Author Archives: NewsHound

NewsHound

LibLink: Edward McMillan-Scott – I am comfortable joining the Liberal family

By NewsHound | Sun 14th March 2010 - 8:35 pm

Over at The Observer today, the Lib Dems’ newest MEP Edward McMillan-Scott, former leader of the Tories in Europe, writes about why he had to leave David Cameron’s party in protest at their extreme views. Here’s an excerpt:

It was chilling to hear say to one very senior spokesman at an EU meeting some years ago: “We can say what we like here, but it will be different when we are in government.” I should have left then, instead of carrying on the pro-European fight from within.

My decision to join the Liberal Democrats this weekend was made easier by the

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NewsHound

The Indy on Nick: ‘Clegg the Credible’

By NewsHound | Sun 14th March 2010 - 11:30 am

That’s the headline in today’s leader column in the Independent on Sunday. Here are 4 things especially worth picking out …

1. On Nick’s task as Lib Dem leader:

Nick Clegg has done a good job of preparing the Liberal Democrats for an election that suddenly looks likely to be the closest since 1992, and possibly since 1974. His task has not been an easy one. … Mr Clegg has to fight to be heard in this restricted space, while leading a party that, perhaps even more than Labour, harbours a deep suspicion of its leaders. And yet, somehow, Mr Clegg

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NewsHound

LibLink: Anna Arrowsmith – Why I’ve gone from porn to politics

By NewsHound | Sun 14th March 2010 - 10:45 am

You want proof that the media is male-dominated? Look no further for your proof than the ludicrous level of attention given to the news that Anna Arrowsmith (or to give her her industry name, Anna Span, the UK’s first female porn director) is standing for the Liberal Democrats in Gravesend at the next general election. Anna has an article on today’s Guardian Comment is Free website explaining her decision to stand for Parliament – here’s an excerpt:

Since news of my selection broke on Thursday, many people have asked me why I want to be an MP. The answer is: for

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NewsHound

Stephen Tall and Mark Pack on the launch of ‘How Liberal / Authoritarian is your MP?’ website

By NewsHound | Sat 13th March 2010 - 9:25 am

To co-incide with the launch yesterday by Lib Dem Voice of our new ‘How Liberal / Authoritarian is your MP?’ website – http://rank.libdemvoice.org – two articles apeared in the media …

Meanwhile Stephen Tall penned an article for The Guardian’s Comment Is …

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NewsHound

LibLink: Nick Clegg’s demands for a post-election deal

By NewsHound | Thu 11th March 2010 - 6:06 am

As reported in today’s Independent, Nick Clegg has been talking about what the Lib Dems would do in the event of a hung parliament, and flags up some of the announcements due at the party’s spring conference in Birmingham this weekend.

the Liberal Democrat leader also revealed that his party would try to calm jitters in the financial markets about a hung parliament by calling for a £10bn “repayment” to cut Britain’s public deficit. It would be found from £15bn of spending cuts to be outlined this month.

Mr Clegg declined to speculate whether his party would

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NewsHound

LibLink: James Graham on the Digital Economy Bill

By NewsHound | Wed 10th March 2010 - 6:39 pm

On Comment is Free, James Graham asks:

Have the Liberal Democrats been taken over by the Flat Earth Society?

To find his answer read here.

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NewsHound

LibLink: why John Kampfner is backing the Lib Dems

By NewsHound | Tue 9th March 2010 - 7:53 am

John Kampfner, journalist and former New Statesman editor, has a Comment is Free piece on the Guardian website explaining why he’s backing the Lib Dems.

My decision to back the Liberal Democrats in 2010 is based on a more fundamental appraisal of Labour’s record, together with a positive assessment of the Lib Dems’ platform.

Their analysis of the failures of the deregulated market has been consistently, and painfully, accurate. Their tax reform plans, taking 4 million low-paid workers out of tax altogether, are the most redistributive of any party, alongside green taxes, a “mansion tax”

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LibLink: Chris Huhne answers Indy readers’ questions … on non-doms, leadership ambitions and best friends

By NewsHound | Mon 8th March 2010 - 8:50 pm

Lib Dem shadow home secretary Chris Huhne answers Independent readers’ question in today’s paper. Here are three which caught NewsHound’s eye:

Why are you sticking it to Lord Ashcroft when your own leadership campaign was part-funded by a “non-dom”?

