Top Lib Dem Sarah Teather to step down in despair at Nick Clegg's policies

Sarah Teather says party is not fighting for justice and describes how immigration policy left her 'desolate'

• Toby Helm, political editor
• The Observer, Saturday 7 September 2013 22.33 BST

Sarah Teather says 'something broke' in her when the Lib Dems responded to public concern about the cost of welfare by backing a government cap on benefits. Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Observer

The prominent Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather – who shot to fame when she became the youngest member of parliament a decade ago – has announced that she is to quit the House of Commons because she no longer feels that Nick Clegg's party fights sufficiently for social justice and liberal values on immigration.

In a blow to Clegg a week before his party gathers for its annual conference in Glasgow, Teather said his tougher approach to immigration – including a plan for some immigrants to pay a £1,000 deposit when applying for visas – left her feeling so "desolate" and "catastrophically depressed" that she was unable even to confront him over the issue. "It was an absolutely black moment. I couldn't even move from my seat when I read it. I was so depressed I couldn't even be angry. I was utterly desolate," she says.

Announcing her decision to turn her back on frontline politics in an interview with the Observer, she adds that "something broke" in her when the Lib Dems responded to public concern about the cost of welfare by backing a government cap on benefits.

Teather believes the £26,000-a-year limit is a political stunt that will not work, and complains that it will force many of her constituents in the ethnically diverse constituency of Brent Central, in north London, to leave their homes and seek work in cheaper areas where fewer jobs would be available.

"It was the moment of realising that my own party was just as afraid of public opinion as the Labour party," she says. "Something did break for me that was never ever repaired."

While she insists that she still has a lot of respect for Clegg, whom she regards as a "decent bloke", she says that too often he seems to lead a party that no longer appears passionate about the values that attracted her to it as a teenager.

"When I joined the party I had this really strong instinct that it was the party of social justice and liberalism. It was the only party that operated in that space." But now, with the pressure of coalition bearing down on him, Teather, 39, says Clegg and his team react too easily to immediate pressure to appease public opinion. "It is about the reactive pursuit of the latest poll irrespective of what is right and wrong.

"What really gets me is that we remove ourselves from any responsibility for forming public opinion … You achieve change not just through policy but by presenting arguments and having debate and leading debate, and using all the platforms you have in television, parliament, the media. All of those things form and respond to public opinion."

The former charity worker, who served as minister for children in the coalition until 2012, shot to prominence when she won the safe Labour seat of Brent East in September 2003, overturning a 13,047 Labour majority.

While insisting her decade in parliament has been "wonderful" in many ways, she says she no longer feels able to operate within the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party while disagreeing with its approach on fundamental issues. She will remain in parliament until the 2015 general election, and continue as a member of the party, but says she has "no idea" what she will do after that.

Her announcement creates an unfortunate backdrop to the Lib Dem meeting in Glasgow, where the party will try to present itself as distinct from the Tories as it prepares to put together a radical manifesto for 2015. The party faces a series of awkward debates on the economy, tuition fees, green policy and taxation, among other things, as it wrestles with how to present a strikingly distinct policy offering that can still be moderated in potential future coalitions with the Tories or Labour.

The Lib Dems' period in government has coincided with sharp falls not only in the opinion polls but also in party membership and income. The latest figures show it now has a membership of just 42,501. This represents a 35% drop since the height of "Cleggmania" in 2010. The fall in membership fees has also contributed to an operating deficit of £410,000 in the latest annual accounts.

The latest Opinium/Observer poll puts the Lib Dems down percentage point on a fortnight ago, at just 7%. This compares with a vote share of 23% at the 2010 general election and scores of more than 30% in some polls in the runup to polling day. Opinium has Labour on 35% (done one percentage point compared to a fortnight ago), the Tories up one at 30% and Ukip down one on 17%.

Teather says she was dismayed to be told by her party to back the recent motion paving the way for military action in Syria because it was an issue of "loyalty". "If it was a minor aspect of administrative policy then fine – talk to me about loyalty. But if they are wanting to launch military action on another country you can't tell me I need to give permission on the basis of loyalty," she says. She voted no.

A Liberal Democrat spokesman said: "Of course we are disappointed by Sarah's decision.

"The Liberal Democrats have a proud record in government, including cutting taxes for working people by £700 and lifting the poorest paid out of tax altogether; helping businesses create a million jobs; investing billions more in schools to help the poorest children and introducing radical plans for shared parental leave.

"Sarah was a part of this when she served as a minister in the coalition, as well as playing a key role in ending Labour's disgraceful policy of locking up children for immigration purposes."

Chemical export licences for Syria – just another UK deal with a dictator

Britain is in no position to lecture on human rights when Vince Cable's authorisation follows a long history of arms sales

• 
• • Nick Dearden
  • theguardian.com, Monday 2 September 2013 15.30 BST

Defence Systems and Equipment International arms fair at the Excel Centre, Docklands, London. Photograph: Rex Features

The latest revelations about the authorisation of chemical exports to Syria proves that British ministers should avoid two things – lecturing the public on personal morality and lecturing the world on human rights. Both will come back to bite them. While Nick Clegg commented on the pages of the Guardian earlier this year that the UK was a "beacon for human rights", his business secretary was authorising companies to sell chemicals capable of being used to make nerve gas to a country in the middle of a civil war.

Clegg almost certainly knew nothing about the potential sales, and indeed the sales themselves might have been quite innocent, but our history should tell us that precaution is the best principle. If the companies had got their act together to ship the goods to Syria, they would probably have received government support through a unit of Cable's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, called UK Export Finance. This unit has sold weapons to some of the worst dictators of the past 40 years – and had a role to play in the most serious chemical weapons abuses since the Vietnam war.

Jubilee Debt Campaign has released new information which confirms that the British government effectively armed both sides during the Iran-Iraq war – one of the Middle East's most bloody conflicts.

Britain had been happily selling weapons to Saddam Hussein, our ally during his war against the new Islamic Republic, in the early 1980s. The UK government also allowed the sale of the goods needed to make a chemical plant which the US later claimed was essential to Saddam's chemical weapons arsenal, with the full knowledge that the plant was likely to be used to produce nerve gas. Saddam used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and against civilians within his own country in 1988, killing tens of thousands.

This is old news, but we now also know that until the fall of the Shah in 1979, Britain also sold Rapier missiles and Chieftain tanks to Iran's autocratic regime – weapons that were undoubtedly also used in the Iran-Iraq war.

Both sets of arms were effectively paid for by the British taxpayer, as both Iraq and Iran defaulted on the loans given by Britain, and they became part of Iraq and Iran's debt. Though Iran still "owes" £28m to Britain, plus an undisclosed amount of interest, this didn't stop Britain guaranteeing £178m of loans to Iran to buy British exports for gas and oil developments in the mid 2000s, thus breaking its own rules.

This new information adds to a litany of such cases – supporting arms sales to the brutal General Suharto of Indonesia, both Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt and military juntas in Ecuador and Argentina, the latter using its British weapons to invade the Falkland Islands.

In opposition, Cable railed against the use of taxpayer money to support such sales, and his party promised to audit and cancel these debts and stop the sales. In power, he behaves the same way as his predecessors. While regularly claiming such deals are a "thing of the past", Cable has signed off £2bn of loans to the dictatorship in Oman to buy British Typhoon fighter aircraft, the sale of a hovercraft to the highly indebted Pakistan navy and an iron ore mine in Sierra Leone which has not even been assessed for its human rights impact.

Cable has ripped up Liberal Democrat policy to keep on supporting the sale of dangerous goods. He continues to insist on the repayment of debts run up by the UK selling weapons to now deposed dictators. Far from being a beacon for human rights, the UK has little legitimacy around the world when it comes to taking sides in wars – a fact that parliament recognised in its welcome vote last Thursday.

Next week, Britain's true role in the world will be on show in Docklands – when the world's "leading" military sales event meets in London. As war and the aftermath of war still rage across the Middle East, one way we as citizens improve our country's damaged reputation is to protest against such an appalling expression of Britain's role in the world. Authorising the export of chemicals to Syria is simply part of a long trend of support for dangerous technology which undermines this country's legitimacy when it comes to speaking about human rights.

Home Office is now a tool for stirring up racial tension

Dave Garret in The Independent 01/08/2013

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen some very visible signs of the Government’s “hostile environment” crusade. There have been vans out on the streets with threatening slogans and, reportedly, non-white people being visibly stopped and searched.

The Home Office is responsible for community cohesion. Yet we are increasingly seeing what appears to be hostility towards non-white immigration, which will do nothing but incite racial tensions and divisions within otherwise rich and diverse communities.

This has to change. We urgently need a more balanced public debate on immigration, free of political agendas. Without it we risk eroding the very foundations of communities across the UK.

The Government has now made the Home Office, who are also responsible for community policing and safety, a highly visible, taxpayer-funded tool for stirring up racial tension and community unrest. The method and location of these stunts make it hard to believe that they are not targeted at non-white communities, but, whatever the truth, they are certainly perceived that way.

Refugee Action wants to see a more balanced debate about immigration, and believes the Home Office has a huge responsibility to avoid adding to its toxicity. At least in the interests of balance, we’d like some vans which say: “The NHS would collapse without foreign-born staff,” or “the Office of Budget Responsibility says that migration has a positive impact on the sustainability of public finances” or “without immigration Britain would be without tea”.

Dave Garratt is chief executive of Refugee Action

The justice and security bill will have a corrosive impact on individual rights.

I'm leaving the Liberal Democrats too

The justice and security bill will have a corrosive impact on individual rights. The party's support for it is a coalition compromise too far

• 
• • Philippe Sands
  • The Guardian, Monday 11 March 2013 20.30 GMT

Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate Jo Shaw announces her resignation during a speech at the party's spring conference. Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images

I have worked closely with the Liberal Democrats since the attacks of 11 September; it has been the only party to adopt a principled and consistent position favouring the rule of law and the protection of individual rights. In difficult times, and in the face of blanket claims invoking risks to national security, the Liberal Democrats have resisted policies embracing torture, rendition and the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists without charge, as well as war under conditions of patent illegality.

After the London attacks of July 2005 the Lib Dems stood firm against the idea that the "rules of the game" had changed, committed to respect of human rights for all. They opposed executive authority, secrecy and the rise of the "security state". In government, on many issues, that position has been maintained. But to my great regret, last week the parliamentary group was whipped to vote in favour of the introduction of secret court hearings in part 2 of the justice and security bill. If adopted, the bill will put British judges in the invidious position of adjudging certain civil claims under conditions in which one party will not be entitled to see the evidence on which the opposing party relies. Last year Lib Dem members voted overwhelmingly against this. They did so again at their conference on Sunday. Their approach was informed, reasonable, principled and correct. Why was it ignored?

This part of the bill is a messy and unhappy compromise. It is said to have been demanded by the US (which itself has stopped more or less any case that raises 'national security' issues from reaching court), on the basis that it won't share as much sensitive intelligence information if the UK doesn't rein in its courts. Important decisions on intelligence taken at the instigation of others are inherently unreliable. We remember Iraq, which broke a bond of trust between government and citizen.

There is no floodgate of cases, nothing in the coalition agreement, nor any widely supported call for such a draconian change. There is every chance that, if the bill is adopted, this and future governments will spend years defending the legislation in UK courts and Strasbourg. There will be claims that it violates rights of fair trial under the Human Rights Act and the European convention (no doubt giving rise to ever-more strident calls from Theresa May and Chris Grayling that both should be scrapped). Other countries with a less robust legal tradition favouring the rule of law and an independent judiciary will take their lead from the UK, as they did with torture and rendition.

I accept that there may be times when the country faces a threat of such gravity and imminence that the exceptional measure of closed material proceedings might be needed. This is not such a time, and the bill is not such a measure. Under conditions prevailing today, this part of the bill is not pragmatic or proportionate. It is wrong in principle, and will not deliver justice. It will be used to shield governmental wrongdoing from public and judicial scrutiny under conditions that are fair and just. The bill threatens greater corrosion of the rights of the individual in the UK, in the name of "national security".

It smells too of political compromise in the name of coalition politics. Being a party of government does not mean such compromise is inevitable. This is particularly important now, as Conservative forces ratchet up their attacks on rights for all and against the European convention. At this moment the need for the Liberal Democrats to stand firm on issues of principle – for individual rights and open justice, against the security state – is greater than ever.

Secrecy begets secrecy. I have listened to all the arguments, and concluded this is a compromise too far, neither necessary nor fair at this time. The point has been made eloquently in recent days by Dinah Rose QC and Jo Shaw. Their principled arguments have long had my full support and so I have joined them in resigning from the Liberal Democrats. I have done so with regret, given the courageous positions adopted on these issues by Charles Kennedy, Menzies Campbell and Nick Clegg in the past. I still hope that the views of the membership might yet prevail, before the bill passes into law. If not, the Liberal Democrats will have lost integrity on one issue that has truly distinguished them from other parties, and on which they can rightly claim to have made a real difference.

Tuition fees: Nick Clegg should come clean about what really happened

The Lib Dem leader campaigned on a promise to abolish tuition fees but confidential papers show he had no such intention

• 
• • Rob Wilson
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 September 2012 15.15 BST

Nick Clegg speaking at Oxford Brookes University before the 2010 general election. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

Nick Clegg has gone through some of the biggest highs and lows of any politician in recent years. During the 2010 general election campaign he was briefly as popular as wartime leader Winston Churchill and commentators talked about his "Obama-esque" poll ratings. For a short time Clegg and his inner circle thought seriously about the prospect of becoming prime minister in a Lib-Lab pact, having (they hoped) received a higher percentage of the general election vote than Labour.

