Author Archives: Paul Walter

Paul Walter

The Liberal Democrats could well be on course to improve our vote share to seats “bangs for the buck”

By Paul Walter | Fri 20th March 2015 - 9:54 am

In the 2010 election, the Liberal Democrats were 14%, or a seventh, less effective at harnessing our vote share to win seats than we were in 2001. If you look at my table below you’ll see that, since 1983, 2001 was our best year for converting vote share into seats.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 44 Comments
Paul Walter

Danny set outs alternative Lib Dem budget

By Paul Walter | Thu 19th March 2015 - 2:57 pm

In a constitutional innovation, from the House of Commons dispatch box, Danny Alexander has today set out the Liberal Democrats’ alternative fiscal plans, as the Guardian reports:

Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, has taken the unprecedented step of standing at the Commons dispatch box to set out an alternative fiscal plan to George Osborne’s budget.

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Paul Walter

Debate likely to be the political Celebrity Squares option

By Paul Walter | Wed 18th March 2015 - 10:40 am

seven candidates

US Republican Presidential nomination primary debate 2012
Don’t hold your breath at this stage, but it looks entirely conceivable that we have possibly got a robust plan for a seven-way leaders debate during the general election campaign. It could well be on April 2nd, although Labour have yet to agree.

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Paul Walter

‘Almost certain that Tim Farron will be leader later this year’ – Stephen Tall

By Paul Walter | Wed 18th March 2015 - 9:15 am

Tim Farron Nick Clegg 2010 Photo by Liberal Democrats Alex Folkes Fishnik photography

With his usual uncanny knack and impeccable insight Stephen Tall is bang on the money over on PoliticsHome:

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Paul Walter

Remembering Srebrenica

By Paul Walter | Tue 17th March 2015 - 5:30 pm

When I clicked through the conference agenda last week, my eye was caught by an exhibition stand entitled “Remembering Srebrenica”. When I got to Liverpool, I made a beeline for that stand and went back again the next day.

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Paul Walter

Our Don says farewell to conference with a song

By Paul Walter | Tue 17th March 2015 - 4:30 pm

Don Foster - Some rights reserved by Department for Communities and Local GovernmentWhen I first started going to Lib Dem conferences, we had fewer MPs than we have now. So, those MPs that we had were run ragged charging from fringe meeting to fringe meeting to speech to TV interview, as they were rather thin on the ground. It always seemed to be our Don Foster who was really doing loads of stuff. I did wonder how he kept going.

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Paul Walter

Thanks Liverpool!

By Paul Walter | Tue 17th March 2015 - 1:00 pm

image

My photo of the stage at the replica Cavern Club, The Beatles Story, Liverpool.

When we visit a city for a conference, it has a significant positive impact on the local economy of that area. Our arrival is very well flagged up in advance with posters and publicity. Then when we arrive everyone knows we’re there due to the extra security presence and hordes of…..well let’s just say unusual looking people with yellow badges and bundles of papers wandering around.

Much of the time during the conferencee, the representatives are charging around like blue-bottomed flies chasing to the next debate or meeting.

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Paul Walter

“Source close to Nick Clegg” needs to stop – now

By Paul Walter | Mon 16th March 2015 - 9:35 pm

Paddy Ashdown gave Tim Farron both barrels yesterday. I think it was justified, but there it stops. I believe Tim has now probably learnt his lesson regarding media interviews. There is no need for any more public chastening of Tim. Despite this episode, Tim has provided crucial cover for the party and been an excellent President.

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Paul Walter

Tim tries too hard, and ends up singed

By Paul Walter | Mon 16th March 2015 - 8:15 am

I looked down at the assembled members during Nick Clegg’s speech yesterday. I was “up in the gods”. It was noticeable that Tim Farron was seated right at the end of the front row. The opposite end to the leader and his coterie, that is. There may have been nothing significant in that seating arrangement. We had got used to Tim being part of the leader “doughnut” in conference speech coverage, while he was an excellent President of our party. He is no longer holder of the official copy of “On Liberty”, which is part of the trappings of the office of President. But the chair positioning was emblematic of what happened on Sunday. Dear Tim was cast out into outer darkness.

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Posted in Op-eds | 90 Comments
Paul Walter

In full: Nick Clegg’s Liverpool speech

By Paul Walter | Sun 15th March 2015 - 6:13 pm

Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather when I read this tweet:

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Paul Walter

Sal Brinton joins the elite triple badge ranks of Team 2015 #mademy10 #ldconf

By Paul Walter | Sun 15th March 2015 - 12:41 pm

image

Earlier this morning, I photographed Lib Dem President Sal Brinton (above) as she made her third batch of phone calls at the Team 2015 phone bank. So she won her third badge at the Liverpool conference. It’s great to see Sal leading from the front.

Update: Quick addition from Caron just to say that sitting next to Sal is Kirsten Johnson who has become a fairly regular contributor to LDV.

Posted in Photo feature | Tagged | 1 Comment
Paul Walter

++EXCLUSIVE++ REVEALED: Evidence of LDV editor skiving off essential constitutional minutiae

By Paul Walter | Sat 14th March 2015 - 11:33 am

caron penny lane nickIt was clearly the duty of all hard-working members of the Liberal Democrat Voice team to be paying attention and taking notes at the constitutional consultative session yesterday afternoon at conference. The last conference decided to move to OMOV, one member one vote, whereby all party members have the right to attend and vote at conference. But there still remained the leg work – the hard yards – that had to be done, going through each line of the constitutional changes – line by line – to check the wording, semantics and punctuation. The meeting yesterday involved much pained discussion over commas, parentheses and potential tautologies.

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Paul Walter

Nick Clegg calls voters from the conference #Team2015

By Paul Walter | Sat 14th March 2015 - 11:16 am

nick clegg team 2015
This morning, Nick Clegg joined Team 2015 at the conference phone bank to make calls to voters.

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Paul Walter

In pictures – the conference so far #ldconf

By Paul Walter | Sat 14th March 2015 - 9:17 am

Scroll down to view. Firstly, Paddy declares that the parrot is not dead:

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Paul Walter

Penny Lane or points in parenthesis? Tricky decision….

By Paul Walter | Fri 13th March 2015 - 4:35 pm

In a windowless room, those members who made it to the conference centre in time, and weren’t skiving on the Beatles tour, went through a package of Powerpoint slides this afternoon.

The slides showed, line by line, in red, all the deletions and additons to the party constitution which are proposed. These proposals are for an extremely important and refreshing reason: they open up attendance and voting at conferences to all members, rather than representatives.

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | 5 Comments
Paul Walter

Tim Farron gives marks to the party in coalition

By Paul Walter | Fri 13th March 2015 - 3:04 pm

If you answer a simple question or register for free (or pay for an extended period) you can read a summary of an FT interview with Tim Farron here.

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Paul Walter

Steve Webb on taking a chance to set pensioners free

By Paul Walter | Sun 1st March 2015 - 11:24 am

Steve Webb, pensions minister, is interviewed in the Observer in the run-up to the big pensions change:

Plans to give millions of people powers to get access to their pensions savings from 6 April are a calculated risk, the minister in charge of the biggest pensions shakeup in decades has admitted.

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Paul Walter

Vince Cable: Labour’s tuition fees plan is “fraudulent”

By Paul Walter | Sat 28th February 2015 - 10:45 am

On the BBC’s World at One yesterday, Vince Cable was interviewed by Mark Mardell. You can hear the interview by clicking on the box below, and the full transcript follows:

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Paul Walter

IFS: Labour fees plan will not make any difference to repayments by the poorer half of graduates

By Paul Walter | Sat 28th February 2015 - 9:45 am

Interviewed by Mark Mardell on the BBC’s World at One yesterday, Paul Johnson, Director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies made these comments about Labour’s tuition fee plans:

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Paul Walter

Money saving expert Martin Lewis on Labour’s fees policy: ‘Poorer students will subsidise city investment bankers’

By Paul Walter | Fri 27th February 2015 - 11:21 pm

Here’s part of what Martin Lewis, the Money Saving Expert, said on the BBC’s World at One today:

This is the worse type of politics for me. It is the politics that may appeal to people on the surface but it is financially illiterate…If any other party was launching a policy that effectively meant that poorer students would be subsidising city investment banking graduates, which is what this does, there would be protests in the streets and it would be led by the Labour party. I simply don’t understand how they’ve launched this.

