Lord Willis on cuts, human misery and lessons from Egypt on change

The former Harrogate and Knaresborough Liberal Democrat MP, who stepped down last year after holding his seat for more than a decade, has just taken a break from his new day job in the House of Lords to visit Sharm el-Sheikh with his wife, Heather.

The pair regularly visit the Red Sea resort, but this year, Lord Willis admits, was a little different. Soon after the trip was booked, four people were maimed and a fifth killed in Sharm el-Sheikh after a spate of shark attacks. Then there was a revolution.

When President Hosni Mubarak was finally overthrown after 30 years after millions took to the streets in protest at his regime, the former leader fled Cairo and holed himself up in a neighbouring hotel.

“First it was the sharks,” says Lord Willis, “then we were looking at the website every day and the Foreign Office were recommending against travel. Then Mubarak fell, and where did he go but to the very next hotel to us.

“I thought, ‘this trip is fated’. We were among the first wave of tourists going back and it was great. It meant you could chat to people and find out their perceptions and hopes.

“What strikes me is they were all against the Mubarak regime and wanted greater freedom, but had not defined what they wanted freedom for. It made me reflect about our political system where we are all against things rather than for things.

“We know what we are against, but trying to do things in a positive way it is so much more difficult to sell.”

Reflecting, is something Lord Willis has been doing a lot of in the first year of the coalition Government.

This is his first major interview since he took his seat in the Lords last July, due to a self-imposed silence over what was going on in the Commons benches where he spent 13 years.

A left-of-centre politician who grew up in a back-to-back house in Burnley, he says he did not want to become known as an outspoken critic of the new regime while it was still finding its feet.

He has instead spent the past 12 months chairing several charities, and rejecting the overtures of more than a dozen big businesses offering “significant” sums to sit part-time on their boards.

It is a practise David Cameron claimed could be the next expenses scandal and one, according to Lord Willis, “that stinks”.

Now ahead of the May elections, the 69-year-old is baring his teeth. He is, he maintains, still a supporter of the coalition and has been impressed by both David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

But he strongly criticises the Government’s health and education reforms as well as claiming social welfare cuts and Cameron’s Big Society could prove an abject failure, widening the gulf between rich and poor in Yorkshire.

“It has been hard having to bite my tongue,” he says, “but I was determined I was not going to be a lightning conductor for dissent.When I stood down as an MP I said I would do nothing with social networking for a year, my Facebook and Twitter sites were put on hold.

“Particularly during the formulation of coalition policies and the agreement, I didn’t want to be a voice of dissent or just simply a voice for acclamation I wanted to spend some time retreating into the back ground before I launched forth again. I know if I was a member of the Government I would have had to take some difficult decisions as well. It is too easy to say they have just got this wrong.

“I found it very hard having been left of centre all my life and seen the Conservatives very much as the party of opponents to suddenly find you are in a party of coalition.

“I fully supported the coalition because I didn’t think there was any alternative, but to try and pretend I support every policy and every part of the agreement is just not so – that would just be hypocritical.

“I worry deeply about the cuts in social welfare that the most vulnerable will be hit. I think the cuts are too fast and I don’t think there is enough emphasis on growth.

“Statistics are easy to trip off the tongue, it is easy to say we are going to cut 25 per cent but that means an awful lot of human misery.”

Lord Willis, a former headteacher and the Liberal Democrats’ schools spokesman between 1999 and 2005, admits his party colleagues have taken “the most enormous battering” over tuition fees and feels rather than simply increasing costs, universities should instead be changed dramatically.

He also describes himself as “not a lover” of the Education Secretary Michael Gove’s push for free schools.

“I’m very much in favour of Gove’s overall philosophy for greater localism in the education system”, he says. “The worrying thing is the Secretary of State is imposing structures often against the will of local people and that is something that I just don’t support.”

A similar thing, he feels, is happening in the NHS with Andrew Lansley’s controversial reforms that include giving £80bn in NHS spending to GPs, and dismantling Primary Care Trusts (PCTs). “What Lansley is doing to the NHS is a huge gamble,” says Lord Willis. “Again I don’t think anybody would disagree with the need for greater local accountability and decision making, but what is good in Harrogate is not necessarily good for Bradford.

“Within our patch we have just got the York and North Yorkshire PCT working effectively, it has built up a good rapport with GPs and hospitals and I see no clamour for it to be got rid of.

“Now it’s all being dismantled, I just for the life of me cannot see what the advantage of that is when something is working well.

“Why do you, simply for ideology reasons, pull it apart?”

The Government, he claims, is also out of step on the Big Society, which has fast become a cornerstone of the Coalition.

“I genuinely believe Cameron thinks this is a concept which will restore community and society into our world. The concept is terrific, if it is not a substitute for high quality social services. There is a real danger of it being seen as that.

“It simply can’t be done in many places without some resources. If these resources aren’t forthcoming, it will fail.”

It has been a tumultuous few years in Lord Willis’ political career. He was among the politicians to become engulfed in the expenses scandal after allowing his daughter to use a flat on which he claimed thousands of pounds in allowances, and he even received death threats.

Despite the revelations, he remains hugely popular in Harrogate and says it was this support which helped get him through the bad times.

Certainly the pub in which we meet on a Friday lunchtime appears to be filled with friends and well-wishers and he admits his close bond with the town meant watching his seat fall to the Tories in last year’s election was all the more bitter.

But as he says he learnt in Egypt, “No regime ever lasts. They all collapse at one point or another.”

For the likes of Lord Willis, there is enough good in the Coalition to stop the Arab Spring spreading to Westminster, just yet.

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