Why I still agree with Nick

The Lib Dems have been criticized by everyone and their dog since they joined the coalition last May – the turnaround on tuition fees, their complicity in the public sector cuts, allowing the Tories in to Number 10. We’ve all heard it before: the Lib Dems are doomed, we’ll never vote for them again, yadda, yadda, yadda.

But really, the Lib Dems have achieved way more than most people give them credit for. Yes, they have broken a manifesto commitment against raising tuition fees, yes, they have gone into coalition with the hated Tories but really, was there an alternative?

The Lib Dems have achieved way more than most people give them credit for

The election delivered a hung parliament, and with a hurricane of debt threatening to engulf Greece, the scarily large deficit seemed to put Britain at risk of having a debt crisis as well. Sure, in hindsight, we weren’t likely to get caught up by the same tidal wave as Greece but we had no way to be sure at the time. A stable government, able to take the drastic measures needed, was necessary.

So that ruled out the Tories going it alone, or a Lib-Lab Coalition (the numbers just didn’t add up). This left two options – either an unwieldy Grand Coalition of the Center-left, comprised of every party except the Conservatives and UKIP, or a Con-Lib coalition. With Gordon Brown less popular than a pile of dog turd, and the prospect of a 5+-party coalition with a whisker-thin majority in the Commons, we chose the latter.

Political coalitions are common on the continent, and they are ultimately all about compromise. Both sides have had to give up a lot, the Tory right is just as, if not more, unhappy about the coalition than the Lib Dems. But the fact of the matter is the Lib Dems agree with the mainstream Tories on many issues – civil liberties, crime and prison reform, how to improve public services, controlling the deficit and streamlining the welfare state. We might not agree on specifics, and we support the policies for different reasons, but ultimately, that is fertile middle ground for compromise.

In coalition, we have made changes and introduced legislation that the Tories would never have done of their own accord: increasing the personal allowance by £1,000, increasing the rate of capital gains tax to 50%, actually putting in place a banking levy and stopping the Tories from increasing the inheritance tax threshold. There are also more subtle influences: the “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality of the Tory right would have made Ken Clarke’s position much harder (prison reform that much more controversial), defense cuts would have been less harsh meaning more cuts in other services, there would have been more aggressive with their cuts to welfare, more aggressive to cuts to education and they would have plowed ahead with the rise in tuition fees anyway.

Ah yes, I bet you were wondering how long it’d take for me to get around to the elephant in the room - the rise in tuition fees. The increases are a bitter pill to swallow, and I certainly don’t agree with such drastic rises, but it is just one policy (albeit a major one), and given Osborne’s determination to hack away at university budgets with a battleaxe, it’s a necessary one. If we voted down the proposals, then the universities would be in a quandary – they’d have lost their government funding, but have no independent source of revenue to make up for it. There have also been measures to temper the proposals – increasing the loan repayment threshold, a bursary for the poorest students, and keeping the cap at £9,000 rather than having them uncapped like many universities wanted them to be. None of it is good – but it could be a lot worse.

Before you call me a sycophant, I disagree with the party and the coalition on many things. I still don’t agree with higher education cuts in the first place – but given Osborne, we took the least bad option. I feel we should have bargained harder for good cabinet posts – particularly the Home Office, so we’d be able to better push through our agenda on civil liberties. The defense cuts were too small, and the NHS reforms are a recipe for disaster. But on the whole, 9 months into the coalition, the Lib Dems have made a substantial impact on the running of the government. The polls state the Lib Dems are headed for electoral oblivion but the election isn’t for another four years; things can only get better.