Section:GDN 1J PaGe:4 Edition Date:190724 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 23/7/2019 19:05 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian Wednesday 24 July 2019
4 Opinion
T
he Liberal Democrats are back, or
so we’re told, with Jo Swinson’s
leadership victory being pitched as
the rebirth of the party. The unique
conditions of Brexit have given the
Lib Dems not only a reason to exist
but the opportunity to detoxify their
brand after their fatal coalition with the
Conservatives, and to cast themselves as a reforming,
progressive party in troubled times.
And yet remarkably little has changed since the days
when Nick Clegg stood laughing in the Downing Street
rose garden next to David Cameron as he signed Britain
up to years of sweeping public spending cuts. When
asked throughout this summer’s leadership campaign,
Swinson (and her opponent, Ed Davey) consistently
defended her party’s role in austerity measures. In an
interview with Channel 4 News, Swinson said she had
no regrets about the coalition, stating it was the right
move “ to get our country back on track ”. This is despite
the fact it has been shown that austerity shrunk the
British economy by £100bn, and has even been linked
to 130,000 preventable deaths. Swinson acknowledged
“there were policies we let through [in coalition] that
we shouldn’t have done ”, naming the bedroom tax , but
remained unrepentant on a whole host of other s.
Instead, Swinson repeatedly claims credit for the
Lib Dems being a moderating infl uence on the Tories.
They may well have helped to rein in the Conservatives
on some things (the party is said to have forced George
Osborne to temporarily shelve child tax credit cuts)
but this fundamentally misses the point: the Lib Dems
Frances Ryan
writes the
Guardian’s
Hardworking
Britain column
Ceri Thomas
is a former editor
of Panorama
and is editor
of Tortoiseweren’t coerced into the partnership, they voluntarily
chose it, and as such were a reason every Tory cut that
was passed was possible.
This isn’t about holding grudges. Political parties
naturally evolve , and progress in policy positions should
be credited. It was four years ago this week that the
Labour party adopted its abysmal abstention strategy on
key “welfare reform ”, but the party has since wrestled
internally to have the strong anti-austerity message it
holds today, winning back support in the process.
The same cannot be said for the Lib Dems. This is a
party that as recently as last year spoke of sacrifi cing
some of the poorest people in society to benefi t
sanctions in exchange for a 5p tax on plastic bags whil e in
coalition. Nor are their MPs against forming a pact with
the Tories again, with Swinson simply ruling out joining
forces with Boris Johnson or any Brexiteer.
Swinson, for her part, could hardly be called a fully
progressive fi gure. As employment minister, she
reversed workers’ rights by introducing charges of up
to £1,200 for the privilege of attending an employment
tribunal ( later ruled unlawful by the supreme court) and
she even considered cutting the minimum wage , all at a
time when workers faced an unprecedented squeeze.
There is a sense in some circles that disabled people
and working-class families should “get over it”; that
those who can’t summon optimism for the revived Lib
Dems are too tribal, irrational, or stuck in the past. But
this dismisses the scale of suff ering austerity has caused ,
and re casts it as a historical slight. Go to your closed local
Sure Start centre or try to get your elderly mother a social
care package and this all seems ever-present news.
Similarly, it’s often inferred that compared with
Brexit, cuts to services are insignifi cant. The danger of
no-deal Brexit is real and this will hit the poorest hardest.
But a political discourse suggesting that nothing but
Brexit matters is wrong. Some may fi nd it easier to switch
back to the Lib Dems, but large numbers of disabled
and low-income families will fi nd it hard to trust them
ever again. If you’re queueing in your wheelchair at a
food bank because the coalition took your benefi ts, it’s
unlikely you’ll be tempted to the yellow fold, even by the
promise of a second EU referendum.
Besides, the two issues are linked. While credit should
be given to the party leading the charge against Brexit,
there is irony in the Lib Dem position. After all, savage
cuts to services and living standards helped create the
conditions for the leave vote in the fi rst place. Indeed, it
feels a bit rich to see a party that helped heap austerity
on to struggling families now leading concern for the
country over Brexit. For many disabled and poor people,
years of Lib Dem-enabled cuts mean hardship is already
here. Austerity has harmed millions of people in Britain,
and continues to wreck lives. It is not too much to ask
that the politicians who administered it learn lessons
before their rehabilitation begins. As it stands, the
rebirthed Lib Dems are still deeply stained.M
any months before the
Panorama investigation
into Operation Midland was
broadcast in 2015, I sat in a cafe
in central London with a senior
offi cer who had just left the
Metropolitan police. He was
an unoffi cial channel, trying
to convey the Met’s new thinking about investigations
into historic sexual abuse. I asked him about his
general approach when he came across allegations like
the ones being made by the man we knew then as Nick,
and now as Carl Beech. The offi cer told me he tended to
assume there was no smoke without fi re.
A celestial alarm bell should ring every time a police
offi cer says that. But none rang, neither in Scotland
Yard nor in enough newsrooms around the country.
Operation Midland continued for more than a year.
With hindsight, Midland can look like a moment of
institutional madness. How was it possible that a set of
allegations as fantastical as Beech’s could be believed?
That i n rooms in London, Ted Heath and other
powerful men had taken their clothes off and tortured,
raped and murdered boys , every trace of their crimes
covered up? Now that the last, slender threads of that
story have unravelled, the police need to understand
how they came to abandon evidence-based policing.
Under immense pressure after the truth about
Jimmy Savile was revealed, the police came to think
that the old ways of investigating didn’t work. In many
respects they were right. Genuine victims had been
deterred from coming forward , and crimes had gone
unpunished. But the right diagnosis was followed by
a spectacularly wrong prescription. Determined to
do nothing to undermine their witness, Operation
Midland closed its eyes to facts that might turn out to
be inconvenient.
There were places to start an inquiry that might have
seemed obvious: the alleged murder of a schoolfriend
of Beech’s named Scott , which Beech claimed had
taken place in plain sight on a public road ; or talking
to Beech’s wife of many years. The Panorama team
was astonished to fi nd we were ahead of the police in
contacting both Scott and Dawn Beech. T he police were
operating from a diff erent playbook, one that relied on
publicity rather than diligence to encourage witnesses
to come forward. It should have be come obvious it
wasn’t working. No credible witnesses did so.
I f you think the police have a steady compass, they
don’t. They’re twitchy, obsessively concerned with
public opinion, easily moved by political pressure. In
overcompensating for their failings over Savile they
drove a steamroller over the rights of innocent men.
If you worry about one consequence of Operation
Midland, it should be this: it put the public in danger.
Carl Beech, a paedophile , remained at large for years
longer than necessary because the police failed to
investigate him fully.Frances
Ryan
Ceri
Thomas
A party reborn?
Many of us will
never trust the
Lib Dems again
In believing
Carl Beech, the
Met put the
public at risk
David Cameron (r) and Nick Clegg on the day they formed the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition in 2010 PHOTOGRAPH: GETTYРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS