Stephen was Editor (and Co-Editor) of Liberal Democrat Voice from 2007 to 2015, and writes at The Collected Stephen Tall. He writes a fortnightly column for ConservativeHome and 'The Underdog' column for Total Politics magazine. He edited the 2013 publication, The Coalition and Beyond: Liberal Reforms for the Decade Ahead, and is a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum. He was awarded the inaugural Lib Dem ‘Blogger of the Year’ prize in 2006, was a councillor for eight years in Oxford, including a year as Deputy Lord Mayor, and appears frequently in the media in person, in print and online. Stephen combines his political interests with his professional life as Development Director for the Education Endowment Foundation, though writes here in a personal capacity. Follow @stephentall
Here’s Lib Dem MP Sarah Teather addressing conference delegates at the Liberal Democrat 2010 Spring conference in Birmingham – what do you think she might be saying, or her audience might be thinking?
Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem members think of a variety of key issues, and what you make of the Lib Dems’ and Government’s performance to date. Almost 600 party members have responded, and we’ll be publishing the full results of our survey in the next few days.
First up we asked about Chris Huhne’s announcement that he is now backing nuclear power in order to ensure the stability of Britain’s energy supplies.
Do you believe Chris Huhne is right to say that nuclear power, alongside oil and gas and renewable sources, …
The new LDV members’ survey is now live. So if you are one of the 1,000+ registered members of the Liberal Democrat Voice forum – and any paid-up party member is welcome to join – then you now have the opportunity to make your views known.
Questions we are asking your opinion on include:
your views on nuclear power;
whether the Lib Dems should make any electoral arrangement with the Conservatives;
your views on the Alternative Vote;
is the media giving the Lib Dems a fair hearing;
what you think are the biggest immediate threats to the
For a brief few weeks during the election campaign, the Indy became quite a readable newspaper, offering some balanced coverage which was at least some relief from the right-wing papers’ slavish Cameron obeisance. The paper didn’t back the Lib Dems, but it did give the party a fair hearing. Well, normal service is now resumed, with the Indy today devoting its front page to some idle, cliched speculation (“growing pressure”, “jittery atmosphere”, “braced for a backlash”).
Compare and contrast these two assessments of Nick Clegg’s demeanour, by the way.
In the Indy: ‘One MP said last night: “Nick just does
The message from Labour-sympathising Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley in this morning’s paper is a stark one: “Labour is playing bad politics.” The reason?
The leadership campaign is turning into a tin-ear, foot-in-mouth competition about who can be nastiest to the Liberal Democrats. As candidates desperately try to prove themselves more true Labour, more tribal than the next guy, they are in danger of missing the big picture about our changing politics. They could end up wrecking their party’s position for the next generation, which is their own.
All political parties sometimes reach for their tribal comfort blanket, especially after a …
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 183rd weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the seven most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (15th – 21st August, 2010), together with a hand-picked quintet, normally courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.
Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox – just click here – ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.
As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:
Last month, The Voice asked the question, Can you design a poster to win the AV “Yes” campaign?, highlighting TakeBackParliament.com‘s competition to crowd-source the design talent of bloggers who support abolishing first-past-the-vote and replacing it with the Alternative Vote in readiness for next May’s referendum.
The winner has now been announced (and sorry, guys, but it doesn’t do it for me). Runner-up was Lib Dem blogger Stuart Bonar, who produced an excellent series of designs.
So today, at last, the news media is finally reporting the pretty unsurprising news that Charles Kennedy, leader of the Lib Dems from 1999 to 2006, is not leaving the Lib Dems in 2010.
Now it is of course the silly season, and we can easily write off this journalistic confection as mere desperation to fill some column inches / dead air-time. But actually I think it’s a symptom of a wider malaise in political journalism, its ‘tabloidisation’.
How an unsourced rumour went viral
Let’s go back to Friday afternoon, when the Kennedy defection rumours started circulating, and work out how …
Lib Dem Voice reported earlier this week the news that Lynne Featherstone had secured government support for a new policy to ban wheel clamping and towing away of vehicles on private property, bringing England and Wales in line with Scotland.
YouGov asked the following question directly of members of the public:
The government have announced they intend to ban wheel clamping on private land. Under their plans only
the police and local councils would have the right to use wheel clamps or tow cars away. Would you support or oppose a ban on private wheel clamping firms?
As this BBC Somerset report excitedly notes, Tessa Munt is “the first Liberal Democrat MP for Wells since World War II”, having defeated Tory incumbent David Heathcote-Amory in May.
You can read here about how she’s settling into her new office (“The most important thing for me was making sure we were actually accessible from ever single part of the constituency”), furnished with recycled fittings (“I did actually do a raid on some of the outgoing MPs offices. … I don’t frankly mind if my box files are second hand.”).
There have been a rather astonishing 36 opinion polls in the six weeks since LDV’s last polls round-up at the beginning of July. Thirty of those 36 originate from just one polling company, YouGov.
So let’s bring you up-to-date with July and August’s polls in chronological order of publication:
Con 40, Lab 36, Lib Dem 16 (YouGov, 4-5 Jul)
Con 41, Lab 36, Lib Dem 15 (YouGov, 5-6 Jul)
Con 40, Lab 36, Lib Dem 17 (YouGov, 6-7 Jul)
Con 42, Lab 35, Lib Dem 16 (YouGov, 7-8 Jul)
Con 42, Lab 34, Lib Dem 17 (YouGov, 8-9 Jul)
Con 42, Lab 35, Lib Dem
Here’s Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg enjoying a friendly conversation with one of his predecessors, Charles Kennedy, during the general election campaign – what do you think they might be saying to each other, or thinking about each other?
The latest round of media sniping was triggered by Simon Hughes’ comments yesterday, widely – but inaccurately – reported as Lib Dems ‘need backbench veto’. So let’s look at what Simon actually said, as opposed to what the news media chose to paraphrase:
If the coalition wants to deliver votes, neither party on its own has a majority, so we have to make sure everyone is brought into that. It’s a matter of practical politics, the answer is therefore: yes, the parliamentary party, on behalf of the wider party, on big issues has to say, ‘No, we can’t go down this road.”
My reading of Simon’s words is this: if big proposals are brought forward by government ministers on behalf of the Coalition then the MPs of both parties are going to have to be satisfied otherwise they won’t vote for them.
All of which, to me, seems plain, obvious and utterly uncontroversial. Which isn’t good enough for the news media, hence the misleading headlines that Simon is demanding a Lib Dem veto – with rent-a-quote Tories like John Redwood and James Cleverly on hand to take the media’s bait and amp up this non-story a little further.
The media’s approach to the reporting of the Coalition’s (yawn) ‘splits’ and ‘tensions’ puts me in mind of The Day Today’s Chris Morris inciting two studio guests to declare war on each other by putting ever more inflammatory words in each other’s mouths. See what you think:
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 182nd weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the seven most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (8th – 14th August, 2010), together with a hand-picked quintet, normally courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.
Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox – just click here – ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.
As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:
James co-founded the Lib Dems’ Social Liberal Forum, and has in the past advocated closer relations between the party and Labour as a progressive force to take on the Conservatives, so he is by no means a natural cheerleader for the Lib/Con Coalition, as his blog-post makes clear.
It’s his take on Labour’s misfiring oppositional tactics, though, which I think are well worth highlighting here:
The annual Waterstone’s ComRes survey of MPs’ summer reading choices has just been published. You can read about the overall responses here, but I had a quick scan of the findings of the 12 Lib Dem MPs who replied to see what our party folk are planning to dip into during the parliamentary recess…
Nick Clegg today delivered his widely trailed speech on improving social mobility today, marking the 100th day of the Lib Dem / Conservative Coalition Government. You can read the full text below, also available at the party website.
Lib Dem Voice Co-Editor Mark Pack has put on his professional hat over at the Mandate blog to offer his commentary, concluding there might be some internal juggling going on between the Coalition partners:
Perhaps too there is a piece of internal coalition manoeuvring going on here: let the Conservatives be the hard-nosed people who balance the books and grudgingly win
Last month, YouGov’s Peter Kellner penned a rather premature post, which stated categorically: The honeymoon is over. I took him to task at the time, and stand by my view that the Coalition is still regarded generally favourably by a plurality of the public.
It’s been interesting, then, to read some of the barrage of opinion polling which has greeted the Coalition’s first 100 days. Perhaps most significant is this article in The Guardian – Coalition winning argument on economy – detailing ICM polling which shows 44% believe the coalition is doing a good job in securing economic …
One hundred days. How the media loves a yardstick.
We have US President FD Roosevelt to thank for the obsession with the first 15 weeks of a new government’s activity: in a race against time to save the US economy from its Depression slump, he signed into law over a dozen recovery programmes. Some worked, some didn’t… You can draw your own analogy.
It is of course far too early to know if the Coalition will succeed. It is also far too early to know whether the Lib Dems will be boosted by our involvement in government, or if we’ll be …
I voted for Tony Blair as Labour leader in 1994; I voted for him again to become Labour prime minister in 1997. I soon learned my lesson.
