wants honest politics, it must be willing to recognise it when it sees it, and give it its due.

Nowhere has this been more clearly on display than over the role immigration is playing in this election.

We in the Liberal Democrats have been aware for a long time about people’s concerns about immigration. I personally don’t feel it’s as much of a threat as others do, and I feel some of the sensationalist media have whipped up a frenzy about foreigners claiming excessive benefits that bears little relation to reality. But sometimes the perception is as important as the reality, so it was something that had to be tackled.

So we tackled it. We set out to assess the current situation, to find out what the extent of the black market – some of it controlled by extremely nasty gangs – really is, and to work out a policy that is fair and makes sense.

What we’ve come up with is a proposal to be stricter with our border controls, and to make permission to come to this country conditional on whether the skills an immigrant can offer are needed in the area he/she wants to work in.

That has gone down very well, but the message has been distorted by how another aspect of our policy has been hijacked by those looking to score cheap points and discredit our ideas. I’m talking about what’s become known as our proposed ‘amnesty’.

We recognise that there are several hundred thousand people in this country who arrived illegally and are working in a shady underworld, often being paid by gangs, frequently in poor and threatening conditions. We’re saying that any of those who have been here for 10 years, speak good English and have no criminal record can apply to become legalised. Even then they wouldn’t have access to benefits for two years. That would mean we find out who a lot of these people are, and they'd start paying tax and contributing to the community.

I share the reservations of many that we’re retrospectively condoning something that was illegal – yes, that goes against the grain. But we have to start from where we are, not where we’d like to be, and our proposals are fair, constructive and make sense.

But now we have people screaming it’s an ‘amnesty’, that it’ll increase our rate of immigration (this has happened in some countries where they have had similar ‘amnesties’ but wouldn’t happen here because of our stricter border controls), and that we’re not listening to people. Instead, people are falling for David Cameron’s unspecified and unrealistic ‘cap’ on immigration, and the threats by both parties to deport immigrants. How can they deport people when they don’t even know where many of them are!

People must make up their own minds about which party best reflects what they stand for. But anyone pining for a better politics must also be willing to accept common sense solutions when presented to them, and not take refuge in a few carefully crafted sound bites that appeal to the heart but have little or no bearing on reality.

WELL GARY, THERE'S NO TELLING WHICH WAY THIS CONTEST WILL END

2010-04-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

It was Harold Wilson who said 'A week is a long time in politics'. How out of date that now sounds - 90 minutes is the new record after Nick Clegg's performance on Thursday night turned our traditional two-party democracy into a true three-party system.

In her analysis in the Sussex Express of 9 April, Susan King predicted that, of the six constituencies in the Express circulation area, five are likely to return an MP of the same party as last time, with only Eastbourne hanging in the balance. That was a reasonably fair assessment before last Thursday's first televised debate, but it's now looking a little less certain.

This was always a difficult election to call, because no-one could be quite sure how the MPs' expenses and cash for lobbying scandals would play out with the public. With the TV debate having firmly established three-party politics in this country, 'safe' seats are suddenly no longer so safe.

What irritated me about Susan King's otherwise fair analysis of the likely outcomes is that it carried an implicit overtone that it’s not worth voting unless you live in Eastbourne. (Credit incidentally to the Express for printing my complaint in this week's paper when they could have hidden behind a pre-election curfew on candidates' letters.)

But that's missing a very obvious point. Just as Manchester United would start at 0-0 in a cup tie against lowly opposition, so all the candidates in all the constituencies start at zero votes, and a rush of apathy or a last-minute reason to switch allegiance could yet produce some shock results.

With Nick Clegg's performance in the TV debate having changed the nature of the whole campaign, that indicates that, even if Charles Hendry represents Manchester United in our analogy of the Wealden constituency, the Lib Dems aren't a League Two side but from the Championship or even Premier League. And the thought of Wealden having a Lib Dem MP isn't quite so far-fetched as it was at 8.30pm last Thursday.

It would still be a major shock if we won this seat, but the Conservatives are no longer a shoo-in for victory. I have met people who have been very impressed with Nick's performance and who are voting Lib Dem having not originally expected to be. A few thousand of those and we really will have a shock result.

I'm also encouraged by Charles Hendry's own slogan 'Vote for Change'. I hope the Wealden voters take him literally, and vote to change the Wealden MP!

But even for those who believe Wealden won't change this time, there is more reason to vote Lib Dem than normal. The overall popular vote – the total votes cast for each party nationally – could have a strong moral role to play if no single party has an overall majority, so even in the supposedly ‘safe’ seats, there is more reason than usual to vote.

And after all, it’s only our corrupt voting system that renders so many votes apparently worthless in the first place. Hopefully this will be the last general election at which we use this discredited system, so there can never be an excuse again that voting Lib Dem - or any other party for that matter - is a wasted vote.

A TAWDRY ROUND OF BITCHING OVER EMPTY PROMISES AND SHABBY TACTICS

2010-04-07T09:37:00.000-07:00

This business about Labour’s proposed increase in national insurance contributions, the Conservatives’ ‘promise’ to abolish it, and the ‘support’ of a couple of dozen business leaders for the Tory position is really doing my head in.

And if this is a sign of how the election is going to be fought, then one of the most exciting elections in living memory will soon turn into a tawdry round of bitching over empty promises and shabby tactics.

Let’s get one thing absolutely clear: the Conservatives’ sums don’t add up. All the political commentators agree this, it’s why Vince Cable was able to land that powerful blow on George Osborne in the ‘Ask the Chancellors’ debate last week, and even Tories themselves don’t believe it.

Look back through the records and they’re doing exactly what they said they’d never do – making promises they couldn’t keep. How do they hope to fund the abolition of the rise in national insurance? Through ‘efficiency savings’. But they haven’t identified these savings – it’s just a case of relying on the moanings of a couple of retired civil servants, who say there are various ways of cutting costs. Well there may be, but no-one has worked out how much.

It’s absolutely clear what’s going on. The Conservatives are making a mad dash for a policy that they hope people won’t see through in the four weeks left before the election.

But if that’s shoddy enough, what’s even shoddier is the way a couple of dozen chief executives and a handful of leaders of business associations jumped on a carefully staged bandwagon to ‘support’ the Conservatives’ plans to avoid the NI 1% rise.

It’s clear what happened. They decided they wanted to see a Tory government, and worked out a cunning plan for how to help sway the opinion polls. They waited for Alistair Darling’s budget, picked on something that would make a few headlines, and coordinated their attack to follow on the heels of the Conservatives’ absurd finance.

Frankly it’s gutter politics, and in the days since then, I have looked at the likes of Sainsbury’s, M&S and other names whose chief executives signed up to the letter to The Times in a different light. I’m not sure how quickly I’ll be through the door of those shops in future.

As it happens, my view is to oppose the national insurance increase, but for totally different reasons than any so far cited.

My years of experience in the environmental movement have told me that the best way to attack pollution, climate change and general wastage of resources is to tax those activities and lower the cost of employing people. In other words, you put the tax on polluting transport and unrenewable energy, and reduce employers’ national insurance contributions.

You’d have thought at least one of the chief executives might have seen that, wouldn’t you! They could then have claimed the moral high ground, bolstered David Cameron’s fragile, skin-deep claim to be ‘green’, and looked a little statesmanlike. But that’s the problem with dirty tricks – they get so dirty that you lose sight of what you’re working for, which ought to be a better society.

One of the Liberal Democrats’ four central policies at this election is a revived economy based on taxing the worst activity and releasing the constraints on employment. It’s known in modern shorthand as ‘green jobs’. That’s the reason why the national insurance rise is misguided, and it’s miles removed from George Osborne’s risible faux finances.

IF WE WANT THE POLICE TO HELP US, WE HAVE TO HELP THEM ... BUT HOW FAR?

2010-04-01T05:29:00.000-07:00

It was the percentage that struck me. Twenty-eight people, who had been arrested by Sussex Police but were later found to have committed no crime, applied for their DNA to be expunged from the police database. Only one request was granted, a rate of 3.6% that put Sussex Police bottom of a national league table of police forces.

So I wrote to the chief constable, asking for an explanation. I made it clear I wasn’t seeking to undermine the great job the police do, but that there were civil liberties at stake and I found the statistic alarming.

That led to me having a meeting with two of the force’s most senior community police officers (I won’t give their names given how close we are to a general election), which just happened to take place the same day the government published its proposed revised guidance on holding DNA samples.

A bit of history here. The government currently allows the police to take DNA samples from anyone they arrest or caution, and to keep those samples ad infinitum. The ad infinitum part has been ruled inadmissible by the European Court for Human Rights, which said – rightly in my view – that the DNA of innocent people could not be kept indefinitely.

