Return of Grammar Schools Will Further Entrench Inequality in England

The Prime Minister, Theresa May, announced today that the government will remove the ban on schools selecting pupils on ability, as defined by some new 11 plus examination, marking a return to the Grammar/Secondary Modern set up that existed in parts Britain until the 1970s.

This move is being spun by May as a way to improve social mobility, and so reduce inequality in society. May seems to believe that the increased social mobility of the 1960s and 70s was driven by having selective education policies in schools, but many things were different in the 1960s and 70s, from the situation we have today.

The BBC quotes Ofsted's chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw saying, the idea that poor children would benefit from a return of grammar schools was "tosh" and "nonsense". Kevin Courtney, leader of the National Union of Teachers, said opening new grammars was a "regressive move and a distraction from the real problems" of funding pressures and teacher shortages, in another quote from the teaching profession.

Grammar Schools have always had their champions within reactionary political circles, and are often greeted with the nostalgia reserved for things like compulsory military national service (which ended in the late 1950s in the UK). Their proponents allege it not only improves the life chances of the brightest pupils, but also instilled some form of discipline and order (and is often bound up with beating pupils, which was banned in British schools in 1986). Although, Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister in the 1960s and 70s, a Grammar Schoolboy himself, famously said that Grammar Schools would be abolished, ‘over his dead body.’    

I went to a Grammar School (single sex) myself in Manchester in the early 1970s, and you could say that it helped me to become upwardly socially mobile, since I now live in north London and am reasonably comfortably off. But it wasn’t really the Grammar School that helped me, it was day release further education from my job, and subsequently going to university, or polytechnic as some higher education establishments were known as, at the time. Also, I went to an excellent primary school.

I hated Grammar School. At that time, Catholic secondary schools in Manchester were split into Grammar and Secondary Modern, depending on whether you passed the 11 plus examination. State schools were all comprehensives in Manchester at the time. I should have gone to a comprehensive school, but bound up with the religious stuff I ended up at Grammar School. I am sure I would have done better at comprehensive school, but stuck it out at the Catholic Grammar, until I was 16, and then left to get a job, relieved I could put it all behind me.

I didn’t like the pseudo public school ethos of the Grammar, and I had long stopped believing in Catholicism and indeed religion generally, so it was completely unsuitable for me. But in some ways, I was lucky. The people I knew who went to Secondary Modern, told stories of how rubbish their schools were, and they didn’t achieve much in the way of examination success. It sounded as though they had just been parked there, to keep them out of trouble, until they could leave at 16 and get a job. It must have been a considerable knock to their confidence too, to be labelled a failure at age 11.

On rare occasions, and I can only remember one example from my days at school, someone would be allowed into the Grammar at 13 or 14 years of age, after retaking the 11 plus, when they had demonstrated academic ability in the their Secondary Modern school. Most were cast into the trash can, destined for manual labour types of jobs, of which there were a lot at the time. May wants to allow access to the new Grammar Schools at 11, 14 and 16, so it looks like a repeat of the old system, but I’ll wager it will be rare for people to move between the different levels of schooling.

May also claims that it will give pupils from poorer backgrounds a better chance of attending a ‘good’ school, as at present it often comes down to whether parents can afford to live within catchment areas, which for good schools are expensive to buy or rent properties in.

I can’t see Grammar Schools making much difference to poorer pupils, as surely those with wealthier parents will purchase extra private tuition for their children, to ensure they pass the 11 plus, so this is just a smokescreen to make it seem fairer, but will just reinforce inequality.

If May really wanted to improve social mobility through education policy, then she should start by putting more money and resources into all schools, reintroduce Education Maintenance Grants and the Adult Learning Grant for further education, abolish private schools and abolish university tuition fees and reinstate maintenance grants for students.

None of this will be done of course, and instead we will have ridiculous claims that Grammar Schools will make us a more equal society. To echo Ofsted's chief inspector of schools, this is tosh and nonsense. It is a return the policies that failed so many young people in the past.

I leave you with a song by The Smiths, about Manchester schools in my era. ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ gives you a good idea of what it was like.

Tory – Lib Dem Coalition 2010 – 2015: A Record of Nastiness and Incompetence

The odious Tory/Lib Dem Coalition government has ended (for now at least), we look back on what this has meant for Britain.

The banks have been re-financed with tax payers money, and the good times in banking, if not for the rest us, are well and truly back. Hefty bonuses are once again the norm for those with their snouts in the trough, even at government owned banks, you wouldn't know that these people crashed our economy. Royal Mail sold off at a huge discount to city investors. All in it together? Risible really.

Welfare benefit sanctions up massively since 2010, cuts to benefits, including the bedroom tax, housing benefits, working tax credits, crisis loans, Independent Living Fund for the disabled and overall benefits allowed to fall as inflation rose. Food banks up by about 500% and suicides up massively for benefit claimants. Hundreds of millions of pounds wasted on IT in the botched attempt to introduce the Universal Credit benefit system.

Workfare schemes introduced which amount to little more than slave labour, benefiting big business with participants learning such valuable skills as stacking supermarket shelves. Temporary, part-time, zero hours and mainly lowly paid jobs 'created'. Public sector workers made redundant in their hundreds of thousands whilst those left have had below inflation wage increases (if any at all) and hikes in their pension contributions. All are considerably poorer than before the Coalition started mismanaging the economy.

On the other hand well paid advisory jobs in government for The Sun hacking crooks like Andy Coulson.

An unsuccessful attempt to privatise our forests and woods and the cruel and utterly ineffective badger cull that despite all the scientific evidence (and there is loads of it) saying it was at best pointless and at worse would increase the spread of bovine TB, duly proved the scientists entirely correct. Defra Secretary of State at the time Owen Paterson, claimed it would have worked out OK, if only the badgers hadn't moved the goal posts!

Vans dispatched by the Home Office to drive around areas where immigrants live to tell people to 'GO HOME' in a panicky response to UKIP gaining popularity.

University tuition fees increased to £9,000 per year for students, already burdened with debt, and despite the Lib Dems promising to abolish them altogether. Once the votes of students were bagged by the Lib Dems their policy was deemed to be too expensive.

Local government cut by around 40% leading to the closure of libraries, day centres, leisure centres, youth clubs and many other services. All under the cover of 'localism'. More freedom for local authorities to spend much less cash. At the same time a huge increase in school privatisations as many were turned into academies, run by crack pot religious individuals and wealthy business men, all funded by the tax payer.

No expense spared though when it came to bombing Libya, which has been a complete disaster as militant Islamists have taken over huge areas of the country, with plans to make it a base for attacking Europe. Thousands killed.

House building, other than for foreign millionaires who 'buy to leave' property in London, down. At the same time homelessness hugely on the rise, especially in London. Families on housing benefit evicted from their homes and sent to all parts of the country (well all parts that are cheap).

All this with wages falling, the NHS opened up to privatisation, Legal Aid cut, Corporation Tax reduced for big business to one of the lowest levels in the G8, inequality rising along with carbon emissions.

What a record. Are they ashamed? Hell no, they say they want to finish the job off. More likely finish the rest of us off. Kick them out.

  

Labour’s Triangulation Strategy for Welfare Benefit Claimants

Interviewed by The Guardian newspaper this week, Rachel Reeves, Labour shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, said Labour did not want to be seen to be the party of the welfare state.

“We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work,” she said. “Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.”

I think this statement must have the Labour party’s 1945 founding fathers of the welfare state turning in their graves. The post World War 2 Labour government, as well setting up the NHS and extending free school education was also responsible for introducing social security payments for all those in need of it.

Working people, often through no fault of their own, find themselves in periodic bouts of unemployment, which is what the contributory nature of National Insurance was designed to alleviate. Like any insurance policy, you pay into the scheme to insure yourself against future spell of unemployment. National Assistance was also extended to all those who had used up NI based payments or those who didn’t have cover, if they were in need.

The very idea of the welfare state was to provide a safety net for those who through cyclical unemployment or disability were unable to work. This notion has been abandoned by the current coalition government, and true to form, Labour is attempting to steal their opponents political clothes. 

This tactic has become known as ‘triangulation’, first pioneered by Bill Clinton, US Democratic party president in the 1990s.

In a classic example of this tactic, Reeves went onto say “The role of the Jobcentre was to help. Now people are made to feel that they are trying to get something that they are not entitled to,” and “We have had a tenfold increase in the number of people being sanctioned. This government says that they don’t have targets for sanctions but they clearly do.” 

