Author Archives: The Voice

Fashionably late, because you should have had this on New Year’s Day, is our top post of 2017.

#1: Jo Swinson MP writes: The role I want to play in our party’s leadership

In it, Jo Swinson explains why she has decided not to run for leader.

I have been overwhelmed by so many lovely messages from people I know, and from many members I have not yet met, encouraging me to stand for leader. I am touched and flattered that you look to me – and I am determined to play a key role in our party’s leadership.

Being the leader of a political party is a unique and all-encompassing job, even more than the roles of MP and Minister that I have undertaken before. It should not be done simply to achieve status, to make a point, or to please others.

When Theresa May called the snap election, my instincts immediately told me that I should stand to win back East Dunbartonshire: it felt right. Every fibre of my being was up for it, my clarity of purpose was intense – to stop a divisive second independence referendum, to halt an extreme Brexit, and to get back to the job I have loved most out of all the things I’ve done.

We’re on the home straight now.

Our second most read post of this year was actually written in 2016, but presumably became important again during the General Election.

#2 How did our constituencies vote in the EU referendum?

Duncan Brack’s commentary on Chris Hanratty’s analysis of the vote in present and former Lib Dem seats challenged the party to come up with ways to appeal to Leave voters as much as to Remain voters.

Given that almost two-thirds of the seats in total (three-quarters in England and Wales) voted to leave, that’s quite a strong skew towards remain-voting areas – as we might expect – and it helps to identify some of the seats we might hope to win back at the next election on the back of pro-remain feeling.

But let’s not forget that we need to win seats in areas that voted leave too. I would expect that Liberal Democrat voters in those areas were predominantly remain, but by no means all of them were – and we also know that, overall, a third of Liberal Democrat voters voted leave.

By the beginning of March, Donald Trump had been in power for 6 weeks and the liberal world was horrified at what he was doing.

#4 Donald Trump is a dangerous and complete joke – but the joke is on the American people

Paul Walter wrote a sobering piece after yet another nonsense tweet storm.

If we step back, we can consider some of the people who have graced the Oval Office: Abraham Lincoln, Dwight D Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin D Roosevelt, George H W Bush, John F Kennedy, Woodrow Wilson, Barack Obama… and then we see this dangerous, complete joke of a President tweeting before he’s shaved. The fine world reputation of successive US Presidents as, more or less, wise and sensible people is being trashed by one man who received three million less votes than his competitor.

So we kick off our second half of our most popular posts of 2017 with one of the most shocking and heartbreaking.

14th June is a day etched in our collective memory as the awful day when the Grenfell fire took place. We were all so horrified.

In the few days after the election, there had been some signs that all was not so harmonious in the parliamentary party. Some Lib Dem members of the House of Lords had publicly made clear their dissatisfaction with Tim Farron and there were reports of private grumblings.

We may never know exactly what it was that prompted Tim to resign so suddenly in the early evening. We had his resignation speech on video and text.

In time honoured tradition, we are running down our most popular posts of 2017 in reverse order:

#10: Remainer myths and post truth politics

Back in January, Ben Andrew wrote that, while he was distraught at the referendum result and believed Brexit would damage us, we shouldn’t pretend to ourselves that people were going to change their mind:

Like most Lib Dems, I think that Brexit will be a total disaster. I think that it will vandalise our economy, damage our universities, and give us less influence on the global stage. However, the response of many Lib Dems and other Remainers to the referendum result has left me a little disheartened. And I’m not talking about this “referendum on the terms of the deal” – which I’m a bit on the fence about, but I do see some reasoning for. I’m talking about the nonsense claims bouncing around our echo chamber, which exist purely to make us feel better about this horrible referendum result.

The one which I hear most often is that, having seen what Brexit really means, those who voted Leave have decided that this isn’t what they wanted after all and that they now wish to turn back the clock. This is a fantasy. Poll after poll after poll has shown that Regrexit doesn’t exist – that no more Leavers than Remainers have changed their mind in the aftermath of the referendum.

He concluded: