Plaid Cymru’s Ceredigion Parliamentary Candidate, Penri James does not like the Welsh Liberal Democrats. In fact he lost his Council seat to us in May 2008, a massive blow to his chances of regaining the constituency for his party at the next General Election.
This may well explain the increasingly bizarre ramblings on his blog about the Welsh Liberal Democrats and our policies. The latest is an obvious attempt to cover-up his own embarrassment at Plaid Cymru’s u-turn on student tuition fees in which he claims that the ‘closest we have got to a comprehensive Liberal Democrat policy statement on tuition fees is One Man Band Liberal Democrat Vince Cable’s opinion on Question Time that the Lib Dems will reduce the number of students in University and constrain the academic curriculum.’
There are of course quite comprehensive policy documents by both the Welsh Liberal Democrats and the Federal Party on higher education and tuition fees, the most recent and important being the one debated and passed at the Harrogate Conference in March and which can be read here. The motion itself can be found here.
Quite clearly the Liberal Democrats have a lot of policy on higher education and this involves scrapping tuition fees for first Higher Education degree qualifications, fully funding the off-the-job training costs of apprenticeships, improving access to Higher Education for under-represented groups, and reforming the bursary scheme to make it available more fairly across universities. For the most part this is an English policy but the funding for it makes it possible for us to carry out similar measures in Wales too, which we would do as I will outline a bit later.
Having been proved wrong on this Mr. James then launched into a largely incoherent critique of the policy mixed in with a semi-apologetic defence of his own party’s betrayal of students as part of the Welsh Assembly Government. Reading between the lines it is possible to picture him wiping the sweat off his forehead as he typed, as he worried about all those student voters in Ceredigion offering two fingers to Plaid Cymru at the General Election:
I need not remind you that its Plaid Cymru policy to oppose tuition fees in Wales, unfortunately it cannot be implemented in coalition with a larger party with an alternative policy. It remains Plaid Cymru policy and Plaid Cymru will continue to try and implement its policies at the earliest possible opportunity. Would implementation have been possible in an alternative coalition considering the lack of backbone showed by Liberal Democrats in 2007. I suspect not.
The only spineless creature involved here is Plaid Cymru but nevertheless it is worth reminding Mr. James that it was the Welsh Liberal Democrats in Government who introduced the Assembly Learning Grant for students in the first place, that it was our steadfastness in opposition, along with Plaid and the Tories that forced the Labour Party to reject top-up fees for Welsh students in the first place and that our record of standing up to Labour in government is a damned sight better than theirs.
As for Plaid Cymru policy being opposed to tuition fees then why did they capitulate on this policy in the first place? If they had made this a make-or-break issue then Labour would have backed down, but instead they decided that their own places in ministerial limousines were more important than taking that risk. He says that Plaid will try to implement its policy at the earliest possible opportunity but why would anybody trust them to do so? They have let students and their parents down once, they will do so again.
Mr. James then goes on to question how the Welsh Liberal Democrats will fund the scrapping of tuition fees. Well, if we are to be Wales-specific about this then the money for Assembly Learning Grants were already in the budget. It is Plaid and their Labour chums who have reallocated that money, using a significant sum designated for student support to fund the colleges instead when a proper reprioritisation of funds over a period of time could have gone some way towards meeting the funding gap with England.
The Liberal Democrat policy on education passed at our Conference in Harrogate has a net price tag of £4.6 billion all of which has been costed and will be paid for by specific and already identified savings. The Barnett consequential to Wales of that sum is £230 million which we would use to get rid of tuition fees here and to target school funding at the most deprived pupils. Because tuition fees have been abolished then the £61 million allocated to paying the tuition fee grant will no longer be required and we would use that to meet the University funding gap between England and Wales.
Mr. James concludes his post by saying that the ‘General Election campaign over the next year will provide the opportunity for closer scrutiny of Liberal Democrat policies. “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”‘
Well yes. We welcome that scrutiny but will Plaid welcome the equally intense scrutiny of their policy and their actions in Government? Judging by Mr. James’ blog and that of Adam Price MP, I think not. In this case it is Plaid Cymru who are trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes, not us.
Kirsty Williams has said that she will work with dissident Plaid Cymru members such as Adam Price to campaign to keep the Assembly Tuition Fee Grant, I fully support that. The interests of students and of higher education should be above party political concerns. That though will not stop us holding the government to account for what they have done and selling our own distinctive policies.
The Welsh Liberal Democrat alternative by the way, Penri, is free education because the future of our country depends on that investment.
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It just goes to show you can’t be too careful.