OMG - Ignorance or Stupidity

[FunkyDexter]

I have to say FD this is one thing on which we disagree, etc

I don't disagree with most of what you're saying but I think I may not have been particularly clear in my post so I'll try to explain a bit better.

The important thing to remember is that the Tories 'won' the last election in so far as they had the highest vote count. The Lib Dems really didn't some anywhere at all and they actually went backwards on previous results. This was a real shame after the promise they showed in the early debates. I'm a natural Lib Dem so I'd have loved to see them do better but I'm forced to acknowledge that they're only really in government at all because they happened to still have enough of a vote to push the tories over the line.

With that in mind I have to accept that this parliament will be driven primarily by the Tory agenda, that's what the public voted for. What I'm looking for the Lib Dems to do (and I believe they have done, reasonably well) is limit the extent to which that agenda is applied. So, for example, we've got an immigration cap because that's the Tory agenda, but it's been set at the highest level that the independent consultations were recommending. The burden of the debt recovery is being shouldered primarily by service cuts rather than tax rises because, again, that's the Tories agenda. But the balance swung back toward tax by 2 or 3 percent* as a result of the Lib Dems pulling in the other direction.

The tuition fees issue is an interesting one. The Libs really did set their stall up on that and do appear to have U-Turned. I'm not sure that U-Turn is really real though. I'm willing to bet none of the Libs wanted the rise and were arguing against it behind closed doors. The trouble is there are so many pundits and political opponents just gagging for the coallition to fail that public criticism of the increase would be taken as 'cracks in the coallition'. I think that's one of the biggest weaknesses of a coallition system (not just this one), because both parties ARE the government, they cannot publicly dissent from the government line, even if the privately do so. That sucks, frankly, but it is the reality of democratic politics. I think proportional representation would be much better in that regard because a certain amount of dissent would be expected.

BTW one thing that seems to have got lost in the furore about the rise in tuition fees is the cynicism in the rules on repaying the student loan. There are two changes I find really objectionable: 1. The interest rate charged is now higher than inflation (it used to be tagged to inflation, making it a zero interest loan in real terms) and 2: You will now have to pay a charge if you want to pay your loan off early. Those two changes shift the student loan from being a way of recovering the cost of your education to a way of actively making money out you as a student.

How do we avoid this in a democracy?

You can't. Seeing a pet project through to completion is actually something a dictatorship is much better at than a democracy. Just look at Stalins 5 Year Plans. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be a price worth paying though.


*Just to clarify that figure because it might be missleading otherwise: I'm refering to the balance of where the savings and gains came from in the budget. The Tories wanted it to be almost exclusively from service cuts. As it's turned out the bulk is still coming from Service cuts but there has been an incrase in tas as well. That doesn't equate to a tax increas of 2 to 3 % or a service budget cut of 2 to 3 %, it's a swing from one source to another of 2 to 3 %.