So 3 million of the lowest income families in the UK not paying income tax is benefiting mainly middle and upper earners? Yes it benefited them as well but saying it didn't benefit the low earners and isn't still benefiting low earners is disingenuous. It also made raising the income tax threshold a serious policy issue and we have seen continued rises when previously there was no expectation of an increase.
Yes, it helped low income families - not the lowest income families because many of them don't earn enough to benefit - but
most of the money went to middle and upper income groups and it was these who benefited the most in percentage terms. This effect is even more pronounced with the further rises introduced more recently and with those rises where they chose not to balance the effect by lowering the higher tax threshold. And, yes, it made this a popular tax policy. But making a bad tax policy popular and, worse, selling a giveaway that mostly gives money to the upper half of the household income distribution as being for the benefit of the poor is not a good outcome. People are misguided enough about the reality of income and taxation in this country as it is.
The rest is just the British misunderstanding of a coalition government the lib dems had three choices, put Gordon Browns failed administration back into number ten, put David Camerons conservatives who had only just missed out on a majority into number 10 with there backing or put David Cameron into number 10 leading a minority tory government and give us two years of chaos followed by another general election at a time when the country needed stability.
I don't think it was possible for the Lib Dems to form a coalition with Labour. Their choices were for a coalition, form a looser agreement, or force the Tories to simply make do with a minority government. They chose coalition and then made an utter hashjob of it.
I don't buy the stability argument. What the country needed was good governance, instead it got five years of Tory economic incompetence enabled by the Lib Dems who went into the election with vastly more sensible economic policies.
Yes they had to compromise but that is what happens when your very much the minority party in a coalition government was the deal perfect no was it better than the current mess definitely. Had we had another Con Lib coalition there would have been no referendum for starters!
They chose to be the minority party, as coalitions the world over have shown, it's perfectly possible for the minority party to have powerful influence. Instead Clegg chose to enable an almost entirely Tory government with a few token Lib Dem policies, a promise of Lord's reform he bungled, and a referendum on a voting system
no-one wanted. Worse, he threw away his party's most potent bargaining tool with the fixed term parliament act. If you want a textbook example of how to bungle a coalition and make your party suffer as a result, the Lib Dem's delivered it.
As for a pure Tory government being worse - well, I agree, but in 2010 pure Tory wasn't an option but Clegg made sure we got something very close to it.
