My election wishlist

None of the items below is sexy, but I think they are all necessary and will have a surprising effect on accountability, efficiency, the quality of the services we receive, and the amount of tax available to pay for them.

Welfare policy
Whatever the words employed, current welfare policy is about demonising and impoverishing claimants. We want a society where everyone who is not working, either because there is no work, or because they are too ill or disabled to work, is guaranteed a decent minimum without fear of constant harassment.


Civil service capacity
We've been outsourcing busily for thirty years. That's an entire generation. But the capacity of the civil service to monitor the tens of billions of pounds in those contracts remains unacceptably low. We need to beef up the contract control functions of the civil service so that it is capable of ensuring that every profit making contractor delivers the service that we are paying them for.


FOI for all government contracts
Much of our tax money is wasted through sloppy procurement of public services from private contractors. (Example: SERCO had to repay £200 million due to overcharging on offender monitoring contracts.) We need to extend freedom of information provisions to all contracts awarded by central and local governments, so that we can see what is going on with our money, and neither ministers nor contractors will be able to hide behind the fig leaf of commercial confidentiality. Yes,  it's not sexy, but it will make a much bigger difference to both our services and our taxes than most people think.


As many staff to tackle tax avoidance as benefit fraud
Benefit fraud costs us approximately £1.2 billion a year. Tax evasion costs approximately £70 billion a year. The DWP claims to employ 3250 people chasing benefit fraud; HMRC claims to employ 300 people chasing high earning evaders. (Other figures are available.) We need to ensure that as many resources are put into chasing tax evasion as benefit fraud. And we need to see that the proportion of tax evasion cases taken to prosecution equals or outstrips the proportion of benefit fraud cases.


And then when we wake up exhausted the day after election day, I wonder what our red lines should be. Just a few observations here. I have very few things that I would call red lines. I don't think our tax ideas need to be there (I don't think a further raise in the level of personal allowance is the best thing to do for low paid people). There has been a certain amount of speculation about the LibDems not having the stomach for another coalition with the Tories. I don't feel that way. If the electorate deals us those cards again, then we have to play them. The country is not in the delicate state it was in in 2010 so we can afford to take longer and play harder if we think it right to do so. Alternatives like confidence and supply are more open than they were in 2010. There is one area where I would foresee difficulty if I were in the negotiating team. I do not see how we could tolerate being in another government with Iain Duncan Smith. It's not about stomach: I can imagine being in the same room as him. But his lethal combination of vindictiveness and incompetence directed at the poorest and most vulnerable is the very opposite of liberal government. If we enabled him to take another five years to bully poor people, sick people and disabled people, we could no longer call ourselves liberals.

Hope and fear

This post is part film review, part social critique.The two went together so they're getting blogged together. My daughter made me go to see Hunger Games with her, and I'm very glad she did. I knew it would be OK really, as Jennifer Lawrence is watchable in anything. But it has rapidly found its way into my flexible top 100. I was thoroughly absorbed from start to finish – a credible story, credible characters, credible special effects, and gripping music (bought the soundtrack, have it glued to my ears). It's best described as The Truman Show meets Winter's Bone. It's been analysed in great detail by lots of people already. Wikipedia gives a very passable summary so I won't go into detail on that here, but just make a couple of observations. The first is that with all the emphasis these days on special effects, Hunger Games shows that it pays not to overdo them. If you've got a story, a setting and characters that you can run with, you don't need anything else. Hunger Games does have its fair share but doesn't make the effects the star as so many movies seem to nowadays.

The second is to do with how the film reflects or speaks to current reality. This is dealt with quite sharply in the Wikipedia article referred to above. Hunger Games won't count as a great film, but it does deal with great themes and there are parallels to be drawn with current reality, and better still lessons to be learned (if only those who need to learn will be open to doing so). The themes sketched out in Wikipedia are feminism, politics and religion.

The feminist issue was interesting for me. I have to confess, mea culpa, that when I watched the film, I didn't notice. It's a great story and she's a great character. It didn't occur to me that there would be anything more to it than that. It's obvious though that, given the gender unfairness that still permeates the world, Katniss will be a hero for those who still have to fight those battles every day. It becomes even plainer when it is noted, per Tom Long in the Detroit News that “of the top 200 worldwide box-office hits ever ($350 million and up), not one has been built around a female action star”, which means that Hollywood still has a very long way to go. (I've no idea where he gets that figure from.) That the film's feminist undertones are not more pointed is partly due to Suzanne Collins' strategy of putting in plenty of violence but no sex, which had two effects, noted by Kate Heartfield in the Ottawa Citizen. First of all it meant patriarchal parents would not refuse to let their teenage daughters read it, (thus contributing to the success of the trilogy) and secondly the concerns of the book did not directly address the arenas in which gender battles are currently being fought in America – primarily reproductive control.

For the record, in my view, one of the most feminist bits in the film is the first music to go with the credits at the end, Arcade Fire's Abraham's Daughter – worth hanging around just to hear that.

Religion is notable in The Hunger Games for its overt absence. But there is plenty that can be painted in, and Amy Simpson in Christianity Today does a pretty good job at that. For me the resurrection allegory is a bit of a stretch, but the imagery of the bread works pretty well. I think, though, that any religious meaning is one of those make of it what you will themes. Amy Simpson also discusses hope, which she understandably puts in a religious framework. But for me, hope is one of the key ingredients that makes the film politically powerful.

