1. The coalition will survive in tact, despite a few unhelpful interventions from prominent figures in the Lib Dem parliamentary party, and continued howls of frustration from the Tory right.

2. Chris Huhne will survive the fallout from the allegations about speeding in 2003, without having to resign, but will be substantially weakened.

3. Vince Cable will still be a member of the cabinet by the end of the year.

4. Ed Miliband will find that the disloyal mutterings from some of his frontbench colleagues become a serious problem. Ed Balls will not be unconnected to this!

5. Ken Clarke will be retired from the cabinet in a reshuffle that will see David Laws return to government.

6. Barack Obama will beat Ron Paul in the US Presidential Race, in a much closer result than many analysts predict when Paul is nominated.

7. The Euro will finish the year in a much stronger position than it started it.

8. UK economic growth will continue to be sluggish, but will not fall back into recession.

9. A major UK newspaper will close or merge with a rival.

10. The Higgs Boson will officially be declared to be discovered, and, rather boringly, the details will utterly fail to significantly challenge the Standard Model.

See you back here this time next year for the results!

Here, then, are the predictions I made:

The coalition will survive through the year.

Correct. 1 point.

The “Yes” campaign will win the AV referendum.

Incorrect. Nul points.

Whilst the year will start with Michael Gove looking increasingly insecure in his position, it will ultimately be Andrew Lansley whose position is threatened most, after his ambitious and rapid set of NHS reforms inevitably come a cropper somewhere along the line.

Well, ultimately Lansley is still in post, but I think it’s fair to say that the general gist of this is right – at one point during the year, there was quite serious speculation about whether Lansley was secure in his job, because the NHS reforms had somewhat blown up in his face (with a little help from us, naturally). 1 point.

David Laws will return to government.

Not yet, alas, but there’s nothing blocking it any longer, after the Standards and Privileges committee made its ruling back in May, and Laws was given a week’s suspension from the house as a (somewhat heavy handed relative to those of many other less forgiveable expenses abusers) punishment. 0 points.

The decision on Murdoch’s attempt to take complete control of BSkyB will ultimately be to deny him his wish, having first undergone several months more investigation.

An awkward one, this. Ultimately Murdoch was more or less forced to withdraw the bid as a result of the phone hacking scandal, rather than as a result of deliberations about media plurality directly. Having said that, it seems that campaigners for media plurality have indeed had their hand strengthened by the results of this process. Half a point.

Lib Dem autumn conference will see attacks on the leadership, with councillors who lost their seats in May out for blood.

Well, not so much as you’d notice, really. Despite some none-too-subtle positioning by Mr. Farron, actual slagging off of the leadership was fairly muted at conference, much to the frustration of the media present. In part, this could be credited to Federal Conference Committee, who did much to selflessly draw the anger of conference-goers in their own direction. 0 points.

The economy will not suffer a double dip, although it will start the year sluggishly, and by the end of the year things will be looking up.

Well, the first half of this is certainly true of 2011, though whether the optimistic second half of the prediction could be said to be true is a bit more of a stretch, what with the eurozone crisis still very much unresolved as we head into 2012. Half a point.

Lib Dem leadership will contribute to progress on a legal vehicle at COP 17.

Well, whether the term “legal vehicle” could be said to be equivalent to an “agreed outcome with legal force”, I will leave to better legal minds than me, but I think it’s fair to say that European leadership, and within that Lib Dem leadership in the UK, has contributed to a positive (though sadly not positive enough, yet) outcome at COP 17. 1 point.

Alan Johnson will not be Shadow Chancellor by the end of the year.

True. Not 20 days into 2011, this not-too-surprising prediction came off nicely. 1 point.

The Independent will not be being published in its current form by the end of the year.

Not happened, unless you count a redesign with a spanky new masthead (which I don’t). 0 points.

House of Lords reform will not be scuppered by the House of Lords itself, and by the end of the year it will be fairly certain that elections for the House of Lords will take place within the next 10 years.

Well, the atmosphere of doom around this has somewhat subsided, and it certainly hasn’t been scuppered yet. Having said that, I don’t think I can really give this one – more work still to do! 0 points.

So, overall, I make that 5 points out of a possible 11.

Still about as accurate as flipping a coin then!

So having sat through the debate this morning and watched with horror over 100 people put their hands up to vote for ammendment 1 (for all papers relating to this post, so you can read the motions and ammendments, go here; the motion is F9 on page 20 of the agenda, and the ammendments are on page 23 of conference extra, both available as pdfs at the above link), I thought I might as well write the speech that I should have put a speakers’ card in to make earlier today.

Basically, my problems with this come under three headings:

1. How is it making us safer?

Let’s assume for the moment that I’m a maniac and I’m looking for opportunities to do something nasty to people inside conference. On my way into conference, four different people check my pass to make sure I match my photo, my bag has been X-rayed and if necessary searched, and I have passed through a metal detector and if necessary frisked. I don’t object to this, I can see the use of it, and I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate FCC on significantly speeding up this process at this conference.

