Liberal Vision

Coalition or chaos – it’s your call, Nick

So now its a real fight. Who do we choose? On my left I give you the bullying, bullshitting, bad tempered – bad man of politics – GORDON BROWN. He who wants to be judged on his moral compass yet surrounds himself with unpleasant characters who intimidate and smear his political opponents, from whatever party, at every turn. He who talked up “Prudence” whilst on the biggest spending binge ever, who raided pension funds, sold our gold at its lowest level for years and who invested more of his time and effort undermining the then Prime Minister, than he did keeping watch on the finances of this country. Hmmm.

On my right I give you the smiling snake oil salesman -the suave, the slick – DAVID CAMERON.Yes the one with the airbrushed photos and dyed hair who beams benignly and promises his party has changed but who cannot be pinned down on anything of any substance. Who talks about being liberal and wanting government with ” a lighter touch” but then brings the full force of his party heavyweights down on his own party regional offices if they dare defy him. The man who has talked such a lot – delivered polished speeches to perfection…and yet said so very little. A man who surrounds himself with friends in Notting Hill kitchens (Coulson, Ashcroft, Osborne and co) no matter how dubious their actions, history or levels of competence best that can be said of him is that he is not Brown – the worst that he is another Tony Blair. Been there done that.

Added to this we have seen what happens when one party wields total power – with a huge majority. The party whips rule; minsters all powerful; bright intelligent MPs sidelined because they challenge the leadership; loyal and dimwitted MPs more likely to end up in the cabinet; debate stifled; decisions taken behind closed doors with little or no scrutiny; laws rammed through.

Why would you want either of those leaders in power? Why would you want either party to win a landslide election when we have felt the pain that they bring, one too many times ? No wonder people are confused. No wonder the polls are erractic.  No wonder, people are talking …correction.. welcoming… the prospect of a hung parliament. None of the other checks and balances have worked. Maybe this one will.

BUT!  The prospect of a hung parliament – without a clear view about what that will mean for the finances of the country – is going to send the markets into tail spin. Why? Because they assume that we will end up with a fudged government with no power to make the cuts necessary, fighting day to day to get each tiny bit of legislation through, and almost certainly resulting in another election within twelve months. What the markets want is certainty and that is not what it looks like.

Of course at the moment we don’t have a single party willing to be honest with us about the economy – the severity of cuts necessary. We all know we are being lied to. And every day our debt gets bigger. So it could be argued that it is not clear that any party will do what is needed.

So we are standing on the brink of disaster. Nick, its time to bring some honesty and forthrightness to the debate. Specifically on (1) the economy and (2) what you will actually do if there is a hung parliament.

1. THE ECONOMY : Be honest about the level of the cuts necessary. Vince Cable is the most trusted politician there is on financial matters. He was the lone voice of caution in the boom years. Yes he was derided by both Tories and Labour (and the media) when he told us bust was waiting round the corner. But he was also proven right. So where is he now? We seem to be arguing about the small stuff . Is it green enough, are we too reliant on banks. Maybe, maybe. But can talk about that when we have an economy worth squabbling about? Where is that beacon of light – that honesty now when we need it ? Show us the real Vince. Show us the real plan – not the sanitised one.  

2. HUNG PARLIAMENT: If we were in “the boom years” Nick, you could fudge what the Liberals would do in the event of a hung parliament. If Britain had cash sloshing around in our coffers, if we had a strong £, if we had shrinking unemployment, if we had financial institutions that were lining up to invest in Britain, if our AAA rating was not hanging in the balance yes then Nick, you could get away with it. And it would probably be the right strategy. The dangers of speaking out are immense and caution might be wise.

But country is not in that position. This country is in dire financial straits. The £ is stuttering at the news of the possibility of a hung parliament. Don’t play politics with our lives and livelihoods.

This country needs a strong Lib Dem party to tell us where it stands. Not a sit on the fence – play it safe – we haven’t planned for hypothetical situations – Lib Dem party. (What ? you only make your plans AFTER the event?). We need a bold and brave – forget the past – lets start a new period of politics- tell it how it is – get the country out of this mess  Lib Dem party. 

At the moment no one is at all clear what “working with” the party with a “mandate from the voters” means. Not me. Not the voters. Not the markets. Stop talking Westminster speak and tell us what you mean. Coalition or not?  The Guardian says you are planning to rule out coalition “because aides and senior MPs argue it would be highly dangerous for the Liberal Democrats to become minority partners in a coalition government”.

