The Alternative Election 2019: Liberal Democrats, 'Stop Brexit'

The Liberal Democrat offering is lean, moderate, costed and will likely deliver measured but, definite, progressive outcomes. But that may not be radical enough for many who have yet to forget, or forgive, The Coalition.

The Liberal Moment in British politics has been a major disappointment for progressives. For many, disaffected with the authoritarianism of Blair's New Labour and distressed by Labour and the Tories each holding one party control over portions of the country, the Lib Dems offered a better way of delivering policies ostensibly similar to those of Labour.

Getting a taste of government changed things for the Lib Dems. And, for many, it crystalised the priorities of the faction that put Nick Clegg into the party leadership and continues to exert a strong influence as Jo Swinson leads them into a general election for the first time.

When push came to shove, the Lib Dems where willing to sacrifice a lot of other policies, and to break a very particular promise on ending higher education tuition fees, for their priority of boosting early years education funding.

Few have been happy with the compromises the party leadership has been willing to make, but the party has been held together by what has always held the party together: their focus on liberty - on civil rights, the rights of refugees and immigrants, of LGBTQ+ people, of minorities.

But that assumption, that the wings of the party will be held together by this commonality, has begun to feel like something being tested to breaking - with some senior party members, such as party LBGT chair Jennie Rigg, quitting as, in their single-minded quest to "Stop Brexit", the leadership has welcomed defecting MPs into the parliamentary party - no matter how scant their record may be in support of unifying liberal issues, or in the case of Phillip Lee, how in opposition to liberal social politics their record may be.

What are the Lib Dems offering?

Unsurprisingly, that has lead to cancelling Brexit being the central theme and focus of their manifesto - with even a second referendum now being seen as a wasteful concession to a costly distraction. Beyond cancelling Brexit, and reinvesting money dedicated to it into key public services, the Lib Dem manifesto presents four key priorities.

First, to borrow and raise tax to fund the decarbonising of the economy and to tackle the affects of climate change. That includes a £10bn seed for a renewable power fund that would seek additional private sector contributions (not unlike the previous Lib Dem idea of the Green Investment Bank), and £15bn to make homes greener to tackle energy bills and fuel poverty.

The idiosyncratic Liberal Democrat pitch of a penny on tax returns, this time for an earmarked £7bn rise to fund social care and mental health services provision. The manifesto hints at more of this use of 'earmarking' to come, with a consultation on a specific-to-health tax.

As you may now come to expect from the Lib Dems, they intend to put more funding into education. A boost of £10bn for schools is an expected cherry at the heart of plan for reforms to education that shows, perhaps, more depth than any other part of the manifesto - and includes rethinking how frequently and heavily we subject school children to examinations and standardised testing.

Less obvious a pitch, perhaps, is the Lib Dems making their pitch on lifelong learning - matching stride and direction with other progressive parties - that offers a £10,000 per person adult skills & training budget. This may well be considered thin fayre considering the anger that followed when their leadership dropped their opposition to higher education tuition fees.

Through these pledges, there is a leanness to see in the Lib Dem manifesto, especially in how ideas are presented, with seemingly every penny accounted for and balanced. That will turn off many looking for a radical shift - and will be seen as a legacy, or perhaps a hangover, from the Nick Clegg era of 'Equidistance' that pitches at splitting the difference between Labour and the Tories.

This can be further seen in a couple of policies.

Alongside the Lib Dems pitch of 300,000 new homes a year, is a plan to help younger first time renters handle exorbitant deposits with a loan rather than reform - though that does need to be taken in the context of their long term Rent to Own proposal, where rent contributes towards eventual homeownership.

The second is the, shall we say, restrained way in which the party has approached widespread calls for at least a trial of the basic income welfare policy. Their plan, which actually comes from their conference and doesn't seem to have found a place in the final manifesto, is instead for a pilot scheme to trial a guaranteed minimum - more of a 'top up' approach, akin to Gordon Brown's tax credits.

It is worth pointing out, however, that in their analysis of the welfare offering of the main parties, the Resolution Foundation ranked the Lib Dem offering as the best for the poorest - ahead of Labour.

Conclusions

Behind the scenes, the Liberal Democrats are a broad and vibrant party with some particularly radical progressive factions - the Social Liberal Forum comes to mind. Those supporters champion a basic income, land taxes, an expansion of cooperative workplaces, and a government that is more interventionist in pursuing liberty.

But these elements have not, for some time, been representated in the party leadership in a way that reflects how these radical groups are supported among the party's members and supporters.

The Liberal Democrat leadership adheres instead to a lean, dry, and 'sensible' support for the free market - and on how therein to maximise the outcomes for people, within that capitalist framework. That means talking balanced budgets, prioritising education and tweaks, not upheavals, to the capitalist model.

When it comes down to it, the Liberal Democrat pitch - though producing some practical progressive outcomes - may simply lack the radical appeal for the times, not least with the party's damaged reputation.

And so the party will likely be swallowed by the two-party battle between Labour and the Tories, rendering even their best policies futile. Their best hope is taking enough seats to be a player in a hung Parliament.

Cameron Premiership in Review: In the end, there was no one left to hide behind

After six years as Prime Minister, David Cameron leaves office having lost the EU referendum argument not just in the country but within his own party. Photograph: Prime Minister David Cameron - official photograph by Number 10 (License) (Cropped)

David Cameron came into office at the head of Britain's first coalition government since the wartime National Government. The message, as he stood in the Rose Garden to begin his double act with Nick Clegg, was a promise of a different form of government (BBC, 2010). More open. Less overbearing.

Yet the laughs and relaxed atmosphere of the Rose Garden came to stand for other things over the course of Cameron's six years in office: a tendency to let others take the hits and an appearance of detachment from the painful realities of the recession and austerity programme that followed.

Cameron certainly rebuilt the Conservative Party as an electoral force and he made a stern effort to try and modernise it, often against much resistance (Hennessy, 2010; Grice, 2014). As PM, he clearly wanted to be remembered as a reformer (Hoskin, 2016).

But that ambition is likely to be overridden by the gap that has opened between Scotland and the rest of the UK - which with another referendum may result in a full division - and of course the EU referendum, that Cameron lost, and will have a long lasting and drastic impact on the future of the UK.

There have been positive reforms. The introduction of gay marriage is a stand out achievement, as Jeremy Corbyn stressed in David Cameron's last appearance at Prime Minister's Questions. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition was itself also a landmark moment for UK politics that until that point had been majoritarian and adversarial to a fault.

And yet even as the PM told the public that 'we're all in this together', part of a big society that government would support rather than direct from the centre, the twin impact of recession and austerity saw poverty deepen. The spread of food banks to help the homeless or those unable to afford food (Williams, 2015), the rise of welfare sanctions (Ashmore, 2015), and the continued rise in the cost of housing have made that promise seem hollow.

That attitude has been reinforced by policies like corporation tax being regularly slashed even as the welfare bill has been squeezed. It was also reinforced by his approach: 'flashman' as he was nicknamed, quick to dish out the put downs and ad hominem insults that made him appear arrogant and dismissive.

Cameron's time as PM was not short of scandals, from the appointment of Andy Coulson to his family being caught up in the Panama Papers revelations. But nothing ever seemed to stick to the now former Conservative leader. Not even NHS doctor's going out on dramatic strikes.

That is perhaps most starkly demonstrated by the way in which the Tories where the ones who benefited at the polls from all of the positives of the Coalition while their Liberal Democrat partners where electorally crushed, seemingly with blame for all of the negatives.

And there were always excuses. The previous Labour government received the main brunt of the Prime Minister's criticism, with economic problems usually prefaced with the work Conservatives were doing to make up for the 'mess' that Labour left (Watt, 2010).

Ultimately, Cameron's premiership comes to an end because he picked a fight on the EU referendum that he couldn't win and it is perhaps significant that it was a fight with the right-wing of his own party. As PM, Cameron's biggest challenge has always been wrestling with his own party rather than fending off the leaders of the other parties.

