Category Archives: Books

The Green Book – new directions for Liberals in government

By Mike Tuffrey | Tue 5th March 2013 - 12:04 pm

Yesterday saw the launch of a book project that I’ve been working on with colleagues over the last year. Between us, we persuaded 27 authors to put pen to paper and say what should be in a programme for government, one that’s fit for the world we live in today. Some 70 people from business, NGOs, academia, think-tanks and political parties joined us in Westminster for the launch.

Our choice of the title “Green Book” is a very conscious nod towards the Orange Book of a decade ago and indeed Lloyd George’s Yellow Book – really authored by John Maynard Keynes – 85 years ago. Last week I wrote how times have changed since then.

Each author has a specific point of view but all were united in saying we can’t go on as we are, both as a country and as a party. As editors, we were clear that the LibDems are now a party of national government; we need a programme to put before the voters that’s frank about the challenges Britain faces: the first industrialised nation that has largely exhausted its natural resources and now has to compete for energy, food and raw materials with the burgeoning economies of India, Brazil and China.

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Also posted in News and Party policy and internal matters | Tagged featured, green book and liberal philososophy | 10 Comments

Yellow, orange, green… time for new book, and a different approach

By Mike Tuffrey | Fri 1st March 2013 - 10:51 am

Back in 1928, publication of The Yellow Book – the report of a party inquiry “Britain’s Industrial Future” – provided the basis for Lloyd George’s 1929 general election programme “We can conquer unemployment!”. It put the party firmly in the camp of an interventionist economic strategy, with John Maynard Keynes as its intellectual lodestar. With the Great Depression ranging, the party firmly rejected laisser-faire liberalism.

Come 2004 and the Orange Book -subtitled Reclaiming Liberalism and edited by David Laws and Paul Marshall – challenged what some were calling nanny-state liberalism. It promoted choice and competition and argued that the Liberal Democrats …

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Also posted in News and Party policy and internal matters | Tagged liberal philosophy | 8 Comments

Want to learn about political campaigning? 5 books for Christmas

By Mark Pack | Tue 13th November 2012 - 10:50 am

Looking forward to some festive season reading or wondering what books to get some of your politically-minded friends?

Here are my top five books which will tell the reader about how political campaigning really works. Not the starry-eyed fun fiction of the West Wing but real politics and real campaigning.

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Tagged featured | 3 Comments

Mothers of Liberty: Women who built British Liberalism

By Mark Pack | Tue 23rd October 2012 - 10:50 am

For an organisation that looks to the past and to party politics, it is almost inevitable that the Liberal Democrat History Group’s publications are rather dominated with accounts of men. Even now, well into the 21st century, we only just have the first female Liberal Democrat ministers, whilst female Liberal Democrat Cabinet members or party leaders are still something for the future.

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Tagged Catherine Gladstone, featured, history, Lady Palmerston, Lady Waldegrave, lynne featherstone, Margaret Lloyd George, margaret wintringham, Mary Gladstone, Mary Wollstonecraft, nancy seear and patsy calton | 3 Comments

A flagship borough: 25 years of a Liberal Democrat Sutton Council

By Mark Pack | Fri 5th October 2012 - 9:45 pm

Look round the room at the next Liberal Democrat event you attend and ask yourself how many people in the room will have their names recorded in places that future political historians can find. A few, certainly, especially if they have been elected to public office.

For most, however, their contribution to a political party slips away through the cracks of the historical record, disappearing as the direct personal memories people have of them fade and then end with death.

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Also posted in Local government and London | Tagged featured, history, sutton council and sutton liberal democrats | 3 Comments

Order! Order! A Parliamentary Miscellany

By Mark Pack | Mon 17th September 2012 - 10:22 am

Robert Rogers, the Clerk of the House of Commons, is the latest in a long line of distinguished authors to have produced a miscellany of Parliamentary history, information and quirks. His volume Order! Order! A Parliamentary Miscellany is a worthy addition to that sequence.

Originally published in 2009 it has just been republished with little changed other than a new Foreword. As a result, although it is not quite as up to date as its 2012 publication date might suggest, it is still pretty fresh. Given Rogers’s background, it is also no surprise that this is primarily a miscellany of the House of Commons. The House of Lords is much the neglected partner.

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Also posted in Parliament | Tagged history and robert rogers | Leave a comment

Review: 101 Ways To Win An Election by Mark Pack & Edward Maxfield

By Stephen Tall | Sun 19th August 2012 - 1:25 pm

101 Ways To Win An Election is a welcome and pleasant surprise.

Now that might seem a lukewarm introduction to a review of a book co-written by my co-editor Mark Pack, together with fellow Lib Dem Edward Maxfield. But it’s not intended to be either ironic or half-hearted because what makes this book such an excellent guide to political campaigning is that it succeeds in being a whole lot more than that.

In fact, its 308 pacy pages cheerfully zig-zag between marketing manual, self-help book, and campaigning A-Z — with dollops of political history, pop-psychology, and behavioural economics thrown in for good measure.

The authors have clearly put a lot of thought into creating a book which people will actually want to read — and to re-read — on a subject many but the most obsessed political aficionado might initially dismiss as dull and boring.

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Tagged edward maxfield and Mark Pack | 2 Comments

Book review: William Gladstone – New Studies & Perspectives

By Tony Little | Wed 8th August 2012 - 2:50 pm

Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and William Ewart Gladstone, giants of the nineteenth century, were all born in 1809 yet as Frank M Turner argues in this collection of essays Darwin and Lincoln are much better remembered today. I am sure this is true even for Liberal Democrats. In the final essay, Eugenio Biagini reflects on a 1992 Economist front cover describing Gladstone as ‘A prophet of the Left’. Gladstone’s legacy has been appropriated by Thatcherites who over simplify the Victorian Liberal view of the roles of government and private enterprise. …

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Tagged history and william gladstone | 2 Comments

Reframe: How to solve the world’s trickiest problems?

By Mark Pack | Fri 3rd August 2012 - 10:25 am

How you view Eric Knight’s book by the end will depend very heavily on what you want out of it. At one level it works extremely well: a very readable and lively introduction to many of the issues which dominate the agendas of politicians and diplomats – fighting terrorism, regulating the financial markets, handling immigration, dealing with climate change and more.

Eric Knight, however, sets out to do more than present a primer on major current issues, as the subtitle suggests: “How to solve the world’s trickiest problems”.

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Tagged eric knight and featured | 3 Comments

101 Ways To Win An Election: now available for Kindle

By Mark Pack | Fri 27th July 2012 - 10:25 am

You may have noticed my excitement as the book I wrote with Ed Maxfield finally appeared, started being shipped to buyers and even made it to bookshop shelves.

Quite a few people have asked whether it would be available as an e-book, which was the plan but has taken a little while to sort.

The good news is that first of the e-book versions is now out – for the Kindle. As with the paperback, it’s packed full of tips on how to win an election …

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Tagged ed maxfield | 1 Comment

The Politics of Coalition: How the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government Works

By Mark Pack | Mon 16th July 2012 - 2:25 pm

Robert Hazell and Ben Yong’s work, The Politics of Coalition: How the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government Works, is a very readable volume, written mostly in the style of an introductory politics textbook and based on extensive interviews with the participants, including at very senior levels.

The book is well done, readable, comprehensive and has a few gems lurking in the revelations from all the interviews, such as the limited involvement of Andrew Lansley and Paul Burstow in drafting the health section of the Coalition Agreement.

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Tagged andrew lansley, ben yong, coalition, coalition agreement, featured, paul burstow, robert hazell, tuition fees, ucl constitution unit and vince cable | Leave a comment

Jo Grimond: Towards the sound of gunfire

By Mark Pack | Tue 26th June 2012 - 3:50 pm

A better understanding of Jo Grimond’s life is always a healthy corrective to some of the cartoon caricatures about right-wing lurches and Thatcherite policies that sometimes get thrown around over the views of contemporary Liberal Democrats.

Grimond was, after all, a man who talked of himself as being on the centre-left and who pushed for a progressive realignment of politics that would see a new centre-left party supplant Labour. Off and on feelers went out to those in Labour ranks during his career. And yet, he was …

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Tagged featured, history, jo grimond and michael mcmanus | 8 Comments

Can you tell the heroes from the villains in the sub-prime mortgage disaster?

