Lib Dem broken promises

Looking back at the 2010 Lib Dem manifesto, you immediately see that many of their election pledges have not been met:

• Saying no to the like-for-like replacement of the Trident nuclear
  weapons system, which could cost £100 billion. We will hold a full
  defence review to establish the best alternative for Britain’s future
  security.
• Scrap unfair university tuition fees for all students taking their fi rst
  degree, including those studying part-time, saving them over £10,000
  each. We have a financially responsible plan to phase fees out over
  six years, so that the change is affordable even in these difficult
  economic times, and without cutting university income. We will
  immediately scrap fees for final year students.
• Reject a new generation of nuclear power stations; based on the
  evidence nuclear is a far more expensive way of reducing carbon
  emissions than promoting energy conservation and renewable energy.
• Rule out the like-for-like replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons
  system. At a cost of £100 billion over a lifetime it is unaffordable, and
  Britain’s security would be better served by alternatives. We support
  multilateral nuclear disarmament and will ensure that the UK plays a
  proactive role in the arms reduction talks starting later this year

If you read the manifesto you will find plenty of other policy statements which will not come to pass.  They also made a U turn on delaying the cuts.  And who can forget this election poster:

Again, the Lib Dems are now supporting the rise in VAT.


The question is, what have the Lib Dems got out of this agreement?

From the looks of it very little.  They have got a referendum to allow some minor tinkering with the electoral system to bring us AV.  But there is no certainty they will get a yes vote with their Tory partners campaigning against it.

At the end of the day, all they've achieved is the chance to say they are in government and a few seats at the cabinet table.  They may well regret this at forthcoming elections, as who is going to believe them when they have committed a u-turn on so many of their election pledges?  And it is clear they can no longer pretend to be a party of the centre left, when the policies their cabinet are selling are clearly centre-right.

Is this the beginning of the end for a public higher education system?

Two stories about HE have made the press this week.  The first is the Browne report which proposes tuitions fees starting at £7000 but with no upper limit, it would therefore be no surprise if we see much higher fees, especially from the Russell Group universities.


Then today we see a leaked letter from Universities UK which has been sent to universities warning them to expect cuts of £4.2bn to teaching budgets and £1bn to research budgets a result of the comprehensive spending review.

The result of both these proposals could be an end to the higher education system as we know it.  It would not be a surprise if we see a drop in student applications from those who do not wish to saddle themselves with debts at more than double the current level.  We could also see some universities going bankrupt due to budget cuts and decreased public funding.

What is most worrying is that this clearly looks like the final step to a privatised university system.  If these changes are implemented universities will need to start funding some arts and humanities courses purely from student fees, as funding is to be withdrawn from all but science, engineering, medicine and modern language degrees and with variable fees we are already very close to seeing a private market in HE with only one more step needed to make the system completely funded by tuition fees and private research funding.

UCU and the NUS have organised a joint national demo called "Fund our future:Stop Education Cuts" on 10th November 2010.  Details at http://www.demo2010.org/

Further vandalism of the NHS as Con Dems axe NHS Direct

The Tories claimed in the general election:

"We can't go on like this. I'll cut the deficit, not the NHS"

This may be technically correct, as they have ring-fenced the budget.  But they are using some of the funding for a pointless and dangerous re-organization of the NHS and to pay for it they are cutting services.

The latest example of this is the announcement yesterday in the Guardian that the Con Dems plan to scrap NHS direct replacing it with a new budget service called NHS 111.

Currently forty percent of NHS Direct's staff are trained nurses.  NHS 111 will have one trained nurse to every 25 call centre staff, in other words only 4% of the staff will be professional nurses.  The other call operators will go on a 60 hour training course.

As soon as the public realise that the new call centre is not staffed by health professionals they will start putting extra demand on casualty and out of hour GP services, rather than risk receiving unprofessional advice from call centre operators.

I have used NHS Direct on more than one occasion in the past and was satisfied with the professional advice I received to save me having to put demand on other NHS services.  I would not use the proposed new service for health advice.

The biggest risk could come from a member of staff offering poor or incorrect advice to a caller which could result in them not seeking professional medical advice when they do require it.

The cost to the public of NHS Direct is £123 million a year.  This is money well spent, which reduces the demand on other areas of the NHS.  We must fight to defend this and you can start by signing the petition at http://www.savenhsdirect.co.uk/

There is no need for these cuts.  The government would not need to be looking for cuts if it was not for their expensive and dangerous re-structuring of the NHS which is going to cost the tax payer £1.8 billion a year.

We have to fight the cuts and the Con Dem vandalism of the NHS before it is too late and see all the improvements of the past 17 years thrown away.