As Prime Minister, he failed. Not so much domestically: sure, he disappointed but show me a political leader who doesn’t.
But in foreign policy, Mr Blair was an unmitigated disaster, the most incompetent post-war Prime Minister bar none (yes, even worse than Anthony Eden).
His intentions are irrelevant: the results of his – and it was his – decision to wage war against Iraq have made Britain and the world less safe at huge …
Erm, except Sky News isn’t reporting a poll conducted by a reputable polling organisation of a representative sample of the British public. I mean, you didn’t seriously expect journalistic integrity and news values from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News-lite, did you?
The figure of 8% support for the Lib Dems is the result of a Sky News Panel survey. The surveys are open to any viewer to join and answer. Sky makes no claim that its Panel is representative, …
The weekend media was full of the news of Alan Milburn’s putative return to front-line politics with his appointment to a role advising the Coalition Government on policies to promote social mobility.
Reaction to the news has been mixed. John Prescott, never one to mince his words when he can mangle them instead, spat out that Mr Milburn was a “collaborator”. Conservative blogger Iain Dale was disappointed to see the Coalition’s big tent expanding to include a former New Labour cabinet minister: “One day they might actually appoint a Conservative.”
For the Lib Dems, Simon Hughes was more amenable to …
Lib Dem climate change and energy secretary Chris Huhne joined with Conservative party chair Baroness Sayeedi Warsi today to launch a blistering attack on Labour’s financial legacy.
You can read Chris’s speech in full, below, in which he issues a stark challenge to Labour to “face up to the challenge of fixing our nation’s finances”, warning that if they don’t “they won’t deserve power for another generation.”
However, it is Baroness Warsi’s demand to David and Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham to forfeit their £20,000 severance pay as cabinet ministers – branded their “reward for failure” – which …
Campaigners for and against electoral reform will be able to spend a total of more than £11m in a blizzard of promotional material and advertisements in the run-up to next year’s referendum, the Electoral Commission has confirmed.
Under the law, the Yes and No campaigns on the alternative vote (AV) system can each spend £5m of private money as well as £600,000 apiece of public funding. The two sides will also be given free use of public rooms such as council buildings, a TV broadcast and free postal delivery to households across the UK of 20m
Climate change and energy secretary Chris Huhne was on Radio 4 this morning with what will have been, for many Lib Dems, a surprise announcement: that the Lib Dem / Conservative coalition government is fully behind the opening of a new nuclear power station in eight years’ time.
Arguing in favour of in favour of a mix of more nuclear, oil and gas and renewable energy, Chris declared, “I have no intention of the lights going out on my watch.”
This is something of a change in direction for Liberal Democrat party policy. For example, in the 2010 manifesto the …
More than half of Liberal Democrat MPs, including two cabinet members and eight junior ministers, are on record as opposing plans by David Cameron to water down security of tenure for new social housing tenants.
The scale of the opposition suggests Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem deputy leader, is speaking for the bulk of the party in opposing the ideas floated by the prime minister.
Cameron suggested the idea of fixed-term tenancies for new tenants last week, and the housing minister, Grant Shapps, continued to defend the plan this weekend, saying lifetime tenancies did not make sense.
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 181st weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the seven most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (1st – 7th August, 2010), together with a hand-picked quintet, normally courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.
Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox – just click here – ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.
As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:
Ah, opinion polls. Love ’em or hate ’em, you just can’t ignore ’em.
Today’s Telegraph reports a typically anti-Lib Dem story, Voters fail to recognise ‘invisible’ Lib Dem ministers. It claims to show that “Liberal Democrat cabinet ministers are far less likely to be recognised by ordinary voters than their Conservative counterparts”. However, the real clue to its accuracy is in the next few words, “a survey by The Sunday Telegraph has revealed”.
So how did the Telegraph commission its survey, you might ask. Did they pay a beyond-reproach polling firm (or even YouGov) to talk to a representative sample …
Nick Baird Ajax should of course have been cancelled years ago. Unfortunately due to the sunk costs the MOD and Government seem to be converging on a plan to spend another...
Peter Chambers > The standout project is Ajax, which should be immediately cancelled.
Oh if only! Ben Wallace confided that "the money is spent" and that if the programme...
Tristan Ward It has been perfectly obvious since the start of trump's second term that UK defence spending must rise. The political difficulty is equally obvious given th...
cim @Nick Baird - Even taking a quarter off the UK's budget would still keep us comfortably in the top 10 for all countries and ahead of the (also nuclear-armed) Fr...
Jenny Barnes We probably do need to increase tax to fund defence. Borrowing depends on the markets beleiving that the country can afford to pay it back, which would requir...
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