Nick Clegg | Alex's Archives

Liberal Democrat travails over the bedroom tax

July 18, 2014 by admin 1 Comment

Well, well, well. It turns out that the bedroom tax isn’t such a good idea after all.

Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander have U-turned on the policy, ostensibly in the light of the (delayed) publication of interim report of the DWP evaluation. The report indicates that the policy largely isn’t achieving the objectives set for it.

Early tabloid headlines announcing that the Liberal Democrats were calling for abolition were misleading. Instead, what Clegg and Alexander would appear to have done is withdraw support for the policy in its current form and adopt a position broadly in line with the motion critical of the bedroom tax passed by Liberal Democrat conference last autumn in Glasgow. To be fair to NC he did state at the time of the Glasgow conference that the independent evaluation would be important in shaping support for the policy. And so, it would appear, it has proved to be. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Housing, Politics Tagged With: Bedroom tax, Danny Alexander, Evidence, Expertise, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, U-turn

Strategic silences

June 12, 2014 by admin 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking a bit since Nick Clegg’s big speech on Monday. It was a speech intended primarily for the party faithful, rather than the broader public. Some of the shifts in position it signalled were only really going to be detected by those with well-tuned antennae.

Some of Clegg’s speech on Monday was as toe-curling as usual. It repeated some tired Coalition tropes. Some passages captured that air of vacuous profundity that you expect from these types of political speeches. But then again I thought some of the substance wasn’t so bad. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Comms strategy, Credibility, Elections, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Political leadership, Political strategy

Going down fighting

May 29, 2014 by admin 1 Comment

My goodness the atmosphere around the Libdems is febrile at the moment.

No sooner had it become clear that Friday’s Libdems4change petition was going to fizzle out than we learn of Lord Oakeshott’s freelance polling manoeuvre. It’s almost as if the timing of the leak of the poll results was planned to keep the heat on.

A number of people online referred to Lord Oakeshott as a Scooby Doo villain, but his acrid resignation letter may yet prove to be genuinely damaging not only to Nick Clegg but also to Vince Cable, his preferred party leader. If so then the self-inflicted damage means the comparison with Dick Dastardly might turn out to be more apt.

As Lord Oakeshott disappeared sulphurously into the sunset the next instalment in the saga arrived in the form of a letter to The Times from the co-chairs of the Social Liberal Forum. The letter calls for a review of strategy and approach, including to the leadership. This was initially represented – and indeed was represented by the Times – as another call for Nick Clegg to stand aside. But, to be fair, the letter doesn’t call for that. Not quite. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Dan Hannan, David Howarth, LDV, Lord Oakeshott, Nick Clegg, Social Liberal Forum, Social liberalism, Stephen Tall, The Orange Book, Vince Cable

Dissent in the ranks

April 22, 2014 by admin 6 Comments

You’d expect lefties to kick up a fuss about the Coalition’s austerity-justified policies. An agenda that is having serious negative impacts upon the most vulnerable, while at the same time transferring wealth to the already wealthy, will have a tendency to annoy those who prioritize solidarity, dignity and security over the search for profit and the appeasement of plutocrats.

But that can be dismissed as just so much hot air from the naïve and irresponsible.

The problems really begin when your own people start cutting up rough.

And perhaps we’re beginning to detect that that is what is happening in the housing sphere. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Housing, Politics Tagged With: Conservatives, Ebbsfleet, Garden cities, Housing policy, Housing supply, Milton Keynes, Nick Boles, Nick Clegg, Peter Oborne

Insipid centrism

February 18, 2014 by admin 1 Comment

That’s what the Liberal Democrats are risking. That, at least, is the view Jeremy Browne expressed on last night’s Radio 4 programme about Nick Clegg. Chris Huhne wasn’t much more complimentary about the current strategy of trying to situate the party between the two major parties. Huhne felt that defining the party negatively – at least we’re not as bad as Labour on the economy or the Conservatives on just about everything else – isn’t really a very appetizing message. A more positive case for what the party stands for needs to be made.

We could dismiss these views as sour grapes from the rejected and discarded. There might be something to that. But Browne and Huhne are hardly alone. While there are high profile defenders of what we might call the “non-specific centrism” strategy, there are plenty of activists who feel that just parroting “stronger economy, fairer society” all the time hardly adds up to a compelling political offer. And I’m not even thinking of those who would have preferred it to be “fairer economy, stronger society”.

The leadership’s non-specific centrism strategy is now seemingly accompanied by an attempted rapprochement with Labour, presumably in the expectation that a coalition with Labour is viewed as more likely than another coalition with the Conservatives.

It seems to me that pursuing the strategy of publicly courting Labour may make the coalition outcome less likely. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Chris Huhne, Jeremy Browne, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Political leadership, Political narratives

Ed and Nick go courting

January 13, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

Today, as might have been anticipated, Andrew Rawnsley took as his subject the apparent thawing of relations between Labour and the Lib Dems. The opinion polls suggest that an outright Labour majority in 2015 is by no means assured. So it makes sense for them to leave the option of plan B open this time around. The major news this week was Ed Balls’ concession that it would be possible to work with Nick Clegg, rather than demand his head on a plate as the price of coalition. Others in the Labour party – notably Tom Watson in the New Statesman yesterday – are, however, holding firm to the Clegg’s-head-on-a-plate option.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Andrew Rawnsley, Coalition government, Differentiation, Ed Balls, Lib Dems, Liberalism, Nick Clegg, Political hypocrisy, Political strategy, Social democracy

Recalibrating the savings from the bedroom tax

October 15, 2013 by admin Leave a Comment

To be fair to the DWP, ex ante assessment of the impacts of policy change is difficult. Especially when the impacts rely upon behavioural effects that are unknown and unknowable in advance. So when it modelled the savings from the implementation of the so-called bedroom tax it was always going to represent a broad estimate. The DWP quite rightly conducted sensitivity analysis to see how robust its conclusions were to different assumptions on key variables.

However, once the policy is in place real data will begin to emerge and ex ante assessments can be recalibrated. That is what Rebecca Tunstall of the Centre for Housing Research at York has attempted. Her report, published yesterday, has generated considerable political and media interest.

The brief report is well worth reading, for several reasons. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Housing Tagged With: Bedroom tax, Centre for Housing Policy, Esther McVey, Nick Clegg, Rebecca Tunstall, Underoccupancy penalty

Browne study

October 7, 2013 by admin Leave a Comment

Reshuffle day is for politics nerds as transfer deadline day is for football supporters. You hope for some big name signings and some surprise moves between big clubs, but most of the activity takes place in the lower divisions.

What was the most interesting component of today’s activity? For some it is no doubt Ed Miliband’s so-called culling of the Blairites. The right wing press have already interpreted this as incontrovertible proof of a lurch to the left and a sign that Len McCluskey is the power behind the throne. On the other hand, most commentators seem to see the reshuffle on the Tory side as being rather unexciting. And that that is fundamentally a good thing.

One specific issue which might develop into something interesting is the fate of the housing policy portfolio. It appears that Labour have moved the shadow housing brief up the pecking order to give it greater prominence. Yet the initial impression is that the Tories have demoted the housing brief within DCLG. If that is the case then it is a frankly bizarre move, given that there is general agreement that housing is going to be one of the top half dozen issues in the run up to the General Election. This may be a story that has further to run.

But perhaps the single most interesting move in the reshuffle was the removal of Jeremy Browne from the Home Office and his replacement by Norman Baker. [Read more...]