That would seem to suggest that , in the event that no party gets an outright majority, you allow either party to pass a Queen’s speech if it makes some concessions to your four prioirities (fair tax, investment in education, a rebalanced economy, political reform).

But whispering tit bits to the Guardian is not the same as telling it straight. OK you’ve let the Queen’s speech go through… Will you abstain or vote through the budget ? Shove in loads of amendments to make it more to your liking? How will you vote the next week or the week after that? Will a weak minority Government lurch from one deal to another as you stand by mildly and meekly watching sterling plummet, and the stock market nosedive? Is Vince Cable destined to spend the next 12 months commentating on the news or making the news?

The country goes to the wall because some of your aides and MPs care more about their political careers than the state of the nation? Maybe they just dont like the idea of actually being in power.

Or perhaps it’s that you can’t go into coalition. With all the will in the world you dont have the power to make that decision? The BBC reports that you “would have to get a formal coalition deal past (your) members” . If true then change the rules at next week’s conference. Tell them you can’t run a party on that basis right now. 

Cowardly or castrated. Which is it ?

The madness is, from what I have seen, you are neither. You started slowly (not a bad thing) but it looks for all the world that you are just hitting your stride. Perfect timing. You have the honesty, integrity and personal belief to make a difference. To change politics. So what’s stoppping you?

You will be dogged by these questions and many others of a similar vein over the coming weeks. Constant reference to a 4 point plan is not going to cut it with the voters, with the media or with the markets. Come on Nick. Step up to plate. The Liberals have to piss or get off the pot. If we are not prepared to take up coalition – to take up the reins of power when the country needs it most (now) then we don’t deserve to be the third party. 

I think I am right in saying that both you and Vince have said publicly that the country’s plight is more important than petty party politics. Prove that you mean that. Give us some honesty. Show us your mettle. I think if you will do that, you will win the hearts and minds of this country. Hell, maybe even save it.

Tags: coalition, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, hung Parliament, Nick Clegg, Vince Cable

“Good for bankers”? Are you sure, Vince?

It was somewhat disappointing to receive yesterday’s post-pre-budget report response from Vince Cable.  As impressively prompt as it was, I couldn’t help suspect that the title and opening line were written before the increasingly-destructive Mr Darling had even uttered a word.

“Good for bankers but bad for taxpayers”

So shouted Vince’s headline, seemingly implying that the former is not included in the latter.  An odd response, really. Those of us who live and work relatively near the City aren’t hearing much cheering. Rather, word on the street is how this disastrous PBR will harm everyone, but particularly bankers.

The absurdly populist destruction of Darling’s PBR is to be expected from Labour.  The anti-bonus measures portend all manner of unintended consequences (or at least I assume they’re unintended) and smack of unfairness.  As explained in today’s City AM, a commodities trader at a hedge fund will receive unaffected bonuses, while a commodities trader at a bank will be hammered – causing the bank to restructure its payment system, fiddle its accounts, or risk losing talent to hedge funds and similar groups.  Or, of course, they can just move their people to Dublin, or further afield. But never mind all that because “bankers’ bonuses caused the financial crisis”. Right?

Wrong, of course, but let’s move on: the budget is appallingly bad for the rest of us folk who work considerably less hours than bankers and are thus less reviled.  The usual surreptitious hiking of NI further increases the burden of income tax, while our unprecedented deficit of £178bn is well reported. According to Darling it’ll all be ok because the economy will grow by at least 3.5% the year after next.  Sure it will.

But the point here is that there’s ample scope for attack from a good Liberal like Vince–without resorting to populist attacks on a minority of the workforce.  Sure, banker bashing may win votes, may be popular among the greater mass of voters, but that doesn’t make it right. And call me sanctimonious, but we’re supposed to be above all that.  As Cicero rightly bemoaned the other day, we mustn’t become just another party.  Sadly Vince’s missive, or at least its headline message, present us as just that.

Tags: Alastair Darling, budget, PBR, Vince Cable

Confused Liberal Democrat seeks help…

Having successfully recovered my pc from a near fatal crash (note to self to actually DO backups rather than think about doing it from time to time)…. I am back.

So what’s been happening whilst I have been off line? More hung parliament discussions (if I hear one more Noddy “explanation” as to “what that means in laymans terms”  I’m tempted  to do some real damage to my pc backup or no backup), more thoughts and declarations on Copenhagen, and, yes, the Lib Dem tax launch.

