The whole point of having a third party like the Lib Dems is that they are extremely unlikely to come into office to implement their policies. Therefore, the poicies that they set out in the election campaigns are merely to keep the other parties on their toes. The Liberal Democrats, although they will not be elected themselves are a great benchmark for other parties, many marginal seats are won by the Lib Dems because people are not happy with the proposals of the two main parties. This can be seen by them winning many University constituencies. The two main parties use the Lib Dems as a benchmark for their own policies and try to win these marginal seats by being in competition with them. But the Lib Dems have set a very low benchmark, they have cut spending on everything important to the public and have failed to show us how this helps the economy in general. This leads the way for Labour and the conservatives to do exactly the same thing.

Nick Clegg’s proposals have no back bone. There is no one overriding policy. There is no direction. The shopping list which they criticised Labour for creating in order to win over the electorate, they have just gone through and put a line through items on the list rather randomly, then scrawled a few extras on the bottom of it.

Nick Clegg had to return to the scrapping of tuition fees but put forward the modest proposal of ‘scaling back the idea to a different time scale’. This has no clarity and is far from a promise to keep to traditional Lib Dem ideologies.

How can cutting NHS spending whilst increasing school spending be compelled together when ill children cannot attend school and it is more likely that children from lower income families, the students Nick Clegg wants to help, are more likely to be ill? The cuts and spends do not form one cohesive web and therefore if adopted Britain would fall out.

Whilst Nick Clegg is planning on cutting back spending on the NHS, care schemes and student fees, he is also planning on raising the tax free threshold to £10,000. They estimate this policy alone to cost £16.5 billion; this renders the savings of £18 billion redundant. In addition, the Labour treasury stated that the true cost of implementing such a scheme will be more like £22 billion. This policy does not only help those on lowest incomes as Nick Clegg would have us believe, but also high earners. When other policies are being cut back which do just help those on lower incomes, such as the free personal care for the elderly, such cuts cannot be justified.

When threats of swine flu and the MRSA bug are still ongoing, how can such a large cut in spending on our healthcare system be justified?

Even the training of our doctors is currently being compromised. During doctor training doctors only fill out four or five prescription forms and this leads to doctors making mistakes in one in ten prescriptions. In order to resolve this issue alone, Government money needs to be funded to aid prescription training for doctors.^[1]

We have also heard about how the funding for dementia is significantly below that of cancer and other diseases. Surely we should aim to level out the funding to different afflictions via increasing the spending on such diseases to the level of other diseases, not by cutting everything back!

1. ^ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6810112/NHS-faces-potentially-serious-problems-from-wrong-prescriptions-on-the-NHS.html