But I’m sorry, I just don’t get how, in addition to these basic physical checks, the fact that the police think that I’m the right sort of chap to be attending conference makes us any safer. Short of strangling someone with my bare hands, I don’t see what damage I could inflict on people inside the barriers even if I wanted to.

2. The argument that “it is still ultimately conference who decide” is flawed.

Andrew Wiseman (who, to his credit, has done more than he could have done to engage with the discontent over this, and is taking a disproportionate amount of flak for a decision that, with the honourable exception of Justine McGuinness, all of FCC should be held accountable for) told us yesterday that two people have been flagged by the police as recommended for being turned away from conference. Of these, one was over-ruled by the “three wise men” who apparently now speak for the party on these matters, and one wasn’t. Andrew told us that he couldn’t give us details, for confidentiality reasons, other than to say that the one who was turned away was a recently joined member, who the police had significant concerns about.

Now, since I don’t have the information, I’m going to have to speculate and make generalisations. But it seems to me that on this limited evidence, we can draw a couple of conclusions: Firstly, if the police try to bar you, you have a pretty good chance of being turned away, compared to if they don’t. And secondly, it seems likely that the most likely people to be turned away are new members, younger people or other new recruits, who don’t happen to have a friend in high places to put in a good word for them.

It seems likely that the people whose flagging will be over-ruled will be people of whom the three wise men can say “oh, that’s just Bill, he’s been coming for donkeys’ years, he’s harmless”. Which is fine, as far as it goes. The problem is, what happens to new members who are flagged. Nobody will vouch for them, since nobody knows them yet. We will create a closed shop, where the only people who can come to conference are longstanding Lib Dems, and nice folk with no questionable things in their records. As was eloquently argued this morning, conference will be all the poorer for the loss of those voices.

3. Some of the arguments being made in favour of accreditation are pretty weak.

Since we know that the same bind on FCC to follow police advice in order to secure their insurance was presumably in place during Sheffield (where, incidentally, the crowds outside the security zone were a damn sight more rowdy than they are in Brum), it is reasonable to assume that in Sheffield, the police didn’t insist on accreditation, even if they might have thought it was a good idea. So there are, presumably, conference venues where we could go where we wouldn’t be subject to this “requirement” from the police. To suggest, therefore, that critics of accreditation would rather have no conference at all is a contemptible piece of sophistry.

So was the argument I heard from one member of FCC today that the nature of some of the people outside the security barriers should be seen as a reason to want accreditation. Either this is supposed to imply that soon everyone who comes within a mile of conference should have to be vetted, or this is merely highlighting the limitations on the effectiveness of this kind of measure anyway. The saddest part of this is that some of the people arguing the FCC line didn’t even look much like they were convincing themselves.

Ultimately, then, I find it hard to conclude that the vetting system is anything other than a piece of security theatre, and a damaging one at that.

And don’t even get me started on the patronising bollocks from a couple of people today who denied the very existence of anyone who had stayed away from conference because they didn’t want to submit to the process. Those people deserved all the angry heckles they got today.

1. The narrative of the party leadership.

The tone of much of what the party’s coalition frontbench is saying is not massively changed, but there has been an evolution if not a revolution. As was widely called for and predicted 6 months ago, the penny seems to be starting to drop about the need to start to “badge” (to borrow Tim Farron’s phrase) more of our policy achievements in government as Lib Dem wins, whilst avoiding the potential pitfalls of exposing the push and pull at the heart of the government too much. In particular, the approach of Nick’s leader’s speech was subtly shifting in this direction, and where previously it was notable that he barely said anything disapproving about the Conservative party 6 months ago, today we saw him, if not laying into the Tory party, at least feeling able to start to express explicit differences.

The main shift by the party leadership, though, was in tone rather than content. More than once, we were urged to “keep your heads up”, not to apologise for being in government. I think this must be right, at least to some extent. 90% of communication is nothing to do with the actual content of what we say, after all. Rather, it is to do with the way we say it. Too often, “we didn’t win the election”, “it was the best we could do in the circumstances” etc. sound like cringing apologies for our part in government. They may be factually correct, but if it sounds like we’re trying to convince ourselves because we’re a bit down about the difficulties of government, it’s not likely to win many people over. What was noticeable about this change of tone is that it was ubiquitous across the spectrum of the party’s leading lights, not just from the cabinet ministers.

2. The battle for the ongoing identity of the party – a rise in social / economic liberal factionalism?

One consequence of coalition, it seems, is going to be the dredging up of old dividing lines within the party, as people try to win the battle for the “direction” of the party in the future. The drive for this seems to spring from suspicion of the party leadership, which I suspect is inevitable in the circumstances of a coalition. Much of our faith in Nick at the moment rests on what we as members believe he is doing within government behind closed doors. People don’t know what to make of Nick’s attempts to find intellectual common ground with the Tories. Some worry that in fact, Nick wants to shift the party to the economic liberal end of the spectrum, and he secretly agrees with some of the Tory policies we would like him to oppose. Others, meanwhile, accept that Nick respects the existing balance of opinion within the party, and is not trying to move us anywhere, merely to paint the party for the moment in a light which makes sense of the coalition.