The point with triangulation is to steal your opponent’s policies, but to claim that you can manage them better, by making small changes to the way you implement them. Reeves also said just after taking on her current role eighteen months ago, that Labour will be tougher than Tories on benefits.

I know myself from working at a Jobcentre for a period that straddled the end of the last Labour government and the start of the Coalition government, that sanctions are used much more frequently now than under Labour. But the same Labour government began the task of pushing people off disability benefits and onto Jobseekers Allowance, using the dubious target driven assessments by private healthcare provider Atos. I saw people who were passed fit for work by Atos, who clearly were not fit for work, even in an abundant labour market, which we didn’t have at that time.

The Coalition government hasn’t altered the benefit sanction rules introduced by Labour, but has merely enforced them much more enthusiastically.

In one of Labour’s most shameful episodes of the current Parliament, leader Ed Miliband ordered his MPs to abstain when the Coalition introduced retrospective benefit sanction legislation, after the Court of Appeal had ruled the regime was illegal in 2013. Retrospective legislation is hardly ever used in the UK, because of the inherent unfairness of it. Can you imagine the outcry if a government tried to introduce retrospective legislation to catch the corporate tax dodgers?   

Reeves’ comments are a clear signal, if anyone still needs it, that new Labour is alive and well, and has changed not one iota from the Blairite script of the 1990s, despite quietly dropping ‘new’ prefix. 

Here’s an idea Labour can have for free from me, a slogan for the election. Drop all that hackneyed ‘hard working families’ stuff and use this instead:

Labour: Crap – but not as crap as the other lot!   

What Have the Lib Dems Achieved in Government?

The Lib Dems could have ended this coalition government at any time in the past five years, so we must assume that they have been broadly happy with the policies that have been pursued. So, I looked through their manifesto for the 2010 general election in search of policies which they stood on, and have managed to deliver.

There is a whole raft of policies in the manifesto, but I failed to find much in the way of policies successfully implemented. Here are the meagre pickings that I have found:

Tax-free earning threshold to rise to £10,000, paid for by a "mansion tax" of 1% on properties worth over £2m applicable to value of property over that figure

Well the Lib Dems didn’t get their mansion tax to pay for this, but the tax free earning threshold has indeed been raised to £10,000. To pay for this in the absence of a mansion tax they have cut spending on public services and made cuts to working tax credits. The effect of this policy is to benefit higher earners, when cuts to tax credits are factored in, the lower paid are worse off.

Cap pay rises at £400 for all public sector workers, initially for two years

Plenty of the public sector work-force has been lucky to get £400 a year pay rises, with pay freezes or 1% increases at a time when inflation was running at well above 1%. On top of this, public sector workers have had their pension contributions raised meaning that their take home pay is reduced further. And these are the lucky ones who have not been made redundant.

Integrate health and social care, allow people to stay in homes for longer rather than going into hospital or residential care by limiting bureaucracy [England only]

This is gradually being introduced by the government with responsibility for health and social care passing to local authorities. Some finance has been transferred from the NHS budget, but nearly all councils, including Tory and Lib Dem run ones, say the money is not enough. The Local Government Association forecasts a crisis in social care provision unless £5 billion of more money can be found to fund these services.

Introduce single transferrable vote system, cut number of MPs by 150 and introduce fixed-term parliaments

Fixed term parliaments have been introduced, although that was more to do with not allowing the prime minister to choose the date of the election that was most unfavourable to the Lib Dems, than any constitutional necessity. We didn’t get STV voting, but we did get a referendum on the Alternative Vote electoral system, which is less democratic than STV, but the referendum was lost massively anyway. No reduction in MPs.

Split up Royal Mail and Post Office, keeping latter in public ownership. Sell off 49% of Royal Mail, dividing rest between government and employee trust

Royal Mail was indeed fully privatised and at a knock down price, probably about one billion pounds under the market value, so the wealthy made a killing buying and selling the shares at a time when public services were being slashed. A profitable publicly owned service now in private hands on the cheap.

Reform regional development agencies, transferring more power over economic development to councils [England only]

This has happened with Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) replacing Regional Development Agencies. These LEPs are a partnership between local authorities and private businesses in regionally geographical areas. The purpose is to grow local economies, but this has scarcely worked at all, with growth outside of the private housing market very modest indeed. Of course, local authorities have had their funding cut by around 40% at the same time so it is hardly a surprise that LEPs have failed to deliver.