As with feminism and religion, it is possible to read into the film whatever you want politically, and, apparently, left wingers, right wingers, liberals and libertarians all have. The overt themes are obvious – mistrust of government, intolerance of inequality and oppression, and a belief that people can stand up for themselves even under the most tyrannical circumstances. The moment that clicked for me in the film is where the President and the Head Game Maker discuss how to end the game satisfactorily. The President criticises the Game Maker's strategy, saying that he has allowed the players, and by extension, their people in the Districts, hope. And hope, he says, is the one thing that is more powerful  than fear. His job is to keep the majority in check, and he does it with a massive police force and pervasive surveillance, maintaining the supremacy of the Capitol with casual brutality. In one scene a salute from Catniss direct to one of the many cameras tracking her movements sparks a riot in one of the districts, which has to be put down by the police. I saw the film just as the final report of the  Riots, Communities and Victims Panel on the riots of last August was published. In some ways those riots were a blip, an inexplicable and complex occurrence which every commentator was able to interpret in their own way (in much the same way as they have been doing with Hunger Games). I think people generally see them as a blip – the very detailed Final Report has sunk without trace. Perhaps that is because the report itself lays the blame in so many places –  more or less everywhere but with the government. It takes up the theme of hope – “Many young people the Panel met expressed a sense of hopelessness”, and one of its main sections of recommendations is entitled “hopes and dreams”.

The riots came in the middle of a series of protests that were altogether more purposeful: about education, about the NHS, about cuts to welfare, that saw some premeditated, persistent and casual brutality meted out by the police charged with ensuring the safety of the public. Those protests have tailed off as the objects of their anger have ceased to be amenable to change – student fees, the privatisation of the NHS, reductions in welfare are done deals. But I would not be surprised if there were more protests, and more violent reaction to them in the summer months.

Hope and fear are currently submerged for the majority in this country under a blanket of comfort. While there is much inequality and much poverty, the fact remains that Britain is one of the richest societies in the world, and the majority of people are comfortable enough not to be so worried about the condition of the country that they will actually get up and do something about it.those who want to do something are too fragmented, and ultimately too let down by the parties that are supposed to represent them. Good people remain. I was recently very impressed by Stella Creasey, the Labour MP for Walthamstow.  (She also provides more proof that the feminist struggle is not over yet: she was refused entry to a members' lift by a Conservative minister who did not believe that she could possibly be an MP.) But I have to remind myself that she represents the party that enthusiastically continued Thatcher's privatisation of the NHS, that brought us the ruinous (to the taxpayer) PFI deals, that led us into at least one unnecessary war with futile results, which was determined to make us all carry ID cards for no purpose other than to snoop on us, which brought us E4A and ATOS, and began the (to my mind criminal) flirtation with Unum which Iain Duncan Smith and his DWP ministers still carry on today. The disconnection of the Labour elite is the main reason why a charlatan like George Galloway can find himself back in the House of Commons: and that ought to be warning enough to all of the main parties.

But the Conservative Party carries on as before, aided or at least allowed to by the Liberal Democrats, to my dismay. Parts of it are beavering away at the reintroduction of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness, banking on the fact that most people don't seem to care. They're right - people don't. But I suspect, and hope, that people will as they begin to see what they are losing. At the moment the losers are too disparate to be a force, and the government continues with its traditional tactic of wearing people down step by step, a process made easier by the move towards individualism brought about by a generation of the politics of selfishness begun by Margaret Thatcher. Death by a thousand cuts was never more meaningful than now. But the sections of society targeted by the cuts will gradually become both more aware and more hopeless as current comfort leaks away with no prospect of future security to temper it. Then riots on the streets will not be about brand names.

The Riots Panel referred to above said "No young person should be left on the work programme without sufficient support to realistically hope to find work". Not something the DWP takes seriously; they follow the dogma of privatising everything because paying money to private companies to shuffle unemployed people around must be better than actually creating jobs. Young people tend to be energetic. And they tend to be on the streets more. At the moment they are quiescent; that may not last.

That same department leads a determined assault on disabled people, cut by vicious cut. The assault on disabled people disguises a more widespread assault on women. In this country most care is done by the family, which usually means by women, and it is they who will pick up the debris left by the  insistence of Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP on making the poorest pay the price for the mistakes made by the richest. Again, this assault does not matter to many people - in fact it is an excuse for some: disability hate crime has been rising steadily in recent months. People who have no hope very easily turn on others. Sooner or later they will turn on the government.

Mid term blues?

The Liberal Democrats are carrying out a mid term review of the coalition. Here's my version. The first thing is that when caught up in the moment – particularly this moment with bruising encounters going on around the NHS, welfare cuts and particularly brutal treatment of disabled people by Iain Duncan Smith and his department - we don't always remember why we are here.

So first of all a reminder – we got here because in May 2010 the UK economy was in desperate need of stable government and the Conservatives had won the most votes and the most seats. So we negotiated seriously with them. There were two alternatives – let the Conservatives govern alone, or join a rainbow coalition with Labour. Labour were in a mess, and, whatever they're saying now they were not capable of negotiating seriously. The Parliamentary maths did not add up. And the prospect of shoring up Labour with the megalomaniac Brown in charge and their plans for the database state would have given us as many ideological and political problems as the Tories have done. You have to deal with the world as it is, and not the world as you want it to be, and although many of us, myself included, would instinctively choose Labour over the Tories, that would not have been a sensible choice in 2010.

