#62

No YOU’RE agreeing with ME

The nationalism, immigration targets etc weren’t the Lib Dems’ doing, they just didn’t stop them. That’s different from them actually doing it themselves (in principle if not result, I mean you could also blame Labour as they were supposed to be the opposition).

1 Like
#63

Nice to see you’ve backed down.

:wink:

#64

The current system’s regressive - those who earn the most pay the least, because they’re not subject to interest over 30 years - they pay it off over the first few years of work in its entirety.

Cable’s proposal (it had to be him as it was in his portfolio) was a slightly changed form of the findings of the Browne report on higher education funding - it was a given that it was going to be put forward in 2010 as both the Tories and Labour were going to go ahead with those, but importantly the Lib Dems negotiated a clause in the coaltion agreement that meant they didn’t have to vote in favour of it.

Obviously Cable was put in a position where he couldn’t do much else (it would be ludicrous if he voted against his own bill), but the coalition allowed every other Lib Dem to abstain. Instead, Clegg chose to do the media rounds as the biggest advocate of a regressive and financially illiterate scheme - (lest we forget there’s a black hole looming as too few loans are expected to be paid off to actually pay for those that are expected to be written off). It’d have still gone ahead if Clegg could have kept the troops in line (almost as many Lib Dems vote against as voted for), but the damage in trust wouldn’t have been anywhere near as fierce.

I’ll say it again. All he had to do was get his party to abstain and say the Lib Dems didn’t like the plan but they’d done their best to improve it within the bounds they could and under the negotiated terms of the coalition agreement they would regretfully not vote against the increase as they previously pledged.

#65

Not disagreeing with any of that except to quibble with the first sentence. Those that pay the least are those that never pay anything.

#66

Fair

#67

thats why I don’t hate on them, I think it was naivety and lack of experience, rather than hunger for power that meant they made so many mistakes. On some occasions they went in with good faith and were stabbed in the back, they should have learnt early on but they didn’t. The way people talk about them as being pure evil or something I find ridiculous, especially given the willingness to forgive the far more serious war mongering of the labour party. I still thing they did some good, and stopped some of the more extreme plans of the conservatives, I remember shortly after the last election, there were loads of policies announced where the coverage mentioned that it had previously been blocked by the lib dems. I know it is only an anecdotal thing, but my friends wife wouldn’t be here without the lib dems lowering the earnings threshold for non-eu partners, their daughter literally wouldn’t exist without the lib dems.

1 Like
#69

Ah ok, I don’t know the ins and outs of the system. I probably shouldn’t have said it was progressive, but I do think it could have been worse, in that people earning bellow a certain amount effectively will never have to pay it back, and I thought the interest rate varied according to earnings?

#70

yep, think the alternative vote referendum displayed that pretty well

#71

Yeah, that was tragic in hindsight. AV was a compromise at best, but still an improvement (that would have enabled further improvements down the line).

That said, I put FPTP as my no.2 in that vote, so at least I got something.

1 Like
#72

Yes but when those limits failed it was implicit that they couldn’t be met without leaving the EU. This wasn’t a ploy (IMO) to force the referendum, rather just to deflect the bad publicity for this failure to something else out of their hands.

#73

Sure, but I think what Marckee is (quite reasonably) getting at is they shouldn’t have set an arbitrary target (why 100,000? Why not 50,000 or 150,000?) that they should always have known they couldn’t meet. Obviously the Tories did it for electoral reasons, but the Lib Dems then signed up to and enabled that in government. Once done, it was inevitable that it was going to fail and the Tories were hardly going to take the fall for the failure - the EU was an obvious direction to deflect the blame towards.

I’m perhaps slightly more ambivalent about that specific myself, but there was certainly a certain amount of stoking the fire that went on under the coalition government.

#74

They did know they couldn’t meet it. And they knew they would be able to blame the EU for that.

#75

Which is my point.

#76

Ah so you were agreeing with me all along.

No apology needed. Cheers :smiley:

#77

Yes, you’re right… some people don’t actually pay anything at all if they’re below the earning threshold. I was only thinking about those who pay significant amounts of the loan and forgot that some people won’t pay anything or very much.

The interest rate varies according to inflation (it’s the same for everyone), but the amount paid back each month varies with earnings (basically, the more you earn, the more you pay each month). The issue is that it clears the debt quite quickly for high earners with a small amount of gross interest whereas a moderate earner will be paying a smaller amount over 30 (or 35? I forget now) years - because they’re paying off less each month and the interest mounts up over time, they’re charged more interest and pay off a larger total sum than the person who cleared their loan quickly, but arguably could have afforded to pay more of their income and benefited more from their education.

It’s perhaps not as regressive as I first said, but it is still a regressive system when set against something like a graduate tax.

#78

I’m perfectly happy wasting my vote on the Greens, cheers.

#79

  1. Went into coalition with Labour in Scotland in 1999 & 2003. Fair enough. Made sense. Nae bother. But… they wouldn’t go into coalition with the SNP in 2007, despite having very similar manifestos, solely because they shat themselves at the notion of the possibility of an independence referendum ever happening and wanted to stop that in its tracks. So shrewd.

  2. After refusing to continue in government in a coalition in 2007 they happily shacked up with the Conservatives in 2010, but backtracked on tuition fees and utterly fucked up the voting reform opportunity with the miserable little compromise of the AV referendum. So very shrewd.

  3. Didn’t hear a squeak from them about their apparent belief in federalism before or during the 2014 indyref campaign. They just blindly tucked in behind Lab & Con and got punished accordingly. So very ruddy shrewd.

  4. In the referendum on the EU they were an irrelevance when they should have been cheerleading strongly and visibly. But they weren’t, because of their total impotence after imploding due to 1, 2 and 3. So very ruddy bloody shrewd.

In a roundabout way they’ve done as much in recent years as any other party to undermine public faith in a) democracy, and b) the UK.

So fuck 'em three times sideways.

I voted LD in 1997 and 2001 (and would have in 2005 if I hadn’t unexpectedly been in a plane when polling stations closed). Won’t be doing that again in the foreseeable future. Pricks.

The Politics Bar (POST election thread)
#80

Will this show a reply link? I suspect not.

#81

Will this show a reply link? I suspect so.

#82

No but I was instantly alerted when you typed both those posts (which was a bit weird tbh, this is nothing like the old place), so something works.