So, as far as achievements go then, not much for the Lib Dems to shout about? They say that their part in the austerity economic measures have paid dividends, as do the Tories, but there is flimsy evidence to support this. They also say that they have reined in the Tories on many policies, and there may be a small amount of truth in this. But it looks to me as though the Tories have got pretty much what they wanted, with the exception of stopping them gerrymandering the electoral boundaries in their favour.

All the ‘successes’ mentioned above have been largely supported by the Tories, so I have to conclude that the Lib Dems have next to nothing to show for their five years in government, except becoming very unpopular with the voters.

Labour are a Centre Right Party

Policies taken from the Labour party website (tuition fees not on the website, but reported widely in the media recently), demonstrate that Labour is not a party of the left by any discernible means.

‘We will balance the books: getting the current budget into surplus and national debt falling as soon as possible within the next Parliament.’

This is a fairly vague commitment, in that it could be that by encouraging growth in the economy, and growth in wages particularly, the national debt can be paid off by rising tax receipts (particularly from the wealthy), without continuing the Tory cuts to public services. But Labour has already said that public sector wages will be held down, and the minimum wage raised only slightly (more of this later). They talk of no money for extra spending, apart from some minor areas, so we must assume that they will continue to cut public sector wages and spending, including jobs, services and benefits. It is often termed ‘austerity lite’.

This is a continuation of the ‘triangulation’ tactics first developed by Bill Clinton and the US Democrats and faithfully followed by the New Labour governments from 1997 to 2010. The aim is to place the Labour party slightly to the left of the Tories, but only slightly. Whether this will be as effective in gaining voter support as in the past, is highly questionable since the electorate appears to have had enough of this, with Labour leaking support to the Scottish National Party north of the border, and to the Green Party in England. Both of these parties are seen as more authentic left parties than Labour now.     

‘We will freeze your energy bills up to January 2017, saving a typical household £120 and an average business £1,800. An incoming Labour government will legislate immediately to make this happen.’

Considering the recent fall in the price of oil and gas, which amounts to something like a reduction of £150 per year for domestic consumers, this policy, timid though is it is anyway, has been superseded by events. Will Labour now uprate this ‘freeze’ to £270 per household? Don’t hold your breath.

‘Earned entitlements: people coming here won’t be able to claim benefits for at least two years.’

Most immigrants to the UK come here to work, not to claim benefits which are more generous in some other EU countries. Indeed more UK nationals are claiming benefits in other EU countries, than EU nationals claiming in the UK. Another piece of triangulation from Labour, since the Coalition government has promised a similar policy and Labour wants to look tough on benefit claimants. This is likely to lead to more street begging and crime, rather than deter immigrants from coming to the UK.

‘We will increase the National Minimum Wage to £8 an hour by the end of the next Parliament – to help ensure that those doing a hard day’s work are rewarded for doing so.’

Without it seems even a trace of irony, a party that calls itself ‘Labour’ trumpets a policy that is so pitiful in ambition it is pretty much irrelevant. The National Minimum Wage (NMW) stands at £6.50 per hour presently. The Living Wage (LW) is currently £7.85 per hour (£9.15 in London), which even Tory Mayor of London Boris Johnson agrees should be the minimum. And this aspiration of £8.00 per hour NMW is to be achieved over five years.

Taking a likely inflation rate (Consumer Price Index, which doesn’t include housing costs) of 2% per year, would take the NMW to £7.15 per hour, and this is not a cumulative calculation. Even a small rise in inflation of above 2%, which is far from unlikely, will make £8.00 per hour by 2020 a wage cut. Why on the earth the trade unions continue to fund the Labour party is a complete mystery.  

‘We will stop employees from being required to work exclusively for one firm if they are on a zero-hours contract.’

Wouldn’t a real party of Labour just abolish zero hours contracts altogether? Not this Labour party, no. Instead this policy encourages more zero hours contracts by freeing up workers to take on more than one contract at a time. It is a return to the bad old days of On the Waterfront where dock workers queued on a daily basis to try a find some work, just for that day. All the gains in employment legislation since the 1950s are tossed away by the Labour party of 2015.   

