No apologies for this 9 day old link. A new blog by somebody who has been one of my closest friends for the last 33 years – and an excellent article on tuition fees. As he says, the rebels are the Lib Dem ministers going against party policy. I see he hasn’t blogged since, so please give him some comments to welcome him to the blogging world!
http://angularangularities.blogspot.com/2010/10/lets-crush-this-tuition-fees-rebellion_12.html
Too late. The LDs should not followed Cleggover into his opportunistic coalition. We should have had another election and should not been panicked by the phony fearmongering of financial collapse.
Quoted from the blog you link to:
“I asked New Labour’s Scottish Education spokesperson when fees would rise from one to two thousand pounds, and when variations in cost between subjects were introduced, and if perhaps it might be the turn of six-form colleges to charge fees next? I received in effect that most hideous and often chilling of politicians’ replies. “We have no plans to do what you are suggesting”. The only problem was, and is, that I wasn’t “suggesting”. I was predicting.”
Your friend ought perhaps to give up predicting and have a look at recent history. His party are no better than Scottish Labour; the laughingly titled ‘Liberal Democrats’ supported the retention of tuition fees in Scotland. Oh, I suppose they stopped calling them ‘tuition fees’ – does that count as abolition? They claimed it did, long and weary.
Here’s how your chum phrases it:
“In Scotland we – the Scottish Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Government – proudly abolished them (and agreed the graduate endowment). It was a matter of principle.”
Pardon my French, but what a dissembling cunt. He wouldn’t know a principle if he found it in his soup. There’s nothing ‘new on the block’ about that nastily familiar kid.
Craig,
Unlike your own blog, your friend’s seems to mandate some sort of verifiable login (by one of several mechanisms) before permitting posting.
My guess is he will get very few posts for that reason. Pity – I tried to comment.
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“Unlike your own blog, your friend’s seems to mandate some sort of verifiable login (by one of several mechanisms) before permitting posting.”
Paul, that’s what some of us have been saying is badly needed here. To cut down (up to 90% I’d say) on spam and trolls. Anyone can post under any name here, including the names of other regular commenters. Impersonation is not nice.
They’ve tried one way, then another nd have decided on this – flooding, as they’ve been beaten in every other way. Their trolls are useless and have been exposed. They do not want CM to remain an active political figure – that much has been clear for years. Now he’s resumed blogging, suddenly these massive spams arrive: “I’m looking through you.” Rubber Soul.
The effort of trying not to say ‘I told you so’ is going to give me a hernia. There is a serious disconnect between the attitudes of grass roots membership of the Lib Dems and the career politicians at the top of the tree – almost as severe as the same disconnect in the Labour Party, though in their case this has been dealt with by most of their members leaving.
Here in Scotland, where we have already seen the LDs in power, your experience sadly causes no surprise. At the last Scottish parliamentary elections the LDs had an opportunity to implement most of their manifesto, on the straightforward basis that it mostly coincided with the SNP’s. Instead they chose opposition with Labour and the Tories, deserting their manifesto, their members and many of their supporters.
There are new elections to the Scottish Parliament in just over 180 days. Here is an easy prediction: if Labour are the single largest party, they will be joined in coalition by the Lib Dems. There will be no sense of dissonance with that other coalition.
You linked to the blog of a fellow ‘Liberal’ who said of university tuition fees:
“In Scotland we – the Scottish Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Government – proudly abolished them (and agreed the graduate endowment). It was a matter of principle.”
That ‘graduate endowment’ sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it – some sort of hand out to students? No, it was the new, marvellously Orwellian, name for – er – tuition fees.
Tuition fees were abolished by the SNP government: not moved, not renamed – just abolished. So here’s another easy prediction. If (and God forbid) the next government in Scotland is Lab/Lib, your Liberal colleagues north of the border will support the re-introduction of tuition fees. For fun, you might try to get a promise out of them that they won’t. I don’t doubt that they will call it some new form of abolition, of course.