So the government now has to propose revised rules, and it’s done so. It wants to keep innocent people’s DNA for six years. To me that’s excessive, and it was described by the Lib Dems’ Home Affairs spokesperson in the Lords, Sally Hamwee, as ‘excessive and potentially illegal’. Another legal challenge could well be in the offing.

In the meantime, what is a poor police force to do? Sussex Police have taken the view that, until the guidance is revised and such guidance is accepted, it will continue to hold DNA samples unless it’s absolutely clear that a person was arrested with no connection to the crime under investigation or any other crime.

This explains the 3.6% – and here’s the rub.

If we want the police to do a job, we need to give them all reasonable means to do it. That includes DNA, and also fingerprinting which seems less emotive but in most respects has the same status as DNA. If you have a case where, say, police are called to a domestic disturbance, there’s a suggestion of violence so they arrest a suspect but no charges are pressed, it’s probably right for that person’s DNA to stay on the record books for a reasonable period of time.

But what happens when you get a case like the Crowborough businessman Sal Miah, who was arrested and later given a caution after attempting to protect his restaurant from youths who tried to break in? The police later apologised and a senior officer said the caution has been revoked and the DNA and fingerprints are being destroyed. But because Mr Miah was cautioned, it isn’t a simple case of destroying the DNA, and until the full process has run its course, his details remain on a database along with convicted criminals.

That’s the bit that doesn’t feel right, but I don’t think we should turn our fire on the police but on the government. They need to give us a workable Crime and Security Bill that allows police to keep the DNA of reasonable suspects for a reasonable time, so the police can do their job and civil liberties can be ensured.

I trust the police. They’re professional, motivated by a desire to solve crime, and while there are occasional cases of police malpractice, they’re the exception, not the rule (they’re newsworthy because they’re so rare). And the vast majority of police officers respect the need for civil liberties to be protected – that’s why sensible government guidelines are a potential win/win in this highly emotive issue.

THE SCANDAL IS THAT WE’VE NEVER HAD A GOVERNMENT ELECTED BY A MAJORITY OF THOSE WHO VOTED!

2010-03-20T08:47:00.000-07:00

I was in Brussels last weekend, celebrating the 20th birthday of an environmental organisation I helped to set up in 1990. Chatting with the various people from a couple of dozen different countries, one thing became very clear – almost all of them come from countries where more than one party is currently in government.

Contrast that with the situation in this country where some sections of society are getting hysterical about the prospect that we could on 7 May have a hung Parliament. What is normal in most other countries appears to be a recipe for national disaster here.

So what’s the difference?

The difference is that we’re not used to different parties cooperating in government. This is not strange, when you think we haven’t had a formal coalition since 1945, or a peacetime coalition since the late 1930s. We had some cooperation between Labour and the Liberals in 1977-78, a short-lived arrangement that served the country well, even if it was disastrous for Liberal fortunes at the polls.

But it’s strange in another way. We have never had a government elected by a majority of those who voted! Maragaret Thatcher’s thumping majority of 144 seats in 1983 was achieved with 44% of the votes. Labour got in in 1997 with a 179-seat majority on 43% of the votes, and won last time with a majority of 66 on under 37% of the votes. This is the true scandal that needs to end.

With the polls suggesting neither Labour nor Conservative will have an overall majority this time, much speculation is put on us as to which party we would support. This question totally misses the point.

The point is that we tell the electorate what we stand for, and then, if there’s a hung Parliament, we look at the maths and see if a majority can be formed involving us and a party that is willing to embrace our four core policies: fair taxes, a greener economy, reform of education, and a new political system.

Yes, I want a hung Parliament, but not because it will help the Liberal Democrats – I’m not entirely sure that it would help us. I want a hung Parliament because it will be best for democracy and may lead us to a new era of cooperative government rather than the elective dictatorship we have now.

Yes, the City and the markets may go into panic mode the morning after an election that offers up no single-party winner. But that will focus the various minds, not just on the need to cooperate, but on our need for a properly written constitution so we have a stronger framework in which to work.

No wonder the latest opinion polls are saying there is popular support for a hung Parliament. The people appear to have a better sense of how the country should be run than the vested interests in the City whose concept of ‘a clear mandate for government’ is very different to mine.

IF WE DON’T TACKLE THINKING ON SALARIES, WE’LL NEVER GET OUT OF RECESSION

2010-03-05T03:04:00.000-08:00

I’ve never listened to either 6 Music or the Asian Network, so if they’re axed I can’t say I’ll miss them. But I’m very angry about their impending demise.

The BBC is clearly keen to show it can cut back, which is good. I’m not going to argue the case for those two stations, because I don’t know the full picture, but it angers me that stations are being axed when the BBC is failing to deal with its core problem: the amount it pays on executive salaries and expenses.

The recent report into BBC pay showed 137 BBC executives are on £100,000 or more. That strikes me as a remarkably top-heavy organisation. The money being paid for ‘celebrity talent’ is another worry, though I won’t go down the Jonathan Ross road as I think even the BBC have realised that £6 million a year is too much.

And the expenses that are paid within the BBC are a scandal. I don’t know if the report that Alan Hansen is paid a taxi each way from his home in the north-west to London to be on ‘Match of the Day’ is true, but the trouble is it’s believable.

It would be wrong to have a go at the BBC alone. Bankers and Premiership footballers are on the kind of silly money that makes them lose touch with the real world. A former colleague of mine, writing in the Daily Telegraph, recently told of a meeting with the chairman of a prominent football club suffering financial woes. When asked why the club had got into such trouble, the chairman said he really wasn’t sure because they weren’t paying their players more than £12,000 a week. That’s well over £600,000 a year! If he thought this was prudent, no wonder he’s not sure why his club’s in difficulties.

There’s a section of society that has simply lost its connection with what it costs to live – and it’s dragging the rest of us down with it.

The average salary in this county is £30,000, and there are plenty who have to live on that. Of course we all want a bit more, and for most of us, hitting £50,000 by the time we’re 50 is a sign that we’re doing reasonably well. Unless you have an exceptional amount of responsibilities, £50,000 is the kind of salary we can all live on, with a couple of luxuries thrown in.

If some businesses can justify paying much more than that, then fine. But it must be justified! The problem is that pay increases have gone up in the good times and not come down in the bad. It has led to a situation where people’s salary is not what their job warrants but what they think they’re worth, which are two totally different things.

We need to stop, take stock, decide what is a reasonable salary for people in responsible jobs, and say that anything more than that has to be justified in terms of money they can bring in. If we fail to do that, we’ll never get properly out of recession, whatever the economic indicators say.

THE WIN:WIN OF GOOD FOOD THAT’S BEEN FAIRLY TRADED

2010-02-20T04:38:00.000-08:00

It warmed the cockles of my heart, it did! I took my daughter to the ‘Fun & Safety’ event at Hailsham Children’s Centre during this half-term week, and there for all the kids to help themselves was a table full of fresh fruit: apples, bananas, melon and pineapple, all cut up into bite-size pieces.

So many of our society’s problems can be put down to children eating junk. Sure, a few sweets and chocolates are part of childhood, and the odd meal of processed food won’t do any harm.

But a range of ills from hyperactivity and short attention spans to early-onset diabetes are fed by the habit we have got into as a nation of giving our youngest citizens the worst start in life in terms of their diet.

That’s why it was so reassuring to see the fruit table, the contents of which had been provided by Waitrose. Kids love fruit – that was obvious from the way they devoured it, especially the boys. Of course most would prefer sweets if you offered the choice, and yes, there were a few mums who had brought sweets to hand to their offspring, but for most it wasn’t necessary.

The next trick is to get the fruit to be all fairly traded. That may sound like trying to gild the lily, but it’s a legitimate aspiration that’s being taken very seriously in Uckfield and Crowborough over the next fortnight.

‘Fairtrade Fortnight’ is the kind of thing that will pass most people by, largely because every week of the year is some cause’s week. But fair trade ought to be thought of as a sign of a civilised society every bit as much as having a public health service to protect us all in our hour of need.

Several years ago I researched, wrote and presented some newspaper articles and a short programme on the BBC World Service on the ethics of sports goods manufacture. I was shocked to find that a pair of branded trainers selling for $80 had earned the guy in Asia who’d made them less than $1. In other words, the other $79 was all middlemen, marketing and profits. OK, so $1 will buy a lot more in Malaysia or the Philippines than it does in America, but it was still a paltry fee.

That shouldn’t happen, and that’s what the fair trade system sets out to tackle. It’s not a perfect system, because the minimum wage in some countries can be pitifully low as governments strive to attract first-world investment. But it’s the best system we have, and it’s a lot better than leaving everything to unregulated markets.

Uckfield and Crowborough are both ‘fair trade towns’. That’s no idle designation – there are minimum levels of free trade products that have to be offered, so they can lose their status if they don’t keep up the required levels. That’s why it’s vital that people shopping in Uckfield and Crowborough ask for free trade products – it’s both morally right, and the sign of a civilised society.

THE ANGER AGAINST THE BANKS IS UNDERSTANDABLE, BUT THE SOLUTION IS MORE COMPLICATED

2010-01-27T17:18:00.000-08:00

Don’t you just hate those bankers? They’re the parasites of our society, the folks who get bailed out by the government and then pay themselves massive bonuses. Aren’t they?

Well it’s not quite as simple as that. True, the banking world has played a big part in the mess we’re in by its reckless lending and paying out of obscene bonuses. And of course it’s galling when banks that were bailed out with public money are found to be still paying big bonuses just a few months after receiving state help.

But there’s a simple truth in all this – if bashing the banks were straight forward, you can be sure the government would have done it long ago.

The problem is that taxes from banking make such a sizeable contribution to the money governments have to spend – one estimate I read put it at 12 per cent – that if we bash the banks, we will find there’s less money available for many of the things we take for granted that the state currently funds.

So how do we get round the problem? The task is to find a solution that keeps the banks contributing to the economy without them enjoying a position where they effectively hold the government to ransom.

Labour’s approach has been to introduce a tax on bonuses. That sounds all very reasonable, except it doesn’t work as there are so many ways round it.

We’re not exactly sure what the Conservatives would do if they got into government. I can understand David Cameron keeping his cards close to his chest, but it does mean he’s asking voters to take a leap of faith in supporting his party, and given the close links between Conservatives and bankers, I have no confidence that any action a Tory government would take would amount to more than tokenism.

The Lib Dem approach is to concentrate on taxing bank profits, not bank bonuses. That way the overall operations of a bank get taxed rather than just bonuses. Apart from being fairer, it would have the additional benefit that we’d avoid discriminating against people working at the lower end of the banking industry who get a large part of their modest pay in bonuses.

We have other finance policies too that are relevant to the bank issue, such as breaking up the banks that are in state ownership so they don’t become massive units that can’t respond to changing conditions; insisting that state ownership should mean an obligation to lend to solid British companies; and closing tax loopholes for the very rich so everyone pays the amount of tax they should be paying.

Despite the understandable public anger, dealing with the banks is a balancing act. What the Liberal Democrats have is a policy that aims to build a banking system of the future that is viable for the country as well as the banks themselves. That is more constructive than policies that offer a sop to popular anger, or offer nothing of substance at all.

IF YOU'RE A FRIEND, VOTE FOR WHAT WE STAND FOR

2010-01-06T09:20:00.000-08:00

The great tennis champion Steffi Graf once told me she had difficulty making friends. It wasn’t that there weren’t people wanting to be her friend – the trouble was working out who were genuine and who were just in it for the reflected glory.

I sympathised then, and I sympathise even more now. As Liberal Democrats, it seems everyone currently wants to be our friend, but there are two very different types of suitor.

The first are those who are attracted to what we stand for, who recognise that while Labour and Conservatives may cramp the centre ground of British politics, the Lib Dems do have something different to offer, something ‘radical’ in the true sense of the word (changing from the roots).

The second are those who think they might need our support after the general election, as a ‘hung Parliament’ looks a distinct possibility. Both David Cameron and Gordon Brown are making noises about how there isn’t really that much that divides the Lib Dems from the main parties, which most people rightly see as little more than a charm offensive in the hope that they can woo post-election Lib Dem support.

As a result, journalists are now desperate to know who the Lib Dems would support – whether in formal coalition or just in Commons votes – if there was a hung Parliament. The question is even seen as reasonable, especially by those whose primary motivation is to see Brown jettisoned as prime minister or Cameron never make it to No 10.

Well it isn’t reasonable, in fact it shows a lamentable failure to understand anything other than a two-party system.

The majority of European countries have coalition governments, and the feature of them is that, in the run-up to an election, all parties campaign as if they are going to form a government. Only after the election do they start doing the sums and seeing what arrangements can be made. Failure to do it that way means parties lose their identity.

That’s why Nick Clegg is quite right not to be falling for the political interviewers’ bait. He and the rest of us want to see a Lib Dem government. We’re realistic enough to know that it probably won’t happen after this election, and may take a generation or two to happen at all. But we believe in our policies to provide the kind of government Britain needs, and we’re not going to be knocked off track by those who want to know whether we’re more blue or more red.

We stand for fairer taxation, reform of the banking system, a better deal for primary school children, reducing the burden on small businesses, and making Britain carbon-neutral by 2050. In my view, that would make a very good government programme – and it’s neither blue nor red but gold!

If we have a hung Parliament, then the sums will be done to work out what alliances would create a working majority. If we hold the balance of power, we will see how other parties have fared, notably who the biggest party is.

But that’s for then. For now, we are asking for voters to vote for a Lib Dem government. That’s why the only friends we value are those who share our view of a socially, economically and environmentally fairer Britain.

WE CAN’T BLAME THE DEVELOPING NATIONS FOR COPENHAGEN’S FAILURE UNTIL WE DO MORE

2009-12-22T15:00:00.000-08:00

There was a terrible irony in the fact that the recent cold snap came over the weekend that the Copenhagen climate conference ended in failure.

The anger that many people, including me, felt when the world’s leaders failed to reach a legally binding agreement was totally justified. At the level of the negotiations, the fault did not lie with the developed nations. The EU made a reasonable offer, Barack Obama took America further than it had ever gone before, and even Gordon Brown pushed for a deal harder than his more climatically telegenic predecessor ever did.

But we would be fooling ourselves if we swallowed our own propaganda that the fault lay entirely with the developing nations. And the cold snap showed us up.

Somehow we can’t accept that the weather sometimes slows us down. We have to do everything just as normal, so we get out our snow ploughs, we crank up the heating, we drive on icy roads causing accidents and dramatically increasing our fuel consumption.

Some of that can be justified, especially for emergency service workers, and for those making sure more vulnerable members of society can survive. But how many shops had their doors wide open in sub-zero temperatures? It would be easier to say how many hadn’t. And why was all the grit used first for roads and only afterwards - if at all - for pavements? Clearly motorists are more important than pedestrians.

I went to my daughter’s school play. It was about climate change awareness, and was exemplary in the message it promoted. Then, when it was all over, two doors – one on either side of the hall – were wedged open and the hall’s warmth was crushed by an invasion of freezing cold air. After that message!

It reminds me of that comical scene at the start of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. The priest is locked in his church, the loo is out of bounds and he’s desperate for a leak, so he drinks a bottle of wine so he can pee into the empty bottle, only to find that the wine provides a new call of nature. Our modern lifestyle has created pressures on our climate that are leading to extreme weather conditions, yet our response is a course of action that uses more energy and emits more climate changing gases!

Set against this background, is it any wonder the developing nations are suspicious about our willingness to address our lifestyle in a way that will seriously reduce climate emissions? They don’t want to forego their material prosperity while we’re still unwilling to compromise on ours – and frankly, why should they? Yet we need countries like China, India and Brazil to cut down on their emissions, or there’s no chance of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius.

That’s why the 10:10 campaign has caught the spirit of the times. It’s far from perfect, but it says ‘We must do something now’ and calls on people to reduce their own personal greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 by 10%. I have signed up to it, and I hope you can too.

Because without some major gesture, there is no way we are going to get the developing nations to make the concessions needed for the world to have a truly meaningful, legally binding climate agreement.

VOTE FOR CONSTRUCTIVE SCEPTICISM OR WITHDRAWAL - NOT FOR A MASSIVE FUDGE!

2009-11-16T04:51:00.000-08:00

Several years ago I was covering a tennis tournament in Germany for BBC Radio when I was asked to escort a German MEP to the commentary box. He was taking part in a discussion on Radio 4, and as he was having a day at the tennis, they wanted him to be on the quality broadcast line rather than a crackly phone line.

Chatting to this corpulent gentleman as I escorted him breathlessly up three flights of stairs, I was struck by how little we had in common. He represented the conservative CDU party, and while I’m a great believer that there’s much that unites people of different parties, his view of the world seemed very different to mine.

So I was somewhat taken aback when I saw his face on page 2 of The Independent last week, writing a comment column about David Cameron’s pledge to renegotiate the Lisbon Treaty. What struck me as he laid into Cameron’s pledge was that I totally agreed with him.

