Save the NHS: As Lib Dems Vote to Support Tory Privatisation Plans, The Last Hope is the House of Lords
When the history of Britain’s first modern coalition government is written, it is fair to say that two events in particular will mark the turning point in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats, when swathes of the population came to regard them as hypocritical and untrustworthy. The first of these was, of course, the vote last December to raise university tuition fees from £3,290 a year to £9,000 a year, and to withdraw all funding from arts, humanities and social sciences, when, as I reported at the time, 27 Lib Dem MPs voted for the rise in tuition fees (including 15 ministers), while 21 voted against, five abstained, and three were out of the country. Crucially, as I also explained, “The vote was won by 323-302, so just 11 more dissenters were needed for the vote to have been lost.”
Given that the Lib Dems had actively campaigned against any kind of rise in tuition fees, and that this was a major manifesto promise, with the party as a whole going so far as to pledge the abolition of fees, and thereby gaining a large number of young voters, this capitulation was a death sentence for the party’s credibility, and one from which it may never recover.
On Andrew Lansley’s wretched Health and Social Care Bill, otherwise known as the NHS Privatisation Bill, to those of us who think that privatisation, where intended, should be exposed for what it is, the Lib Dems were not faced with such a stark manifestation of hypocrisy and capitulation in voting for the bill on its third reading. This was because they had not made a specific manifesto promise to protect the NHS from the Tories, although they did promise to “protect frontline services such as cancer, mental health and maternity despite a squeeze on the NHS budget,” as the BBC explained prior to the General Election last year. Read the rest of this entry »
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