Author Archives: Caron Lindsay

Caron Lindsay

Now this is how to write a motion on immigration issues

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 4th August 2018 - 10:54 am

From the last paragraph of the Preamble to our Constitution:

Our responsibility for justice and liberty cannot be confined by national boundaries; we are committed to fight poverty, oppression, hunger, ignorance, disease and aggression wherever they occur and to promote the free movement of ideas, people, goods and services. Setting aside national sovereignty when necessary, we will work with other countries towards an equitable and peaceful international order and a durable system of common security.

That’s a brilliant, positive statement of who we are and what we are against. It’s a very clear statement in favour of free movement of people.

Now have a look at the second paragraph of our new policy paper on immigration to be debated in Brighton:

However, migration today is not the peaceful, equitable, ordered guarantor of durable security that our constitution envisages. Fuelled by the failure of governments to spread economic prosperity widely, some people feel that their concerns about employment, housing, and social and welfare resources are somehow linked to immigration. There has been an alarming rise in hostility to all immigrants, including some British people settled here for a generation or more.

Some people also believe that the earth is flat. We don’t supply them with ropes in case they fall off the edge. We prove to them that they are wrong. The way to stop hostility to immigrants is to challenge the poisonous drip-feeding from the right wing tabloid press and right wing politicians, to to pander to it, don’t you think?

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Caron Lindsay

Timid, half-hearted and apologetic immigration policy is not the way to tackle prejudice

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 2nd August 2018 - 9:01 pm

Remember back in March, I almost spontaneously combusted when I read the consultation paper on immigration. Anything that put the word “robust” before “humane” really didn’t have a place in a liberal party as far as I was concerned.

After I wrote that piece, I became more hopeful at what I thought was a genuine attempt by the working group to engage with members. I know that they received a huge amount of feedback suggesting that they should take a more compassionate and fair approach.

We don’t know what the policy paper says yet as it hasn’t been published but the motion, which appears from page 35 of the Conference agenda actually makes me ashamed.

Let me talk a bit about why it is so important to tackle fear and prejudice. Nigel Farage, the Daily Fail and other elements of the right wing press have spent the last half century dripping poison about immigrants and immigration. They have used immigrants and lately EU citizens as scapegoats, wrongly. The problems we have are as a result of the failure of successive governments to adequately invest in housing and public services. If they had done that, then there would be no need for the right wing to turn groups of vulnerable people on each other.

As we move in to very dangerous times, as Brexit’s economic hit threatens jobs and public investment, when they can’t blame the EU any more, who will the Torykip lot blame next? It sure as hell won’t be them for getting us into this mess. It’ll be disabled people for claiming too many benefits (as if – most can’t get the help they desperately need), workers for demanding such indulgences as a minimum wage, set working hours and maternity leave.

If this immigration paper is an indication of how we as Liberal Democrats are going to stand up for these targeted groups, then we really need to demand better.

The motion is apologetic, timid and half-hearted. Every time it talks about doing something remotely right, it adds in a caveat saying, effectively, “but it’ll save us lots of money.”

It talks about fairness in the title, but there is no underscoring of that in the motion.

It tinkers at the edge of a horrible system that needs to be dismantled and started again from scratch with a new, enabling, compassionate, culture.

I also have a real problem with the paragraph that reads:

Our goal should be a positive, liberal consensus on immigration, partly by rebuilding people’s trust in the system, and that this requires us to listen and engage with those who do link pressures on public services and housing to immigration and to reject the argument that merely labels such people as racist.

That is a worthy goal, but thinking you are going to achieve it with the policies and attitude outlined in the motion is a bit like trying to clean a casserole dish with baked on dirt with a cotton wool ball.

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Caron Lindsay

Changes to Lib Dem leadership rules – what the constitution says…

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 2nd August 2018 - 1:25 pm

Can I just make a very polite suggestion to those who are briefing the press about potential changes to the way we elect leaders and who can stand in those elections to make sure that they understand our party’s processes for doing these things?

Because some things that the journalists are writing are just wrong.

Over the last week, we’ve seen a number of stories in the press which seem to be drip-feeding out some sort of process to change the rules for the election of a leader. There’s an article in Buzzfeed today which says that the rules for all this will be changed by a membership vote in November.

