The trouble with our transport

My good friend Bob Robinson recently gave me a nudge to listen to this podcast – see link below:-

https://www.centreforcities.org/podcast/city-talks-british-rail-with-christian-wolmar/

It’s was interesting to me as a transport nut as in many ways Woolmar, despite being a bit of a Labour hack, makes many interesting and relevant points regarding how the UK has failed to plan for transport for generations, probably going back as far as the birth of our railways.

 

As a society we’ve seemingly always been happy to allow many of our transport developments to be at the behest of private developers and financiers’ meaning little is planned in any meaningful way except for short-term financial gain of course.

Yes, of course governments went motorway mad from the 1960’s onwards as they tried to make the motorist (read Daily Mail readers) happy with their car-centric lives and any form of public transport was really for the poor folk who could not afford their own car. Hence our run down railways and ever decreasing bus services (since 1980s Bus Deregulation outside of London) have been the norm as public sector transport spending/subsidy has been withdrawn/redirected in favour of private motor vehicle.

I was amused to hear Woolmar making reference to that rather right-wing country Switzerland where public transport is really a big thing. Our usual UK right-of-centre politics has left public transport poorly planned and second class yet those who do successful right-wing politics far better (from a public transport perspective anyway) than our Conservative Party have a totally different attitude to how best to plan and run public transport. I bet the Swiss are utterly horrified at the UK’s apology for public transport.

Go on give Centre For Politics’ Woolmar podcast a listen; his analysis and ability to put our transport troubles in historical context is compelling.

Questions I’ve been asked during my time in politics

What made you join the Liberal Party? – I read the 3 party manifestos from the 1979 General Election and decided I was a Liberal. Liberalism was clearly the way forward to me.

Front cover of 1979 Liberal Manifesto

 

Who would you vote for if there was no Liberal-type party in the UK? – I’d  establish a Liberal Party.

Have you ever voted other than Liberal? Yes, in my first ever vote, for Park Ward – Sefton Borough,  I put an X next to the Labour candidate. I have voted for independent candidates too in local elections where no Liberal/Lib Dem candidate has been standing.

Why don’t you support Labour? - They’re mostly to the political right of me as a Social Liberal. Labour are also authoritarian of nature i.e. the exact opposite of Liberalism which puts the individual at the heart of everything.

How left wing are you? – I’d say I’m a radical, progressive leftie and I think I’m probably the most left leaning Leader of Sefton Council to date.

Aren’t some Liberals right-wing? Yes, some are and this is where the distinction between Liberalism and Libertarianism can be found. Libertarians don’t see us all being a part of a society, I call them ‘me first’ politicians. They will usually be found in the Tory Party. A true Liberal will virtually always be progressive, radical and left of centre.

Which Liberal/Lib Dem politicians do you admire? – Joe Grimond, Charles Kennedy, Paddy Ashdown, Shirley Williams, David Penhaligon, Richard Wainright.

What national policies do you think should be a priority? – Tackling Climate Change, eradicating poverty, building far more Social Housing, proportional representation voting, community policing and rebuilding quality public transport.

Do you hate Tories? Hate is a terrible word that is used far too often in everyday conversation; I try not to use the word or indeed hate anyone. Tories for me are all about making the rich richer, the days of the reasonable One Nation Conservatives are long gone.

What politics did your parents follow? – Dad was from a working-class Conservative background whilst Mum was more a Chapel Liberal. I recall Mum being quite disgusted that women could not be members of the Conservative Club my Dad was director of and she refused to attend the yearly Ladies Night.

Were you paid to be a councillor? - As a Town and Parish Councillor I received no remuneration at all except for a small allowance in the year I was Mayor of Maghull. As a Borough Councillor I was paid a basic allowance plus additional amounts during my time as a Cabinet member and Leader of Sefton Council. All payments to councillors are on public record.

Why do some voters think that money changes hands to get planning permissions through? – I’ve heard this said many times but personally I was only ever aware of one such incident which, I was told, involved someone offering to do a favour for councillor if he could sort out their planning application. The councillor concerned reported the matter and the police visited the person concerned. Other than that one hearsay incident I can honestly say I know of no others.

Don’t you think it odd that a Liberal like you was also a trade union officer? – Not at all, there’s a long history of Liberals working within the trade union movement. I enjoyed every minute of being a lay trade union officer but found that some union officials from a Labour background could often be too socially conservative for my liking. It would manifest itself in reluctance to see situations other than from a Working-Class perspective when a wider perspective was really required.

Did you have any friends across the political spectrum? – Yes, I tried hard to get on with councillors with differing political views. I considered Dave Martin, for example, who led the Labour Group on Sefton Council for many years a friend. We probably hit it off as we were both from a trade union background.

 

 

To regulate or not to regulate & trickledown economics

A friend of mine said to me the other day ‘this country has gone to the dogs, nothing works yet we’re paying the highest taxes in many a year’. And you know he’s right, the NHS is in a terrible mess, policing is too. Environmental protections are being weakened all the time and no one seems to be able to get the trains to run anywhere near reliably. I could go on but I think you’ll get my drift.

