Tag Archives: richard grayson

Lib Dem members launch group opposed to the coalition

By Nick Thornsby | Published 9th February 2012 - 1:51 pm

The Guadian reports:

The first Liberal Democrat group openly opposed to the coalition is to be launched at the party’s spring conference in Gateshead next month with a warning that the coalition has been a political disaster for the party, as well as a denial of its radical roots.

Launching a website on Wednesday, the group Liberal Left said it hoped to become a rallying point for members opposed to the coalition and those who see the party as a centre-left organisation seeking common cause with Labour, Greens and others on the centre left.

One

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Posted in News | Also tagged Liberal Left, linda jack | 22 Comments

10 Lib Dems call for emergency recovery programme

By The Voice | Published 1st November 2011 - 12:19 pm

From today’s Guardian:

We write to express broad support for the Compass Plan B proposals reported in the Observer (30 October). We are Liberal Democrat members who have campaigned hard for decades in national and local elections. We have also engaged in our party’s policymaking. For both reasons, we take seriously the policies on which we fought the last general election, in particular the belief that the Conservatives’ economic proposals would have dire consequences.

In May 2010, our party signed up, through the coalition agreement, to a series of policies against which it had recently campaigned. But out of responsibility to the …

Posted in News | Also tagged economy, jo ingold, linda jack, margaret phelps, nick rijke, ron beadle, ruth bright, simon hebditch, stephen haseler, stephen knight | 53 Comments

LibLink: Richard Grayson – NHS reforms: Listen to your party, Nick, or the voters will punish you

By Nick Thornsby | Published 17th March 2011 - 10:25 am

Writing on Comment Is Free on Sunday, Professor Richard Grayson warns Liberal Democrats in government against ignoring the calls of party members to re-think elements of the planned NHS changes.

Here’s a sample of what he had to say:

If the Liberal Democrat leadership is wise (and they have said that they want to listen to the party), it will now act to the advantage of both the party and the NHS. Unless the leadership actually agrees with the reforms, why continue to support them now that they have such an opportunity to amend them significantly? The party leadership must tell the

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Posted in LibLink | 26 Comments

Eight former Liberal Democrat candidates take part in Labour’s policy-making process

By Mark Pack | Published 12th February 2011 - 11:25 am

On Friday former Liberal Democrat policy director and Parliamentary candidate Richard Grayson announced more details of his response to Ed Miliband’s invitation to encourage Lib Dems to take part in Labour’s policy review. The details came in the form of an article due to be published in Liberator:

I saw that invitation as part of an effort to move Labour away from the tribalism which has been such a feature of its past. I have long been committed to pluralism and have a history of working with people from other parties. I have done that for some time through Compass, and

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Posted in News | Also tagged ed miliband | 47 Comments

The political thought of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats since 1945: book review

By Mark Pack | Published 26th January 2011 - 10:25 am

Kevin Hickson’s volume, The political thought of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats since 1945, may be a short volume from an academic publisher with an academic book price tag to boot (look out for cheaper second-hand copies) but its contributors include many political practitioners. With Vince Cable, Steve Webb, David Howarth , Richard Grayson and Duncan Brack amongst them, this book has a very strong representation of people at the coalface of policy making rather than simply those who know of it only in theory.

As Hickson points out in the book’s introduction, the policies of the Liberal Democrats – even more so than other aspects of the history of the party and its predecessors since 1945 – have had very little coverage in books, an omission which this volume sets out to remedy and which political fortunes in the year after the book’s publication has made all the more useful a task to tackle.

Posted in Books, Op-eds, Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged david howarth, duncan brack, kevin hickson, richard acland, social mobility, steve webb, vince cable | 1 Comment

The Liberal Democrat challenges for 2011: defining and explaining economic fairness

By Mark Pack | Published 26th December 2010 - 10:25 am

This is the final piece in a series of posts on the main Liberal Democrat challenges for 2011. You can find all the posts in the series here.

Having started this series with the economy and then moving on to more internal issue in latter posts, it seems fitting to return to economic issues for the final post in this series.

Getting the substance on economic fairness right is and should continue to be a top priority for the party. In addition, getting the messaging right will help differentiate not only the Liberal Democrat contribution to the coalition from that of …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged alex wilcock, jonathan calder, lib dem challenges 2011, nick clegg, paddy ashdown, social mobility | 6 Comments

More on Richard Grayson, Liberal Democrats and ideology

By Mark Pack | Published 14th July 2010 - 3:20 pm

A footnote to my piece earlier this week about Richard Grayson’s pamphlet. In it I commented:

What I think Richard under-plays is the way the party’s attitude towards the state has changed not in response to different internal ideological views gaining ascendancy but rather in response to changing external circumstances. Given the huge expansion in public spending in the middle years of the Labour government, and the big expansion of central control in the early, middle and late years of Labour government, it is hardly a surprise that many who previously instinctively reached for more public spending and new regulations

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged david boyle, jonathan calder | 18 Comments

The ideological background to coalition

By Mark Pack | Published 12th July 2010 - 3:20 pm

Richard Grayson (former head of policy for the party and one of the leading lights behind the Social Liberal Forum) has written a thoughtful pamphlet for Compass about the different strains of thought within the Liberal Democrats and what they mean for coalition government.

The subtlety of some of Richard’s views mean you have to read the whole piece to do them justice, but a flavour of his interpretation of the so-called social liberal versus economic liberal difference is given by these extracts:

One other point needs to be made about the supposed social-economic liberal divide is that for the vast bulk

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Posted in News | Also tagged iain sharpe, polly toynbee | 50 Comments

LibLink: Richard Grayson – Lib Dems must dare to be different over prisoners’ voting rights

By NewsHound | Published 10th June 2010 - 10:10 pm

Over at The Guardian, Richard Grayson, a Lib Dem parliamentary candidate and former director of policy for the party, argues that the Council of Europe ruling against the UK ban on prisoners voting offers the Lib Dems a chance to seize the initiative. Here’s an excerpt:

While Liberal Democrats have consistently made it clear that they understand the need to punish crimes (despite the way the party has been characterised as “soft on crime” by both Labour and the Conservatives), the party is generally most interested in stopping crime in the first place. One way to do that is to transform

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged jock coats, jonathan calder, prisons | 41 Comments

Compass want Lib Dems at its conference

By Gavin Hayes | Published 2nd June 2009 - 3:43 pm

As a visitor to LibDemVoice you may or may not be aware of the work of Compass – the influential pressure group that campaigns for a more democratic, equal and sustainable world. Compass is about building a broadly based Liberal Left politics and as a Liberal Democrat activist we wanted to introduce you to our important work and to invite you to attend our National Conference on Saturday 13 June.

We believe that both the Tory and Labour leaderships want to turn back as soon as possible to the failed politics of the pre-crash – both in terms of the old economy …

Posted in The Independent View | Also tagged amnesty international, compass, constitutional reform, demos, electoral reform, electoral reform society, evan harris, fawcett society, helena kennedy, john harris, jubilee debt campaign, make votes count, neal lawson, oxfam, polly toynbee, social liberal forum | 14 Comments

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