Let’s see if we can restore this feature…
- Lib Dems tell Government to stop “flip-flopping” and introduce EU Youth Mobility Scheme without delay
- Lib Dems slam Govt as “asleep at the wheel” on tech as Labour rejects common-sense reforms to Data Bill
- The ghost of Liz Truss: Lib Dems attack Welsh Conservatives unfunded tax cuts
- Shoplifting rises by a third across Scotland
Lib Dems tell Government to stop “flip-flopping” and introduce EU Youth Mobility Scheme without delay
Responding to the Government’s comments that they may finally be implementing a Youth Mobility Scheme with the EU, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Europe James MacCleary has said:
Labour now needs to stop flip-flopping and introduce an EU Youth Mobility Scheme without delay. Our young people won’t forgive them if they don’t.
For months now, the Government has totally dismissed the idea of extending a scheme we already have in place with countries like Australia and Japan to our European allies.
Securing a youth mobility scheme with the EU would be a common sense win-win – creating new opportunities for our young people and delivering a much-needed boost to our economy.
Lib Dems slam Govt as “asleep at the wheel” on tech as Labour rejects common-sense reforms to Data Bill
The Lib Dems have hit out at the Government’s ‘sell-out’ approach to tech policy as Labour MPs vote against “common-sense reforms” in the Data Bill this evening.
Labour MPs rejected plans proposed by the Lib Dems to restrict companies’ access to the personal data of under-16s and to protect British creatives from having their work scraped by AI models in the Commons this evening.
The online safety legislation would have protected children between 13 and 16 from having their data harvested by social media giants. Tech companies can use the data of under-16s to drive hyper-targeted advertising and content pushed by addictive algorithms, driving children’s engagement with digital content.
On copyright, the legislation proposed by Lib Dem tech spokesperson Victoria Collins would have prevented AI companies’ scraping of British artists’ work without a license, under existing copyright law. This would have protected UK creatives from having their work mined by large language models like ChatGPT without remuneration. AI programmes that collect data from British creators – music, TV, written material and the like – would have had to get a license to access those artists’ works, in line with existing copyright laws for all other non-AI users.
The Government voted against both measures – sparking accusations from the Lib Dems that they’re “asleep at the wheel” when it comes to tech.
Liberal Democrat spokesperson for Science, Innovation and Technology, Victoria Collins MP, said:
Whether it’s our young people or our hardworking creatives – it seems this Labour government is ready to sell out the British people to please tech giants.
They’re asleep at the wheel while the rest of the country is facing a sea change in how our online world operates. It seems they won’t even take up common-sense reforms to keep our young people safe and our brilliant creatives in business.
Lib Dems will continue to campaign to make sure tech works for all of us – including our young people and world-leading creative artists and writers.
The ghost of Liz Truss: Lib Dems attack Welsh Conservatives unfunded tax cuts
The Welsh Liberal Democrats have attacked the Welsh Conservatives plans to cut income tax in Wales, stating they have not learnt the lessons from Liz Truss’s ill-fated premiership where unfunded tax cuts crashed the economy, describing the plans as the “Ghost of Liz Truss”.
Commenting, Welsh Liberal Democrat Leader Jane Dodds MS said:
The Welsh Conservatives have very clearly shown today they have not learnt any lessons from Liz Truss’s disastrous stint as Prime Minister.
They are also not being honest with the Welsh Public, the only way they could afford these tax cuts would be to make sweeping cuts to our already struggling public services.
It is this sort of economic recklessness that is causing former Conservatives to abandon the party in droves and find a new home in the Liberal Democrats.
Shoplifting rises by a third across Scotland
Scottish Liberal Democrat justice spokesperson Liam McArthur MSP has called on the government to urgently focus on restoring community policing after new research by his party found that crimes of shoplifting have increased by more than third since 2019, with particularly steep rises in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
New research by the party shows that:
- Across Scotland between 2019 and 2024, shoplifting crimes recorded by the police have increased by more than a third.
- In this same five-year period, Edinburgh shoplifting crimes increased by 76%, while in Glasgow they rose by 46%.
