Author Archives: The Voice

The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Michael Moore – Stop these broken promises

By The Voice | Tue 24th March 2009 - 6:58 pm

Over at the New Statesman, Michael Moore, the Lib Dems’ shadow international development secretary, argues that the G20 summit offers a key opportunity to revitalise the international community’s commitment to development at this difficult economic time. Here’s an excerpt:

The Liberal Democrats believe that the G20 summit offers a key opportunity to revitalise the international community’s commitment to development at this difficult economic time. In an interconnected world tackling the impacts of the crisis on the developing world is not just a moral imperative, but in our own self-interest.

If we do nothing it will not be long before humanitarian crises,

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The Voice

Eating a vegetarian meal = suspicious terrorist activity

By The Voice | Mon 23rd March 2009 - 1:45 pm

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Nick Clegg – Banks’ business is taxpayers’ business

By The Voice | Fri 20th March 2009 - 8:37 am

Yesterday The Guardian ran a piece from Nick Clegg on Barclays and its attempts to keep secret details of how it goes about reducing the amount of tax it pays:

Yesterday Barclays may have won on a point of law. But it cannot run away from the wider point of principle: now our whole banking system relies on the support of British taxpayers, how the banks run their business is our business, too.

So long as these banks are sustained by explicit or implicit Treasury guarantees, they have no right to deprive the Treasury of money by running circles round the taxman.

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The Voice

Former Lib Dem MP raises fear of sword attacker’s move

By The Voice | Thu 19th March 2009 - 12:37 pm

Today’s Telegraph reports on the concerns of former Cheltenham Lib Dem MP Nigel Jones, who was injured, and local councillor Andrew Pennington killed, in a brutal attack during a constituency surgery:

A former MP who was attacked by one of his constituents with a samurai sword fears for his safety after his assailant said he wants to move to a town just nine miles away. Lord Jones of Cheltenham is so concerned that Robert Ashman wants to live in nearby Gloucester that he is meeting Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, to express his concerns. Ashman, now 58, stabbed and killed

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Nick Clegg – It’s time for a truly different banking system

By The Voice | Thu 19th March 2009 - 12:29 pm

Over at the Yorkshire Post, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg argues that, after a decade when British banks have been allowed to get away with far too much, it’s high time for real reform of the banking industry. Here’s an excerpt:

I want a return to old-style high street banks so people’s savings are protected from bankers who are obsessed with taking high risk gambles with other people’s money. I propose that banks are given a choice: they can do ordinary consumer business like current accounts, mortgages, business loans, savings, they can even make sensible low-risk investments and we will protect

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The Voice

Lib Dems urge Tories not to join with homophobes

By The Voice | Wed 18th March 2009 - 9:39 am

Lib Dem equalities spokesperson Lynne Featherstone has written to the Tories shadow foreign affairs spokesman William Hague asking him to clarify if his party intends to join forces with a Polish party in the European parliament known for its homophobic remarks. Politics.co.uk reports:

The party in question is called the Polish Law and Justice party. The Tories are being pulled towards them after leaving their grouping in the European parliament – the centre-right European People’s party. It was the culmination of a promise David Cameron made while running to be party leader, but he must now form a grouping with at least six other parties to earn EU recognition and funding.

But Liberal Democrats and Labour warned the party could easily be thrown into the arms of non-mainstream parties, putting them on “the lunatic fringe” of European politics. Senior politicians from the Law and Justice party have made homophobic statements, as well as describing Barack Obama’s election in the US as marking “the end of white man’s civilisation”, the Liberal Democrats said.

The full text of Lynne’s letter to Mr Hague is below:

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The Voice

Poll: 72% back official inquiry into the UK’s role in the invasion of Iraq

By The Voice | Mon 16th March 2009 - 6:01 pm

The BBC reports:

Almost three quarters of British people believe there should be a public inquiry into the invasion of Iraq, an opinion poll suggests. The BBC Radio 5 Live poll also found almost two thirds are not convinced UK soldiers should be kept in Afghanistan. …

The survey, conducted by ComRes for the BBC, found 72% of those questioned believe there should be an official inquiry into the UK’s role in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This figure increases to 81% in the 18-24 age group.

Just last week, Lib Dem shadow foreign secretary Ed Davey repeated the …

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The Voice

£853 a night – Lib Dems reveal true cost cost of locking up prisoners in police cells

By The Voice | Mon 16th March 2009 - 9:15 am

The BBC reports:

The cost of housing prison inmates in police cells is double the amount previously thought, the Lib Dems claim. The Ministry of Justice says it costs £385 a night to detain an inmate in a police station when prisons are full. But the Lib Dems say the true cost of ‘Operation Safeguard’ is £853 a night – a figure disputed by the government.

The article quotes Lib Dem justice spokesperson Paul Holmes:

For this amount of money, you could stay in the Ritz. … The government’s incompetence in managing our prison system is staggering and has left the

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The Voice

Davey slams Labour’s foreign affairs shame

By The Voice | Fri 13th March 2009 - 2:39 pm

Ed Davey, Lib Dem shadow foreign secretary, has taken to the airwaves today to make the case for inquiries into the two dodgy areas of Labour’s foreign policy – the basis for the war in Iraq, and allegations of British complicity in in illegal abduction and torture.

A full inquiry into the Iraq war

Commenting on the latest evidence to show the extent to which Labour’s spin doctors intervened to ‘sex-up’ the Iraqi weapons dossier prepared by intelligence officials, Ed said on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today Programme:

He said the emails show, “there was intervention, and we didn’t know that

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Jonathan Calder – Messy but meaningful

By The Voice | Thu 12th March 2009 - 11:25 pm

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog, Liberal England’s Jonathan Calder argues ‘of course policy on faith schools is a compromise – that’s how social institutions are most often made to work’. Here’s an excerpt:

… if, in a surge of Jacobin purity, the party had voted for an outright ban on faith schools, it would have been only a gesture. Few Liberal Democrats would have campaigned on a policy that threatened to alienate every church and disrupt a third of the schools in the country.

Besides, it’s not faith schools that are the problem: it is the conventional state schools.

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Vince Cable – Keep an eye on the dapper, shy man at the back

By The Voice | Tue 10th March 2009 - 8:54 pm

With apologies for missing this yesterday – that’ll teach me not to pay my daily homage to that fount of reactionary, fact-free unpleasantness, the Daily Mail website – but the Lib Dems’ deputy leader Vince Cable was performing the remarkable feat of inserting some common sense perspective into the paper, writing about the growing importance of China to the world’s financial affairs. Here’s an excerpt:

China now has the second biggest economy in the world, based on purchasing power, and India the fourth (Britain is battling it out for sixth place with France). This new industrial revolution is not a pretty

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: James Graham – Reasons for Lib Dems to be cheerful

By The Voice | Tue 10th March 2009 - 12:25 pm

Over at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog, Quaequam Blog!’s James Graham argues that the Lib Dems’ spring conference ‘revealed Nick Clegg’s sense of purpose as he delivered a message of hope amid the economic gloom’. Here’s an extract:

Nick Clegg’s early weakness for attention-grabbing gimmicks has been superceded by a new seriousness of purpose by a leader finally finding his voice. He has been rewarded by a small but perceptible shift in the polls. The talk a few months ago was of a Tory landslide and a Lib Dem wipeout, yet it has become increasingly apparent that Clegg may find

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The Voice

Exclusive: 94% of conference attendees took Winslet picture seriously

By The Voice | Mon 9th March 2009 - 1:03 pm

There was further embarrassment for the party this morning as it emerged that a vast majority of grassroots attendees had taken seriously the “evidence” of this picture of Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet in the conference brochure:

Kate Winslet

Over seven of the nine people quizzed by Lib Dem Voice’s roving reporters on Saturday morning in the exhibition hall at the Harrogate Conference Centre had taken the picture at face value, and assumed that Winslet had attended the Lib Dem Council Awards event held by the party

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The Voice

Simon Hughes in Harrogate

By The Voice | Sun 8th March 2009 - 10:21 am

Simon Hughes’s speech from yesterday morning is online to watch, and for your viewing convenience we present it here:

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The Voice

Vince warns against inflationary boom following recessionary bust

By The Voice | Fri 6th March 2009 - 9:33 am

Today’s Financial Times notes soothsayer and Deputy Lib Dem leader Vince Cable’s latest economic warning:

Vince Cable called the recession before it hit but now the Liberal Democrat has another worry preying on his mind: that Britain might find itself emerging quickly from the crisis and straight into a new era of rising inflation. On the day the Bank of England announced plans to pump £75bn into the economy, Mr Cable warned that this expansion could fuel a return to “old-style boom and bust” unless it were handled with extreme caution.

The Lib Dem Treasury spokesman is not known for his

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The Voice

A note of thanks from Nick and Miriam

By The Voice | Thu 5th March 2009 - 4:51 pm

Nick Clegg’s office has asked us to pass on the following message from Nick to Lib Dem Voice readers:

A big, big thank you from Miriam and myself to everyone who sent such generous messages to us when Miguel was born.

