Category Archives: The Independent View

The Independent View: Wootton Bassett demonstrations: another Muslim point of view

It was the afternoon of 31st October 2009 when emerging from the Piccadilly Circus tube station I received a text message informing me that Anjem Chaudhary had given up his plans to march through central London under the banner of Islam4UK that day.

Not only was I pleasantly surprised but felt a deep sense of satisfaction at having, perhaps for the first time in the history of post-Rushdie-affair Britain, reclaimed the public sphere away from the pseudo-religious bigots. These people have consistently hijacked the name of Islam to gain political mileage and to sow the seeds of mistrust, hatred …

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Voting started in Britain’s best MP campaign

You may remember that back at the beginning of December we launched our ‘Best MP’ campaign to highlight the fact that not all MPs should be tarred with the same brush as the ‘expenses cheats.’

We asked users of our website – Yoosk –  to send in their nominations for Best MP and to send us the questions they would like to put to the nominees. All eight nominated MPs agreed to answer and you can compare what they said on our website now and cast your vote in our Poll, which will be ‘live’ until the 31st December.

Here is a sample of how we edited the answers together to make them easier to compare.  This question came from ‘artichelper’ and received most votes from our users:

‘What do you believe is the best change in policy that you, yourself played a significant role in making that change happen?’ And you can view a compilation of the answers below.

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A decision the next Prime Minister must make

The last Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was undertaken in 1998 and the die is now cast for the remaining months of this government. As the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said in his last speech on the subject of defence, ‘The nation must debate and decide what we want our country to do in the world and then fund it, so that it does not slip by default into the second division’. A major decision with respect to foreign and defence policies and their funding awaits the next Prime Minister and this decision can no longer be fudged.

We could decide …

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Libel law needs major reform

The clamour for a change to our pernicious libel laws grows louder every day.  In November, Index on Censorship and English PEN published Free Speech is Not For Sale, a report into the state of libel in England & Wales, and the bizarre phenomenon of libel tourism.  Impressed by this report, Jack Straw announced the creation of a working group to deliver reform.  Lib Dem peer Lord Lester announced on the BBC Radio 4 PM programme he will begin drafting a libel bill, and MPs have begun to sign EDM 423 (tabled by Dr …

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Inequality: the enemy between us?

Richard Wilkinson, Emeritus Professor of Social Epidemiology, University of Nottingham and Kate Pickett, Professor of Epidemiology, University of York are co-directors of The Equality Trust and authors of The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better.

There is a long list of health and social problems which tend to be more common in the most deprived areas of Britain. The further down the social ladder you look, the more common they are. The pattern is the same whether you look at heart disease, homicides, teenage birth rates, mental illness, imprisonment, drug abuse, obesity, poor maths and literacy scores, low levels of child wellbeing, life expectancy or infant mortality.

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What makes a ‘good’ MP?

Well, there has been plenty in the news recently about what makes a ‘bad’ MP so we at Yoosk thought that it might be a good idea to focus for a while on the qualities of a ‘good’ MP. End the year on a positive note.

And that is why we started our ‘Britain’s Best MP’ campaign two weeks ago. We want to find out who the good MPs are and what differentiates them from the rest. We asked our users at Yoosk to nominate their candidates and these are the people they put forward:

Gisela Stuart (Lab)
Lynne …

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24,000 children will die today – support our campaign

More than 8.8 million children each year – more than the population of Greater London – die before their fifth birthday. That’s 24,000 every single day. Our government, in common with governments around the world, has committed to cut the rate of deaths by two thirds by 2015. But a lack of political will and focus means that we’re well off track for hitting this target. Immediate action is needed to turn this situation around.

A report we have released today shows that ninety nine in every hundred child deaths happen in the world’s poorest developing countries. The changes that are needed to confront this challenge need to come first and foremost from within these countries. Next year, world leaders will gather to review progress on the eight UN ‘Millennium Development Goals’ for tackling poverty and its underlying causes by 2015.

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More power for cities over skills budgets

This week The Voice is running a four part series from the Centre for Cities, a think tank that works on analysis and policy to boost city economies. They launched their ‘Cities Manifesto’ at the Bournemouth Lib Dem Conference and this series looks in more detail at its main planks. You can also find out more at http://www.citiesmanifesto.org.

UK business leaders have become so fed-up with our skills system that they’re now refusing even to discuss it. Asked what the priorities for skills reform should be over the next five years …

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Dodgy dealings at the G20?

