From my time as leader, and indeed from reading the memoirs of previous leaders, I know that no leader of the Liberal Democrats worth his salt would ever dare to predict how every Liberal Democrat was going to vote at any given time. But we hope that the critical mass will be such that it will send a helpful signal to those on the Treasury Bench and give me a sentence or two for my own memoirs, if I ever get round to them.
I do not want to get into detail at this stage in the debate: my objection is more a philosophical and political observation. It is right that a party that can look back to a lineage including Beveridge and Lloyd George should make this reflection—that there is a large measure of political device about the Bill, which emanates in particular from the personage of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, aided and abetted by the Prime Minister. I say that because a tactical judgment has been made by the Conservative—not coalition—high command that this can be a very useful dividing stretch of water to place between themselves and, in particular, the Labour party with a view to the next election.
We are not against the politics of choice, argumentation and the clash of ideas—what is the point of a House of Commons and a parliamentary democracy without that? But the insidious aspect of the Bill is that, in seeking to open up a philosophical divide of that type, it becomes not an issue of political leadership, but of political pandering to some of the fears, insecurities and downright prejudices that can be stoked up in society—the “us and them” mentality and the sense of resentment and envy. When people start playing fast and loose with those factors—and we have seen early examples against the backdrop of this legislation in the last week to 10 days —they are following a very risky strategy indeed.
I was pleased that the Deputy Prime Minister—the leader of my party—spoke out robustly against the initial posters and some of the leaflets that the Conservatives were producing. However, where the temptation of Her Majesty’s Britannic and historic Conservative and Unionist party is concerned about opportunism within the welfare state historically and playing that card to their advantage and to the disadvantage of others, I would take reassurances from them on that this week as assuredly as I would take reassurances on Wednesday night from the Prime Minister about the direction of their European policy. That is the fact of the matter. But if that is the game that we are playing—and I fear it is—the Liberal Democrats should ensure a clear distance between ourselves and the Conservatives, given our political lineage.
My second point is, as my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives said, that the presence of my hon. Friend the Minister of State—and other colleagues, both in the coalition as Ministers and outside it—has added strength to the philosophical and practical arguments that we seek to bring to social policy. Before the last election, I shared a party platform at one of our conferences with the leader of my party. We were speaking about aspects of social policy, and the point I made to him and to the audience I repeat tonight. We can be tough-minded—indeed much more tough-minded than many an outside commentator ever expected the Liberal Democrats would or could be when the coalition was entered into two and a half years ago—and that has been proven. What we have to remind people of—with a view to the next election—is that our party and our cause is not just
about the head, but must also be about the heart. Many people will view this Bill as hard-hearted, and many will remember that when they come to cast their votes. In part, what we are trying to do here is remind that section of our electorate, our membership, our activists, our sympathisers and our supporters whom we want to come back over the second half of this Parliament, that while the head remains rigorous in government, the heart has not been lost in the wider environ that is UK Liberal Democracy.
My final point is one that I believe my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid), who has had such excellent and characteristically detailed input to our internal discussions, raised with the Prime Minister only last Wednesday at Prime Minister’s questions. In setting this arbitrary and post-2015 set of legislative strictures on what will happen to benefits uprating, what account had been taken of the difficult art of gazing into the crystal ball where future levels of inflation are concerned, not least where trends in food and energy prices are involved? The answer, frankly, in any fair-minded way, came there none from the Prime Minister to my hon. Friend.
7 pm
Thinking back to the awful events that the Prime Minister was describing in this House a few hours ago before this debate, if the Ministry of Defence ever committed itself to a course of action without some sense of a contingency there would great criticism from across the political spectrum. As drafted—which is why the amendment is so important—the Bill will commit the Government, and beyond what can be the lifetime of this Government and this Parliament, to a course of action for which there is no contingency. That is not a social, political or economic blank cheque that those of us who put our name to this amendment, and will vote for it, wish to extend.