‘We will cap social security: addressing the root causes of welfare spending by getting 200,000 homes built a year and making tough decisions like scrapping Winter Fuel Allowance for the richest pensioners and capping Child Benefit rises.’

A cornerstone of the Welfare State created by the present Labour party’s forbears after World War 2, was the universality of the system. These Labour leaders knew that if they were to get the middle classes to buy into the welfare state then they had to able to see some personal benefit from it. Means testing removes this benefit, making claimants feel stigmatised and is effectively a return to pre war welfare policies where claimants had to prove absolute poverty to claim. People were forced to sell their furniture and belongings before receiving benefit. ‘Back to the future with Labour’ might make a good election slogan for the party?  

Tuition fees: Labour pledges maximum cap of £6,000

This policy returns university tuition fees to the level of the last Labour government (reduced from the present £9,000 per year). It is the worst of both worlds in that it will deprive universities of the funding they need, whilst having no discernible effect on the amount many students will pay back. Students from wealthy backgrounds have these fees paid by their parents so don’t claim these loans. For those from modest backgrounds who do claim the loans, it still leaves a sizable amount to be paid back. Let’s not forget that these students need maintenance loans too and if they do not reach the levels of salary to trigger the pay back threshold, will never actually pay the money back, instead the tax payer picks up the tab. For those that do pay back the loans, they start working life with debts of £30,000 to £40,000 typically. This policy makes little difference.

So there you have it, and Labour whines about losing support to the Greens, who split the ‘left’ vote and will let the Tories in again. It is Labour that is splitting the left vote, with not even very left policies, a mere shadow of the party’s noble past. 

But past it is. 

Hunt's neo-liberalism distorts his understanding of education policy

Tristram Hunt's Guardian attack on the Green party's education policy LINK , characteristising it as 'total madness', seems to have spectacularly misfired today. Guardian readers looking up the detail have come back to comment favourably on the policy.

Our policy does of course mark a clear break with the neo-liberal policies of the three main parties which support competition and marketisation of schools based on what Chomsky recently called the 'grading of students and teachers'.

Labour of course began the marketisation of schools with their sponsored academies and this, along with the privatisation of the NHS, was a key element in Blair's New Labour strategy.  Hunt, along with Lord Adonis, is essentially a Blairite and we cannot expect him to offer a fundamental critique of what the system, instigated by them,  has become.

So what is this 'madness' Hunt has found:

Delaying the start of formal education until the age of six

There are many countries in the world where children start later than in England and Wales and achieve just as well, if not better, with less anxiety. The Green Party takes account of such evidence and understands the importance of play and exploration in early childhood rather than the testing and ranking at ever earlier ages supported by the neo-liberal parties.

Ending SAT tests in Primary Schools

SATS are essentially a way of grading teachers and schools putting them and their students under intense pressure. This has had the effect of narrowing the curriculum, deskilling teachers who are under pressure to 'teach to the test' and removes much of the joy from teaching and learning. Greens have a much broader view of what constitutes education.

Hunt suggests that children's progress would no longer be monitored, but of course SATs are not the only way to monitor and evaluate progress and tell us little about the individual child compared with other systems.

Abolition of Ofsted will end accountability

The  Green Party would replace Ofsted with a collaborative system ending much of the stress, illness and rushed judgements associated with Ofsted:

The Green Party will instate a system of local accountability using continuous, collaborative assessment of schools. We would replace OFSTED with an independent National Council of Educational Excellence which would have regional officers tasked to work closely with Local Authorities. The National Council would be closely affiliated with the National Federation for Educational Research (NFER).

Where pupils’ attainment and progress is reported as part of a school’s holistic report to parents and the wider community it will include assessments, including value-added, moderated by the National Council of Education Excellence and the Local Authority’s School Improvement Service as well as the school’s own self evaluation.

Education cannot compensate for society
 
In a variation of Michael Gove's 'enemies of promise' labelling of his opponents, Hunt suggests that Natalie Bennett speaks the language of 'low aspiration and defeatism' because she recognises that schools cannot compensate for all the ills of an unequal society.

This is what Natalie actually said:

I am gravely concerned about low exam results and high dropout rates from children from disadvantaged backgrounds. But I understand that even wonderful schools can’t fully compensate for severe poverty and stress at home - which is why making the minimum wage a living wage, affordable and warm homes, and ensuring decent benefits are available to all who needs them, are education issues as well as social justice issues

More than 40 years in teaching and school governance has certainly taught me the importance of material conditions, and I would add a daily hot meal and a place to study to the list. These make an impact on levels of energy, motivation and self-worth. We have to work on both improving education and improving living conditions and increasing equality.