Even with the pain of austerity, the opposition has always been so divided that it is almost unsurprising that Cameron, with the help of his own party, had to be the orchestrator of his own downfall. Progressives will not to be too sad to see the end of his tenure. But the future after Cameron is uncertain.

Trying to moderate his party's position, Cameron rebuilt them as a political force. Without him at the helm, with the opposition divided, a question now hangs over what the new Tory leader will use that platform to pursue next.

Manchester Pride is a symbol of the campaign for individual liberty that is only sustainable with greater economic equality

Manchester Pride has grown to be a bright and gleeful reminder of the advances made in the struggle for the freedom of identity. The Pride parade has become a city-wide carnival celebration of the acceptance of difference (BBC, 2015).

Yet the liberty that the parade lauds is a fragile thing. It can only survive so long as the society around it is willing to support the capacity of its citizens to exercise that freedom. In the long run, that means support for more than free association. It means supporting the economic equalities and opportunities that makes the so-called 'luxury' of choice a realistic possibility.

The present political era has been described as a 'liberal age' (Payne, 2015). With the general paucity of success for liberal political parties, that might seem to be a bit of a grand statement. Yet it reflects the astounding success of social liberalism in society.

The liberties of the individual have been widely accepted - as Manchester Pride shows. When Ireland embraced equal marriage, in an emphatic plebiscite that was signed into law on Saturday (The Irish Times, 2015), it left only Italy as a hold out for the old ways in Western Europe (Kirchgaessner, 2015).

Yet, as touched upon in Nick Clegg's resignation speech, the advance of these freedoms is fragile in the face of 'fear and grievance' (Lindsay, 2015). These strong emotions follow an historical pattern, with tough times, caused by an economic crisis, leading to fraught social disputes and hearts turning inwards towards tribalism - just when a broader social solidarity is called for.

In the age of austerity, these problems are exacerbated by the inequalities that the austerian system promotes. Concentrations of wealth (Piketty, 2013; Naidu, 2014), the strains of globalised competition and the slashing of social security only reinforce these fears and tribalism (Rivera, 2014; Washington, 2013).

Few organisations epitomise this modern struggle and contradiction so fully as the European Union. It champions social liberalism, supporting the liberation of the individual from the ideological chains of the state, even as it is itself used by nationally conservative parties as a vehicle for the fiscally conservative policies of austerity.

On the one hand, in Italy there is pressure from European institutions for the country to meet the basic rights of its citizens over issues of identity and gender - against pretty stern resistance in places like Venice (The Guardian, 2015). Yet on the other hand, Greece has been struggling under heavy fiscal pressure applied by the European 'Troika' (Fazi, 2015) - largely against the democratic voice of Greek citizens (Monbiot, 2015).

The trouble for this liberal age is that it's happening side-by-side with an age of conservative economics - and all of the success won by social liberalism is under threat from it. Without strong social security safety nets, with people burdened by servitude as a way of life, they have little time to find, let alone make the most of, opportunities - and that takes away their capacity to make choices for themselves.

The Manchester Pride parade, with its lights, music and colour cheered on by the citizenry, is the symbol of a modern, progressive society - and a social solidarity stretching beyond simple tribalism. The spirit of solidarity symbolised by the Pride festival - even with it's imperfections (Amelia, 2015) - is needed now in the struggle against a conservative economic supremacy that, by taking away the social security, threatens the freedoms of all citizens.

Liberal Democrat Leadership Election: Who's who and what do they stand for?

The Liberal Democrat leadership election is the first step to recovery for a party whose voice is being missed in the campaign to protect human rights in Britain.

After the party's electoral collapse in May, the Liberal Democrats have run an accelerated campaign to elect a new leader to replace Nick Clegg. Voting will come to an end on 15th July and the results will be announced the following day.

Clegg's resignation has, dramatic as it was following the party's disastrous election night, been seen as a long delayed inevitability (Wintour & Watt, 2015). Ultimately, the decision to go into coalition with the Conservatives seems to have been something from which the party could not recover.

And yet, early indications suggest that the party nonetheless possesses an enduring appeal. Their presence is already being missed in the defence of civil rights and liberties (The Guardian, 2015), and council bye-elections are already being won (Steerpike, 2015).

However, their collapse has raised a question within the party, one that has importance for all of the parties across the Centre-Left (Kettle, 2015). Is the response to the election loss to move Left and embrace more idealistic positions, or to move Right and try to win voters away from the Conservatives directly?

For the Liberal Democrats this has been distilled into the nominated candidates. The candidate representing continuity with Clegg, seen as the Centrist and Centre-Right wing of the party which is concerned with being a practical party of government, is Norman Lamb. The more Left-leaning candidate, which in the case of the Lib Dems means embracing its campaigning and grassroots tendencies, is Tim Farron.

Norman Lamb

Norman Lamb served in the last government as a Minister of State for Care and Support, a position he pursued with a personal passion. He has made a point of vociferous campaigning on issues of mental health, and was deeply involved in the party's aims of putting mental health onto an equal footing with physical health (Lamb, 2015).

Lamb is very much the designated heir of the Centrist liberal faction that took the party into the Coalition - something reflected in the endorsements he has received, which include Clegg's closest supporter and former party leader Paddy Ashdown (Lindsay, 2015). Little can symbolise that more distinctly in the minds of voters than the fact that Lamb voted for the Coalition reforms to tuition fees (BBC, 2010).

So far Lamb has argued that the party should not retreat to its comfort zone (Lamb, 2015{2}), a sentiment likely reflected by those in the liberal centre. Yet, at the same time he argued for new ways to tackle economic inequality that are not based on old models of redistribution - singling out mutuals and social enterprises as things that liberals 'instinctively' support.

Tim Farron

Tim Farron remained aloof of the government during the last parliament, during which he served as the party president - a position from which he was often a voice critical towards the coalition (Greenwood, 2015). As might be expected, he voted against the coalition tuition fee changes (BBC, 2010).

The MP for Westmoreland and Lonsdale has received the endorsement of the party's more radical, campaigning, Left - including former leader David Steel, who was very critical of how the Coalition was handled (Steel, 2015) - and the leaders of the Welsh and Scottish Lib Dems (Perraudin, 2015). He also, notably, has the endorsement of both The Guardian and the New Statesman (The Guardian, 2015{2}; New Statesman, 2015).

Farron's main distinctive positions came up in the debate between the candidates at 2015 Conference of the Social Liberal Forum group (Lindsay, 2015{2}). He displayed his openness to liberals increasing taxes to fund public services and expressed a willingness, should he become leader, to not get into conflicts with the party conference policy making processes. Farron has also stressed his intention of rebuilding the parties grassroots and so increasing party membership 100,000 by 2020 (Farron, 2015).

Quiet establishment man or the problematic firebrand?

Voices in the social liberal and liberal centre wings of the party have their own reasons for leaning either way. Those in the liberal centre argue that there is value in the consistency of remaining in the Centre, from which the party's only opportunities to make its policies a reality will come through coalition with the Conservatives or with Labour (Tall, 2015).

For social liberals, however, there were important things ignored by the party leadership from 2010 onwards (Howarth, 2015; Smith, 2015). They argue that the leadership abandoned the radical Left-of-Centre causes and ideals, upon which they had been elected, in favour of a Centrist coalitionism - built around stability, unity and the embrace of a Toryism-lite - for which they had no mandate and were duly punished.

The Guardian has argued that there is a need for a figure who can lead a 'charismatic insurgency' (The Guardian, 2015{2}). But there are also warnings against the danger of traumatised parties electing 'feel good', comfort zone, candidates (Kettle, 2015). That need for a comfort zone candidate may factor in if there is felt to be a strong need to distance the party from the previous leadership and its direction.

