sally cinnamon wrote:
I am not a big fan of all this criticising Clegg for sacrificing the tuition fees policy to join a Coalition.
The Lib Dems did not win the election. They were the third party. Therefore they have to act appropriately in order to form a coalition.
You can't go from a policy of zero tuition fees to tripling them and suggest that was a "compromise". Furthermore once the zero tuition fees policy was abandoned the Lib Dems were as vociferous in arguing FOR the tuition fee increase as any Tory. It suddenly became right and proper for students to contribute via increased fees.
Finally you may recall it came out that Clegg concluded the zero tuition fee policy was a non-starter before the election took place. They still went to the country on the back of the zero tuition fee pledge.
What they did wasn't compromise to form a coalition, it was to display rank hypocrisy.
The problem is if everyone gives a third party leader stick over compromising on parts of their manifesto, we will end up with someone stonewalling when there's a hung parliament, and holding the largest party over a barrel "we'll only join you if we can have OUR way on everything". That isn't democracy, thats just bullying the third party in to power.
Using the forming of a coalition to abandon your principles on which you went to the country isn't democracy either. A compromise on tuition fees would have been leaving them as they were. Instead we didn't get a compromise we got a 100% Tory policy as regards tuition fees.
Both the Conservatives and Lib Dems had to give things up from their manifesto in order to form an agreement. The Conservatives had pledged to reduce inheritance tax in fact that was a big part of debate in the last leaders' debate where Brown was giving Cameron a hard time and he was making a robust defence that it was the most natural thing in the world to want to leave things for your children and the government shouldn't take it off you....and yet that policy got dropped a week later.
It should not have been about "giving things up" but about compromising. As I said instead of a 100% Tory policy on tuition fees the Lib Dems could have compromised by arguing for them to remain unchanged.
If a party gets an overall majority and then backtracks on its pledges then thats out of order, but when there's a Coalition, by necessity there needs to be some kind of compromise and agreement. There are plenty of people in Northern Ireland that said David Trimble and Gerry Adams were sell outs but if they had stuck to all their core demands we would still have a terrorist war...
You seem to have a strange view of the word compromise. What has actually happened is a majority of largely undiluted Tory policies have been enacted. In particular the NHS reforms and also Education are two areas where we see a thoroughly right wing agenda being carried out. Any minor tweaks the Lib Dems secured are just that, minor.
What actually happened is the Lib Dems gave a free hand to the Tories in major policy areas in return for what turned out to be some rather small crumbs. That is not how I envisage coalitions working.
My late father used to say he never liked large majorities in governments of any flavour because they tended to go the extremes if given a free hand. You would have thought a coalition government would also have reigned in some of the extreme Tory policies but it has not.
Instead of discussion and compromise on all areas of policy the two coalition parties simply divided up the spoils with the Tories getting the majority of departments to do as they pleased with.
Any idea the Lib Dems have put a significant break on Tory excesses is joke. They have enabled much of the bad policy this government has enacted.
We have the stupid situation where the Lib Dems vote with the Tories because they are both part of the government and have no option to do otherwise, not because they actually agree with the policies.