The focus on individual progression in education with its blame for failure on pupils, parents, teachers and schools, serves to let politicians off the hook over increased inequality, child poverty and inadequate housing.

What Hunt didn't say

Hunt failed to attack the Green Party's policy to end academies and free schools, integrate existing ones back into the Local Authority system, strengthen LAs through better funding and increased democratic accountability,  restore LA's ability to build new schools where they are needed and end Performance Related Pay for teachers.

Perhaps they were too popular for him to advertise?

Green Party Education policy is HERE

Written by Martin Francis, Green Party Education Spokesperson and London Green Left (Brent)

Martin blogs regularly at Wembley Matters

Should the Greens Support a Labour Austerity Budget?

I argued on this blog recently that the Green party should avoid any coalitions with other parties, should we win enough seats at the general election to be invited into one. I said that the most we should consider is a Confidence and Supply (C&S) arrangement with the more ‘progressive’ parties. 

This means that the Greens would vote with a minority government on votes of confidence and for their budget proposals. All other issues would be dealt with on a case by case basis.

Thinking this through though, I’m going to lay out here the pros and cons for the Greens in taking a C&S approach.

Firstly, the pros. Should the numbers fall right after the general election, and Labour are the largest party, but short of an overall majority and we win a handful of seats, together perhaps with the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, we might judge that by getting some concessions from a minority Labour government, we can further our cause in some way. For example, scrapping the white elephant that is the Trident nuclear weapons system, which has been mooted recently.

A bonus to this might be that we remove the odious Tories from government, and get a Labour government instead. Although Labour will continue the austerity measures of the present government, they would cut a little less and at a slower rate. This might not be what we really want, but if it saves some public services from the axe, who are we to sentence the public to five more years of savage Tory cuts, taking us back to 1930s levels of public spending?

Of course, by scrapping Trident we would save billions of pounds which could be used to reduce other spending cuts further, as well as achieving a notable victory over nuclear proliferation.

Maybe this is the best we can hope for and the pressure would be on our MPs to do the best they can in minimising cuts and achieving something valuable?

On the other hand, I think this would be an extremely risky strategy for the Green party to take. The main focus of our election campaign will be as an ‘anti-austerity’ party, where we challenge the perceived wisdom of ‘there is no alternative’ narrative, and instead advocate more taxes on those who can easily afford them and a less obsessive attitude to clearing the national debt by spending cuts over the next few years.  

Of course we will be putting forward a whole raft of policies which would in effect be a root and branch rearrangement of our whole economy and how we live generally. But the anti-austerity banner will be at the forefront, to distinguish us from the other parties, and it is bound to be what the media will focus on, because it makes for a good story.

The big risk is, to promise to be anti-austerity, win some representation and then vote for a cuts budget, even a bit less of the cuts. This could be another ‘Lib Dem moment’, a party who campaigned against university tuition fees, went into coalition government with the Tories, and promptly increased university tuition fees. Look what has happened to the Lib Dems? They are pretty much finished as a significant political party now.

The public are, quite rightly, sick of politicians who promise to do things, and then do the exact opposite, once they have bagged the people’s votes.

It is highly unlikely that Labour would offer to scrap Trident or to alter their budget plans in any major kind of way. This is all hypothetical in any case, as the numbers may not fall in the right way or we might win only a couple of seats and others, notably the SNP do well enough to form a pact with Labour alone.

Best to be clear I think, and say now that we will not vote for an austerity budget under any circumstances. We can position ourselves well for the 2020 election, or even sooner election given the chances of a clear winner emerging in May is pretty small. There has been a motion submitted to the party’s spring conference, D5, (and an amendment to it), which covers this issue, so it should be debated by party members in March.

I think we need to be very careful here, as this will be a vital call for the Green party. The only way we will get real change, is if we stick to our principles, and not get involved in some sordid horse trading. We are against the austerity programme, why on earth would we endorse it? 

