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The problems faced by the Liberal Democrats were encapsulated perfectly last night on BBC Question Time as a young girl bemoaned her lack of career, education and housing options, ultimately telling the browbeaten Michael Moore to 'get a grip' after he tried to defend the cuts his party is bringing in alongside the Tories. Dougie Alexander indirectly assisted in the Scottish Secretary's unease by pointing out that Labour's deficit reduction plan would have involved spending £40bn less than the current coalition. This in turn was backed up by the thoroughly excellent Ed Byrne who, no doubt in keeping with many Lib Dem members, believes that in tough times it's not unreasonable to pay someone to dig a hole and pay someone else to fill it in again.
I had thought that during the term of this Parliament the Lib Dems might find a narrative of being the reasonable partners in an unpopular coalition but on last night's evidence it will be a tough needle to thread. I am finally beginning to wonder just how hard the Lib Dems will be hit in next year's election and, only somewhat mischievouly, is it worth considering if they could be wiped out entirely?
The Liberal Democrats hold 11 First Past the Post seats with Dunfermline West (maj 1.6%), Tweeddale, Ettrick & Lauderdale (maj 2.0%), Edinburgh South (maj 5.9%), Aberdeen South (maj 9.1%), and Ross, Skye & Inverness West (maj 11%) amongst the most vulnerable.
In Central, Lib Dem MSPs were voted in 6th on the list, North East 6th and in the South they were 7th so a net loss of 3 list MSPs wouldn't be too difficult to achieve with a few thousand less votes in each region all things being equal. Furthermore, the single Glasgow Lib Dem MSP could be in jeopardy if Nicola Sturgeon is not voted back into Glasgow Govan as 5 SNP MSPs, 1 Tory MSP and 1 Green MSP could quite easily freeze them out.
A total Lib Dem wipeout is of course unlikely but if Tavish Scott's party are swept back largely to just the Orkney and Shetland Islands, one can only conclude that their decision to be the face of the Tory cuts was a humiliating disaster.
Who votes Lib Dem? People who don't want Labour, don't want the Tories and don't want independence. That's a lot of things that are not wanted. What if those same people don't want cuts that the UK Government is bringing in?
16 comments:
Jeff, If I had any confidence in the FOIA, I would write to the BBC and find out the methods used to select the audience, who did the selecting, and what was the demographic make up of the audience. However the contempt that the BBC has demonstrated for Scotland and her politics makes me believe I would be wasting my time.
It was very obvious that the audience was stuffed with Labour supporters, every means possible will be used between now and the Scottish elections to snuff out the SNPs voice, hence the referendum on the same day as that election on the constitution of the Westminster parliament. The TV and the MSM, channels will be overflowing with that debate so once more sidelining the debate on Scotland. This is no more than the cynical agenda we have come to expect from the Unionist establishment, in particular the Scottish Office. Respect my big hairy a...! Unionism if fighting to the last man for it’s survival, and they have all the tools to make it very dirty, and they will.
As is usual on these few QTs that come from Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon was interrupted and treated in a very brusque manner by Dimbers. She was not allowed anything like the time of the rest of the panel.
No questions were taken regarding the democratic deficit now in Scotland, where we are to vote in a referendum on the constitution of Westminster, but prevented from voting on a Scottish independence in a referendum. To rub our faces in the muck that vote will obscure our own parliamentary election, in terms of the MSM.
Nicola failed to point out, (or was prevented from,) to Forsyth that the banks only became Scottish when they failed. Before which they had been pouring billions into the UK treasury in London. That he was spreading unionist propaganda by speculating that Scotland would not have been able to deal with the bank problem. Also that he knows fine well had Scotland not been prevented from having full fiscal autonomy, we would now have one of the strongest currencies in Europe with an embarrassing surplus, (according to the suppressed McRone report.)
Notably no questions were taken on Scottish independence.
I say taken because I do know that these questions were submitted.
The SNP have to find a way of getting out from under this blanket that is trying to smother them, and they have to do so now. Not leave it to the last minute like the last UK election and then run out of time. If the SNP is serious about independence and turning Scotland round they need to act in ways they have not perhaps considered. However, they must do it and do it soon. At the moment they are being suffocated by lies and propaganda, gleefully assisted by the MSM, in particular BBC Scotland. On this form they are heading for certain defeat in Holyrood.
Well said KBW. While I came away feeling a bit underwhelmed by Nicla's contribution, I was aware that she didn't get much of a chance to speak and many of the questions were very poor. Maybe it was a plant as you say but if the public don't understand how Holyrood cuts flow down from Westminster cuts then this next election is going to be a shambles.
I guess it's up to the SNP to communicate that, and Nicola had a stab last night, but it's not an easy task.
Thanks for explaining who voted Libdem Jeff. I always wondered.
I think there is a likelihood that they will all but disappear in the elections next year. The real cuts will have started to bite and there will be real misery. Iain Macwhirter is suggesting that there might be civil unrest, particularly over the attempts to do something about the Civil Service pensions.
I’m a great advocate of PR and of coalition governments, but when the Liberals get involved, with whoever, it seems to be that they are subsumed into the party with which they coalesce, without actually making much of an impact. In short they shored up Labour in Scotland and they shored up the Tories in England.
I see no point in them.
You’re the man with the stats and you’ll know better than I do, but I can imagine them being wiped out of everywhere except the islands in the north and the border country in the south.
The question is who will pick up the votes.
Tris, you seem to have forgotten that when we were in coalition with Labour at Holyrood, we introduced free personal care and abolished tuition fees, 2 things that London Labour never bothered their backsides to do. Also our freedom on information legislation is a lot stronger.
The Lib Dems are also responsible for a fair voting system in council elections which has swept away Labour fiefdoms. It's also shown how irresponsible Labour are in power by putting the spotlight on how careless they were with the public purse in charge of councils. In Edinburgh, they only left £375,000 in the emergency budget. The Lib Dem finance conveners have had to restore those reserves to a much healthier level as advised by Audit Scotland.
I think that the people of Scotland will realise that the Liberal Democrats have made valuable contributions whenever they have been in government and that our support will increase. You can tell that by the steep rise in membership in Scotland, since the coalition government was announced.
Jeff, that crystal ball of your's has proven wonky in the past and I suspect that its performance hasn't improved.
I agree with Key bored warrior. I was so angry last night, the way David Dimbleby constantly interrupted Nicola Sturgeon during last night's edition of Question Time was nothing short of a disgrace. It might be one thing to treat Nick Griffin or any other extremists in this way, but a completely different matter to treat the democratically elected Deputy First Minister of Scotland like that. It shows a typical lack of respect and dismissive attitude of the British Establishment towards Scotland's independence movement and to Scotland.
The only reason Nicola wasn't on usual form last night is because the "chair" hardly allowed her to get a word in edgeways, or to refute some of the quite preposterous questions coming from the audience and other panel members. Douglas Alexander made a couple of really glaring gaffes last night that were allowed to pass without being noticed, and Mr Burns was, well, Mr Burns, or Dracula maybe. Either way, it's lucky for Scotland he and his party are no longer relevant or wanted here.
I don't believe for one moment that the audience was at all representative of the make up of the Scottish electorate, and wouldn't be surprised if most of them turned out to be card carrying Labour members.
Also, why on earth did they allow a question on the English education system? Surely a matter that only applies south of the border and one that MSPs don't have enough knowledge of all the detail to be able to give any sort of informed answer, other than being able to respond in very general terms. I wouldn't expect English MPs to be able to answer questions properly about Scottish education, health, justice or any other devolved matter, or vice versa, so why do the BBC let it happen?
It's likely that the Scottish election next year will be ignored by all sections of the media. The public will constantly be hearing about the AV referendum, and will not get a proper chance to see how abjectly poor Iain Gray really is during the election campaign and how little policies of their own the Labour Party in Scotland have. Most people don't watch coverage of parliament every week to see this for themselves. We could well end up with Iain Gray getting in by the back door, which simply does not bear thinking. What a disaster that would be for Scotland. If we thought Jack McConnell was awful, then Gray would be ten times worse.
For both the SNP and Labour, 2011 is a "Must Win" and I hope the SNP are much more forthright in their opposition to these attempts to have proper debate stifled, one party being excluded from the UK election was bad enough, but for all parties to be excluded from full participation in a Scottish election campaign would be unacceptable.
Jeff - the Lib Dems took the least worst option they had by joining the Tories at Westminster rather than:
- propping up Labour in a collation likely to fall apart in a very short time given its multiple constituents and even then a tiny majority: when that government would fall, in probably a short period, the LibDems would be thrashed by English voters for keeping in Labour, in an election they would have no funds to fight
- sitting on the sidelines even after what appears to be a reasonable offer from the Conservatives: are they always going to be a party of non government or were they really saying they would only be in a LibDem / Labour collation (in which case just vote Labour)?
The UK position of the LibDems seems to be to keep the collation going as long as possible to allow the best prospect for an economic recovery and the implementation of AV at Westminster – i.e. hang on in there. But for Scotland they seem to be stuffed next year – maybe they have written it off?
It seems that there is plenty evidence around to suggest that the Lib Dems are heading for an electoral pasting and that their membership is at the same time increasing. Maybe it one of those occasions where you can prove anything with statistics. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating and my gut instinct tells me that the Lib Dem systematic ditching of all their principles will not set them in good stead with the Scottish electorate.
This coalition is not like their one with Labour in Scotland where they sat back and let Labour take the blame for all the bad things while they sucked up the credit for all the good. Indeed they are still doing it as evidenced on here. In England it’s the opposite that seems to be emerging where the Tories are letting the Lib Dems announce all the bad things and its now coalition cuts and so on.
Karen: You make a fair point that Labour would never have allowed free personal care (despite the nonsense Brown talked about before the last election), nor would they have abolished tuition fees. These are both things that get my vote of approval, and perhaps I was a little harsh to suggest that the Liberals make NO difference. However, in passing, I would have to question whether the funding that the English government, of which the Liberals now form a part, will be giving us will allow for these choices of the Scottish parliament to continue being affordable.
In short, I imagine that next year the Scottish government will probably have to reduce its commitment to both of these policies in order to pay back the debts that were run up by the bankers.
I’m afraid don’t know anything about the Freedom of Information legislation you talk about, so I’ll have to pass on that.
Now big and important though these two items were... life changing for some, allowing people to go to University and older people not to have to sell up to pay for care in their old age, they were only 2 over the period of 8 years of government.
In England it seems that the AV (non proportional) system is the price for some of the most dramatic cuts ever seen, and surely not Liberal policy.
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/thetorydiary/2010/07/this-coalition-will-break-down-or-drift-leftwards.html
( Angus Reid Polling)
Jeff
I was a bit shocked at the audience, questions and chairmanship of last night's QT, but I suppose you have to remember that 90% of the TV audience was from England, and that the two Scottish Westminster MPs actually do legislate on English-only schools!
KBW does raise some serious questions about what the SNP does now. And a great starting point would be fiscal autonomy. The ground on this is shared by the other parties who seem to be half-hearted in their attempt to appease large sections of Scotland with Calman. But the SNP could put full fiscal autonomy at the heart of their campaign for next year's election. This wouldn't be a U-turn from independence, merely a stepping stone on the way.
And look how relevant and realistic it is. The economy is the one subject which won't be going away anytime soon, and fiscal autonomy is therefore wholly relevant. It fits in with Scotland's 'surplus' contribution to the UK, with the Tories' desire to see the back of the Barnett formula and with many Lib Dems who actually want to see a federal system. It would naturally drive down the proportions of Scotland's public sector and enable politicians to set favourable conditions for increasing home-grown entrepreneurialism. And once in place, media reporting and analysis would be more Scotland-centric and less London-centric.
An independence referendum does not appear very popular at the moment, but I believe a campaign for full fiscal autonomy would concentrate the minds of SNP members, and and be very relevant in the short term.
There is no chance of us getting a "fair" hearing on QT because it's a UK show. The SNP are peripheral.
I think we should stop sending our top politicians onto it because it's pointless. Maybe we should stop sending any politicians onto it.
The independence case can be represented by people who are not politicians after all. Maybe the next time they ask for an SNP speaker we should ask Elaine C Smith or Joan McAlpine to do it.
Caron - sorry, but the Lib Dems are dead in the water. You have allied yourselves with the Tories and are providing them with the support they need to implement drastic and unnecessary cuts which are motivated by an anti-public services ideology. People who support those ideas can and do vote Tory. Everyone else is appalled by what your party is doing.
Caron said:
Tris, you seem to have forgotten that when we were in coalition with Labour at Holyrood, we introduced free personal care and abolished tuition fees, 2 things that London Labour never bothered their backsides to do.
Preposterous, tuition fees were not scrapped by the Lib/lab coalition, they were just renamed "graduate endowments"
Anyone who graduated prior to May 3rd 2007 is still liable to pay those fees.
Surely the real story here was how woeful Nicola Sturgeon was and how impotent Scotland and the Scottish Government appeared to be in the face of these cuts.
Well Wardog, when you have no control over your income and are dependent on a neighbour for handouts it does rather leave you looking impotent... mainly because you are impotent.
I dunno, I think the Lib Dems have shown that they're grown-ups and willing to get involved in a government that needs to make difficult decisions due to the massive debt we've got ourselves into.
Before the election, the LDs just seemed to be the refuge for 'Not in my Name' voters for whom the Labour brand had become too tarnished to earn their precious vote. These were the voters got all excited in the run-up to the election that they had found someone unbesmirched to vote for while retaining their left/liberal principals. Now that Labour is in opposition and able to behave as such, they've returned to the fold.
Imagine if Scotland were independent - we could avoid these cuts, just like independent Ireland.
I think what it showed was the clear contempt for the Lib Dems shown by almost everyone in Scotland. Given that the show was held in Edinburgh, it was likely that the majority of the audience would be Labour or Lib Dem voters as the SNP did not perform particularly well there or in most other parts of central Scotland in the general election, though there did seem to be more hostility to Sturgeon than would seem normal among a balanced audience and I was certainly surprised when Douglas Alexander managed to get a few rounds of applause!
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