Author Archives: Mary Reid

Mary Reid

From today’s Lib Dem News

By Mary Reid | Fri 4th May 2012 - 12:15 pm

Lib Dem News cartoon 04-05-12

 

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Mary Reid

London elections results open thread

By Mary Reid | Fri 4th May 2012 - 10:00 am

The count for the Mayor of London and the members of the London Assembly is now underway in Olympia, ExCel and Alexandra Palace.

Once again, the electorate have had to cope with not one but three different voting systems.

Mayor of London

There are seven candidates for the Mayor of London, with Brian Paddick standing for the Liberal Democrats.

Voters had the opportunity to mark a first and a second preference candidate on the ballot paper. If one candidate achieves more than 50% of the first preference votes then that person is elected. If, as is more likely, no candidate passes the 50% ...

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Posted in London and News | Tagged , , and | 21 Comments
Mary Reid

Good morning, voters

By Mary Reid | Fri 4th May 2012 - 7:32 am

If you have just joined us after a heavy night at the count, or watching the results on TV, then welcome. LDV readers have been reporting and commenting on the results all through the night, so please join in the discussion on the local elections open thread.

Later this morning we will be starting a London elections open thread to reflect on the results at City Hall.

Posted in News | Tagged , , and | 1 Comment
Mary Reid

The local elections results open thread

By Mary Reid | Thu 3rd May 2012 - 10:05 pm

The polls have closed, so where are we?

England

Elections have been held for 128 councils. In most cases one third of the seats were being contested. Altogether 6706 seats were up for election, of which 1170 were held by Liberal Democrats.

Ten English cities have been holding referendums on whether to have a directly elected mayor. They are Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Coventry, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield and Wakefield.

Doncaster was voting on whether to abolish its directly elected mayor.

Three cities – London, Salford and Liverpool – have been electing a mayor.

  • London: 7 candidates, with Brian Paddick waving the Lib Dem flag.
  • Salford: 10 candidates, including

…

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Posted in Local government, London, Scotland and Wales | Tagged , , , and | 35 Comments
Mary Reid

LibLink: Stephen Gilbert – This half-baked pasty tax is offensive

By Mary Reid | Fri 27th April 2012 - 3:31 pm

You really must follow the link to the Guardian to see what  Stephen Gilbert, MP for St Austell & Newquay, is eating.

The pasty industry is rising up and marching, it seems.

He writes:

It’s just over a month since George Osborne presented his budget to the House of Commons but the uproar over the proposed “pasty tax” hasn’t subsided. The VAT extension on hot food, which would include the Cornish pasty, is not only politically unpopular, it’s also unworkable, unfair and based on a flawed logic.

…

Today, I’m joining hundreds of people from the pasty industry to demonstrate

…

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Posted in LibLink | Tagged and | 25 Comments
Mary Reid

Demos: “Religious people are more likely to be politically progressive”

By Mary Reid | Sun 8th April 2012 - 3:55 pm

It seems appropriate on Easter Day to report the findings of the report entitled Faithful Citizens by the think tank Demos.

I have been embarrassed and saddened by the portrayal of “the church” as bigoted and homophobic recently, and this research helps to counterbalance that impression. Demos’ report implies that people of faith are more likely to share Liberal Democrat values than to hold the conservative fundamentalist views often described in the media.

13% of citizens claim to belong to a church or other religious organisation, so these findings refer to believers across all the faiths in the UK, although Christians are …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 25 Comments
Mary Reid

Party groups unite against increased surveillance

By Mary Reid | Wed 4th April 2012 - 3:55 pm

Yesterday Mark Pack summarised the current state of play on the snooping row (“The wheels are coming off the online monitoring wagon”).

This topic has generated more emails, blogs and tweets from angry Lib Dems than anything I can remember. Party members seem to be united in their opposition to increased monitoring, so much so that statements from the so-called right and left of the party are virtually interchangeable.