The economy remains our main concern, despite it not being top of the agenda at the moment. (It may well return there if the Euro crisis breaks out in spots again.) So the rationale for the coalition remains as it was in 2010, and is likely to remain so right up to 2015. And then, to lengthen our perspective the other way, towards what may happen in 2015, as usual voters are most likely to vote on the state of the economy, together with the perceived competence of the incumbents.

A lot has happened in these nearly two years that I like, and a lot has happened that I dislike. My greatest regret about the first part of the coalition is that we let the poisonous Iain Duncan Smith anywhere near welfare. But, on the whole, my feeling is that we have done good things – we have demonstrated, and will continue to demonstrate that coalitions can work. We have done very well on taxes for poor people, and with a variety of other issues – pupil premiums, affordable housing, apprenticeships, the green investment bank. MarkPack's infographic explains it all very well 

Given that we have approximately 1/6 the number of seats the Tories have (despite having two thirds of their vote, but that's not a popular topic at the moment), that's a pretty good result. Maybe we could have done better at reining in some Tory excesses, but on the whole we have done well at a time when a lot of unpopular decisions were necessary. The noise coming from our Parliamentary party is that getting in to government and finding out how it all worked was a steep learning curve, not least in learning how to keep an eye on absolutely everything going on in each department. We have more experience now and more staff which means we're better prepared for the second half of this government than we were for the first. The second half promises to be very different – I'll come on to that in a minute.

We have had to compromise on a lot of things, and we have learned that compromise can be a minor and polite disappointment, but it can also be downright painful. As I haven't been in government myself (and, no, I couldn't do a better job, thank you), I've had the luxury of being semi detached. I like what we've done on pupil premiums, I dissociate myself from the cesspool Lansley is creating for the NHS; I like what we've done with personal tax allowances, I can say the filth and lies Iain Duncan Smith's DWP is peddling about disabled people is nothing to do with me. But if I'm to be honest, I can't do that. I have to accept that my party is part of government and has been party, willingly or not, to decisions I abhor and despise. Welcome to government. People can point the accusation of inconsistency at us (as if they haven't been doing that all along – say one thing in one place and another along the road, all things to all people etc etc, yawn). Labour are pointing the finger often. I wonder how many Labour supporters feel completely comfortable about the Labour government's decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq – no, didn't think that many. This government, to my shame, is causing deaths*, but not on the scale Tony Blair did.

I think it is possible that we are changing the temper of politics, which can only be to the country's good. We have been working openly and productively with people we dislike as well as people we like. Vince Cable is now famous for saying we have discovered the Tories are calculating, ruthless and tribal – but that doesn't mean we can't work with them.  . This week at PMQs (7^th March) Labour tried to score a point by asking Cameron what he thought of Vince Cable's leaked letter on industrial policy. What Cameron said and also how he said it were both revealing and to my mind potentially very hopeful. He neutralised the question completely by saying straightforwardly that he disagreed – he gave a number of reasons why. But he did it in measured and polite tones. It is unheard of for a Prime Minister to disagree so publicly and on such a stage with a Cabinet colleague. But he did, and he did it in straightforward, polite and measured tones. For once we had people at PMQs – some of them anyway - acting like adults. One of the worst kept secrets of contemporary politics is the fact that people disagree. In the febrile and juvenile atmosphere of PMQs any slip, any suggestion of anything other than complete marital harmony draws horrified gasps and journalistic metaphors of slit jugulars and mortal wounds. But here was Cameron saying he disagreed with a colleague, and doing so in such ordinary tones that it was not possible for any journalist observing to do their usual impression of a ferret on crack rushing round screaming “Disagreement, government in chaos, it's all falling apart. Leave the country NOWWWWWW!!”

It is just possible that this is one of a few signs of grown up politics, and that will be a very good thing both for the Liberal Democrats and for the country. If we can demonstrate not just that coalitions work but that they work very well, then, whatever happens after the next election we will have done the country a power of good. When people are actually allowed to disagree and debate, you get better decision making. And we LibDems will probably do ourselves good too, because people will see that we have contributed to that measured tone. We are, after all, quite good at it. We are famous for the way we “argue” with each other. Only, what other people call “argue” we call “debate”; and the policies that emerge from that cauldron of debate are the better and the stronger for it. We have seen several internal groupings emerge recently, to the usual chorus from some that we are suffering splits that will lead to our inevitable decline (again). But to me they are just signs that we are organising even more and better debating platforms than we have had in the past, and we will formulate good resonant policy out of them.

We're being told that the main legislative programme for the coalition is going to be complete well before the end of the Parliament. There may be nothing else that we want to do. Even if we do, there may be nothing that we can agree with the Tories. It would be wrong to go looking for things to legislate about. As all the best doctors often do, leave the patient alone. If you've got nothing to change, then govern.