Lib Dem members will get the chance to debate a “supporters’ scheme” during a lunchtime session at the party conference in Brighton in September.

The rule change allowing non-MPs to stand as leader, which was first revealed in The Mirror last week, is expected to be formally announced to the press in early September and put to a vote of the membership in November.

This actually conflates two very different ideas.

We already know that Vince is keen to have a registered supporters scheme. There is a debate going on at the moment about what rights those registered supporters would have. Federal People Development Committee Chair Miranda Roberts looked at some of the issues in her latest report. 

Would they, for example, be able to vote in leadership elections? That’s what happened in the Labour party and that didn’t exactly work out well for them.

It would be really ironic if those people displaced by Corbyn’s election by registered supporters’ Momentum takeover of Labour then came to us and used our registered supporters scheme to turn our party into New Labour mark 2. While they are a million times better than the irresponsibly destructive government we have now, they are no respecters of individual and civil liberty. There is a big danger that the Liberal Democrats as we know it would end up as the smile on the face of the tiger of some new flaccid centrist affair which won’t change much and we need to think very carefully before we take such a move. This country is in such a dire state that radical change is vital to heal divisions and make it a kinder and fairer place.

There will be a consultation on all of this at the Brighton conference, with provision for those who can’t go to Conference to take part.

The other piece of the jigsaw is that there may or may not be a plan to allow a non-Parliamentarian to stand for leader. That may or may not have its merits but, as I said the other day, is all this process stuff where we really want to be as we approach the most intense time in the anti-Brexit campaign?

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Caron Lindsay

No, Ian Blackford, you really weren’t the victim: your campaign against Charles Kennedy was a disgrace

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 2nd August 2018 - 11:55 am

Few things have made me quite as angry as SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford’s revisionist interview in The Times (£)last weekend in which he claimed that the SNP’s vicious campaign against Charles Kennedy in 2015 was nothing to do with him and he was in fact the victim.

He said:

I did not enjoy the election campaign in 2015 but that was more to do with the characterisation of me from the Liberals. I’m not in any way blaming Charles, who was the MP. It was the campaign against me. It was pretty nasty.

Blackford objected to the Liberal Democrat literature which referred to him, accurately, as a banker from Edinburgh. While his supporters were going round being pretty blatant about Charles’ health problems and calling him a quisling. At the time former Labour minister Brian Wilson outlined some of the horrendous abuse Charles received on social media from Blackford’s allies:

Mr Smith sent at least 115 offensive tweets to Charles Kennedy between January and May as well as countless Facebook messages. He was not alone. A member of Charles’s constituency staff worked full-time on deleting abuse from his own social media sites. Any attempt to communicate on behalf of his own campaign met with another torrent of well-orchestrated poison.

When Charles asked for supporters to put posters in their windows, one Clare Robertson (if that is indeed his/her name) sneered: “Just put an empty whisky bottle in your window. It’s the same thing.”

The Mr Smith referred to was Blackford’s constituency chair who resigned over his comments on Twitter. 

Blackford also refers to a visit he made to Charles’ campaign office in Fort William:

What about the infamous episode, I ask, when you and some supporters were said to have burst into the Liberal Democrat campaign rooms and had a shouting match?

“That wasn’t the case,” says Mr Blackford. “I’d been in on several occasions. We even took some cake into them when we opened up our offices. I’d actually gone in to him because we’d had a public meeting the night before and I’d gone to see Charles to say, look, could you lay off this personal attack on us.

“With the benefit of hindsight, which is a wonderful thing, perhaps it would have been better not to do that, but that’s what happened and the Liberals have sought to characterise it in another way.”

On the day, in April 2015, we brought you the story of Blackford’s ill-tempered and aggressive visit to the campaign hq where he had a right go at young staff members. 

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Caron Lindsay

Tim Farron reminds us how the Lib Dems have led the fight against Brexit from the start

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 2nd August 2018 - 10:25 am

Yesterday, Tim Farron sent round an email to party members the other night saying this:

Mine was a lonely voice two years ago.

The UK had narrowly voted to leave the EU. The next day, I committed the Liberal Democrats to fight back.

I said the British people must have the final say on any Brexit deal – with the option to Remain in the EU.

