Those of you who voted for a Lib Dem MP and Lib Dem policies can hopefully be pleased that the party hasn’t let you down. Clegg did exactly what he said he would when it came to building a coalition and the outcome is an agreement heavy on Lib Dem policies.You voted Lib Dem, you got Lib Dem – as much as we could manage, anyway!
Here’s the summary:
The policy agreement for the new Government is full of Liberal Democrat policies. It is a real chance to put into action the ideas that we have campaigned for.
A Fair Start for Children
· Introduce a Pupil Premium to give all children a fair start.
Fairer taxes and Economic Reform
- A substantial increase in the personal allowance from April 2011 with a longer term policy objective of further increasing the personal allowance to £10,000, making further real terms steps each year towards this objective
- Reform of the banking system, ensuring a flow of lending to businesses and a Banking Levy. An independent commission on separating retail and investment banking.
- Capital Gains Tax reform
Fair Politics
- Fixed-term parliaments and a referendum on electoral reform for the House of Commons.
- A power of recall, allowing voters to force a by-election where an MP was found to have engaged in serious wrongdoing.
- A wholly or mainly elected House of Lords on the basis of proportional representation.
- Giving Parliament control of its own agenda so that all bills are properly debated.
- Enacting the Calman Commission proposals and a referendum on further Welsh devolution.
- A statutory register of lobbyists.
- A limit on political donations and reform of party funding in order to remove big money from politics.
- Radical devolution of power and greater financial autonomy to local government and community groups.
A fair and sustainable future
- Establish a smart electricity grid and the roll-out of smart meters.
- Establish feed-in tariff systems in electricity
- A huge increase in energy from waste through anaerobic digestion.
- The creation of a green investment bank.
- The provision of home energy improvement paid for by the savings from lower energy bills.
- Retention of energy performance certificates when HIPs are scrapped.
- Measures to encourage marine energy.
- The establishment of an emissions performance standard that will prevent coal-fired power stations being built unless they are equipped with sufficient CCS to meet the emissions performance standard.
- Establish a high-speed rail network.
- Cancel the third runway at Heathrow and refuse additional runways at Gatwick and Stansted.
- Replace the Air Passenger Duty with a ‘per plane’ duty.
- The provision of a floor price for carbon, as well as efforts to persuade the EU to move towards full auctioning of ETS permits.
- Make the import or possession of illegal timber a criminal offence.
- Promote green spaces and wildlife corridors in order to halt the loss of habitats and restore biodiversity.
- Reduce central government carbon emissions by 10 per cent within 12 months.
- Increase the target for energy from renewable sources.
Pensions
- Restoration of the earnings link for the basic state pension from April 2011 with a “triple guarantee” that pensions are raised by the higher of earnings, prices or 2.5%.
- Phase out the default retirement age and end the rules requiring compulsory annuitisation at 75.
- Implement the Parliamentary and Health Ombudsman’s recommendation to make fair and transparent payments to Equitable Life policyholders.
Civil Liberties
- Scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the ContactPoint Database.
- Outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
- Extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.
- Adopt the Scottish approach to stopping retention of innocent people’s DNA on the DNA database.
- Defend trial by jury.
- Restore rights to non-violent protest.
- A review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
- Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
- Further regulation of CCTV.
- Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason.
- A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.
- End the detention of children for immigration purposes.
Labour said they would abolish hereditary peers from the Lords. They failed despite, initially, a 170 majority and thirteen years of power. Will the Lib Dems in this coalition be any more successful?
I’ll be exceptionally disappointed if they don’t abolish the Lords – that’s one set of elections I’m really looking forward to.
I’m afraid that disappointment is something you will have to get used to, Iain. My understanding of the ‘grandfathering system for current Peers’ referred to in the coalition agreement indicates that hereditaries will be there forever.
Grandfathering clauses, (a very American political device), are usually employed to exempt incumbants from the effect of new rules.
Les – I’m not quite clear on what the grandfathering thing means, or on whether we’ll be able to get a wholly elected chamber. I think it might be that the chamber gets elected in thirds so, when the first third are elected, two thirds of the peers remain – or something like that.
Iain, Michael White for the Guardian, 19th May, thinks it might mean retirement in stages. He also says that the coalition agreement on reform is,’a big win for Clegg if he can make it happen, as the deputy PM is tasked to do in the face of Cameron’s known indifference’. I sincerely hope it doesn’t turn into a poisoned chalice.