In the absence of any really contentious legislation (politicians being politicians, any legislation will be contentious, especially if there's nothing more important to fight about), then I think there are two things for the LibDems to do. The first is to work for fairness in the application of the laws we have. Mostly that means finding ways of reversing some of the nastiness that has come from the Conservative end of government, particularly the vicious treatment of claimants, and especially disabled people, emanating from Iain Duncan Smith and the other Tory ministers at the Department for Work and Pensions. I fear that there are scandals to come, with continuing exposes of A4E's ways of working, which may enable the DWP to deflect attention. I also hear suggestions that A4E may not be the only offenders. (What do you expect? If you give people an unsupervised money making machine, they will take advantage.) But that will not detract from the fact that a lot of good can be done by purposefully using the machinery of government – influencing the way regulations are laid, how policy is enacted, and the ways in which select committees and other inquisitors can hold the government to account. That is a full time job for the next three years.

While doing that we should be extending the conversation. We should be going out to the country (all the different parts of it, but if you care about the union, do pay particular attention to Scotland). Using our eyes and ears as much as our mouth. Debating with people what a fair society is and what they want to see in order to achieve that will serve three purposes. It will show people that fairness really is at the heart of what we try to achieve; it will give us a clearer sense of what will work in terms of making Britain a fairer place; and that it turn will give us a very clear idea of what we can offer that will resonate with the country for 2015 – 2020.

The hamster in the NHS waiting room

Some of my friends, with whom I have been debating the rationale for the coalition have referred to the NHS as the elephant in the room. I think it is that, but not in the sense they mean.

What they mean is, I think, this:

- both parties had policies for the NHS in their manifestos. The LibDem manifesto contained proposals for greater democratisation and accountability, and the Conservatives' for more efficiency, with a hint of privatisation. At the same time David Cameron was very clear in his promise that there would be no top down reorganisation. I read a blogpost which very helpfully set out the contents of the manifestos, but I can't find it now; I'll link later if I can find it.
- then Andrew Lansley came up with a radical set of “reforms” which suggested wholesale privatisation that went beyond either party's manifesto.
- the narrative is that the LibDems were bounced by this in a typical piece of right wing privatising Tory skullduggery. To an extent I think that is right, but he also bounced a lot in his own party. He bounced everybody in fact, not just the LibDems. The LibDem hierarchy was perhaps slow to respond in full measure, though in my view they've made up for lost ground since.
- although retrenchment is promised after the “listening” exercise, there is still a perception that further ambushes may be lurking round the corner.
- and there is a fear that the LibDems will get the kicking for this as we did on student fees, and will come out of it worse off.

But there is an entirely different set of issues which are really at stake, and nobody is actually talking about them. I want to deal with those and then deal with what I consider to be, in the scheme of things, a little local and temporary difficulty about this particular attempt at reorganising the NHS.

There are three key features to healthcare in this country at the moment. The first is that it is very expensive; the second is that the amount we are prepared to spend on it is limited; the third is that we are prepared to do very little about it. Neither of these is limited to the UK.

Western medicine is in the most expensive phase it has ever been in, and probably the most expensive it ever will be. We have much to be proud about. We are very good at major trauma and very good at keeping people alive. But our record on actually curing things is patchy to say the least. We cannot cure even things as simple as the common cold; what we do is deal with the symptoms until it goes away. We cannot cure AIDS, we cannot cure Parkinsons, we cannot cure Alzheimers, we cannot cure malaria, we cannot cure MS. I know, at bitter personal cost, that we don't have a clue about ME/CFS. We cannot even cure cancer – we can cure some cancers some of the time. The list goes on and on. What we do is keep people alive, often very expensively, often for decades, in greater or lesser degrees of comfort. Now, I expect and hope that as medical and biological knowledge advance, particularly at the quantum level, we will find ways of curing many of these conditions, or better ways of preventing them, and then we will all be leading better lives, and the average cost of care over each person's lifetime will go down. But for now we have to bear the cost. There's not much else we can do.

The second issue is what I regard as the actual elephant in the room – something nobody, least of all politicians, is allowed to talk about. We could undoubtedly keep more people alive, and keep them in less misery or greater comfort if we spent more money. I have no doubt that every hospital administrator in the country would efficiently and effectively spend an extra million doing good for a lot of people. But that million would come out of people's taxes, and the fact is that we – the public, you and I – are unwilling to see our taxes rise. So in the end it is you and I – not politicians – who decide who lives and who dies. But of course politicians are not allowed to say that; it would be taken as the worst faux pas imaginable if Andrew Lansley were to say “Actually people are living in misery, or dying, because you won't spend more money on their care”. But that is the truth of the matter. All the reorganisations in the world will not undo that truth.

There's another, although much smaller elephant, which is what we do about our own health. This is dealt with much more in public, although with not nearly enough effect yet. I speak as one of the villains here. I have just started taking blood pressure pills – yet to find the right combination or dosage. I am no doubt going to cost the NHS a fair bit over the rest of my life. This is largely due to the last ten years. I was fairly fit till around 2000, but since then I have sat too much, exercised too little, eaten and drunk too much and not the right kinds of food. My condition was avoidable, as are many of the conditions we are paying the NHS to treat. The difference that makes to the overall cost is staggering, but, despite great efforts by government and healthcare professionals, we are slow to get the message. In 2009 we topped a million alcohol related hospital admissions. That figure itself is staggering – I'll just say it again – over one million hospital admissions in 2009 were alcohol related. All but a few of those admissions were avoidable. I have not found any studies of what better personal health care might do for the NHS bill (if anyone has, let me know), but just let me put some very broad figures into the frame. The NHS costs approximately £2000 per person per year. (I'm using that as a very round figure for ease of use here.) That means that a village like this one, around 5000 people, is going to cost, or pay, whichever way you look at it, around a hundred million pounds over ten years. The effect of reorganisation on that (I'll talk more about reorganisation in a minute; this figure is for comparison) would be minimal, to be honest. If we were very lucky, we might save 10%, though I doubt if we'd ever see those savings materialise – see more below. But consider the possible differences if we lived “properly”. Our share of those million a year alcohol related hospital admissions would be avoided. My blood pressure pills – and those of most of the other other people in the village with blood pressure problems would be avoided – and I intend to live for a good thirty years more. I'm plucking a figure out of the air here, but I would not be surprised if the cost of treating us were halved by us living properly. Fifty million pounds over ten years, five million a year saved easily. And that's just one village. But we don't do it.