Back then, even our friends weren’t with us. Not the remain media or remain MPs from other parties. Not even the big remain organisations.

But together, we’ve changed all that.

Polls this week show a clear majority now back our position.

A national newspaper has backed our call. Many pressure groups are now calling for a vote on the deal.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t in Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg’s script.

And it hasn’t happened by accident. It’s thanks to you.

Together, over the last two years, we have:

  • Grown our party to nearly 200,000 registered members and supporters – and spoken with over 2.4 million voters in the last 12 months
  • Reached around 24 million voters online each year
  • Achieved our best local election results in 15 years

At last, there’s real hope. We can change this – but timing is crucial. We must step up the pressure for change.

So please – TAKE ACTION today, share our campaign with your friends and family – and help us reach 150,000 supporters:

All of this is absolutely fine, but he didn’t actually call for another referendum immediately. That came later in the Summer and Conference enshrined that position in a motion passed in Brighton in September. 

This is one for the nit pickers among us and for slight amusement rather than criticism. After all, it is absolutely nothing compared to say, forcing the country in a position where we have to stockpile what basic food and medicines we can to mitigate against a disastrous and extreme interpretation of a narrow vote to leave the EU which was driven by a Leave campaign that lied and cheated its way through and therefore can’t be legitimate. 

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Caron Lindsay

35 years on and the fight is more important than ever

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 31st July 2018 - 8:07 am

Today marks 35 years since I joined the SDP on my 16th birthday. What motivated me then was a desire to turn this world into a kinder, fairer place where all people had power over their lives. My parents thought it was a rebellious phase that wouldn’t last.

Being involved in this party has brought me an extended family, my best friends, some amazing highs – Willie Rennie winning in Dunfermline, Christine Jardine and Alex Cole-Hamilton in Edinburgh for a start. There’s been the sheer joy of working with others on a common cause. You never know how wonderful the highs are if you don’t have lows and there have been many of them – the frustration, the disappointment of defeat and sometimes self-inflicted wounds.

The SDP and the Liberal Democrats have so often been on the right side of the argument, from Iraq, to Vince predicting the economic crash to Hong Kong to the Gurkhas to housing to civil liberties and protecting us from 90 day detention.

In some ways the world back then was very different. We are all so much more inter-connected now. In 1983 there was no internet, no 24 hour news cycle (breakfast tv had started only a few months before), no mobile phones. The other side of the world seemed so inaccessible.

There was injustice across the world with apartheid South Africa being the focus of our fight for human rights. The subsequent release of Nelson Mandela and the leadership he showed in creating an inclusive democracy shows what can be achieved from a seemingly impossible situation.

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Caron Lindsay

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #526

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 29th July 2018 - 9:00 pm

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 526th weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the five most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (22-28 July, 2018), together with a hand-picked seven you might otherwise have missed.

Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox — just click here — ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.

As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:

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Caron Lindsay

Big ideas abound at SLF Conference

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 29th July 2018 - 3:24 pm

Yesterday was a fantastic day out at SLF Conference. This annual get-together is always thought-provoking food for the social liberal soul. At this point I should say a massive thank you to the organisers for a great day – and particularly to our own Mary Reid who does so much to make the event a success every year.

Layla Moran followed in the footsteps of the likes of Nick Clegg, Tim Farron and Vince Cable in delivering the Beveridge Memorial Lecture. She’s been in the papers a lot this week with talk of un-named people supposedly trying to support the idea of her being leader. There is no suggestion that these moves have anything to do with her and it seems very unlikely that a new MP with a majority of 800 would be preoccupied with such things. In the last session of the day, she emphatically and genuinely endorsed Vince, saying he is doing brilliantly and is “the grown-up in the room” of British politics. Actually, I think our Golden Dozen are probably the most united, together group of Lib Dem MPs I have ever known. They are all working really well together.

One of the many reasons it’s great to have her as education spokesperson is that you can tell how driven she is. She knows from practical experience what the problems are and has some great ideas about how to fix them. Her frustration at being told to concentrate on the average children and leave the bright to teach themselves and the ones who needed help most to flounder so that the school could do well in league tables led her to find another job.

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Caron Lindsay

Can we please just concentrate on fighting Brexit, not internal party processes

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 27th July 2018 - 8:29 pm

There are not enough swear words in the world to describe my reaction when I read this Mirror story today about Vince’s alleged plan to open up the party leadership to non MPs.

He wants to scrap or amend an obscure part of the party’s constitution which states only an MP can take the helm.

The move, which is likely to be put to the party after summer recess and could be debated at the annual conference in Brighton in September, would mean a non-politician could become leader, scuppering ambitions of Sir Vince’s rivals on the Commons’ benches.

It may or may …

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Caron Lindsay

No Deal would be horrendous – but let’s not forget that any other type of Brexit is bad news and we must resist it

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 26th July 2018 - 11:55 am

So, let me get this right. Our own Prime Minister has admitted that we are now stockpiling food and medicines just in case Brexit goes disastrously wrong. Our ability to supply ourselves with the basics of life is now under threat because of her Government’s reckless appeasement of the extreme right of her party. And this really matters. It’s actually about whether people live or die. As my friend Jenny points out:

Tory extreme Brexiteers think that no deal would be just fine, we’d breeze through it. They also said that negotiating Brexit would be simple. No, it’s bloody complicated. And it would be even with a Government that didn’t turn up to the negotiations like a disorganised student turning in a badly crafted essay written in an all night Red Bull fuelled panic in the hours before the deadline. I’m slightly worried by all this ramping up of No Deal, though. I don’t want people to think that when the Brexit outcome is finally unveiled, that anything that doesn’t involve having to survive on barbecued rats, Baldrick’s coffee from Blackadder goes Forth and having our loved ones dying unnecessarily because they can’t get the medicine they need is in any way desirable. Just because we’re not cooking cockroach lasagne with boiled tulip bulbs from Theresa’s Brexit Cookbook and have our holidays cancelled because there are no flights anymore, it’s still a bad option that no responsible government would put before us.

Any sort of Brexit is really bad for this country. Don’t let the Government and the Brexiteers ramp up the possibility of No Deal to make the shambles they come back with look good in comparison. It really won’t be of any benefit at all to this country. How do we know? The Government’s own analysis tells us so. In January a leaked government document told us that we’d be worse off under every Brexit scenario. We can and should insist on a more ambitious approach – and the only thing that works is staying in.

The softest Brexit option of continued single-market access through membership of the European Economic Area would, in the longer term, still lower growth by 2%.

And some more misery:

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Caron Lindsay

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #525

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 22nd July 2018 - 9:00 pm

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 525th weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the five most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (15-21 July, 2018), together with a hand-picked seven you might otherwise have missed.

Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox — just click here — ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.

As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:

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Caron Lindsay

On Vince, the Lib Dems and this supposed new party

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 22nd July 2018 - 10:34 am

The Sunday Times reports (£) that the reason missed that vote the other night was because he was at a meeting discussing the formation of a new centre party.

A few brief thoughts from me:

First of all, I think that if it is finally going to get off the ground, @libdems need to know about and work with it where it shares our values. It would be daft to stand against each other in an anti-Brexit election.

It may be that we can only work together on the anti-Brexit stuff because @libdems couldn’t work closely with a party that didn’t have a clear strategy to tackle poverty and inequality, tackle climate change, reform our political system & champion human rights & civil liberties.

So it’s very sensible for Vince to be in the discussions. He may be telling them that the best thing they can do is join the Liberal Democrats because we already have the campaign infrastructure and the Commons presence and experience.

If Vince wants @libdems to co-operate closely with any new party – and we’ve heard about lots of these which have never got off the ground – he will have to persuade our Conference to vote for it and there will be some spirited resistance.

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Caron Lindsay

See the Brexit supporting rich people bankrolling the Conservatives

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 21st July 2018 - 6:00 pm

If you are incredibly rich and want to influence the Government, you can, for a cool £50k per hear join the Conservative Party’s Leaders’ Club.

This buys you some pretty major access to key players in the Government:

The Leader’s Group is the premier supporter Group of the Conservative Party. Members are invited to join Theresa May and other senior figures from the Conservative Party at dinners, post-PMQ lunches, drinks receptions, election result events and important campaign launches.

