Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems and Tuition Fees

The Deputy Prime Minister, together with his Lib Dem colleagues in the Coalition are in some difficulty over tuition fees. They all signed a pledge. Now they have to make excuses why they have to renege on the pledge. Not just an off the cuff pledge; one they all signed on camera. Oh dear.

Their supporters, especially students, are very unhappy. They are young and having something of a baptism of fire into the ways of modern, dishonest and duplicitous politics. This is a good thing, as enough of them may be motivated to change the style of politics and make it more honest and honourable. When they have graduated and are busy paying back much bigger student loans than they were promised in the notorious pledge.

The Party grandees argue that they did not realise the state of the books and now they know how bad things are they have had to trim their ambitions for this parliament. They should have read this blog more carefully before the election. We knew exactly how bad things were. We had all the figures. Why did not the Lib Dem leadership?

There are two answers. All politicians of all parties, even the Tories, were in a state of denial about the scale of the crisis, which was the outcome of policies over the last twenty years or more, involving all parties of government. The Lib Dems went with the flow. The second answer is that the third party in our democracy enjoyed the luxury, once again, of making campaign pledges it could not keep, because it knew it would not have to, because it would not win. Then it did, or sort of.

Hillary Clinton and Wikileaks

It is understandable that the U.S. Secretary of State, one of the most respected politicians on the world stage, expressed outrage over the potential damage of the mass leaking of confidential, rather than secret, material. Nevertheless this Blog remains of the view that this is a sign of the times and no bad thing.

These are not the blueprints of an American weapons system or a new missile defence. This is the stuff of diplomatic assessment, even gossip. Some of it shows Americans quite prim and unreal. When we learned a ‘royal’ had behaved inappropriately we thought of trysts with tabloids lurking. In fact he said what he thought in rather blunt terms. We like that. Prince Andrew’s stock has risen. At this blog anyway. The shocked U.S diplomat should be invited to spend a day with Prince Philip.

After the annoyance, America will learn fast. It will learn, as the younger generation the democratic world over already knows and feels, that people are no longer willing to be governed on the basis that they are told one thing, while those they elect to govern them do another. If they are to pay taxes, fight wars and endure economic austerity, they want the full picture. They expose more of their thoughts and feelings on social networking sites than was ever thought conceivable in the past and they expect their leaders to do the same.

Moreover these cables were shared, it appears, among three million Americans. If three million why not all? Why does some NCO so far down the chain to be almost buried, have the power to ping all this stuff to the world? The lesson is that in the modern world the Internet, even password protected secure channels, is no place for real secrets. These still have to be passed by word of mouth in bug free rooms or by packages left in trees. The Internet is for gossip and gossip is for all. Like this Blog.