- Between 2019 and 2024, there were 183,486 shoplifting crimes recorded by the police. As of 31st March 2024, just 79,569 resulted in charges being reported to the Procurator Fiscal- just 43% of all shoplifting crimes.
Mr McArthur said:
These figures emphasise just how vulnerable shopkeepers are to criminal gangs that, too often, are allowed to operate with virtual impunity.
For too long, the SNP have failed to give our justice system the support it needs. Now, crimes like shoplifting, which cause so much misery for local businesses and communities, are rising.
Ministers should be pulling out all the stops to reverse this worrying trend, and that starts by focusing on restoring community policing in every corner of Scotland, making sure officers are visible and trusted on our high streets, equipped with the resources they need to do their jobs.
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6 Comments
The answer to shoplifting is not more community policing since the police do not patrol within shops and no one is suggesting that they should. If the thinking behind the suggestion of more community policing is that shoplifting needs to be deterred, then the fact that only 43% of those caught shoplifting end up being prosecuted is maybe a more relevant issue to be addressed.
“… they have not learnt the lessons from Liz Truss’s ill-fated premiership where unfunded tax cuts crashed the economy, describing the plans as the ‘Ghost of Liz Truss’.
There’s no such thing as “unfunded” or “funded” with regards to either Govt spending or taxation.
Reductions in taxation and or increases in Govt spending will likely speed up the economy meaning that taxation revenues will likely not fall as a back-of-envelope calculation might suggest. A good reason for not stimulating the economy this way is to avoid reflation becoming higher inflation. Unfortunately our Liz chose just about the worst possible time to try this with inflation being a significant problem after the Covid emergency.
Rachel Reeves is making the opposite mistake. She thinks she has to cut spending to reduce the govt deficit. If a govt reduces spending it will reduce its taxation revenue too.
@Peter Rachel Reeves is a qualified economist, so I’m sure she knows perfectly well that reducing Government spending tends to reduce revenue. But the key point is it doesn’t reduce revenue by as much as the spending reduction – so it still reduces the budget deficit, which is the aim. From what I can see, the consensus amongst most economists seems to be that Rachel Reeves is correct about the need to reduce the budget deficit, and there aren’t really any other ways to do it other than reduce spending/increase taxes.
I think the problem is that she’s boxed in by manifesto commitments not to raise income tax, and has therefore been constrained by the politics to raise other taxes that are far more damaging to business and to the economy – notably employers’ NI. Really it would have been better to take the initial popularity hit of raising income tax, perhaps take the chance to do some simplification of the tax system, in order to get a better long term outcome for the economy.
@ Simon,
You’re right in a way but…
If we think of money originating as it’s spent into the economy by govt and then being destroyed as it is collected in taxes we can see it’s essentially like current flowing from one terminal of a battery to the other terminal. If we complicate the circuit slightly by adding a capacitor we simulate the effect of some users saving their curren(t)cy. (Sorry but I’m an electrical engineer by background!)
An electron will either end up at the other terminal or be stored in the capacitor. Any deficit therefore is what all users of the currency, which includes our overseas trading partners, effectively net save. Of course they can effectively net de-save too which will give the government a surplus. This might not be a good thing.
Deficits and surpluses are largely outside of the government’s control except that Government can make everyone so poor by reducing its spending that no-one can afford to save. This is why I ended the first paragraph with a ‘but’.
@ Simon,
You’re right in a way but…
If we think of money originating as it’s spent into the economy by govt and then being destroyed as it is collected in taxes we can see it’s essentially like current flowing from one terminal of a battery to the other terminal. If we complicate the circuit slightly by adding a capacitor we simulate the effect of some users saving their curren(t)cy. (Sorry but I’m an electrical engineer by background!)
An electron will either end up at the other terminal or be stored in the capacitor. Any deficit therefore is what all users of the currency, which includes our overseas trading partners, effectively net save. Of course they can effectively net de-save too which will give the government a surplus. This might not be a good thing.
Deficits and surpluses are largely outside of the government’s control except that Government can make everyone so poor by reducing its spending that no-one can afford to save. This is why I ended the first paragraph with a ‘but’.
The Bank of England provided a note, during the Coalition era, to remind us all about how they view money as being created and destroyed. This was necessary as the viewpoint of the nation as a household persisted.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy