Author Archives: The Voice

Here’s how The Times is reporting the story:

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, will set out today why he believes patients should be allowed to pay privately for drugs to “top up” NHS care. The Liberal Democrats will seek to outflank both Labour and the Tories after patients who bought life-extending cancer drugs privately were refused further treatment by the NHS.

Under current guidelines, patients risk forfeiting their right to NHS care, such as nursing or chemotherapy, if they pay privately for treatment rejected or not yet approved by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).

The Government is

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Via the BBC:

Annual fitness tests for police and an end to the “job-for-life” culture are among the proposals in a Lib Dem policy document on fighting crime.

Home Affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said more officers were needed on the streets to catch criminals.

But he said there also needed to be an urgent review of working practices to make it easier to sack those who could not do their job properly.

The party said it would also jail fewer criminals for minor offences.

And it would give police authorities the power to set their

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All of us here at the Voice extend our warmest congratulations to Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, on the news that he and his wife Miriam are expecting their third child in February:

Mr Clegg and his wife Miriam Gonzalez Durantez said they were “thrilled to bits” to be expecting their third child in February. The couple already have two boys and Mr Clegg said they always hoped to have a “little brother or sister” for them. The announcement comes one week before the Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth – his first as party leader.

Via Liberal England:

An alarming story from The Herald:

Scottish Liberal Democrats have been warned by their auditors that … it may be deemed, in accounting terms, to be no longer a going concern, after nearly a tenth of its expenditure last year was not met by income…

But, as the Herald points out, other Scottish parties are equally precariously placed but have not received such warnings.

Via News of the World:

TOP Tory Caroline Spelman—already under investigation for paying her nanny from public funds—was last night embroiled in a NEW £100,000 cash row.

For the Conservative Party chairman used taxpayers’ cash to pay her top aide, DESPITE him undertaking party political work.

Via the BBC:

A former donor to the Liberal Democrats is to be tried for fraud in his absence after he skipped bail.

A warrant was issued last month for the arrest of businessman Michael Brown, whose firm gave more than £2m to the Liberal Democrats.

Nomination papers will be available next week for the party’s biennial internal elections.

The committees up for election are the Federal Executive, the Federal Policy Committee, the Federal Conference Committee and the International Relations Comittee. Also up for election are the delegation to the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party, and there’s the Interim Peers List Top-Up Election to choose 30 new potential peers (because we believe in an elected Lords). The electorate for these elections is made up of voting representatives to Federal Conference.

There’s find more information about the elections and the timetable on the party website. There are …