By Mark Pack | Thu 21st June 2012 - 10:25 am

Michael Lewis’s highly readable account of the collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage market and the worldwide financial crisis it triggered focuses on a small number of characters. People with iconoclastic views determined not to be constrained by the old conventional rules. People who created new financial investments. People who put money into places their investors did not really understand on a good day and did not even know what had been done with their money on a bad day. People who made huge profits …

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Tagged economy, featured, financial irresponsibility and michael lewis | 8 Comments

The New Depression: Richard Duncan’s prognosis of our economic ills and the answer to them

By Mark Pack | Mon 18th June 2012 - 1:54 pm

A slight change from the usual in my day job at MHP Communications has come courtesy of our client Richard Duncan and his new book, The New Depression, which is primarily about the US but with lessons that are very applicable to the UK.

In a nutshell, his case is half-Austrian. Or indeed half-Keynesian. That is because whilst Duncan’s diagnosis of the current economic ills is very much in the Austrian school of economics, with its emphasis on the role of credit, his prescription for fixing the economy is large-scale borrowing to fund infrastructure work, all of which sounds rather Keynesian.

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Also posted in Op-eds | Tagged economy and richard duncan | 17 Comments

Vince Cable: Free Radical – what the memoirs say about the man

By Mark Pack | Mon 7th May 2012 - 10:25 am

A little belatedly, I’ve got round to reading Vince Cable’s memoirs (or rather, listening to the audio book version – what better accompaniment to a delivery round?).

Vince Cable’s memoirs do much to explain both the praise and the criticism he has received. At one point he writes how “I am often asked why I am not party leader…”. Conceit or modesty? You can read that comment either way and it is easy to see why he produces such different views.

Views differ too over quite where …

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Tagged andrew reeves, featured and vince cable | 1 Comment

Gurkha: The true story of a campaign for justice by Peter Carroll

By Mark Pack | Fri 30th March 2012 - 4:05 pm

The Gurkha Justice campaign, seeking to give those who had served in the British army the right to settle in Britain afterwards, is a classic and heartwarming story of how a small number of people can bring justice and joy to many.

For many years Gurkhas and others had raised the injustice of ex-soldiers being told ‘thank you for your bravery, now go and live elsewhere’. It was, however, only when Peter Carroll got involved that an effective campaign really started to take shape and then took off after a chance remark from a passing member of the public tipped him off to Joanna Lumley’s potential backing.

As Peter Carroll puts it in this account of the campaign:

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Tagged featured, joanna lumley and peter carroll | Leave a comment

Paddy Ashdown: A Fortunate Life

By Mark Pack | Thu 15th March 2012 - 4:50 pm

It is a tribute to Paddy Ashdown’s varied and fascinating careers that even hardened politicos reading his autobiography, A Fortunate Life, do not express regret at how relatively briefly his British political career features in it.

Around two-thirds of the book document his times as a Royal Marine, in the Special Boat Service, then as a spy and finally, after time as an MP and leader of the Liberal Democrats, international peacemaker in the former Yugoslavia. Even if his time as leader of the Liberal Democrats had ended quickly in ignominious failure, Ashdown would have multiple impressive legacies to outweigh it. That in fact his time as leader saw remarkable success in rescuing the party from death’s door makes all but the most hardened reader end up feeling their life is just rather tame, straight-forward and under-performing compared to Ashdown’s.

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Plan C: The Social Liberal Forum’s economic prognosis

By Mark Pack | Tue 13th March 2012 - 10:50 am

There has been a very welcome recent revival of policy thinking in the Liberal Democrats, despite the large cuts to the party’s official policy research staff. This has included a new think tank (Liberal Insight) and good work by Richard Kemp and the local government sector in encouraging imaginative plans for making use of the new legal powers going to local government.

Added to this is the Social Liberal Forum’s further foray into economic policy-making, following up on some of their successful events with their first policy pamphlet. Prateek Buch’s “Plan C – social liberal approaches to a fair, …

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Tagged compass, economy, featured, george osborne, prateek buch, richard kemp, social liberal forum and will hutton | 7 Comments

Peace, Reform and Liberation: how does the new party history measure up?

By William Wallace | Thu 12th January 2012 - 10:25 am

Late last year a new history of the Liberal Democrats and its predecessor parties was published. In this post William Wallace reviews it, whilst you can watch Paddy Ashdown, Julian Glover and Shirley Williams talk at the book launch here.

