Author Archives: The Voice

The Voice

Shirley Williams on A life in politics

By The Voice | Sat 24th January 2015 - 8:55 am

The Daily Politics has been running a series of interviews with political figures in their A Life in Politics series.

This week it was Shirley Williams talking about her varied career and personal life. Look back not he formation of the SDP, her passion for education reform and the prospects for the Liberal Democrats in the election, saying “we’re bound to be a main factor in another coalition.” Oh, and don’t call her indecisive.

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The Voice

Welsh Lib Dems get good media coverage for new website launch

By The Voice | Fri 23rd January 2015 - 4:15 pm

Welsh Lib Dems weibsite“New websites put Welsh Lib Dems at forefront of web campaigning” screams the headline on Wales Online. Not bad coverage for the launch of a website, albeit one using the new .wales and .cymru domain names.

Kirsty Williams is quoted as saying:

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The Voice

Brent Central’s Ibrahim Taguri appointed as Liberal Democrat Race Equality Champion

By The Voice | Fri 23rd January 2015 - 8:35 am

Ibrahim Taguri selected for Brent Central
Ibrahim Taguri was born and raised in Brent not far from the office he wants to take over from Sarah Teather in May. Last Summer he wrote of his ambition for the area:

Yet I was lucky. My mother was single minded when it came to our education as children. That was our route out of poverty. I was also lucky in many ways, so when I had opportunities I was able to make the most of them. That’s why when Sarah Teather announced she was standing down as MP, I knew I had to take the opportunity to represent my community. My job as an MP will be to challenge those structural barriers that prevent people getting on in life as well as to support the most vulnerable in our society on a day to day basis, helping them to escape a cycle of despair.

That’s why, if I’m fortunate enough to be elected, I will be dedicating my first term in parliament to eradicating child poverty in the UK by 2020. A goal set out but the last administration and continued by the coalition. Yet the target is in serious danger of being missed as political parties continue to embroil themselves in blame games and semantics.

I believe that focusing on this issue we can tackle many of the great challenges of our time; improving life chances no matter where someone was born, integrating physical and mental health services; increasing housing stock to not uproot families; providing more educational opportunities and making work pay.

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The Voice

Nick Clegg tells Chilcot: People will think your report is being “sexed down”

By The Voice | Tue 20th January 2015 - 11:07 pm

Following tonight’s news about the further delay in the publication of the Chilcot Report until after the election, Nick Clegg has written to Sir John Chilcott to ask him to get on with it.

Here’s his letter in full 

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The Voice

Now, about those secret party elections we told you about the other week…

By The Voice | Tue 20th January 2015 - 3:10 pm

A couple of weeks ago, we told you about those important party elections, details of which were hidden in an obscure corner of the party website. Well, our stirring did generate a few nominations which meant that there were a good few contested positions.

Federal Executive members voted over last weekend and the results were declared last night. Here they are in full:

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The Voice

“What I need is what I think the Liberal Democrats are proposing” says Labour’s Peter Mandelson on Mansion Tax

By The Voice | Tue 20th January 2015 - 10:31 am

Well, well. Who would have thought Peter Mandelson of all people would back a Liberal Democrat policy over a Labour one?

The Guardian has the story:

Speaking on Newsnight on BBC2, Mandelson said he favoured finding new ways of taxing property in Britain. But he added: “I don’t happen to think that the mansion tax is the right policy response to that. I think it’s sort of crude, it’s sort of short-termist.

“What we need is what I think the Liberal Democrats are proposing and that is the introduction of further bands that relate to different values of property within the council tax system. That’s what I would like to see. It will take longer to introduce, that’s true, but it will be more effective and efficient in the longer term than simply clobbering people with a rather sort of crude short term mansion tax.”

Mandelson is the latest senior Labour figure to criticise the party’s plan to impose a tax on properties worth more than £2m to help raise £1.2bn towards the £2.5bn costs of a new “Time to Care” NHS fund. This is designed to support 20,000 more nurses, 8,000 more GPs and 5,000 more care workers by 2020.

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The Voice

Nick Clegg’s speech today on mental health

By The Voice | Mon 19th January 2015 - 4:52 pm

Nick clegg by dave radcliffe, liberal democratsThis is the full text of the speech Nick Clegg gave today at the Mental Health Conference that he co-hosted with Norman Lamb. You can see a video of part of the speech here.

Imagine breaking your leg, only to be told that your nearest care facility was half way across the country, with a long waiting list and no guarantees about when you’ll actually get the help you need. Or developing diabetes but being too scared to tell your family, friends and your boss about what’s happening, because you’re worried about how they might react and possibly losing your job.

