‘People didn’t listen to what we Lib Dems were saying...’
In his latest Martin Shipton Meets podcast, our chief reporter speaks with former Liberal Democrat AM Peter Black, currently the Deputy Lord Mayor of Swansea. Black recently said he would not be seeking a return to the Assembly in 2021
PETER Black is a casualty of the slump in Liberal Democrat support in Wales, losing the South Wales West seat he held from the National Assembly’s outset to Ukip in 2016.
He doesn’t think the party will find it easy to bounce back.
Speaking in a Martin Shipton Meets podcast, he agreed that the broken promise to scrap student tuition fees had been “cataclysmic” for the Lib Dems after they joined a Westminster coalition with the Conservatives in 2010.
He said: “The problem was that Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and David Laws were never convinced by the party’s policy on tuition fees. They tried to change it and were turned down by conference. They didn’t make it the red line they should have done.
“It was all very well saying it wasn’t in our top five pledges, which it wasn’t. But all the MPs had signed a pledge, all the Welsh MPs signed the pledge, and voted against [the huge rise in fees] but still suffered because of it.
“And Nick Clegg did that party political broadcast surrounded by pieces of paper which represented the broken promises of other parties.
“The Liberal Democrats were different, and it turned out we weren’t different at all, and as a result of that we suffered badly. We should have been much stronger on the red lines, and I think Nick Clegg would acknowledge now that he should have been much stronger on tuition fees.”
Asked whether he agreed that Liberal Democrats also became associated with austerity politics by urban voters who might previously have seen them as a left-wing alternative to Labour, Black said: “It certainly hit us in Wales and in Labour-facing areas. The irony is, of course, that we actually modified a lot of the austerity measures. If you look at what happened after the Tories won a majority in 2015, the stuff they brought in, in terms of welfare cuts, was stuff that Nick Clegg had been vetoing. But of course no-one was seeing what was going on behind the scenes, with Nick Clegg vetoing welfare cuts and insisting that government expenditure still had to go ahead in certain areas. We were still tarred with the same brush and there was very little we could do about that. The trust issue was the really big one.”
As a consequence, the Tories were victims of their own success in 2015 on having to deliver on a Brexit referendum.
Black said: “They targeted ruthlessly the Liberal Democrat seats. They won lots of them, and David Cameron thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got to bring the Brexit referendum in after all’.
“I know that George Osborne was completely against the referendum and a lot of people were counselling Cameron not to have that referendum. But in a sense it was that referendum that did for our AMs as well, because come 2016 a month before the referendum people were voting for Ukip because they thought they were voting in the referendum.”
Asked why he thought so many people in the region he represented, where he had built up a following over the years, had voted for Ukip, he said: “Swansea wasn’t so bad. It was Neath Port Talbot, Ogmore, Bridgend, those Valleys seats where Ukip and Brexit got quite a lot of support. Because although people were benefiting from European money, they didn’t get it – they thought they were being neglected. Factories were closing, unemployment was high, social deprivation was high, lots of people were feeling very angry and they wanted to express that anger.
“Assembly elections, much like local government elections, were there as a protest vote. The Brexit referendum was there as a protest vote. So a lot of Labour areas, across the Valleys particularly, voted Brexit, they voted for Ukip thinking they were voting for Brexit as a protest against the establishment, whether it was Tory or Labour. They knew they weren’t going to beat their Labour AM or MP, but they thought they were going to make a point about the way they’d been treated in their community over decades, ever since Thatcherism in the 1980s really, in terms of the unemployment rate and the neglect in their community – ignoring the fact that European money which largely went into infrastructure instead of actually generating jobs, which was a big mistake by the Welsh Government at the time, was coming to them and helping their community.”
Unlike other politicians, Black didn’t get personal abuse at the time: “It was worse in a sense,” he said. “I got largely ignored. People weren’t listening to what we were saying. We were trying to make a case for the Liberal Democrats in the Assembly, and what we’d managed to influence over several Budgets in the Assembly, introducing the pupil deprivation grant and a whole range of other things we got through by negotiation. We tried to emphasise that, but people just weren’t listening.”
Asked to assess the performance of Kirsty Williams, the only remaining Lib Dem AM who was appointed Education Secretary by Carwyn Jones following the 2016 election when Labour was reduced to 29 of the 60 seats, Black said: “I think Kirsty has actually turned round education in Wales.
“Leighton Andrews I think did a reasonable job. Huw Lewis did a job which wasn’t quite as good. There was a lot of stuff going on with education and Kirsty’s brought a new focus to it – a lot of stuff which we’ve had in Liberal Democrat manifestos. She’s brought in grants for rural schools, for example, and support for rural schools, stopping them closing. We’ve altered the student grant, again with Liberal Democrat policies.
“And not just in education – in housing we’ve brought in this new scheme to help people get on the housing ladder where they rent for five years and then they can buy the property, and some of the rent goes towards a deposit. I think Kirsty has had a good influence on government – she’s brought Liberal Democrat thoughts and ideas in. So I don’t view her as a Labour patsy, I view her as being a Lib Dem minister within what is effectively a coalition administration now that Dafydd ElisThomas is in there as well. Without her they don’t have a majority, so they have to listen to what she says.”
However, Black isn’t optimistic about the prospect of an electoral dividend for his party as a result of all this.
He said: “I don’t think there will be an electoral dividend. The experience is that whatever you do in government doesn’t have much of an impact in Assembly elections. I think what it does give us is a case to argue, both in terms of the debates and the election leaflets – ‘This is what the Liberal Democrats have done and want to do’. It gives our arguments some credibility.”
He agreed that the current Welsh Liberal Democrat leadership wasn’t getting through to the public in the way it had been hoped – the leader Jane Dodds isn’t even a councillor, let alone an AM.
“Kirsty couldn’t really do the job and be a minister at the same time – not with the job she’s in. It’s true that Jane is not an AM or a councillor, and I think we’ve suffered because of that. Jane Dodds hasn’t had the impact we’d hoped she would have, simply because she hasn’t got that support and position which makes the press think there’s somebody speaking here. And I’ve made the point too in terms of Vince Cable’s suggestion that a non-parliamentarian can be a leader.”