I had, in the past, generally accepted the argument that the line between social liberals and economic liberals in the party was overplayed. Sure, there is a spectrum of thought in the party on some issues, but liberalism isn’t primarily about the left/right divide, it defines itself against authoritarianism – it lies on a different axis. I still believe this, but as the party tries to reassert its identity it is perhaps inevitable that it is going to end up pulling away from the centre of gravity of the coalition government.

Thus, we have seen a resurrection of the struggle between liberalism and social democracy within the party, with many within the party, consciously or not, playing up to these terms. The Social Liberal Forum, for instance, and many other members of the party, spent the weekend trying to reassert the values of what they insist (probably correctly) are the mainstream of party opinion. Speeches were heard in the debate on the strategy paper bemoaning the lack of reference to social democratic traditions from the leadership of the party. As if to underline their point, Nick then spoke in his speech of the great intellectual history of the Liberal party, but not so much of the social democratic tradition.

Partly, though, this is because Nick’s mission in his speech was to set out a coherent narrative of who the party is for and what it believes, whilst at the same time maintaining the intellectual coherence of the coalition’s joint programme. The language of the party’s liberal inheritance makes this easier; I personally don’t think Nick is deliberately shunning the other side of the party’s roots – indeed, quoting Shirley Williams in this context rather masterfully downplayed the significance of the divide.

Lastly on this point, it’s probably worth pointing out that, had we been in a parallel universe where we now found ourselves in coalition with Labour, I very much suspect that the economic liberals in the party would very similarly be decrying an over-emphasis on social democracy at about this point in time. I think this kind of ideological rebound is likely to be an inevitable feature of coalition for our party, and I don’t know that there’s much Nick or anyone else can do about it.

3. The NHS amendments and the risks of “going native”.

One problem for our ministers, it seems, is the risk that they may be perceived to be “going native” in their departments. In particular, many of the people with concerns about the Lansley reforms have been getting the impression that Paul Burstow pretty much approves of the policies in the proposed NHS reforms, rather than regretting that they are not in line with many aspects of Lib Dem policy. I rather get the impression that he is much keener on the reforms than Nick Clegg ever was. But of course, I have no idea what Burstow might have privately been saying to Andrew Lansley and his other Tory colleagues in the Department of Health. This, really, is the problem our frontbenchers have. We simply have to take it on trust that they don’t really believe everything they have to say as coalition ministers.

F5 Updating the NHS: Personal and Local

Conference believes that the NHS is an integral part of a liberal society, reflecting the social solidarity of shared access to collective healthcare, and a shared responsibility to use resources effectively to deliver better health.

Conference welcomes our Coalition Government’s commitment to the founding principles of the NHS: available to all, free at the point of use, and based on need, not the ability to pay.

Conference welcomes much of the vision for the NHS set out in the Government’s White Paper, Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS, which commits the Government to an NHS that:

i) Is genuinely centred on patients and carers.

ii) Achieves quality and outcomes that are among the best in the world.

iii) Refuses to tolerate unsafe and substandard care.

iv) Puts clinicians in the driving seat and sets hospitals and providers free to innovate, with stronger incentives to adopt best practice.

v) Is more transparent, with clearer accountabilities for quality and results.

vi) Is more efficient and dynamic, with a radically smaller national, regional and local bureaucracy.

vii) Gives citizens a greater say in how the NHS is run.

Conference particularly welcomes the proposals to introduce real democratic legitimacy and local accountability into the NHS for the first time in almost forty years by:

a) Extending the powers of local authorities to enable effective scrutiny of any provider of any taxpayer-funded health services.

b) Giving local authorities the role of leading on improving the strategic coordination of commissioning across the NHS, social care, and related childrens’ and public health services through councillor-led Health and Wellbeing Boards.

c) Creating Health Watch to act as a local consumer champion for patients and to ensure that local patients are heard on a national level.

d) Returning public health duty to local government by ensuring that the majority of public health services will now be commissioned by local authorities from their ring-fenced public health budget.

Conference recognises however that all of the above policies and aspirations can be achieved without adopting the damaging and unjustified market-based approach that is proposed.

Conference regrets that some of the proposed reforms have never been Liberal Democrat policy, did not feature in our manifesto or in the agreed Coalition Programme, which instead called for an end to large-scale top-down reorganisations.

Conference therefore calls on Liberal Democrats in Parliament to amend the Health Bill to provide for:

I) More democratically accountable commissioning.

II) A much greater degree of co-terminosity between local authorities and commissioning areas.

III) No decision about the spending of NHS funds to be made in private and without proper consultation, as can take place by the proposed GP consortia.