If any of these things happened to someone with a serious physical health condition in our country, there would quite rightly be outrage. It would be on the front page of every national newspaper and dominate Prime Minister’s Questions every week. People would be out on the streets calling for reform. But this is exactly the kind of second-class treatment that people with mental health issues have had to endure for decades.

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The Voice

LDV’s Sunday Best: our 7 most-read articles this week

By The Voice | Sun 18th January 2015 - 2:35 pm

7 ver 4 fullMany thanks to the 17100  visitors who dropped by Lib Dem Voice this week. Here’s our 7 most-read posts…

 Could we have a better leader? (57 comments) by Stephen Phillips

The Greens: the Lib Dem fightback begins (74 comments) by Caron Lindsay

Êtes-vous Charlie? (133 comments) by The Voice

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The Voice

How you can help Liberal Democrat Voice

By The Voice | Sun 18th January 2015 - 11:25 am

The Voice is only a success because of the interest and support from our readers. For many people just lurking and reading the site is all they want to do – and that’s fine, we’re grateful for people taking the time to read the site.

You can though help us continue to produce interesting content for a growing audience. Here are four simple ways:

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The Voice

Nick Clegg pledges to end illiteracy by 2025 by ensuring every child leaves Primary School able to read

By The Voice | Sun 18th January 2015 - 9:01 am

Nick Clegg has unveiled a key manifesto commitment for the Liberal Democrats this morning:

The plans mean that every child born in 2014, who will leave primary school in 2025 will be able to read and write at a standard identified to lead to success in secondary school and beyond.

Nick Clegg explained why this is so important to Liberal Democrats:

I am proud of the scale of our ambition. We are raising the bar on what children should be able to achieve by the age of eleven and want all children to get over the bar by 2025.

The Coalition Government has

…

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The Voice

Nick Clegg to be pelted with space hoppers?

By The Voice | Sat 17th January 2015 - 6:34 pm

Nick Clegg has set himself up for a potential pounding with space hoppers by agreeing to appear on Channel 4’s The Last Leg programme to convince presenter Alex Brooker that it’s worth voting.

From the Independent:

Nick Clegg has accepted a challenge to appear on television show The Last Leg as part of a quest to convince one of its presenters to vote.

The Deputy Prime Minister said he would happily face being pelted with space hoppers as part of the Channel 4 comedy show.

He was the only politician to respond to a challenge to poll presenter Alex Brooker but the video he initially sent in was not enough.

Mr Clegg appealed to the presenter to vote in May’s general election to “celebrate democracy” and hold politicians to account.

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The Voice

Two deadlines all Scottish members and all Council campaign teams should be aware of

By The Voice | Sat 17th January 2015 - 5:30 pm

Be very aware that there are two deadlines rapidly hurtling towards us. The first is tomorrow, so you really need to get a move on.

It’s for ALDC’s postal voter mailing, the details of which you can find here.

As they say:

Turnout of supporters who receive literature and are contacted during a campaign exceeds 80%, far higher than the turnout proportion of our polling day Shuttleworth. This underlines the importance of getting known supporters onto postal votes, as it will help both our local and national results next May and could be the crucial difference.

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The Voice

Call Clegg 15 January 15: The Cleggster goes cold on Carlile

By The Voice | Thu 15th January 2015 - 7:00 pm

Today’s Call Clegg was another lively affair. A bit of froideur towards a Lib Dem peer, a lot of distance put between Nick and David Ward and, of course, those debates.

The first question was about freedom of speech. The caller asked if there wasn’t a double standard between people getting away with insulting Mohammed but Muslims burning poppies were convicted. Nick was right to pick up that the second case was not the same thing. It was more causing a disturbance at an event and getting in the way of others expressing their views.

He made an interesting little barb about Alex Carlile the Lib Dem peer who was the independent overseer of terrorism laws under Labour governments over the snoopers’ charter .”He hasn’t agreed with the Lib Dems on this for years and years and years,” said Nick, “He’s not the touchstone of liberal thinking.” Ouch.

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The Voice

WATCH: How Lynne Featherstone secured an extra £23.5 million in NHS funding for local health services

By The Voice | Thu 15th January 2015 - 4:15 pm

This video shows how Lynne Featherstone went about remedying an inequality in NHS funding which meant that health services in Haringey received less in terms of funding than other areas of London. We love the bit where Lynne says:

If I see something that’s unfair, I want it made fair.

That’s very her.

She’s continuing her campaign because although the funding boost has enabled better facilities and staffing, it’s still not on an equal footing with other boroughs. Enjoy.

