Author Archives: Michael Taylor

Michael Taylor

Why are we so timid?

By Michael Taylor | Sun 17th May 2026 - 8:55 am

The Liberal Party I joined in 1964 was not a timid party. Under Grimond’s leadership, it wanted major changes to the UK. It wanted devolution, voting and parliamentary reform, sexual and racial equality, supported joining the EEC, wanted nuclear disarmament and wanted more cooperatives amongst many other things. And it wasn’t afraid to say so.

Fast forward to today and we seem afraid of our own shadow. We say little or nothing on controversial issues for fear of offending anybody. Dig a little deeper and you find we probably support the same things that we did before but you’d never know. We are criticising Starner for being too cautious, whilst doing exactly the same ourselves.

Often our leadership wrings its hands about a perceived problem but makes no proposals to change them. Take the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of sex. We all know that the right thing to do is to change the law to make the equality act mean what we thought it did, but our leadership’s silence has helped the growth of anti-trans sentiment and made the lives of trans people more difficult. We have gained nothing but contempt for our stance and lost the support of many in the trans community.

We continue with the pretence that the answer to Brexit is to join a custom’s union, when the real problem is not being in the single marker. Obviously, some focus group has been telling the party that support for the SM or joining the EU will upset voters in some undefined demographic.

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Michael Taylor

Another cockup by this ham-fisted government

By Michael Taylor | Mon 13th April 2026 - 9:04 am

For years, our political opponent, especially the hypocritical Labour party, have lambasted us for our role in tuition fees during the coalition, conveniently overlooking Labour’s role of introducing them in the first place after saying they wouldn’t and then introducing top-up fees when they said they wouldn’t.

This ham-fisted government has messed about with student fees ever since getting back into power, first raising the interest rate and then capping it. Saying they would reintroduce maintenance grants and then not doing so.

Now a group of mainly poor working-class students are being told that the people responsible for student loans have mistakenly …

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Michael Taylor

Equality, degrowth and survival

By Michael Taylor | Mon 15th December 2025 - 12:31 pm

I am becoming increasingly concerned by the party’s continued stress on economic growth. This is in total contradiction to what is necessary on the environment. Of course, when pressed, this aim is hedged about as ‘green growth’, but increasingly this is detached from the direction needed to save the planet.

As a Quaker, one of my aims is to speak truth to power. When the very survival of our planet is threatened by widespread flouting and outright denial of the steps necessary to achieve a green economy, it is surely time that we, as radical politicians, start to tell the truth about the future direction of our country and our planet.

We can no longer promise never ending increases in living standards. So, all the pretence that somehow, we can improve life for those on lower incomes through growth must be discarded. The only way the poor can become less poor is through greater equality and this necessitates the rich having less. It is already obscene that a small number of people, both in the UK and worldwide, have income and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice and are able to use the power that it brings to pursue their goals at the expense of everyone else.

As a party, we pass policies which talk about equality, but our leaders continue to talk about growth, rather than facing up to the need to radically shift the split of income and wealth. It may not be a popular message and it will be roundly attacked in the media owned by the super-rich, but it’s the truth.

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Michael Taylor

The Supreme Court decision – End the Trappist-like silence now

By Michael Taylor | Tue 18th November 2025 - 10:29 am

The Supreme Court (SC) was asked to interpret what ‘man’ and ‘woman’ meant is respect of the Equality Act.

Their decision was that ‘with respect to the Equality Act and that Act only’ man and woman were to mean the biological gender recorded at birth and not that recorded on gender recognition certificates.

This was a very unwelcome judgement and it has been seized upon by all manner of anti-trans people to mean that the judgement applies in all circumstances and in every possible situation. Most notably, this interpretation was jumped on by Kishwer Faulkner, Chair of the Equality and Human Rights …

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Michael Taylor

Conference countdown: A confusing state of affairs

By Michael Taylor | Sat 23rd August 2025 - 10:12 am

The party seems to be getting into a strange situation about the European Union, and it seems confused as well.

On the one hand it is calling for a special customs union with the EU, when there’s a perfectly good one already available – one we were in for over 40 years – and on the other it’s castigating Labour for not having the courage to join the Single Market and the Customs Union, but not, apparently, seeking for the UK to join them.

Serious observers of the state of the British Economy vis-à-vis the EU know that the only way to start to make up the serious decline caused by Brexit is to join the Single Market and the Customs Union, so that the many barriers that now exist to trade with the EU can be eliminated and trade can flow uninterrupted to and from the EU, our biggest and nearest trading partner.

Indeed, this contradiction can be clearly seen in the resolution F31 up for debate on the Monday of Conference. In lines 30-34 it bemoans the lack of ambition by the government’s refusal to consider joining the Single Market and the Customs Union and in lines 66-69 urges the creation of a new bespoke Customs Union with the EU to cut red tape and spur economic growth.

It seems to me that there is a singular lack of ambition by the writers of the motion. Instead of calling for the UK to negotiate entry to the Customs Union and the Single Market, it calls for something much weaker instead.

I am very puzzled by this. Opinion polls are now showing a clear majority in favour, not of Single Market and Customs Union, but fully rejoining the EU.

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Michael Taylor

What? Sewerage spills will halve by 2030?

By Michael Taylor | Mon 21st July 2025 - 12:37 pm

What is this Labour government playing at? Having steadfastly refused to abolish OFWAT until last week, they now blithely announce, as if it’s some great triumph, that sewerage dumping will halve by 2030.

Once again this pusillanimous Labour government are letting private water companies off the hook. Successive government (including it must be said the coalition government) did nothing about OFWAT and continued to allow water companies to siphon off cash in dividends, outrageous salaries and huge bonuses, instead of insisting that they deal with sewerage treatment so that dumping became a thing of the past.

Now Labour is, with extreme reluctance …

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Michael Taylor

Public sector procurement

By Michael Taylor | Thu 10th July 2025 - 5:05 pm

Both Peter Black and Lord Bonkers have referred to the problems of public procurement. It is a major problem and one that would have had our Victorian and Edwardian ancestors scratching their heads in bewilderment. Whenever they wanted to build say a railway, they would get an Act of Parliament passed authorising all the necessary work, the finance and land acquisition, appoint contractors and get on with it. This didn’t only apply to new undertakings. A recent TV documentary based round Leeds told us that a local building contractor was appointed to sort out the land and tracks round Leeds Station in the late 1800’s devastated by a fire in Dark Arches. The contractor gathered a huge workforce and had the railway back in business in 6 days. Can you imagine that ever happening today? Yet, when I was young, British Rail often got railways running again in a few days, even after serious crashes.

Just look at the mess surrounding major projects, like CalMac’s new ferries, HS2, Midland Mainline electrification and many more. Constant delays, huge price rises, cancellations. Why is this happening and why do both the UK and Scottish governments accept huge price rises often amounting to a doubling of the price?

Here a comparison with the private sector is apt. If someone wants a house/houses built or if a business wants new offices or a factory, professionals are employed to get the necessary permissions, raise the finance and employ a contractor to do the job. A price and timetable are agreed with the contractor and very often there are penalty clauses for not completing on time and to budget. If a contractor doesn’t do the sums right, then that’s their problem. They can’t, usually, go back and ask for more money. When I was in the USA in the early 70s, motorways had to be resurfaced overnight and there were huge penalties if they were not completed on time. Where is that sort of operation in the UK today?

Yet, somehow, with public contracts, this doesn’t apply. Contractors seem to have carte blanche to announce delays and demand more money, presumably on the basis that it’s only the state and their funds are bottomless. Why are contractors for public projects not held to the same rules as those working in the private sector?

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Michael Taylor

The Action Day – a good thing?

By Michael Taylor | Wed 25th June 2025 - 8:55 am

A lot has been said about the value of ‘Action Days’. I have no doubt that for a parliamentary or council by-election it is a vital tool in getting outside help to where it is most needed. I am certain that there is great camaraderie and that it seems more effective to be working in a group and appear to cover a lot of ground.

Is this a tool to be used when council wide elections are happening alongside say a Mayoral election, where lots of people are seeking election or re-election. Is it productive to move people around instead of focussing on your own ward? Do action days add to the number of leaflets delivered or doors knocked?

I want to suggest that they don’t. In my early days as a campaigner and councillor, I found very soon found that me knocking on doors to ask people to vote for me was the most effective tool in the armoury. Taking time to go and knock on other people’s doors or deliver their leaflets reduced the number of doors I could knock on in my own ward. Moving local members around the council area is a bit like moving the deck chairs on the Titanic! 

The alternative to all this busy organisation is to spend the non-election period recruiting deliverers, getting poster sites agreed and running training sessions for members who haven’t canvassed before, so that wards can run largely self-sufficiently during elections.

There is one caveat. There does need to be a mechanism for funnelling volunteers from outside the area to where they are needed and for sorting out where a mayoral candidate is to go during the campaign, but action days add a layer of complexity that may actually detract from getting things done.

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Michael Taylor

The importance of the presumption of innocence

By Michael Taylor | Sat 3rd August 2024 - 7:55 am

Innocent

There is a tradition dating back well over 1000 years that any person accused of a crime  is presumed innocent until proved guilty. In other words, an accusation doesn’t make someone guilty, it a court that hears the evidence and decides, either magistrates or, for serious offences a jury.

There is a worrying tendency today to pronounce someone guilty merely on the basis of an accusation and to demand that that person be treated as a criminal, losing their job and being shunned by society.

Take Huw Edwards. He was accused of dreadful crimes involving children and has, after a trial in which he pleaded guilty, been convicted. This is the point at which he should have lost his job, not back in 2023 when the accusations surfaced. Many years ago, I attended a CHE bonfire party held at the independent Labour Party tearooms somewhere outside Burnley. An older man recalled that prior to the sexual offences act he was charged and convicted for homosexual acts. His employers, the local council, waited till he had been convicted and then, and only then, handed him his dismissal papers. Of course, today he wouldn’t even have been in court, but the council did not assume he was guilty and continued to employ him until after the conviction.

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Michael Taylor

The future of telling?

By Michael Taylor | Wed 24th July 2024 - 11:55 am

I sat for an hour at a polling station in Camborne as part of my very long day on July 4th. I was struck by the change in voters’ habits. Whereas in the past they would bring their polling cards with them, one unexpected side effect of the new rules on voter ID has brought about is that they no longer do.

Now they bring ID with them.

I found it very difficult to get polling numbers at all. It was only possible – and then only in about 30% of cases – to get numbers by being quite pushy in asking voters to get their number from the poll clerk and give it to me on the way out. Those who know me well will have little doubt about my ability to be downright pushy, but I very much doubt that this is the right way to endear us to voters.

Now you can argue that telling isn’t really about the numbers but about being there, but we certainly have relied on telling to reduce our necessity to knock up. Indeed, that’s often how I used to sell telling to would be tellers. Asking people to go and stand in the polling station to be seen is, in my view, a much harder sell.

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Michael Taylor

The hole in our democracy

By Michael Taylor | Fri 6th October 2023 - 3:33 pm

There is an increasing hole in our democracy, a place where election candidates and political parties are finding increasingly difficult to reach. I refer, of course, to gated communities and those many high-rise blocks where access is by code or fob.

This is not assisted by owners and managers of these houses making it almost impossible to contact them to seek access. I have personally been escorted off the premises by officious caretakers who point blank refuse to give details of who manages the blocks. Now whether this only applies to political parties with whom they disagree, I have no idea.

Sometimes, there is a way round this problem. Some blocks have a trades button that operates for a few hours in the morning and enable those in the know to get in. Sometimes, it is possible to persuade a resident to let you in. (However, as I found out in a gated community in Mid Beds, that doesn’t mean they leave the gate open long enough to get out and I found myself having to climb over the gate!)

There are some rights, I am led to believe, in the Representation of the People Acts that purport to give candidates access to voters, but they are difficult to enforce, and obdurate officials simply stonewall and refuse to give access.

I now think this is a case for legislation to ensure that candidates and campaigners get access to every property to deliver leaflets and to canvass. If such houses were obliged to display at their access gates the name, address, phone number and email of the company managing the block (with suitably large fines for non-compliance) and those property managers were obliged to arrange access for election campaigners within say 48 hours of a request (again with large fines for non-compliance), then this problem might be solved.

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Michael Taylor

The other elephant in the room

By Michael Taylor | Wed 27th September 2023 - 10:17 am

We all know that one of the topics the leadership don’t want us to talk about is the EU. But there is another very important matter to voters that we say almost nothing about either, taxation.

There was a time, when I was a young Liberal and just starting out on the employment trail when we proudly supported a progressive income tax system as both fair and certain. When I started work, basic rate was 33% and the top rate was 98%. We told people, quite rightly, that the tax was necessary to pay for public services. Then along came Thatcher and Laffer with his ridiculous curve and suddenly we have joined the ‘tax is bad’ viewpoint and we have become terrified of even suggesting that our policy programmes WILL require tax rises. Sure, we talk about taxes on the banks, or windfall taxes on utilities or taxing fatcats, but we simply don’t engage in the task of reminding people that their taxes are not a dreadful burden, but actually necessary to pay for the services we (and they) want.

It’s almost as if we now share the view of a US citizen interviewed about tax, who said ‘Why should I pay tax, the government should find the money!’

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Michael Taylor

Reflections after a Conference – a challenge to the Lib Dems

By Michael Taylor | Wed 28th June 2023 - 8:22 am

Editor’s Note: Mick wrote this piece after the Brighton Conference in 2018 and sent it to me recently as he felt it was still relevant today. Apart from the fact that Brexit is now an (at least for now) inescapable reality, he’s right.  We need to be radical and punchy to deliver the liberal, fair, more equal society that we want to see. I’m reminded of the Liberal not Moderate t-shirts that some of us wore proudly around that Conference…

After a short period at the Lib Dem conference I am still in Brighton for a couple of days. Brighton is quite a good place to reflect on the state of the UK.

Thinking back, Brighton used to be in much better nick than it is now. Many pavements are cracked and broken, many of the houses and hotels look run down and in need of repair and renovation. The seafront is not particularly special and the West Pier is still a burned out shell. Here, in one of the UKs premier resorts, there are many homeless people on the streets and many beggars as well. Hardly the sort of Britain that we Liberal Democrats want to see!

Recycling largely takes place by means of unsightly bins strewn around the streets and the former green-run council’s recycling policies made a mockery of recycling anyway.

I suspect that much of this is the result of austerity, especially the massive cuts to the finances of the local council that no longer enable it to respond to the needs of the Brighton and Hove Community.

Brexit will hardly improve matters, because hotels and restaurants here rely heavily on European workers and they may not be available after March 2019.

Although I have no direct information, I suspect that housing is expensive and that many people, especially the young, have no hope of getting on the housing ladder and live in the private rented sector with its high prices and insecurity of tenure.

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Michael Taylor

How to find candidates

By Michael Taylor | Wed 21st June 2023 - 7:30 am

I note that Mark Pack is trying to persuade the party to run many more candidates in local elections. He’s quite right. No-one, as far as I know, has suggested how you do this. In this article I offer my take on how to get candidates from scratch.

So, what do you do to get candidates? Ideally, you would have started this process at least 6 months before the election, but the methodology is the same. September is also a good time to start because we often have a useful boost in interest because of the party conference.

Forget the phone, email, text or any other sort of social media. In 40 years of candidate hunting I have recruited only one person using all these approaches. You have to go and call on people, unannounced and ask them. If you try any other approach, they will say no. Lots of people have not accepted the no contact in advance rule and wonder why they fail. “Oh, but it’s rude not to phone in advance, they might not be in, we may be wasting our time” or similar are all guaranteed to result in the person saying no. Believe me, as one of the most successful candidate recruiters in the country, I really do know what I’m talking about.

But how do you know who to ask? Mostly, you don’t. Connect and EARS both have functions that enable you to create lists of people who have been canvassed LIB DEM and voted at least twice recently. It may not be a big list, but it works for me. Secondly, look for activists in local causes or clubs and societies. Thirdly ask everyone you call on if they can think of some else to ask. Of the 13 people I recruited in 2019, only 3 were active party members at the time of asking. 3 were activists in local charities or organisations and the rest came from the lists of people who we thought had supported us.

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Michael Taylor

The case for state ownership or control of water and electricity

By Michael Taylor | Thu 4th May 2023 - 10:35 am

As many friends know, I now live in a seaside town in Greece.

I have been reflecting on the cost of living here and, in particular, the cost of water and electricity, compared to the UK.

I have just paid my first water bill. For six months I have paid 37€. It’s not that I don’t use water, I do. I have a washing machine and a dishwasher, I clean the car, I water the garden and of course I shower and shave daily. Compare that with the £25 a month I was paying in Mytholmroyd, which I left just over a year ago. I suspect it’s gone up now.

My most recent electricity bill was 134€ for a month and the Greek government subsidies me by 159€ a month. My house is all electric with AC units which double up as heaters in the winter and there are pumps on both the cold-water supply and the solar water heating panel. My cooker is electric. I believe that were I still in the UK I would be paying around £450 a month for my previous flat. This means that electricity in 74% more expensive in the UK even if I had no subsidy in Greece. With the subsidy my electricity bill is 280% less than in the UK.

Now, Greece is not a particularly wealthy country. It recently went through a major financial crisis and much that the state had done before has been lost. Water, however, is run by local councils. In the UK water is owned by private companies and the costs are exorbitant and the directors grossly overpaid.

My electricity company in Greece DEH is the former state-owned electricity company. Yet, it is not charging grossly inflated prices and people are being helped with their electricity bills. Sure, it’s slow to act and there are power cuts sometimes (mainly due to weather like thunderstorms), but it is providing a service at affordable prices. It is clearly regulated and behaves reasonably.

The conclusion I draw from this is twofold.

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Michael Taylor

We really must stand up for the NHS

By Michael Taylor | Sun 15th January 2023 - 12:30 pm

The NHS is once again in the news and not in a good way. It is fast becoming a basket case with ambulances unable to deliver critically ill patients to hospital in anything like acceptable times, operations often delayed with unacceptable waiting times, people unable to make GP appointments and now a series of strikes because the Tory Government cries crocodile tears instead of funding the NHS and its staff properly.

There is a dangerous myth that has been around in our politics for far too long that the public sector is inefficient and that as much of it as possible …

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Michael Taylor

Are we becoming like North Korea?

By Michael Taylor | Mon 14th March 2022 - 3:43 pm

I have just sat through almost every debate in the auditorium of Spring Conference and have been struck by the lack of real debate. This is primarily because nothing remotely controversial is put to the conference. We get votes in favour of between 80 and 99% in favour of policy motions and even in favour of amendments.

The only time a vote was even remotely close was on whether or not to HEAR a request for a reference back!

The most enthusiastic anyone got to debate issues was on how to reform the party structure.

I have been a party member since 1964 and have attended many assemblies (Liberal Party) and conferences (Liberal Democrats). I don’t think I look back with rose tinted spectacles, but I have a clear recollection of closely argued debates where a few votes either way determined the outcome. The late Edward Dunford once said that you could see the audience swaying one way and then the other as a debate progressed.

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Michael Taylor

Tolerance and free speech

By Michael Taylor | Tue 18th January 2022 - 4:58 pm

When I joined the Liberal Party, as a young Liberal, in 1964, I joined a party that wanted to build a society where all possessed liberty and none should be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.

The party expected broad agreement with the ideas of a Liberal society but tolerated people who had a variety of views on the issues of the day.

So, whilst the majority view in the party was against capital punishment, in favour of legalising abortion, divorce law reform, decriminalisation of consenting homosexual relations between adults and of joining the EEC, there were those who differed from majority party opinion on any of these issues and argued them passionately.

MPs were expected to follow their consciences on social issues and were not whipped on them.

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Michael Taylor

Electoral fraud – the truth about personation

By Michael Taylor | Fri 18th October 2019 - 1:55 pm

I doubt that one in a hundred readers of LDV have ever heard of a tendered ballot paper, let alone seen one.

Electoral law makes provision at EVERY election for the issue of tendered ballot papers, sometimes known as pink ballot papers.

If you go down to the polling station to vote and the presiding officer says to you, “I’m sorry, but I can’t give you a ballot paper because you’ve already voted”, what do you do? The answer is that you can insist that you haven’t voted, and the presiding officer must then offer you a ‘tendered’ ballot paper. This is the same as the white ballot paper, but for two things.

  1. It is a different colour (usually pink)
  2. It is stored separately from the white ballot papers.

How is it counted? The answer is that it isn’t, unless the election is challenged in an electoral court. In that case, the original ballot paper is found and compared with the tendered ballot paper and the tendered paper is the one that is counted. Now of course you might quite correctly argue that this breaks the secrecy of the election, but it does give an element of protection against personation, that is the attempt to impersonate a voter and vote instead of him/her.

I have been involved in an election where tendered ballot papers were issued. This was in a big city in 2008, in a local election where the Lib Dem candidate lost by less than 120 votes. The election had many strange features, but it became clear that a party had engaged in personation by finding out who wasn’t going to vote and sending someone to vote for them. Following this narrow win, I asked the returning officer if there had been any tendered ballot papers issued and there had. He also told me it happened in many wards in the city.

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Michael Taylor

It’s a question of honour

By Michael Taylor | Wed 2nd October 2019 - 8:21 am

I have been involved in Liberal and Liberal Democrat politics, mostly as an activist, councillor and parliamentary candidate, since 1964. During that time there have been thirteen different Prime Ministers, none of whom I agreed with politically at all. Until the advent of the current PM, all of them behaved in a civilised fashion and played the game according to the rules.

There was a time when if you broke the law, or lied to parliament, you resigned. How honourable John Profumo now seems, when compared to the present incumbent of 10 Downing Street. Profumo, for those of you too young …

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Michael Taylor

The Luciana Phenomenon

By Michael Taylor | Fri 20th September 2019 - 10:55 am

I attended the fringe meeting to meet Luciana Berger MP in a small room fit for perhaps 30-40 people. Whoever thought that would be enough at a Lib Dem Conference for a meeting with the dynamic, young Jewish MP who had just joined the Lib Dems after 10 years as a Labour MP?

The room was rammed to the doors with another huge group outside the open doors. It was clear that Luciana hadn’t expected such a welcome. The room was so crowded that the person due to chair the meeting couldn’t get in!

A chair, who happened to be from Luciana’s constituency in Liverpool took over and we had an hour of intense questioning from the audience. Luciana answered all the questions with no evasion or missing the point. She told us what her skills were and about her journey to join the Lib Dems. Those of us who were there were left in no doubt as to her commitment to our party.

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Michael Taylor

Where will we get and use volunteers?

By Michael Taylor | Tue 27th August 2019 - 9:40 am

The next election, whenever it is, could see major gains by the party, or not.

What’s the difference between the two outcomes? In my view it is knocking on doors. In the Brecon and Radnor by-election, although we won, we did not knock on enough doors, but almost certainly delivered far too many leaflets. Yet every measure of how to win people over to our cause says that we will do it by talking person to person, either on the doorstep (best) or over the telephone.

In their book, Rules for Revolutionaries (recommended by Mark Pack), Becky Bond and Zack Exley talk about distributed organising, which explains how the Bernie Sanders Team used vast numbers of volunteers – 80% of whom had never been involved in politics – as the mainstay of their organisation, giving them equal roles with paid professionals, and built a volunteer organisation that could contact over 100,000 by email at one go and could run a voter registration operation in every state as well as GOTV.

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Michael Taylor

YOU are needed NOW in Brecon and Radnorshire

By Michael Taylor | Thu 4th July 2019 - 3:37 pm

I  have just spent 3 days in Brecon and Radnorshire working out of the Llandrindod Wells Lib Dem Office. The reception on doorsteps is very good, but there are a lot of people who have yet to decide whether they will back Jane Dodds or to stay at home. What the campaign needs in the next few weeks is data and that means lots of people knocking on doors.

Bluntly, not enough people are coming to help in this, the most likely Lib Dem by-election prospect of this Parliament. Jane Dodds, Leader of the Welsh Lib Dems is a top notch candidate and deserves much more support.

We need hundreds of people to go.

So my question to you, dear LDV reader, is when are you coming and how long can you stay?

If you want us to win this seat, then YOU have to offer your help. There is lots of canvassing to do, there are thousands of leaflets to deliver, there is clerical work in both the Brecon and Llandrindod offices to do.

I am utterly convinced we can win this seat. We held it almost continuously from 1985 to 2015 and the Welsh Assembly Member is Lib Dem Education Minister Kirsty Williams. The Tory candidate is the former MP who was found guilty of expenses irregularities and recalled by over 10,000 of his constituents. The Greens and possibly Plaid Cymru are not standing to boost the remain side and Labour haven’t won this seat for generations. The real threat probably comes from the Brexit Party, who may well mop up many of the Brexiteers as they did in the EU elections.

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Michael Taylor

The past can be useful

By Michael Taylor | Fri 18th January 2019 - 11:55 am

My wife, Ruth, has had a collection of boxes, originally some 30 strong, in which she stored both personal and political stuff, waiting for the opportune moment to open them and sort out the treasure trove within.

That job is now underway and there are minutes of both NLYL and ULS as well as a huge collection of newsletters produced by all manner of Liberal activists in the late sixties and seventies. Radical Bulletin, Gunfire, New Outlook, Liberator and a whole raft of local stuff from Young Liberal and Liberal Student groups from Scotland to Cornwall. It even included some copies of Clockwork Orange, a Manchester ULS publication that I started in 1971/2 and that was then carried on by Pat Coleman.

Political discourse in the 60s and 70s was carried out by meeting and pamphlet.

Ruth reminded me that Young Liberal branches often met weekly to discuss politics and campaigns, actually campaigned most weekends and met up socially as well.

There were frequent conferences on political issues and both the Young Liberals and the Liberal Party had council meetings on a regular basis (the ‘Council’ was the policymaking body between Conferences), primarily on political issues.

Liberal Party Constituency and branch meetings were at least monthly. In short, our politics centred on meeting together, talking about ideas and putting them down on paper for discussion in order to get out and campaign together.

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Michael Taylor

The case for Trades Unions

By Michael Taylor | Mon 3rd December 2018 - 8:17 am

There has been for some time a substantial number of Liberal Democrats who think that Trades Unions are an anachronism. They are wrong.

In the neoliberal times in which we live, one of the main neoliberal aims is to weaken wage earners so that companies can force down wages, leaving lower wage earners poorer and at the mercy of unscrupulous employers. The result is zero hours contracts and poverty wages.

Trades Unions are a block to this neoliberal aim so, starting with Thatcher, they set about weakening unions and deterring people from joining them. …

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Michael Taylor

An open letter to Stephen Lloyd MP

By Michael Taylor | Tue 20th November 2018 - 8:52 am

Dear Mr Lloyd

I, along with many other of your fellow Liberal Democrats, have noted with considerable alarm, your intention to vote with the government on the issue of Brexit. Not only is this totally at variance with the party and the manifesto on which you fought the last General Election, but it flies in the face of your duty as an MP to vote in the best interests of your constituency and the country.

It is worth remembering the letter written by Edmund Burke MP to his constituents in which he examines the whole question of what an MP’s duty to his constituents is. Whilst it is well worth reading the whole letter the most salient point is:-

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

(Edmund Burke, Speech to the Electors of Bristol, 3 Nov. 1774)

I well understand your belief that you ought to keep a pledge made in the heat of an election campaign. (Though perhaps the experience of a pledge that bedevilled the party in coalition should have given you pause before making it).  However, the Brexit with which you promised to keep faith no longer exists. Instead there is an exit agreement that keeps almost none of the promises made by Brexiteers and in fact breaks one of the key promises, namely to get away from regulation by the EU. The reality is that the agreement that Mrs May wishes you to support leaves the UK having to obey all the EU rules, but having no say in their creation.

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Michael Taylor

Reflections on Brighton

By Michael Taylor | Fri 21st September 2018 - 1:30 pm

After a short period at the Lib Dem conference I am still in Brighton for a couple of days. Brighton is quite a good place to reflect on the state of the UK.

Thinking back, Brighton used to be in much better nick than it is now. Many pavements are cracked and broken, many of the houses and hotels look run down and in need of repair and renovation. The seafront is not particularly special and the West Pier is still a burned out shell. Here, in one of the UKs premier resorts, there are many homeless people on the streets and many beggars as well. Hardly the sort of Britain that we Liberal Democrats want to see!

Recycing largely takes place by means of unsightly bins strewn around the streets and the former green-run council’s recycling policies made a mockery of recycling anyway.

I suspect that much of this is the result of austerity, especially the massive cuts to the finances of the local council that no longer enable it to respond to the needs of the Brighton and Hove Community.

Brexit will hardly improve matters, because hotels and restaurants here rely heavily on European workers and they may not be available after March 2019.

Although I have no direct information, I suspect that housing is expensive and that many people, especially the young, have no hope of getting on the housing ladder and live in the private rented sector with its high prices and insecurity of tenure.

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Michael Taylor

We need fair devolution

By Michael Taylor | Thu 23rd August 2018 - 11:12 am

Wales and Scotland have a devolved assembly/parliament and a single tier of local government. Northern Ireland could have if their politicians would sit down and agree a programme of government instead of playing yahoo politics.

In England there is no serious devolution and the system of local government is a dog’s breakfast with elected mayors, police commissioners, the London assembly and a wide range of councils with different powers.

Yet a working party in the Liberal Democrats has managed to come up with an even bigger mess than currently exists because they won’t argue for radical change.

‘Devolution on demand’ is a recipe for years of argument, disagreement and no action. Does anyone seriously believe that holding referenda on whether an area wants devolution will lead to a successful vote? Of course not. The anti politician brigade will be in full cry and the claim that it’s just another obstacle to people doing what they want will be pushed to stop it. No! If we want devolution, we should say so and legislate for it once we get the chance. Look at any country with a proper federal system (and our brave working party don’t even utter that word) and you will see that their devolved governmental units have common powers and that they are entrenched in the constitution.

Now I accept that there needs to be discussion about the boundaries of the devolved government for England, even though I personally favour a parliament for Yorkshire. What is wholly undesirable is different powers in different regions, because that is a recipe for total confusion.

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Michael Taylor

Time to ditch Connect?

By Michael Taylor | Fri 22nd September 2017 - 10:21 am

The party has used two systems for computer based campaigning. EARS, developed in the UK for UK elections and more recently Connect, which was developed for use in US and Canadian election systems. Some elections ago the party made a decision to start using Connect instead of EARS as its main computer tool for digital and on the ground campaigns. This was largely because at that time EARS had not been able to demonstrate that it could provide an internet based service of the sort the party wanted.

So there began an experiment with this USA based computer tool that promised much but often failed to deliver it. I know umpteen people who after many training sessions on this election software are no nearer being able to use it than when they started. There are a number of things that make Connect a failure.

  1. As it is web based, with no backups on computers in each constituency, when it crashes or when the servers go down, we’re stuffed. There is reason to believe that Connect going offline during recent General Elections cost us seats we might otherwise have held or won. There is nothing worse than losing all your data on polling day and that has happened more than once, often for several hours.
  2. You can’t actually get the data you want to deal with on screen in front of you in an easy readable format.
  3. The Connect system seems unable to cope with the requirement for stable walk orders and printing out canvass cards that bear any relation to what’s on the ground is, if not impossible, beyond the ability of many of its users.

Now to be fair, the one part of Connect that made many of us willing to persevere with it is Minivan. It really is superb to be able to canvass, knock up and take numbers on a tablet or a phone and for it to go straight onto the system. Even then that only works if you are connected to the system via phone or wifi.

The reality is that this software developed for the US and Canadian election systems has adapted poorly to the UK. However, in line with the oft-cited inability of politicians to admit mistakes, those who continue to push Connect, seem blind to the difficulties experienced on a daily basis by many who use it.

So much time and party money has been invested that there is a reluctance to look at any alternative

I would argue that the time has come to abandon Connect, because the EARS platform is now superior to it.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 28 Comments
Michael Taylor

The sixties

By Michael Taylor | Fri 21st July 2017 - 11:55 am

I just visited an amazing exhibition in Montreal at La Musee de Beaux Arts, entitled ‘Revolution’, all about the sixties, when I was a teenager. The revolution in question was the change in art, ideas, politics, power, dress, music etc etc that occurred in the late 1960s, which culminated in the 1968 student riots, Expo ’67 in Montreal and Woodstock.

Many people today, especially young people it seems, criticise the sixties as a time of fantasy, forgetting what life had been like before the so-called swinging sixties. Before the sixties, (male) homosexuality was illegal, women were second class citizens, treated as appendages of their husbands especially in regard to finance, people were hanged for murder, computers and the internet were non-existent, books, plays and films were rigorously censored and non-white people were subject to overt harassment and discrimination. Who can forget the prosecution of the publishers of Lady Chatterly’s Lover – the book the prosecutor said you would not want your wives or servants to read! Or the shocking Tory campaign in Smethick in 1964, when the Labour MP Patrick Gordon-Walker lost his seat to a campaign of ‘If you want a ******* for a neighbour, vote Labour’.

During the sixties, homosexual acts between consenting adults in private were made legal, the Race Relations Act outlawed much discrimination based on colour or race, hanging was abolished, abortion was legalised up to 28 weeks and the voting age was reduced to 18.

The sixties saw an unprecedented revolution in fashion in which the UK through designers like Mary Quant and the Carnaby Street shops changed clothing forever from the somewhat staid post war styles to the modern ever changing fashions of today. The Women’s Liberation Movement started demanding equal rights for women and the end of patriarchy, which, in Britain, eventually led to the Sexual Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act in 1975.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 23 Comments
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