All parties take contributions from non-dom taxpayers, but the Liberal Democrats do not put them into the House of Lords where they can make law for the rest of us who pay full taxes. Nor do our Lords break solemn and binding commitments to become permanently resident and pay full taxes. Nor do our Lords fail to tell our leaders that they have

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NewsHound

LibLink: Vince Cable – We pay millions to lock up the wrong people

By NewsHound | Mon 8th March 2010 - 9:55 am

Over at the Mail, Lib Dem deputy leader Vince Cable looks at four cases brought to his constituency advice surgey, and examines the very human stories behind each “to question the role played by prison in dealing with the individuals concerned.” Here’s the first story:

An elderly lady came to see me about her grandson. Let me call him Mr A. He is serving a sentence for GBH.

He had drug problems and had gone into a pub, got into an argument with a barman and in the fight that followed pulled out a knife, causing injury. As I told his grandmother,

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NewsHound

LibLink: Chris Huhne – Tough on crime? Jail’s not the answer

By NewsHound | Sun 7th March 2010 - 4:05 pm

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free website, Lib Dem shadow home secretary Chris Huhne argues tht locking up more people is a populist ploy that doesn’t cut crime. Instead, he says, we should focus on rigorous community sentences instead. Here’s an excerpt:

It should be a given that important matters of public policy are based on evidence and research, rather than political whim. Why, then, is the field of criminal justice uniquely and scandalously divorced from this obvious rule? … Both continue to try to frighten the public into the arms of their party. It is this politics of

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LibLink: Giles Wilkes – The hidden cost of quantitative easing

By NewsHound | Wed 3rd March 2010 - 6:45 pm

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free website, Lib Dem blogger Giles Wilkes – liberal think-tank Centre Forum‘s award-winning chief economist – argues that though quantitative easing was needed to prevent financial collapse, it has made the rich richer, and taxpayers will foot the bill for growing inequality. Here’s an excerpt (but NewsHound does recommend you read the full article to enjoy Giles’s imagined budget speech of a year ago):

QE was the right thing to do: it may become the most significant step that Labour took to fight recession. … quite possibly averted an outcome far worse: an

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LibLink: Nick Clegg – Government should nurture virtue

By NewsHound | Sat 27th February 2010 - 5:15 pm

Over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, Nick Clegg contributes to the Citizen Ethics strand.

He recalls Margaret Thatcher’s economic aims in the 1980s, saying that he seeks a revolution as big as the one in the 1980s, but of a different quality: “I do not want to change things back; I want to change them forward.”

Here’s an excerpt:

I do not believe that society is broken. There are minor miracles done every day by parents, teachers, carers, total strangers: acts of kindness that are the overwhelming majority of human experience. For every banker justifying their grotesque bonus, there are hundreds

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LibLink: Paddy Ashdown – A military Rolls-Royce, but a political car crash

By NewsHound | Fri 26th February 2010 - 12:45 pm

Over in The Times, former Lib Dem leader Lord (Paddy) Ashdown argues that though there are reasons to be cheerful in the latest news from Afghanistan, battlefield success alone won’t win the war. Here’s an excerpt:

… we do, at last, seem to be getting our act together on the battlefield. We are now following the right military strategy — protecting the people, not chasing the enemy. We have limited our aims to the achievable and matched our resources to our objectives. … it is now possible to turn the momentum on the battlefield in our favour in the next few

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LibLink: Nick Clegg – Brown has failed not on character but on credibility

By NewsHound | Thu 25th February 2010 - 8:00 pm

Over at The Independent today, Nick Clegg argues that Labour has no basis on which to claim the ground of fairness any longer. Here’s an excerpt:

Last weekend, Gordon Brown set out his stall, claiming that Labour is the party of fairness in Britain. Their General Election slogan, “A Future Fair for All”, seeks to stake out this territory as their own. But, after 13 years in government, are these claims credible? Gordon Brown also urged people to “take a second look” at Labour. What, then, is Labour’s record on fairness really like?

The slogan itself is old, first used back

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LibLink: Mike Tuffrey – No accounting for Boris Johnson

By NewsHound | Tue 23rd February 2010 - 6:50 pm

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog, Lib Dem leader in the Greater London Assembly Mike Tuffrey argues that, though the mayor of London made many promises about changing the way the city is governed, nothing has materialised. Here’s an excerpt:

Alas, Johnson’s bold claims to change how London is governed have proved to be largely fanciful. The specific promise to introduce a cabinet system at city hall – an idea introduced by Livingstone, but afterwards abandoned by him – was quickly dropped, despite my constant probing. …

The mayor has also stopped holding regular press conferences at city hall,

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LibLink: Nick Clegg on Lib Dem cancer policies

By NewsHound | Tue 23rd February 2010 - 4:45 pm

Over at Cancer Research UK’s science update blog, Nick Clegg asnwers questions about the Liberal Democrats plan to do to help beat cancer. Here’s an excerpt:

Britain’s cancer survival rates are worse than many of our European neighbours – what are the Liberal Democrats planning to do to tackle this?

Nick Clegg – Early detection is key. It simply doesn’t make sense for people to be turned away from screening programmes because they’re thought to be too old or too young, so we’d scrap age limits on screening for a start. And we need to get more people to go and get

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NewsHound

210,000 internal Government flights in one year

By NewsHound | Sun 21st February 2010 - 6:54 pm

The BBC reports Simon Hughes’ criticism of the Government for letting the plane take the strain a little too often.

Party spokesman Simon Hughes said: Government staff should “use trains and video-conferencing more so they fly around the country less”.

“Civil servants are spending staggering amounts of taxpayers’ cash flying around the UK,” he added.

“The Civil Service Code needs to change so that environmental factors are considered when travel bookings are made.”

Government departments spent £21.8 million on over 210,000 internal flights in the year 2008-9. Well over half that total is down to the MOD, with the Department for Work …

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LibLink: Nick Clegg answers Pink News readers’ questions

By NewsHound | Wed 17th February 2010 - 5:25 pm

Over at Pink News, Nick Clegg answers questions from its readers on gay marriage, homophobic violence, faith schools, LGBT asylum seekers, and many other political issues. Here’s a taster:


The number one question submitted by our readers was on whether Nick Clegg and his party support gay marriage. Mr Clegg said last month he supported civil partners calling themselves husband or wife but would he change the law to allow gay civil marriage?

Yes, I support gay marriage. Love is the same, straight or gay, so the civil institution should be the same, too. All couples should be able to make that

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LibLink: Campaign diary – Jamie Saddler in Wirral South

By NewsHound | Tue 16th February 2010 - 1:25 pm

Jamie Saddler is pounding the streets as the Liberal Democrat candidate in Wirral South and is producing a campaign diary for Catch21, an organisation trying to get more young people interested in politics. Jamie is 23 himself and so has caught their eye.

In his first diary, Jamie talks about tax policy, the military and what it’s like on the campaign trail:

I have more action days planned, I’ll be knocking on more doors, delivering more leaflets, and visiting schools and community organisations right across the constituency. It’s hard work, but I’m enjoying every minute of it! I’m a Wirral lad, and

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Vince writes on why security checks have gone too far

By NewsHound | Sun 14th February 2010 - 9:44 am

Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Vince Cable argues that the State should pull back on the obsessive checking in its attempts to wrap us all in cotton wool and stop the all bad things happening.

The endless checking is costly for the individuals, an unnecessary intrusion and a vast waste of resources at a time when public services are squeezed. Sunday schools and voluntary groups such as the Scouts have difficulty recruiting new leaders, one reason being the problems of adults being alone with children.

The Government has backed down from some checks. But the checking machine grinds on. Common

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LibLink: Brian Paddick – A bad day for race relations in the police

By NewsHound | Tue 9th February 2010 - 9:20 pm

Over in The Indpendent, former top police officer and 2008 Lib Dem candidate for Mayor of London Brian Paddick writes about the case of Commander Ali Dizaei, jailed yesterday for perverting the course of justice. Here’s an excerpt:

If ever there was a “Marmite” senior officer, it was Ali Dizaei. Many hated him, believing he had “got away with it” because “he was black”. But for the Black Police Association, he was their flag-bearer.

He was an undoubted champion for racial equality, but his approach was sometimes aggressive and confrontational when dealing with “the establishment”. Ali Dizaei’s MO was getting things done

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NewsHound

LibLink: Chris Huhne – The alternative vote is not the solution

By NewsHound | Tue 9th February 2010 - 4:20 pm

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free site, Lib Dem shadow home secretary Chris Huhne argues Labour has got it wrong in proposing a referendum on the Alternative Vote: only the Single Transferable Vote will remedy the unfairness of the present system. Here’s an excerpt:

is very similar to first-past-the-post in two key respects. Because it is based on single constituencies – a virtue for its proponents, who say they prize the constituency link – the parties continue to select one candidate each, and the voters only have one choice for each party.

That means that in the majority of parliamentary

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NewsHound

LibLink: The eminently quotable Nick Clegg

By NewsHound | Sat 6th February 2010 - 1:25 pm

If you haven’t read it yet, can I urge you to click here to read a fantastic interview of Nick Clegg by Mary Riddell in today’s Telegraph. For a start, it’s well-written; for another it covers a fair chunk of policy ground accessibly; but most importantly it is one of Nick’s most quote-tastic interviews. Here are a few of the highlights:

On taking over as party leader:

When I took over, morale was low. It was a horrid time, and I made mistakes. You get thick-skinned pretty damn quickly or you just get knocked over in the animalistic culture of the

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LibLink: Lembit Öpik – Notes on a progressive decision

By NewsHound | Fri 5th February 2010 - 3:30 pm

Lib Dem MP Lembit Öpik has written an article for the Progressive London blog based on his speech to their recent conference on the topic, The Tories are not Progressive. Lembit reveals himself to be a “left-leaning libertarian” with deep scepticism that the Tories under David Cameron have actually changed. There’s lots of eminently quotable material, but here’s just a few excerpts:

I’m a practical kind of person. I don’t like the high levels of dogma which seems to attach itself to party politics and elections. There are good people in every political party, and no major grouping is

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LibLink: Norman Lamb – A healthier Health Service

By NewsHound | Thu 4th February 2010 - 7:15 pm

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free site, Lib Dem shadow health secretary Norman Lamb argues that instead of slashing NHS budgets, we can get smarter services by devolving power to patients and professionals. Here’s an excerpt:

Opinion polls suggest that satisfaction with NHS has never been higher. The challenge facing all political parties is to sustain that support in an era of reduced public spending. The NHS is facing a perfect storm of rising costs due to our ageing population, a range of lifestyle conditions and a constant flow of expensive new treatments, but there will be no significant new

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Lib Link: James Graham on electoral reform

By NewsHound | Thu 4th February 2010 - 4:21 pm

James Graham gives Comment is Free the benefit of his views on Gordon Brown’s electoral reform fudge:

AV is the perfect electoral system for Gordon Brown. It enables him to look in two directions at once: supporting a system which ensures that fewer votes are wasted while being resolutely non-proportional. Superficially it sounds like a big deal, but in most elections it will probably only change the result in a handful of seats. And, like all Gordon Brown policies, it has a fair chance of blowing up in his face; because of AV’s habit of exaggerating swings, the system is

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LibLink … Simon Hughes: You Ask The Questions

By NewsHound | Tue 2nd February 2010 - 9:25 pm

Apologies, folks, we missed this one yesterday … Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem shadow secretary of state for Energy and Climate Change, was the subject of The Independent’s latest You Ask The Questions Q&A feature. Here are three of the 15 questions and Simon’s answers:

Why is your constituency still riven by inequality and lack of jobs 25 years after you became MP? TANYA AHMED, WOLVERHAMPTON

The short answer is that inequality and job creation is most influenced by the international economy, and national and regional government – and for all of my time as MP we have had Conservative and

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LibLink … Norman Baker: Hutton was farcical, feeble and amateurish… so we MUST be told the truth next week

By NewsHound | Sun 24th January 2010 - 3:30 pm

Over at the Mail, Lib Dem MP Norman Baker writes about the imminent appearance of Tony Blair in front of the Chilcot Inquiry into the war in Iraq – and makes a plea for the Hutton Inquiry’s inadequate questioning of how government scientist and former UN weapons inspector Dr David Kelly really died. Here’s an excerpt:

… the fact that we, the British people, have had to wait seven long years for justice is a disgrace, and much of the blame can be firmly laid at the door of one man: Lord Brian Hutton. … when Lord Hutton finally reported in

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LibLink … Vince Cable: Mandelson melted like a creme egg as the vultures swooped

By NewsHound | Sun 24th January 2010 - 1:30 pm

Over at the Mail, Lib Dem shadow chancellor Vince Cable writes about Kraft’s takeover of Cadbury, arguing that government policy has failed in three ways: by ignoring the damage mergers do to the economy; by refusing to curb the company voting rights of short-term speculators; and by letting a state-owned bank lend the money which sealed the deal. Here’s an excerpt:

I feel for the Cadbury workers, but that alone is not enough explanation for the anger over the deal and the significance of the takeover. Nor is the fact that Kraft is American. Britain has long been open to foreign

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LibLink … Paddy Ashdown: If we want to win wars, first change the MoD

By NewsHound | Sat 23rd January 2010 - 12:15 pm

Over at The Times today, former Lib Dem leader Lord (Paddy) Ashdown has an article arguing that the the Ministry of Defence is not fit for purpose, branding it sclerotic, inefficient, hamstrung by inter-service rivalry, and resistant to change. Here’s an excerpt:

While the American Army under General Petraeus has developed a culture of listening, and learning, to troops, whatever their rank or experience, the culture in the MoD is that you don’t take lessons from junior officers. The ministry needs to become a learning institution if it is to become effective.

The adaptation to counter- insurgency operations seems to have been

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