It was a serious possibility, given that Labour was pushed into third place in a number of polls and the Liberal Democrats hoped to poll more than 100 seats. Of course it had evaporated by the end of the campaign and the Lib Dem leader was left with fewer seats, wounded pride and depression. He was devastated by the final result.

Next, the high of negotiating his party into government and himself as deputy prime minister, was rewarded with the low of a dramatic drop-off in the Lib Dem poll rating. Part of the reason was what was considered "the party's treachery" over tuition fees.

The Lib Dems had gone into the election promising to abolish tuition fees over two parliaments, while the two big parties had kicked the ball into the long grass through the Brown review, while privately recognising an increase in fees was highly likely. The party targeted university campuses with their campaign to abolish fees and its MPs and Clegg signed the NUS pledge not to vote for a rise in parliament. Clegg even made a direct appeal to students through a video, again making a promise to students about his party's intentions.

What students and potential voters did not know is that months before the general election David Laws, Chris Huhne, Danny Alexander and Clegg had met in secret as part of their preparations and decided that the abolition of tuition fees was not a priority for the party. This senior group had for some time been taking seriously the likelihood of a hung parliament and were meticulous in their preparations. In making their plans, the Lib Dems knew with certainty they would not be in government alone.

Thanks to confidential Liberal Democrat papers passed to me as part of my research for my book Five Days to Power, the evolution on the party's negotiating position is clear. By March 2010 the party had come to the clear position that the Lib Dems would not waste political capital pushing for the abolition of tuition fees. It was clear and unambiguous. This was a totemic party policy and it was to be ruthlessly sacrificed without any attempt to salvage it. The document said: "On tuition fees we should seek agreement on part-time students and leave the rest. We will have clear yellow water with the other [parties] on raising the tuition fee cap, so let us not cause ourselves more headaches."

With these words the full extent of the Lib Dem political calculation being made becomes clear. The party would gain its benefit from its public position vis-a-vis the other parties, but privately fighting for their key general election pledge was always a non-starter. Even more than two years later, I still find the level of cynicism involved quite shocking. The party's MPs and candidates were not told of the strategy.

So Clegg's apology this week is welcome. He is right, he should not have made the promises he did on tuition fees – they were unaffordable and he knew that. He is right his party had become irresponsible in opposition, making promises it knew it could never honour. The Lib Dems were well known for saying one thing is one area and the opposite in another and that culture had seeped into the party's DNA, hence its "treachery" on fees. But the Lib Dem leadership should not try to rewrite history. What the leadership did at the 2010 general election was pretty cynical and calculated. He knew he would not fight to abolish fees but said he would. This also requires an apology to the public and probably to the Liberal Democrat party as a whole, who were not aware of the leadership's position.

It is welcome that Clegg now realises his party needs to grow up and to turn its back on being a party of perpetual opposition and frivolous chancers. But he needs to do it with the full and open recognition of past mistakes, not a selective narrative that is historically inaccurate.

This Coalition government won’t see out 2013

The best government for decades will be brought down by the inherent pitfalls of partnership.

Friends in need: it all started so well, but the Coalition is showing the strain Photo: AP

By Peter Oborne

8:02PM GMT 07 Mar 2012

221 Comments

Just after the general election, over breakfast at St Pancras Station, I had an electrifying political conversation with Mark Oaten, the former Liberal Democrat MP and home affairs spokesman. It clarified my thinking and its details have stayed with me ever since.

Mr Oaten was the author of a rather important book, which analysed both the past British history of coalition government as well as the far more extensive contemporary experience in continental Europe and Ireland.

We were having breakfast because I wanted to ask him what lessons could be learnt from past experience that would help me understand the Conservative/Lib Dem administration, which had been formed just a few days before. First of all, said Mr Oaten, coalitions are always disastrous for the smaller party. It gets swallowed up, blamed for the failures and only rarely credited with the successes, and then not nearly enough.

In some cases, as with the hapless Progressive Democrats, who never recovered from their alliance with Fianna Fáil and were dissolved in the wake of the 2007 Irish general election, the smaller party vanishes from history. But always it suffers heavy losses.

So I asked Mr Oaten whether there was any way to avoid this disaster. He shook his head sorrowfully. The best that could be hoped, he replied, was to mitigate the scale of the setback. “It is impossible,” he said, in a remark that Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, might do well to ponder, “to walk out of a ministerial car and into an election campaign. There must be a clear and decisive rupture between the coalition parties well before a general election, otherwise the smaller party will always be obliterated.”

