Liberal democrats

Council tax freeze is a cracking wheeze for Labour

Paul Waugh has the scoop that all eight Labour councils in London will freeze council tax from next April. The councils worked with Communities Secretary John Denham, who emphasised that 2010-2011’s increase in the central grant means that tax rises are unacceptable. As Waugh puts it, the “low-tax era seems finally to have begun”. This is very early to announce rate levels and represents a pre-election skirmish, suggesting that Labour will campaign on the issue of maintaining low council taxes nationwide. Labour face annihilation in the capital, so freezing unpopular rises whilst not embracing equally unpopular cuts is politically smart. Although it will be interesting to see if Tory councils

Clegg embodies his party’s incoherence

Nick Clegg started the Lib Dem conference with an interview calling for ‘savage cuts’ in public spending and ended it with a speech trying to position the Lib Dems as the main party of the left in Britain. That pretty much sums up the strategic incoherence of this conference which has left the Lib Dems worse off than they were before.   The Lib Dems have had an awful week for several reasons. First, they haven’t done the basics well—putting Clegg up against Obama was hardly clever programming and not informing every spokesperson of policy announcements before the media was told was bound to cause trouble. (How no one thought

Lloyd Evans

Nick Clegg at the LibDem conference

What a week for the LibDems. The conference began, as always, with the sound newspapers being arranged across sleeping faces as the mass snore-in started. A few hopeful souls wondered if the LibDems might finally tell us exactly what their party is for. And LibDems went about their usual business of behaving like some cuddly cult for Terribly Nice People. Then everything changed. Out came their true colours and they started scrapping in the sand-pit like a pack of ruthless cockerels. It began with Nick Clegg’s misuse of the word ‘savage’ in reference to cuts. It got worse when Vince ‘Capability’ Cable announced a muddled new levy on million-pound houses.

James Forsyth

Banging on about Europe will cost the Lib Dems seats

In his interview with the FT, Nick Clegg says that the Lib Dems have been too “reticent” about making Europe a dividing line with the Tories. There’s little doubt that Clegg, a former MEP is an ideological pro-European. But if he starts banging on about Europe he’ll cause his party problems. The Lib Dems have several seats in the South West, one of the most Euro-sceptic regions of the county. As the European elections results there showed, when Europe is the issue the Lib Dems do badly. If Clegg really does intend to make Europe a key campaign dividing line, then the Tories will fancy their chance of picking up

Lib Dem conference goes from bad to worse for Clegg

After an awful conference so far, the last thing the Lib Dems needed was for another internal row to threaten to overshadow the leader’s speech. But that is what has happened. 18 of the 29 member Federal Policy Committee, which produces the Lib Dem manifesto, have written to The Guardian saying that they will include in it a commitment to scrap tuition fees regardless of what the leadership wants. This is not the only open defiance of Nick Clegg’s authority. Steve Webb, the party’s work and pensions spokesman, has moved on from slapping down Clegg over the possibility of means-testing child benefit to, as The Guardian reports it, ‘saying the

Is bad publicity really better than no publicity?

The Liberal Democrat’s party conference is the one occasion when they are guaranteed what they need most: publicity. This year has seen them dominate the headlines, albeit negatively. Unashamedly public in-fighting followed Nick Clegg’s extraordinary pronouncement about “savage cuts”. Steve Webb’s rejection of Clegg’s plans to tighten up ‘middle-class benefits’ and Charles Kennedy’s thinly veiled call to arms against the proposed abolition of the pledge to abolish tuition fees were minor squabbles compared to the Mansions tax debacle. Yesterday, I suggested the proposal was sensible; it isn’t. In theory it’s not a bad idea for a targeted super tax (a fiscal expedient necessary for tackling Brown’s deficit), but the Lib

Alex Massie

Vince Cable – Clever Chap; Hopeless Politician

The other thing to be borne in mind about the Liberal Democrats – apart, that is, from the fact that they betray proper liberalism every day – is that they’re hopeless at politics. Vince Cable’s proposals on freezing public sector pay, reforming pensions and increasing the personal allowance are actually all very sensible. Good policies in fact! Worth talking about! So what does he do? Only ruin everything by proposing an absurd, back-of-a-napkin plan to tax large houses still further. (That the Lib Dems are, or used to be becauses, really, who can tell these days, in favour of replacing property taxes with a local income tax merely adds to

Are the knives out for Vince?

This morning it emerged that Julia Goldsworth, the Lib Dems’ communities’ spokesman, who nominally supervises local taxation, knew nothing of the mansion tax until hearing it announced over the radio. The Guardian’s Allegra Stratton writes that Goldsworthy’s disclosure proves that Clegg and Cable run a ‘duopoly on leadership’. Cable is not as popular within his party and resentment is building on the frontbenches. Andrew Neil reports that a private meeting of Lib Dem MPs rounded on Cable and his “suicidal” mansion tax. Also, Stratton was informed by one frontbencher that “Clegg will have to sack Vince” after the election. Cable has begun to resemble the court’s jester rather than its

The love that dare not speak its name

The Conservatives’ unrequited love for the Liberal Democrats receives attention this morning. The Times’ Rachel Sylvetser points out that in reality, away from dreams of government and official opposition, the Lib Dems have everything to gain by giving in to David Cameron’s and Eric Pickles’ serenades: ‘They set themselves up as the party of honesty, who will tell the truth about fiscal restraint, but on the issue over which they have most control — the role they would play in a hung Parliament — they offer only obfuscation. They define themselves constantly in terms of the other two parties, then when it comes to the crunch they refuse to say