I had not expected to enjoy this book as much as I did, or to learn as much from it. It covers the political history of 332 years in 372 pages, unavoidably gliding past major episodes with passing glances. Eleven chapters by different authors suggested a degree of incoherence. Yet there are some clear underlying themes, and a number of aspects …

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Tagged history | 1 Comment

Flying Free: Nigel Farage’s take on his own life

By Mark Pack | Thu 5th January 2012 - 10:25 am

Events and the political calendar are likely to keep UKIP as one of the most prominent ‘other’ political parties in the UK over the next few years, making this newly revised and expanded autobiography of its most high-profile and flamboyant personality, Nigel Farage, timely not only for the party’s own fans but for anyone else interested in British politics.

It is a well written, lively book, full of the sort of pugnacious language that has helped give Farage his high popularity. It is also rather kinder to some of his opponents that you might expect if you had only come across Farage through his headline grabbing strings of insults aimed at others, though when it comes to the EU and its main functionaries he doesn’t hold back. He even has some kinds words to say for the man who threatened to kill him – and rightly so given the person’s mental health had fallen apart.

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Tagged nigel farage and ukip | 9 Comments

What our readers have been buying this year…

By Mark Pack | Fri 30th December 2011 - 11:45 am

Lib Dem Voice has an affinity deal with Amazon, which means if you purchase goods from Amazon via our link, Lib Dem Voice earns a small commission. We don’t get to know about people’s individual orders, but Amazon does report overall sales and these show that the five best-sellers to our readers in 2011 were:

1. The British General Election of 2010 (reviewed here)
2. 22 Days in May by David Laws (reviewed here)
3. Peace, Reform and Liberation: A history of liberal politics in Britain 1679-2011 (watch the book launch with Paddy Ashdown and Shirley Williams here)
4. Don’t Take No For …

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Also posted in Site news | 1 Comment

Brown at 10: the authoritative account – which lays into Ed Balls

By Mark Pack | Wed 30th November 2011 - 3:54 pm

When it first came out Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge was extremely well received for its authoritative detail and the revised paperback edition maintains that standard well. With Seldon being one of the founders of the modern school of contemporary history, it is no surprise that the book follows the thorough, heavily documented approach contemporary historians strive for – with over 1 million words of interviews recorded for posterity (even if many are, for the next 30 years, withheld from public view) and extensive access to private diaries.

The huge depth of research is accompanied by …

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Tagged anthony seldon, ed balls, ed miliband, featured, gordon brown, guy lodge and harriet harman | 3 Comments

Was there a Clegg coup? Review of The Clegg Coup – Britain’s First Coalition Government Since Lloyd George by Jasper Gerard

By Mark Pack | Wed 23rd November 2011 - 9:54 am

Many book titles reveal little about what their book contains, either providing but a banal name for its contents or a clever, clever name which obscures rather than reveals. However, The Clegg Coup – Britain’s First Coalition Government Since Lloyd George by Jasper Gerard has a title which is revealing in two aspects. First, the way general accuracy in the book is marred by detailed slips – for whilst the general point of the title is true, with the May 2010 coalition being the UK’s first peacetime coalition in Westminster since before 1939, the title does not use the …

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Tagged charles kennedy, chris bowers, chris rennard, Danny Alexander, david laws, duncan brack, featured, jasper gerard, matt chorley, Ming Campbell, nick clegg and paul marshall | 25 Comments

Book review: Peace, Reform and Liberation – “the first port of call for anyone wishing to learn more about Liberal and Liberal Democrat history”

By Iain Sharpe | Wed 16th November 2011 - 10:25 am

There has long been a need for a single volume history of the Liberal and Liberal Democrat parties covering the entire period from its roots in the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century to the present day.

While Liberal history has received plenty of attention from historians, previous studies of the party have been limited to a specific eras or themes. In many ways of course the party has several histories. This includes the origins of the Liberal tradition in the Whigs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the heyday of Liberal government in the middle of the nineteenth century, the party’s decline and near extinction between the 1920s and 1950s, its recovery in the second half of the twentieth century, and now the challenges of governing in coalition with the party’s historic enemies, the Conservatives.

So it is welcome that the Liberal Democrat History Group has sought to fill a gap with Peace, Reform and Liberation.

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Tagged asquith, charles kennedy, david dutton, david lloyd george, duncan brack, eugenio biagini, featured, ian hunter, jaime reynolds, keynes, martin pugh, martyn ryder, philip cowley, robert ingham, tony little and william beveridge | 16 Comments

Dishonourable Insults by Greg Knight

By Mark Pack | Fri 4th November 2011 - 7:46 am

Over the years, Conservative MP Greg Knight has made a mini-cottage industry out of collections of political insults, wit and invective, of which the new Dishonourable Insults is the fifth.

