This morning Nick Clegg promised "
savage cuts" to public spending, and by nightfall it was becoming clear they would fall
at least partly on students. Well, it's not a cut to abandon a spending pledge, but it will certainly feel like one to students and would-be students.
Apparently the pledge would cost "
billions every year". When Charlie Kennedy was promoting the idea, though, the price was just
£700m a year. At least one Liberal leader is clearly lying here, unless the cost really has trebled since then. Thank goodness they worked
with us and the Nats at Holyrood to abolish fees last year - just in time, it seems.
The mood at Westminster is what. The big boys are having a discussion about cuts, so he's got to join in. They're
equidistant from Labour and the Tories in principle, however contradictory that may be. If both those parties are tacking to the right and preparing to slash services for the poor, he'll have to be right in the middle of it all.
It's obviously too painful or strategically inadvisable for a Liberal politician ever to admit that the Greens and the Nats are mainstream parties. This is a stunt they pull with tiresome regularity, and I'm sure a hundred years ago they were doing it to Labour. Sometimes the media play along, as with
this example on Trident.
This mantra about being the only "mainstream party" to oppose Trident, the Iraq War (
which was a particular lie), tuition fees, etc, etc, simply decodes as a claim that Labour and the Tories are equally dire on these issues. Is that really much to crow about?
While the rest of the UK hasn't been governed by the Liberals since Lloyd George knew your father, we did have Liberal Ministers from 1999 to 2007, Ministers who made some of the most egregious and anti-environmental decisions taken in Scotland since the 1960s. Their specialities included
motorway building and
GM crop planting, alongside other hypocrisies like
tuition fee renaming and
ID card abstention.
Their
2007 manifesto had ten pages dedicated to the environment, although three of them were full-page photos of grass and snow and stuff. Surely this greenest of all the mainstream parties would have some achievements to cheer about from eight years in power?
Not much. In all this verbiage ("They may be only the tip of the morbidity iceberg") there are just two references to any actual achievements in this area:
* £20 million invested in "public sector energy efficiency"
* "recycling rates have trebled under the Liberal Democrats" (although what they did to achieve this wonder isn't stated)
To be fair, they did a bit better on funding marine renewables than their SNP successors, too. But, unlike the Romans, that really is the lot.
Contrast these baby steps with the massive expansion of the motorway network Liberal Ministers forced through. It's in the manifesto, albeit disguised as a pledge to "implement the current planned road infrastructure investment". Presumably they wanted us to believe it was just some minor frippery they happened to inherit.
For years I met English friends who genuinely believed that the Liberals had abolished fees in Scotland, and that they were like a more organised version of the Greens. Plausible, perhaps, if you've never been governed by them, if you overlook their lust for
privatisation.
It won't wash in Scotland, though. I almost hope the English have to put up with Liberal Ministers. Perhaps then we'd start to see more pieces like
this: the New Statesman's great exposé of Vince Cable, which points out he was just as enthusiastic a deregulator as those he now criticises. And that he was happy to work for Shell in the mid-1990s during the period
they were accused of complicity in the murder of Ogoni activists (Ken Saro-Wiwa pictured). Enough said.
Things go from bad to worse for The Donald's would-be Scottish Empire. Tripping Up Trump took the battle to him, getting the eager New York public to sign petitions against his plans outside Trump Towers. They've got over 11,000 signatures online now, plus many more on paper. 