The Conservatives have now published the list of government ministers who have attended events  with these very rich people, who include key backers of Brexit, associates of Vladimir Putin (him again) and even a partner of Jacob Rees-Mogg, since the 2017 General Election. They were able to dine and chat with Theresa May, You have every great office of state represented – May, Boris, Amber Rudd and Philip Hammond along with Liz Truss, Greg Clark, Jeremy Hunt and others.

What’s interesting is that if you look at the group of guests they are almost all men.

As the campaign group Open Britain said in its analysis of the guest lists:

The publication reveals that super-wealthy donors being wined and dined by Theresa May and senior ministers include a host of speculating hedge funds, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s business partner at Somerset Capital Management, and the wife of Vladimir Putin’s former deputy finance minister.

One dinner guest, Hardy McLain, attended dinners in 2017 and 2018 and previously donated £20,000 to the Vote  Leave campaign. The firm he founded was previously linked to attempts to “profit from Brexit uncertainty”.

Another, Dominic Johnson, who attended two dinners in 2017, is the co-founder of Somerset Capital Management – an investment firm set up by hard Brexiteer and Chairman of the ERG Jacob Rees-Mogg. Somerset was recently reported to be warning their clients about “considerable uncertainty” as a result of Brexit, and set up a new fund in Ireland, which benefits from EU financial passporting rights.

Edmund Truell, who attended dinners in 2017 and 2018, owns a Swiss-listed private equity business called Disruptive Capital which has a mission statement to ‘exploit market uncertainty’ to generate returns.

In total some 81 figures paid a total of £7.4 million to the Conservative Party for access to exclusive dinners with the Prime Minister and senior Cabinet Ministers since the General Election 2017.

Lib Dems have long talked about getting the big money out of politics. Our 2017 manifesto said we would:

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Caron Lindsay

Verdict on Vince’s first year

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 21st July 2018 - 12:14 pm

Yesterday was Vince Cable’s first anniversary as leader – the paper anniversary, so that should encourage us all to go deliver lots of leaflets for our Exit from Brexit campaign over the next wee while.

We undoubtedly have the grown-up in the room as far as British politics is concerned. While the Tories’ toxic civil war leads them to force a catastrophic economic meltdown on the country and Labour stands by and lets them do it, Vince has been tirelessly making the case for us to get out of this mess.

Two years on from the Brexit referendum, if it was all going well, if the Government really was enacting this “will of the people”, we wouldn’t have polls showing significant support for a People’s Vote on the final deal.  We even have polling showing that Remain would win the sort of three way referendum Justine Greening was talking about by the same margin as the Scottish independence referendum was won.

Our arguments are prevailing and our poll ratings are edging slowly towards double figures, but we haven’t had the massive breakthrough we’d all like to see.

Why is that and what can Vince do about it in his second year?

Creating waves

Vince’s piece for us yesterday showed that he has been talking a lot in the past year about issues that matter to people. Housing, health, inequality, public services as well as Brexit.

What we need over the next while is a thread that ties all these things together in a way that shows what we stand for – a radical, bold, reforming party that champions freedom from poverty, co-operation, internationalism, human rights and giving people power over their own destinies. We must do this with vigour and passion and show that we will never settle for anything less.

We need to show how our broken democracy has got us into the mess we’re in and lead the way out.

Vince has a reputation for being scholarly and academic with speeches more like lectures than political orations, but he can deliver the goods and create some waves:

I’d like to see him elaborate on the things that get him this sort of attention like this from Spring Conference:

Too many were driven by a nostalgia for a world where passports were blue, faces were white, and the map was coloured imperial pink.

Their votes on one wet day in June, crushing the hopes and aspiration of the young for years to come.

He was absolutely right to say it and we need to hear it more often. We need to hear more of the “young are being shafted on Brexit” and he needs to show that Jeremy Corbyn is just as responsible for what is happening as Theresa May and her Brexiteers.

He needs to take more risks and say more audacious things.

He got a whole load of attention back in February for asking the PM if the NHS would be protected in any trade deal with Donald Trump. He’s not yet exploited the potential of that line and he could do worse than take Willie Rennie’s terrier approach to these things. He just keeps asking the question at every opportunity.

That Lib Dem Process thing

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Caron Lindsay

WATCH: Layla on the need for inclusive sex and relationships education

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 21st July 2018 - 10:40 am

This week the Government started consulting on relationships and sex education. For years, Liberal Democrats have argued that it is vital that every child has access to information that includes everyone, where LGBT+ people are included and which covers issues of consent and life-saving information about safe sex and contraception. Education spokesperson Layla Moran encourages responses and highlights how Lib Dem Education secretary Kirsty Williams has done this in Wales.

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Caron Lindsay

A very strong hold in Oxfordshire

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 20th July 2018 - 7:56 am

Oxford Liberal Democrats pulled off a brilliant hold last night, getting over 60% of the vote.

Congratulations to Cllr Stefanie Garden

There was a bit of a Conservative surge in Bury but we managed to hold our own in terms of vote share as …

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Caron Lindsay

Dinosaur found at Westminster

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 19th July 2018 - 10:48 pm

The BBC’s Nicholas Watt seems to have been trawling the bars of the Parliamentary Estate looking for dinosaurs. And he struck gold.

Oh.My.Days.

I have a list of suspects, although that grows exponentially if we’re including Lords.

I have been saying for a while that we should paint in primary colours, that we should say what we really feel and not be too subtle.

Our Press Office stepped up to that plate tonight. Do not read on if you are easily offended.

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Caron Lindsay

Leadsom, Lewis and Smith in trouble over Jo Swinson pairing scandal

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 19th July 2018 - 4:16 pm

Remember when the Tories cheated in order to win the tight vote in Parliament, just like Vote Leave cheated to win the EU Referendum?

Tory Chairman Brandon Lewis, paired with Jo Swinson who was at home with her two week old baby, should not have voted on Tuesday night. He honoured that in the first few, but in the really crucial ones, on the European Medicines Agency (which the Government lost) and the customs union, (which the Government narrowly won), he cast his vote. Now, had he voted in the earlier divisions, Alistair Carmichael, our Chief Whip, might have noticed …

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Caron Lindsay

George Dunk’s memorial service to take place this Saturday

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 19th July 2018 - 2:47 pm

George Dunk was a much-loved presence on the Lib Dem scene for decades. I first knew him through his wife, Sandra, who was the Party’s fantastic candidates officer. She died very suddenly in 2004. He was such a kind and funny man who always had a story to tell and he is incredibly missed. He died at the end of April.

This Saturday, his memorial service will take place at St James Church, Bermondsey, Thurland Road, SE16 4AA at 11:30 am. It’s just off Jamaica Road, and three minutes from Bermondsey tube station.  There will be a gathering in a local pub …

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Caron Lindsay

Tories cheat like a Vote Leave campaign over crucial customs union vote

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 17th July 2018 - 10:33 pm

This country is currently on a path to economic self-destruction because of a narrow vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Today we discovered that the Vote Leave campaign had cheated. And, by the way, that monumental news isn’t even on the BBC’s front page any more.

Tonight, this country was helped along its path to economic self-destruction  because of a narrow vote – 307-301 against an amendment which would have kept us in a customs union with the EU after Brexit. The desperate Tory government pulled a particularly dirty trick to win that vote.

The pairing system has long been a civilising feature of our Parliament. When an MP is indisposed for some reason or needs a night off, they can be paired with an MP who would vote the opposite way. Imagine the sorts of circumstances that you might need that in – maybe a dying parent, or a sick child, or your own illness, or being on maternity leave. Tonight, Jo Swinson, whose baby is just two weeks old, was paired with Conservative Party chair Brandon Lewis. He voted in the crunch votes. He didn’t vote in the earlier votes.  Jo was justifiably furious:

The incident even got a Twitter moment.

After a couple of hours, Lewis tweeted that it had been an honest mistake:

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Caron Lindsay

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #524

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 15th July 2018 - 9:00 pm


Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 524th weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the five most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (8-14 July, 2018), together with a hand-picked seven you might otherwise have missed.

Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox — just click here — ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.

As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:

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Caron Lindsay

Now is not the time for the BBC to be cutting back its political programmes

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 15th July 2018 - 7:07 pm

This week the BBC announced changes to its political programming. When I say changes, I mean cuts. BBC Parliament will just cover Parliament and the devolved assemblies when they are sitting and the UK wide Sunday Politics is axed.