One way of ensuring that distance could be embracing the rebranding of the party, with talk going around of a possible name change. Changing the name of the party could be a powerful moment upon which to hang the interviews and coverage that would make clear how the Lib Dems have heard their critics and responded (Withnall, 2015). In that case, Tim Farron's detachment from the Coalition would seem to make him the more ideal candidate - and he has certainly floated the idea of a fresh start (Farron, 2015{2}).

Yet there remain lingering reservations about Farron, in regards to his seemingly anti-liberal personal stances on a number of pressing social issues from abortion to gay rights (Birrell, 2015). With the party desperately needing to regain trust and a consistent identity, his own inconsistency could well factor against him and the party.

Though Farron might suggest that these personal standings should have no bearing, it is hard to escape an overriding feeling that there is also a decision to be made between the candidates' different characters: the quiet and practical, though establishment, man or the problematic firebrand. It's as if liberals are once more being faced with the spectre of siding with Asquith or Lloyd George. A more easily unifying figure would have been preferable, such as Jo Swinson - who would surely have been a leading candidate had she retained her East Dunbartonshire seat.

Rebuilding trust

In The Guardian, back in 2006, the late Charles Kennedy argued that:

"Fewer people are joining political parties, yet single-issue pressure groups continue to flourish. Mass international movements - from opposition to the war in Iraq to last year's Live 8 - demonstrate how great issues and principles can still motivate on a huge scale. But somehow our current political culture seems unable to accommodate and address such concerns...

...The danger in all of this is that if sufficient people conclude that there is nothing in the conventional political process for them then they may opt for more simplistic and extreme options on offer. I remain an optimist. But across the mainstream political spectrum there is a candid recognition of the danger."

For Liberal Democrats, and liberals generally, this has become a matter of great importance. Regardless of who becomes party leader, their first task must be to regain political trust. That means carving out a distinctive position that the whole party can comfortably adhere to and, importantly, campaign on. It means opening the party to working with others for electoral and political reform and encouraging a progressive alliance, even if only informally.

From a pragmatic point of view, those will likely remain the priorities - for the moment at least. Anything else might simply lead to a division that would strip the party of any credibility it has left, which means that neither candidate is likely to pick a fight with the supporters of the other. As a result, the issues that arise between the Centre and Left strands of liberalism are likely to go unresolved in the present. This election will instead be about who leads, rather more than to what they lead the party.

Election 2015: A bad night for progressives. What now for the Left?

The night began with the prospect of a parliament painfully divided between Left and Right. But the release of the exit polls at 10 O'clock turned that stress into a painful crushing blow to progressives. Even to the last moment, the polls had indicated a multi-party split. Yet when ballots were cast in the polling stations of England, there was a kind of sudden and astonishing shift towards the Conservatives.

In the short term, while the Conservatives form a new government without the need for the compromises of the last five years, the Left needs to find a new way forward. The most emphatic message of the night is that the Left does not have a convincing message for the people of the UK. That has played out with some dramatic losses.

Labour have lost swathes of supporters in Scotland and failed to be convincing in England. The Liberal Democrats where heavily criticised for their coalition with the Conservatives, and for a broken promise over tuition fees, and yet have lost seats by bleeding thousands of voters to the Conservatives and UKIP.

That contributes to a very complicated picture for the Left to try and understand.

Labour tacked to the Right on social issues, while sounding moderately Leftist on the economy and have barely survived outside their Northern heartland - and even lost part of it with voters swinging away from Labour to the SNP. They have lost their Scottish leader Jim Murphy, their campaign organiser Douglas Alexander and even their shadow chancellor Ed Balls.

The Lib Dems ran as a socially liberal and economically centre-right party, and have found themselves decimated. They have lost ministers and senior figures all over - Danny Alexander, Vince Cable, Ed Davies, Simon Hughes, Jo Swinson, Lynne Featherstone and many more are all gone.

This must all, surely, mean the leaderships of the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats, particularly, will have to change.

Some of the expectations that came with the prospect of a hung parliament, that many had thought was awaiting voters on the 8th May, was big political reform. Talk is still abound of constitutional change. But now, with the polls leaning to the right, it will likely be less about proportional representation and more focussed on Unionist concerns. Matters like English and Scottish votes and their role in a British Parliament and changes to the electoral boundaries will take precedence, but Federalism may still get a look in.

Teresa May of the Conservatives is already talking about life without a Lib Dem anchor - she told the BBC's election night programme that she blames the Lib Dems for holding back Conservative wishes to give the security agencies more intrusive powers of investigation.

With that announcement setting the tone, the first thing for the Left is to find a way to put together a meaningful and co-operative opposition. One that can restrain the very slim measure of control that the Conservatives will have over the Commons - and find candidates that can drum up passionate support to challenge the Conservatives at bye-elections.

The second aim, for the longer term, has to be figuring out what it is that the Left can offer to the people of the UK at a sorely divided time. Scotland is represented almost entirely by the SNP Nationalists, and England is under the control of the Conservative Unionists. Nationalism has become a very major factor once again. But above all, voters in Scotland found the SNP a more convincing representative of the Left values than Labour, and in England it seems that few were convinced that they as voters belonged with the Left at all.

Something has gone very wrong for the Left. The starting point in the recovery will be accepting what has happened. That will mean Paddy Ashdown eating his hat and Alastair Campbell eating his kilt. The next step will be to find the big new visions that are needed to rebuild a progressive alternative.

Election 2015: The BBC's opposition leaders debate sees Farage cornered by the Left and lash out at the audience

David Cameron's refusal to engage with debates has led to some very awkward arrangements, one of which was tonight's debate. The leaders of the opposition present - Ed Miliband for Labour, Nicola Sturgeon for the SNP, Leanne Wood for Plaid Cymru and Natalie Bennett for the Green Party - but not Nick Clegg for the Liberal Democrats, who by virtue of a deal between broadcasters and the Prime Minister ends up left out (BBC, 2015).

With no place in the previous Prime Minister's debate, and no place at the opposition debate, its hard not to think that the Lib Dem have been unfairly excluded. Yet the debate itself was lopsided enough without another party of the Left or Centre taking to the stage.

With the leaders of four broadly progressive parties lining up against the leader of one Far-Right party, it was always going to feel like they were ganging up on UKIP's Nigel Farage. Farage was clearly feeling cornered - going so far as insult the entire audience and the BBC for being too Left-Wing.

The fact is though that the parties on the stage, not only the independently selected audience, were fairly representative of national polling - 13% for the Far-Right UKIP, 39%+ for the Centre-Left parties, a difference of at the least 3-1, before you even add on the numbers for the SNP and Plaid Cymru.

That was reflected throughout the debate. Nicola Sturgeon, Leanne Wood and Natalie Bennett regularly ganged up on both Nigel Farage and Ed Miliband - challenging the Far-Right anti-immigration narrative of Farage on one side and calling for Miliband to join their anti-austerity progressive movement on the other.

That three-way alliance seemed to be a clear precursor of what Sturgeon hinted about at one stage: a Progressive Alliance bloc in the next parliament formed by MPs from the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party (Mason, 2015). On the present polling that would mean a 57 seat bloc pressuring for Left-Wing anti-austerity policies.

Once more, there was less discovered by the debate than many would have hoped. However, it did provide a platform for a challenge to Farage and UKIP's anti-immigration, anti-EU, narrative that has been contested far too little over the last five years. And, once again, it showed the UK's voters that there are alternatives, and that multi-party politics is a very real possibility. Those, at least, are some positive in favour of the debate format.

Election 2015: Liberal Democrats

For Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, the 2015 general election has to come with extremely low expectations. The party is polling at only a third of those that voted for them in 2010, a measly 8%, and Clegg himself seems to have been made a scapegoat for all of the failures of Britain's political system.