Spot checking the content of this volume against one of his previous works - Parliamentary Sauce - you find that there is a fair amount of reused content, including whole passages which reappear with varying degrees of editing. Generally the 19th and early 20th century figures have had their range of insults edited down, losing as a result one of my favourite Disraeli insults, directed at a backbench MP: “He is not …

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Tagged benjamin disraeli, charles de gaulle, greg knight, Harold Wilson and winston churhcill | Leave a comment

Opinion: Reassessing New Labour

By Ed Maxfield | Mon 31st October 2011 - 3:54 pm

It is worth buying Reassessing New Labour just to read James Purnell’s short preface. New Labour’s would-be philosopher king pretty much disappeared from view after Labour chose the wrong Miliband as leader. Purnell’s piece highlights perfectly the challenge Labour faces in coming to terms with its 2010 election defeat. It is brilliantly lucid in assessing why Labour lost. It is extremely limited in its analysis of how to recover. In particular it completely ignores the 500lb gorilla in the corner – the economy. I’ll come back to this in a moment.

Diamond and Kenny’s book brings together a range of contributions …

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Also posted in Op-eds | Tagged james purnell, labour party, maurice glasman, michael kenny, new labour and patrick diamond | 4 Comments

Don’t Take No For an Answer: Lewis Baston and Ken Ritchie on the AV referendum

By Mark Pack | Wed 26th October 2011 - 10:35 am

The May 2011 electoral reform referendum is not a happy memory for Britain’s electoral reformers, which makes this book from two long-standing electoral reform campaigners surprisingly positive. As the title indicates, their view is that the overwhelming No vote does not signal the death of electoral reform in the UK.

In part the optimism comes from the gory details it gives of the appalling mistakes and mismanagement in the referendum Yes campaign. This was not a superbly organised push for electoral reform that got defeated; the weakness of the campaign gives some hope for a future if, as the authors express the hope, the book helps people learn from the mistakes made.

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Tagged av referendum, ken ritchie, lewis baston and nick clegg | 30 Comments

Jasper Gerard writes… The truth about David Cameron’s relations with Liam Fox

By Jasper Gerard | Fri 21st October 2011 - 9:25 am

Rarely can a ministerial resignation be less mourned than Liam Fox’s. An intriguing aspect of his fall is explained in my book The Clegg Coup. Senior Lib Dems and Tories told me repeatedly how Cameron and Fox loathed each other. Indeed, Cameron would often ring our Nick Harvey rather than his Fox to the extent that Harvey became known as “Cameron’s man at the MoD”.

“Fox sees himself as the prince across the water,” I was told. “He thinks Cameron never faced a proper challenge for the leadership because he was edged out in the first round by David Davis, whom he considers flaky. Liam is not going to blow his shot too early and it’s a good way off, but I do think he wants to challenge Cameron for the leadership.”

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Also posted in Op-eds | Tagged david cameron, liam fox and nick clegg | 2 Comments

Jasper Gerard writes… The Clegg Coup – and the serialisation horror

By Jasper Gerard | Wed 19th October 2011 - 9:25 am

To those who fear the future marching over the horizon, this must feel suspiciously like enemy occupation. Liberal Democrats, with their new and sinister continental ways, have seized power. If conservative opinion believed it had the measure of Labour, it can’t quite get to grips with Britain’s newest rulers. For not only are Liberal Democrats in office for the first time, they have given us an apparently foreign form of government, a coalition.

Traditionalists have to trawl back more than a century for the homely comfort of precise precedent. Such has been the opposition to peacetime partnership, where two united parties …

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Also posted in Op-eds | Tagged featured, nick clegg and nick harvey | 37 Comments

After the Coalition: A Conservative agenda for Britain

By Mark Pack | Tue 11th October 2011 - 10:25 am

Collections of policy essays from new or junior MPs rarely have much of an impact or shelf-life in British politics, but however fallible their predictions for the future they can be illuminating about the current state of the authors’ party and its broad ideological direction.

So it is with After the Coalition which is very different in tone and hope for the future from last year’s Which Way’s Up? by Nick Boles. The contrast is there in the sub-titles for the two books. Boles had “The future for coalition Britain” whilst the five authors behind this volume have gone for …

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Tagged conservative party, dominic raab, elizabeth truss, featured, Kwasi Kwarteng, nick boles and Priti Patel | 9 Comments