From the Social Liberal Forum:

Any furthering of the already-extensive powers to interrogate peoples’ communication, especially in the absence of proper oversight, would constitute an ineffective and illiberal intrusion of our civil

…

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Posted in News | Tagged , , and | 6 Comments
Mary Reid

Nick Clegg and Ming Campbell add their tributes to David Walter

By Mary Reid | Fri 30th March 2012 - 2:55 pm

From Nick Clegg:

 This is such sad news. I knew David for years and he was widely loved and admired in the party. He was a gentle and patient man with great integrity and an impressive career in journalism. 

I will always remember him for his great sense of humour at the most difficult or challenging times. He will be hugely missed by all of us in the party and our thoughts are with his family.

From Ming Campbell:

David Walter was a professional to his fingertips. He was universally respected and admired by his fellow journalists and held in great affection by the Liberal

…

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Posted in News and Obituaries | Tagged , and | Leave a comment
Mary Reid

LDVideo: Jenny Willott joins Platform 51’s Glad Rags campaign

By Mary Reid | Fri 30th March 2012 - 1:51 pm

Jenny Willott MP talks about her wedding jewellery as part of Platform 51’s campaign to raise awareness of the widespread use of depressants by women.

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Posted in YouTube | Tagged and | 2 Comments
Mary Reid

David Walter

By Mary Reid | Fri 30th March 2012 - 10:25 am

Yesterday, sadly, David Walter lost his battle with cancer and died in the Royal Marsden Hospital.

He was widely known in the party, having served as Director of Communications for the Liberal Democrats at Cowley Street.

Chris Rennard writes:

David was widely respected as a decent, principled and trustworthy person.

He was always positive and encouraging to work with as well as being professional and completely loyal to the party that he always supported. He had to be discreet about his party allegiance whilst working for the BBC and ITN and he was greatly respected by both those organisations and friends

…

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Posted in News and Obituaries | Tagged , and | 29 Comments
Mary Reid

LibLink: Redressing the balance between the generations

By Mary Reid | Fri 23rd March 2012 - 4:43 pm

Chris Nicholson, Director of CentreForum, has posted his take on the Budget on Total Politics.  He concludes:

It is often said that the best Budgets are usually those that get the immediate negative headlines. While the press has focused on the alleged “unfairness” of the Budget, history is likely to be rather kinder in suggesting that the budget has been much fairer than it at first sight appeared.

You can read the reasons for his optimism here.

Posted in LibLink | Tagged , and | 1 Comment
Mary Reid

LibLink: David Laws on the Budget in the Telegraph

By Mary Reid | Fri 23rd March 2012 - 10:49 am

David Laws penned his thoughts about the Budget in the Telegraph yesterday, under the headline “Budget 2012: Not so much a gamble, more a grand strategy”

He writes:

Despite its scratchy origins, this was a strong Conservative-Lib Dem Budget, reminiscent of the earliest days of the Coalition at its best. It was radical and combined both enterprise and fairness. It did not duck difficult decisions or end up with lowest common denominator compromises. At times, the run-up may have looked like Coalition politics at their worst. I would argue that what resulted was Coalition policy-making at its best.

The Liberal Democrats challenged the

…

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Posted in LibLink and News | Tagged and | 34 Comments
Mary Reid

How many Liberal MPs can you get in a taxi? *

By Mary Reid | Fri 16th March 2012 - 10:55 am

I guess I am the only Lib Dem Voice editor who actually remembers the Orpington by-election of 1962.  I was not old enough to vote (in case you were wondering) and I did not actually get involved in campaigning, but the excitement of the event certainly made an impression on me as a young supporter of the Liberals.