To quote from the piece, the MEP (Elmar Brök) said, “The Conservative leader’s new warning that he will seek to ‘repatriate’ powers from Brussels to London is no more realistic than the referendum he has just given up on ... I do not see any chance of passing even the very first step of such a process.”

And he added, “The EU will, as a result [of the Lisbon treaty], be more democratic, more capable of acting and more transparent, because the treaty will strengthen the principle of subsidiarity as well as the role of national parliaments. This is the biggest paradox of Mr Cameron’s stance: the Lisbon treaty will actually massively strengthen the role of Westminster.”

Quite apart from showing how isolated David Cameron is across Europe, even from conservative opinion, this shows how the Conservatives in this country are using Europe to play a game, not to offer a vision of good governance. There are many things we don’t like, but those we cannot change we have to accept and work within the defined limits, not duck out of as if throwing our toys out of the pram is somehow OK.

The fact is that the Conservative leadership is as pro-Europe as we Liberal Democrats are, but it doesn’t dare say this in public for fear of alienating dyed-in-the-wood Tories who hanker after a bygone age of an isolated but powerful England. If the Conservatives want to represent business interests, they have to be largely pro-Europe, but if they come clean about this, they risk hacking off the traditionalists.

To be brutally honest, there is very little difference between the three mainstream parties on Europe. All three are in favour of the EU, but keeping a watchful eye over the development of the UK’s right of influence. They just sell this same policy to different ‘voter markets’. While we are enthusiastic but with reservations, the Tories are sceptical but with reluctant involvement, and express their scepticism by teaming up with neo-Nazis in the European Parliament.

If people really don’t want Britain to be in the EU, they should be voting Ukip. Ukip’s arguments are fatuously simplistic and have little basis in fact, but at least the party is clear that it would take Britain out of the EU. Therefore, any voter for whom Europe is a big issue should go either for the Lib Dems or Ukip – not the Conservatives, for whom Europe is one big and dangerous fudge.

STRCTLY COME OFF IT!

2009-11-02T02:30:00.000-08:00

This is a truly terrible time for sensible decisions to be made – and you only have to watch the current series of Strictly Come Dancing to see why.

Twice in the last couple of weeks we have had the government ignoring advice from experts and doing the opposite of what they recommend. First, the education secretary Ed Balls dismissed the Cambridge Academic Review’s recommendation that formal learning in primary schools shouldn’t begin until children are at least six, and then the health secretary Alan Johnson’s sacked Professor David Nutt after rejecting his advice on criminalisation of cannabis and ecstasy.

The common factor in both decisions is that the government wanted to look tough, and was willing to ignore advice on what would work best. With a general election no more than seven months away, it figured there were more votes to be won in making it look like it was getting kids doing ‘proper work’ earlier rather than playing, and in making it look like it was tackling drug abuse.

The reason for this is that many voters – especially many floating voters in the constituencies that will decide the next election – judge the issues emotionally rather than on the basis of information. And if you doubt this, look no further than the current series of Strictly Come Dancing.

For the benefit of those with lives on Saturday nights, the ‘Strictly’ format is simple. A group of ‘celebrities’ (the quote marks are obligatory this series) are paired up with a professional dancer and have to prepare short dances which are judged by a panel of specialist adjudicators.

Then the public is allowed to vote by phone. That’s when all reason goes out of the window, because the public clearly votes on the basis of emotion which has nothing to do with the issue at hand: the ability – or lack of it – to dance.

How else can one explain the survival of Craig Kelly, the Coronation Street actor who is utterly wooden in his body movements and thinks he’s smiling when he clearly isn’t? He has been pilloried by the judges, but he has survived at the expense of other contestants who have done much better on the dance floor. Why? Because Craig has an immense following among Coronation Street viewers.

That’s why Ed Balls dismissed the Cambridge paper on primary school learning before he or his staff had even read it, and why Alan Johnson fired Professor Nutt. The emotions of the voters were more important than what might be best for society. No wonder politics has a bad name!

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not opposing the principle that when you ask for advice you have the right to reject it. In all walks of life, we need to take responsibility for our own decisions, even if that means saying to a friend ‘Thanks for your advice, but I’ve weighed it up and on this occasion am doing the opposite.’

But if you’re a government minister who has spent thousands of pounds of public money on specialist advice, and you then reject it because it doesn’t fit with what your focus groups say voters will go for, then you must expect the kind of backlash Johnson is facing this week. It’s another version of bringing politics into disrepute, and I hope voters will see it as that, come the general election.

LET’S HAVE A GREAT TIME – WITHOUT MUCH ALCOHOL

2009-10-21T10:53:00.000-07:00

You want to have a good time? Yes, so do I. Like most people in this country, when I go out, I like to enjoy myself. But unlike many people, there’s one ingredient I like but don’t need – alcohol.

What is it about people that they feel they have to drink to have a good time? Why is it that when people talk about going to a party, there is an implicit assumption that they will get smashed and have a hangover the following morning?

It may all seem pretty harmless, with any damage being largely done to the self-inflicter. But consider this.

Recently it emerged that the number of people landing in accident & emergency wards in East Sussex for alcohol-related reasons had increased by 131 per cent in the last six years. In 2007-08, there were 6,064 alcohol-related admissions in Brighton, East Sussex Downs and Weald PCTs.

It was only in 2002-03 that statistics on alcohol-related admissions in the county began to be collected. In the first year there were 2,624, a figure that has risen every year to make for a six-year total of 24,520. Of these, 729 have been people under 18 years old, and that age group is rising too.

These statistics are truly alarming. And at a time when there’s precious little money in public coffers for essentials, why is the NHS having to spend money dealing with a problem that is largely avoidable?

It certainly is avoidable. I know of a case in which a woman was convinced her gin & tonic at 6pm was the key to letting go and enjoying herself. So one day her daughter gave her tonic without the gin at 6pm – and she still got drunk! In other words, it doesn’t take alcohol, only the belief that it’s OK to have a good time.

It’s easy to blame retailers for selling alcohol to under-age buyers, but let’s face it, if young people want alcohol, they’ll get hold of it somehow.

It would also be wrong to overreact and try to make alcohol the demon, when millions of people drink in moderation and get great enjoyment out of it. I especially enjoy locally produced drinks, such as a half-pint of Harvey’s, or a glass of organic wine from a Sussex vineyard.

No, alcohol isn’t the demon – it’s our attitude as a society towards it. It’s enjoyable and can take the edge off us, but we don’t need it, and certainly shouldn’t have so much that we suffer and make others suffer for our indulgence.

We’ve largely got the message when it comes to drinking and driving. Now we need to get the message that it’s OK to say no even when we’re not driving – and that it’s possible to have a great time without a hangover, let alone a hospital visit.

WE NEED IMAGINATIVE WAYS OF TACKLING LITTER LOUTS

2009-10-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

Now here’s an idea. When you go into a takeaway food outlet, you should be charged a deposit on your cups, plates or burger boxes. You then take them back after you’ve finished your meal to get your money back.

The idea works with glass bottles, so why shouldn’t it work with disposal one-use receptacles? And why on earth am I asking this now?

Here in Wealden, rubbish is back in the news. In Hailsham in recent weeks, there has been a lot of talk about whose responsibility it is to keep the town centre clean, particularly litter-free. And last month Wealden District Council launched ‘a crackdown on litter hot spots in Wealden’, with a news release saying the council’s Street Scene teams will be ‘getting tough on litter louts after an increase in the number of litter hot spots’ in Crowborough, Hailsham, Heathfield and Uckfield.

I suppose it’s just unfortunate that the post of Street Scene Team Leader has been vacant since mid-July. It did rather make me wonder whether someone in the controlling group on Wealden District Council has said, “Look fellas, we know tackling litter is popular among the public, so let’s say we’ll launch a crackdown, even if there’s not much we can do.”

That's probably being too cynical, but let’s be clear about one thing. Litter is a big problem, costing us far too much, locally and nationally. But efforts to collect litter in our towns and villages, while part of the solution, can only deal with the symptoms. If we’re seriously going to tackle the problem, we need to get inside people’s heads about why they drop litter.

Because the fact is that far too many people think it’s entirely acceptable to drop whatever they’ve finished with wherever they’re standing, sitting or walking.

Only last week I was coming out of Uckfield Civic Centre and saw three youths walking across the grass. One of them was just finishing his McDonald’s drink, and after the last mouthful he tossed the cup into the air and let it drop on the ground behind him before walking off. I wish I’d been close enough to have told him he’d dropped something – I don’t know what response I’d have got, but it might have made him think.

