I saw this excellent video whizz passed on twitter, about the difference we are making, and will continue to make over the next four years, in government. Since twitter is so temporary, I wanted to make a more permanent note of it, and share it with a few more people. Enjoy.
Posts Tagged ‘Coalition’
The Lib Dems in Power
Monday, February 21st, 2011X Factor Government
Tuesday, December 28th, 2010This grauniad article had me in a small fit this morning. I shall quote from the unchanging print edition:
"The government is to follow the lead of the television programme The X Factor and allow the public to decide on legislation to be put before MPs."
EXCUSE ME?! The government is not going to try and make a profit by setting up a pay-per-vote system judging a pointless talent contest! Nor is the X Factor the first opportunity the British People have had to vote, which is something that’s been going on for a long time, started by…let me see… Elections! Sorry, but the government got there first again.
This is an important news story about procedure; it’s true the public have never had so much power over what parliamentary time is devoted to (a set of decisions hoarded by parliamentarians for too long) and that’s thanks to the new Liberal Principals guiding this coalition.
Don’t let the Guardian fool you; this isn’t a trivial New Labour gimmick but a serious increment in a set of constitutional reforms designed to make our government work better by being more accountable and democratic.
And so the pain begins
Monday, October 25th, 2010There is something important we should all bear in mind over the next few weeks as the coalition’s CSR is picked over. It will be shown to be fair and unfair, progressive and regressive, liberal and authoritarian, environmentalist and industrialist, no doubt. But remember that this is everyone’s plan. Both the governing parties and the official opposition proposed this, and that while there will be legitimate debate over detail, there is only one MP who stood on a genuinely alternative platform; Caroline Lucas.
The Labour party will be spinning the overall effect of this review as negative, ideological, unnecessary and insane, a rerun of the 1980s. There is one important difference between 2010 and 1979; the size of the deficit. In the 60s and 70s Labour had the courage to put up tax to pay for it’s policies; the deficit was only 4% of GDP by 1979, while now it is nearer 10%*. In contrast, Gordon Brown actually reduced income tax (22% to 20%), apart from those on very low incomes for whom it increased with the abolition of the 10p rate, while massively increasing spending. He half paid for some of the changes; charging students fees was one example, and he did reasonably well at raising petrol taxes to push people onto alternative fuels, although we all know how that ended (he put the cart before the horse; making petrol painfully expensive without providing a viable alternative first.)
New Labour were, in short, too cowardly to make people pay for their big state. Now I am no small statist, I defer to Einstein (“things should be as simple as possible, but no more,”) but big or small state you have to pay for it by taxing people. Labour hid their budgetary black hole in a huge gravitational well, that of the housing bubble, so that it only became detectable after the supernova had become a remnant. Alistair Darling’s plan (which lets be honest is the only thing Labour would have implemented in place of the Coalition’s plans) was slightly slower deficit reduction, but of the same order of magnitude (cut the whole deficit in 9 years, starting in year 2, rather than over 5 years starting in year 1.)
So, not only were Labour’s plans not that much different from the coalition’s, but they were also the principal cause of the fiscal crisis. Don’t let anyone tell you that the deficit is the fault of bankers, any more than the recession is the fault of the government. Booms and busts are a natural phenomenon, as Marx showed in his one piece of objective research, the best** we can do is save during the former and stimulate during the latter, and hope to mitigate the worst. The last government failed in a fundamental fiscal duty; to save during the boom. These cuts are the reversal of an unsustainable push, borrowed time as well as money, for an ineffective lame duck populist government that should have been ousted in 2001 following tuition fees and 2005 following Iraq.
The British people will have no problem kicking out this coalition in four and a half years, to replace it with god knows what, because it did the unpopular, difficult, unfair and right things.
The next time the Lib Dems get a chance at government, I hope to hell we have a proper shot at it.
* Of course, actually deficit / GDP actually rose to 4% under the tories in ’70-74, and Harold Wilson’s brief second term just wiggled up to 6% and down again. Here is my source for the historical numbers, and here for the modern ones.