It was, of course, almost impossible to cut through all the headlines about “u turns” or “backtracking” on the original mansion tax policy to get to what the meat of the Liberal Democrat tax plans were. But they were there if you persevered.

But it’s all been about that mansion tax. That was originally, you will remember, the 0.5 per cent of value of property above £1 million, announced by Vince Cable at conference in September , without reference to the front bench, or the media team, seemingly – leaving open mouths from some, half-baked attempts at explaining by others and general chaos all round.

Vince’s original plan would have affected some 250,000 homes in the UK – many of them doubtless in the London commuter belt where the likes of Susan Kramer would be fighting for her political life (against the non domicile- thank you Zac Goldsmith).

That was catastrophically managed. But, as we said at the time, it won’t end there. And it didn’t… The mansion tax has been “tweaked” . Now its 1% on all properties over £2million.

And all the headlines on Monday’s tax launch  were “Lib Dems rethink their top housing tax policy”…. “Clegg denies U-turn over ‘mansion tax'”…. “Liberal Democrats backtrack over ‘mansion tax’“…. “Vince Cable forced to water down ‘mansion tax’“…. And so on…

Let’s put aside for a moment whether the Mansion tax – at whatever level – is a good idea or not. And consider the half-baked way this has been handled. It has dented Vince Cable’s reputation, it has allowed opponents the opportunity to question Libdem’s grip on financial matters, it has confirmed the “off the cuff nature” of the original announcement (how many times have I been told that one of our strengths was the “considered” nature of our proposals?), and perhaps most importantly stopped us from getting our message across.

I have been told that it’s not as bad as I think….that actually if you read the meat of the articles and listen to the interviews, then the LibDems did much to explain the full package of taxation proposals and that the Mansion Tax was only the headline. ONLY THE HEADLINE ? Don’t people realize that the vast majority of the voters ONLY READ THE HEADLINES? Not as bad as I think?  It’s probably worse than I am actually stating.

Someone please get a grip ….

I suppose the one good thing about the Mansion Tax fiasco if there was one, was that it largely distracted most commentators from asking whether the Lib Dems were doing the Hokey Kokey? Right foot in, right foot out …Left foot in, left foot out, … liberals moving towards small efficient government (all that talk at conference of those savage cuts) or lefties looking to milk the anti fat-cat sentiments?

And I don’t think I can answer the question “so are the Lib Dems for property tax generally?”.. “Well um…Yes”…,”Yes now”  (but only to get the country out of this financial mess?) “No not really” ?. After all we were the party of the “fair tax campaign” which we were running vociferously a while back (are we still running?) – where we stated that “The Council Tax is an unfair tax, based simply on outdated valuations of property and with no link to ability to pay. It should be scrapped and replaced with a system based on people’s ability to pay” . And which still apears on Lib Dem websites up and down the country.  Have we managed to square that with the mansion tax? If we have I am afraid it was buried under the “u-turn” headlines and I could find no mention of it in the published “liberal Democrat tax plans“. I was sure that I heard Vince say somewhere once that the mansion tax was a kind of emergency measure that would be replaced by a local income tax in due course. Did I dream that – or was that off the cuff?

I am so confused. How can the voters be anything but likewise? And that, quite frankly is not good enough. As I said. Someone please get a grip.

Tags: Axe the tax, mansion tax, Nick Clegg, Vince Cable

The rule of law takes another beating

Political commentators too freely use expressions such as “totalitarian”, “undemocratic” and “tyranny”. But I struggle to avoid applying them to the Government’s latest assault on liberal principles.

HM Revenue and Customs has reissued its code of practice to give sweeping powers to HMRC officials to investigate those legally avoiding tax, including giving officials discretionary powers to interpret what parliament might have intended had they legislated on the matter.

According to the Code of Practice:

Avoidance is not defined in the Taxation Acts…One definition is ‘a situation where less tax is paid than Parliament intended, or more tax would have been paid, if Parliament turned its mind to the specific issue in question’. At a practical level the problem is then essentially one of deciding what Parliament would have intended and identifying who should be asked to decide this.

Inspectors need to have in simple terms a working concept of ‘avoidance’ in order to properly identify cases which can be worked…The starting point should be that one would normally expect taxpayers to pay tax on their income or profits…It is reasonable to assume that where a commercial transaction is carried out in a particularly convoluted way, then avoidance is afoot.

The extent to which this undermines the principles of Democracy and the Rule of Law cannot be underestimated.

