We made the right choice

IAN SWALES is a little irritated, a touch exasperated, although he is too polite to show it. He doesn’t get up and stomp angrily around the former station platform in Redcar; his voice doesn’t rise furiously above its mild-mannered tone with a gentle Leeds inflexion.

It is only on re-reading his comments, and looking at his short staccato sentences, that one realises how riled he is when told, for the umpteenth time, that the Liberal Democrats betrayed their voters when they backed a rise in tuition fees.

“The media doesn’t seem to understand what a coalition is,” he says, in polite fury. “We are the minor party. We are unable to implement our policies. How can the media use words like ‘broken promises’? Even over the rock-and-ahard- place decision over tuition fees, you can’t say that. How on earth can anyone say ‘you are not doing what you said you would?’ We didn’t win the election. We don’t have the power. We have only ten per cent of MPs. We are not masters of our own destiny.”

It is a couple of days since the local elections and the referendum on voting reform. Although nationally his party got a good kicking, locally the Lib Dems just about maintained their equilibrium. Along the Tees Valley, they didn’t haemorrhage councillors, although they did lose a lot of votes.

It marks the end of a remarkable year. “It has been surreal,” he says. “From being a no hope Lib Dem candidate to sitting on the Government benches has been an incredible journey.”

He sensed two weeks before polling day that, implausibly, he was in with a chance of overturning Labour’s 12,000 majority as the closure of the Corus steelworks fuelled local discontent.

“In Eston, two houses in a row took a poster and when the third asked for one before I’d even offered it, I knew I had momentum,” he says.

The Lib Dems failed in Durham City and Newcastle North, two prime marginal targets, so to unseat Vera Baird with a 21.8 per cent swing – the largest recorded in a General Election between the major parties since the war – was astonishing. And before it could sink in, he was catapulted into intimate discussions on forming the next government.

“It’s the first time in my life that I thought I should be writing things down,” he says. “It was genuinely historic – momentous. We had four choices and I still think we got it right.”

These ranged from doing nothing, keeping a disintegrating Labour in power, to forming a loose alliance with the Conservatives. Instead, they opted for full-blown coalition – a decision which caused a chill wind to blow last Thursday.

“We discussed during the coalition negotiations how it would be in the first two years,” he says. “We talked about how difficult these elections would be given what we were going to do.

“The strategy was that we would get through the difficult period of sorting out the country’s finances. We knew we might need five years so people could take a balanced view of what we had achieved. Let’s hope that strategy works.”

Mr Swales, a chemical engineer by trade, moved to Redcar in 1978 to work for ICI. He joined the SDP in 1981 and two failings of Tony Blair’s government drove him to become politically active in the Noughties.

The first was university tuition fees, introduced and topped-up by Labour, and now driven up to £9,000-a-year by the coalition – even though Lib Dem candidates, like Mr Swales, signed a student pledge last year to scrap them.

Mr Swales, a backbencher, voted against the rise and has sympathy for his ministerial colleagues who were locked into coalition collective responsibility.

“The burden of funding education has moved much more towards the students,” he says. “Although they don’t have to pay fees up-front and repayments will be lower, we are giving young people who are making their way in life a longterm commitment, and I remain uncomfortable with that policy.

“As Liberal Democrats, we fix our major policies at conference and I’m sure we will turn back the tide on tuition fees.”

The other of Mr Blair’s failings was invading Iraq – “an illegal war”, in Mr Swales’ opinion – and yet one of the first decisions for the new Government MP for Redcar regarded another Middle East military adventure.

“I did a lot of soul searching over Libya, on what I rationalised as a humanitarian measure based on a UN resolution,” he says. “I’m now very concerned mission creep is taking place – we are now talking of regime change, we now have military advisors on the ground, both of which I think may be beyond what the security council and Parliament authorised.

“It is a great dilemma for the UK: to what extent do we act as the world’s policemen in places such as Syria, Bahrain, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe.

As we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, when we start, we are very poor in planning an exit route. I would not support an increase in our role in Libya until someone describes the endgame.”

IN Redcar over the past year, new green industries have opened and steel-making has made a welcome return. But Nick Clegg, who campaigned at the Coatham Memorial Hall 72 hours before polling day, probably could not make such a return.

“Nick is a powerfully principled and engaged man and I believe there will be a lot of sneaking admiration for someone who can be hit this hard for so long and still keep working for his Liberal Democrat principles,” says Mr Swales.

“We remain a distinctive party and we have to remind people of that. We have to be proud enough and bold enough to agree things in coalition for the good of the country and to be clearer with people what we would be doing on our own if they elected a Lib Dem government.

“The media will describe this as cracks, but we are two parties, we think differently about most issues, but we have to come up with compromises to drive the country forward out of the financial mess.”

As the Redcar experience shows, a year is a long time in politics; the Lib Dems are hoping the four years to the next election will be long enough to rehabilitate their reputation.