News from the New Party

Betraying liberalism

Vince Cable's proposals on freezing public sector pay, reforming pensions and increasing the personal allowance are actually all very sensible. Good policies in fact! Worth talking about!

So what does he do? Only ruin everything by proposing an absurd, back-of-a-napkin plan to tax large houses still further. (That the Lib Dems are, or used to be becauses, really, who can tell these days, in favour of replacing property taxes with a local income tax merely adds to the absurdity of the situation.) So, guess what gets the headlines? Surprisingly it's not the sensible ideas.

The late Iain Macleod said of the old Liberal Party that they had some new ideas and some good ideas.  Unfortunately none of the good ideas were new, and none of the new ideas were any good.  Not much change there.

The problem is that the "new" Liberal Democrats, now twenty years old, are not a liberal party at all, but an amalgam of social democrats, environmentalists and vaguely libertarian leftists.  Any liberal leading such a party has got a job on his hands.  And Vince Cable isn't helping.