Views
We must be brutally honest about changes required - for the Inverness Courier
THE party conference season — now drawing to its close — has brought back to mind the choice we all face, most likely eight months from now on Thursday 6th May next year.
At the Liberal Democrats' gathering in Bournemouth a couple of weeks ago, the focus was firmly on the choices we have to make before the election, recognising the reality of the recession's impact on overall public spending in the coming years.
These are not easy discussions for any political party to have. A century on from Lloyd George's People's Budget, there is a lot the Liberal Democrats are hungry to do.
But our seriousness about our priorities for the next five years will be judged by our success in making them meaningful.
Public confidence in politics has rarely been lower — but scepticism is not necessarily an unhealthy thing. People are looking around for something different to long lists of vague and dateless promises.
The onus, for us and for others, is to be brutally honest about the changes that need to be made, not to imagine that a scattering of fiscal fairy dust can make the problems disappear.
I am determined to make sure that we can make our tax system fairer for the least well off, and the hardest hit by recession.
We must take people — among them pensioners, carers and young people taking their first steps into work — who earn less than £10,000 out of the income tax system for good.
That reform will mean £700 more each year for every low and middle earner, and ensure that four million people on low incomes pay no tax at all.
We can only do it, and bring the books back into balance, if we find clear savings and openly restrain some of our own long-term ambitions.
By abandoning like-for-like trident replacement, scrapping ID cards and addressing the unsustainable and unfunded pensions currently reserved for MPs and senior civil servants, we have found more savings than some.
But there is no shortage of difficult work still to be done.
Gordon Brown seems to want to do the opposite and overlook the huge and growing hole now left in the public finances.
His speech in Brighton looked like a desperate final throw of the dice from a lame duck Prime Minister whose promises now point easily and emptily into the twilight zone after the next election.
It is essential that we do things differently in Britain. The mistakes of the past need to be put right. We also need hope that things can be better — but that hope will only be credible if it is backed by the tough economic choices that need to be made.
BROADBAND DEBATE
When it comes to finding priorities and spending wisely where we can, there is still a strong case for finding sound capital investments which will employ people today and pay serious dividends as the economy recovers.
Roads and railways, not to mention airports and harbours, have an undeniable importance in the Highlands. But where the railway brought economic revolution in the past, today's potential revolution is in the speed and reliability of broadband connections, allowing instantaneous exchange of information and work worldwide.
Last week I was pleased to attend a meeting organised by Inverness Chamber of Commerce with the communications regulator Ofcom, to follow up the concerns raised by Chamber members earlier this summer and present their ambitions for the future.
There are real and unacceptable problems with the broadband service many local people receive — in the centre of Inverness as well as in rural areas.
Big technological change is coming with the next generation of broadband. The gradual replacement of copper wire by fibre optic cables will multiply connection speeds almost out of recognition.
The concern for the Highlands is the Government's habit of referring to us as "the final third" in this process — the portion of the country which BT say will not be upgraded by commercial investment alone.
Our opportunity is that Government support in this area could make a truly transformational difference. We need to make the case for "the final third" to be first.
It is to Ofcom's credit that it came to the Highlands and listened. We will judge it by what happens next, and locally we have a lot more to do if we are to force the Highlands to the front of the queue for next generation broadband.
Posted on: 06/10/2009