Eric Lubbock, now Lord Avebury, gained a huge swing in Orpington, taken mainly from from the Conservatives. That victory was widely perceived as a turning point for the party. For many years before, Liberal support had been declining; the standing joke was …

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 7 Comments
Mary Reid

Boris Johnston breaks promise on free Olympics tickets for school children in London

By Mary Reid | Mon 5th March 2012 - 12:17 pm

Last November the Mayor of London announced that 125,000 schoolchildren in London would be given free tickets for the Olympic or Paralympic Games. That would have been enough to provide tickets for one in eight London children aged 10 to 18.

But, as reported in the Evening Standard, Lib Dem London Assembly member, Dee Doocey, has asked the Mayor how many tickets were actually allocated to children.  The answer came back: just 95,761 tickets. The remaining 30,000 or so tickets have been given to teachers to accompany them. 

That raises at least two questions:

Why did the Mayor overlook the fact that

…

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Posted in London and News | Tagged and | 5 Comments
Mary Reid

LibLink: Are the Lib Dems Giving Up More Than the Tories in Government?

By Mary Reid | Tue 21st February 2012 - 8:03 pm

Louise Phillips, a former Lib Dem staffer, asks this question in the UK version of The Huffington Post.

There have been a lot of sacrifices from the Liberal Democrats in the past two years. Tuition fees (obviously); mansion tax; free schools. But, and this is the argument I make in the pub whenever someone finds out I used to work for the party, the Tories are giving up more. They have sacrificed long held beliefs on taxation to allow the Lib Dems to raise the tax threshold to £10,000, putting money back into the pocket of most working people in the

…

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Posted in LibLink | Tagged and | 51 Comments
Mary Reid

Nick Clegg launches Youth Contract for unemployed young people

By Mary Reid | Tue 21st February 2012 - 6:07 pm

More than a million young people, aged 16 to 24, are unemployed. That does not include students. Every single person included in that number is not in employment, not in education, and not in training either – the so-called NEETs.

That is a shocking figure, and as well as having a profound impact on the lives of each of those young people, it also affects the rest of us.

As Nick Clegg says, “Sitting at home with nothing to do when you’re so young can knock the stuffing out of you for years. It is a tragedy for the young people involved …

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Posted in News | Tagged | 3 Comments
Mary Reid

Petitions to Parliament – waste of time or golden opportunity?

By Mary Reid | Sat 30th July 2011 - 10:09 am

The Government has just launched its brand new e-petitions system. You can find it here. The first petitions will be going live next Thursday.

Haven’t we been here before? Well, it is true that Labour surprised us all by setting up the Number 10 online petitions website some years ago, and that this attracted thousands of petitions.

But after the initial enthusiasm there was inevitable disappointment, because, in the vast majority of cases, the only response received by petitioners was a statement from a civil servant. It is true that, in some cases, petitions channelled strong public concern about …

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Posted in Online politics | Tagged | 25 Comments
Mary Reid

Opinion: Digital local government

By Mary Reid | Thu 21st April 2011 - 9:25 am

The devolution of powers and responsibilities from central to local government – a major commitment of the Coalition – has long been an aspiration of Liberal Democrats.  Centrally-driven, over-prescriptive bureaucracy is bad for democracy. But there is a danger that devolution could result in disenfranchising people if their democratic entitlements are not defined, recognised and upheld.

Before we go any further we need to distinguish between two ways in which residents relate to their local council:

  • Residents are consumers (or users) of local council services.
  • Residents are citizens. They have the right to vote in elections, of course. Beyond that, as Liberal Democrats,

…

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Posted in News | Tagged | 6 Comments
Mary Reid

Opinion: Do social networking sites support democracy and the Open Society?

By Mary Reid | Mon 6th December 2010 - 11:47 am

The obvious answer is, yes. But do they?

Let’s track this idea back.

In 1979 Christopher Evans published “The Mighty Micro”. His bold and prophetic book looked at the impact of the microchip on society over the next 10-15 years.

In the same year, 1979, I wrote my first computer program on a teletype terminal and stored it on paper tape. Some desk top computers had been built, but they were very uncommon.