And this week I was on the train, and found a used plaster left on one of the seats! By what moral compass is this acceptable behaviour?

Wealden’s news release quotes lead environment councillor Sylvia Tidy (there’s a name to match the task) as saying, “It is time we turned up the heat on people who idly toss litter from their cars, sweet papers on to the high street or throw cigarette ends on to the pavement.” And what heat is this? – £75 spot fines.

That might catch some people, but it won’t ultimately solve the problem. And it’s a stick, not a carrot. A much better approach would be my deposit idea. Anyone who dropped litter then would find some enterprising youngster picking it up to claim the deposit.

So much for incentives, but we must also try to tackle the ‘acceptability’ of dropping litter in many people’s minds. Two decades ago, a series of public information films turned drink-driving from a harmless peccadillo into an activity recognised as being a killer. The same could happen now with litter.

Of course that would have to be a government initiative. At local level we need to get into schools, not to tell children not to drop litter – they know that – but to explain what damage is done when you do. Show them films of a duck in agony after getting a piece of discarded plastic stuck round its beak.

We have to pick up litter, if only because a street with lots of litter will spawn even more litter. But if we’re serious about tackling the problem, we have to be more creative than just a couple of £75 spot fines.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT GETS POLITICIANS A BAD NAME!

2009-09-15T03:47:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought some lessons might have been learned from the MPs' expenses scandal, we get a crass piece of politicking that will make people even more sick of politics than they are already.

This week, the Conservatives' spokesperson for communities and local government, Caroline Spelman, sent a letter to Conservative 'colleagues' (leaders of Tory-controlled councils, basically), telling them what an in-coming Conservative government would do on planning issues and giving them some advice on what to do with regional planning over the next few months. And for good measure she made sure the letter reached a far wider audience, including (indirectly) the likes of me.

Now let's be fair here. I am not having a go at Caroline Spelman for her inability to tell the difference between a nanny and a secretary; you may recall at the height of the expenses scandal that she was found to have been paying a nanny out of public funds while calling it secretarial work. That left a bad taste in the mouth, but she's been moved from party chairman to this new role, and she's entitled to start with a clean slate.

Nor do I disagree with everything the Conservatives are proposing to review, as I believe the regional spatial strategies are flawed and should be reviewed in some shape or form.

What I am objecting to is the cavalier approach she takes to guidance from central government simply because it's not a government of her party. She is effectively asking Conservative councils - well, any councils really - to disregard what the government is asking them to do, and play for time so they can be rescued by a new Conservative administration sometime next spring.

Leaving aside the fact that I'm not entirely sure a Conservative government would abolish the house-building targets in the regional spatial strategies - after all, does the Tory party receive no contributions from developers, who would want their pound of flesh if the colour of the governing party changes? - this is tantamount to making Britain ungovernable!

We have an elected government, and however much we dislike that government, or find the system by which it is elected unfair and unrepresentative, it is the government. So when it orders councils like Wealden District Council to undertake a consultation on where future housebuilding should be concentrated, who is Caroline Spelman to say 'Oh, just play for time, we'll write it all off when we come to power'? She's effectively wasting the taxpayers' money that Wealden is spending on its consultation.

It's cynical - and hypocritical, as she would be spitting blood if non-Tory councils adopted the same approach if her party were in power.

However flawed the South East Plan is, we will have to have a certain amount of house-building to avoid serious social problems. Even the Conservatives signed up to 8000 houses for Wealden by 2026; the figure has since been raised to 11,000. Of course we must fight to protect the integrity of rural life, but that integrity will not be upheld by figures who want to be entrusted with power telling councils to ignore the will of our elected government.

Once again, I find myself wondering just how fit the Conservatives actually are to run the country.

LOOKING AT THE RICH IS NO BASIS FOR BUILDING A NATIONAL MEDICAL SERVICE

2009-08-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

Have you ever experienced one of those moments when you feel like utterly railing against something or someone? They’ve let you down, they’ve treated you badly, and you’re determined to do what you can to draw the flaws of the whole system to as many people as you can?

I have, and there’s a fine line to tread between, on the one hand, acting on a natural – and often legitimate – sense of injustice, and on the other, being aware that mishaps happen in life and one’s own indignation isn’t always the best guide to social injustice.

There’s a debate raging in the USA about reforming the system of medical care. The only headlines it has made over here came when Daniel Hannan, the Conservative MEP and supposedly a rising star of the party, described the NHS in an American TV debate as ‘a terrible mistake’ which we have lived through for 60 years.

I don’t know what Dan Hannan’s experiences of the NHS are. I can only assume he’s had some bad ones, and in this he’s not alone. But can anyone really justify calling the NHS a 60-year mistake?

He also said the NHS ‘makes people iller’. What, everyone? A majority even?

I sometimes get frustrated with the NHS, and in my more cynical moments feel it should be called the National Sickness Service, because by and large it only wants to know you if you’re sick. I wish it concentrated more on ‘health’ and did more preventative work like its excellent babies/toddlers health visitor service, and its many screening programmes, but is that sufficient ground for calling it a 60-year mistake?

There are two indisputable facts about the British system compared with the American. Firstly, the average person is better off under the NHS than in America. The NHS is geared up for catching everyone, regardless of circumstances – you don’t find poor people here having to hold fund-raising events to pay for operations, as frequently happens in the USA.

Secondly, we pay only 8.4% of GDP on healthcare, compared to the 16% of GDP spent by Americans, and all like-for-like comparisons show the NHS as better than the sum total of American medical care. Because we pay for the NHS through our taxes, the cost is spread across the entire country and so isn’t nearly the burden that insurance is for Americans.

What Hannan has done is to compare the medical care the rich of America get with the medical care the rich of Britain get. On that comparison, I wouldn’t be surprised if the US system comes out better. But that’s not the basis on which I want to build a national medical insurance system, thank you.

And this lies at the heart of why the Conservatives still haven’t won people round to the idea that they would be a more benign government than they were in the 1990s. Personally I think David Cameron is a fundamentally decent guy, but he has some nasty people in his cabinet, and Dan Hannan’s outburst merely shows how difficult it is for a Conservative leopard genuinely to change its spots.

PUBS NEED HELP, NOT THE GLASS KNOCKED OUT OF THEIR HAND

2009-07-21T07:32:00.000-07:00

A feature of battles between Liberal Democrats and Conservatives is that both try to claim they are better guardians of rural areas than the other. Both have large support out in the sticks, and thus speak from a position of strength, even if they represent different interests and policies.

So why on earth were Tory MPs last week voting against a plan to scrap the alcohol tax escalator? This was a measure that would have given a boost to the country pub, that staple of rural (and urban) life that was struggling even before the credit crunch knocked the glass out of its hand.

The pub has been hit by a double-whammy of people having less money to spend on non-essentials, and the ban on smoking in public places.

The smoking ban is an improvement that would have come sooner or later anyway, but one of its side-effects has been to endanger the life of the local pub – it has made pubs nicer places to drink in but has left many with fewer drinkers enjoying these nicer places. Nationwide, more than 2000 pubs have closed in the past year, while beer sales dropped by 8.2% in the first quarter of 2009.

And it’s likely to get worse, after the Chancellor introduced the alcohol tax escalator in his budget – a measure which sees alcohol duty go up 2% above inflation every year.

So a group of Lib Dem MPs tabled a motion calling for the escalator to be dropped. It was supported by 62 MPs, 49 of them Lib Dems. It was opposed by 311 MPs, almost all of them Labour and Conservative.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not calling for people to drink more alcohol. Much havoc has been wrought by people drinking too much and at inappropriate times, and the ‘everything in moderation’ philosophy applies to drinking. But pubs are part of the fabric of community life, often bringing people together in ways that might not otherwise happen, especially since the demise of village shops and community facilities.

Tax escalators are good if your idea is to wean people’s dependence off something. But if we want to wean people off pubs, then we will be left with a pub-less landscape. That’s not something I want to see.

HAVE THE CONSERVATIVES LEARNED NOTHING FROM THE EXPENSES SCANDAL?

2009-06-25T06:06:00.000-07:00

The most repugnant element of John Bercow’s election as Speaker of the House of Commons was the way in which many Conservative MPs were so unmagnanimous about it, and even talked about him being ousted if the Tories have a majority after the next election.

It’s blatantly wrong to judge someone before they’ve had even a day in office. In addition, the Speaker is a neutral figure who should command respect from all parties. But most importantly, such a grudging, even parsimonious response to a victory that was as hard-fought as any constituency election shows that the Conservatives have not learned a thing from the public’s indignation about the expenses scandal.

