Election 2024: Those Lib Dem manifesto endorsements

The 2024 election is in full swing and this week is Manifesto Week. All the major parties have shown their hand and it’s gratifying to see a positive response to the Lib Dems manifesto across the board. If the Lib Dems play their cards right they can hit a sweet spot – differentiated enough away from the major parties to offer a genuine and interesting alternative, but sensible and evidence-based enough not to have a load of looney tune policies that would weigh it down, like the Green Party has.
The Lib Dem platform often receives praise from people not necessarily close to us – in 2019 it received a particularly glowing review from Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. However at the time our childcare, lifelong learning, and environmental policies were simply drowned out by the Brexit cacophony.
Hopefully this time round things will be different, although in what’s become a very shallow and superficial age it’s tough to get policies across compared to personality based content – hence Ed Davey’s long outward bound holiday. The following isn’t a complete list, I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but here’s a potted summary of the feedback we’ve received so far:

While Lib Dems have used It’s a Knockout style visuals to get onto TV bulletins there’s a lot of substance in our manifesto, drafted by Dick Newby (centre), now promoted by our party leadership

The Environment – Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace
Both major environmental bodies have given their thumbs up to the Lib Dems platform, they are no pushovers and often tell the government it isn’t going far enough with their commitment to the environment. The Lib Dems have policies to address Net Zero, promoting the decarbonisation of the electricity grid, improved building performance, decarbonising transport but also improving habitat and reversing nature loss.
Earlier this week Friends of the Earth said, “The Lib Dems have released their manifesto and it’s encouraging It ‘appears to be an impressive document recognising the interconnection of the climate and nature crises with existing societal inequalities’ – Mike Childs, head of policy at FoE.” By contrast FoE said, “The Conservative manifesto falls so far short of what’s needed it reads like the party has given-up on the long-held conservative value of protecting the environment for future generations.”
Yesterday FoE said of Labour’s manifesto, “We really needed to see firm plans on how the biggest long-term challenges of our lifetime will be confronted. Yet the Labour Party manifesto skates over so much of what’s needed to tackle the climate and nature emergencies.” Clearly unhappy with Labour backtracking on its £28Bn Net Zero investment plan.
As you can see from the tweet below Greenpeace is equally positive about the Lib Dems manifesto, interestingly enough it gives less detail and hasn’t even bothered to critique the Conservative and Labour manifestos, presumably because they’re so weak they don’t merit comment.

Greenpeace – thumbs up for our Net Zero policies

Housing – Shelter and Crisis
In the Autumn the Lib Dems published its most detailed housing policy document in a generation, there was a lot to like about it – raising design and build standards, changing the relationship between landlords and tenants, aspiring to build 380,000 homes a year, of which 150,000 would be social homes. This contrasts with Labour’s commitment to taper up to 105,000 social homes a year over the course of a parliament. In response to the Lib Dems manifesto Shelter said, “The Lib Dems manifesto includes a cross-government plan to end homelessness, plus a social housing programme & scrapping the Vagrancy Act. Now we need the same level of ambition from other parties and commitments to End Homelessness. Let’s Make History.
With homelessness at record levels these manifesto proposals would put us on the path to tackling this growing crisis and offer hope to the thousands facing the injustice of being without a safe home.”
Shelter produced a lengthy thread on twitter picking out highlights from the manifesto, this included, “We applaud the focus on delivering Social Housing and we urge all parties to prioritise building social rent homes, not just Affordable Housing. The difference is crucial for those in need. The Lib Dems aim to end rough sleeping within the next Parliament and immediately scrap the archaic Vagrancy Act. We strongly welcome a target to end rough sleeping, and rights to emergency accommodation.”

Layla Moran – a persistent and dogged campaigner for scrapping the Vagrancy Act

Women’s equality – Fawcett Society
The Fawcett Society campaigns for gender equality and women’s rights. It produced a detailed commentary on the manifesto and how it relates to women. It said, “A new right to flex working, comprehensive reforms to childcare, increases to maternity and parental pay and reforms to parental leave will ensure that more families have a genuine choice about how they bring up their children and balance this care with their working lives. We are particularly pleased to see
Lib Dems put quality at the heart of their offer with a workforce strategy, and prioritising training including in supporting children with Special Educational Needs. They’ve also included proposals to public gender, ethnicity and disability pay gaps, alongside diversity targets. This is another major Fawcett campaign that we are delighted has been picked up. We know that when social services fail, women are most often the ones who step in to cover the gaps. It’s fantastic to see Lib Dems coming out with ambitious policy on adult social care.
The reforms proposed would mean that both men and women would be better supported to care for their loved ones, and that those working in social care will receive proper recognition of the difficult work they do, including fairer pay and a proper career structure.
We commend the party for putting this issue back into the campaign, and urge other parties to explain how they would resolve the crisis in adult social care.”