The chapter that really inspired me when I first read it was the one on Political and Social Issues. He predicted that the 1980s and 1990s would be dominated by “virtually infinite data transmission”

“This kind of development will encourage lateral communication – the spread of information from human being to human being across the base of the social pyramid. Characteristically this favours the kind of open society … the opposite effect on autocracies who like to make sure that all information is handled very firmly downwards”

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 3 Comments
Mary Reid

Opinion: Pulling the plug on swimming pools?

By Mary Reid | Sat 30th October 2010 - 12:55 pm

Over the last week, we’ve all focussed on welfare issues, tuition fees and housing. The impact of the 7% pa cut in local government funding has yet to register with most of us.

Each council will make its own decisions on how to deal with a total grant reduction of 28% over four years. Coverage will be local, so the public will inevitably blame councillors rather than ministers when popular services disappear.

The media have been, inaccurately, talking about a 28% cut in council budgets (rather than in funding) – it’s not quite as bad as that, although it will still be …

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Posted in Local government and Op-eds | Tagged and | 13 Comments
Mary Reid

How to blog successfully as a councillor

By Mary Reid | Sat 28th November 2009 - 8:55 am

Welcome to part eight of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via this page. The series will then be revised and collated into an e-book, so please do post up your comments as the series progresses. Today it’s the turn of Kingston councillor Mary Reid.

Young woman, blogging by windowYou probably already know that 7% of Liberal Democrat councillors have a website/blog, compared with 2% of Tory …

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Mary Reid

Mary Reid on Nick’s first 100 days

By Mary Reid | Thu 27th March 2008 - 8:55 pm

Just before we knew who our new Leader would be, I wrote one of the pieces on Lib Dem Voice giving him some advice for the first 100 days.

I said:

We all know that our real power base is in local government. And it is here that some of the most interesting initiatives in community politics are being played out by Lib Dem run councils.

So I want to challenge the new leader to capitalise on our distinctive style of leadership out beyond Westminster. He could begin by a fact-finding tour of the country, and, guided by local knowledge, align himself

…

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Posted in Leadership Election and Op-eds | Leave a comment
Mary Reid

Nominate your International ePolitician

By Mary Reid | Mon 21st January 2008 - 10:53 am

I have a dream that the International ePolitician Award will go to a Brit, and a Lib Dem at that.

Since I am involved with ICELE, which is sponsoring the awards, I can’t nominate anyone. The rest of you have got until next Wednesday to do the right thing.

To quote:

ePolitician – making a difference on the ground
This award will be given to the politician who can demonstrate how, by engaging online, they have made a difference to their electorate, and how online engagement has improved local people’s lives.

You can nominate any elected representative, or if you are one, you can …

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Mary Reid

Opinion: What should the new leader do in his first 100 days? #4

By Mary Reid | Tue 18th December 2007 - 8:55 am

We all know that our real power base is in local government. And it is here that some of the most interesting initiatives in community politics are being played out by Lib Dem run councils.

So I want to challenge the new leader to capitalise on our distinctive style of leadership out beyond Westminster.

He could begin by a fact-finding tour of the country, and, guided by local knowledge, align himself with the greenest or most citizen-centric initiatives that have been introduced by our councillors. Each one will be accompanied by a challenge to the other parties to show whether they have …

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Posted in Leadership Election and Op-eds | Tagged | 7 Comments
Mary Reid

Opinion: Bring back the suppressed blogs

By Mary Reid | Sun 23rd September 2007 - 12:42 pm

I was pretty shocked to learn, via Colin Ross’s blog this morning, that a councillor’s blog has been taken down. In fact, his webhost has been shut down as a result of an international legal action which had nothing at all to do with him.

Bob Piper is a Labour councillor in Sandwell and I have dipped into his feisty blog from time to time. It’s just the kind of campaigning local blog that councillors should be doing; it keeps democracy alive and lively, and I value that even when I disagree with what he writes.

The story revolves around …

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Posted in Op-eds | 5 Comments
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