More than half of those who voted Labour in 2005 say they won’t do so this time round

The new ICM poll for The Guardian shows the Tories in an extremely strong position heading into conference season. They are on 43 percent, 17 points ahead of Labour. The extent of Labour’s fall since the last election is illustrated by the fact that only 47 percent of those who voted for the party then intend to do so again. Indeed, even 40 percent of those who have remained loyal to Labour now expect a Tory victory at the next election. The poll also shows that Labour is not seen as credible on the state of the public finances by the electorate. Only 14 percent of voters believe that Labour is

The Tories must ready themselves for the coming tax battle

You may not agree with the specifics, but one of the successes of the Lib Dem conference so far has been to shift the debate about our fiscal recovery from one wholly about spending cuts to one about tax changes too.  This is a necessary step.  For reasons which have been delved into by Danny Finkelstein, spending restraint alone won’t be enough to tackle Brown’s debt mountain.  There will have to be tax rises.  And, what’s more, they will have to be efficient and – as far as possible – fair. These points are made by Jackie Ashley in today’s Guardian, who argues that Labour should move as quickly as

Alex Massie

Could You Vote for the Liberal Democrats?

Sometimes, you know, I wish I could. Then the Liberal Democrats come along to remind one how difficult it is to support them. But, in theory, could one vote for a truly liberal party? Of course one could. And would, if only one were so available. In Massie’s Better Ordered Political Landscape the Liberal Democrats would, roughly speaking, be the equivalent of Germany’s Free Democrats*. It’s true that there are some liberals** in the Lib Dems – one thinks of the gang at Liberal Vision and other bloggers such as Charlotte Gore – but they’re a minority within their own minority. As Mark Littlewood says, a new BBC poll confirms

Lib Dems in the limelight

The Lib Dems need eye-catching policies to attract attention and this time round their neon lit policy is a 0.5% levy on houses valued at over £1million. The party forecast levying £1.1bn from the top 1% of rich property owners to raise the income tax threshold to £10,000. The tax will be collected by councils using land registers to identify which properties are liable. It doesn’t follow that families can afford a £2,500 bill just because they happen to own a property worth in excess of £1million. But, providing the levy remains a temporary measure, the proposal is a fair way to fund an income tax threshold rise, the current

The Lib Dems: not as nice as you think

A story that has escaped largely unnoticed this weekend is the creation of the Liberal Democrat party’s sinisterly named ‘anti-Tory attack unit’. Sam Coates has the details in the Times: ‘Nick Clegg has created an anti-Tory attack unit which will focus Liberal Democrat firepower on exposing George Osborne’s “complete inexperience”. In an interview with The Times, Chris Huhne said that specialist staff will be seconded to the new group, which he will chair and will include all the party’s most effective attack dogs, including Norman Baker, Norman Lamb and Lord Oakeshott. Mr Huhne, the party’s home affairs spokesman, will lead the party’s attack at their conference, which begins today in Bournemouth.

Why Vince Cable is not too sexy for his party

For all his celebrity, Vince Cable is not exactly an economic genius – as those who have read his book, The Storm,  will know all to well (Specator review here). But he is seldom tested on this point, as he encounters broadcasters whose line of questioning is normally “tell us, Sage of Twickenham, what is happening.” For those who don’t regard him as the new Oracle and have wanted  see him put through his paces, Andrew Neil – Cable’s former student – gives his old master a grilling on the BBC News Channel. In the interview, Cable gets steadily more irritated (and rumbled) and admits to having flip-flopped. The Cable phenomenon

Liberal moment or Liberal Democrat dilemma?

It’s not often that a man who claims to have bedded and satisfied over 30 women declares that the nation is on the cusp of ‘its liberal moment’, and it’s drawn attention to the Liberal Democrats. With Labour seemingly returning home to the house that Jack Jones built, Nick Clegg should be sweeping the country, but his earnest predictions about a progressive liberal future have made no impression and his party still trails. Why are the Lib Dems doing so poorly? Lloyd Evans’ appraisal that they failed to use the expenses scandal to push their long-standing reform agenda has much to commend it. And today, Polly Toynbee writes a brilliant

Is Osborne worth it?

Fresh from winning GQ’s Politician of the Year award last week, George Osborne now has an accolade he may be even happier with: heavy praise from both Peter Oborne and Matthew Parris.  Both commentators write columns today which dish out the superlatives for Osborne’s response to the fiscal crisis, and suggest he has been vindicated by events.  Here’s the key passage from Oborne’s article, by way of a taster: “Slowly Osborne began to win the argument. First (as I revealed in this column last March), Bank of England governor Mervyn King sent private warnings to the Treasury that he feared extra public spending would damage the official credit ratings that

Cable separates his own brand from the Lib Dems

So are Vince Cable’s public spending cuts his own, or are they Lib Dem policy?  In his Straight Talk interview with the Lib Dem treasury spokesman this weekend, Andrew Neil tries to get to the bottom of it all.  The result?  Well, according to Cable, Nick Clegg “approved” his pamphlet for the think tank Reform, and some of its contents could find their way into the party’s manifesto: “A lot of it is already Lib Dem policy, a lot of it already is, the rest of it will have to be considered and we’ll go into an election with a manifesto, we have a due process.  Maybe because of who