Broken promises...

In the last few weeks there have been some very disgruntled Liberal Democrat supporters. The feeling that the Lib Dems had ‘sold out’ and forgotten their election pledges is widespread. So in light of the spending review, have the Liberal Democrats broken their election promises?

It’s worth having a look back to the manifesto they released before May’s general election. In it, they clearly and strongly outlined their commitment to both education, through the scrapping of “unfair tuition fees”, and science: “In the current economic climate it is not possible to commit to growth in spending, but Liberal Democrats recognise the importance of science investment to the recovery and to the reshaping of the economy.”

This had enticed a large number of new voters who were not happy with the attitudes of the other parties. The reaction to Vince Cable’s speech at Queen Mary’s University in September should therefore not have been unexpected. His remarks, considered by some to be incredibly ignorant, about cutting out the “research which is neither commercially useful nor theoretically outstanding” stirred up a lot of heated emotions.

So when the spending cuts were announced today people must have been breathing a sigh of relief, having feared the worse. Despite science and environment receiving a 9% cut, Liberal Democrat MPs must feel that their pledged commitment to science hasn’t been entirely overlooked in the coalition government.

However, despite receiving the smallest budget cut across the many Whitehall departments, it is predicted that education will suffer when the government acts on the recently published Browne report to remove the cap of tuition fees. This flies in the face of the Liberal Democrats manifesto pledge and leave many deeply unhappy or with an uncertain academic future. The extent to which this will now affect education now lies in the hands of the universities.