There’s been a political fad, which probably has its roots in the demise of the post-war consensus in the late 1970s, of deregulating pretty much everything and leaving many things to the free market to find solutions. I recall Gordon Brown’s ‘light touch regulation’ with regard to banking as an example. Of course, the free market will always come up with deregulation solutions that benefit the comfortably off and the wealthy; it’s how unregulated/deregulated capitalism works. The poorest in our society will always lose out and they’ve done so in spades as the checks and balances we once held dear have melted away. For me, the way a society treats its poorest is measure of how it is progressing or otherwise and frankly the UK treats those with little or nothing very badly.

Much of damage done has been via deregulation and the oft used phrase trickledown economics. When I say oft used phrase, I mean by the political right who have been shifting wealth in our society towards the richest whilst restricting help for the poorest. The theory is that by creating wealth the poorest will gain too but in reality the poorest have continued to get poorer so trickledown economics is really code for widening the gulf between the richest and poorest.

Some regulation will have been openly and deliberately cut/weakened by governments but probably much more has been caused by budgetary reductions to councils, the police, Environment Agency etc. etc. By reducing the amount of money a public/regulatory organisation receives the effect is that it has to prioritise what it does and therefore what it regulates. In the end checks that should be attended to simply don’t happen anymore.

So when you hear a politician telling you that deregulation will provide ‘X’ benefits just think that those benefits will be for the middle incomes to wealthy. The chances of the deregulation (often sold as getting rid of red tape) benefiting those with little or nothing are pretty much nil. And the same politicians will be promoting trickle-down economics. 

For capitalism to work it requires significant regulation otherwise the poor and those with little will continue to be exploited.

Next general election outcome – Best one for proressives?

As a Social Liberal I’ve always looked upon Labour as being to the right of me (and far too authoritarian) on the UK political spectrum. However, it seems, if polls are to believed, that Labour are likely to be the largest party after the next election. Should that be the case, and Labour does not have an overall majority, then I’d prefer them to be dependent on the SNP to form a government. In my view a Labour majority government would change little that’s wrong with our broken political system and they’d simply hand power back to the Tories who’d reverse anything they'd done which was progressive. That’s assuming Starmer’s Labour Party does anything progressive, of course!

Now yes I know, the SNP have been doing a pretty good self-destruct of recent times so there’s more than a possibility of them coming unstuck at the next election, but bear with me.

Labour and the SNP just don’t get on and there’s a child-like my dad’s bigger than yours relationship between them. Having said that it’s debateable whether the Lib Dem-SNP relationship is any better i.e. very school playgroundish. However, despite this my view is that Starmer stuck with the SNP may well be in the interests of progressives as they’d certainly hold his feet to the political fire and blunt the right-of-centre agenda that a Labour-led administration would seemingly be tempted to push on with.

But why not a Labour administration dependent on left-of-centre Lib Dems I hear you say? Well, having been a Liberal and Lib Dem member since 1980 I think the Lib Dems, who’ll likely have a new crop of inexperienced MPs, need a spell as a left-of-centre opposition to a Starmer-led administration. However, they should in such circumstances, be a constructive opposition which backs either a minority Labour or Labour/SNP administration but ONLY when it does progressive things. I’m recalling here Charles Kennedy’s ‘constructive opposition’ approach.

Looking at the present political landscape it can often be a bleak view for radicals, progressives and Liberals as our politics in general has been dragged predominately centre-right; a direction Starmer seems content to follow. The trouble is we don’t know much about Starmer’s political history as there’s not much of it to look at. Yes, he was a prominent part of Corbyn’s Labour leadership but then under his leadership Corbyn was chucked out of Labour.

Labour is ‘popular’ not because of what it stands for (because we really don’t know what it stands for) but because the Tories are so desperately unpopular. But a telling point for me is that right-leaning voters seem to like Starmer, Reeves and Streeting and I guess that’s because they say things that Tory voters can warm to? So I think it realistic to say that Labour won’t be a radical or progressive in government. They’ll just try to be more competent and that shouldn’t in any way be difficult based on the madness that has emanated from No.10 over recent years.

Starmer says he won’t reverse Brexit, that he’s not keen on electoral reform and he seems to be rowing back on much of what he said he stood for when he was running to be Labour leader. On that basis radical and progressive policies will need to come from parties that are progressive of instinct i.e. SNP, Lib Dems and Greens.

So, should we end up with a Labour-led government propped up by the SNP, with the Lib Dems as a radical/progressive opposition then I think such an outcome would be interesting. Will it happen? Not if the SNP continues to shoot itself in the foot it won’t, but just imagine Starmer waking up each morning and having to do battle over pretty much everything with the SNP. Surely he’d be forced into all kinds of progressive areas, especially with radical Libs giving him grief too, that he’d rather not pursue. It could just be the major shake-up our broken political system really needs.