IV) The complete ruling out of any competition based on price to prevent loss-leading corporate providers under-cutting NHS tariffs, and to ensure that healthcare providers ‘compete’ on quality of care.

V) New private providers to be allowed only where there is no risk of ‘cherry-picking’ which would destabilise or undermine the existing NHS service relied upon for emergencies and complex cases, and where the needs of equity, research and training are met.

VI) NHS commissioning being retained as a public function in full compliance with the Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information laws, using the skills and experience of existing NHS staff rather than the sub-contracting of commissioning to private companies.

VII) The continued separation of the commissioning and provision of services to prevent conflicts of interests.

VIII) An NHS, responsive to patients’ needs, based on co-operation rather than competition, and which promotes quality and equity not the market.

Conferences calls on:

1. The Government to uphold the NHS Constitution and publish an audit of how well organisations are living by its letter and spirit.

2. Liberal Democrats in local government to establish local Health and Wellbeing Boards and make progress developing the new collaborative ways of working necessary to provide joined-up services that are personalised and local.

3. The government to seize fully the opportunity to reverse the scandalous lack of accountability of publicly-funded local health services which has grown up under decades of Conservative and Labour governments, by:

a) Ensuring full scrutiny, including the power to require attendance, by elected local authorities of all organisations in the local health economy funded by public money, including Foundation Trusts and any external support for commissioning consortia; ensuring that all such organisations are subject to Freedom of Information requirements.

b) Ensuring Health and Wellbeing Boards (HWBs) are a strong voice for accountable local people in setting the strategic direction for and co-ordinating provision of health and social care services locally by containing substantial representation from elected local councillors; and by requiring GP Commissioning Boards to construct their Annual Plans in conjunction with the HWBs; to monitor their implementation at meetings with the HWBs not less than once each quarter; and to review the implementation of the Annual Plan with the HWBs at the end of the year prior to the construction of the Annual Plan for the forthcoming year.

c) Ensuring commissioning of health services has some degree of accountability by requiring about half of the members of the board of commissioning consortia, alongside GPs, to be local councillors appointed as non-executive directors.

d) Offering additional freedoms only to Foundation Trusts that successfully engage substantial proportions of their local populations as active members.

Well it certainly wasn’t terrible, I guess. I should probably preface this review by saying that I would dearly love the UK to have an answer to The Daily Show in the US, which I think is brilliant. I would be quite happy to see some brave network simply import the format wholesale, so long as they did it right. I accept that not everyone wants to spend their career simply trying to make a carbon copy of someone else’s success, though, so I’m not going to insist that 10 O’Clock Live be that show. It clearly is trying to be something a bit like it, though, and for that I have both a lot of goodwill towards it, and a lot of points where I really wanted it to be better. I will identify some of the areas I think it needs to work on to take on the best aspects of the Daily Show.

Some people, like Mark Lawson, thought it was an issue that the programme had a pretty consistent liberal leaning to it, but I’m not sure that’s such a problem. For one thing, I actually thought David Willetts did pretty well on the tuition fees interview, in what could have been a very hostile environment (how many politicians would relish being interviewed in front of a rowdy studio audience by a well-liked comic?).

In any case, Conservative-leaning satire has always been rather unloveable, largely because it tends to revolve around mocking the weak and the vulnerable. As many people pointed out, the Daily Show has a similarly liberal slant to it, and the Colbert Report, ostensibly a kind of Republican balance to the Daily Show’s leftish sensibility, doesn’t really balance the situation out because it revolves around a bloviating Glenn Beck-alike character as a presenter, which is clearly intended to be appreciated on an ironic level. But I digress.

Most of the British attempts to Do Something A Bit Like The Daily Show have run into a couple of depressingly familiar stumbling blocks. And by the way, there have now been a number of attempts to get a topical, satirical, spoof-news ‘n’ interviews format like this going – see also the laudable The Late Edition (a BBC4 Marcus Brigstocke-led effort), and Channel 4′s previous effort, the abysmal Tonightly and its successor The TNT Show.

Problem 1: They have tended to talk down to the audience. Much has been made of the fact that in the US, viewers of the Daily Show and Colbert Report have been found to be better informed about current affairs than people who primarily get their news from more conventional sources, like the mainstream network news channels. Of course, correlation is not causation, and it might be because the Daily Show has a high student audience, for instance.

It’s probably not just that, though. Often you will see more coverage of what is said in Congress on the Daily Show than you do on other news reports – admittedly cherry picked for stuff which is easily mocked, but still. Interviews with academics and people who have written interesting, and not at all mainstream, books, are also a regular fixture, although admittedly they vie for time against interviews with film stars about their latest movie. The jokes on the Daily Show don’t sound like someone is trying to make a dry subject palateable to an audience which is otherwise too lumpen and incurious to care; the best of the Daily Show assumes that you already do know and understand something about the issue it is addressing, even when discussing geopolitics with former presidents.