Why The Green Party Should Avoid Coalitions

The result of next year’s General Election is as unpredictable as any I have known. The latest headline figures in YouGov’s opinion polling is CON 32%, LAB 34%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 14% and GRN 7%, giving Labour a small lead. Other polls put Labour and Conservative neck and neck and all polls show around 15% for UKIP and around 7% for Greens and 7% Lib Dems. The SNP are polling strongly in Scotland too.

All of which points to no single party having an overall majority of MPs after the May election. This being so, we will see either a minority administration or another coalition between two or more parties in Parliament. Of course it is still possible that Labour or the Conservatives achieve a (small) majority but I think the odds are against it.

Politicians (and more importantly the financial markets) dislike minority governments, which is the main reason cited by the Lib Dems for entering the current coalition government in 2010, i.e. ‘to maintain stability’. Minority governments are vulnerable to no confidence votes in Parliament which by convention leads to another election, so the argument goes, businesses dislike uncertainty. 

So, there is fair chance of us having a new coalition government next year. If the Greens win a few Parliamentary seats in the general election which could happen, say three or four seats is eminently possible, we could be invited into a coalition. There would be a temptation to wring some policy concessions out of the dominant perspective coalition partner(s), maybe something on climate change or raising the minimum wage for example, as the price of cooperation.

In my view this would be a very dangerous thing for the Green party to do. We need only to look across the Irish Sea for a stark warning of where these things can lead. The Irish Greens joined a coalition with the right wing Fianna Fail party, were complicit in many unpopular policies (including road building) and promptly withered away into a micro party and it set them back a generation in electoral terms.

Even closer to home, geographically at least, the Lib Dems entered a coalition with the Tories in the UK four and a half years ago. The Lib Dems could have joined a ‘rainbow coalition’ including perhaps the single Green MP, Caroline Lucas, the SNP, SDLP, PC and Labour, which just would have had an overall majority. Some senior Labour figures poured cold water on this idea anyway, but the Lib Dems chose instead to form a coalition with the Conservatives.

As I said above this was all couched in terms of ‘stability’ and the Lib Dems didn’t want to be a in multi-party coalition as they thought they would have more influence on government in a two party arrangement. The suspicion is too, that getting the status and the Ministerial limos also came into their MPs thinking.

The decision has been disastrous for the Libs Dems, losing half of their members and two thirds of their voters and they will be lucky to retain half of their MPs at the next election and will throw away thirty years of steady electoral progress. The headline betrayal was the increasing of student tuition fees, when they said the complete opposite in their manifesto.

So, Greens beware! The furthest we should go, is to enter a Confidence and Supply arrangement with the more progressive parties and no deal whatsoever with the Tories. A C&S arrangement guarantees against a no confidence motion in the government and voting for the government budget. All other issues are considered individually and voting for or against on the merits of the policies. The C&S agreement should also be only for one year at a time, with new negotiations every twelve months.

This would provide some stability but also give the Greens the freedom to keep our principles and distance ourselves from any bad policies that the larger party wants to introduce. And of course, no trappings of office, limos etc, which would be a good thing because people are sick of self-serving politicians and this would no doubt increase our popularity.      

           

The Lib Dems Must Think the Electorate are Stupid

In a way you have to admire the chupatz of Nick Clegg when he stated in his speech to the Lib Dem conference this week, ‘if the Conservative party were in power on their own they would only ask the working-age poor to pick up the tab for the mistakes made by the bankers in the past.’

He went to add that any post general election coalition with Tories would not allow the working poor to be exploited in this way to fund tax cuts for the better off. All very laudable of course, but this being so, why have the Lib Dems allowed this approach to cutting the budget deficit for the past five years?

The bedroom tax, benefit sanctions, benefits uprated by less than inflation, cuts to public services, privatising Royal Mail at a knock down price, reducing the top rate of income tax and pay cuts for public sector workers, have all been the norm under the coalition government. If Nick Clegg or his party wanted to put a stop to any of this, they could easily have done so. They did put a stop to the Tories gerrymandering the electoral boundaries (although only in retaliation for the Tories blocking reform of the House of Lords).

The Lib Dems must be more deluded than I thought, if they really think the voters are going to swallow this one?

The above video is a reminder, if anyone needs it, of Nick Clegg promising to abolish university tuition fees, and we all know what happened next don’t we?

The ‘Home Office Source’ who last week said that ‘Nick Clegg is a w*nker’, was actually spot on.