I almost choked on my Earl Grey this morning when I read Danny Alexander’s piece in the New Statesman in which he suggested that there was much to cheer in George Osborne’s budget. I wondered if he had forgotten that May, you know, happened?
The reason we lost so many seats to the Tories is, at least in part, that the people who voted for us no longer felt that we represented their values, the sorts of values that had seen us stand up for freedom and social justice. Those people turned to the Greens and Labour. Yes, of course the Tory tactics over the SNP were relevant but we kind of stoked that by legitimising it.
We also made a great thing during the election campaign of talking about our opposition to the Tories’ £12 billion welfare cuts proposals, much of which we had stopped in government. Now Danny suggests that we shouldn’t go out of our way to oppose them in opposition:
Neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats should envisage a future as a sort of soggy Syriza in sandals. I don’t like some of the welfare reforms in the Budget, but to make it the political dividing line is to fail to recognise the views of most people.
I’m not sure that compromising your values in favour of a more populist approach is the right thing to do. Surely we should be setting some of the myths straight in a reasonable way. The Tories make out all benefits claimants to be feckless scroungers. If that narrative isn’t successfully challenged, the welfare state could end up being dismantled. Danny joked that the Ginger Rodent agreed with the woman who gave him that name, but it really isn’t anything to be proud of.
Danny talks about not being able to oppose things like the new non-doms rule which he devised. Fair enough – but the Finance Bill doesn’t come in bits. You can’t pick or choose. As a package, I think we should oppose it because the bad stuff outweighs the good by a massive margin.
Stephen Tall wrote last week that if we had been in coalition, we’d have been cheering the Budget. I don’t think so. Where I disagree with Stephen is that I don’t think that the Budget was “liberal enough.” In fact, the cuts to tax credits and benefits undermine a lot of what we have been trying to do in recent years to help disadvantaged kids. The cuts to tax relief for buy to let may well lead to a shrinking of that market and rents going up. So we are investing in helping disadvantaged kids in school while heaping yet more disadvantage up on them. It’s not easy to learn if you don’t have enough food in your tummy or you are living in poor, overcrowded housing.
That there may have been a few things in the Budget that didn’t give us apoplexy (and the increase in the tax threshold was virtually automatic anyway) does not make it good.
Danny’s article isn’t all bad, but what he has done is that every time our new leader gets up to oppose a cut to welfare, the minister will simply quote it at him. The “soggy Syriza” will become a mantra inflicted by one of our own. It’s not really a term that shows respect for the party, its members and traditions, either.
His conclusion is one which merits further debate within the party:
Ensuring that schools have the policies and resources to deliver rising standards for all children feels like a much more fertile argument for the next leader of the Liberal Democrats to lead. Picking fights over core liberal issues such as civil liberties and the environment, which the Conservatives seem intent on trashing, and speaking with the most authentically pro-Europe voice in the EU referendum, all underpinned by a responsible economic policy, seems like the best route for my party to follow.
There is an argument, though, that our economic policy has always been responsible. We’ve been obsessed with making things add up and be credible. Even way back in 1992, that penny on income tax for education was seen as almost dangerously radical by some while being very well received by the public. It’s about time we really let our values do the talking and not get so tied up in the detail. It hasn’t done the SNP any harm.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