Compare and contrast this approach with both Jimmy Carr’s bit on Tunisia-as-holiday-destination, and Lauren Laverne’s sleb-news spoof about Sudan’s vote for independence. 10 O’Clock Live does not come out of this comparison at all well, given that we are a country which would like to imagine it is culturally more sophisticated. I mean, come on, 10 O’Clock Live even opened with a kind of mission statement that they were here to explain the complicated world to us poor, addled simpletons.

Of course, 10 O’Clock Live has a challenge, in that Britain has news programmes from the BBC and Channel 4, whereas the US… doesn’t. That shouldn’t stop them from aspiring to hold that same position, though. Programmes like this don’t really work when they try for a mass audience. They work best when they appeal directly to an audience who are educated, interested, and don’t want to feel like they are being edutained at a level which is one or two levels down from anything they might actually find in the least bit informative.

Problem 2: Often, British shows try to start off being weekly, which just doesn’t really work very well. I think to really establish itself, a network just has to have the balls to really commit, and go straight for a nightly show. Tonightly at least got this bit right – its problem was simply that it suffered horrendously from Problem 1. Anything which wants to be The British Daily Show just has to go big or go home. It needs a big, intelligent writing team, and it needs to churn out good content on a daily basis, like the Daily Show somehow manages to.

In addition to these common problems, 10 O’Clock Live seems to have given itself a bit of a problem of its own. Its mutli-star format seems like a bit of an encumberance, at least in the way they have construed it. If I was to cast a British Daily Show, I can’t think of many people better suited to be Jon Stewart than David Mitchell. Charlie Brooker would certainly feature as a regular correspondant. But I’m not so sure about Jimmy Carr, although he certainly wasn’t a disaster. Lauren Laverne isn’t known as a comic, and felt rather as though she’d been chucked in for gender balance (which is a fair point, but surely the answer is to use one of the many good female comics who’d do well on a show like this) and to play the straight-woman to the other three, which seems a rather thankless task.

I wasn’t sure about their semi-funny, semi-earnest discussions around the table, either. These seemed a bit… neither nowt nor summat.

But still, it’s early days. With a bit of luck some of these crinkles will be ironed out in time. And of course, much of the charm of the Daily Show is in the way it has established long-running characters and features, and found its voice over many years. It wouldn’t quite be fair to expect this of 10 O’Clock Live straight away, when they haven’t had time to establish themselves.

So, my prescription:

1. Nightly, not weekly.
2. Talk up to the audience.
3. Cut down on the number of “hosts”, and redeploy some of them as more confined contributors – Charlie Brooker, much as I love him, is much better scripted than off the cuff, IMO.
4. Bring in more contributors, too. Why not show off some of the great, intelligent comics Britain has? MacIntyre types have plenty of formats that serve them well, but what about the less observational, more thoughtful ones? I would have thought this would be right up any number of people’s streets.

1. The coalition will survive through the year.
2. The “Yes” campaign will win the AV referendum.
3. Whilst the year will start with Michael Gove looking increasingly insecure in his position, it will ultimately be Andrew Lansley whose position is threatened most, after his ambitious and rapid set of NHS reforms inevitably come a cropper somewhere along the line.
4. David Laws will return to government.
5. The decision on Murdoch’s attempt to take complete control of BSkyB will ultimately be to deny him his wish, having first undergone several months more investigation.
6. Lib Dem autumn conference will see attacks on the leadership, with councillors who lost their seats in May out for blood.
7. The economy will not suffer a double dip, although it will start the year sluggishly, and by the end of the year things will be looking up.
8. Lib Dem leadership will contribute to progress on a legal vehicle at COP 17.
9. Alan Johnson will not be Shadow Chancellor by the end of the year.
10. The Independent will not be being published in its current form by the end of the year.
11. House of Lords reform will not be scuppered by the House of Lords itself, and by the end of the year it will be fairly certain that elections for the House of Lords will take place within the next 10 years.

My 10 Predictions:

1. Barack Obama’s approval ratings will improve, but the Democrats will nonetheless have a disappointing set of mid-terms.

Half right. The Democrats certainly had a disappointing set of mid-terms, but sadly it wasn’t even in the context of Obama’s approval ratings improving (see here, for instance). Instead, they drifted slightly downwards over the year, though you couldn’t really call it a precipitous drop; compared to the previous year it’s pretty much a flat line.

2. . The Lib Dems will gain more seats at the general election than they lose.

No, we gained 8 but lost 13, in a result which surprised many of us at the time.

3. Any hung parliament which may arise from the general election will not produce a full coalition government, but instead the Lib Dems will offer confidence and supply to the party with most votes.

No, it looked like that for a bit during the coalition negotiations, and had Clegg and Cameron not been so set on pulling a full coalition together it might have been, but in the end I was wrong on this one too.

4. The Tories will suffer serious internal divisions over climate change.

Not really, unfortunately.