That sort of figure puts reorganisations into context. I think organisation is a very good thing. We need to make sure that the services we get are organised as effectively as possible, and, as conditions change, so the means of effectiveness change and reorganisation is a part of the process of ensuring that. But the NHS is over-reorganised. It has had major reorganisations in 1974, 1982, 1990, 1994, 1997, 2002 and 2007. Now they want to give it another one. Part of the rationale is that we won't be able to afford it without the intended reorganisation. I doubt that very much. I also think that the theme of not being able to afford it is, for some people, an excellent rationalisation for a doctrinaire determination to marketise the NHS. But I also think that politicians get sucked into using this language because they're not allowed to use it about the elephants in the room discussed above. If we don't change our lifestyles, and if we don't accept that we are actually ourselves daily making life and death decisions about the facilities available to other people, then indeed we will not be able to afford the healthcare we need. But they're not allowed to talk about our spending at all, and not allowed to talk about our lifestyle enough, so the theme gets exported onto the issue of efficiency. Now it may be that whatever set of reforms eventually goes through will make the NHS marginally more efficient. I doubt that, because reorganisation is itself a costly process, a very large sunk expense, and usually results in a great deal of changing the position of the furniture without actually effecting any radical change in effectiveness or efficiency. But we shall see.

I note that there were three reorganisations under Labour. I also note that Labour is being castigated for having thrown so much money at the NHS. Some of that money was wasted and some of it was used to boost salaries rather than add to service. But do please think back to the state of the NHS in 1997. We now have a guaranteed maximum waiting time of 18 weeks. That would have been inconceivable in 1997, and in my view the road from there to here was paved partly with reorganisation but largely with money.

Bringing some kind of market disciplines to bear is one thing. There is a trick to doing that without making the NHS market led, a very difficult trick, but nonetheless an achievable one, I think. Ruling the NHS by market forces is a very different thing, and in my view is pernicious. I call the USA as my witness – a market led system, in which they spend nearly twice as much of GDP as we do, for outcomes that are only marginally different. The NHS is founded on the idea of equality and markets thrive only where there is inequality; to subject the NHS to market forces would be to build in inequality. Some will say we already have inequality; it is just masked by the current system. That is indeed true, but I suspect that inequality rises as market penetration into the system increases.

Anyway this reorganisation will make some sort of difference, I am sure, but not much. It is much more important to politicians than it is to the NHS. It will be a big political football over the coming months and years. It will make the careers of some politicians, maybe, and it will ruin the careers of others, most likely. It will be a massive political issue, but its effect on the outcomes of healthcare in this country will be minimal. That is why I regard this, big though it is for Tories, LibDems and Labour, as a little local and temporary difficulty in the NHS. It is a hamster in the waiting room by comparison with the two elephants discussed above. At last we've arrived at the title of this piece. Compared to our willingness to pay and our willingness to look after ourselves, it really is hamster sized. And that is why I am content to talk about it as a strategic and tactical issue for the LibDems, rather than something of genuine importance to the nation.

As for the strategy, I think it is quite simple. It's much easier for us than tuition fees. It is evident that this is a Tory thing, not a LibDem thing. We will be excoriated by some just for being in the coalition that is proposing this (they always will, regardless of how illogical it is), but for most people in the country, it is identifiable as a Tory issue. It is noticeable that the overall perception of the Tories as not safe for the NHS is still strong, despite David Cameron's best attempts to decontaminate. PoliticsHome's poll on this issue makes interesting if complex reading. Their conclusion is that the public still don't trust the Tories, despite apparently liking some of the ideas. They conclude that there is still more danger in it for Clegg than for Cameron; there is some truth in that. It may be perverse, but that's the way voters are, and it illustrates the need for LibDem strategy to illustrate that our power is limited, but that this is not in itself a condemnation of coalition, that we are different from the Tories in terms of our strategy for the NHS, that we have been instrumental in mitigating the Tories' worst ideas,and, above all, that coalition actually works. Tactically this calls for subtlety in handling, demonstrating the difference and the benefits of having LibDems in government, while not making relations so difficult as to prevent us doing the job we're there to do. Our leadership is capable of that.

The tools we use to implement those tactics are up for grabs, but just as a last note, it might enable us to resurrect Mark Pack's lost idea “community politics”. While I can appreciate our government's wish to foreground the big society idea, I think we can do ourselves some good by keeping the theme going, indeed emphasising it, that there are differences – notably that we've been on the ground of community politics for a long time, unlike Dave's relationship with his new Big Society idea. And we can also emphasise that what we want for the NHS is absolutely in keeping with the principles of community politics – giving genuine power to the people rather than trying to hand over responsibility without power.

