Author Archives: Stephen Tall

An interesting comment from Ming Campbell, as reported in The Guardian:

“When the moment comes, it won’t just be Huhne and Clegg, there will be others, including at least one woman. There’s some very bright cookies around.”

Any similarity between that statement and this article in The Scotsman is surely coincidental:

‘Revealed: Lib Dem version of Margaret Thatcher, 29’.

This is it: ‘Lib Dems accused over donor link to company in offshore tax haven’

The report continues:

The Liberal Democrats have been accused of hypocrisy after The Times discovered that the party’s biggest business donor is controlled by a company in an offshore tax haven.

Alpha Healthcare, a residential homes firm which gave the party £125,000 this year, is ultimately run by Harberry Investments in the British Virgin Islands.

This week the Lib Dem conference suggested a clampdown on the use of offshore companies as part of action on tax loopholes for the super-rich.

So, let me get this straight… The …

The Lib Dem conference has just this moment backed the abolition of the Council Tax by a local income tax, overwhelmingly rejecting an amendment in favour of land value tax.

The unamended line of the motion reads: Lib Dems would “Abolish the unfair Council Tax and replace it with a tax based on ability to pay -Local Income Tax is a fairer way to raise local government revenue, as acknowledged by Sir Michael Lyons in his review of local government.”

Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems’ shadow home secretary (and touted alongside Chris Huhne as Ming Campbell’s most likely successor), was the subject of The Independent’s ‘You ask the questions’ feature today. You can read it in full here.

Here’s one Q&A to entice you to read them all:

Under Ming Campbell, the party has been slowly sliding into electoral irrelevance. What is your strategy for making people take notice again? Allan Forrester, Orkney

If you look at the big challenges in British politics today – the environment, Britain’s role in a globalised world, the balance between freedom and security, accountability and

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Sometimes, you suspect, it must be a bit frustrating to be Vince Cable, the Lib Dems Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.

For three years now, he has been highlighting the impact of Gordon Brown’s economic policies on consumer debt. Here (just one example) is what he said in March to the Lib Dems’ spring conference in Harrogate:

… the most alarming deterioration in Britain’s national finances arises from the accumulation of private, household debt. There is now £1.2 trillion – that is thousand billion or million million – of personal debt, 85% in the form of mortgages.

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Ed Davey MP, Ming Campbell’s chief of staff, has posted a comment to Lib Dem Voice setting out why he thinks the Lib Dem leader is right to reject a referendum on the EU reform treaty, but to call for a vote on the UK’s continuing membership of the European Union. Here’s an extract:

For the record, Ming has been thinking about this idea for some time, and, not surprisingly you might say, I think it is a bold and astute move – and I’d like to set out the full argument, including why the *draft* Reform Treaty doesn’t appear to

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