Author Archives: Richard Huzzey

It’s time for the Liberal Democrats to kill off any talk of co-operation with either Labour or the Tories. Otherwise speculation will carry on until the next election.

Sir Ming and his Chief of Staff, Ed Davey, must be heartily sick of having to bat such stories off as they arise, and have made valiant efforts to do so. But it’s time to say, categorically, that we will work on a case-by-case basis in the next parliament. That means an ironclad promise we’d form a coalition with neither Labour or the Tories.

The obvious criticism of this is that it would scotch the possibility of electoral reform or other long-term Lib Dem goals that could have been the price of our coalition participation. It is generally a bad idea to reduce your choices before you have to. But at the risk of predicting the future, I find it hard to imagine any deal could be good enough to taint us by association with either of the other main parties. Labour and the Tories have so much more in common than either has with us. We would have to prostitute too many liberal principles to join a formal coalition with either party.

The party’s policy commission on Higher Education has prepared its consultation paper and is now seeking comments.

Overall, the commission clearly seeks to keep an open mind, but I hope many grassroots members will make their voice heard. Personally, I’ll be writing in to back our current policy against tuition and top-up fees. I am sure the commission will add much nuance to our ideas, but at the core, I’d be sad if we moved away from this principled stand.

It’s interesting to see that David Irving, the holocaust-denying Briton, has now been released by the Austrian authorities. It raises some challenging questions about other European countries’ attitude to freedom of speech, and the use of Nazi symbols and texts.

Irving describes himself as a historian, which he’s free to do, but he of course has no credentials in academia or peer respect. It’s a bit like me saying I’m a literary critic because I’ve written a review of a book. And his ideas are, of course, foolish, and would be laughable if they weren’t so offensive.

The Government’s new proposals for local government sound like decentralisation. Councils will get the power to create their own by-laws, and public services will get more scrutiny from the public.

But on closer inspection, it’s the sort of decentralisation one would expect from Labour. Without a reform of local government finance, Westminster still plays the tune as it pays the piper. The by-laws are spun as a new way to fine people for anti-social behaviour, as if Labour haven’t realised that enacting more and more laws is not as effective a way to curb crime as better policing of the laws we have.

The struggle for action against climate change is one Lib Dems have played their part in, with a proud environmentalist tradition that has only got stronger in recent years. In arguing that climate change science is compelling, we are happy to make common cause with people from any other political stripe. To demonstrate the problem, that’s quite proper. There are still climate-change deniers (usually funded by Exxon-Mobil) and dismissing their propaganda is vital.