As he sleeps through each day, and keeps his parents wide awake by night, he seems blissfully unaware of all the goodwill from so many Liberal Democrats. But we’ll be sure to remind him when he’s old enough to appreciate it!

Many, many thanks again.

Nick and Miriam

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The Voice

Ros Scott’s Presidential report to party members

By The Voice | Tue 3rd March 2009 - 5:42 pm

We’re coming a bit belatedly to this, but in case LDV readers missed it, Lib Dem president Baroness Ros Scott blogger her February report to members over at Because Baronesses are people too. Here’s an excerpt:

My manifesto set out a number of areas where I wanted reform, but made it clear that there is no Presidential magic wand to make changes happen. I’m really pleased that progress is being made in many of these areas already, although it is still early days. The English Party are looking at selection rules for Westminster candidates and at the formal relationship between

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The Voice

Three Lib Dem councillors suspended

By The Voice | Tue 3rd March 2009 - 11:20 am

The Aberdeen Press and Journal reports,

Councillors who resigned from a local authority group have been suspended by their party and threatened with expulsion.

Paul Johnston, Sam Coull and Debra Storr quit the Aberdeenshire Council Liberal Democrat group, but remained members of the party, after a row over Donald Trump’s golf resort plans.

A spokesman said the Scottish Liberal Democrat executive committee voted to suspend the trio at a meeting on Saturday.

He added: “The party hope they will rejoin the Liberal Democrat group on the council, but the choice is now theirs.”

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The Voice

Forthcoming PPC selections

By The Voice | Sun 1st March 2009 - 2:40 pm

The Lib Dems 4 Parliament site brings news about a bumper set of selections closing in March:

GEDLING – PPC (28th Feb 2009).

HARWICH AND NORTH ESSEX – PPC (2nd Mar 2009).

CLACTON – PPC (2nd Mar 2009).

BECKENHAM – PPC (5th Mar 2009).

WELSH Region – PPC’s (6th Mar 2009).

WAKEFIELD – PPC (7th Mar 2009).

NORMANTON, PONTEFRACT AND CASTLEFORD – PPC (7th Mar 2009).

MORLEY AND OUTWOOD – PPC (7th Mar 2009).

HEMSWORTH – PPC (7th Mar 2009).

HARROW WEST AND HARROW EAST – PPC (13th Mar 2009).

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Nick Clegg – We need to clean up our act … now!

By The Voice | Mon 23rd February 2009 - 2:09 pm

Over at the Mirror’s website, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has an article (submitted, the Voice assumes, before his paternity leave started!) calling on politicians from all parties ‘to get together and give politics a proper Spring-clean.’ Here’s an excerpt:

Politicians are the least trusted people in the country, and restoring people’s faith will be a big task. So we can’t do it like a succession of governments have always wanted – bit by bit, issue by issue, crisis by crisis. We need to think big on the way politics works.

If we have flimsy rules for expenses, people will always

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Vince Cable – Let’s make a virtue out of thrift again

By The Voice | Sun 22nd February 2009 - 12:47 pm

Over at the Mail on Sunday, Lib Dem deputy leader Vince Cable ponders the question he is asked every day: why are profligate borrowers being rewarded by lower interest rates while thrifty savers suffer? Here’s an excerpt:

Interest rate cuts were unavoidable, though they have reached their limit and other policies are now more important – especially getting credit flowing to sound companies. Of course, it is necessary for the economy that people should spend, sensibly, since this also creates production and employment for others. There is a danger that fear is leading many people, and companies, to hoard excessive cash

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Vince Cable – Why our economy is trapped in a time warp of tribal politics

By The Voice | Sat 21st February 2009 - 11:30 am

Over at the Yorkshire Post, Lib Dem deputy leader and shadow chancellor Vince Cable marks the first anniversary of the nationalisation of Northern Rock with his account of ‘one of the most tumultuous years in the history of the financial sector and the British economy.’ Here’s an excerpt:

Eighteen months into the credit crunch and six months into a recession, the Conservatives and the Labour Party are still rehearsing the same arguments. The Conservatives have one message: “It’s all your fault, Gordon.” The Government, on the other hand, endlessly repeats its claim: “It’s nothing to do with us; it is a

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Norman Baker – It might be legal, but it’s not right

By The Voice | Fri 20th February 2009 - 6:22 pm

Over at the Mirror, crusading Lib Dem MP Norman Baker writes (briefly) about the damage that the ‘drip, drip, drip of stories about MPs’ expenses’ is doing to Parliament. Here’s an excerpt (actually, it’s pretty much the whole piece):

We can’t continue to have revelations that the public find so shocking. Jacqui Smith’s homes are a prime example. It’s not acceptable that she can claim her main home is her sister’s spare room. Saying it is within the rules is not good enough. House of Commons officials must be able to veto MPs’ declarations. They need to ask questions like where

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The Voice

Duwayne Brooks: “The smart young man with a clipboard in one hand and Liberal Democrat leaflets in the other”

By The Voice | Tue 17th February 2009 - 9:50 pm

Last month, LDV brought you the news that Duwayne Brooks, one of the best friends of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, will be fighting a council by-election for Lewisham Lib Dems on 19th February. Today’s Times carries a feature article about Duwayne:

Ten years ago Duwayne Brooks was known mainly for being the best friend of Stephen Lawrence. As a witness to the murderous attack on his friend, he found himself on a collision course with the police, the courts and even the Lawrence family. Now he is seeking a title that is decidedly more establishment-friendly: councillor.

This month marks not only

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Nick Clegg – There’s a job at home for out-of-work dads

By The Voice | Tue 17th February 2009 - 7:34 pm

Over at the The Times, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg suggests the recession is an opportunity to shake off our preconceptions about men’s and women’s roles. Here’s an excerpt:

As this recession bears down on thousands of communities and families we must again be open to reinventing ourselves. Many men will be forced to let go of their earlier identities and try something new – like the unemployed car worker in the West Midlands who explained on Newsnight last week that he was retraining to become a social worker. And many women may become the only family breadwinner for the first

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Vince Cable – Bewildered for now, but there’s anger to come

By The Voice | Mon 16th February 2009 - 6:06 pm

Over at the Daily Mail, Lib Dem deputy leader and shadow chancellor Vince Cable writes about the ‘financial aristocracy’ of Sir James Crosby (‘affable, very bright and self-confident’) and Glen Moreno (‘a Gold Card member of Tax Dodgers Anonymous’). Here’s an excerpt:

Surely, now that the Government has taken over and rescued several big banks using taxpayers’ money, they must be run in the public interest, not as bolt holes for the financial aristocracy. By contrast, I see more and more ordinary people being ground down by the recession and by the banks. I was visited this week by a lady

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The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Tim Leunig – Co-ordinated inflation could bail us all out

By The Voice | Sun 15th February 2009 - 10:40 pm

Over at the Financial Times, Tim Leunig – occasional contributor to LDV, and reader in economics at the London School of Economics – considers the unusual financial origins of the current recession. Here’s an excerpt:

The global economy would benefit from a pre-announced, temporary, globally co-ordinated bout of moderate inflation. Since it takes about two years for central-bank policy fully to influence inflation, a sensible policy would be to target 4 per cent inflation for the five years from 2011, followed by 2 per cent thereafter. … An increase in inflation by an extra 2 percentage points for a period

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The Voice

And the moral of the story is…? Energy efficiency begins at home

By The Voice | Sun 15th February 2009 - 9:26 pm

From Friday’s Guardian, Lib Dems unveil plan for energy-efficient households:

Every UK home will be made energy-efficient within 10 years in a compulsory revamp of British housing stock equivalent to the “digital switchover”, the Liberal Democrats will promise today. … The party’s ambitious pledge increases pressure on the government, which will today announce its own plans to offer voluntary eco-makovers to one in four British homes. … It is estimated that carbon emissions from British homes account for a quarter of the country’s total. Under EU agreements, the government has 42 years to cut emissions by 80%. …

Announcing his party’s

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The Voice

Lamb criticises “MMR scaremongering”

By The Voice | Thu 12th February 2009 - 10:40 am

Norman Lamb has tabled Early Day Motion 754, “MMR vaccine and the media“.

This follows a public dispute between award-winning blogger Ben Goldacre and radio station LBC over a broadcast by Jeni Barnett that Goldacre describes as a “44 minute tirade against MMR”.

According the party’s press release, Norman said:

“Suggesting that the MMR vaccine is dangerous in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary is massively irresponsible and could put children’s lives at risk.

“This kind of scaremongering has had a serious impact on public health in the last decade.

“Cases of measles have risen dramatically in the

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The Voice

Brake: fears Olympics will turn into new Millennium Dome

By The Voice | Wed 11th February 2009 - 7:50 pm

The Times reports:

Taxpayers face a multimillion-pound maintenance bill at the Olympic Park after organisers admitted that they had failed to find a commercial operator to take over the main venue after 2012. … The Times has learnt that the Olympic stadium will cost at least £800,000 a year to keep open. Projected revenues from athletics events and a proposed sports academy will leave a big funding shortfall at the venue, where building costs have already spiralled from £282 million to £547 million. There are fears that the final bill could be much higher.

As Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrats’ Olympics …

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