The main changes are outlined here:

A new team giving better digital and social coverage – including podcasts – of politics and parliament for audiences who are increasingly getting their news online, especially on mobiles. In an era of concerns about misinformation and ‘echo chambers’ this is designed to bring trusted impartial political coverage to younger audiences

A new daily political programme –

…

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Caron Lindsay

Brexit contradictions and scary polls – how do we escape from the mess?

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 15th July 2018 - 3:33 pm

So Theresa May tells Brexiteers in the Mail on Sunday that they had better back her or there’ll be no Brexit yet on Andrew Marr, she trots out that old phrase “No deal is better than a bad deal.”

We’re all over the place here. The only option that gives us any control at all over what happens, ironically, is staying in the EU. Then we’ll have influence over the rules that affect us. Theresa May’s White Paper is unpalatable to the Brexiteers who see it as tying us too closely to the EU and to Remainers who don’t see the point in something that gives us less than we currently have with no say on any future changes. No deal is akin to jumping out of an aeroplane at 20,000 feet and convincing yourself that if you land in a soft pile of manure you won’t hurt yourself.

Vince had this to say, which is all very sensible

Within a few hours Theresa May moves from saying Brexit might not happen to casting the spectre of ‘no deal’ and all the disastrous consequences that would entail for the country. These mixed messages and confusions show she is not in charge of negotiations – the Conservatives spent two years to reach a chaotic position that is unworkable.

Trump’s ‘advice’ again illustrates how ill-informed he is and that his interest in Brexit is not to help the UK but to create mayhem.

But then I’m finding myself becoming a bit cynical. Could all the confusion be deliberate?

Remember how confusion was a deliberate tactic during the referendum? One minute you’d have Brexiteers saying “But it’s fine cos we’ll stay in the single market” and the next that we’d be free of the EU and not having to abide by any of its rules. Creating that confusion was deliberate because the Leave campaign didn’t care about the issues. They just wanted to create enough anger to persuade people to give the establishment a kicking.  And it worked.

May seems to be trying the same tactic now, generating anger so that people are focused on that rather than the nightmare process of leaving the EU.

How much better would it be to deal with the cause of the discontent as Chris Bowers said earlier and I‘ve been saying for a long time that we need to inspire with a vision of what a liberal society could look like and how it is much more likely to happen if we forget about this Brexit business?

This Government’s approach to Brexit has been criminally irresponsible. Surely when there’s talk of stockpiling food – and not that much each either, as Adam Bernard pointed out on Twitter:

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Caron Lindsay

WATCH: Christine Jardine speaks to anti Trump demo

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 15th July 2018 - 10:55 am

It was a fine day at the Trump protest yesterday. The photo shows some of the Scottish Lib Dem contingent before we went to the pub to watch sports and drank ridiculous amounts of Prosecco.

My favourite banner was so rude that I definitely can’trepeat it here. To paraphrase, it suggested a name we might like to call the President if only he had warmth and depth.

Our speaker at the demo was Christine Jardine, MP for Edinburgh West. Here she is quoting Bobby Kennedy saying that we don’t need division and hatred but wisdom, compassion and love.

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Caron Lindsay

Why I’m one of the many #libdemsagainstTrump today

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 14th July 2018 - 9:57 am

I asked on Twitter this morning what the worst thing about Donald Trump was. Many of the replies I got were variations on the theme of “everything.”

It is rare that you find a human being with so little empathy for others and so few saving graces. When that person has so much global power and influence, it’s utterly terrifying.

It’s not just about his racism which leads him to ban people of a certain religion and decry Mexicans as rapists and slag off the most prominent Muslim politician in the UK. It’s not just about the ingrained misogyny which leads him to boast about sexually assaulting women. It’s not just that he is more comfortable with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un than he is with Justin Trudeau. It’s not just that he is stitching up the Supreme Court and with it threatening human, reproductive, workers’ rights for generations. (Let’s not forget that his current nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, who spent the 1990s persecuting  Bill Clinton, now thinks that no sitting President should be subject to criminal investigation). It’s not just that he brags about separating children from their parents and detaining them in soulless camps on the Mexican borders. It’s not just that he is doing the work of a deeply unpleasant Russian dictator for him. Who wins if Europe, the EU and NATO are destabilised? Putin, of course. And I’ll just leave here the news that you may have missed amid yesterday’s trail of chaos and destruction the entirely unrelated news that 12 Russians were indicted for interference in the election that Trump so narrowly won.

Any single one of these things is enough of a reason to protest. Together they are compelling.

How good would it have been yesterday if Theresa May had channelled Hugh Grant from Love Actually and ripped Trump a new one in the Chequers press conference? It was never going to happen, because our position in the world is so weakened because of Brexit, but someone has to stand up to the very real danger he poses to every civilised value that we have until now taken for granted.

But what is the point in protesting? It’s not going to change anything, is it?

Well, sitting at home while this appalling man takes a sledgehammer to the values I hold dear isn’t an option for me. Of course he’s not going to change his ways just because a few hundred thousand of the people he can’t stand take to the streets.

I hope that the coverage of the demonstrations gives some comfort to his targets, though. That they will know that people thousands of miles away stand with them.

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Caron Lindsay

A quick shout out to the person who sends out the emails from LDHQ

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 12th July 2018 - 10:29 pm

Much of the information about the Trump protest in London came out in an email to members last night.

I didn’t get it.

This is a very good thing. Because as a Scot, I was getting all the info about the protest in Edinburgh on Saturday at which Christine Jardine is speaking (Meet at the Scottish Parliament at 11:45 am).

Heaven knows, I have whinged when things that affect England only are emailed to Scottish members. We Scots get a bit sensitive about these things.

So, when the lovely people who send the emails get it right, then they deserve the credit.

Thanks!

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Caron Lindsay

What’s your favourite thing about Liberal Democrat Conference?

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 12th July 2018 - 1:55 pm

In just over 9 weeks’ time, thousands of Lib Dems will be packing up and heading to Brighton for four days of serious debate, fun and thought-provoking fringe meetings.

This Saturday, Federal Conference Committee will have a very loooooong meeting to decide how they will fill up four days by the sea.

We’ve had a couple of posts about some of the motions submitted by members. Only a small fraction will make it on to the agenda. If you want to make a pitch for yours, there’s still time – just send …

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Caron Lindsay

Fancy sending a message to our new Brexit Secretary?

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 11th July 2018 - 8:41 pm

Dominic Raab is a staunch Leave MP representing a constituency which voted strongly to Remain.

He was elevated to the Cabinet after David Davies’ resignation presumably because Theresa May was doing everything she could do to avoid giving the job to Michael Gove.

He and the Prime Minister crossed swords before, back in 2011, when he referred to feminist ideas as “obnoxious bigotry”

If you want to learn more about him, he actually wrote on this site back in 2015. The comments tell you a bit more about why.

Later that year, during the election campaign, Tim Farron said he represented …

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Caron Lindsay

Lib Dem MPs to use Opposition Day Debate to argue for People’s Vote

By Caron Lindsay | Mon 9th July 2018 - 10:06 pm

Well, it’s been quite a day, hasn’t it?

It takes you right back to 1990 and all the drama of Sir Geoffrey Howe’s resignation- over Europe.  Well, all the drama and none of the class. It remains to be seen whether the same fate befalls this Prime Minister as happened to Margaret Thatcher back then. .

We now have a chaotic situation where the 50 or so Tory Brexiteers won’t back a deal that looks anything like Theresa May’s plan  because it doesn’t go far enough for them and a fairly huge swathe of Labour, the SNP and us won’t back it because it is just ridiculously unworkable and will make all of us poorer. The pro European wing of the Tory party will do what it always does and cave when it comes to actually voting.

You would think that we’d have some idea of where we were going with little more than 8 months to go before we are scheduled to leave the EU. However, the headlines ricochet between “yikes, it’s going to be no deal” to “soft brexit wins the day” all the way back to “yikes.”

Something has to happen to make sense of all this chaos.

Tomorrow, Lib Dem MPs will hold an opposition day debate. In news that will surprise nobody, they are going to call for a People’s Vote on the final deal with the option of remaining in the EU.

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Caron Lindsay

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #523

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 8th July 2018 - 9:00 pm

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 523rd weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the five most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (1-7 July, 2018), together with a hand-picked seven you might otherwise have missed.

Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox — just click here — ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.

As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:

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