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The Voice

Lord Roger Roberts: May’s Counter-Terror powers could enable her to ban liberalism

By The Voice | Thu 15th January 2015 - 2:45 pm

Lord Roger Roberts gave the following speech expressing his concerns about the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill in the House of Lords at its Second Reading on Tuesday:

I was delighted that Lord Carlile mentioned, in his contribution to the debate, the four Albanians—two Muslims and two Christians—who walked together in the demonstration in Paris

Multi-faith groups exist in many places and people are able to say, “My brother, my sister, my family; we are one family”. We could really tackle a lot of these stresses before they become threatening. There is an opportunity in some way or another to encourage it.

However, the world is full of uncertainties. I am not the only one who remembers the time when it was better to be red than dead—so some said. Others said that it was better to be dead than red. Today it is the difference, between security and liberty. We are trying to see where is the line that needs to be drawn. This Bill seeks to draw that line. I sometimes measure our civilisation by Alan Paton’s (the author of Cry, the Beloved Country) values. In a lecture in 1953, he declared himself a liberal and defined the term thus:

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The Voice

Should the SNP and Greens be included in leaders’ debates?

By The Voice | Thu 15th January 2015 - 1:15 pm

Welcome to another of our occasional series of posts where two writers offer an alternative view to one of the issues of the day. Today, it’s whether the SNP, Plaid and Greens should be invited to take part in leaders’  debates. 

Jonathan Waddell says there is a case for the Greens to be included on a UK basis but not the SNP and Plaid:

Earlier this week, Wings Over Scotland claimed that to exclude the SNP from UK-wide election debates would be to subjugate Scots to second-class citizens. Website owner and frequent contributor, Stuart Campbell, argued:

the only reason to bar them is that they’re Scottish. In other words, Scotland’s MPs are worth less than MPs from other parts of the UK, and therefore by extension Scottish votes are worth less than other people’s votes.

Speaking as a Scot who believes in giving a platform to a plurality of parties at any given election to encourage a representative debate of the issues and views affecting the country, surely the more obvious reason is that over 90% of the electorate can’t vote for them; or at least a question of electoral logistics rather than anti-Scottish sentiment?

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The Voice

Featherstone and Hughes defend Coalition record on civil liberties in letter to Independent on Sunday

By The Voice | Sun 11th January 2015 - 8:30 pm

The coalition’s record on civil liberties took a bit of  a pasting in last week’s Independent on Sunday. Today, Justice Minister Simon Hughes and Home Office Minister Lynne Featherstone defended the Liberal Democrat record in a letter to the paper. Their missive rather felt the sharp edge of the editor’s pen, but the full version (via the party website) is below. They have a good go at both the Tories and Labour.

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The Voice

LDV’s Sunday Best: our 7 most-read articles this week

By The Voice | Sun 11th January 2015 - 2:35 pm

7 ver 4 fullMany thanks to the 19,100 visitors who dropped by Lib Dem Voice this week. Here’s our 7 most-read posts…

Êtes-vous Charlie? (100 comments) by The Voice

Ming Campbell’s response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings worries me (95 comments) by Caron Lindsay

Could there be a National Government by the end of the year (42 comments) by Sally Pearson

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The Voice

Farron: Publish Chilcot Report within a week

By The Voice | Sat 10th January 2015 - 9:22 am

On Thursday, Tim Farron, writing for this site, said that Liberal Democrats must continue to push for the Chilcot Report to be published.

In the same way, we must push for the UK’s Chilcot report into the Iraq war to be published. The delay has gone on long enough – key actors like Tony Blair and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw must be held to account. Jack Straw steps down as an MP in May – it is vital that the truth about Iraq comes out long before that!

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The Voice

Êtes-vous Charlie?

By The Voice | Fri 9th January 2015 - 11:31 am

There was a bit of a discussion on Twitter yesterday about the use of the hashtag “Je suis Charlie.” Some people are uncomfortable about being seen to endorse a publication whose views they did not agree with. Here are two opposing views from George Potter and Caron Lindsay:

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The Voice

Je suis Charlie

By The Voice | Thu 8th January 2015 - 7:22 pm

Charlie front page

We have made an extraordinary change to our home page. We have four “featured post” windows at the top of it. They contain a photo accompanied by a headline. Today we have changed all the photos to show a “Je suis Charlie” image. The headlines then link to articles, on the subject, which we have published so far.

This is a small act, to underline a few things.

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The Voice

Christmas in Bermondsey the Simon Hughes way: “Our big city is made up of little villages, little communities and we all have to look after each other”

By The Voice | Thu 8th January 2015 - 3:30 pm

Do you have those inevitable first week of January blues? This will warm your heart because it’s really what politics is all about. It’s about making people’s lives better. It’s a short film showing Simon Hughes going around various community events in his constituency on Christmas Day. As he said, the big city is made up of villages and we all need to look after each other. Enjoy.

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The Voice

Nick Clegg on the Charlie Hebdo horror: “barbaric attack on freedom of speech”

By The Voice | Wed 7th January 2015 - 4:10 pm

Nick Clegg has responded to the news of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris:

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The Voice

Charlie Hebdo – in sympathy and solidarity

By The Voice | Wed 7th January 2015 - 2:40 pm

The news from Paris today is deeply shocking. There are twelve people who are reported dead and four reported injured by the attack at the offices of satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Four cartoonists and the editor-in-chief of the magazine are reported to be among the dead. We express our sincere sympathy to those who have lost loved ones and those affected by the tragedy. We also express our solidarity with the French people and Charlie Hebdo magazine in standing for free speech and against such mindless acts.

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The Voice

While we’re talking about deadlines….

By The Voice | Tue 6th January 2015 - 7:08 pm

We told you about the secret elections earlier, but there’s something else you might want to think about. The deadline for submitting motions for the Spring Conference in Liverpool is less than 8 days away. It’s 1pm on Wednesday 14th January so if you are keen to see a change in policy, now is your chance. Get it drafted and get 10 voting representatives to sign it.

The party website has some tips for writing motions here.

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The Voice

You’d think these important party elections were a secret or something

By The Voice | Tue 6th January 2015 - 11:55 am

 

Chances are you don’t know this unless you’ve been unusually geeky about the party website over the Christmas period, but some very important elections are taking place and the closing date for nominations is this Friday, 9th January, at 5pm.

The electorate is very small – the 30 or so members of the Federal Executive. However, there are several positions, such as the Chair of the influential Campaigns and Communications Committee, that are open to any party member. Here’s the call for nominations which is hidden away in the members’ section of the party website. In fact, you actually have to download the papers to get it. Here’s the posts available:

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The Voice

Clegg says Lib Dems would spend extra £8bn on NHS

By The Voice | Tue 6th January 2015 - 10:25 am

nhs sign lrgNick Clegg has set out how the Liberal Democrats would invest in the NHS in government for the next five years.

From the Guardian:

Fleshing out the figure released by the deputy prime minister at a press conference, the Lib Dems said they would increase the NHS’s funding by £8bn a year by 2020-21 in three stages. They would make permanent the coalition government’s extra £2bn a year – which was announced in the autumn statement – by 2015-16.

In addition, Clegg said the party would find another £1bn a year in real terms in 2016-17 by capping pension tax relief for the wealthiest (which the Lib Dems said would save £500m), aligning dividend tax with income tax for those earning more than £150,000 (saving £400m) and scrapping the shares for rights scheme, which allows employees to forfeit certain employment rights in return for company shares (saving £100m).

Once it had reduced the deficit in 2017-18, Clegg said that the party would increase health spending in line with growth in the economy. He said: “It’s a combination of change plus more money and the reason we can do that, and no other party will be able to do that, is firstly, as we explained at our party conference, is we are going to introduce some tax changes which only affect the very wealthiest, to put in an extra billion pounds into the NHS, and next year and the year after that.”

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The Voice

The 12 most-read LDV posts of 2014 (Day 12)

By The Voice | Mon 5th January 2015 - 2:45 pm
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The Voice

Nick Clegg’s press conference today

By The Voice | Mon 5th January 2015 - 2:15 pm

Nick Clegg Glasgow 2014 Liberal DemocratsAt the press conference this morning Nick Clegg said:

We, as a country, have come a long way since the great crash of 2008. Those long nights in May 2010 when we negotiated the coalition as riots took place on the streets of Athens and our economy teetered on the brink seem ages ago now.

It’s been a hard slog – for everybody – but one that is beginning to pay off. The economy is recovering, the deficit is coming down, more people are in work and wages are starting to overtake inflation.

The central question in this year’s election is simply this: who is best placed to finish the job and do so fairly?

There are two huge risks which now loom large: the threat from those whose plans would undo the economic repair job; and the threat from the populists who want to put their own narrow interests ahead of the interests of the country.

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The Voice

What’s on in our parliaments this week? 5-9 January 2015

By The Voice | Mon 5th January 2015 - 8:22 am

While AMs in Cardiff have another week off, it’s back to business at Holyrood and Westminster. So what will MSPs and MPs be debating this week?

Holyrood

Mental health is starting to really matter on the political agenda and although the Scottish Government is lagging behind Norman Lamb and Nick Clegg in terms of improvements to service, at least the Parliament will be debating a Scottish Government motion on mental health on Tuesday.

There will also be debates on boosting the economy, active travel and Winter Festivals.

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  • Nick Baird
    I don't think anyone's suggesting we are better off with fewer seats. The question is whether we accept this is our ceiling, or have a vision and plan for more....
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