Chris Jordan is Economic Justice Campaigns Officer at at ActionAid and writes about their new campaign – and the opportunity you have to suggest a question to be put to Treasury Minister Stephen Timms.

With the G20 newly anointed as the premier global economic forum, the final Finance Ministers meeting of the year of the in St Andrew’s on 7 November will provide a useful insight into just what kind of ‘G’ the 20 intends to be.

Will they take the path of the G8, making and breaking commitments on an annual basis, or take the opportunity to step up and …

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Building the houses we need in Britain’s cities

This week The Voice is running a four part series from the Centre for Cities, a think tank that works on analysis and policy to boost city economies. They launched their ‘Cities Manifesto’ at the Bournemouth Lib Dem Conference and this series looks in more detail at its main planks. You can also find out more at http://www.citiesmanifesto.org.

In our cities, some of the most visible effects of the credit crunch are the housebuilding projects and plans that have ground to a halt. The regeneration of York Northwest

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More financial power for cities

This week The Voice is running a four part series from the Centre for Cities, a think tank that works on analysis and policy to boost city economies. They launched their ‘Cities Manifesto’ at the Bournemouth Lib Dem Conference and this series looks in more detail at its main planks. You can also find out more at http://www.citiesmanifesto.org.

All the major parties spent party conference season trying to advance their localist credentials. However, there’s more the Liberal Democrats could do to reassert their radical localist credentials – most significantly, by …

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Opinion: Metro Mayors for UK’s largest cities

This week The Voice is running a four part series from the Centre for Cities, a think tank that works on analysis and policy to boost city economies. They launched their ‘Cities Manifesto’ at the Bournemouth Lib Dem Conference and this series looks in more detail at its main planks. You can also find out more at http://www.citiesmanifesto.org.

At party conference last month, I was struck by just how many of the UK’s biggest cities are run by the Lib Dems. You now control virtually every big city outside London – that means that, taken together, 25 million people …

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Open Rights Group call to action

This week, for the first time, public opinion was tested on the government’s proposals to disconnect people from the internet for copyright infringement.

Open Rights Group commissioned a YouGov poll, which came back with some remarkable findings.

The political implications are profound, if our poll is to be believed. While Labour have certainly got this wrong, we are yet to see any UK parliamentary party fully backing the public’s instincts shown in this poll. Perhaps the Liberal Democrats will be ready to pick up the challenge.

In our poll, 42% said that disconnection, should it be applied to them, would disrupt their …

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The Independent View: Road to recovery

At a Reform event this week, Vince Cable gave his response to our new report on infrastructure. On the key points there is much we agree on. Infrastructure is critical for economic growth, and with a £175 billion government budget deficit, greater private finance is urgently needed to fund infrastructure investments. Government has a role to play in infrastructure, but bureaucratic, interventionist policies will be a barrier to productivity.

The report finds that the UK is in the infrastructure slow lane, ranked 34th in the world on the quality of its infrastructure in a recent competitiveness study. Road to recovery suggests that politicians of all parties have been blinded by the “green heat of technology”, moving towards a more interventionist approach in infrastructure markets.

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Opinion: Our public services are overburdened with pointless regulation

It is well acknowledged that our public services are overburdened with pointless and counter productive regulation, that there is too much wastage and bureaucracy which stops police officers, teachers and social workers getting on with the job, and front line staff are treated like teenagers who can’t be trusted. Much of the blame lies with obsessive control driven from Whitehall.

Every party – indeed every party for the last 30 years – has promised to remedy this by slashing bureaucracy and “re-empowering” the front line, but none have succeeded. Tony Blair made it a key priority, but made matters worse. The …

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Tom Watson writes … on the Royal Mail and postcodes

It’s not often that The Voice invites MPs from other parties to do a guest post, but in this case we’ve asked Tom Watson as the postcode issue is one he took a close interest in as a minister and it is an issue that cuts across parties.

The recent decision by Royal Mail to close down the Ernestmarples.com web site shows us how our public institutions are woefully unprepared to seize the new opportunities created by the internet.

Ermenmarples.com is a web site that enables other sites to provide postcode driven, citizen focused web services on a not-for-profit basis. Sites like …

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Royal Mail, postcode data and what you can do

With the recent takedown of the postcode geocoding API provided by Ernest Marples Ltd, there has been discussion of other ways to get hold of postcode data without paying prohibitive licence fees to Royal Mail. One solution is to collect the data from scratch, without using existing sources that are derived from the Royal Mail licensed database. This has at least some chance of avoiding the infringement of Royal Mail’s intellectual property rights.