Short reasons to be cheerful

One of my readers said he read my post “Reasons to be cheerful” right through to the end, but “the reality of modern politics is that very few will get to the end, so having summed up your thoughts very nicely, how about summing them up in a pithy slogan? “ I wasn't sure about that, to be honest. I don't know about blog reading habits in general, but certainly, in terms of my own habits, I read my way through some hefty posts if they grab my attention. And I have many of the characteristics of the butterfly when it comes to concentrating. But I took his remark as a challenge. So here is a short version.

I haven't thought of a pithy slogan yet: "LibDems in grown up government action shocker" is the best I've come up with.*

I've also thought of "Still LibDem, still working for all the people, still sensible, now with long term vision".

But here is a summary:

- going into the coalition was a viable action politically
- going into the coalition was also morally right; the country needed stable government and no other option offered the possibility of such stable government
that disconcerted a certain proportion of LibDem voters, many of whom were actually “none of the others” voters
- but it left us with the opportunity to appeal long term to sensible, liberal minded voters
- the party leadership's strategy is a sensible long term plan to demonstrate that we can govern and that coalition works
- we are getting some new experiences – being kicked because we are in government is one of them
- we still get some familiar experiences – the media still heap s*** on us; they always did
- the left and the right, particularly the hard right, will continue to heap bile upon us; they always did
- we have a joint programme with the Conservatives to rescue the economy which will take time to work
- but we are different from the Tories and we claim success in moderating some of their destructive tendencies
- we will eventually get the credit for all of that
so, although now is squeaky bum time, we have to hold our nerve, and...
- to keep working, because where we work we win

Those who have short attention spans can stop here.

A couple of additional points. I know we've been stuffed by a couple of setbacks that may or may not have been our fault – student fees and the NHS cock up. We make mistakes. All parties do. Maybe student fees was one. I say “maybe” - it is becoming received wisdom that it was a big mistake for our MPs to sign that pledge. I'm not so sure – it is difficult to see what else we could have done, given our official policy. If all our MPs had refused to sign, great play would have been made of that by Labour and Tories, and we might have been distracted from the main task. I also think we didn't manage the fall out as well as we could. It's been stencilled into the public perception as a broken promise. It was not. You break a promise if you are in a position to keep it and decide not to. We were not in that position – never were. We might have worked more effectively to mould that perception.

Some things will go against us – the point I made in my first post, that we have one sixth of the seats the Conservatives have is a very important one. They bounced us, as well as the rest of the country, with their ill thought out and doctrinaire plans for the NHS, which were not in their manifesto, and in fact run contrary to David Cameron's pledge that there would be no further top down reorganisations of the NHS. Maybe we need to be more tactically astute over the NHS than we were over student fees, and make sure that if anybody gets blamed it is the Tories, whose idea it is, and not us.

*Daily Mail version "LibDems governing sensibly shock; cause cancer".

Reasons to be cheerful

I've had a couple of conversations with local LibDem colleagues lately who have been looking rather down in the mouth – poor results on May 5th (despite good results here), doubts about the coalition, doubts about the future. I found myself saying to them that I feel strangely cheerful, and then had to enumerate the reasons why. They are a combination of ethical and political issues.

The first reason is the fact that we're in the coalition in the first place. I think more and more firmly that the party leadership made the right decision – not just the right decision for the party but for the country. The country needed (and still needs) a stable government to get us through this economic crisis. That government is being provided by the LibDems in concert with the Conservatives. It felt unlikely when it was first mooted, but it has happened as it has by and large governed well. The fact that we are able to argue about things like voting reform and the precise nature of changes in the NHS shows that we have done the hard things reasonably well. We need to think in terms of long cycles as well as short ones. Nick Clegg's strategy was to position us to take the credit as much as the conservatives if we are in a good position in a few years time. We are still on course to do exactly that. It's a different experience being in government. When you're in government, people kick you because you're in government. That's a different experience from being kicked because we're Libdems, which we're used to, and it works on a different logic. People often register short term resentment at polls between elections, but give the party credit, albeit grudgingly, at election time. If we hold our nerve, that prize still awaits us. I was very pleased to see Tim Farron say much the same soon after the elections: "Enough doom and gloom, we have the greatest opportunity in the history of our party".

We were even more under pressure a couple of weeks ago with the sharks doing their best to circulate around Chris Huhne. But a week is a long time in politics, and a fortnight even longer. Chris may not be quite out of the woods yet, but he is last fortnight's news – last week's news was Andrew Lansley. And we've even moved on from him – modern politics moves fast.

The sniping will go on. We are viable targets for the media – not just LibDems, but Libdems IN GOVERNMENT, shock horror. Those who loved to hate us still do. The level of bile against us on ConservativeHome remains just the same. Go there and see the comments on... well, on pretty much any post. That's politics. They were spitting just as much bile at us before last year's election and it didn't stop us getting our message across – it won't next time either. And we will get it from the media as well. Last week's Observer's cheaply hostile editorial about the NHS rehashed the old meme “It's all Nick Clegg's fault”. It was mostly about Cameron and the NHS, and it followed a standard, for all papers, editorial line, of declaring that Mr Cameron now has a dilemma between softening the bill and displeasing his right wing or driving it through and thereby displeasing everybody else, thereby attempting to sound weighty and statesmanlike without having to come up with a solution. The LibDems are reduced to an opportunistic bit part, changing our tack because we are concerned all of a sudden for our survival. What do you expect after the setback we've just had? Sail on merrily towards the iceberg? “To change course would be unprincipled”? No, we steer round the iceberg and them resume our intended course when we are able to.

