Author Archives: Caron Lindsay

Caron Lindsay

Sick absence figures reveal extent of strains on NHS staff as 45 million hours lost in Scotland alone

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 27th December 2017 - 12:53 pm

Last year, my husband spent 51 days in hospital. He received excellent care from compassionate and skilled staff at what was an absolutely terrifying time for us.

That experience gave us an insight into the strains and stresses that the NHS faces. The most common refrain from staff was that it was so stressful and the Winter hadn’t even started yet.

He spent a just over a month in a medical ward in our local hospital and a further three weeks in a specialist centre in our nearest city. On only one occasion in the whole 51 days did I see staff going home when they were actually supposed to. There were times when I was shocked to see the same members of staff on their 5th or even 6th 12 hour shift in a week. One day I arrived at the hospital in the afternoon to see a health care assistant who had been on night shift the previous night. Because the ward was so under-staffed, she had gone home, slept for a couple of hours and come back in for the busy stretch around lunch and dinner.

During their shifts, the nurses did not stop. They were dealing with multiple stressful situations at a time. They were stretched to the limit.

Obviously a situation like that is not sustainable. It’s going to affect people’s health in some way or another. Alex Cole-Hamilton now has evidence of that.

He revealed that more than 45 million hours have been lost by Scottish NHS boards to staff ill health during the past four years and said the immense pressure staff are under could account for rates rising.

Data obtained from health boards under the Freedom of Information Act reveals that the number of hours lost to illness increased from 11.4 million hours in 2014-15 to 13.1 million hours in 2016-17, with the number rising year on year.

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Caron Lindsay

Lib Dems highlight plight of homeless young people

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 27th December 2017 - 9:45 am

45000 people. It’s the size of a small town. It’s also the number of young people presenting as homeless to local authorities across the whole of Britain. The wonderful people in the Lib Dem research team have uncovered this in a series of freedom of information requests which revealed the number of 18-24 year olds who presented themselves to councils as homeless or at risk of homelessness, who were subsequently assessed under the Housing Act, and who were then accepted as statutorily homeless in the year to September 2017.

You can see a full breakdown of the figures here. Notable points include that four of the top five areas for young people being declared statutorily homeless are in Scotland where this is devolved to the Scottish Government.

This was sadly all too predictable as soon as George Osborne announced cuts to Housing Benefit for young people. He did this at the first chance he had, just after the 2015 election when he didn’t have Nick Clegg there to stop him any more. Vince Cable made the point about benefits cuts in his comments:

These figures reveal the hidden homelessness crisis affecting thousands of young people across the country.

It is a national scandal that so many youngsters are struggling to find a permanent place to call home.

Young people should be hopeful and looking to the future. Yet instead thousands will be spending this Christmas without a roof over their head, worrying about where they will sleep at night.

The situation is being made worse by the Government’s heartless decision to strip young people of housing benefit.

The government must reverse cuts to housing benefit for young people, invest more in preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place and build more genuinely affordable homes.

The utterly heartbreaking thing is that these figures don’t even include all the young people where a final decision was made, not the full number who applied and may have been turned down. 

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Caron Lindsay

Will Nick Clegg be getting a knighthood at the weekend?

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 26th December 2017 - 10:28 am

The papers are full of reports that The Cleggster is getting a knighthood in the New Year Honours. The right wing tabloids in particular are particularly enraged at this award for an “arch remainer.” The Mail even devotes a separate article to the question of whether Miriam Gonzalez Durantez will use the title “Lady Clegg” to give them another reason to remind readers of their twin obsessions with her being Spanish and not using what they refer to as her “married name.” The fact that she just has a name, not a married name, is lost on them as usual.

It’s much better for them, of course, to obsess on these things rather than her expertise on international and EU trade which leads her often to demolish the Government’s handling of Brexit as she did in this article in the Summer.

The best thing this government could do to appease the serious concerns of UK business leaders on Brexit is to rely on the business leaders themselves. This means no more toying with extravagant and ill-founded ideas. And it also means seeking an interim arrangement with the EU to continue benefiting from the single market and the customs union for as long as is needed until an alternative EU-UK deal is reached, as business leaders have proposed. This can be done by placing the UK into the European Economic Area on a temporary basis, and/or looking for an ad hoc arrangement extending the current status quo. Neither the extreme Brexiteers nor the extreme remainers like this option, but it is the only sensible thing to do right now. It allows the UK government to win time. And time is what the government needs – to get the skills it misses, to draft proposals it has not even started to draft yet and to negotiate with the serenity that the high economic interests at stake deserve.

An interim deal is the only way to deal with the ticking clock Michael Barnier hears because, as any trade negotiator knows, there is nothing worse than negotiating against time. Except for negotiating against time in pursuit of delusional and unrealistic ambitions.

But back to Nick. We won’t know if the knighthood story has any basis in fact, or is just something that the Brexiteer tabloids using to fill their pages in the post Christmas lull. 

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Caron Lindsay

Merry Christmas to you all

By Caron Lindsay | Mon 25th December 2017 - 12:00 am

The LDV team wishes all of you the most peaceful, healthy, happy festive time.

We send our love and support to those of you who face Christmas for the first time without someone you love. A loss that is acute every day can feel especially intolerable amongst all the jollity.

We should also think of those whose lives are a constant struggle with poverty and those who put so much time and effort into helping them. I’m thinking of those at welfare rights organisations and charities who prepare and represent them at appeals, of the food bank volunteers who try to make …

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Caron Lindsay

Daisy Cooper attacks sexist Bible stories for girls book

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 24th December 2017 - 1:55 pm

I was taken the other day by this tweet from Daisy Cooper, who was unimpressed by a book she found in a branch of The Works:

If, like me, you had no idea who the Five Daughters of Zelophehad were, their story is interesting. They took on an all -male establishment and challenged the fact that they had no right to inherit their father’s property.

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Caron Lindsay

Does it matter what colour your passport is?

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 24th December 2017 - 12:55 pm

My reaction to the news the other day that blue passports were going to be coming back after Brexit was one of frustration and annoyance.

I am not young by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve never had an old style passport. My first one, issued in 1993, was the burgundy European Union one.

It’s not the colour change that upsets me so much but what it symbolises. Those words European Union signify openness and co-operation. That translates into meaningful rights for me as a citizen. It means that I can travel freely across the EU. It means that I am part of something that protects my rights – even when my own Governments, Scottish and UK, seek to undermine them.

I absolutely cherish those words. The change in passport colour symbolises a retreat from those values.

Tom Brake made the point the other day that there is a huge financial cost to each of us that he put at £721 per passport. That’s based on a £35 billion settlement to the EU divided by 48.5 million passport holders. He said:

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Caron Lindsay

Swinson: Sectoral analysis shows that Brexit is a far-reaching, ridiculous folly

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 22nd December 2017 - 11:00 am

So MPs and peers had some time alone with the Brexit “sectoral analysis” papers. And those of ours who expressed an opinion were far from impressed. You can make your own mind up as the papers have been partially published here.

Vince Cable had been particularly scathing about them in an article for the Independent on Sunday:

Those who have seen them – under a procedure rivalling access to the Crown Jewels – say they are descriptions of the sectors, not assessments of impact, and contain nothing unavailable on Wikipedia.

The second, more serious, point was that the decision to leave the customs union was taken by the Cabinet without any quantitative assessment of impact.

This doesn’t surprise me. Whenever I try to engage Brexiteers with technical issues which face supply chain industries, whose components cross borders, along with practical problems surrounding border certification and rules of origin, eyes glaze over.

Then Jo Swinson had some time alone in a darkened room with them and she was underwhelmed to say the least. She set out her thoughts in a series of tweets.

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Caron Lindsay

Carmichael: The Cabinet crumbles

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 20th December 2017 - 10:45 pm

A few weeks ago, I was out drinking (which I don’t do very often these days) on a Wednesday night and Michael Fallon resigned.

Tonight I was out drinking on a Wednesday night and Damien Green resigned. Robert Peston, who predicted he’d be absolutely fine, must be crying into his beer now.

All I can say is that it’s a sacrifice I would be prepared to make on a regular basis, especially for the Hanging Bat’s excellent honeyed ale with a schooner of rather excellent Porter on the side, all in the company of a very bad  influence indeed.

It must …

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Caron Lindsay

A chance to choose to #exitfromBrexit

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 20th December 2017 - 8:55 am

The EU Withdrawal Bill finishes its Committee stage in the House of Commons today and for Liberal Democrats the emphasis will be on our amendment calling for a referendum on the final deal.

Most of us baulk at the idea of another referendum, especially those of us who have been through two horrible and divisive referenda in the last three years as it is. Referenda are not an efficient tool to resolve complex issues and, as we have seen, can be manipulated by populists with an agenda.  However, the only chance we have of getting out of this mess is to …

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Caron Lindsay

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #499

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 17th December 2017 - 9:00 pm

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 499th 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 (10-16 December, 2017), 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

Don’t feel too sorry for Nigel Farage

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 17th December 2017 - 1:18 pm

I know that many of us who read and contribute to this site are pretty much bleeding heart liberals.

Our hearts are not bleeding, though, when we hear Nigel Farage whinging in the Daily Mail about how hard his life is. He complains about being skint and how there’s no money in politics.  

His near £90k salary apparently isn’t enough for him to live on. I’m sure  someone struggling on Universal Credit would have a different perspective.

But his MEP salary isn’t his only source of income. He doesn’t do all his media stuff for nothing. His most recent update to …

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Caron Lindsay

Poll gives Remain a 10 point lead over Leave – what does this mean?

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 16th December 2017 - 10:27 pm

A BMG poll for the Independent shows a majority of those asked are now in favour of remaining in the European Union. In fact, Remain has a 10 point lead over leave which widens to 11% when you exclude the don’t knows:

When a weighted sample of some 1,400 people were asked: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union, or leave the European Union?” – 51 per cent backed Remain, and 41 per cent backed Leave.

7 per cent said “don’t know” and 1 per cent refused to answer.

After “don’t knows” were either pushed for an answer or otherwise excluded, 55.5 per cent backed Remain and 44.5 backed Leave.

Polling since this time last year appears to demonstrate a clear trend; Leave enjoyed a lead last December which gradually shrank, before turning into a lead for Remain in the month of the general election, that has since grown.

So by the time the Government drags us out of the EU, it is likely that a majority of people will be in favour of staying. How can that possibly be legitimate?

This poll does come with a bit of a health warning. The fieldwork was carried out during that week where the deal over the Irish situation was unravelling in slow motion in front of our eyes. However, the deal that was reached on 8th December, the final day of the fieldwork, is simply a bit of fudge covered with sticking plaster resolving none of the key issues. Those problems will loom large in the early months of 2018.

What if the polls turned? Surely the Government would be compelled to test whether their deal has public sympathy.

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Caron Lindsay

Politics Galore – a new podcast about Scottish of politics

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 16th December 2017 - 3:04 pm

One of the reasons I prefer writing over speaking in public is that my gob doesn’t have a backspace key. However, I am not known for my silence or unwillingness to express an opinion so when I was invited to take part in a new podcast about Scottish politics, I jumped at the chance.

On Thursday, just after the Scottish Budget was announced, I spent an enjoyable half an hour talking over the issues of the day with the hosts Andrew Jackson and David McColgan.

I don’t think I said anything too embarrassing but have a listen to try and …

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Caron Lindsay

Rennie: Scottish Budget a “missed opportunity”

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 14th December 2017 - 9:57 pm

Today was an historic day. Twenty years and three months ago, the Scottish people voted to have a Scottish Parliament with tax raising powers.

In his annual Budget, Scottish Finance Minister Derek Mackay increased the basic rate of income tax to 21p for those earning above £24,000. He also decreased it to 19p for the lowest earners up to £13,850. He put up the higher rate to 41p and the top rate to 46p.

It’s all pretty modest and it represents the sort of moves we were calling for in the Scottish elections last year and since. We wanted to see the money brought in put into education to make what Willie Rennie calls a “transformative”investment.

So we’re not going to complain about the idea of tax rises in principle. However, Derek Mackay is getting a world of pain from the Tories because the SNP said in their manifesto that they wouldn’t raise the basic rate of income tax. They were pretty scathing about our plans during the campaign and there are a whole load of words they said that are coming back to haunt them now.

They could have saved themselves that grief by ceding the principle last year.

Anyway, that is their problem to deal with. The Budget is a pretty modest affair. It’s certainly not the sort of budget to deal with a struggling health service, unfit for purpose education system and a housing crisis that keeps getting worse.

Willie Rennie had this to say:

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Caron Lindsay

Lib Dems GAIN another Council seat

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 14th December 2017 - 8:30 am

Wednesday by-elections may be rare and weird but they are very welcome when they result in a Lib Dem GAIN.

Paul Follows took the Waverley, Surrey seat of Godalming Central an Ockford. We didn’t even stand a candidate there in 2015. We had a reasonable record there, pulling in 400-500 wards in previous years but this is a very good leap forward for us.

…

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Caron Lindsay

A rare bright spot in the Brexit nightmare

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 13th December 2017 - 7:55 pm

There have been precious few bright moments since the Brexit nightmare started. In fact, I can’t really remember any that didn’t involve being at an anti Brexit protest with other pro-Europeans.

I seriously didn’t expect the Government to lose tonight.  I thought that Tory rebels would express concern but ultimately line up behind Theresa May and David Davis. I felt it was more likely given that May is on the up at the moment. Maybe I was wrong, though. It’s probably easier to rebel on a good day than inflict what may be a fatal act on a government that you support.

I’d got in from work just as the vote was being called and the commentary was all about people thought to be certain Tory rebels now abstaining. My heart sank. But then when the tellers lined up, the opposition side started cheering. A tight vote had gone the right way.

The Government lost by 4 votes. 309 people backed Dominic Grieve’s amendment, 305, including Labour MPs like Kate Hoey and Frank Field, voted with the Government.

My reservation is that there is very little point in Parliament having a meaningful vote if Jeremy Corbyn simply lines up his people to support the Tories in implementing a really unpleasant and painful brexit. Labour did what it was supposed to do tonight, but every time it’s had the chance to do something it says it believes in, like back the single market,  its MPs sit on their hands.

Will they do the right thing as the issues kicked so deftly into the long grass have to be confronted and resolved? Who knows? At least they have the chance, I suppose.

And what of the Lib Dem reaction to the Government defeat? Tom Brake used some novel phrase we’ve never heard before about taking back control:

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Caron Lindsay

So what’s on your Christmas reading list?

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 13th December 2017 - 11:55 am

It’s that time of year when we hope that our nearest and dearest know us well enough to get us the books we want for Christmas. There is nothing nicer than spending the Christmas holidays snuggled up on the sofa with a nice pile of books that you don’t usually get the time to read.

My husband has been pointed firmly in the direction of the new Nigella book. Anything with a recipe for a chocolate and amaretto cake in it will definitely have pride of place in my Christmas reading pile. He also knows not really to bother buying me politics books because I will have bought them for myself throughout the year and failed to find time to read them.  Here are some I am looking forward to reading over the holidays:

I’m already a fair bit of the way through Hillary Rodham Clinton’s What Happened. I also have the audio book of Hillary reading. With every page there’s a huge pang of what might have been. I’ve been a huge fan of Hillary’s for half my life and I think she would have made a brilliant President. She would have done so much for young people and particularly women and girls in the most difficult places on earth to be female. Her book is candid and terrifying and it even has a chapter on love and kindness which aren’t qualities often associated with modern politics. They are always there in abundance as there are good people in all parties, but they don’t get much coverage.

Iain Dale’s Biteback Publishing is very annoyingly having a “everything at half price” sale until 31st December. Here is a selection of the Lib Dem books you might wish to buy.

 

David Laws’ second book on the Coalition, his diaries as he wrote them, is another interesting take on those years in Government. It’s not so neatly organised and very much in the moment.  He even included those entires which show him in an unexpectedly poor light. I’ve been an admirer of David’s ever since I realised that, despite being a bit too right wing for me on the economy, he was in favour of banning smacking. However, his rather bitter attacks on decent Lib Dem activists like Linda Jack are the polar opposite of endearing.  I’ll save that one for a day I’m angry anyway.

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Caron Lindsay

Laura Gordon steps up her campaign for Sheffield Hallam

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 13th December 2017 - 10:25 am

It’s only a few weeks since Laura Gordon was selected as Lib Dem Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for the marginal seat of Sheffield Hallam but already she is making her mark.

In June, Nick Clegg was defeated by the controversial Jared O’Mara who has failed to do the job he was elected to do.

Laura is effectively having to behave like an MP to fill the vacuum. In a wide-rangingi interview with the Sheffield Star, she talked about what she is doing to help local people:

She is helping people with casework, ‘taking up issues’ for Hallam constituents with councillors and the Lib Dem parliamentary team. “I feel this is something we can usefully do,” Laura says.

At the moment Jared O’Mara is not holding surgeries, so somebody needs to be looking at those casework issues. “He hasn’t voted since the 18th of October, it’s on the public record. He’s the only MP elected in 2017 who hasn’t made his maiden speech yet. It kind of speaks for itself, really.

She also talked about the guy Jared beat and what a loss he is to Parliament:

A lot of people have commented on that as I’ve been going around talking to people. Lots of people have said ‘I was helped by Nick’, often with things that we might think of as quite small, like getting a road fixed and campaigning on school buses or crossings. “He was very willing to get engaged on local issues, as well as doing all this work on the national level. I’ve got big shoes to fill but I’m going to do my best to fill them.

She and her husband settled in Sheffield five years ago:

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Caron Lindsay

Vince: Labour should be ashamed

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 12th December 2017 - 10:44 pm

Over the past few days, Liberal Democrats have been challenging Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party to back our amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill which would keep us in the single market which is so important for jobs and prosperity.

We are at this singularly unlucky point in time where we have a reckless and incompetent government leading us towards a potentially terrible Brexit. It doesn’t know what it wants as ministers say different things. You have both Gove and Davis undermining the deal before the ink is dry. It does nothing for the reputation of our country.

You would think …

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Caron Lindsay

Good news from Jo Swinson

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 12th December 2017 - 7:02 pm

Lovely to see some good news on Twitter today:

The new baby will be their second child. Their son Andrew was born in December 2013 and made history 7 months later when he became the first baby to go through the Commons voting lobby in the arms of his father.

Many congratulations to Jo, Duncan and Andrew.

Jo, of course, has a keen interest in protecting women from bad employment practice during and after pregnancy. Until she …

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Caron Lindsay

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #498

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 10th December 2017 - 9:01 pm

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 498th 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 (3-9 December, 2017), 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

The Mail on Sunday and Nigel Farage in one day? Vince takes the fight to the right

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 10th December 2017 - 5:52 pm

I certainly didn’t think I’d ever be embedding Nigel Farage’s LBC show on this site, but the first 20 minutes of today’s is well worth watching because our Vince is on there.

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Caron Lindsay

Budget drama in Scotland – Willie Rennie wants “an education focus as never before”

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 10th December 2017 - 8:47 am

The Scottish Government unveils its budget this Thursday. The SNP mislaid their majority in Holyrood in the elections last year so there could be a bit of drama between now and February when the Finance Bill is finalised.

The last time a Budget fell was in 2009 when the Greens, to everyone’s surprise, voted against. A couple of weeks later, to nobody’s surprise, they voted for it but hadn’t extracted anything of consequence from the Government.

When John Swinney was Finance Minister, he used to engage pretty well with the other parties. Willie Rennie was able to get things like free school meals, tens of thousands of college places and nursery education for 2 years olds put in. However, now that we have started beating the SNP pretty comprehensively, the atmosphere has turned a bit nasty.

New Finance Minister Derek Mackay is playing games with crucial inter-island ferry services in Orkney and Shetland, both represented by Liberal Democrat MSPs. Various SNP Ministers have been giving the very strong impression that they would help the Islands Councils with the cost of these ferries without which some remote communities simply could not survive.

Now, however, they are inferring that it’ll only go in the Budget if the Lib Dems promise to vote for it. That sort of posturing doesn’t play well in those communities. The issue was debated in Parliament last week during a Lib Dem opposition day and the Transport Minister Humza Yousaf made a pretty blatant threat.

There is a window of opportunity for Liberal Democrat members of the Scottish Parliament. Either they can engage positively in the budget, have a discussion about this important issue and side with their constituents, or they can play party politics.

I mean, we’d brought the issue to the floor of the Parliament, which was discussing it at that time and made its view plain by passing the Lib Dem motion. If SNP ministers fail to honour Parliament’s wishes, that is a pretty serious thing. 

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Caron Lindsay

Vince Cable calls for all BAME shortlists to tackle Parliament’s lack of diversity

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 9th December 2017 - 6:15 pm

Speaking to an audience of 4000 people at the Grand Mawlid Conference in Birmingham today, Vince Cable called for all BAME shortlists to tackle the lack of diversity in Parliament.  Currently, the law only allows exclusive shortlists for women and disabled people and the party elected MPs in both categories this year. Stephen Lloyd was selected from an all disabled shortlist in Eastbourne and Christine Jardine was selected on an all-women shortlist in Edinburgh West.

Vince said:

There remains a serious lack of diversity in Parliament.

There are just 51 BAME MPs. Despite being a record total, they represent only 7.9% of all

…

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Caron Lindsay

LibLink: Nick Clegg: Skeleton Brexit deal risks leaving Parliament in the dark

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 8th December 2017 - 2:55 pm

It’s been a good week for Nick Clegg. he won Best non fiction book by a parliamentarian for his How to Stop Brexit book in the Parliamentary Book Awards. We won’t mention the fact that he sadly wasn’t a parliamentarian when he wrote it. You don’t have to be – former MPs are eligible. He was quite pleased:

Writing in the FT Nick points out the dangers of the current direction of travel in the EU negotiations. With Brexiteers just wanting to get out and not caring about the consequences, they will be happy if there is only a basic outline deal on the table for MPs to vote on this time next year.

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Caron Lindsay

Layla Moran’s favourite film may well surprise you…..

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 8th December 2017 - 1:29 pm

Layla Moran is one of 17 new MPs in 2017 to give an interview to the Huffington Post about her life and what makes her tick. She talks about her childhood in places as diverse as famine-hit 1980s Ethiopia, Brussels and Jerusalem.

She talks about what sparked her interest in politics and distracted her from her first love of science.

I did a Masters degree in comparative education in 2007. That’s what really politicised me. I got very angry about the fact that having a had a background in countries that are genuinely poor, why in this country do we still have

…

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Caron Lindsay

Friday fun: Alex Cole-Hamilton, the snake and creepy crawlies and the Prime Minister of Spain

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 8th December 2017 - 8:04 am

To take our minds off the sound of things being kicked into the long grass in Brussels, here’s something to cheer you on a Friday morning. You really do need to watch the video because it will make you smile.

Some of you will be thinking What.On.Earth? Well, we have dug deeper and found where the actual footage is. As you probably know, Kezia Dugdale, Scotland’s former Labour leader, took part in ITV’s I’m a Celebrity. BBC Scotland’s current affairs programme Timeline made a slightly lower budget version of the programme and invited politicians from all parties to take part. Only two obliged. One of them was our Alex.

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Caron Lindsay

Did the Lib Dems GAIN that seat in Devon from the Tories?

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 7th December 2017 - 11:22 pm

The party had high hopes of gaining a seat in Devon from the Tories tonight.

So did we pull it off?

Nice one, Caroline Leaver and team.

Sadly we didn’t have a candidate in the only other principal by-election of the night, in Enfield which Labour won convincingly.

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Caron Lindsay

Lords Committee: “Difficult to envisage a worse outcome than no deal”

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 7th December 2017 - 10:25 am

As the EU negotiations traverse this predictably tricky stage, the Usual Suspects appear on television blithely arguing that we should just walk away from the negotiations with the EU with no deal because it’ll all be fine, really.

Except anyone can see that that outcome is far from desirable.

The House of Lords European Union Committee has skewered any notion that “no deal” is anything other than a highly damaging option in a report published today. It also slams the Government for enshrining the date of withdrawal in the European Withdrawal Bill.

They also make the obvious point that it is not possible to reach a deal by the March 2019 deadline and so our membership of the EU should be extended to cover this.

We may not have much information from the Government in terms of the impact of Brexit on certain sectors in the economy, but we do have some pretty strong evidence in this report of what  a disaster a “no deal” scenario would be for the agri-food business, for the ports, for aviation, for the financial sector and it really isn’t pretty. Read through the evidence and wonder how anyone can actually go on telly and advocate it as an option.

The report’s conclusion is damning:

A complete ‘no deal’ outcome would be deeply damaging for the UK. It would bring UK-EU cooperation on matters vital to the national interest, such as counter-terrorism, police, justice and security matters, nuclear safeguards, data exchange and aviation, to a sudden halt. It would place the status of UK nationals in the EU, and EU nationals in the UK, in jeopardy, and would necessarily lead to the imposition of controls at the Irish land border.

The wider economic impact of an abrupt departure from the EU single market and customs union, and the adoption of WTO conditions for trade, would be felt across a range of sectors, including financial services, the agri-food sector, and aviation. It would have a particularly disruptive impact on cross-border supply chains. The short-term impact on trade in goods would also be grave: the UK’s ports would be overwhelmed by the requirement for customs and other checks. There is simply not enough time to provide the necessary capacity, IT systems, human resource and expertise to deal with such an outcome.

Vince Cable echoed the Report’s conclusions, saying that “no deal” would leave us “poorer, weaker and more isolated than at any time in modern history.”

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Caron Lindsay

Your last chance to stock up on your Never going to give EU up merchandise

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 6th December 2017 - 10:04 am

I really, really wasn’t going to do it. I know it was a great idea for the party to run a design competition for some pre-Christmas merchandise, but I wasn’t actually going to buy any.

Then  I looked at my mug in the office that had seen better days and caved.

The party asked members to come up with a design to put on t-shirts, bags and mugs.  Out of 700 entries, whittled down to a shortlist of 3. I have to say that one of the reasons I was put off buying was because the shortlist wasn’t very diverse. The other reason was just the thought of Rick Astley.  I digress, however.  9000 members voted and the design you see above emerged victorious.

You can see the design as it appears on the said t-shirts, mugs and bags here.

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 8 Comments
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