The FT notes this morning that:
The Liberal Democrats are tacking to the right of Labour on a number of policy areas — including taxing employers, inheritance tax and VAT on private schools — in an apparent bid to hold on to formerly Conservative voters.
As they note:
In the run-up to July's general election, the party pitched itself to the left of Labour on a wide spectrum of economic policies, calling for higher taxes on banks, energy and water companies, a 4 per cent tax on share buybacks and for an increase in capital gains tax for the highest earners.
It would now seem as if the LibDems have realised that it is the Tories that they have to keep on board to keep their seats, and so they have tacked right.
A party bought that cheaply has shown its true colours.
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This is all very sad. Almost all of the new Lib Dem gains – around Cambridge and Oxford, along the M4 corridor, suburban areas to the south west of London – have experienced strong demographic growth in recent years. There are not only ‘liberal Tories’ living in those areas, but progressive younger people and new families moving to these areas, who (as working age people) the results show that a very small percentage (of working age people) would be willing to vote Tory.
Therefore these areas are getting less Tory in demographics.
Davey is making a mistake. It is perhaps doubtful that Ashdown and Kennedy would make the same error.
Thank you and well said, Duncan.
I live in Buckinghamshire and have observed.
I’m not surprised, though, about Davey. In the coalition, when colleagues and I had some dealings with him, he struck me as neo-liberal. One could not tell the difference between the Liberal and Tory ministers.
@Duncan MacInnes
The fact that Charles Kennedy was a hopeless drunk, that led to his early death, is a tragedy not just for his family, but for the UK, because he was replaced by Nick “airhead” Clegg (to whom Groucho Marx’s immortal comment “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, I can give you others” applies with a vengeance) and his coterie of Orange Book Liberals.
Charles Kennedy would never have gone into coalition with flabby Cameron, but would instead have forced a confidence and supply minority administration on him, squeezing Cameron very hard by the short and curlies to keep him away from Neoliberal austerity – the EXACT opposite of what the UK needed – and to get a real commitment to real PR, and see it carried through to implementation – EXACTLY what the UK needed, and still needs.
Blair’s pusillanimous, and frankly unconstitutional, kicking of the Jenkins Report and opposed AV+ voting reform was his most damaging error, as a properly proportional Parliament would almost certainly not have let the BREXIT fiasco occur, nor least because it would never have stood by and let a 52% majority of a minority decide the future of rhw whole of the UK, especially when there was zero clarity as to what that 52% had voted for!
Flabby Cameron should have told Parliament that at least 66% was needed (the trigger point in the Tories’ malign Fixed Term Parliament for agreeing to premature dissolution BTW), and ridden out the storm. Instead, like the coward he was, he cut and ran, and the UK is still paying for his cowardice, as it’s also still paying for the dog’s dinner Clegg’s economy over principles enabled Cameron to introduce.
Thank you and well said, Andrew.
It’s little that the Orange Book Liberals used young women MPs to bring down Kennedy in 2005.
Ian Blackford, who worked for the same bank as I did and has mutual former colleagues, should regret his targeting of Kennedy in the 2015 election.
Should ‘little’ read ‘likely’?
Sorry for the mangled state of the following: “Blair’s pusillanimous, and frankly unconstitutional, kicking of the Jenkins Report and opposed AV+ voting reform was his most damaging error”
It should read: “Blair’s pusillanimous, and frankly unconstitutional, kicking of the Jenkins Report into the long grass, and opposition to his AV+ voting reform was his most damaging error”
As to why I say it was unconstitutional, such a proposal, once in the public domain, could ONLY be decided at least by a totally free vote in Parliament, but at best really only by the electorate.
Not even the ruling Party could make such a decision on its own, and CERTAINLY not one man who happened to be PM, as happened with Blair.
A PM may be “Prime”, meaning “top dog”, but s/he is STILL a “Minister”, meaning a servant – in theory of the Crown, but in reality of the sovereign people, in whose hands the decision should have been placed.
Charlie Kennedy was anything but a hopeless drunk.
He was a depressive and an alcoholic, though far from being the first senior politician to have alcohol abuse problems. That frailty is not the only criterion for judging his career or personailty.
He carried the party to considerable success, though his legacy was mostly the LDs incidental bolstering of Blair governments, through leading the 3rd party success that allowed Labour’s majority via the perversity of FPTP.
Perhaps, though, we should hold the 2005 election against him.
Kennedy did not rely on jet skis for his public profile, and was a better natural communicator than any of the current crop of senior party hacks.
The LDs today would do very well to look at where Kennedy positioned the party on the left of the social democrat spectrum.
He took a principled position on Iraq.
Ian Blackford’s disgraceful campaign against him was the nadir of his career.
I never voted for CK, but traducing him with such a negative reference seems somewhat crass, when we have so few politicians of any merit.
Oh dear.
Who is in charge here? Why not tack further Left and pick up some none voters and disenchanted Labour voters?