On 7th May the Liberal Democrats look like they will be held responsible, for better or worse, both for the impact of the coalition and for the compromises made in the forming of it. While the Conservatives look set to be judged on austerity, how much support - and how many seats - Clegg and the Lib Dems are able to retain will represent whether or not the decision to enter coalition has been accepted by voters - regardless of any proposals that the party puts forward.

If the public's judgement should run against them, as polls suggest, the party looks like it will still survive in some seats where it is, ironically, protected by the first-past-the-post system against which they have campaigned for decades. That campaign for political reform was one of the party's biggest hopes for the coalition, and also their biggest disappointment. Their already compromised proposals for changes to the electoral system were rejected at a referendum (BBC, 2011), and attempts to reform the House of Lords into an elected chamber were put to an end in cross-party talks, with the Conservatives and Labour both blocking Lib Dem efforts (Clegg, 2012).

The Lib Dems have, however, managed to get quite a few policies through. The rise in the Personal Tax Allowance (Liberal Democrats, 2014), the Protection of Freedoms Act (Liberal Democrats, 2012), and the Pupil Premium (Vasagar, 2011). While they have been charged, by association through coalition, with culpability for allowing the Tories to govern, the party has argued that they have held the Conservatives back from doing their worst.

They resisted and tried to get a better outcome on the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (Harris, 2012), they resisted the Tory version of the Bedroom Tax (Watt, 2014) and they earned praise for standing up for public sector Trade Union members against the Conservatives (Syal, 2014; Watt, 2015). Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, have both gone further and warned of worst to come from the Tories if they're left unchecked (The Guardian, 2015{1}; The Guardian, 2015{2}).

Their future plans have also been roundly copied by their rivals. Their Mansion Tax has been co-opted by Labour (Dominiczak, 2013) and their Personal Tax Allowance has been taken on by the Conservatives (ITV, 2014). The Liberal Democrats are also the first party to pledge an increase in NHS funding each year through to 2020, in real terms - adjusting for inflation - to the £8bn more that the NHS has stated it needs (Wright & Moodley, 2015; Campbell, 2015).

Despite all of this, there is one one policy that the party does not seem able to live down. The compromise too far was tuition fees. The party argues that, despite being a small party without enough influence and no parliamentary supporters, it got the best deal it could, rather than let something worse come about - specifically uncapped unlimited fees. The solution itself is, although achieved through what feels a lot like an accountants sleight-of-hand, higher education free at the point of use, to be paid back later in tax.

That outcome comes - along with the risk of non-payment being moved to government away from the universities in order to secure higher education funding for the present (Ashworth-Hayes & Sippitt, 2015) - with a shift in the burden of debt from universities to students. With repayment thresholds designed to protect the poorest, the tuition fee has turned into a de facto graduate tax. The problem is that the debt, though structured to lessen the burden, is still - on principle - a burden (Swain, 2015).

That goes against the radical principle the party had stood for, and it seems few want to hear the arguments about political compromise from weak bargaining positions - despite that being central to the party's political beliefs since before they were called Liberal Democrats. Their practical stances and readiness to compromise means that few would find it realistic for the party to present themselves as the radical alternative protest party that they were seen as in 2010 (Brocklebank, 2010). In that light the Lib Dems have had to take a new approach.

The new presentation is focussed on the party's belief in practical, balanced budget, Centrism. Fair and balanced is what they are presenting as the order of the day under a Liberal Democrat government - or, at least, a government under liberal influence. Fewer cuts than the Right wants, less spending than the Left wants. Cuts only to tackle the deficit, spending only what can be afforded, with a commitment to raising taxes on the wealthier to reduce the depth of cuts to public spending. Less harsh and more understanding on welfare than Labour or the Tories (Batchelor, 2014); a commitment to funding for mental health care (Sparrow, 2015); a commitment to Europe; a commitment to civil rights (Macwhirter, 2015); and a commitment to devolving power away from Westminster (Demianyk, 2015).

Despite their proposals, despite their achievements, the party is nonetheless in a precarious position. There are those, however, who are not so pessimistic about their chances on the 7th May (d'Ancona, 2015). Away from the mainstream polls, there is positive thinking amongst Lib Dems that 12-15% of vote and 30-something seats is possible, and that 40-something seats are not out of reach (Tall, 2015{2}). With annihilation predicted for them, even 30 seats would be seen as a huge victory - and maybe in some way vindication for taking the difficult decision to change British politics and go into coalition.

In that there is something from which the Liberal Democrats will ultimately take pride. Clegg and the Lib Dems have made compromise, coalition and a more grown up politics possible. They have made it possible to have, not only coalitions, but stable coalition government where both sides can openly, brazenly disagree and still work together - even if in doing so has damaged their own chances of ever playing that role again (Gibbon, 2015).

---

Prospects: 8% for 28 seats (for a loss of 28).*

Potential Coalition Partners: Labour Party (273 seats), Conservative Party (273), SNP (51), Green Party (1).

Verdict: All of the reasons to vote Liberal Democrat in 2010 remain valid in 2015 - with the obvious exception of the tuition fee policy. Abolition of fees for Higher Education is now being considered a future aspiration the party, not something it can deliver in the short term. That alone may be enough to damage the party significantly. Keeping half of their seats would be seen as a major success.

---

Election 2015: Seven-way debate sees the Left outnumber the Right to talk about ideals, fairness and being open to the world

Before tonight's ITV leader's debate began, the focus had been steadily upon David Cameron and Ed Miliband (Battersby, 2015; Hawkins, 2015). There are obvious reasons why. Polling continues to suggest either the Conservatives or Labour will be the biggest party come May - and that it will be close however the ballot papers eventually stack.

But the debate itself reflected the other thing that the polls have been saying: British politics has fragmented. There are now five parties that compete across the whole of Britain and are polling over 5%, and two regional parties with a large and growing presence within two of Britain's countries. For those smaller parties it was always going to be a major boost just to be invited to the show (Robinson, 2015).

Yet they did so much more. Natalie Bennett of the Green Party and Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru talked about ideals like freedom of movement. Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP spoke of ending austerity. Nick Clegg joined in, on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, to challenge Farage over the need to be open hearted and fair.

Despite Farage's best obsessive anti-European efforts, he was repeatedly overshadowed by the three female leaders of the SNP, Plaid and the Greens. Their anti-austerity message and language of hope frequently stole his thunder and ensured that the Left outnumbered the Right in every round of the debate. Whenever he tried to push the anti-immigration and anti-EU agenda, there was a voice - as there has been far too infrequently in recent years - to speak of being Pro-European as being open to the world, positive and fair in how we treat other people.

The reality is that TV debates have been shown not to play a particularly useful role in analysing the ideas of the different parties (Cooper, 2015). But what this debate has done is to provide people with reassurance that there are other alternatives out there. There are different narratives to the mainstream idea of fiscal austerity. There is a will to be open and co-operate, rather just compete and alienate. As Natalie Bennett put it:

"If you want change, you have to vote for it. You don't have to vote for the lesser of two evils.

The Liberal Democrat Spring Conference - their last chance to define themselves

The Liberal Democrat Spring Conference represents probably the last chance the party will have to present its own vision, on it own terms, before they face an election campaign that could result in massive disappointment (Perraudin, 2015). It is not, however, a problem with which the Liberal Democrats are unfamiliar. They are long used to being marginalised and struggling for visibility.

Since the party was established - in a 1988 merger of the old Liberal Party with the Labour Party breakaways the Social Democratic Party, after a decade long electoral alliance - it has struggled to make itself heard in the political arena. 2010 had promised a major breakthrough, but, yet again, promising surges at the polls and 23% of the popular vote did not ultimately translate into seats.

The decision that followed, to go into coalition with the Conservatives, and for the leaders of the party - though not the majority of its MPs or the party membership itself - to drop direct opposition to tuition fees, turned public opinion definitively against them.

The great surprise is the difficulty which has faced the Liberal Democrats in getting across to people what it is that liberalism represents, this despite - with the exception of the pretty significant blip over tuition fees - the fact that the party has otherwise shown remarkable consistency over time. The conference speech of Party leader Nick Clegg could as easily have been promoting the 1997 manifesto as it is the 2015 manifesto.

