‘Being a Catholic Liberal can be difficult’
Peter Stanford speaks to Sarah Teather, the MP who defied the coalition on welfare and gay marriage
By Peter Stanford on Tuesday, 14 May 2013
We have grown collectively cynical of late about politicians and their motives. Perhaps we always were. But among those men and women of principle who enter the political bear-fight, there seem to be two career paths: the independent-minded backbencher, fearless in standing up for what he or she believes to be right, to the horror of party whips and the applause of the public; or then the embedded fighter, the MP who agrees to become a minister, determined to avoid making the shoddy, short-term compromises usually necessary to climb the ladder of preferment and instead to inject a bit of moral backbone into those who hold the levers of state.
The two routes occasionally cross. Labour’s Frank Field, a former columnist in this paper and almost universally admired for his willingness to speak truth to power, lasted just a year in Tony Blair’s Government, having been drafted in 1997 with an express mandate to “think the unthinkable”. More recently Sarah Teather endured a bit longer as a Minister of State at the Education Department, one of the contingent of Liberal Democrats to join the Government payroll as part of the coalition agreement in 2010. But after two years when this hitherto high-profile conviction politician effectively disappeared from view, she was returned to the backbenches and has since been re-born, voting against her party, for instance, as one of the most eloquent opponents of the cap on welfare benefits. So is she back where she feels most comfortable, with room for her conscience to breathe?
“I’m not sure if I accept the idea that I disappeared,” says 38-year-old Teather, who became the youngest MP in the Commons when she won a famous by-election victory in Brent East in 2003. “It is something to do with being a minister and using the tools that you then have. When you join a government, you agree not to air your differences in public. Instead you get to air them at the table where the decisions are being made. So you trade a high profile in the press for the power to be at the meeting when the decisions are made. And then when you leave, you no longer have that access, so you have to make your points in a different way.”
For instance by voting against the Government on welfare caps, or against the majority line in her party on David Cameron’s gay marriage proposals, and, in the case of today, by agreeing to give interviews. We are sitting in a narrow, high-ceilinged room at the back of her constituency office on Willesden High Road in north-west London. It’s a modest place, with damp patches on the wall, but that’s an improvement, she points out, on her last local HQ that had a tendency to flood each time the rain came. There are no airs and graces about this ex-minister.
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/features/2013/05/14/being-a-catholic-liberal-can-be-difficult/
Can somebody from the UK weigh in with more information about her and the political stance of the Liberal Democrat Party. I'm curious as to why it's called a "centre-Left party".
= new reply since forum marked as read