Of course, when a Parliament with a Labour majority (yes, there’s still a Labour majority in Parliament in case you’d forgotten) votes for a Conservative MP to be Speaker, you know it won’t be a dyed-in-the-wool Tory. But that’s precisely the point! John Bercow has been elected because he has shown he understands points of view that go beyond the boundaries of his own party.

What the British public has been screaming for is a politics that reflects the reality in their own lives. That reality is that you have to make do with increasingly tight budgets, and that you have to find areas of compromise.

By contrast, our politics has become a parliamentary bubble in which members think it’s OK to claim for everything that moves (or flows, in the cast of moats). By doing so, MPs have got themselves and this country’s democratic traditions into deep water. So the election of a new Speaker became a signal of whether the Westminster village was willing to think outside its own bubble – and in the election of John Bercow, it showed it was.

I have no idea how good a Speaker Bercow will be, but in the current circumstances the election of a man who has clearly modified his convictions on the basis of experience and listening to other people’s points of view is a good sign. And if he’s too far to the left for many Tories, that is precisely what makes him a Speaker in whom many of us can have some hope.

I understand he has a manner that can alienate as much as attract, but the man deserves a chance. And if the Conservatives can’t accept that a 46-year-old Speaker who has some ideas of his own might be good for British parliamentary democracy, it makes you wonder how fit they are to be the party of government.

FEEL THE ANGER, BUT DON’T SHOOT THE LOCAL GUY WHO CAN HELP

2009-05-22T04:27:00.001-07:00

There’s nothing like spending three hours putting leaflets through people’s doors to give you a perspective on what politics really is.

In the current angry – perhaps even hysterical? – climate, it would be easy to think that politics is rotten to the core. But it isn’t. Do you remember those ‘Love is ...’ cartoons that had as many answers as people wanted to think up? Well let me paraphrase.

Politics is:

· Bleeding knuckles from dropping leaflets through metal letterboxes

· High blood pressure from having dogs threatening to bite your fingers off

· Low self-esteem from being the recipient of people’s anger for all sorts of reasons nothing to do with you

· Finding the wallet is empty because the party has asked for yet another donation to funds campaigning work

· That look in one’s partner’s eye that says ‘You said you’d be home an hour and a half ago’ when you get back from yet another meeting.

And many more – all because you believe in something enough to be willing to go out and put your money (and the skin of your knuckles) where your mouth is.

Normally when I go from door-to-door asking people if the Liberal Democrats can count on their vote at the forthcoming election, I listen and don’t generally challenge what people tell me – it’s like a surgery on foot. But I have become, not aggressive but politely assertive when people say, as they do at lot at present, ‘Oh you politicians are all as bad as each other.’

What I don’t say – though often want to – is that there are very few people who have a totally clean record on their expenses, and that those who do should be the ones to cast the first stone. Many people – waiters, hairdressers, even my own profession of journalists – have been caught up unwillingly in a system that underpays but has a tacit acceptance that income can be topped up by ‘expenses’ claims, so it would be wrong to assume that MPs are all bad apples because they too have got caught up in it (a system largely instigated incidentally by Margaret Thatcher).

The anger people feel about MPs’ expenses is totally understandable. But it is a travesty of justice to take it out on their lay councillors and council candidates (unless they have done something illegal or unethical). So I say to people on the doorsteps: ‘I understand your anger, but surely you’re not going to let the goings-on at Westminster stop you saying who should represent you in filling in the potholes in your road and making sure your council tax is well spent, are you?’

Whether I get through to them will only become clear after 4 June. But I urge every voter in the forthcoming county council elections to vote – and to vote on local issues. If we get a turnout that’s higher than Westminster, that will send the signal that people do believe in democracy – it just has to be a fair, representative and clean one.

A KICK IN THE TEETH FOR HARD-WORKING COUNCILLORS

2009-05-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

I had to laugh. “Vote for change!” said David Cameron, launching the Conservative Party’s county council election campaign this week. Er, has no-one told him that his party holds 19 of the 27 shire counties of England and Wales up for election?

Like East Sussex, for example. I’d be happy for people to follow Cameron’s example and vote for change. Get the Conservatives out of County Hall in Lewes where they’ve inflicted enough damage for the past eight years.

But this column isn’t actually an attack on the Conservatives. David Cameron is just the latest national figure to have put party tactics before the realities of local government, and thereby to have kicked in the teeth the thousands of lay councillors up and down the country – councillors of all parties – who put in loads of time for little thanks.

Think about it. If our democracy is to function, if we’re to have real people making decisions on behalf of their communities rather than faceless Whitehall mandarins, people need to volunteer to be councillors. Most councillors are members of a party, though many of them aren’t ideologically attached to their party – it can be a convenience thing, or even a reflection of who most of their friends are. When the friends of a community-spirited individual ask “Why don’t you stand for the council?”, the party label is often just that – a label.

And so, thousands of councillors spend lots of time doing good work, often in amicable cooperation with councillors of other parties, and at the end of their term of office ask the voters to approve the work they’ve done by giving them another term. Except that then national figures jump in and hijack the whole process, asking people not to recognise the hard work done by councillors but to use the election as a stick with which to beat a rival at national level.

I have seen countless good councillors put in four solid years, and then lose their seats, not because the voters are ungrateful (though they frequently are), but because a party is going through an unpopular phase. It can be heartbreaking, and a real turn-off to those considering whether to stand.

So when I hear David Cameron asking people to “vote for change”, knowing full well that he means change in Downing Street, it makes me very angry. How dare he make the hard work of county councillors – for it’s mostly county councillors who are up for election next month – a pawn in his battle with Gordon Brown! These elections have nothing to do with Brown, nor with Cameron, but with local issues.

I would like to see the Conservatives lose control of East Sussex, because I believe they are leading us in the wrong direction on vital issues such as waste disposal and transport, and frequently have their priorities wrong. For those reasons I hope voters vote Liberal Democrat, but I would never dream of degrading the work put in by our four dozen county councillors over the past four years by saying people should vote on national issues. That is an insult to them, and to our democracy.

I hope it backfires on David Cameron – either by people voting for the change he doesn’t want, or by Labour being so crushed that they get rid of Gordon Brown in favour of a more electable leader and the Tories find they’re not such a shoo-in for election next year as they thought.

METHADONE PROGRAMME FOR ADDICTED CAR MAKERS

2009-04-22T10:49:00.001-07:00

Credit where it's due. The government's attempt to set price signals - through taxes and charges - to encourage environmentally beneficial behaviour is correct, if long overdue.

If we're to retain many of our freedoms but still take the environment seriously, we have to make sure the prices of things reflect the true price, which includes the cost to the environment. If a product or an activity has an environmental cost, that has to be paid for by the user - simple economics really. And we have to move towards a situation in which doing the right thing is also the cheapest and/or easiest thing.

But the idea that offering motorists £2000 to scrap an old vehicle and buy a new one is not, repeat not an environmental measure. Nor is the idea that it has been successful in Germany a comment that should go unchallenged.

It's not an environmental measure for two reasons. Firstly, around 20 per cent of the energy used by a car in its lifetime comes in its manufacture, a factor seldom taken into account when emissions from old vehicles are compared with emissions from new. There's also the waste problem of disposing of even larger numbers of used vehicles.

Secondly, much less progress has been made on emissions reduction than the car makers would have us believe. A study in 2008 showed a Volkswagen Beetle now is no more fuel-efficient than a Beetle made 60 years ago. The car makers held out scandalously against EU efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the average new car to 120g per kilometre, saying it was technically not feasible when several makers were already doing it! What they meant was that they make greater profits on the bigger gas guzzlers. Regrettably the Commission and member state governments fell for it.

The 'scrappage' payments in Germany (they offer €2500, very close to Alistair Darling's £2000) have been a success in terms of a massive take-up, so successful that the government has exhausted the money it put aside and has been forced to make more available. It's like a drug German car buyers have become addicted to in a very short space of time.

A central argument made in all this is that the car industry is central to our economic well-being. But it isn't! We have learned - for cost and environmental reasons - to treat electricity, gas, oil and other sources of energy as something we need to use as little as possible of. We should view transport the same way - some is needed, some is even desirable, but the sign of a well managed and efficient economy is that we use no more than is necessary.

Imagine offering state subsidies to encourage people to use more fuel than necessary to heat their homes - it would be laughed out of the political arena! So why is offering state subsidies to boost an industry whose dependence we should be weaning ourselves off any different?

These £2000 payments are like a financial methadone programme for addicted car makers.

