One of our central aims as Liberal Democrats is to show that coalitions work. And Nick Cleggâs major contribution as leader has been to do just that.
I believe we need an industrial strategy â a positive and ambitious vision, built around long-term investment in innovation, skills and science.
We must now implement the âpioneeringâ coalition policy of splitting the investment bank casinos from mainstream personal and business banking, as in the Vickers report. Without Liberal Democrats in government you can be
Earlier in the day, Clegg was repeating his calls for a mansion tax in some form:
Our focus does remain on very high value property for the simple reason that I think most people in this country just donât understand why people who have very high value properties just donât pay their fair share, in the way that everybody does.
Danny Alexander has been calling for speedier action to implement social care reforms:
Danny Alexander will warn his Conservative colleagues on Monday not to delay plans to reform social care for the elderly and state pensions, amid Treasury fears that the changes would cost too much.
The Treasury chief secretary plans to use a question-and-answer session at the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton to insist that the government goes ahead with both the Dilnot reforms and a single-tier state pension, according to officials.
Meanwhile, Vince Cable is winning out in the arguments with the Treasury over creating a new business bank:
Vince Cable reveals ÂŁ1bn backing for business bank to help small firms…
In what Liberal Democrats are hailing as one of the major announcements of their conference, the business secretary will say that the new bank could leverage up to ÂŁ10bn to help businesses struggling to find funds from high-street banks…
The Lib Dems say they have had to fight hard to persuade the chancellor to sign up to the bank, which will be funded from “underspends” by Whitehall departments. These are the funds that remain unspent by departments, which are then clawed back by the Treasury.
And here is Ed Davey and colleagues explaining the Green Deal:
Having political opponents think you are honest, decent or hard-working are all accolades to be welcomed. But trusted to do the right thing? As one party’s right thing is another party’s wrong thing, hearing that the MPs of another party doubt you’ll do the right thing is rather an accolade in itself.
Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show this morning, the Liberal Democrat leader ruled out the possibility of the Government filling the gap in public finances through cuts to the welfare budget â something reportedly being mooted on the Conservative benches.
He said the Government would âstart at the top and work downâ, and was optimistic about his chances of persuading his Conservative colleagues to agree to a so-called âwealth taxâ.
Cable said that introducing regional pay was “completely unacceptable” and “terrible economics”. He said that although the Lib Dems were prepared to contemplate a measure of public sector pay
That was the question House Magazine asked me for its Lib Dem Conference Special Edition, and here’s what I told them. You can read Stephen Tall’s take on What should the Liberal Democrats focus on in the next year? here.
Only rarely does it make sense for a political party to concentrate on something other than what the public says is the most important issue facing them and their families. Now it not one of those exceptions, so it is the economy that should top the …
There has recently been a rise in concerns about the quality of elections in the UK and electoral administrators have commonly been blamed for making administrative errors or not planning properly for elections.
The causes of legal fragmentation and complexity are partly devolution. This has created many overlapping frameworks of electoral law, more frequent elections and more combined elections and the lack of consolidation. But it is also that electoral law needs to be consolidated periodically and this has not been done since the 1980s.
Nick Clegg will veto George Osborne’s demands for a two-year freeze in most state benefits from next April and a further ÂŁ10bn of welfare cuts…
The Deputy Prime Minister revealed he will block the Treasury’s demand for more cuts before the 2015 election to compensate for lower-than-expected growth. “Not a penny more, not a penny less,” he declared.
The message is reinforced Danny Alexander in The Guardian:
Monday is jobs, with policy motions on creating jobs and policy papers on both sustainable prosperity and also on mutuals, employee ownership and workplace democracy. The first of these (F23) may generate some lively debate around an amendment that would delete the reference to keeping to the government’s “fiscal mandate”.
We believe that everyone should pay their fair share of tax. That means the people who have the most paying more than those who have less. To help make that happen, we want to give a tax cut to every working family in the country by raising the amount you can earn before paying income tax, initially to ÂŁ10,000 a year.
This would give every working person in the country a tax cut of over ÂŁ500.
You can sign up to back the campaign or to find out more …
Saturday is education day, with David Laws giving a keynote speech. For many party members he is more respected than trusted; recognised for his skills yet leaving people uneasy over quite what a David Laws manifesto would look like or whether it was right to bring him back into government this year. Saturday is his big chance to win over members.
The work by the University of Exeter and the University Iowa found that the “halo effect” of attractiveness was most prominent in hotly contested constituencies.
Researchers found in those seats the most attractive candidate wins nearly three quarters of the time.
Dr Caitlin Milazzo, a lecturer in politics at Exeter, said choosing attractive candidates could give a party the “edge”.
“While our findings certainly do not indicate that unattractive candidates are unelectable, they do suggest that an attractiveness âadvantageâ may come
Back in the 1990s, the idea of theming different days of party conference around particular themes was a fairly controversial issue, even playing a role in contested elections for membership of Federal Conference Committee and then elections from within its membership for Chair and Vice-Chair.*
Since then the idea has become well-established, if sometimes more in theory than in practice. Looking through not just the agenda for the 2012 autumn conference in Brighton but also associated conference publications and …
Back for its fourth year (see 2009, 2010 and 2011) is my conference fringe meeting league table, showing how many fringes each MP will be speaking at. As ever, this is based on the information from the official fringe listings in the printed conference directory. With the reshuffle, I expect a fair number of fringe organisers are reshuffling their panels too; the table is still however a good indicator of the combination of demand for certain MPs and their enthusiasm for working the fringe.
Trends to note include that Cable topped the table the first two times, then slipped to third …
Robert Rogers, the Clerk of the House of Commons, is the latest in a long line of distinguished authors to have produced a miscellany of Parliamentary history, information and quirks. His volume Order! Order! A Parliamentary Miscellany is a worthy addition to that sequence.
Originally published in 2009 it has just been republished with little changed other than a new Foreword. As a result, although it is not quite as up to date as its 2012 publication date might suggest, it is still pretty fresh. Given Rogers’s background, it is also no surprise that this is primarily a miscellany of the House of Commons. The House of Lords is much the neglected partner.
As the Evening Standard reports there’s good news for one of the issues London Assembly member Caroline Pidgeon has been campaigning for with others:
Traffic lights for cyclists are to be brought in under plans to improve safety on the capitalâs streets.
Transport for London has pledged to test the Dutch-style lights, which will be at eye-level and could be staggered to give bikes a head start…
TfL chiefs are holding talks with the Department for Transport about installing the equipment as it would require a law change. But managing director for surface transport Leon Daniels suggested that TfL would press ahead with a trial regardless.
No more. The Conservatives have seen sense and, despite David Cameron’s talk of pressing ahead and hoping to win a vote to get the new boundaries in place, the party organisation has instead accepted reality and is selecting candidates on the existing boundaries.
MPs who suffer mental health problems will benefit from the government’s decision to back a Bill going through Parliament:
The Deputy Prime Minister announced that the Government is backing the Mental Health (Discrimination) Bill brought forward by Gavin Barwell MP, which receives Second Reading in the House of Commons today.
The Bill repeals section 141 of the Mental Health Act, which sets out that an MP automatically loses their seat if detained under the Act for more than six months. It also amends similar discriminatory provisions in legislation concerning
This is a rather nifty new publication from the party, with some great content and presentation that is well ahead of the traditional party fare for these sorts of documents.
Welcome to the latest in our occasional series highlighting interesting findings from academic research. Today – the impact of the Ashcroft-funded Conservative key seats campaign in the run-up to the 2010 election.
The latest edition of the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (Volume 22, No.3) includes, “Laying the Foundations for Electoral Success: Conservative Pre-Campaign Canvassing before the 2010 UK General Election” by David Cutts, Ron Johnston, Charles Pattie and Justin Fisher:
Boris Johnson has twice won a contest for a directly-elected Mayor. George Galloway has recently won a Parliamentary by-election.
That is why, for all the many reasons Liberal Democrats have for criticising both, smart Liberal Democrats also know that there are lessons to be learnt from their electoral successes.
The nights are getting shorter, the football has started and the first few “x days to Christmas” signs are appearing in shops. Yes, it all  means that the local party AGM season is approaching.
To help local parties get the most out of them, here then is a reminder of the simple factsheet giving 10 tips to lift an AGM from being a boring, business meeting that no-one comes to into an interesting and successful event. Though written in conjunction with London Liberal Democrats, the tips are applicable across the country.
Hope you find it useful – and of course please do share this post (or this pdf) with whoever is involved in organising the AGM in your own local party.
I’ll happily admit that Ryan Coetzee’s name is one I’ve have been hard-pressed to remember at the start of this week, and one which I still have to double-check the spelling of. Yet at a vague remove I’ve been impressed with his work with the Democratic Alliance in South Africa, for whom he has been at various times both an MP and their Chief Executive.
This week’s Politics Weekly podcast from The Guardian features, ahem, myself alongside Dan Sabbagh, Juliette Jowit and Tom Clark. Amazingly, we talked reshuffle, then reshuffle and a bit more reshuffle, including how Jo Swinson is now one of the party’s main rising stars.
All three of the Guardianistas are their own people with their own views, yet I was struck how between them they didn’t particularly paint the reshuffle as a lurch to the right – more a nudge of a few points – and also how they were relatively kind to the Liberal Democrats too. Not quite the collective Guardian …
Welcome to another experiment with our ‘in discussion’ style blog posts, which today features myself and the CentreForum’s Tim Leunig looking at Sunday opening.
Mark: In the recent debate about Sunday opening hours, many people were doubtful that longer opening hours would boost the economy, making comments such as “Would you really buy more things if all the shops were open on Sunday? Or would you buy the same amount of total stuff and just not buy it on one of the other days of the week?”
Compared to many a previous government reshuffle, this week’s went at a pretty standard rate. It felt, however, slower. Slower because our speeded up news cycle and appetite for instant updates, fed above all by Twitter, means that spreading out a series of announcements over several hours feels slow and bitty.
You don’t have to go very far back in time for a reshuffle that takes a good part of the day still to feel quick to most as it would all be heard about in one wrap-up report in the evening news, a further one in the next day’s paper …
London MEP Sarah Ludford has welcomed the use of the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) in a bid to apprehend a former Catholic priest accused of sexually abusing children at St Benedict’s School in Ealing, west London. After failing to answer bail the man, named by police as Lawrence Soper, is believed to have fled to Italy.
Ahead of the reshuffle, I posted four criteria against which the Liberal Democrat part of the shuffling should be judged. Now nearly all the details are in, how does it look?
Most importantly, have people been put in jobs theyâve got a decent chance of doing well? Itâs hard enough being a minister in the smaller party in a coalition government without having lots of people thrown into policy areas they are completely new to.
Maria Miller’s appointment to, amongst other things, the Women and Equalities brief has received quite a lot of criticism from non-Conservatives today.
One part of that is wrong, but understandable – a simple mistake in not realising that the role she’s taken on isn’t the one Lynne Featherstone had but rather the one Theresa May had. As the BBC got this wrong, it’s no surprise many others followed in also getting it wrong, even though the accurate information is readily accessible in many places such as in Theresa May’s own write-up on the Home Office website. Not double-checking something the BBC …
Nigel Jones @Mick Taylor, you are right to focus on strategy since we have plenty of policy, but i think we also need a vision and better messaging. It is easy to have stro...
Nigel Jones The New Deal graphic is very helpful but of course not perfect. As to preventing Reform from winning, we need to be an anti-establishment party as Chris Bowers ...
Nigel Jones It is certainly true that community politics is insufficient for long term gain. That was my experience in 13 yrs as a councillor and still active locally; at o...
Katharine Pindar Splendid stuff, well done Yorkists! 'The New Deal' seems a great idea in itself. Your graphic shows, however, how much work will need to be done to assert ourse...
Chris Bowers Just a quick response to Kira Collins' comment. An article on LDV is limited to around 750 words, so there's a lot more in the 20-page 'New Deal' paper. And tha...
The Deputy Prime Minister announced that the Government is backing the Mental Health (Discrimination) Bill brought forward by Gavin Barwell MP, which receives Second Reading in the House of Commons today.
Boris Johnson has twice won a contest for a directly-elected Mayor. George Galloway has recently won a Parliamentary by-election.
The nights are getting shorter, the football has started and the first few “x days to Christmas” signs are appearing in shops. Yes, it all  means that the local party AGM season is approaching.
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In which D.H. Lawrence visits Snailbeach
Chase Park fair photos
A swamp of lies and disinformation
Doing better? The goal must be Sufficeincy
Michael Meadowcroft (1942-2026) - A Liberal to His Core
Nigel Jones 
Katharine Pindar 
Chris Bowers 