5. Steven Moffatt’s era of Doctor Who will be darker than RTDs, it will continue his obsession with the Doctor “dancing”, and Matt Smith will be better than David Tennant.

Matt Smith is better than David Tennant. As for “darker”, well, visually it is, but whether you could really call the tone of it darker is less obvious. “Dancing” not as bad as it could have been, but certainly present. I’ll count this as largely correct, though.

6. Lawrence Miles will not give up watching, or indeed commenting on, the series. He will, however, start an exciting new direction.

Well he may have stopped watching it (properly, anyway), but he’s still commenting so far. As for new directions, well… does this count? Of course, he might well have started any number of exciting new directions of which I am, as yet, unaware.

7. The financial position of the Labour party will bring its continued existence into serious question.

Well, you certainly couldn’t say they’re in rude health, but the party isn’t quite dead yet, it seems.

8. David Dimbleby will remain host of Question Time

Yes.

9. The Green party will do better than the BNP at the general election.

Yes, it got an MP elected. No, the BNP won nearly twice as many votes. Which is more important? You decide.

10. Marc Maron will successfully monetise WTF, and will still be making the podcast at the end of the year.

Don’t know how successful he’s been in monetising it, but he seems to be doing OK, and still going strong.

So I make that about a 50% hit rate. Which suggests that my considered opinion on a given subject is about as accurate as flipping a coin. Ho hum.

I also made some resolutions:

1. I must stop putting off getting myself organised.
2. I must endeavour to get along to my first Spring Conference.
3. I must rationalise my finances.
4. I must blog more.
5. I must make a dent in the stack of books which I’ve bought but not read yet.

Well, some of those are rather less quantifiable. I certainly did get to Spring Conference, but I probably didn’t really blog any more than before. I did read some of the books in question, but then again I acquired more to take their place in the yet to be read pile. The other two… well, nothing’s gone catastrophically wrong with my life yet, so I guess I’m doing OK at those.

I’ve not been blogging much lately, but watching today’s events unfold, and the vitriol being expressed by some of the opponents of the government, I thought I might as well put some thoughts together, if only as an aid to my own thought process.

Where to start?

The Policy Itself

Personally, I have never felt entirely comfortable with the party’s stance on tuition fees. Yes, I would like a university education to be free, and I think that the increasing casting of the decision to go to university or not in terms of a cost-benefit anaylsis for the student is rather sad and will lead to the decline of people studying subjects in which they have no intention of pursuing a career – a trend for which our country will be all the poorer (and less liberal, as I understand the concept).

However, I have always thought that the criticism of tuition fees as a “crippling” debt was overblown, and would contribute more to any discouragement felt by prospective students than anything the policy itself might have done. Yes, there is a cost to graduates which was not incurred by previous generations, and there is therefore an issue of intergenerational equity here, but to call it a “debt” is disingenuous to my mind. This is not a debt in the sense that most people generally use the word. No bailiffs are going to turn up on your doorstep if you can’t pay it. Vince Cable, in his speech a few months back which was so widely trailed as advocating a graduate tax, made the point eloquently enough that

We currently have what is misleadingly called a system of ‘tuition fees’. Many people believe, wrongly that when students arrive at university they or their parents are required to get out their chequebooks, or wallets, and pay more than £3000 for a year’s tuition.

The idea that students are repelled from higher education by fees owes much to this erroneous belief.

In reality of course most students meet these costs by taking a student loan, payable direct from income after graduation when earning a reasonable salary. In this sense, we already have a form of graduate tax.

In this sense what students are being “saddled” with is not so much a debt as a future tax obligation, albeit quite a personalised and very specifically hypothecated tax. We shouldn’t pretend that that isn’t significant, and nor do I even dissent from the view that it is undesirable. What I do not accept is that there should be any differential in the proportions of prospective students who are put off by the policy who come from poorer or more affluent backgrounds. To suggest that there would be seems to me to require the corollary belief that students from poorer backgrounds are less able to rationally weigh up the benefits to their future of going to university.

Of course there are problems with the repayment system, and Vince has correctly identified these and sensibly addressed many of them. The bottom line, then, is that this is an undesirable policy, but not because it is an “attack on poorer students” or any of the other rather overheated rhetoric which we have seen from some of the more ideologically motivated opponents of the government today.

People like the NUS, who are now busy telling everyone, future students included, that students from poorer backgrounds will not be able to go to university in the future, could be helping to create exactly the chilling effect on social mobility they claim to fear. If anything is going to put people off going to university, it is the perception they might form from statements like these, and in this case it is indeed fair to suggest that the effect may well be greater for people who do not have immediate examples from their own lives of peers and members of their own families who were able to go to university and have not been ruined financially by it.