All the Lib Dems want is certainty. Mind you, if you were on £90K+ a year, so might most people.
Swing voters eh? A self reinforcing death spiral.
I used to live in a LibDem/Tory marginal on the S coast. We had an excellent LD MP.
Then came 2010, and the Clegg/Cameron coalition, where the LDs swapped a plastic bag tax for their principles, abandoning years of promoting PR at the one moment they should have pushed for it, and, incidentally, enabling Brexit.
I started running a food bank soon after that, and began tacking sharply and publicly to the left.
LDs operate in a sort of political no-mans land, and where it is “expedient” are quite capable of blowing local dog-whistles in local campaign literature, to exploit any local prejudice, usually racist, or inter-communal.
How can we get a more honest politics? I genuinely don’t know.
Is a desire to avoid the wrath of the Daily Mail type headline -‘FURY AT LIB DEMS ‘ on some issue?
Not many former Tory voters will pay inheritance tax or use private schools.
They could try to work out policies which benefit most people, are fair and effective.
People might vote for that and with more conviction.
This is absolute madness.
I will make a bold suggestion here, the overwhelming majority of voters in this country, want free healthcare, free dentistry, free eye tests, home GP visits, cheap green energy, cheap public transport, cheap rental housing, safer streets, secure jobs, free social and nursing care for the elderly just like we had years ago.
Why don’t the Lib Dems, Greens or whoever, go and read your Taxing wealth report, or Stephanie Kelton’s book and then grow some balls and put the point across that we really can have all this.
It is an election winner. What is the matter with them?
I don’t think you’re right Sean. A majority possibly but certainly not an overhwelming majority want those things and we know this from revealed preferences. If someone acquires a lot more money they could continue to get the free education option for their children and spend all the extra on themselves, or they could put their children into fee-paying education and have less for themselves. Or look at the numbers entitled to free public travel who choose car or taxis instead.
But suppose there is still a majority in favour. In your view, in a liberal non-authoritarian non-socialist society, should that give them the right to impose their preferences on the minority especially when those desires can be means-tested.
You gave yourself away as a neoliberal when you mentioned revealed preferences.
Now look at the real world, I suggest.
So, Andrew, you are telling me that there are people who do not want free stuff?
I am going to suggest that what you really mean is not that people don’t want (they do) but that you don’t like the idea we could actually do this. I think that is Richard’s point.
Thank you, Richard.
I deleted known, as in little known that the ladies were used to unseat Kennedy.
My questioning was more of a reply to Sean, but thank you for your thought.
I realised that
But you came at it from what you thought a rational and I think an absurd angle
Revealed preferences of the sought you claim exist are best explained as the price of snobbery
Tony criticises my reference to Charles Kennedy as a hopeless drunk with the words “I never voted for CK, but traducing him with such a negative reference seems somewhat crass, when we have so few politicians of any merit.” ENTIRELY missing the very clear high respect in which I held Charles Kennedy.- clear from the way in which I believe his survival and continued leadership of the Lib-Dems qoyks have been to the good of all of us.
As to the “hopeless drunk”, Tony clearly doesn’t remember the deeply embarrassing Lib-Dem election broadcast – must have been a live show – in which Sarah Teather was attempting to put across Lib-Dem policy on, I think, taxation and investment, only to be overtaken by a rambling
intervention from a pretty incoherent Charles Kennedy, in response to which poor Sarah Teather clearly wished the ground would swallow up and remove one or other of them from the broadcast – a tragedy for her, a greater tragedy for him, and most of all a tragedy for the UK that a man of such talent, skill and integrity should have been so destroyed by alcoholism.
Far from disrespecting Charles Kennedy, I have the very greatest respect for him. Had he led the Labour Party, he would surely have made it to No. 10. It is his tragedy, and ours, that he didn’t.
Richard, do you understand what the economic term ‘revealed preferences’ actually means?
From your response, it would seem not.
It basically means ‘look at what people actually do, rather than what they say’. You can’t get more “real world” than that!
I know exactly what it is claimed to mean
It is an action by homo economicus
Being ignorant of what “revealed preferences” means, or even that it is a technical economic term. I put it into a non-G***le search engine, & read the explanations in Wikipedia, Investopaedia, Brittanica and one other site. There was not a real world example in any of the “explanations” and I couldn’t make head nor tail of any of them – the explanations seemed extremely rarefied. A few scatter graphs, a lot of algebraic symbols, but not much “real world” visible at all. But I have no economic expertise except from my own reading, so what would I know? (But I know what I want, and it isn’t an unfair, unjust, unsustainable, grossly unequal, cruel society where economic disparity increases exponentially, year on year, and Elon Musk and his private jet can choose to wipe out in one day, the entire beneficial effect of the more just and sustainable choices I try to make, through my whole lifetime.
It is neoclassical gobbledegook intended to prove their economic order is correct. It requires wild assumptions, like consistency of choice. It assumes we are rational. It is nonsense.