Equality

I’m going to be slightly unusual here and admit that, as a young straight white male, I’m probably not your most likely source of insight into equality issues this time around. I can read the manifestos, certainly, but as an explicitly privileged generalist I’m unlikely to be able to deliver the kind of quality analysis that these issues deserve.

For that reason I’m going to point you in the direction of some excellent, non-partisan primary sources. I know that equality issues tend to be the province of the left, but there are a few scrupulously fair resources out there.

For issues of women’s rights and and how the manifestos will affect women in general check out the Fawcett Society. They sent a raft of questions to each of the parties on a wide array of issues and got detailed responses from all of them.

On issues of gay rights it’s pretty hard to find a single source that doesn’t editorialise. That’s somewhat unsurprising; only 4% of gay voters are planning to vote Tory, which is itself perhaps the only information you need on this topic. MyGayVote gives a fairly stark indication of how the voting records of the three main parties stack up.

On black and minority politics check out OBV. They’re doing great work on keeping minority issues in the spotlight, and I’ll be keeping an eye on them long after the election is done.

Issues related to the elderly and elder care haven’t received anywhere near enough attention online or off. Mary Ridell, the Telegraph’s token leftie, argues fairly persuasively that Labour would be the best bet, and my own read corroborates this.

Civil Liberties
An area in which I am much more comfortable.

First off, forget Labour. The party of ID cards, detention without trial, the massive extension of the surveillance state and the Digital Economy Bill couldn’t give less of a shit about civil liberties, and their manifesto reflects that. Labour would extend CCTV coverage to 700 new areas, strengthen the DNA database and ram through ID cards by hook or by crook.

The Tories are better – the party of David Davis and their excellent Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, has a significant wing dedicated to the rollback of liberty-encroaching legislation – but their approach is too punative. It’s moderately good to see that the party commits itself to rolling back the database state – ID cards, the ContactPoint children’s database and the vetting and barring scheme will be scrapped or reduced. The Tories would also curtail the surveillance powers of local councils, giving more power to the information commissioner, and would introduce privacy impact assessments on all new legislation. However, the party does not go far enough on changing the law in respect to the DNA database, and they still insist on repealling the Human Rights Act, which gives the European Convention on Human Rights full force in the UK. They would likely replace it with a UK Bill of Rights, which would be softer on prohibitions of torture and harder on legitimate asylum seekers. The Tories don’t even fully leverage their own dogwhistle policies of overturning the smoking and foxhunting bans.

But the truth is that this is the one area in which the Lib Dems have a clear, unambiguous and historic tradition of strong performance. They would curtail the use of CCTV, restore the right to protest, guarantee the safety of investigative journalists from prosecution, protect whistleblowers, scrap ID cards, role back “Escelon” measures (laws and secret doctorines governing government monitoring of email and internet traffic), repeal the Digital Economy Bill, scrap ContactPoint, reduce pre-charge detention to 14 days and scrap secret evidence. The DNA database would be heavily curtailed. It’s an absurdly complete wish-list for anybody who cares about the erosion of liberty in this country.

It remains unclear why the Tories were so anaemic on this issue, but they hand a clear win to the Yellows on what should have been a major plank of their election offering.