Tag Archives: hopi sen

Stephen Tall

Your essential weekend reader — my personal pick of the week’s must-reads

By Stephen Tall | Sat 12th January 2013 - 9:23 pm

It’s Saturday evening, so here are twelve thought-provoking articles to stimulate your thinking juices culled from all those I’ve linked to this last week. You can follow me on Delicious here.

What will make banks care about their customers? – Diana Coyle says don’t increase banking regulation, instead open up the oligopolistic banking industry to true competition: ‘more competitive banking systems are more stable – the banks tend to be smaller so the “too big to fail” problem is less acute, and smaller banks …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Also tagged , , , , , , , , and | 1 Comment
The Voice

The political year reviewed by Stephen Tall, Tim Montgomerie and Hopi Sen

By The Voice | Mon 24th December 2012 - 3:53 pm

LibDemVoice co-editor Stephen Tall guested alongside ConservativeHome‘s Tim Montgomerie and Labour blogger Hopi Sen on BBC Radio 4′s The Westminster Hour last night, reviewing the political year with presenter Carolyn Quinn through the rear-view mirror. Issues dissected in the 20-minute discussion included Andrew ‘Gate-gate’ Mitchell, Coalition differentiation, Nick Clegg’s future, welfare reforms and secret courts. You can listen here:

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Also tagged , , and | Leave a comment
Stephen Tall

Your essential weekend reader — 8 must-read articles you may have missed

By Stephen Tall | Sat 27th October 2012 - 8:15 am

It’s Saturday morning, so here are eight thought-provoking articles to stimulate your thinking juices…

Why don’t we trust politicians? – The BBC’s Nick Robinson takes politicians to task, doesn’t let the media off the hook either… while Labour’s Rachel Reeves mouths platitudes.

The BBC regains its honour - Nick Cohen links the Beeb’s problems with Newsnight and Jimmy Savile to the wider question of institutional trust: ‘We ought to be extending anti-managerialism into every private and public hierarchy.’

The Savile inquiries: giving truth a …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Also tagged , , , , , , and | 1 Comment
Stephen Tall

Your Saturday morning reader – 8 must-read articles

By Stephen Tall | Sat 6th October 2012 - 8:15 am

It’s Saturday morning, so here are eight thought-provoking articles to stimulate your thinking juices…

5 Years On: The Election That Never Was - Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s former spinner-in-chief whose must-read blog is essentially a memoir-by-instalments, recalls the week in 2007 that turned the new Prime Minister from hero to zero.

Jimmy Savile: The birth of a paedophile hoax on “Have I Got News For You” - John Fleming recounts the curious tale of how some invented, ‘censored’ scenes achieved such wide currency on the internet, eerily anticipating the past week’s revelations.

A speech that, thankfully, will not be made …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Also tagged , , , , and | Leave a comment
Stephen Tall

‘Could a Lib Dem / Labour agreement happen before 2015?’ asks Hopi Sen

By Stephen Tall | Wed 18th July 2012 - 4:05 pm

I realise the headline may well pre-destine this post for John Rentoul’s ever-expanding #QTWTAIN category. But Hopi Sen, an influential Labour blogger, is always worth listening to, and this week he put forward a scenario in which “a LibDem-Labour realignment could foil the Tories”:

Could this happen?

For the first time, it seems at least plausible. Senior LibDems feel let down by the Conservatives over Lords reform and the AV referendum. They feel they have delivered painful changes to their policy programme for the sake of national unity and this generosity has not been reciprocated. They see the Tory backbenches unafraid

…

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | 18 Comments
Stephen Tall

Labours of Letters: the Alex Hilton & Hopi Sen correspondence

By Stephen Tall | Sat 18th February 2012 - 5:38 pm

At the risk of intruding on private grief, I feel I should draw the attention of Voice readers to an excoriating broadside against Ed Miliband’s leadership published on LabourList last night.

Entitled ‘Losing faith’, it is an open letter from Alex Hilton, twice a Labour parliamentary candidate and founder of the Labour Home website, to ‘Dear Ed’. It weighs in at 1,457 words — here are just a few of them:

I no longer have any faith that the Labour Party will make a better society – or even

…

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Also tagged and | 16 Comments
Mark Pack

Ed Balls has a new take on having your cake and eating it

By Mark Pack | Mon 26th September 2011 - 9:19 pm

There are two problems with a Liberal Democrat like myself blogging about Labour Party conference. First, as I’ve so often seen from the other side of the fence, an outside blogging about another party’s conference frequently misreads what is really happening. And second, no blogger can compete with Hopi Sen and his cat.

So caveats deployed and on to the confusion that Ed Balls’s speech today left me in. For he had two messages: first, that Labour can’t promise to undo the government’s cuts and, second, that many of the cuts are wrong. Either on its own would be a …

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , and | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Three-quarters of Lib Dem manifesto becoming government policy – independent research

By Mark Pack | Mon 2nd May 2011 - 5:53 pm

Sunday’s Politics Show featured the results of research by independent academics into how each party in the Coalition Government is doing at getting its polices enacted.