If there is anything that could save Liberal Democrat seats at a general election, that consistency is one of them - if they can finally make a breakthrough in getting across what being liberal really means. And getting to the bottom of that, means understanding what the party has stood for over time.

The modern party's origins are in the old Liberal Party, the classical liberal, free trade, small government party that believed in laissez-faire administration, where the government does not interfere. Yet by the beginning of the 20th Century they had evolved - through struggles with old Tory landowners, and in response to the revelations of the poor reports - into the party in government under Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith and Lloyd George (governments that included Winston Churchill) that pursued the liberal welfare reforms. Those efforts established a national insurance to cover sick pay and unemployment, introduced pensions, and expanded access to schools.

That work was later further expanded after the Second World War, when the ideas of Liberal Party thinkers like William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes had a decisive influence on the work of the post-war Labour governments. While the Liberal Party itself was at the time riven by splits as a result of different views regarding the two wars and various coalitions, the ideas and work of individual Liberals still had huge impact. The work of Beveridge and Keynes were key in the expansion of government action to intercede against the instability of the market economy, and to create cradle-to-the-grave social security in the form of welfare, pensions and the NHS.

In the face of the emergence of a virtual two-party system, split between the Conservatives and Labour while the Liberals were divided, it took decades for the party to recover. When the Liberals recovered, they did so in an electoral coalition as the SDP-Liberal Alliance - alongside the Social Democrats (SDP). The SDP had broken away from the Labour Party, uncomfortable with the far left-wing and right-wing factions that were struggling with each other for control of the party. Senior Labour figures Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams - both former ministers, and in Jenkins a former President of the European Commission - were amongst those who defected to create the SDP, and who were later to become Liberal Democrats when the SDP-Liberal Alliance merged.

The Alliance enjoyed some success in the polls - polling as high as 50% in the early 1980s- but they continued to fail to win seats. Despite, in 1983, securing as much as 25.4% of the popular vote, they only received 23 seats in parliament. Having again struggled to establish themselves and make a breakthrough with voters heavily invested in the two-party dynamic, the Alliance elected to merge and form the Liberal Democrats.

Under their first leader, Paddy Ashdown, the Liberal Democrats made their first big breakthrough in decades, by gradually increasing their seats in parliament up to 46 by 1997. During that time the party pursued a close relationship with Labour, with talk of coalitions leading up to 1997, and over the possibility of introducing proportional representation for elections (BBC, 1999).

Looking at the party's commitments in 1997 (Liberal Democrats, 1997), it shows a remarkably consistency in message over time. In the 1990s, under Ashdown, there were commitments to raise tax by 1p in the pound to increase education funding, with the priority put on early years. A commitment to increase NHS funding, and increase choice for care. Balance borrowing against public investment, and cut wasteful spending. Championing civil rights, supporting small businesses, investing in research, devolving power through reforms of the economy and the constitution, supporting Britain's place in Europe, and encouraging a fairer society - all of these policies could have represented liberal ideas anywhere from the 1910s through to the 2010s.

The next leader, Charles Kennedy, continued to push these priorities as the party finally became widely known. However, its rise in prominence seemed to come almost exclusively from its noted socially liberal stances. The party was celebrated for campaigning for civil rights and opposing the War in Iraq (BBC, 2004). While they continued to increase their representation in the House of Commons, up to 62 by 2005, they still failed to make a major electoral breakthrough - even with an aggressive strategy aimed at defeating the Conservatives head-on (Carlin & Sapsted, 2005). When Kennedy's leadership ended in acrimony in 2006, he was replaced in the short term by Menzies Campbell.

By the end of 2007 there was a fresh leadership election, at which Nick Clegg was elected leader. Nick Clegg defined the party as the exclusive representative of the radical centre (Stratton & Wintour, 2011):

"Lloyd George's 'people's budget' to make the wealthy pay their fair share and give a pension to all those who had worked hard. Keynes's plans to make our economy work for everyone and provide jobs for all. Beveridge's radical blueprint for a welfare state to give security and dignity to every citizen... We are the heirs to Mill, Lloyd George, Keynes, Beveridge, Grimond. We are the true radicals of British politics."

Although Clegg's leadership would be seen as a shift to the Right, the party continued to be perceived as a centre-left, 'radical alternative' to Labour. Students, in particular, aligned with the Liberal Democrats - with a little help from a pledge to abolish university tuition fees. Under Clegg, the party seemed to be on the verge of a major breakthrough. However, the strong polling numbers didn't turn into seats. When the election came around for real, a lot of voters seem to have retreated to their safe havens.

The disappointment of winning only a few seats turned first into consolation at entering government, for the first time in a century, and having the opportunity to implement policies. The second turn was to astonishment and despondency as the party was assailed over the decision of Lib Dem leaders to go against their own party's official position on tuition fees, and vote for them with the government (BBC, 2010). Public anger turned into media campaigns assailing the Lib Dem leader, and now Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg (BBC, 2012). That situation has persisted and the party is now struggling desperately in the national polls. Yet, even without being vilified for a broken promise, the Lib Dems might still be struggling.

Across Europe there has been a very definite struggle faced by liberal and centrist parties. The FDP in Germany, the long time Liberal alternative to the conservative CDU and the centre-left SPD, collapsed at the last election to less than 5% of the vote - and so didn't even qualify for a seat in the German Parliament. In Italy Scelta Civica - Civic Choice - was founded to support the technocratic Prime Minister Mario Monti. In 2013 it received 8% of the vote and 37 seats. However, at the European Parliament elections in 2014 the party received only 0.7% of the vote.

For all their liberal social policies, liberals and centrists are still largely struggling to find persistent support. Part of the problem is that they are still seen as being nowhere in terms of economic policy. They are perceived to be right-wing capitalists by those to the Left who believe in a policy of taxing, borrowing and spending, and too left-wing by conservatives on Right who preach the economics of austerity.

Despite a lot of consistency between liberal and centrist parties across Europe, and consistency of policies and priorities over time, they struggled to get their message out. When they do, it is often distorted to fit into the narratives of the dominant, mainstream political-economic spectrum.

At their Spring Conference over this weekend it was precisely this message that the Liberal Democrats made with their last chance before the 2015 UK general election to put out a controlled message out to the public, announcing who they are and what they stand for. In his speech to the conference, Clegg made one last pitch to the public, in a speech that was praised (Walter, 2015), identifying Liberals with a moderate, decent, and fair centre-ground that had been abandoned by the other parties:

"And here at home and across Europe, reactionary populism and divisive nationalism are on the rise, slowly moving from the margins to the mainstream... If we want to remain an open, confident, outward-looking society, it will only happen if political parties who believe in compassion and tolerance step up to the plate.

Instead, the opposite is happening. Labour and the Conservatives are deserting the centre ground. Compromise is treated like a dirty word. Everywhere you look there is blame and division.

It’s in the angry nationalism of UKIP, setting citizen against citizen as they pander to fear. It’s in Theresa May’s Go Home vans. In the glint in George Osborne’s eye as he announces that the working age poor will bear the brunt of the cuts. It’s in the red-faced bluster of the Tory right wingers who are determined to scrap the Human Rights Act and drag us out of Europe. It’s in the ‘us versus them’ scaremongering of the Labour Party, as they condemn every decision to balance the books as a betrayal and then make wild predictions about mass unemployment or the death of the NHS that they know are not true.

As the Conservatives and Labour veer off to the left and right, who will speak up for decent, moderate, tolerant Britain?

...We have shown that we are prepared to put the national interest first, even if it means taking a hit to our short-term popularity. And we will continue to put the national interest first."

The Liberal Democrats remain sanguine (BBC, 2015). They are placing their focus and their hopes on the positive response they are apparently receiving in those places where the Lib Dems have spent decades building up a local base of support (Wintour, 2015). It would be sad to see the parliamentary influence of liberalism diminish in Britain as elsewhere, as the influence of liberalism has been a force for good.

But whether or not the Liberal Democrats manage to get themselves across to voters, liberalism will continue play an important role. From Beveridge and Keynes and their ideas backing and underwriting social security, to the Liberal Democrats who opposed the War in Iraq, to those in government campaigning for civil rights - like the end of child detention or the moves to expose and end gender inequality in pay - liberals have shown that their ideas carry weight, and play an important role, regardless of the number of seats a particular liberal party holds, and whether or not they were doing their best work inside or outside of parliament.

What are the liberal alternatives to the austerity cuts?

Vince Cable and Nick Clegg, two of the most senior Liberal Democrats, were quick to make their voices heard in response to the Autumn Statement and to the Conservative push for more cuts during the next parliament. The essence of their narrative was simple: the Lib Dems believe that austerity has been pushed as far as it can or should go.

Cable was quick off the mark with a letter to the Office of Budget Responsibility, which called for the OBR to make a clear a distinction between the future policies of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats  (Wintour, 2014). Clegg followed in his wake by stressing that the Tory determination to cut tax was not matched by available funds (Marr, 2014) - meaning more public services would have to go.

The economic analysts seem to agree with them. The analysis released in response to the Autumn Statement stressed that public spending would have to be reduced drastically if the Conservative path was to be followed (Johnson, 2014). And this week the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) announced that its research had shown that inequality is bad for economic growth, and that a redistributive economy is far more conducive to economic success - not to mention beneficial to social welfare (Elliott, 2014).

So what would the Lib Dems do differently?

Well, Clegg says that they are not ashamed of the role they have played in arresting public spending (Mason, 2014), but the party has expressed disagreements over the way forward. While the Conservatives want more and deeper cuts, the Lib Dems think that the realistic plateau has been reached. Instead of more cuts, they want a rise in tax that is controlled to protect the poorest (Lansdale, 2014).

While serving as a practical challenge to the Conservative narrative pushed by the Tories and UKIP, people are unlikely to be inspired by ideas aimed at just keeping a sinking ship afloat. People want an opportunity to make things better - and there are liberal ideas, more radically progressive, that the Lib Dems could push.

Though the modern Lib Dems have been focussed on the idea of reducing the state - with a Gladstonian commitment to capitalism, in opposition to the state - when the old Liberal Party began to modernise in the early twentieth century, the new social liberalism it had embraced opened the party up to the idea that there was a role for the public sector to play, though still with the proviso that it should be reduced wherever possible.

Those deep rooted liberal tendencies have produced ideas, beyond simply reducing state influence, that are more conducive to creating a new era of reform. In the 1920s, Liberals under the guiding hand of John Maynard Keynes produced an in depth report of the British economy that included in its recommendations co-operatives, and democracy in the workplace (Yellow Book, 1928).

'The worker's grievance arises from a sense of the inadequacy of their reward, of their insecurity of livelihood and tenure, and of their lack of information as to the financial results of their work... The present ownership of industry is unduly concentrated and should be diffused as widely as possible among industrial wage-earners. Such diffusion, tending towards the popular ownership of industry, may be effected partly by progressive taxation and restrictions upon the inheritance of large fortunes, but more directly by the stimulation of employee-ownership under schemes of profit-sharing and investment by employees, by the encouragement of popular banking and investment, and by the creation and development of investment trusts. All these processes should be encouraged and, where necessary, regulated by the state.'

These ideas are still woven into Lib Dem policy proposals. Nick Clegg has previously called for a move towards a 'John Lewis Economy' (Clegg, 2012), with companies embracing workers holding shares, and party members have argued that co-operatives should be at the forefront of the Lib Dem economic policy (Donaldson, 2013) - as they are in the preamble to the party constitution.

Now could be the time to start bringing those ideas to the forefront. Co-ops represent a huge step forward, giving people more autonomy in their working lives and spreading the profits of their labour more equitably. If the Lib Dems are to see the aims of the authors of the 1928 Yellow Book report fulfilled, to ensure that individuals may enjoy life more abundantly, co-operation is going to play a key role in achieving them.

The party conferences reveal different visions for our economic future

With the next UK general election now only months away, this round of political party conferences is all about building towards polling day. That means each party is beginning to mark out its territory, and to lay out the policies that voters will be asked to choose between.

With the economic crisis refusing to abate, and a series of deep cuts to public sector funding likely to be followed by more in the next parliament - certainly if the current government survives the election - the economy is going to be a major factor for consideration.

On the matter of economics, political parties seem to adhere to a set of rules that ensure that things don't change too much. But the main parties all have their own visions, even if there are some common themes. Each of those visions reveals to us a little bit about the differences between the parties.

Amongst the most telling are the policies of the right-wing conservatives, who will have the novelty of being represented by two parties at the next general election. The Conservative Party and UKIP represent the same fundamental political positions, though in UKIP's case it has been taken to some extremes.

Savage cuts to public services appear to be on the Conservative Party agenda for the next parliament, with the wealthiest looking likely to be the main benefactors (Ball, 2014). UKIP's offer looks astoundingly similar, if anything even more weighted towards the upper middle class and upwards - to be paid for, they say, by leaving Europe, and so ending Britain's contributions to things like the Regional Development Fund and support for Agriculture and Fisheries, and by cutting foreign aid (BBC, 26/9/2014).

Both conservative parties are also offering to copy the Liberal Democrats and their stated commitment to take the poorest out of income tax. Along with that, go commitments to give tax cuts to those earning up to £50-£55,000 a year, along with making fairly tenuous promises to 'protect the NHS' (Wright, 2014).

The question is, with all of the tax cuts, how exactly is the NHS going to be protected? Unless by more cuts to other public services or more privatisation? It has been suggested that the cuts will only really benefit the wealthier. Those concerns will become a reality if keeping public healthcare afloat means even more cuts to basic services that the poorest depend on.

With those kinds of attitudes towards the role of government, and to the running of public services, along with the belief of both conservative groups in dismantling Europe's Human Rights framework, the way ahead does not look rosy for the poorest should one of the conservative parties get their way.

Labour Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has focussed his economic pitch on standing out from the other main parties. Rather than raising many of the lowest paid out of tax, Labour want to increase the minimum wage. They want to combine that with a freeze on energy prices (BBC, 22/9/2014).

The issue comes with Labour's unwillingness to commit to whether or not they will continue with the Conservative Party's cuts to public spending (Peston, 2014). This has happened before. Throughout the last four years Labour haven't ruled out continuing the cuts, and Ed Balls' conference speech has done nothing to offer reassurance on the matter.

The Labour Party's determination to set itself apart from the opposition is so far obvious only in words. On the surface, the difference between conservative and Labour positions appears as if it will be a contest over who can better administer the status quo, and subtle shifts in tax taken either from the wealthy, or from the poor.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats have also set their stall out in an effort to distance themselves from the others. They want to give a tax cut to 29 million, increasing the pre-tax allowance to £11,000, a policy that has been copied across the board. However the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has stressed that this will be paid for by focussing tax increases on the richest, as part of an effort to 'rebalance' tax increases and cuts (Lansdale, 2014) - highlighting the need to find new ways to rebalance state finances without more cuts.

Their pitch is that the Lib Dems would borrow less than Labour and cut less than the right-wing parties. They are trying to set out their own position, and get back to the basics of liberal policy. But that comes with an attachment to the free market that ultimately chains them, and has led them to sacrifice other policies, like the abolition of tuition fees, that were more important to voters (Wheeler, 2014). It also prevents them from being a complete alternative to the Conservatives, UKIP and Labour.

A group that has not been afraid to criticise the market orthodoxies are the Green Party. The Greens present voters with a progressive alternative that sets them very much apart from the other parties.

They want levies on wealth and large rises in the minimum wage, along with the introduction of a basic income - also known as a citizen's income - and to renationalise the railways (Mason, 2014). Further, they aim to do this within a new framework, a new political settlement, to be drawn up with the participation of the whole country.

The Greens represent a quietly growing progressive movement, with organised political parties across Europe, who are beginning to find support for a renewal of trust and engagement in politics, one coupled to a new approach to economics.

Yet that quiet movement is struggling to make the catchy headlines needed to get public attention away from stunts and controversy, like the Conservative Party tearing itself in two over the European Union, and splitting apart into new factions like UKIP.

Those controversies will ultimately prove the making or breaking of this next UK general election. With so much populist and hyped-up focus on extreme factions, and the main parties squabbling over who to trust on certain issues, it will be hard to see the real information through the cloud of noise.

And that is a problem, because to make the right decisions, when election time comes around, all of the best information is needed. The noise and popularity contests will mean people having to remain vigilant to find it, and see through the propaganda to what each party is really trying to achieve.

==========
References:
==========
+ James Ball's 'Cameron’s tax cuts benefit middle and higher earners, not the poorest'; in The Guardian; 2 October 2014.

+ BBC's 'UKIP conference: Income tax cuts plan unveiled'; 26 September 2014.

+ Ben Wright's 'Cameron frames election choice with tax cuts pledge'; on the BBC; 1 October 2014.

+ BBC's 'David Cameron pledges tax cuts 'for 30m people''; 1 October 2014.

+ Nick Robinson's 'Cameron: Talk of 'better times' rather than austerity'; on the BBC; 1 October 2014.

+ BBC's 'Ed Balls sets out priorities for 'first Labour Budget''; 22 September 2014.

+ Robert Peston's 'Can Balls be just austere enough?'; on the BBC; 22 September 2014.

+ James Lansdale's 'Lib Dems seek centre 'gap' as Tories and Labour shift'; on the BBC; 5 October 2014.

+ Brian Wheeler's 'Lib Dems should have died in a ditch over tuition fees - Farron'; on the BBC; 6 October 2014.

+ BBC's 'Nick Clegg pledges 'tax cut for 29 million people' in 2016'; 7 October 2014.

+ Chris Mason's 'Can the Greens' economic ideas grab the attention of voters?'; on the BBC; 5 September 2014.

+ BBC's 'Green Party calls for £10 hourly minimum wage by 2020'; 5 September 2014.

+ BBC's 'Green Party says membership up to 26,000 across Britain'; 6 October 2014.

+ BBC's 'Green Party seeks 'radical' new political settlement'; 19 September 2014.

Principle, compromise and the politics of the status quo

If there is anything that any political establishment does not like, it is an unflinching unwillingness to compromise. If you won't deal with the establishment and its priorities, you will find yourself frozen out to the fringes.

Considering the fact that politics demands so much of those who take part - expecting them to leave idealism at the door - it isn't too much of a surprise that people's interest in the political arena drifts away. Nor that others encourage people to walk away (Brand, 2013).

Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats are only the most well known to have been faced with this difficult dilemma.

Clegg and the Lib Dems, by choosing a tawdry compromise - compromise itself being a virtue, not a vice, when attempting to achieve all of the best things without any of the worst - and accepting a coalition with the Conservatives, made a pragmatic choice: to get things done, within the system presently in place, and risk the ire of their slighted support on the left. That choice has so far only burned them.

In 2010, with a potential coalition looming, more than one comparison was made between Clegg's situation and that of the former Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.

Ramsay MacDonald, Prime Minister in the 1920s and 30s, chose to defy his party and form a multi-party national government to deal with the Great Depression - following the stock market crash of 1929. MacDonald and Labour found that, restricted as they were in their views to a classical economic approach and balanced budgets, they were unable to respond to the crisis.

MacDonald would not listen to the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, who suggested that the country aught to engage in deficit spending - using the cheap credit available to nation-states - in order to cover financial commitments and stimulate a recovery. As unemployment rose drastically the Labour Party split, unable to resolve their differences.

The King encouraged MacDonald to form a National Government - a coalition between all three major parties, in the national interest - to manage the crisis. By forming a government with the Conservatives, however, MacDonald was labelled a traitor and expelled from the Labour Party.

MacDonald paid the price in infamy for making practical compromises with the establishment, in order to achieve his aims. Other have instead paid a price for refusing to compromise their principles.

Louis-Joseph Papineau was the Speaker of the Assembly for Lower Canada, the French-speaking predecessor to the French-Canadian province of Quebec. He would not deal with the British Empire's unelected, and unaccountable, colonial governors, who he felt were allowed to run rampant and ruled through their Chateau Clique.

Papineau was amongst the leaders of Parti canadien, and the founders of its successor Parti patriote, combining Canadians of many backgrounds form French and Irish, to English. He was opposed to British commercial exploitation of Canada and Canadians, led boycotts against British goods and campaigned for responsible government in Canada - government and economic policy accountable to the people.

His resistance ultimately led to open rebellion, which he had opposed at the Assemblée des six-comtés when other had spoken of revolution. Despite not taking part in the rebellion, his arrest was nonetheless ordered, and was forced to flee into exile. By the time his name was cleared, and he was able to return, the country had already changed drastically. The Canadian provinces had been unified, as part of attempts to assimilate the French-speaking population, and the issues of the day had moved on.

Carlo Cattaneo was another who found himself frozen out. Cattaneo - a writer, as well as founder and editor of Il Poletecnico, a journal committed to the positive sciences, to interdisciplinary work and to practical applications - was a federalist and republican in 19th century Italy.

Cattaneo supported the Italian states in their fight for an unified Italy, against the various interfering outside forces. However, when the campaign was brought in line with the ambitions of King Vittorio Emanuele II of Piedmont-Sardinia to become King of Italy, Cattaneo would not go against his federalist and republican principles, by supporting a monarchy, and so withdrew.

By doing so he maintained his principles, but was not involved directly in the shaping of the new Italy. The game of politics does not always, however, reward you any better for trying to work within the bounds of the system than working outside of them.

Millicent Fawcett, leader of the Suffragists, discovered this in her long campaign for women's right to vote. Her long association with the Liberal Party, even with adamant support from many of its most learned members and thinkers, did not manage to advance her cause.

Fawcett, and her Liberal MP husband, were considered to be Radicals and supporters of individualism, trade unionism and other liberal causes, and were active in the Liberal Party. With her husband's death she withdrew for a while, before returning to public life in the role of the leader of the NUWSS (National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies).

Despite her personal connections to the Liberal Party, the Liberals persistently avoided dealing with the issue of women's suffrage. Much as the Liberals managed to drive away the Trade Unions by failing to address the causes close to them, they drove away Fawcett's Suffragists by failing to listen and act.

She ultimately resorted to switching their support to the Labour Party, in protest at having campaigned for and supported a party, within the system, and not received their wishes for reform in return. While ultimately successful, it took extraordinary circumstances for the establishment to listen, let alone to grant reform, even where it was sensible, just and supported by members of the establishment itself.

In the face of reason and progress being stifled in the defence of a status quo that crudely bundles progress together with extremist forms of change - from the chaotic, to the militant, to the reactionary, the fascist, and the totalitarian - is it really any wonder that people are disaffected by politics?

Is it much of a wonder that they feel voting to be only an endorsement of a broken and corrupt system (Brand, 2013), and that they promote resistance to it?

Political systems need to be adapted to end these kinds of crude resistance to reason and progress. There have to be a better ways of resisting tyranny than to stifle campaigns for social justice and social welfare. If, within our present political systems, we cannot move forward and make our world better, then our next step has to be reform - lest our brightest minds and best ideas are suppressed in the name of an institutional mediocrity.

==========
References:
==========
+ Russell Brand's 'Russell Brand: we deserve more from our democratic system'; in The Guardian; 5 November 2013.

