Author Archives: Ed Randall

A mistaken diagnosis that leads to mistaken and damaging policies: an invitation to Liberal Democrats to reflect on coalition policy before they meet in Liverpool in September.

The coalition government is committed to urgent fiscal retrenchment. Measures agreed between the coalition partners mean that the coalition has adopted £6 billion of ‘early’/Conservative public sector spending cuts, cuts that Liberal Democrats previously opposed.

The coalition’s emergency budget announced an increase in VAT from 17.5% to 20%, to be introduced at the beginning of 2011. The VAT rise was presented as an essential part of a plan to accelerate the elimination of a …

The British electorate has spoken!

On Thursday, and (given the numbers of postal votes cast in the 2010 General Election) for many days before, the British electorate ‘spoke’. But it didn’t speak with one voice.

For decades our electoral system has suppressed dissent and aided those who dismiss fundamental disagreements as ill-considered discontents. First past the post in UK parliamentary elections has been a variant on Henry Ford’s famous maxim – you can have any colour, providing it’s black.

But the British electorate isn’t made up of post box red or royal blue electors. It has been multi-coloured for a long time …

I think Nick is right – we need change”
Gordon Brown to Andrew Marr (18th April 2010)

Gordon Brown keeps agreeing with Nick Clegg but he doesn’t seem to understand where this agreement is leading. It leads directly to the following question, for the man who now admits he has had one damascene experience after another: “How can you or your party be the change we need?”

Gordon Brown has long had trouble reading the runes (and much else besides). He says he has been appalled by dishonest dealing in the City. He admits that he personally should have done better in …

There is one principle that Labour politicians seem willing to test to destruction in the English courts. It is the avoidance of embarrassment principle. The Foreign Secretary has not only tried to apply that principle in court, in full public view – where he has looked increasingly ridiculous in the Binyam Mohamed case – but his legal representative has also tried to pursue the principle in private, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to conceal his master’s shame and the
Government’s hypocrisy.

Even though the Government appeal in the Binyam Mohamed case was dismissed the Foreign Secretary told the House of Commons that …