Author Archives: Stephen Tall

16th October: nominations open for the vacancy of leader of the Liberal Democrats. To run, an MP must be nominated by 10% of the Parliamentary party, currently seven MPs; and also by at least 200 party members in 20 local parties.

31st October: nominations close.

17th November: ballot papers will be sent out to party members.

15th December: last day when ballot papers can be returned.

17th December: the new leader of the Liberal Democrats will be announced.

Simon Hughes, Lib Dem party president and unsuccessful leadership candidate in 1999 and 2006, has just ruled himself out of contention in an interview on BBC News 24. It was, he said, a decision he took last year.

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog, Lib Dem blogger of the year, James Graham, analyses the problems facing the party in The fight for survival. It’s well worth reading in full, but here’s an extract:

… the fact that Ming is not the problem. Rather, what we’re seeing is the consequence of a campaign strategy (or lack thereof) that has been focused on winning round swing voters in target seats at the expense of all else. The party’s fundamental problems are the fundamental problems we had under Kennedy – poor communications and a lack of coherence.

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As reported everywhere: a man who left money to the Tory party has been judged not to have been of sound mind at the time.

Lib Dem President Simon Hughes, interviewed for GMTV’s programme on Sunday, has this to say about the party leadership, according to the BBC:

“The leadership is always an issue in all of the parties, we live in a presidential system and therefore the leader has to continually do well and better and he had a good conference,” he said.
“He did a very good speech, it was meant to be the best conference speech he’s made since being leader, and Ming knows that and there’s no sign that he’s not up for that as a task.”
Asked if that meant Sir Menzies

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A media lie when repeated often enough becomes the truth. Discuss.

I raise the point because the BBC is now peddling the same rubbish LDV criticised the Grauniad for just a few hours ago:

The Lib Dems’ conference week in Brighton was overshadowed by speculation – denied by all concerned – about possible leadership bids by environment spokesman Chris Huhne and home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg.

This is what is technically known as complete bollocks. The only people speculating about Ming’s future at conference were the media. Lib Dem conference delegates were too busy talking policies, some of which required an attention …

A brace of good results in last night’s local by-elections in Horsham and Chippenham. Congratulations to Belinda Walters and Mark Packard. Jonathan Wallace has the full figures.

And in particular for the benefit of Andrew Pierce of The Daily Telegraph and Hélène Mulholland of The Guardian.

First, please do try and get our name right. It’s simple common courtesy. A look at the mast-head or website address may help. This is Liberal Democrat Voice. We can happily live with Lib Dem Voice. But we are not Liberal Voice. Any more than you are the Torygraph and Grauniad.

Secondly, you say Lib Dem Voice has been “swamped” by grassroots activists demanding Ming quit. I assume you refer to this thread, Lib Dem MP: “We have to think …

The BBC’s fairly self-explanatory report – Darling ‘using Lib Dem air tax’ – can be read here.

For those who’d like to enjoy Vince’s wise words in full here they are, brought to you thanks to the wonder that is the online Hansard:

Dr. Vincent Cable (Twickenham) (LD): I thank the Chancellor for an advance copy of his statement, but 12 of the 18 pages were blank. Is that a new signal of open government and transparency? I congratulate him on adopting our long-standing policy on aviation taxation. … May I also sympathise with the Chancellor for having obviously spent the past 72 hours rewriting a speech that was originally intended to be a chapter in the election manifesto, and for having only just recovered from the ignominy of being the first Chancellor of the Exchequer since 1866 to preside over a run on a bank? Not since Black Wednesday has there been such a collapse of confidence in the authority of Government.

First, came Yellow Saturday, when he ditched his plans to call an election

Then, yesterday, the Parliamentary ombudsman criticised the former Chancellor’s own invention, the bureaucratic and complex tax credit system, as being “unfair” to some of the UK’s poorest families.

As Danny Alexander, Lib Dem shadow secretary of state for work and pensions, commented:

“Gordon Brown is incapable of admitting mistakes. His callous disregard for the Ombudsman’s first report, as the title suggests, has led to continued incompetence in the administration of the system.

“Well intentioned policies for low income families are entirely undermined by mass means-testing, chaotic

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There’s nothing amateur psephologists and party hacks like more then feeding the latest poll figures into Martin Baxter’s Electoral Calculus seats predictor. Tonight, there’s a small ripple of excitement in the blogosphere as it shows the Lib Dems with zero (0) seats.

From which we can infer two possible conclusions:

1. The Baxter model is nonsensical for three party politics (which is what now de facto exists in the UK);

2. Or the Lib Dems are going to find themselves in a worse position than the Liberal Party in 1979, which retained 11 MPs even after Jeremy Thorpe’s resignation and the

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