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Paul Walter

Institute of Fiscal studies: Labour’s tuition fees plan would “benefit higher income graduates”

By Paul Walter | Fri 27th February 2015 - 8:41 pm

In a detailed report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, on Labour’s higher education funding plans, the Institute of Fiscal Studies concludes:

The reform to HE funding announced by Labour on 27th February would:

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Paul Walter

To hit the LibDems, Labour give £2 billion to graduates earning 32%+ above the average wage

By Paul Walter | Fri 27th February 2015 - 2:22 pm

Details of Labour’s tuition fees policy are emerging today. There is a proposed higher maintenance grant and higher interest rates for higher earning graduates. It will remain to be seen how much those two changes alter the regressiveness of the main proposal to reduce the fee cap to £6,000.

That basic policy proposal is to take £2 billion from pension tax breaks and give it to graduates who earn 32% above the national average wage.

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Paul Walter

Who’s who in the Scooby Doo gang?

By Paul Walter | Wed 11th February 2015 - 1:35 pm

David Pickett photo Scooby Doo gang PEsky LIbDems lego
“Those pesky Lib Dems” comes up with quite a few usages on a Google search, mostly in connection with stopping the Conservatives from going what they really want to do. We carried a headline at the weekend with such a reference.

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Posted in Humour | 4 Comments
Paul Walter

Questioning newsagents about Charlie Hebdo sales – the police need to sort themselves out

By Paul Walter | Wed 11th February 2015 - 12:10 pm

The Guardian reports that police from several UK forces have questioned newsagents about sales of the Charlie Hebdo post-massacre issue. It’s a patchy phenomenum. Police in Wiltshire have apologised for doing it. There was a phone call from a Cheshire police person. And in Dyfed-Powys a newsagent reports being questioned for half an hour by police in her shop. A police spokesman there said:

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Paul Walter

Easing the trauma of care home finance

By Paul Walter | Wed 11th February 2015 - 11:04 am

Last week the government started a consultation, flowing from the Care Act 2014, on the draft regulations and guidance to implement the “care cap” and policy proposals for a new appeals system for care and support. You can read the consultation document here.

That may sound as dry as toast, but, trust me, these things are really important. I happen to believe that the Care Act 2014 is one of the most significant pieces of legislation we’ve seen for many years. It goes a very significant way towards easing the human trauma of self-funding care home provision.

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Paul Walter

What will the electoral fruit machine* come up with on May 7th?

By Paul Walter | Wed 11th February 2015 - 9:45 am

This post is reserved for new and infrequent commenters. “Infrequent” is defined as having posted less than five comments in the last month.

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Posted in For new & infrequent commenters | Tagged , , and | 16 Comments
Paul Walter

Our next post will be for new and infrequent commenters

By Paul Walter | Wed 11th February 2015 - 9:15 am

Happy hump day and Happy Birthday to Denis Skinner MP

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Paul Walter

Nick Harvey: ‘If you think we are going to spend another five years being shafted (this time) by Labour, you’ve got another think coming’

By Paul Walter | Sat 7th February 2015 - 10:55 am

The Liberal Democrat coalition negotiation team leave Cowley Street HQ for the fourth day of discussions with the Conservatives May 10th 2010.

Earlier this week we highlighted Nick Harvey MP’s report “Beyond the Rose Garden”. In it, he recommends a range of changes in arrangements for any future coalition governments.

In the wake of his report’s publication, Nick has now given an extensive interview with Huffington Post

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Paul Walter

It was a Monday in November 2000…#timetotalk

By Paul Walter | Thu 5th February 2015 - 11:20 am

Time to talk 2015It was a Monday in November 2000 around 11am at work. My boss put his head round the corner:

“Have you got a moment, please Paul?”

“Yes, sure”, I replied.

I followed my manager, another Paul, to a room where a member of our Human Resources group was sitting. The long and the short of it was that they wanted me to take a week off work as paid leave and arrange for free counselling for me. I agreed. Boss Paul, bless him, drove me home in his posh BMW and waited around for my wife to come home so he could explain the situation to her, so she wasn’t “spooked”. (Her first reaction was that I was being sacked, but fortunately he was able to reassure her).

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Paul Walter

BBC Newsnight: ‘Innocent people’ on police photos database

By Paul Walter | Wed 4th February 2015 - 1:41 pm

A special BBC Newsnight report says:

Police forces in England and Wales have uploaded up to 18 million “mugshots” to a facial recognition database – despite a court ruling it could be unlawful.

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