+ Tom Clark's 'Nick Clegg and the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald'; in The Guardian; 9 May 2010.

+ Will Straw's 'Lib-Con coalition? Only if Clegg does a Ramsay Mac'; on Left Foot Forward; 26 April 2010.

Economic Reform and the Ideological Defence of Capitalism

The latest failures of the capitalist system, the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent worldwide recession, have led to calls for a rational reassessment, both of its theoretical value and of its practical application. There is rising discontent with what capitalism has offered, compared to the price it extracts in return, and people want to explore new ideas, and new possibilities and alternatives (Skidelsky, 2014).

In the beginning though, capitalism had all of the makings of a radically progressive economic system. As the merchants found resources and traded them, they broke the economic stranglehold held by the traditionally powerful landowning classes. Enterprising individuals could become wealthy, and free themselves from the strictures of social class, while also furthering the erosion of those class boundaries by creating paid work that distributed wealth.

Eventually, however, the power of the capitalists broke the power of landowners, and toppled their social order - but only to replace it. Capital has become the foundation of a new establishment, and its interests have become the new guiding motivation for the society that has sprung up around it.

Now, its failures have exposed it to criticism from which it was previously safe. While it continued to improve conditions for people in general, even in just a peripheral way, its excesses and inequalities where excused. But when those benefits cease to be generally seen, discontent swells and questions begin to be asked. Are there other ways we might go? Can we do better?

The call for new ideas

Economics students around the world have led the call for a fresh look at economic theories. They want broader studies of the impacts and flaws of present theories, and the freedom to study new or alternative economic ideas - and with good reason (Skidelsky, 2014). Inequality, failure to predict catastrophic crashes and the subsequent fallout all demand answers.

Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's former Director of Financial Stability, and the present Chief Economist, supported their announcements (Inman, 2014), saying:

"The crisis has laid bare the latent inadequacies of economic models. These models have failed to make sense of the sorts of extreme macro-economic events, such as crises, recessions and depressions, which matter most to society."

But the concerns of students go beyond theoretical and practical accuracy (Husnain & Parekh, 2013). There is also a belief that economics can be about more than exploiting conditions for immediate selfish profit. That the study of economics can be used to increase our knowledge of how systems work in order to develop more effective and more sustainable ways of supporting people, without flaws like massively unequal social stratification.

The Gift Economy

Lily Cole, through her website impossible.com, which promotes a vision of an economy based around gifts and reciprocity (Cole, 2014). Using the internet as a medium, Cole's site allows people to post the things that people need or want, and allows others to answer those needs for free - for nothing other than a thank you.

The idea of a reciprocal economy tie in with certain anthropological views on the role of reciprocity and exchange in human societies (Green, 2014). It seems that, rather than barter, early human social groups completed tasks and exchanged their product with others as needed. These exchanges were conducted on the understanding that, through gratitude and debt, they built trust and social cohesion, leading to those positive actions later being returned in kind.

While our communities are far less personal, and far more widespread, the internet certainly does have the potential to break down those barriers and distances. Lily Cole's approach is none the less, however, still a fairly extreme example and utopian in nature. As an overnight alternative to the capitalist economic orthodoxies, it would be outright revolutionary. In the short and medium term, simply reforming the present systems is the more practical alternative.

The John Lewis Economy

Back in 2012, Nick Clegg announced Liberal Democrat backing for what he called a John Lewis Economy (Clegg, 2012). Clegg vision has workers as stakeholders in a business, with an active shareholding that gives them a tangible investment in the well-being of the organisation. There is a hope that, through these means, the wider economy might benefit from the stability, productivity and long-term sustainability of employee-owned businesses (Ashton, 2012).

And yet, this is only a limited form of co-operative or mutual. Through the offering of a stake, the form of a material benefit, it only offers to include - at arm's length - the workers into the present system without the requirement of a major change in systemic habits. To find a fix for inequality and exploitation, co-operative and mutual models would have go further, and really embrace the right of individuals to autonomy.

In an economy where paid work is essential for survival, it is of the utmost importance that people receive a truly fair portion of the product of their own work. Part of that means protecting autonomy, and the right to an equal say in their working conditions, who their management are and how they behave, and in how the organisation's profits are used.

However, even the level of autonomy offered by co-operative and mutual models fails to address an essential lack of autonomy within mainstream market societies.

A Basic Income

One way of addressing the most fundamental lack of autonomy - the necessity of paid work for survival - is to introduce a Basic Income. At present, out of mainstream UK political parties, only the Green Party is offering the Basic Income as a real possibility (Fearn, 2014). Basic Income, also known as Citizen's Income, represents, within market economies, an expression of a belief in a person's essential right to live - counter to those value systems that demand people earn the liberty to live.

It offers to citizens a universal safety net to guarantee that, no matter their living conditions - working, retired, student, teacher, single parent or 'traditional' family - they will have the ability to support their most basic needs. In principle it eradicates poverty, and raises the baseline standard of living that we have a right to expect up from nothing, to the basic capacity to interact with the world, and to survive it.

Such ideas do however have the tendency of running into ideological barriers.

Economy & Ideology

The primary issue facing reform of capitalism has been ideology. In particular, conservative ideologies have defended the competitive and their segregation of society into 'strivers and skivers' (Coote & Lyall, 2013), with others going further still, to even praise greed (Watt, 2013).

These ideological views have protected capitalism from the attempts of students to study and test new theories, and from the attempts of reformers to change its selfish, greedy and accumulative motivations into more socially constructive attitudes. Economic theorist Thomas Piketty has criticised mainstream economic thought, stressing that rather than being a broken element, inequality is in fact an active feature of capitalism (Piketty, 2014).

Capitalist theories are usually defended against these attacks by pointing to its certain elements - stressing that it is a 'natural' system that replicates efficient 'natural orders', or by stressing the idea that capitalism represents the 'end of history', the end point to which progress has been heading. That capitalism has found the essential elements of society and economics, and that our material pursuits within its framework represent a pure and distilled lifestyle, of which other ideologies are only a distortion.

These are, however, extremely materialist views. A more idealistic perspective might demand a search in a different direction than financial accumulation for a societal focus. In the opinion of Oscar Wilde (1891):

"For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them."

Breaking through these barriers to reform is a vast challenge, of which reforming the study of economics is but one aspect. Other reforms will need to follow. Getting there will require understanding how economics works, but also how it can, and how we want and need it, to serve us.

==========
References:
==========
+ Phillip Inman's 'Economics students call for shakeup of the way their subject is taught'; in The Guardian; 4 May 2014.

+ Robert Skidelsky's 'Economics faces long needed upheaval as students demand right to dissent'; in The Guardian; 18 June 2014.

+ Mahim Husnain & Rikin Parekh's 'Economics students demand an education that reflects post-crash world'; in The Guardian; 13 November 2013.

+ Lily Cole's 'Lily Cole: welcome to the gift economy, where the kindness of a stranger rules'; in The Guardian; 19 March 2014.

+ John Green's 'Money & Debt'; Crash Course World History 202, on YouTube.com; 17 July 2014.

+ 'Nick Clegg calls for a 'John Lewis economy'' on the BBC; 16 January 2012.

+ James Ashton's 'Nick Clegg set for 'John Lewis' economy'; in The Independent; 28 October 2012.

+ Hannah Fearn's 'How about a 'citizen's income' instead of benefits?'; in The Guardian; 8 April 2014.

For other information on a basic income:
http://www.citizensincome.org/
http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/ec.html

+ Anna Coote and Sarah Lyall's 'Strivers v skivers: real life's not like that at all'; in The Guardian; 11 April 2013.

+ Nicholas Watt's 'Boris Johnson invokes Thatcher spirit with greed is good speech'; in The Guardian; 27 November 2013.

+ Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'; Harvard University Press; 2014. [Buy Now]

+ Oscar Wilde's 'The Soul of Man under Socialism'; London, 1891.[Buy Now]