There are several such projects already in existence. The oldest is Free The Postcode which invites visitors to collect the location of a postcode by visiting a location and recording the latitude and longitude of its …

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The Independent View: Time to better regulate the sunbed industry

Cancer Research UK welcomes the emphasis placed on public health and disease prevention in ‘A Fresh Start For Britain‘ recently backed by the Liberal Democrat conference – through mention of the need to tackle obesity, alcohol abuse, and smoking. We know that around half of all cancers are potentially preventable, so we welcome this focus. However, we believe there is one important omission – the need to better regulate the sunbed industry.

Earlier this year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer re-classified UV radiation (and therefore sunbeds) – elevating it to it’s highest risk category for cancer, the same as tobacco. Easy access to unregulated sunbed salons, particularly by young people, continues to be a problem across the UK.

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The Independent View: Time to be honest about English matters

The scandal provoked by MPs’ dodgy expenses claims earlier this year led to unprecedented professions of interest in constitutional reform on the part of the three main parties. For the Liberal Democrats, unlike the other two parties, this was set in the context of a long record of advocating constitutional change; hence the party’s contributions to the debate carried more credibility than most.

However, amid the flurry of proposals for parliamentary reform, very little of the debate addressed the English Question: the issue of how England should be governed as a nation, taking into consideration the impact on England and …

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Adam Boulton writes… Lib Dems should back a Leaders’ Debate

Two weeks ago Sky News’s political editor Adam Boulton launched a campaign to to get the leaders of Britain’s three main political parties to take part in a televised debate at the general election. Lib Dem Voice asked Adam to pitch his arguments in favour to our readers, and he gamely said yes…

Liberal Democrats know what it feels like. You’ve got a brilliant idea, it’s so obvious it just has to be right. But your competitors make patronising noises about your initiative, while trying to work how they can nick it for themselves.

That’s how I feel about Leaders’ Debates at the next General Election. Of course they should happen. Television is still the major mass medium of communication at a time when more and more people feel alienated from politicians – how could our political leaders possibly deny the public the chance to compare them face to face at election time?

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The Independent View: the ippr on ‘The future of politics itself’ #ldconf

I’m Carey Oppenheim and I’m Co-Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr), the UK’s leading progressive think tank. If you have been to the Liberal Democrat conference before you may have been to one of our events.

The debate dominating the conferences this year is the future of politics itself – ippr is hosting a key event at each of the three main conferences where leading figures will discuss how to renew trust in politics and the crucial issues facing us in the coming general election.

To open up the debate, ippr and Lib Dem Voice are asking party …

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STV: System for The Voter

Only STV can make MPs really accountable to voters on their expenses claims and local issues, or major decisions on war and peace, the environment and the economy – indeed all issues. Only STV offers voters a genuine choice of candidates from the same and different parties, which must be essential for anyone who believes in freedom, choice and freedom of choice.

The current scandal of MPs’ expenses and allowances has triggered a popular demand for reform and some people think that proportional representation (PR) should be an important part of a reform package. PR has many advantages; it would for example:

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The Independent View: Making your voice heard on the file-sharing law

The government has plans for a Digital Economy Bill, which, if you took it at face value, sounds like exactly the kind of thing the government should be focusing on to help keep Britain at the cutting edge of the ‘new economy’.

As usual, however, the details tend to be slightly more complicated. The legislation will, instead, be used to introduce a new system for targeting pretty much everyone who shares files on the internet.

The government wants Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to monitor your broadband connection and send you ‘warning letters’ if you are sharing files improperly. Details of who has been sent a letter will be made available to big corporations, which can then use them in court to sue you.

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The Independent View: Calling time on National Justice

Shema Begum works at the Local Government Information Unit, which has just published a report entitled Primary Justice. This report proposes devolving control of power and funding for specific parts of the criminal justice system to upper tier local authorities. Shema explains more here.

Our centralised prison system may keep the public safe while offenders are inside, but it fails to equip ex offenders to lead law abiding lives once they are released. We need a new localised approach. This is the verdict of a three month inquiry conducted by the Local Government Information Unit in cooperation with the All Party Parliamentary Local Government Group.

During this inquiry sixty local authorities submitted written evidence and high profile commentators such as Charles Clarke (former Home Secretary), Lord Ramsbotham (Former Chief Inspector of Prisons) and Louise Casey (Government Neighbourhood Crime and Justice Adviser) were grilled by a panel of MPs and academics. Their recommendations are detailed in a report launched today entitled Primary Justice.

We all know the facts. There are currently 82,000 people in prison, the second highest incarceration rate across Western Europe, and 10% above its stated capacity. Despite overcrowded prison conditions most offenders return to prison within two years of their release. A typical offender leaves prison with a £46 allowance to support themselves for a fortnight. With no job, and often no home or loved ones to return to, it is easy to understand why some may find it difficult to become law abiding citizens.

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The Independent View: Liberals must embrace republicanism

Ever since the notorious Whig party, and her revolutionary platform, liberals have always embraced the very notion of constitutional reform and the democratic defence of Britain. The modern paladin of liberalism, Nick Clegg and his colleagues, must now take up the challenge and argue the formation of a British Republic.

The Monarchy is old-fashioned, undemocratic, unrepresentative of society, and lumpen. Prince Charles’ ambition to be a “political Monarch” not only violates the constitutional monarchy, but undermines the sovereignty of Parliament. Labour’s administration remains silent, as Prince Charle damages construction projects, and contradicts government health and environmental policy. Monarchists need to understand the concept that no member of the Royal household can give a public political opinion. It’s against the constitution.

To declaim the monarchy, and advocate its removal, is still a political taboo. But the threat of King Charles III should be challenged, especially if this individual is proclaiming the introduction of a political king. Britain cannot afford to turn back 400 years of reform by refusing to question the accountability of the monarchy.

Ask to see Her Majesty’s accounts or even the financial status of the Duchy of Cornwall? Notice the wall of silence and the refusal to announce basic, fundamental details. The public expressed deep anguish and antipathy towards Members of Parliament and their expenses, but what about the royal family?

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Local Solutions 2009 – Carbon Reduction Commitment for councils

The third of our instalments from ALDC’s local government conference Local Solutions takes the Government’s energy policy for local authorities as its topic.

You can still hear the first two instalments: Nick Clegg and Ros Scott, and Paul Scriven on Sheffield.

Today’s instalment is an excellent presentation from Mo Baines, from the Association for Public Service Excellence, talking about how councils will shortly be required to monitor closely just how much energy they are using and reduce it year on year.

Sheffield Local Solutions 2009

You can …

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Opinion: Genuine chance for Lib Dem breakthrough

In the current tumultuous political times, both Labour and the Conservatives are clothes shopping, trying on different shades of a variety of colours. Labour has embraced the True Blue capitalist philosophies, and the Tories are trying to show themselves as champions of the poor and oppressed.

Yet the Liberal Democrats are sitting comfortably in their well-worn pants of proportional representation and civil libertarian values. Sitting comfortably is not an option in politics.

The issue of PR is being seriously considered by Labour, and the Conservatives are now attempting to portray themselves as the friends of liberty. This is a real challenge …

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The Independent View: Restore trust to reform democracy

The crisis over MPs’ expenses has shattered trust in politicians. Trust in Parliament has never been particularly high – it has now plummeted to new depths. Our long-standing scepticism as to the motives of politicians has turned into a strongly held conviction that ‘they’re all at it’.

The silver lining is that the crisis may have opened the way for much needed constitutional reform. The Lib Dems in particular have proposed a raft of constitutional reforms as a solution to the crisis. But are we really at a constitutional turning point? And is institutional reform …

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Compass want Lib Dems at its conference

As a visitor to LibDemVoice you may or may not be aware of the work of Compass – the influential pressure group that campaigns for a more democratic, equal and sustainable world. Compass is about building a broadly based Liberal Left politics and as a Liberal Democrat activist we wanted to introduce you to our important work and to invite you to attend our National Conference on Saturday 13 June.

We believe that both the Tory and Labour leaderships want to turn back as soon as possible to the failed politics of the pre-crash – both in terms of the old economy …

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Tim Montgomerie writes about www.nothingbritish.com

We’ve taken the slightly unusual step of inviting Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome to write this guest post as his latest internet venture is one on which there is much common ground.

It’s a great pleasure to write for Liberal Democrat Voice. I read it most days and learn a great deal from it. More than occasionally it gives me ideas for posts on ConservativeHome!

We have many things in common as Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and many things that divide us. Perhaps the most important area of common ground is our belief in a Britain where every person – regardless …

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