On 1st March, my colleague on Hedge End Town Council, Jenny Schwausch, and I acted on our increasing disappointment with the Liberal Democrats at a national level and left the party. We will sit as independent councillors until the elections in May. This means that there are now two independents on Hedge End Town Council and four on Eastleigh Borough Council (equal with the Conservatives - I wonder who is the "official" opposition now).
David Laws MP speaking on Radio 4 recently made it clear: "The party has changed and now the challenge for everybody is to look to the future rather than to re-fight battles from the past." Nick Clegg is leading the party in the wrong direction for me, and when I look to the future I can only see it getting closer to the Conservatives. For somebody who hoped the Lib Dems would bring about a realignment of the Left, that is clearly a disappointment.
It can't be right to promise to vote against any rise in tuition fees and then vote to triple them.
It can't be right that councils are being forced to cut libraries, children's sure start centres, and day centres for older people when George Osborne found £7 million to bail out the Irish government.
It can't be right that people with disabilities are worried about losing their disability living allowance when bankers are still walking away with their massive bonuses.
It can't be right that the coalition is forcing through massive changes to higher education and the NHS which were in neither party's manifesto.
The old cliche "all politics is local" means that local politics also gets tainted by national politics. It is not possible to stand as a "local" liberal democrat and dissociate yourself from the national party. So although I have no major arguments with the local liberal democrats - and still have many friends who are choosing to stay in the party - I couldn't honestly put on an orange rosette in May.
@TGR Worzel - Thanks for your comments.
ReplyDeleteThe Lib Dem manifesto commitment was clearly and unequivocally to scrap tuition fees entirely (over time). As the Lib Dems (as you rightly point out) came third, it is indeed unfair to criticise them for not keeping to their manifesto commitment.
But the NUS pledge was a personal promise made by every Lib Dem MP to their voters (especially students and younger voters). It was a promise to vote against any increase in fees.
Now, if the Lib Dems had gained a majority, there would have been no question of an increase even being proposed, as the official party policy was to phase out fees over time.
Despite Clegg's subsequent sophistry, it is clear that the personal pledge was not at all dependent on the Lib Dem's winning the election, but was made in the expectation that they would lose and be free to vote against any majority party's proposal to raise fees.
Bottom line is a promise was made and broken. They broke both the tuition fees promise and the "no more broken promises" promise.
Your thoughts on how to legitimise coalition agreements are interesting.
What worries me more is that the coalition is pushing through policies which are not in either party's manifesto or in the coalition agreement.
Whatever happened to the St George's Day Festival in Hedge End? It took off like a rocket but has now apparently exited the solar system as I haven't seen anything at all about it.
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