And when should such a breach occur? Once again, Mr Oaten produced a precise and thought-provoking answer. “A danger moment comes approximately two years after the general election. That is when the coalition agreement tends to run out. At this point the parties often try to create a fresh coalition agreement. But such attempts normally fail.”

Just under two years have passed since our conversation, and nothing since suggests that Mr Oaten’s analysis was wrong. There has indeed been an attempt to create a new agreement to renew the Government two years in, and it has – as predicted – failed. Lib Dem support has slumped, just as Mr Oaten said it would: the party will be lucky to win more than a dozen seats next time.

Meanwhile, the original dynamism and sense of purpose has gone. It is important to remember that the Lib Dems and the Tories remain united on certain issues, above all the need to tackle the deficit. But on numerous others – Europe, tax, health, trade policy, family policy, constitutional reform – the two parties are polarised.

This week’s leaked letter from Vince Cable to David Cameron and Nick Clegg merely drives home a point that has been obvious for some time: the Coalition has two economic policies. One is being run by George Osborne at the Treasury, while the other is being articulated by Mr Cable. The letter does the Business Secretary credit. It is a mature meditation on Britain’s economic and industrial predicament. The assertion that the Coalition does not possess a vision for future growth is nothing less than God’s own truth. While the leak may be regrettable, it is thoroughly reassuring that letters of this calibre are passing between senior members of the Government.

Allies of the Chancellor are trying to diminish Mr Cable by pointing out that he has been responsible for business since the Coalition was formed, and that he is therefore highlighting his own failure. This is disingenuous. No trade policy is even remotely possible without the assent of the Treasury. Consider Mr Cable’s most concrete and thoughtful proposal: the break-up of RBS. It was Mr Osborne’s decision to leave the doomed conglomerate to its own devices, a stagnant weight on the British economic system, marooned in the hands of the investment banker Stephen Hester for the past two years. The fact is that Mr Cable has a reasonably worked-out and coherent grasp of political economy, whether one agrees with it or not, and Mr Osborne does not. A large number of Tories want Mr Cable out. They are very stupid. Few things would damage Tory re-election chances more gravely than the Business Secretary on the back benches in partnership with the increasingly impressive Labour leader, Ed Miliband.

Far more lethal to the Coalition, however, is House of Lords reform. With the Government due to unveil the shape of its Bill by the end of this month, it may well turn into the final battlefield upon which the Coalition will fail. Nick Clegg’s motives are understandable. The Deputy Prime Minister, who has suffered a series of pulverising reverses and humiliations, is a fairly intelligent man. He probably senses the scale of the impending electoral catastrophe and is desperate to extract something – anything! – from the rubble. An elected House of Lords, chosen through proportional representation, will guarantee that the Lib Dems hold the balance of power in the Upper House for the foreseeable future, and secure Mr Clegg some sort of political legacy.

But he must surely have been told that his proposals are doomed. They may well bite the dust in the Commons, where the ablest young Tories, led by the outstanding Jesse Norman, have already destroyed, with frightening ease, their intellectual basis. But they have no chance whatever in the House of Lords, where my inquiries have discovered that appointed peers will refuse point blank to countenance their own extinction.

Some weeks ago, Lord Steel, a former Liberal leader, suggested a solution to this problem: peers should receive lump sums as a way of easing the prospect of retirement. The logic behind this sordid and grossly improper proposal is faultless. Many of the peers who now occupy the Lords benches paid good money to get in: they would doubtless be swayed by a generous tip on the way out. But it is surely wholly unacceptable, even by today’s debased standards of public conduct, that legislators should have a financial interest in the outcome of such an important vote.

The failure of Mr Clegg’s House of Lords reforms will have major consequences. Furious Lib Dems are already plotting their revenge in the shape of pulling the plug on planned constituency boundary changes, seen by Conservative Party strategists as essential to a Tory victory at the next general election.

I write all this with sadness. Plenty of mistakes have been made since 2010, but this has nevertheless been the best government for a generation, led by men and women for the most part of decency and goodwill. Important steps have been taken towards addressing the financial deficit, while the reforms to welfare and education are essential to the health of Britain as a nation and will soon be irreversible.
It is only thanks to the skill and admirable personal forbearance of Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron that the project has lasted as long as it has. But the odds against its long-term survival are lengthening.
Expect the Coalition to break apart by 2013 at the latest, though a minority Conservative administration may linger on for a while longer. And expect that five-year fixed parliament, like Lords reform, to turn out to be another of Nick Clegg’s charming constitutional delusions.