But what I like most of all is that, despite all the pettiness and meanness directed at us, we are showing how grown up politicians can be. And not just politicians in general, but Liberal Democrat politicians. The old excuse that a vote for the LibDems is a wasted vote because they'll never get in to power is shown up for what it is – nonsensical. Being grown up has its downsides of course, not least missing the Short money that gave us a budget with which to oppose. It is perverse that there is no similar budget to allow us to govern, but that is the case, and we must make do – and by and large we are making do. There was another report this week which examined the role the LibDems are playing in government, and was spun by the media to say we're not doing it well. The idea of putting a minister in every department spreads us thin. If we'd chosen a smaller number of ministries to go into we could have concentrated our power and had more of an effect in those departments. No shit, Sherlock? What annoys me most about post-coalition debate is the assumption that, because we haven't got everything we wanted, we have therefore failed. It's a peculiarly British assumption to do with the nature of power. We tend to think that power is a zero sum game and people either have it or don't have it. The concept of shared power seems to be alien to British thinking. Maybe that's why the idea of coalition is so difficult for some people to accept. The assumption behind much media reporting is that because we don't get everything we want, we must have failed. No, we haven't failed. We have one-sixth the number of seats the conservatives have.* On that basis we should get one-sixth of the results, and on the whole we've done better than that. The Guardian's headline, by the way, reads: "Deputy PM's office ineffective, report on coalition government finds. Document says most decisions reached through informal channels rather than formal coalition machinery". In the Guardian's view it's clearly a bad thing, if you read the rest of the article. But I find myself wondering in what way that constitutes a bad thing. I know it's a problem to journalists who can only think in binaries, but governments work on the basis of informal relations as well as formal relations. Nick and Dave get on well, so they're using that. Why should they not? In what way is that somehow unconstitutional or ineffective?

We continue to have to put up with misreporting by media who are perhaps not biassed against us, but just need conflict for a good headline. Vince Cable comes in for more than most. He was headlined as "Cable attacks 'ruthless' Tories" when he called them "ruthless, calculating and thoroughly tribal". In the interview, which you can listen to on that last link, he said it in a perfectly affable tone of voice, and he went on to say, immediately, in the same sentence, "but that doesn't mean we can't work with them". They're at it again today: "Vince Cable warns GMB against co-ordinated strikes". He is getting a simplistic knee jerk reaction from the GMB, who clearly don't understand coalition politics either.Fortunately, cooler heads area round to give a truer picture. Paul Waugh on PoliticsHome, Why Cable's no Tebbit, points out that Cable is giving the unions the political reality. Cable has no wish to crack down on unions, but there is a very strong body of opinion within the Conservative party that does. A wave of strikes would give them motive and opportunity. Cable counsels wisdom, not quiescence. The media are not helpful to us, but then they never were. We just have to continue to work.

The left wing don't like us, because we're not left wing. Those who used us as a convenient protest vote don't like us because we've grown up. The right wing loathe us because, well, because we're human. We are definitely doing something right. But we need to connect that again to what voters want. Politics is a tough business and it will go on being tough. The rules have changed because we are now in government, but the nature of the game hasn't. It's still true that where we work we win. Besides working we need to hold our nerve, something we have not had to practise so much in the past, and we need a narrative, aversion of events that holds true for us and that we can sell on the doorstep. that narrative is taking some time to emerge, but the bones are there in place:
- coalition does work (and we are proving that)
- we do do a lot of good for the less well off (which again we can prove)
- we have moderated a lot of Conservative policies into sensible ways forward (and we have blunted the glaringly socially authoritarian wing of the Conservative party (something I am delighted about, and so should everybody be who is not a glaringly socially authoritarian Tory. For a glimpse of why see here. I suspect, by the way, that Dave is monumentally pleased that he has the LibDems to lean on and not his own right wing.)

So, to sum up:
- we are still Liberals. That's absolutely clear from the policies we are putting in place and the policies we have prevented from being enacted.
- the media are not helpful to us, but they are no less helpful than they have ever been.
- we need to find, and will find, a new constituency of voters. Those who voted "none of the others" don't have that easy option any more, but there are plenty who will vote for a liberal and capable government in the UK.
- and this time we have a time scale, a long one. It won't matter if we're still unpopular in a year's time, as long as we are building, in policy achievement and in campaigning, towards a sustainable recovery for the country by 2015, because I am as near certain as I can be that that will mean a sustainable recovery for the LibDems. It will be hard work. It always was hard work being a LibDem. But we mustn't lose our nerve.


*Despite having two thirds of their votes. (FPTP is *such* a fair system.)**

**For those unable to detect irony, that was ironic.

Not shedding tears for AV

I'm really not too sad about losing the referendum on AV. Nick was right – AV is a miserable little compromise, better than FPTP but not hugely so. I am more sad about losing the opportunity to get a proper debate a vote on voting reform that really works.