Where the Lib Dems went wrong

The problem with criticising such overheated rhetoric, of course, is that the Lib Dems bear much of the responsibility for feeding it in times gone by. When it suited us, we used exactly the same sort of language about tuition fees. Yes, we were right to oppose tuition fees, and we still are. When the economy is in better shape, I still hope, as difficult as it will be, that it will be possible to see some of the proceedsdecision is not in much danger of changing. of growth used to return to free university education. But we were never right to describe student debts as “crippling” or any other form of words which might have suggested to people thinking of going to university that they couldn’t afford it. They could. They still can. This isn’t about whether or not people can afford to do it. It’s about whether they will want to or not, and for what reasons.

So I’ve never thought that what the party was saying on fees was particularly sensible, though I do support the party policy of favouring a free university education. In many ways, much of the opprobrium we are reaping today we sewed ourselves when it was us attacking the Labour Party on the issue.

Of course, the other component of that opprobrium is the fact that we signed the NUS pledges. Yes, it is possible to argue, as Duncan Hames did today, that we have not reneged on this pledge because we have indeed “pressure[d] the government to introduce a fairer alternative” (the second half of the pledge, and curiously the bit that tends to be omitted when people quote it back to us now), but the point is academic and frankly will not butter many parsnips with most voters. Given the likelihood of a hung parliament, in retrospect it is astonishing that the party doesn’t seem to have been more wary of such an obvious hostage to fortune, particularly when many of the party’s front bench clearly had their doubts over the feasibility of moving away from fees in this parliament.

Having made that mis-step, however, is there an argument that the party should have gone through with it and stuck to its guns while the coalition agreement was being negotiated? To my mind, not really. To secure this, we would have had to use up much of our leverage, which we used instead to achieve the key priorities (“the four fairnesses”) which we had campaigned on. We would rightly have been derided as a middle class special interest group, consigning areas of government spending like apprenticeships to harsher cuts as a consequence. We might have been able to keep a promise, but if that meant abandoning some of the movement on the £10,000 personal allowance, a greener economy, political reform and the pupil premium, the accusations of “Yellow Toryism” would have been much more accurate. As a post-script, however, whoever thought that the permission to abstain was going to help anything had clearly not been getting much sleep. With the benefit of hindsight it has only served to cloud the defence that “this is a coalition, and we have had to compromise”.

Finally, having reached the point we did today, should more of our MPs have voted to defeat the government? No. I understand why many of them felt that they couldn’t go back on a promise they made their constituents, but even if doing so had not brought down the government, it would certainly have been a license for the Tory backbenches to defeat those areas of policy which they don’t like so much. Once you agree a coalition platform, you can’t pick and choose which bits to support.

Where do we go from here?

There is every reason to think that this decision should be by far the most toxic for us in the coalition. There may be further unpopular decisions, reversing manifesto commitments, coming down the pipe, but the argument that we didn’t win the election is quite legitimate. The Tories promised to jail anyone caught carrying a knife, which they have now abandoned, which was met with not-quite-comparable levels of criticism. The problem with the tuition fees vote was the separate pledge all our candidates signed as individuals. We haven’t, to my knowledge, made any such ill-advised promises on any other subjects, so any future issue, whilst it might be disappointing, should be by no means as damaging.

At least that’s the theory. The problem with that is that we have allowed a frame to be attached to the Lib Dems in the coalition, which says that we are simply liars who will say anything for a sniff of power. Superficially, it is convincing; we are in government, but much of what we said before the election isn’t happening. It requires a bit of calm, rational explanation to point out that a coalition requires compromise, we didn’t actually win the election, and so on. If every little thing from here onwards becomes another “betrayal”, we will be in trouble. So every compromise needs to be rationalised and explained. We must fight the betrayal narrative hard, before it sticks.

Can you see where this is going?

What this means is that the Clegg strategy of “owning” the coalition must end. We cannot simultaneously position ourselves as rational compromisers whilst simultaneously sounding overjoyed at everything the coalition does.

And finally…

I suppose I should conclude by saying that, although I can think of many days when I’ve felt more proud to be a member of this party, I’m not about to rip up my membership card or storm off in a huff. That might not be too surprising given that I’m not as upset about tuition fees as some in the party. Nonetheless, the deficiencies of our presentational strategy whilst in the coalition have meant that the thought has crossed my mind. I always immediately dismiss the idea, though. Why?  I can do no better than to repeat what Jae tweeted earlier: “Join the Labour party? I’d rather be waterboarded (which I’m sure they’d arrange gladly).”

My involvement in politics has always been based primarily on a belief in the importance of engaging rather than whining from the sidelines, and consequently on choosing whichever party I most agreed with and fighting for it, whilst also pushing within it for the things most important to me. Whilst that process leads me to the Lib Dems, I will remain a Lib Dem. Until the Green party becomes less obsessed with unelectably daft ideas and quite a lot of woo, or until the Labour party get a whole lot less authoritarian and tribal, or the Tories become much less of a special-interest group for the rich and for big business, that state of affairs is not in much danger of changing.

At the end of the day, the coalition has still yet to launch an illegal war leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths.