** assuming a centrist capitalist perspective. Communism implies a permanent downturn.
Free Schools: they’ve got Freedom right there in the name!
Monday, September 20th, 2010Lib Dem Conference (affectionately known as ldconf) has just passed a motion attacking free schools and encouraging people not to apply to set them up. The media will try and package this as a coalition split; nonsense. It is Lib Dems deciding party policy, which (alas) is not the same as government policy. It does not bind the coalition; it does change what Lib Dems argue for inside the ministerial offices though. So we could see a movement in government policy as a result, particularly as several points raised in the motion are in the Free Schools and Academies Act 2010 but not the Coalition Agreement; and thus are up for debate, amendment, or repeal in this parliamentary term.
Lib Dems in the House of Lords (house of geeks, I prefer to call it) did manage to water the act down a bit, but it was rushed through parliament with ridiculous urgency. There was a general feeling in the speeches that this was hasty, poor legislation, so I sincerely hope that our agent in the DoE can wheedle something back, perhaps in the way of a supplementary act. We shall see, but here are the arguments aired about the shocking socially divisive, damaging to existing schools, religious segregationist free-for-all that is the so-called “free” schools policy.
Stockholm Syndrome
The Swedish model, used by proponents of free schools, shows attainment rising by a small amount on average. However, a closer inspection of the data shows that it is privileged, and therefore higher attaining, pupils who benefit a lot, and disadvantaged pupils either stay put or a pulled back by the introduction of the system. I am sure this suits the Tories just fine, but it is not the Lib dem way.
Comprehensive schools axed, or losing funding, in favour of free schools applications.
A new comprehensive school in Harrow was, ldconf heard, axed in favour of a free school, applied for by a Tory supporter. We heard numerous other warnings about free schools taking regionally allocated funds from adjacent schools, rather than the businesses or groups wanting to set up the schools footing the setup costs themselves. In any other culture this would be called corruption; in the UK it is sanctioned by the Tories’ flagship education policy, sadly voted for my Lib Dem MPs who didn’t have time to give it proper scrutiny. This is the point where we hang our heads in shame, briefly. Go on, I’m not joking.
Out of the sixteen applications for free schools, seven have so far been approved. Of those seven, two are Jewish, one is Sikh, three are Christian. Far from being a faith schools issue, although it is that as well, this is a segregationist issue; why are we allowing faiths, strongly linked to ethnicities, to set up their own exclusive schools? Free schools can’t set their own entry criteria but they can draw their own catchment area; we heard about a school in Yorkshire that has drawn it’s boundary very close to the school on one side to avoid including a deprived area, and an ethnically diverse area. This is coming very close to racism, let alone religious discrimination, and the detrimental effect on social mobility as a result of drawing catchment areas avoiding the local council estates is indefensible.
National curriculum exemption
I went to a Roman Catholic Comprehensive school; they taught me the national curriculum; I am against faith schools in principal but I am happy to let existing ones continue in a proper framework, governed by the national curriculum. Free schools are exempt from the national curriculum, and are therefore free to stop teaching people about sexual health and start teaching them creationism. This is a massive destruction of the freedom of young adults to make their own choices in life, and is a classic example of confusing parental freedom for child freedom. More on this in other contexts later.
Entrenchment of centralism
The final point I want to highlight is the myth that free schools are localist. LEAs have, to quote a headmaster of 35 years, “not been controlling schools for decades.” They used to control them down to the dotting of Is and crossing of Ts, but not since the 80s has this been the case; schools are controlled by headmasters and governors these days. The LEA provides services to the local schools, including administering the admissions system, but “Local Authority Control” is a myth. What “freeing” the schools from this control actually means is making it directly accountable only to a national complaints body, and ensuring it’s funding is guaranteed by Whitehall, unlike the existing state schools – to quote my landlord (a professor at the Institute of Education) “Giving the secretary of state the most power since the 1944 Act.”
Free schools are not fair, take funding from existing schools, not aren’t diverse (to put it charitably), are free to indoctrinate and omit sexual health education, and is a policy entrenchment of centralism. There is nothing Liberal Democrat about this policy, this act or these problems, and today our conference proudly decried it.