Sharing this mainly because it pointed me towards FullFact’s Government Tracker, which looks handy. According to them, only one pledge has not been kept, on the National Wealth Fund:
“Capitalised with £7.3 billion over the course of the next Parliament, the National Wealth Fund will have a remit to support Labour’s growth and clean energy missions”
And three others are ‘Off track’, while six are ‘Unclear or disputed’.
Those that have been achieved include:
delivering an extra two million NHS operations, scans and appointments, recognising a Palestinian state, introducing a Football Governance Bill, ending the use of offshore trusts to avoid inheritance tax and abolishing non-dom status.
I mean. This is just false, on several levels. Firstly, on the level of what I said: I didn’t ‘use Liberal to describe the left wing of the Labour party’, because I didn’t describe anyone in this way.
Historically, the formation of the Commons predates the concept of liberalism by several centuries! The Liberal party came into being only in the 19th century and was not, at any point in the UK or elsewhere, simply the ‘support for corporation and wealth’. There’s certainly no consensus, on the left or elsewhere, that this is the case. Liberals in the UK were responsible for extending the franchise to working people and introducing the welfare state (very much opposed by many corporations and wealthy landowners). Unsurprisingly, given that they really did redistribute wealth and power to working people, many individual Liberal MPs were endorsed and sponsored by trade unions (until we got organised and founded the Labour party). Even major social democratic achievements like the NHS and the postwar consensus were both proposed and supported by liberals like Keynes and Beveridge!
The right to protest is a part of (social) liberalism and liberal democracy, as broad concepts, and has frequently been defended by liberals in the UK, the EU and elsewhere on the grounds that it’s a part of free speech and an acceptable - even necessary - part of liberal democracy. That being the case, which it is, it’s reasonable to describe an abrogation of the right to protest as illiberal, just in the sense of ‘not liberal’. This is not at all incompatible with (neo)liberals, in practice, failing to uphold it. Political ideologies are just not all that solid and coherent even theoretically, never mind in practice.