Are Lib Dem ministers happy with a “wogs go home” message?

Yesterday came news of the government’s latest wheeze to reduce illegal immigration. The Home Office is planning to send large billboards round six London boroughs on the back of advertising vans, carrying the slogan “Go home or face arrest”.

For the full sordid details, read Caron Lindsay’s report on Liberal Democrat Voice, the report in last night’s London Evening Standard, and a statement issued by Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, which is worth quoting in full:

This is the latest in a string of Home Office announcements that are designed to make the Government look tough on immigration. But I fear that the only impact this deeply divisive form of politics will have will be to create tension and mistrust towards anyone who looks and sounds foreign.

Instead of trying to grab cheap headlines, the Government would be much better advised to tackle the real issues that undermine confidence in the immigration system. Home Office statistics show that decision making by officials is extremely poor and leads to a quarter of initial decisions to refuse asylum being overturned on appeal. And many of those people who the Government are targeting with these policies are either those whose case has been mishandled by the Home Office, or who Ministers acknowledge cannot be sent home because they wouldn’t be safe.

Vulnerable individuals who are fleeing persecution and violence are treated with disbelief and a complete lack of compassion in a rigid and inhumane system. But rather than tackling these problems head on, Ministers are choosing to once more crank up the anti-migrant rhetoric.

These adverts are nothing less than straight forward intimidation and can only have bad consequences for communities like those I represent in Brent, where people from all faiths and races have mixed for decades. We will all be much poorer for it.

Well said, Sarah. The question is why there have been no similar utterances by any Liberal Democrat minister. After all, this is not merely some mildly unpleasant concession the Liberal Democrats have made as part and parcel of the coalition agreement. This is a fundamental issue of principle, where the Tories are indulging in blatantly racist and provocative tactics. It’s not even a practical policy; these billboards will have no impact on immigration but they will help increase racial tension. Any self-respecting Liberal should publicly disown this policy. Instead, not a word.

Might this be the explanation? In yesterday’s Guardian, John Harris noted how all the proud talk of Britain’s diversity we heard during last year’s London Olympics has been dropped by the government. He reported:

Ten days ago, the former Lib Dem education minster Sarah Teather broke cover, and talked not only about initial Tory intentions to restrict the bringing-in of non-European spouses to people earning £40,000 a year or more, but a new subcommittee of government called the Inter Ministerial Group on Migrants’ Access to Benefits and Public Services. No cabinet ministers attends its meetings, but it apparently includes such figures as the Lib Dem education minister David Laws and the Tory immigration minister Mark Harper, and its fingerprints are all over many of the proposals above.

What on earth is David Laws doing participating in such an exercise? Did he consult Liberal Democrat colleagues before agreeing to these racist policies? The man is a complete and utter disgrace to the party.

And why has Nick Clegg failed to respond to criticisms from within his party? In this instance, he would be well advised not to resort to his usual tactic, which is to patronise internal critics as naive children who don’t understand the practicalities of government. Party members already understand perfectly well what nasty game the Tories are playing – the question is, does Clegg?

Postscript: See Liberal Democrat Councillor Lester Holloway’s blog post: “Theresa May and her ministers and officials know full well the impact of this billboard will be on multicultural communities in general rather than the odd illegal immigrant who might be passing by. It reads like a message to the whole community, an attempt to divide communities and harvest the racist vote from UKIP.”

Why the next manifesto will be boring

The Liberal Democrats have already begun the process of drafting their manifesto for the 2015 general election. Dr Alun Wyburn-Powell reminds us of something fundamental the party risks forgetting:

The major political parties are worried that the voters will blame them for the state of the economy at the next election. But with opinion polls showing that voters share the blame between the last Labour government, the current coalition and the problems of the world economy, there is little to be gained for any party in trying to revisit the past and apportion blame to their opponents. Why?

Voters tend not to be interested in the past (if they even know about it). They are more interested in who can offer the best future. There are plenty of examples of voters ignoring the past (good or bad) and voting for what they believe will be the best option for the future.

This truth presents the Liberal Democrats with a practical problem. If you want to entice voters with “the best option for the future”, you need a vision, and for that you need values.

Liberals have no shortage of values, so why should creating a vision be a problem?

First, Nick Clegg is promoting the idea that he is a non-ideological pragmatist following the only possible course of action. Because he thinks his preferences are both obvious and inevitable, he will brook no argument. Left to his own devices, we will get a manifesto featuring a vague promise of ‘fairness’, an indistinguishable appeal to the mythical ‘centre ground’, patronising lectures about an endless need for austerity, inflated claims about the crumbs the party has picked up from the coalition table, and a tedious blame game (“the mess left by Labour”). What we won’t get is any vision of how society could be radically different. How can we, when above all Clegg will want to avoid saying anything that is implicitly critical of coalition government policy or that makes it more difficult to renew the coalition with the Tories?

Then there is the problem of David Laws, who Clegg has appointed to chair the working group that is drafting the manifesto. Laws has a strong ideological attachment to the failed economic orthodoxy of the past three decades. Left to his own devices, we won’t get a vision for the future but the promise of a better yesterday.

Ah, you may say, but what about the party’s Federal Policy Committee? The FPC is supervising the manifesto drafting process. Surely it will ensure the necessary vision and values? If only we could be so sure.

In 2011, the FPC produced a ‘policy development agenda’, a sort of pre-manifesto called Facing the Future. It was a depressingly timid, unimaginative and lacklustre document, which signally failed to face the future. That is why David Boyle and I wrote an alternative called Really Facing the Future, which suggested a bolder direction for the party.

As long as the Liberal Democrat leadership is reluctant to face the future but prefers to look to the past and cling to a clapped out orthodoxy, the party will fail to offer “the best option for the future” and will suffer the consequences at the 2015 election.

The difference between David Laws and Nick Clegg

There is a narrative of current trends in the Liberal Democrats (repeated most recently in some of the comments here) that says David Laws and Nick Clegg are joined in some sort of conspiracy to move the party rightwards. It’s not as simple as that. There is an important philosophical difference between Laws, who is motivated by ideology, and Clegg, who is motivated by an idea of pragmatism.

Laws believes that Liberalism once existed in a pure form, the classical liberalism of the mid-nineteenth century. Since then, it became polluted by association with socialism and social democracy. The task is therefore to “reclaim liberalism” (as the cover of the Orange Book put it), purify the party and return it to an unsullied state – hence all the low tax, small state stuff. (This view is shared by Clegg’s former adviser Richard Reeves).

Clegg, on the other hand, believes in a notion of pragmatism (explored more fully in an earlier post). He is too young to have any adult memory of politics before the Berlin Wall fell, so has no recall of politics as a battle of ideas. He assumes that the basic ideological questions have been settled for good and sees himself as a post-ideological pragmatist (rather like Tony Blair and David Cameron – the coalition works in part because Clegg and Cameron share the creed of politics-as-management).

Clegg does in fact have an ideological standpoint (which is evident in the whole set of tacit assumptions he makes about moral questions concerning public policy) but he doesn’t see it that way, preferring to present his opinions as self-evident truths or incontestable facts. It’s only other people who have ideologies, which get in the way of what needs to be done. This is why Clegg turns impatient and tetchy with anyone in the party who disagrees with him. “Can’t you see?” he seems to be saying, “My way is the only possible way. If you disagree, you are living in the past, an immature and hopeless idealist who doesn’t recognise the realities of modern government.”

While Laws has a surfeit of imagination (so much that he believes he can restore an imaginary past), Clegg has a poverty of imagination (so little that he cannot imagine an alternative future). What they share is a denial of possibilities, which stifles debate about the sort of society we want to live in.

Laws and Clegg remain close allies because the former’s ideology happens to overlap with the latter’s idea of what is pragmatic. But when the orthodoxy about ‘what works’ changes (and it will), they will no longer see eye to eye.

Laws scrapes home

The Liberal Democrats’ Federal Policy Committee (FPC) last night voted by 14 to 8 to accept Nick Clegg’s nomination of David Laws to chair the working group that will draft the next general election manifesto. (See this blog’s previous reports here and here).

This decision was not a ringing endorsement. Clegg and Laws won the vote but lost the argument, with some of the 14 who voted for Laws nevertheless openly critical of his nomination. They reluctantly accepted Laws only after it was made clear that the working group would remain subordinate to the FPC.

This is not a good start to the manifesto drafting process. Laws does not have the full confidence of the FPC and, given his habit of making provocative statements, the working relationship is likely to deteriorate.

There is also a more fundamental problem. Leadership is about keeping the party together, not fracturing it still further. When you consider Clegg’s nomination of Laws together with his refusal to budge over the issue of secret courts, it seems that our leader thinks he has nothing to lose by arrogantly driving through his own agenda.

This hubris will be Clegg’s undoing. In British politics, leaders are never bigger than their party – as even Margaret Thatcher found to her cost.

POSTSCRIPT: A post on Liberal Democrat Voice disputes this version of events:

A motion from Gareth Epps saying the Manifesto Working Group shouldn’t be approved until a full process and remit was agreed was defeated 14-8. However, David’s position as chair was unanimously approved, 22-0.

We have checked with our sources. What Gareth Epps’s motion actually proposed was to decline to endorse all of the nominations for the working group, not just David Laws. It called for a hearing session with the chair of the working group to ensure that he accepted the primacy of mainstream thinking in the party. It also called for terms of engagement, and most of the debate at the FPC meeting was about that. This motion was rejected by 14 votes to 8. Separately, there was also a vote to add Lord John Shipley to the working group. There was no unanimous 22-0 vote to approve Laws’s position as chair.

More about David Laws and the manifesto

Yesterday, this blog reported the rumour that David Laws was to be put in charge of drafting the Liberal Democrats’ 2015 general election manifesto.

We can now confirm this story. Nick Clegg has nominated a manifesto working group and Laws is the proposed chair. Clegg’s nominations will be discussed by the party’s Federal Policy Committee (FPC) tomorrow (Monday) evening.

The other proposed members of the group are the leader himself, the party president (Tim Farron MP), the four officers of the FPC (chair Duncan Hames MP and vice-chairs Duncan Brack, Julian Huppert MP and Julie Smith), Baroness Sal Brinton, Jo Swinson MP (representing Scotland), Jenny Willott MP (representing Wales) and Sharon Bowles MEP. Only two of these nominees (Duncan Brack and Julie Smith) are not parliamentarians.

On the face of it, there appears to be no particular ideological imbalance. The significant thing about the majority of these nominees is not their ideology but their loyalty to Clegg.

The controversy centres on the nomination of Laws as chair. There would have been little or no objection to Laws as one member of a balanced team, but putting him in charge of drafting the manifesto is a highly provocative act – and Clegg knows it. Indeed, several members of the FPC have told Liberator that they see this appointment as a “declaration of war” and Monday evening’s discussion is likely to be a full and frank exchange.

In case anyone wonders why Laws is such a controversial choice, the 2010 expenses scandal is the least of people’s concerns. The problems are Laws’s ideological views on economics (which are well to the right of most of the party) and his general contempt for party policy. And Laws is only too ready to broadcast his contempt:

• The shared responsibility for the laughable slogan ‘Alarm Clock Britain’, revealed in the Daily Telegraph (11 January 2011) – “Alarm Clock Britain: David Laws to lead policy team”.
• The smearing as ‘grumpy’ of any Liberal Democrat not expressing unalloyed joy about the coalition, reported in the Sun (16 September 2011) – “Lib Dem David Laws in ‘grumpy’ warning to party”.
• The astonishing statement “George Osborne is proving to be a very strong chancellor who gets the big decisions right,” in an article in the Guardian (21 February 2012).
• A call for further and permanent spending cuts (via the market fundamentalist think tank IEA), reported on Conservative Home (25 June 2012) – “David Laws battles for classical liberalism in the Lib Dems”.
• A declaration that “All Lib Dems have ‘collective responsibility’ for breaking tuition fee promise,” reported in the Daily Telegraph (20 September 2012).

One enduring mystery is why Clegg repeatedly goes so far out on a limb to promote Laws. When Laws was brought back into government in last year’s ministerial reshuffle, David Cameron extracted a heavy price from Clegg (including the sacking of Nick Harvey from the Ministry of Defence). Laws may be intelligent and able, but no individual – no matter how talented – justifies Clegg’s continuing (and reckless) expenditure of political capital.

POSTSCRIPT: An update reporting the decision of the FPC is here.

Laws to write manifesto?

“Sources in Westminster” (as they say in the proper newspapers) have informed Liberator of a strong rumour that David Laws is about to be given the job of writing the Liberal Democrats’ 2015 general election manifesto.

Is this what Nick Clegg means by getting his message across? The symbolism of appointing Laws would not be lost on Clegg, given Laws’s notoriety for holding views on economics well to the right of most party members.

The party’s 2011 policy document Facing the Future suggested that the next manifesto was likely to be a rather timid affair (which is why David Boyle and I wrote a more robust alternative). That prospect now seems attractive compared with a document written by Laws.

Meanwhile, it seems that the party is trying to take the credit for Liberator’s leak of the ‘message script’. In today’s edition of the ‘Letter from the Leader’ e-mailed to party members, Nick Clegg writes “We also got a bit of attention after the party’s central message for spokespeople was featured on the BBC.” Is this what they mean by ‘damage limitation’?

Clegg goes on to argue:

There’s nothing unusual about political parties wanting to ensure they get their message across, and our key argument – that the Liberal Democrats are building a stronger economy in a fairer society, enabling every person to get on in life – is one that I hope some of you are already starting to recognise.

A good test for the validity of any argument is to ask whether anyone would seriously propose the opposite: “We are building a weaker economy in an unfairer society, preventing every person from getting on in life.” I don’t think so.

POSTSCRIPT: Update here.

Spending and Growth

In the 2010 general election, the Liberal Democrats recognised that the government deficit had to be brought under control, but also that cutting too fast or too soon would be self-defeating. The party’s manifesto said:

We must ensure the timing is right. If spending is cut too soon, it would undermine the much-needed recovery and cost jobs. We will base the timing of cuts on an objective assessment of economic conditions, not political dogma.

Once the coalition was formed, that wisdom went out of the window. Liberal Democrat ministers began arguing for the Tory policy of early cuts, on the dubious grounds that the UK economy was comparable to Greece.

It seems that Nick Clegg and David Laws, contrary to the manifesto, were more concerned with political dogma than “an objective assessment of economic conditions”. They saw the coalition as an opportunity to reorient the Liberal Democrats around a ‘small state’ ideology. Laws makes that clear in an essay he wrote for the IEA in June.

David Howarth has demolished Laws’s arguments in an essay written for the think tank Liberal Insight. He asks, “Is Laws right to imply that reducing the overall share of public spending in GDP will lead to greater prosperity?” and concludes he is not.