The conclusion? Three-quarters (75%) of the Liberal Democrat manifesto is being turned into government policy, compared to noticeably less (60%) of the Conservative manifesto, as illustrated in this screenshot:

Politics Show screenshot

(For a sample of those Lib Dem policies being put into action see the excellent site What The Hell Have The Lib Dems Done?)

Conservative blogger Tim Montgomerie and Lib Dem blogger and Federal Policy Committee (FPC) member Linda Jack were both interviewed to discuss these results and other aspects of the coalition’s future:

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Also tagged , , and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

Why budget maths makes me thinks of Escher

By Mark Pack | Fri 2nd July 2010 - 12:50 pm

A small state is smaller than a big state, right?

But now bear with me.

Take a glance at the heated rhetoric coming from Labour ranks about how the coalition government is hell bent on a right wing crusade to slash the size of the state.

Then consider this. The coalition’s spending plans will see public spending in 2015-16 at a fraction under 40% of GDP.

And you know what? That’s higher than it was under Labour in 1997-98 and in all the intervening years through to, and including, 2003-04. (See the graph here from Peter Hoskin.)

So the horrible dreadful right-wing small state still …

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 5 Comments



Recent Comments

  • User AvatarSimon Banks 19th Jun - 10:51am
    Andrew Tennant - you've fallen for the propaganda. Yes, the market works extremely well for some things, but its flaws should be obvious. If you're...
  • User AvatarSimon Banks 19th Jun - 10:38am
    Don't tell your kids they're beautiful. Tell them they're interestingly ugly and enjoy their puzzled faces.
  • User AvatarRobert Wootton 19th Jun - 10:38am
    S. Your comment about centralisation/decentralisation is valid. However the new science of cybernetics staes that any viable system is a combination of centralised and decentralised...
  • User AvatarEdis Bevan 19th Jun - 10:35am
    We need a proper discussion of Baumol's cost paradox. Awareness of this is central to understanding why 'public services' take up a greater proportion of...
  • User AvatarRobert Wootton 19th Jun - 10:15am
    Businesses have to be profitable to survive. The way businesses do this is to minimise labour and wage costs. Unless and until the internal mechanisms...
  • User AvatarMichael Parsons 19th Jun - 10:07am
    The often negative response of the commentary here, such as silly attacks on the desperate efforts of Occupy on St. Paul's Cathedral steps, serve to...
Wed 19th Jun 2013
13:00
Kettner Lunch:Speaker Dr Evan Harris
13:00
Kettner Lunch:Speaker Dr Evan Harris
Thu 20th Jun 2013
Edinburgh City Council, Liberton and Gilmerton by-election
Scottish Parliament, Aberdeen Donside by-election
Horwich TC, Bridge by-election
19:00
Westminster and City of London LD Summer Party
Fri 21st Jun 2013
19:00
Amber Valley Liberal Drinks Fri 21 June 2013
Sat 22nd Jun 2013
10:00
Bradford East Action Day
10:00
Bradford East Action Day
10:00
LGBT+ Lib Dems Summer Conference
19:00
Quiz Evening (22nd June) from 7pm
Sun 23rd Jun 2013
11:45
North West Cambridgeshire & Huntingdon Lib Dems Ouse Cruise
12:00
Meon Valley Lib Dems Annual Summer BBQ
13:00
East Hampshire Summer BBQ Lunch
Wed 26th Jun 2013
Sprowston TC, Sprowston West by-election
16:30
Canvassing in Bradford East
19:00
Manchester Liberal Drinks
Thu 27th Jun 2013
Norton PC, Campsall by-election
Sat 29th Jun 2013
17:00
Summer BBQ
18:30
Bassetlaw & Sherwood Liberal Democrats Summer Barbeque
Sun 30th Jun 2013
00:30
Chiltern Summer Buffet
19:00
Liberal Drinks
Mon 1st Jul 2013
19:00
Poppadoms & Politics
Wed 3rd Jul 2013
16:30
Canvassing in Bradford East
19:30
Pub night
Thu 4th Jul 2013
Vale of White Horse, Abingdon Fitzharris by-election
18:30
"East-West Business Networking Evening"
20:00
Winchester Liberal Drinks
Sat 6th Jul 2013
13:00
Summer garden party with Sarah Ludford MEP
Sun 7th Jul 2013
13:00
Hackney Lib Dems Green house tour and Garden Party "Green Book Debate" with David Howarth, Chris Nicholson and Shas Sheehan
Mon 8th Jul 2013
18:30
Lib Dem Christian Forum Prayer for Parliament & the Nation
19:30
'The Elephant and the Dragon - India, China and our relationship with them'.
Thu 11th Jul 2013
19:30
Annual Dinner with guest speaker Shirley Williams
Sat 13th Jul 2013
10:00
Bradford East Action Day
10:30
Portsmouth Regional Action Day
Sun 14th Jul 2013
15:00
Tonbridge, Chatham and Malling Libdem - Summer BBQ
Tue 16th Jul 2013
19:30
LDCF Gladstone Lecture 2013