Author Archives: Sara Bedford

Sara joined the LibDems as a student in the 1980s, becoming National Chair of YLD (the predecessor to LDYS and Liberal Youth) between 1990-92. After serving as a member of the Federal Executive and Federal Conference Committee between 1991-95, in 1996 Sara settled down to motherhood and serving as a councillor for Abbots Langley on Three Rivers District Council, which has been majority Lib Dem controlled since 1999. She is also an active member of the core campaigns team for the target seat of Watford. Sara is a well-known councillor and campaigner, not only in Hertfordshire, but also across the country, due to her involvement with by-election campaigns and many party groups. She is a member of the Hearts and Minds group of the party’s Technology Board and continues to blog at Always win when you're singing.

Senior Labour councillor moves to the Liberal Democrats

By Sara Bedford | Published 23rd March 2011 - 9:01 am

Cllr Ron Spellen and his wife Nena with their Liberal Democrat membership cards

Long-time Labour member and councillor Ron Spellen, currently Chairman of Three Rivers District Council, has left the Labour Party and joined the Liberal Democrats. Ron will defend his seat at May’s local elections as a Liberal Democrat.

The former Labour group leader and representative for Northwick ward, South Oxhey for many years, said “Today’s Labour Party is not the party I joined fifty years ago. It is now the Liberal Democrats who represent what I came into local politics to achieve – a determined effort to protect local people, promote their interests and consult with them about local issues. Three Rivers Liberal Democrats have always put the needs and wishes of residents priority over party politics.

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Lib Dem council leaders attack Pickles over speed and scale of cuts

By Sara Bedford | Published 10th February 2011 - 12:00 pm

Over ninety senior Liberal Democrat councillors have written to The Times (£) today, attacking the front-loading of local government cuts imposed by central government. The letter is as interesting for what it doesn’t say as for what it does. Despite the spin placed on the letter by the BBC this morning, the letter does not deny either the need for cuts, nor the deficit which has required them. Rather the letter argues that the cuts are too big and proceeding too quickly, and that councils could protect more frontline services and save more money in the long term if spending reductions were carried out in a more controlled manner. The senior councillors are stating publicly what many Lib Dems in local government  have been muttering for a while: that councils recognise that they must play their part in reducing the national deficit and controlling spending, the speed and depth of the cuts to government grants have left local authorities with little room to manoeuvre.

The attacks have centred on the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, EricPickles, who despite his local government background is widely seen as not having put up a fight for his own departmental spending and having been too keen to offer cuts. The letter is scathing about  the seeming inability of Pickles to work with local councils to promote efficiencies and minimise the impact of the cuts on vulnerable people. The Secretary of State has kept a public silence over the letter, leaving Lib Dem Communities Minister Andrew Stunell to call on the party not to fall out over “pointless debate”.  Stunell said, “Whilst I fully understand the real challenges councils face I think it will be much better to direct all our energy to solving these problems rather than falling out between ourselves”. The full text of the letter is reproduced below.

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A personal view: ending the stigma and waste of mental illness

By Sara Bedford | Published 2nd February 2011 - 7:07 pm

Less than two months after he was elected as leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg made a widely-reported speech at the Guardian Public Services Summit in St. Albans, on the subject of mental health. Nick pointed out that “One in four Britons suffers from a mental illness at some point in their lives. One in six is suffering at any given time. Mental health issues directly affect most of Britain’s families today.”

It was laudable and maybe surprising for Nick to use a keynote speech so early in his leadership to highlight such an unfashionable subject. For there is no doubt that mental health issues are seen by some as not really an illness, but some spiritual or character weakness on behalf of the sufferer. And yet most of us have either suffered with mental illness, or have a close family member who has done so.

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Labour bullies journalists to follow party spin

By Sara Bedford | Published 18th January 2011 - 2:30 pm

Last month, Ed Miliband banned his MPs from using the word “coalition” to describe the government, hoping that the phrase “Conservative-led government” would diminish the role of the Liberal Democrats within the coalition and help to tease away Lib Dem voters.

Now it seems Labour would like to see journalists whipped into line. According to Joe Murphy at the Evening Standard, Miliband’s newly-appointed Director of Strategy and Communications Tom Baldwin instructed the BBC, ITV and Sky that they should stop using the word “coalition” and use the phrase “Tory-led government” instead.

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Former MP jailed for expenses fraud

By Sara Bedford | Published 7th January 2011 - 2:41 pm

Disgraced former MP David Chaytor was today jailed for 18 months, after admitting to three charges of false accounting on his expenses, totalling over £20,000. He had faced a maximum sentence of seven years imprisonment, but his guilty plea was taken into account.

The former Labour MP for Bury North had made claims for renting two properties which were owned by him and his mother, and for IT consultancy for which he was never charged. According to the Daily Telegraph, Chaytor had spread more than £91,100 of expenses claims across five different properties in five years, ‘flipping’ the designation of his second home six times.

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Rachel Smith RIP

By Sara Bedford | Published 3rd January 2011 - 9:04 am

Rachel Smith first came into my life last year,  through the medium of Twitter, where she tweeted as @rachelolgeirsso. Witty and intelligent, Rachel readily engaged others in conversations about politics, life and popular culture. Although we were both active Lib Dems, we’d be as likely to exchange comments about The Apprentice or Strictly Come Dancing as about the coalition or political policies.

Rachel had been an active tweeter through the general election and the formation of the coalition, strong about the Lib Dems place in government and scathing as to what she saw as Labour’s opportunism and hypocrisy, especially where it related to her own constituency of Sheffield Hallam and her MP, the Deputy Prime Minister. So it was no surprise when in July she started blogging. The reason for this soon became clear: Rachel was looking for a distraction whilst she was in hospital, undergoing chemotherapy for leukaemia.