Democracy first. Laws are made by parliament. It is true that parliament (all too) often delegates responsibility to ministers to create Secondary Legislation, but this still requires a legal process. The government cannot change the law through a administrative fiat (though Labour has often neglected this fact, as they did when they tried to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor as part of a cabinet reshuffle). Granting officials the power not just to interpret the law (the role of the judiciary) but also to create law based on an assessment of “what Parliament would have intended” is completely and utterly undemocratic.

Now the Rule of Law (a principle of liberty probably more fundamental even than Democracy itself). Laws do not exist to justify punishing bad people. They exist to prevent errant behaviour. They do this by signalling to us in advance what behaviour is acceptable and what is not. Pursuing people for crimes that are not yet on the statute book completely undermines the fundamental principles of the law. If one does not know what financial arrangements are legitimate, one cannot hope to do what is acceptable to the authorities.

The analogy I often use is with traffic laws. If the law says that the national speed limit is 70mph, it is perfectly legitimate to drive at 69.5mph on the motorway. If the traffic police were instructed to arrest and prosecute people for driving “at a speed faster than Parliament would have mandated, if Parliament turned its mind to the specific issue in question”, we’d all end up being banned from driving!

Labour members, of course, will barely notice and care less about any of this. The Labour party has never had much use for the Rule of Law. If the Tories kick up a fuss, they will be accused of protecting the rich, even if they argue from the point of principle.

Sadly, however, the animosity that many (including too many Lib Dems) feel for those who make legitimate but convoluted arrangements to avoid paying tax means that this is unlikely to cause uproar among Liberal Democrats, either. Vince Cable is a constant enemy of avoidance. However, I would hope that even those Liberal Democrats who want to crack down on tax avoidance would agree that this must be carried out in accordance with the Rule of Law, enacted by democratic legislation.

Putting aside for a moment the (emotively overlooked) distinction between avoidance and evasion, liberals of all parties should stand up to oppose what is surely slide towards totalitarian tyranny.

Tags: HMRC, rule of law, Vince Cable

Clegg and Cable – could it be like Owen and Steel all over again?

The good news is that the shambolic party conference has not impacted on us in the polls (yet) – the you gov poll in tomorrow’s Telegraph has the LibDems on 20% (+3%), the Tories are down two points on 39% and Labour down one on 26%.

But my worry was not so much that we’d crash because of a few bad headlines, but that our communications infrastructure may not be robust enough to withstand the rigours of a General Election campaign.

Vince Cable’s high profile and popularity should be a great asset at the next election. However, it also raises some difficulties. The Liberal Democrats now have, to some extent, a dual leadership – not wholly dissimilar to that of the two Davids in 1987. The parallel is not a happy one.

By common acceptance, the Alliance campaign in 1987 was the worst of the three parties – and a fair chance of coming second in vote share at the outset was comprehensivley squandered in a confusing tangle of contradictory  messages coming from the mouths of Owen and Steel. With the two men on a punishing schedule – and often at different ends of the country – any differences of nuance were ruthlessly exposed by the media as evidence of fundamental cracks in the SDP-Liberal Alliance.

A similar risk surely applies to the Nick and Vince show in 2010. Of course, the Owen-Steel relationship was characterised by a personal animosity that doesn’t apply in the Clegg-Cable case. But cordiality does not firefproof you against blunders.

Both Nick and Vince have an endearing tendency to say what they think. These are not tedious, automaton politicians who parrot a script. And therein lies the danger. One can imagine it now – Nick is in Manchester expounding, say, the need for savage spending cuts, while Vince is in Cornwall saying that cuts certainly need not to be savage, but will have to be serious. In the heat of an election campaign, a small distintion in emphasis or the choice of slightly different adjectives will be all the press pack need to start running stories of LibDem chaos and confusion.

Modern communications technology (they didn’t have mobile phones or the internet in the dark days of the late 80s), should help mitigate this risk. On the other hand, the very nature of today’s relentless rolling news media means exponentially greater opportunities for gaffes.

One thing’s for sure – we’ll need much better co-ordination of messages than was evident in Bournemouth. Three or four weeks of such confusion would dash any realistic hope of gaining support as the election campaign progressed.

UPDATE 9pm, 26th September: Perhaps conference mayhem is what the public want to see! ICM have the Tories on 40% (-3%), Labour on 26% (+-0)% and LibDems on 23% (+4%). If Labour’s conference is a funeral and the Tories get into a lather about Lisbon, maybe these numbers will hold up next month.

Tags: Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Vince Cable