WE NEED A SHIFT IN FOREIGN POLICY TO MAKE BRITAIN SAFER

2009-04-09T09:18:00.000-07:00

They say in areas of the world like America and the Middle East that foreign policy is an integral part of home affairs policy, as it affects basic national security. I sense that’s becoming the case here too.

While it’s right that we should never cave in to terrorism, we always have to ask whether there is a legitimate claim behind terrorist activity. And if that legitimate claim is being thwarted, then that will feed terrorism.

The Middle East is an area of the world which has an increasing impact on how safe and secure we feel in Britain. Britain played in a part in the current grim state of affairs. OK, our biggest blunder was 92 years ago when the Sykes-Picot agreement totally betrayed the indigenous Arabs, and today’s politicians shouldn’t be blamed for that. But we can play a part in building a peace that would strengthen our own security.

One of the major lessons to learn from relatively successful peace settlements such as Northern Ireland and South Africa is the role of forgiveness. People who were bitter to the core about having lost friends and relatives had to put aside their understandable wish for vengeance in the interests of long-term peace. And that has to happen now in the Middle East.

I was recently listening to Paddy Ashdown, who, as well as being the former LibDem leader, is one of this country’s leading foreign affairs analysts. He said the problem Israel has is that it has yet to learn that it must deal with and make peace with its neighbours, however abhorrent it finds them. If it doesn’t, it will never know peace for itself and will endanger the safety of others.

I have a natural affinity with Israel. While not Jewish myself, some of my ancestors were, in fact I lost great aunts and great uncles in the concentration camps and have relatives today in Israel. I therefore like to feel I understand some of the pain and anger that still lingers in Israeli citizens.

But that’s no reason to turn a blind eye to some of Israel’s atrocities – and yes I mean ‘atrocities’ – in the occupied territories. And I fear those atrocities could continue with the new Israeli government.

We need to use our powers of persuasion – such as they are – to encourage the state of Israel that it must deal with its neighbours, including the hated Hamas. Hamas is a dangerous body, but it has been fuelled by the failure of past statesmen to address legitimate concerns. With the White House now in the hands of someone who seems to understand world affairs, we have the chance to put pressure on Israel, in a way that the Blair-Bush alliance miserably failed to.

Criticising the actions of the Israeli government is not anti-Semitic. I am British and pro-British, but still criticise the British government. So I can be pro-Israeli but still criticise Israeli action. If our foreign policy can be directed at persuading Israel to be more forgiving, we might reduce the extremism that fuelled the July 2005 London bombings and make our own country a little safer.

LET’S GET OUR PRIORITIES RIGHT – CIVIL LIBERTIES ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN JACQUI SMITH’S EXPENSES

2009-03-31T06:13:00.000-07:00

I’m not a fan of swimming against the tide, because it’s an energy-intensive pastime and in politics you have to take people with you if you’re going to be effective. But I can’t help thinking we’ve all got rather too hysterical about MPs’ pay and expenses in recent days.

I don’t wish to exonerate Jacqui Smith, Tony McNulty or any other MPs who have submitted dubious expenses claims. There are bad apples in every barrel, and I don’t know whether they count as bad apples or not – we have a parliamentary standards commissioner to judge that. What I do know is that being an MP is a fiendishly difficult job, and that people need to understand that before they condemn MPs for what they earn and claim.

When you’re an MP, your life is barely your own. You’re expected to be on call pretty much the whole time, you’re every move is monitored, you can’t even get irritated with an overzealous parking attendant without someone seeing it and citing it as a bad example of how to behave. The hours are long, job security uncertain, and the privacy virtually non-existent, to the point where it can drag in innocent victims like an MP’s partner and children.

It’s better for those in the south-east, because they spend less time travelling than those from further afield, but it’s hardly surprising many spouses end up working for their other halves – it may be the only time they see each other! I’ve never met an MP of any party who hasn’t had moments of wondering whether it’s all worthwhile, nor a parliamentary candidate who hasn’t questioned whether he/she is a mug for standing (this mug included).

You may say it’s a voluntary profession that one doesn’t have to apply for. But many people go into politics to do some good and are then sucked into an artificial world where the original aim gets lost in the mire of political mechanisms. So if they’re paid £63,000 a year and are allowed to claim some expenses, is the system really at fault, just because a few people abuse it and one prominent MP’s husband watches a couple ‘adult’ films?

Of course we could pay MPs the average salary of around £30,000. But then a lot of good people will decide it just isn’t worth the hassle, we’ll end up with a worse House of Commons intake, and we’ll be moaning about the quality of our politicians even more than we do at present. Do we really want that?

I’m not saying nothing should be reformed. MPs must stick to the letter and spirit of the rules, and the idea that MPs with London constituencies should have second-home allowances is ridiculous and open to abuse.

But let’s get our priorities right. Most MPs are clean, and paid less than their counterparts in other countries (and MEPs). And if we’re going to have a go at Jacqui Smith, it’s much more important to condemn her actions over holding suspects without charge, ID cards and other threats to our civil liberties than whether she’s signed an expenses claim that includes a couple of films her husband watched that we wouldn’t want our children seeing.

WHY HAS SUCH AN AWFUL DECISION BEEN ALLOWED TO HAPPEN?

2009-03-24T03:55:00.000-07:00

When a decision is made that seems so utterly mind-numbingly wrong, it’s always good to ask – as dispassionately as possible – why it was made. After all, if it was that wrong, why couldn’t everyone have seen it?

I find myself in this position over the fact that the incinerator in Newhaven that will soon burn much of the county’s rubbish has finally got the go-ahead. This is a quite appalling decision, which is no better for the fact that we have had several months to steel ourselves for it.

Although Newhaven is not in Wealden, Wealden is most assuredly affected by the incinerator. This is both in environmental terms (lorries thundering through carrying hazardous waste, airborne pollutants being blown north, etc) and through the cost that will affect every council tax payer in East Sussex (the latest estimate for the incinerator is £145 million – more than double the original figure).

The list of reasons against it runs to much more than I can write here. There is a better and more environmental option proposed and costed by the Liberal Democrats for dealing with the county’s waste, the county council’s contract with its waste management company seems likely to limit the incentives for recycling just when we need them most, the incinerator will be run on mains water despite being by the Ouse estuary, the waste will be brought in – and hazardous ‘bottom ash’ shipped out – by lorry, despite a railway line being right there ... the list is endless.

So why is it happening? The answer appears to be an old-fashioned belief among the county council officials who devised the incinerator scheme in the mid-1990s that a single waste contract with a high level of incineration offered a better way of getting rid of waste than a series of smaller-scale solutions. Add to that a handful of lead county councillors who never grew up with the environmental threat and thus saw waste disposal purely as ‘the right mechanics for the right price’ and it’s easy to see why incineration seemed attractive. If you then put several years’ work into a project and fear it coming to nothing just as we’re threatened with punitive fines for missing landfill reduction targets, it is understandable you should want to salvage it.

That’s why I don’t condemn the Conservatives who run County Hall for incompetence. But they can be legitimately attacked on two fronts:

Firstly, they were anti-democratic over the whole planning and consultation process by riding roughshod over 16,000 legitimate objections (yes, 16,000!). Secondly, they have been gutless in the face of changing realities that should have told them to seek other options for waste disposal – even the Tory-controlled West Sussex County Council has now abandoned incineration, so it’s hardly an issue of political ideology.

We need a shake-up at County Hall! And that shake-up can happen on 4 June when elections to the county council take place. Even those in the Conservative heartlands of north Wealden and much of Rother should be as alarmed about the incinerator as the poor souls of Newhaven, albeit for different reasons. We all need to send a warning shot across the bows of the county Tories that we need to face down the environmental threat, not add to it.

THE ISSUE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE POLITICAL CLASSES

2009-03-11T05:54:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if it counts as self-fulfilling prophecy or built-in flaw, but my blog last week appears to have made worse the very thing I was trying to avoid!

I was trying to warn against the dangers of the political classes getting so consumed with their own personal battles that they overlook the problems they’re supposed to be tackling. By saying this in relation to the provision of youth facilities in Hailsham, I’ve rather reinforced the point, though take no satisfaction from it.

As the prospective LibDem candidate for the next general election, should I be aware of every detail of an internal row that took place over six years ago? Perhaps I should, though I felt that would mean looking back rather than forward, if not be a form of navel gazing.

But clearly feelings still run deep from ructions dating back to 2002. So deep that when I put out a press release asking the county council’s senior official in charge of youth affairs what he’s planning to do to address the fact that the county has closed two youth facilities in Hailsham, it reignites passions to such an extent that, instead of supporting the call, certain people felt the need to accuse me of ‘misinformation and scaremongering’ when I was clearly doing no such thing. That is very sad, and I can’t help feeling it fails the youth of Hailsham.