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Posted in News, Obituaries | Tagged | 10 Comments

The Liberal Democrats must not become the battered wives of British politics

By Sara Bedford | Published 12th October 2010 - 8:56 am

So the leaks from the Browne Report were right. The cap on university tuition fees will be removed. A real rate of interest will be applied. The cost of studying for a degree will reach the level of a small mortgage. Many young people will have a lifetime of debt hanging over them as they study, continuing through the years when they would hope to be setting up home and starting families of their own.

What will the Liberal Democrat MPs do now? Before the general election, Vince, Nick and the rest of the Lib Dem MPs committed to abolishing tuition fees and voting against any increase proposed. Now we will see just how strong their mettle is. I have been willing to back the coalition in all the difficult dealings that they have had. I do so as an elected councillor in a local authority with a Lib Dem majority administration, knowing that the actions of the government may not make things easy for us locally. I am not 100% happy about the coalition, but I truly believed and still do that there was no sensible alternative that would have been better for the country or indeed my party in the medium term.

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Oakeshott: New tax only way to end bank bonus culture

By Sara Bedford | Published 6th October 2010 - 10:18 am

A Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman has called for a new tax on bonuses  to be placed on banks. Lord Oakeshott’s call came after the Royal Bank of Scotland’s chairman claimed that regulation was the only way to restrain the annual bonus bonanza in the financial services industry.  Sir Philip Hampton admitted that the bank was “paying a lot of people who aren’t worth it” and concluded that, whilst RBS  had made changes to the structure of bonus deals to avoid rewards for failure, “My own view is it can probably only be decisively solved through regulation”.

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The Ryder Cup – celebrating a Liberal invention

By Sara Bedford | Published 5th October 2010 - 10:56 am

Whilst the nation celebrated Europe’s triumph and the champagne flowed at Celtic Manor, few people will have realised that the Ryder Cup was introduced by a Liberal politician.

Sam Ryder was an entrepreneur and golfing enthusiast, who built his fortune by selling garden seeds in small ‘penny packets’ to ordinary households. A keen amateur golfer, with a single figure handicap, Ryder proposed a tournament between British and American golfers, with a trophy manufactured by the jewellers Mappin and Webb at a cost of 250 guineas. The first official match for …

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Lib Dem wins council seat whilst on his honeymoon!

By Sara Bedford | Published 20th August 2010 - 12:45 am

An interesting mix of results in this week’s by-elections. In the first result of the evening, the Liberal Democrats comfortably held North ward of Seaford  Town Council, which is in Lewes constituency.

LD Nick Norman: 407
Con: 319
Lab: 137
Ind: 74
BNP: 20
The turnout was 23.7%.

The new councillor is currently away on his honeymoon, with new wife Naomi.

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Smaller Commons ‘would hit Lib Dems’

By Sara Bedford | Published 12th August 2010 - 6:45 pm

The Lib Dems would have been proportionally the biggest losers if proposed changes to equalise constituency size had been implemented at the last election, according to research carried out by independent organisation Democratic Audit for BBC Newsnight.

The report estimates that the party would have lost 12% of its seats – or 7 out of 57. Labour would have lost 25 of 258 (10%), and the Conservatives just 13 of 307 (4%). The research did not make any assessment of the effect of a change in the voting system to AV, but instead assumed the use of FPTP.

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Cable: It’s more fun being in opposition

By Sara Bedford | Published 10th August 2010 - 8:24 am

The Business Secretary Vince Cable is the subject of a profile in today’s Guardian. In a somewhat affectionate piece, Decca Aitkenhead reports:

There has been much speculation that frugality is the only feature of this government Cable will find to his taste. Perceived as the Lib Dem furthest to the left – a former Labour party councillor and parliamentary candidate, the man Gordon Brown phoned in the frantic post-election days – Cable is widely tipped as the minister most likely to resign from the coalition. He made no secret of his preference for forming a government with Labour – but was forced by the arithmetic of the election result to abandon that dream, “and follow my head, not my heart”.

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No official Hague invite to Lib Dem conference

By Sara Bedford | Published 7th August 2010 - 7:37 am

According to today’s Daily Mail, the Foreign Secretary William Hague is being lined up to speak at the Liberal Democrats’ annual conference in Liverpool next month. The paper describes Hague’s participation as ‘a move designed to cement relations between the coalition partners’.

The Foreign Secretary, widely seen as one of the best orators in the Commons, is expected to lead a Conservative charm offensive at the gathering in Liverpool in the hope of winning over disaffected LibDem activists. Tory sources suggest Mr Hague will give a ‘witty’ address, rather than focusing heavily on policy.

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Should prayers be a part of council meetings?

By Sara Bedford | Published 6th August 2010 - 8:59 am

 The issue of prayers being said before council meetings appears to be moving towards the courts, after Bideford Town Council sought legal advice.

Earlier this year, the National Secular Society (NSS) applied to the High Court for a judicial review of the council’s decision to continue holding prayers as the first item of every council meeting. The NSS believes that religion should be separates from government sated that holding prayers before council meetings was an ‘archaic practice’ which was ‘not appropriate in modern-day Britain’. It claims prayers breach Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which …

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Parliament to scrutinise government’s planning reforms

By Sara Bedford | Published 5th August 2010 - 7:22 pm

The Commons Communities and Local Government Committee has announced that it will be holding  two separate inquiries into aspects of the government’s local planning regime. One inquiry will examine the decision to abolish regional spatial strategies (RSS) and the other will review the coalition’s localism agenda. The abolition of the regional spatial strategies was one of the main measures featured in the coalition government’s Localism Bill, announced in the Queen’s Speech.

The inquiry into the abolition of regional spatial strategies will focus primarily on the implications for house building, in particular the implications of the abolition of regional house building …

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