I should, incidentally, declare an interest at this point, in the interests of transparency, in that I am supporting Jennie Rigg to be president. That said, I’m certainly not hostile to Susan’s candidacy, and might very well give her my second preference.

Anyway, Mary started out, perhaps unsurprisingly, by asking Susan about why she decided to run and what her aims would be as president. She seems to have been persuaded to stand (in part, at least) by several people she met at the recent Earl’s Court by-election urging her to stand, following the surprise announcement by Ros Scott that she was not standing for a second term as party president. Susan has been a great admirer of Ros’s presidency; she approved of some of the internal reform of the party which Ros contributed to, and says that she wants to pick up the baton of Ros’s “pastoral” approach to the role, travelling the country regularly and keeping in contact with the party’s grassroots around the country. She argues that trying to help build and maintain the party’s strength and unity will be increasingly essential in the years ahead, and the Westminster elements of the job correspondingly less so, and she suggests that the time she has to commit to the role now that she is not an MP would be a definite asset in these circumstances. When I invited her to suggest that the job is one that could not be done effectively by someone who is also working full time as an MP, she suggested that this is particularly true in the present circumstances – it seems that she would not want to criticise past presidents like Simon Hughes who have done the job whilst being MPs, but the definite implication is that she does not think an MP could do the job at the moment.

The elephant in the room of course is the coalition. Whilst the party president’s position is outside of government, the coalition has such implications for the party that none of the candidates can sensibly ignore it. Where Tim Farron has tried to pitch himself as wanting the job as a springboard from which to act as a kind of ideologically pure surrogate party leader (whilst Nick has to sully himself with collective responsibility), Susan sees the important thing as being more to do with making sure the party helps the activists on the ground. Campaigning in Earl’s Court, Susan and the other party activists understandably faced a number of questions about the coalition, and it occurred to her that the activists need better and more timely information from the federal party to help them on the doorsteps to sell the Lib Dems’ part in the coalition. Both improving the speed of some of the communications structures Ros set up, and also occasionally “just picking up the phone” at the crucial point where it might make the difference – in byelections, for instance – were cited as goals. She is clearly aware that as a campaigning machine, the Lib Dems have some way to go to regain their position ahead of the other two parties in campaigning terms, when we will never have the resources of the other parties.

She was also keen to make the point that, although not an MP any more, she does still have media contacts and would be a relatively safe bet for media appearances on Newsnight, Question Time, etc.

That said, Susan was keen to emphasise that all of the candidates for the presidency were “exceptional people”, and that any of them would be brilliant, but would bring different things and a different emphasis to the role.

Next up, Alex Wilcock, as channelled by Stephen Tall, asked a couple of questions via the miracle of email: When so many people say that politicians are “all the same” these days, what do you think the Lib Dems stand for, and why should people vote for us. Essentially, Susan’s answer boils down to the combination of freedom and social justice. She describes the previous Labour government’s surveillance state as “terrifying”, and says that the Conservatives would not have countered it without us. She also cites her experience of living in the USA in the past, which has given her reason to cherish the centrality of social justice and genuine opportunity to decision making here. She thinks people should vote for us because we are in tune with the Britain most people want to see, where people are “respected as individuals”, but also supported by communities, where children are central to our concerns, and we have a very British respect for freedom. Family members of hers fought in both world wars for those freedoms, she points out. The environment also figures in her run-down of why people should vote for us.

Next, I asked if Susan had any thoughts on combating the geographical and time/money-rich biases which affect participation in the party’s federal structures. Whilst she was aware of the issue, and agreed that anything that could be done about it should be, Susan was reluctant to suggest that there were any magic bullets, aware that much has already been tried – and that the other parties are even worse from that point of view. One suggestion was that regional and national parties be strengthened and embedded, which is particularly important now we face the Scottish and Welsh nationalists as well as the traditional two parties.

Another question from Alex followed, a particularly mean one at that: Why should the party presidency be a consolation prize for losing your seat? Unsurprisingly, Susan was keen to deny that she saw it as any such thing, arguing “I don’t need consolations, I’ve had a wonderful time with the party”, not only as an MP but also as a London mayoral candidate. The people she felt sorry for were the PPCs who had sacrificed so much to fight the election, but never made it into parliament. She says that she now feels this is something she can do, for the party and for the grass-roots who have campaigned for her as MP and for mayor of London over the years.

Lastly, asked how the coalition affects how we as a party proceed, she said simply that we keep our core values, develop new policy which is not the same thing as coalition policy, but remember that we do have to compromise. She was keen that the party should not simply be an echo of the coalition, but at the same time, the party’s unity would not be best served by allowing the coalition to be an area of conflict; the leadership, she was keen to remind people, do have responsibilities.

And with that, we grabbed a quick photo, and trooped into the hall to watch Nick’s speech from up in the gods at the back of the hall. Now that she isn’t an MP, she might have more time to devote to other things, but there was no seat with Susan’s name on it down the front of the hall this year.