I am also very sad about the losses of councillors we suffered yesterday. My own district council, having been LibDem run for some time, and well run, is now Tory. Oh boy. But we live in the real world, and I think Tim Farron got it right yesterday – this is our first experience of being in government, and now it's our first experience of being in an unpopular government. It's downright unpleasant, but it's what happens. The reaction from some is also what happens – Nick Clegg is finished, the party is finished, we've been outfought, outfoxed, etc, etc. In the Independent yesterday. Mary Dejevsky called our some of voters “naïve and disgracefully fickle”. She's right. But again that's reality. We have to work to reacquire those voters and to show that we can govern. Right now, I still feel that we have done the right thing all the way through the last year. Maybe some decisions and some tactics could have been marginally better, but I don't think anybody could have put us in a better position than Nick and the party leadership have done. OK. We've had a kicking. Live with it.

I think it remains worth remembering, and reminding people how we got here.

We went into the last election facing a massive public sector deficit and a world in recession. The recession was not Labour's fault, but their continuing to spend when the money was no longer there, and their insistence on maintaining light regulation of the baking sector were the cause of it being deeper and more painful in this country than it would otherwise have been. Dealing with the deficit was going to be the major problem for any new government. All three parties had different strategies for dealing with it, but there would have been pain under any of them.

After the election all three parties had choices. Ours was to go into coalition with the Conservatives, go into coalition with Labour or sit on our hands. The Conservatives' was to go into coalition with us, or to try to govern as a minority party. Labour's was coalition or nothing. We and the Conservatives found we had things to talk about which enabled both us and them to make coalition government a reality. Labour were clearly not serious about negotiating (whatever they say now) and in any case, coalition with Labour was not nearly as palatable as coalition with the Conservatives looked at the time, and has turned out to be since. And, yes, I know what I just said.

Coalition with Labour. Leaving aside the practicalities of governing a rainbow coalition, we'd still have Gordon Brown, that great clunking fist dominating everything. And ID cards; would Labour have given those up; I doubt it, with the control freaks in charge.

We chose coalition with the Tories and they chose coalition with us. We got a lot of our manifesto in to the coalition agreement. There were some things we were never going to get – free university tuition was one of them. It's only actually a broken promise if you are capable of doing something and don't. Given the electoral maths, we were not capable of delivering free tuition under the coalition agreement. I do not regard that as a broken promise. I know other people do, and that is a political reality. But maybe we could work harder to change the way people see that decision. I also think – if we're going to talk about broken promises – I think about all the students who said they were going to vote for us and then broke their promise. We know that fewer students actually voted than any other demographic in the UK. Just consider what the position might be if they had voted: we might have a lot more seats than we have now, the Conservatives fewer, as well as Labour. The dealing around that negotiation table would have been very different. So I accept it's a reality, but I do find it a bit hard when people talk about being betrayed.

What “do” we have? 75% of our manifesto being delivered. That's not bad. I am so glad to be rid of ID cards and all that database state paraphernalia that went with it. And we actually agreed with the Tories on that, and disagreed heartily with Labour – something that ought to give any tribal leftwinger in the party pause for thought. What else have we got?

A crackdown on tax avoidance and evasion; equalising capital gains and income tax rates, a substantial hike in personal tax allowances, with plans to head for £10,000, restoring the link between pensions and earnings, got a fair deal for Equitable Life pensioners, we have a commission looking at breaking up the big banks, we've got the banks agreeing to lend more, we have delayed the decision on replacing Trident, we are reducing red tape with a one in one out rule, we're supporting superfast broadband, we are expanding the market for green products and technologies, we have extended flexible working, we've introduced the pupil premium, we're improving SEN educational provision, we're reviewing the National Curriculum to make it slimmer and more flexible, we are strengthening guidance to head teachers on combating bullying, including homophobic bullying, work is being done on integrating health and social care, we have increased the priority of research into dementia, we have increased funding for counselling, we have introduced controls on low price alcohol sales, we are maintaining free entry to museums and art galleries, and we are making putting on live music easier for small venues, we are increasing spending on early years education, and on respite care, we are ending the compulsory retirement age, we have created an entire new Green Deal, including energy company obligations, created a Renewable Heat Incentive, we are investing more in plants to build wind turbines, we are working with others to establish a system for reducing emissions from deforestation, we have been influential in the EU wide ban on the import of illegally sourced timber and timber products, we are reviewing the restrictive terms and conditions of employment for police officers, we have a new strategy for hate crimes, we are moving towards prisoners contributing to financial reparation for victims.

I could go on. And on and on. But I think I've made my point – after only a year, we have record we can be really proud, and even if we do go into oblivion – which I don't think we will – we have done things we can look back on with pride.

We have also had a valid and valuable effect in keeping Tory headbanger policy off the agenda. We have been instrumental in forcing the “pause” on Lansley's ill judged NHS reforms, with the prospect of genuine changes in what is being proposed. We have kept the loonier rightwing ideas about benefits and Europe off the agenda. That is something to be quietly pleased about even while we nurse the wounds of May 2011.

The realities of political life on the street are different. The public has chosen to give us a kicking. That's what happens. We need to keep working, keep our nerve, keep an eye to eye with the ruthless, calculating and tribal Conservatives, and keep communicating with people who we know we can serve better than the Conservative or Labour parties can. In that regard I think Nick Clegg is doing well; this is what happens when you're in government. I hope he carries on doing well. If the economy comes right, which is looking a decent prospect at the moment, we will also prosper.