The Fawcett Society recognises our female-friendly set of policies

Health & Care – The King’s Fund
The King’s Fund is a leading Health & Care charity, its CEO Sarah Woolnough commented on the Lib Dem plans, “The Liberal Democrats are currently the only major English party proposing much-needed reform of social care, with plans to introduce free personal home care and a higher minimum wage for social care workers in England.
Free personal care doesn’t cover all aspects of a person’s care, and it’s unclear if the policy only applies to older people or also covers working-age adults living with disabilities. But the plan would still represent a significant step forward and increase many people’s access to state-funded care.
The party’s pledges to rescue NHS services touch on many of the key issues for patients, but could be summed up as good on ambition, light on detail. The aim to speed up access to GP appointments by recruiting 8,000 more GPs is a laudable ambition, but as the current government has found, recruiting more GPs and retaining existing ones is not easy, and without more detail on how the party would achieve this goal, it is hard to see how their promise of faster access to GP appointments can be met.
The party has pledged £9.4 billion additional health and care spending a year by 2028/29. Of that, £1.1 billion a year is to improve NHS buildings and equipment, and £3.7 billion a year is for day-to-day NHS spending.”
Unsurprisingly because this is such a wide area of policy The King’s Fund doesn’t give unequivocal support to every Lib Dems policy but we fare better than Labour who are criticised for not going into specifics for social care and the Conservatives for not offering enough money and for causing a workforce crisis via Brexit.

A tabulated summary of care policies courtesy of The King’s Fund

Education – The Sutton Trust
The Sutton Trust is an educational charity (a genuine one, unlike the IEA), that promotes social mobility via improved access to education. It provided a very detailed critique of the Lib Dems education agenda this week.
The trust said, “For the early years, the standout pledges are to give disadvantaged children aged three and four an extra five free hours a week (making it 20), to be extended to two-year-olds ‘when the public finances allow’, triple the Early Years Pupil Premium to £1,000 a year, and develop a career strategy for nursery staff, with the aim that the majority of those working with children aged two to four have a relevant qualification.
The commitments outlined for schools are wide-ranging, with many geared towards tackling the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. Above inflation annual school and college funding increases would benefit all pupils, and start to redress the stagnation of school funding we’ve seen over the last decade. The ‘Tutoring Guarantee’ shows recognition of the huge impact this intervention can have in tackling the attainment gap when targeted to disadvantaged pupils.

We’re nothing if not sensible and evidence-based, the Lib Dems have fleshed out a detailed set of education policies from the nursery sector through to universities and workplace training for the first time in a long time

It’s therefore welcome to see commitments in this manifesto for expansion of free school meals to all those in poverty (current FSM eligibility locks out 1.7 million children in families eligible for universal credit) and a qualified mental health professional in every school. More broadly, the pledge to remove the two-child cap on child benefits could have a major impact on tackling disadvantage and poverty.
The headline policy to reinstate maintenance grants for disadvantaged students ‘immediately’, to make sure that living costs are not a barrier to studying at university, is absolutely right. However that should also be accompanied with a rise in the overall amount, to make sure students have more money in their pockets.
Our research has shown that students are increasingly skipping meals and taking on extra paid work at the expense of their studies to make ends meet. The poorest students also graduate with the highest levels of debt – a barrier for some wishing to go on to higher education. This must be a priority for the next government.”
By contrast The Sutton Trust points to glaring gaps in Labour and Conservative education policies – director of research and policy Carl Cullinane said, “To achieve their mission, Labour will have to go way beyond the policies set out in their manifesto. The Conservatives’ manifesto is relatively light when it comes to the education sector, given the scale of the challenges facing the sector. There are clear issues with some of the well-trailed policies it contains.”

Election 2024: Shattered dreams and no real plan

Below I’ve lifted one of my favourite even election maps from the vault – Local Elections 1995. As you can see plenty of amber, a profusion of red, almost no blue on the map. John Major took as big a kicking here as he did in 1997. Why was it quite so bad? It’s my belief that if you sell Joe Public a dream and it turns sour they will really turn on you.
Before 1995 the Tories had tried to sell the unsuspecting British public two dreams – a property-owning democracy and a share-owning democracy. The property-owning side of things had gone spectacularly wrong by 1995, people had endured years of cripplingly high mortgage repayments, house repossessions and negative equality. As for owning shares, turns out people weren’t interested, they did buy stakes in privatised utilities, but only to sell them for a quick buck.

John Major reaped the whirlwind in 1995, by then voters had grown tired of the property-owning Thatcherite agenda that had cost them dear

A new shattered dream
This year we’re looking at a similar shattered dream scenario – The Tories sold millions the idea of Brexit as a dream for taking back control, genuine independence and sovereignty – only upsides, no downsides. Nobody voted to make themselves poorer, but unfortunately it’s working out pretty much as Remainers predicted.
In my case, I said that it would lead to a period of sustained economic mediocrity, where we’d lag behind our neighbours, and that no other EU country would contemplate leaving, so the domino effect would turn out to be a myth. Life in no growth Britain is tough, with millions living with food insecurity and struggling to pay their monthly bills.
It’s quite remarkable, therefore, that the Conservatives’ flagship policy of the last election – Get Brexit Done – is hardly mentioned by surviving Tories fighting this campaign. They know Brexit is increasingly unpopular and cannot be linked to any tangible and worthwhile improvements in people’s lives. If the best you can offer is selling wine by the pint, you’re really struggling.

HS2 Northern – is cancelling a project you agreed to 13 years ago a sign of great planning?

If you’ve been paying close attention to the election campaign so far what the Tories are doing amounts to a rhetorical inversion – this a debating trick whereby you accuse your opponent of the exact thing you’re doing yourself. People only tend to do this when they know they’re losing and get desperate.
Rishi Sunak and the rest of the cabinet go on and on about Labour not having a plan. Let’s just step back and look at recent history – we’ve had five different Prime Ministers in nine years, Sunak has attempted to impose a large number of policies not included in the 2019 manifesto (cancelling HS2 Northern, making Maths compulsory until 18, fining people for missing doctor’s appointments), and their biggest policy, Brexit, had no implementation plan attached to it.

Brexit headless chickens
Having studied Economic History, I had a fair idea of the problems Brexit would bring to the British economy, there is no example from history of a capitalist economy putting up tariffs, non-tariff barriers, imposing quotas to make trade less free and going from strength to strength afterwards. There are plenty of examples where the tightening of trade undermined economic growth, the most notorious being in the mid-1930s where tariffs jeopardised the post-Wall Street Crash recovery around the industrial world.
The headbangers in UKIP agitated for leave for decades before the referendum, without any concrete plan in terms of economic impacts or navigating the constitutional legal aspects of disentangling ourselves from the EU. It’s not that surprising, therefore that HM Treasury did no modelling of likely Brexit outcomes. This is in marked contrast to exhaustive studies carried out at Gordon Brown’s behest about the potential impact of Britain adopting the Euro around the turn of the millennium. In the end we blinked and decided to keep the pound, this was only after much well-informed debate, deliberation and study.

Gordon Brown – eventually decided against the €, at least due diligence was carried out

There is no compass, there is no route map with Brexit, no other major economy has voluntarily left a trading bloc like Britain has. Any notion we could ape other successful countries – Norway, Switzerland, Singapore is fanciful. They’re low population countries, or city states, that have key characteristics that can’t be replicated in the UK such as vast hydrocarbon reserves or notoriously opaque banking.
The Conservatives never formulated a serious plan to ‘make Brexit work’ because that’s not possible, it’s a bit like trying to squeeze both ends of a rugby ball hard in order to turn it into a football. Try as you might, you can’t turn it into something it’s not.

Apres le deluge, gimmicks
So Brexit has turned out to be as bad the Eurotrash generation predicted, we’ve seen the worst growth performance in peacetime since the Agrarian Revolution, public services, amenities and infrastructure are crumbling. Everywhere you look – Schools, Hospitals, Prisons, Council Houses, Police Stations, MoD accommodation, roads – there are multi-billion £ repair backlogs.
Instead of addressing the problems and delivering investment the Tories have procrastinated and wasted the opportunity of low interest rates (a window of opportunity now closed) – they’ve barely got started with the 40 hospitals they promised, their extremely modest schools rebuilding programme doesn’t keep up with dilapidation rates, they launched a ‘Restoring Your Railway’ programme, except it isn’t a programme, it’s one minor scheme every 2/3 years.

Britain’s sink estates – no substantial investment since the 1970s

What have the Tories got to offer instead? Vacuous pointless rubbish such as reintroducing National Service, endless dunking on small vulnerable minorities like asylum seekers and trans, and a tissue of lies about ULEZ, meat taxes, recycling and forced car sharing.
We shouldn’t be too surprised by this, in 2019 the Conservative manifesto was the shortest and vaguest document in a generation. They don’t really know what they’re doing until prompted by the Murdoch press, or dark money think tanks like the IEA, Policy Exchange or Centre for Policy Studies. Expect another slim and vague manifesto this time, for all the bluster of claiming to have a plan. They’ll stand on a platform that is painfully short on detail and won’t address the major problems facing Britain. It’s the Tories that have no effective plan, and offer no future.