A point I made in last week’s blog is that I think the work of Hailsham Town Council, including that of Ian Haffenden and Nick Ellwood, on youth facilities is good. I’ve spoken to Laura Murphy about this, and she agrees. She has also acknowledged that her original fears from 10 years ago about the town council taking over 1 Market Square have proved groundless, though she says it was something of an act of faith given that the council had no previous experience in purchasing and running such a facility. In view of the duties on councillors to exercise due diligence, I find her original doubts understandable – even if I can’t judge whether I would have shared them or not – and it’s good she’s willing to acknowledge that it’s worked out well.

I realise that disputes can cause a lot of resentment, and who am I to say that people should let bygones be bygones when they may feel very hurt by things that happened? But is this a reason to sabotage a call for the county council to explain what it intends to do with regard to replacing the youth club at Hailsham School and the young persons’ area at Hailsham East Community College? Surely not.

I hope everyone who has the interests of the youth of Hailsham at heart is as concerned as I am that these facilities have been lost, and that all the head of children’s services at ESCC can say is that he’s ‘listening’ (he may have said more, but unfortunately he hasn’t had the courtesy to reply to my letter). I hope also that we’re not going to be seduced by the £800,000 promised by the county council until we know how much, if any, will go to Hailsham.

These are the problems we should be tackling. Not everyone may wish to work with everyone else – irrespective of what party (or none) they belong to – but we shouldn’t work against the best interests of positive action.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT GETS POLITICS A BAD NAME!

2009-03-03T13:51:00.000-08:00

Something has happened in Hailsham this past week that highlights exactly what is wrong with politics nationwide.

One of the growing problems in Hailsham is the amount of ‘low-level’ crime involving young people that’s making life a misery for many residents. The fact that in the past two years we have lost the youth facility at the Hailsham East Community Centre and the Hailsham Youth Club at the community college is no coincidence.

So I wrote to Matt Dunkley, the head of children’s services at the county council, asking what plans he had to tackle the issue of youth facilities. To put a little pressure on him to come up with something meaningful, I put out a press release saying I’d written to him and making the point that doing nothing was not an option.

I wasn’t born yesterday so didn’t expect this to achieve great results on its own – it was aimed at creating some momentum. What I also didn’t expect was a vehemently angry reaction by two leading members of Hailsham Town Council, Ian Haffenden and Nick Ellwood. They put out a counter-release accusing me and one of our Hailsham county council candidates of ‘misinformation’. Well I wish it was misinformation, because then we’d still have the two youth facilities that have most assuredly disappeared!

I have a problem here. One of the central planks of my involvement in politics is that I want to work towards better politics. The idea that ‘our side’ has everything right and ‘the other side’ has got everything wrong is a nonsense. When we discuss problems in groups, we work towards solutions, not towards being able to say with righteous indignation ‘they’ve got it wrong’. It should be the same in politics.

I believe those who have lost faith in politics as a means of good governance have become disillusioned with the bickering, point-scoring, playground mentality that characterises Prime Minister’s Questions. They want people of different persuasions to work together to find solutions.

So how should I react to Messrs Haffenden and Ellwood? I’m aware they’re former LibDems who don’t hold much of a candle for their erstwhile colleagues, but I wasn’t around when they left, so I start from scratch with them. I’m also aware they have been doing their own work on the youth issue through Hailsham Town Council, which is good.

But they have put out what by any standards is a spoiling press release, which has led to the story being reported in the local press NOT as a call for improved youth facilities in Hailsham but as a spat between two warring political factions? It has made me very angry, but if I say that, am I engaging in exactly the kind of slanging match that drives people away from politics and keeps voting rates dangerously low? That’s my dilemma on this.

Mr Dunkley’s response to my letter – delivered incidentally to the media rather than to me – was that the county council is ‘listening’. This is OK-ish, but doesn’t go nearly far enough. We need more youth facilities in Hailsham – not an excessive amount so we spoon-feed teenagers, but more than we have now. All of us have a role to play, but we must fight the problem, not each other.

CAN WE REALLY BE SERIOUS ABOUT THE UCKFIELD-LEWES LINE?

2009-02-19T08:25:00.000-08:00

Do you ever wonder what people in the future will make of our life today? We find it amazing now that our ancestors could have taken so long to abolish slavery, or to give women the vote. So imagine a history lesson in about 100 years’ time – what will gobsmack them about our life?

One of the things local historians will scratch their heads about is why the Uckfield to Lewes railway line was ever closed, and why it took so long to re-open it. I’m willing to be forgiving about the way it was closed – true, you could describe it as a form of authorised vandalism, but you have to take into account the climate of the time (1969). People thought railways were old hat and being superseded by the car, so if a money-losing railway line got in the way of a new road (in this case the Phoenix Causeway in Lewes), well you closed the railway, didn’t you!

But for the past 20 years, if not many more, we have known that railways hold the key to allowing us to get from A to B without further damaging the planet or congesting our roads. They represent a good option environmentally and practically, and those two arguments increase in validity with every new house that’s built in the Wealden area.

And not just Wealden. Can we really be serious that the whole of the south coast from Hastings to Littlehampton should be served by a single twin-track rail route from London? It sounds ludicrous, but that’s what we’ve got. And that’s what the re-opened Uckfield-Lewes line would eradicate.

This is not the place to look at why the line hasn’t been re-opened, but I find it a disgrace that a Labour government has not backed rail in this case, and some prominent people will have to eat humble pie when the line re-opens. For re-open it will, because re-open it must. And when it does, people will look back in astonishment at how long it took to re-open it and how some of the most valid arguments were tossed aside with fatuous counter-arguments.

On Monday a plaque commemorating the 150th anniversary of the line’s opening will be unveiled at Uckfield station. Let’s hope it will be start of the final push to end 40 years of mealy-mouthed ‘oh, I’m not sure it can really be done’ arguments and get the most obvious rail re-opening in Britain off the ground.

WHO DO YOU TRUST TO CAMPAIGN ON HOUSE BUILDING NUMBERS?

2009-02-10T09:01:00.000-08:00

They just don't understand, do they!

I've never been keen on a 'them & us' view of urban and rural people, because everyone likes their own mix of the urban and the rural in life, but you have to wonder sometimes just how much people in the office blocks of government really understand what life is like out in the sticks.

It took several decades for Whitehall's mandarins to realise that the policy of 'predict and provide' didn't work with roads. They thought that if you predicted the amount of traffic that would want to use the roads, you then just built the right amount of road capacity, and there you are. What they didn't realise is that the more roads you build, the more journeys you create, so you're always chasing your tail.

It's not exactly the same with house building, but pretty nearly. The government and its so-called economists (I say 'so-called' because some of them seem to be giving economics a very bad name with their fatuous assumptions) have realised that house prices are going up, and that there's greater demand for homes because of marriage breakdowns and twentysomethings wanting their own place earlier. So it says we must build the right amount of houses, and that will solve the problem.

So it comes up with all sorts of numbers, and says - among other things - that Wealden has to have 11,000 new homes by 2026! Eleven thousand! And it's not even guaranteeing the schools, shops, hospitals etc will also be around to make all these new homes part of viable communities. So they are building homes to house people who will have to drive everywhere in their cars to get their basic services. Great for the environment, eh!

In short it's madness, but then it was the urban majority who thought it was crazy that the government should spend so much money bailing out the farming industry when it suffered from foot-and-mouth a few years ago. Why should a sector responsible for just 3% of GDP receive so much money, the argument went.

I saw it differently. To me the scandal was that growing our own food makes up just 3% of GDP, not that the government should support it in its hour of need. And that summarises how much the conurbation mindset doesn't understand the countryside.

I'm pleased to see there is widespread support for an on-line petition calling for the government to review its house building target for Wealden, including from our MP Charles Hendry. But wait a moment.

It's easy for Charles Hendry to support this petition now, but if his party gets into government - which is a distinct possibility after the next general election - will he continue to back the call for revised targets? And if he does, will he get heard? The Conservative party won't get into office without some funding from private companies, and you can bet those companies will include developers who are dead set on getting their houses built.

I too am encouraging people to sign the petition (click on http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ProtectWealden), and if elected to Parliament I will also push for the house building targets to be revised sharply downwards. We don't want a complete absence of development or the area will stagnate, but it has to be at a level that the established community can reasonably absorb.

Just ask yourself before the general election - do you trust an MP whose party relies heavily on big business to stick to his promise on house building targets, or would you trust more an MP whose party has a root-and-branch understanding of the countryside and is not beholden to large developers?

Ends