100 days

We have now reached 100 days of the Con Dems and we face a very bleak picture of what the country will be like for the next five years.  The country faces:

• Drastic cuts to public services of up to 40%, even though the private sector is in no position to absorb the thousands of public sector workers who will be made redundant.  Those who manage to keep there jobs face a two year pay freeze at a time when RPI is currently 4.8%.
• A rise in VAT to 20%.  A regressive tax which will hit the poorest in society the worst.
• A wrecking bill which will see an expensive re-organisation of the NHS and allow back door privatisation by scrapping primary care trusts.
• An unequal education system which will see Gove's free schools create a two-tier education system at the expense of 700 projects being scrapped from Labour's building schools for the future scheme.  At the same time we will see higher education facing a real funding crisis as cuts kick in.
• A shake up of benefits which will see many of the poorest in society facing even tougher times as benefits are slashed.
• A cut in the number of MPs tagged onto the AV bill. The money this will save is negligible and will mean MPs will be more thinly stretched to cover constituency work.
• Councils will see funding cuts of £1.165 billion, meaning drastic cuts to local services.
• The arts will see major cuts regardless of how successful some of the projects currently are.  This has been shown by the scrapping of the UK film council.
• 9 regional development agencies have been scrapped.
• More outsourcing of government duties to the private sector, most recently with the scrapping of the audit commission.

There is absolutely no need for such huge cuts to public services at such speed, and no need for root and branch re-organisation of our public services.  These moves have more to do with Tory ideology than reducing the deficit.

None of this would have been possible without the support of the Lib Dems.  Many Lib Dem voters feel betrayed as they did not vote for this.  Many voters believed the promises of not bringing in immediate cuts or raising VAT and I sincerely hope they desert the Lib Dems at the next election, polls at the moment show a drastic drop in Lib Dem support and at the same time the highest polling for Labour in 3 years, not something you would expect so early in a new administration.

It was not an easy decision for me to leave the Green Party as I supported many of their ideals and policies, but the country now faces impending crisis and the wrecking of the public service improvements made by Labour in the past 13 years.   Only Labour can mount a serious challenge to the ConDem government and it is important that all of us who feel passionate about defending public services no longer sit on the sidelines and join the fightback to ensure the next election brings a clear Labour majority to roll back the mess this coalition will have made.

A short video explaining why the ConDem plans equal the privatisation of the NHS

The ConDem Milk Snatchers

Borrowing from Thatcher's milk snatching policy of the 70s, the ConDem government are now going to stop free milk for under-fives in nursery and day care.

What really annoys me about this move is the rubbish spouted by Health Minister Anne Milton to justify the cut by saying there was no evidence the scheme improved health.

Anyone with the slightest knowledge about health knows it is a given fact that milk is beneficial to child development.  I'm sure many experts on health will soon come out to challenge Milton's statements.  This has already started with the following quote:

Tam Fry, honorary chairman of the Child Growth Foundation charity, said scrapping the Nursery Milk scheme would be "disastrous", adding: "The Conservative minister for health doesn't seem to have learnt the lessons from Margaret Thatcher. Milk is absolutely vital for children in their growing years, particularly pre-school, and has many other attributes as well. It's a step towards healthy living."

Yahoo news

Fib Dem Clegg misled voters in run up to election

Last night's BBC documentary Five Days That Changed Britain, about the negotiations which produced the Con Dem coalition proved to be quite revealing.

Many of us have been rightly saying that the Lib Dems have ditched their principles for power, but the documentary proved that they were not even honest with the voters before the election.

Nick Clegg admitted that he changed his mind about the timing of spending cuts before the election, even though he was telling voters that to bring in cuts now would be "economic masochism" (More on this story in the Guardian)

I hope this latest revelation will cause the exodus of even more Lib Dem members.  They have been betrayed by their leader, and will pay dearly in the next election.

Who can trust a word the Lib Dems say in the future after this betrayal?

Andy Burnham on Lib Con NHS reform

In today's Independent on Sunday Andy Burnham writes a very important article challenging the Lib Con reforms on the NHS.   I strongly recommend that everyone who is concerned about the direction the government are taking the NHS in reads this article.  It clearly highlights the major flaws of a plan which could end the NHS as we know it.

Andy Burnham is not my first choice for Labour leader, but he has been excellent on calling the Lib Cons to task over their reform plans.

The end of his article is a rallying call we should all respond to:

So, my message to patients, doctors and staff who hate these plans as much as I do is this – get ready for the mother of all battles. Labour will bring forward a campaign over the summer to show the strength of opposition to these plans before the health Bill arrives in Parliament in the autumn.

We will defend our party's finest creation with everything we've got from a Bill that threatens to unpick its very fabric.

I would also recommend you join the following two Facebook campaigns:

Hands of our NHS

National General Protest Day to Save the NHS 

Interim cap on non-EU migration bad news for Higher Education

There are many reasons why the Libservatives cap on migration is a badly thought out policy, but the reason which concerns me the most is the effect it will have on Higher Education.

Universities and colleges are already facing hardship, closing departments and making wide spread redundancies, and this is before the implementation of the 25% cut on the Department of Education announced in the budget.  With the cap on migration it will also limit the amount of non-EU students who can attend UK universities.  This will have a devastating effect on university funding if it loses the income from overseas tuition fees.

To quote the article from the BBC News article on the interim measures which are being introduced:

Tim Finch from the Institute of Public Policy Research, said the measures were just a stopgap and would have a detrimental affect on the higher education sector.

He added: "Do we really want to have restrictions on foreign students at a time when the higher education sector is facing funding cuts and is going to rely on the fees that those students bring in?"

According to the Guardian there are 250,000 non-EU students.  This wreckless move will have a devastating effect on higher education.  I hope when the full policy is implemented the government think twice about include non-EU students in their cap, or we may begin to see the closure of whole universities rather than just departments, as there will simply not be the demand out there for the current number of student places.

Do you believe this man when he says 'We're all in this together'?

I feel nauseus each time I hear him say 'we are all in this together'.  The government has a majority of millionaires in the cabinet completely out of touch with real life.

The Lib Dems put out the following poster during the election:

They have now let down those who voted for them who believed they would not raise VAT.

VAT hits all regardless of income and raising it to 20% will hit the poorest the most, where as capital gains tax was only raised to 28%.  Raising this higher would have been fairer as the it would not affect the poorest in the country unlike VAT.

On top of this public sector workers are faced with a pay freeze for two years. Considering RPI is currently over 5%, this is in real terms a significant pay cut.  On top of this many are likely to lose their jobs in the public sector due to real terms cuts across all government departments of 25% over four years (with the exception of health and foreign aid).  How can making thousands of workers redundant and putting them on unemployment benefit help the economy?

The Tories have always been in favour of rolling back the public services and now they can use the fig leaf of the economy to do just that.  Harriet Harman was right when she said that the budget was driven by "ideology not by economics". 

David Laws is arguing over semantics

David Laws was entitled to a private life, and his relationship with another man did not need to be made public.  Unfortunately David made an ill judged decision, and he alone is reponsible for the repurcussions.

In his statement on the BBC News website he says:

At no point did I consider myself to be in breach of the rules which in 2009 defined partner as "one of a couple … who although not married to each-other or civil partners are living together and treat each-other as spouses."

Although we were living together we did not treat each other as spouses - for example we do not share bank accounts and indeed have separate social lives.

This is simply playing with the semantics of the term partner.  Many who have come to his defence in the media this morning talk about his great intellect.  Surely a man of such intellect should have realised that what he was doing was at the very least bending the rules.

According to a recent article in the Times he is worth an estimated £1.3 million.  If David had wanted to keep his relationship private, he should have made the decision not to claim expenses to give to his partner for rent. 

Interim Libservative plans for House of Lords are an undemocratic stitch up

I failed to spot the following Guardian article when published last week. It is certainly a worrying move:

Coalition deal 'to bring 172 peers'

The coalition agreement between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats could result in the parties appointing more than 100 new peers, despite being committed to a largely or fully-elected upper house, it is reported.

The agreement, published last Wednesday, states that a committee will be set up to come forward with draft motions by December to create a reformed upper house elected by proportional representation.

In the interim, the document states that "Lords appointments will be made with the objective of creating a second chamber reflective of the share of the vote secured by the political parties in the last general election".

With Labour currently represented by 211 peers, on a strict mathematical calculation, this would imply an increase from 186 to 263 in Tory numbers in the House of Lords and a boost in Lib Dem places from 72 to 167 - a total of 172 new peers.

This is a blatant attempt to ensure the government can push all of their legislation through without facing opposition. The Libservatives claim to be introducing us to the "new politics" when in fact this is the worst kind of example of the grubby old politics.

By awarding Tories and Lib Dems many more peerages it will not reflect the will of the UK electorate. For a start there are 208 crossbenchers and 26 Lords Spiritual there is a chance many of these peers could be classed as being on the right of the political spectrum, particularly when it comes to issues on equalities.

If they really believe in political reform they should make reform of the House of Lords a priority and bring us an elected second chamber as soon as possible, rather than rushing to cram the Lords with political allies.

Libservatives announce badger slaughter

Listening to Farming Today this morning I was saddened  to hear that the new government has decided to go ahead with a 'cull' of badgers to reduce TB in cattle.

This move is all about appeasing the National Union of Farmers and little to do with scientific evidence.  Hilary Benn was rightly not convinced by the arguments, and it is a shame our new government have decided to ignore the facts.

Find out more about the Save the Badger campaign at

Have we been here before?

Meet our new minister for equalities

As well as becoming Home Secretary Teresa May has also been awarded the position of Minister for Women and Equality.  Presumably she was given this post as only one of two women in the cabinet, the other being Cheryl Gillan as Welsh secretary.  Every other member of the cabinet is a white male.

A quick look on the public whip site shows that Teresa May is no fan of gay rights, having either voted against or being absent when most gay rights legislation of the last government was tabled.

She voted against:

• Crime and Disorder Bill — Reduce age of consent for homosexual acts to 16 
• Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill 
• Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill — Reduction in age at which certain sexual acts are lawful 
• Local Government Bill [Lords] - Prohibition on promotion of homosexuality: bullying 
• Adoption and Children Bill (Programme) — Consideration and Third Reading 
• Adoption and Children Bill — [2nd Allotted Day] — Applications for adoption 
• Adoption and Children Bill — [3rd Allotted Day] — Clause 131 — General interpretation, etc. 
• Adoption and Children Bill — Suitability Of Adopters

I do not have the confidence in her to be a true champion of equality.  This is one post where the Libservatives could have gained a little more credibility by appointing a Lib Dem with a much better voting record than Ms May.