Category Archives: Op-eds

Chris Perry

HGV and social care crises – some alternative solutions

By Chris Perry | Mon 27th September 2021 - 8:49 am

As people queue for petrol the Government intends to reverse another of the consequences of Brexit by making it easier to recruit drivers from Europe. The promised trades deals have not materialised, and far from getting Brexit done, a solution has yet to be found for the Irish Border.

A radical reform of our governance, in which elections are won or lost on a few marginal seats and MPs speak to themselves in parliament, at great public cost, with Government seemingly taking little notice, is long overdue.

The system promotes quick fix component level solutions to whole system problems thereby creating problems for future administrations to deal with.

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Councillor abuse on social media – what can we do about it?

By Andy Boddington | Sun 26th September 2021 - 9:30 am

Social media is the expression of all of us. Collectively and individually. Even if people don’t participate in it, its impacts cannot be ignored.

Social media is all of us on the internet, on phones, laptops, smart speakers and an ever growing number of devices. It is almost as everyday as conversation.

Except social media is not like conversation. Any abuse in conversation is usually sporadic. On social media it can be relentless. This commentary comes from someone who has engaged with online communication since the late 1980s. I get abuse as a councillor but not as much as some others. The deputy leader of my council has just resigned citing online abuse.

The question for all of us in public life is how we cope with the flack and the abuse. And can we limit it?

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Tom Arms

World Review: US ballots, the Quad, Britain as a “vassal state” and vaccinated Africans

By Tom Arms | Sun 26th September 2021 - 8:30 am

In this weekend’s review, Tom Arms reports auditors have discovered that Donald Trump received 261 fewer votes in Maricopa County, Arizona, and Joe Biden 99 more undermining those that called the election result the “Big Lie”. Could the crisis at Evergrande slow China’s economy and that of the world? The “Quad” is a new Indo-Pacific alliance of the US, India, Japan and Australia designed to counter the rise of Chinese. India is the outlier in the group perhaps its including might mean it will look more towards the US. France has recalled its ambassadors to Australia and America over the nuclear submarine row but their man in London stayed put, the French claiming Britain has become a “vassal state” of the United States. In another row, vaccinated Americans can visit the UK but vaccinated Africans cannot.

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Caron Lindsay

Lib Dems mark Sabina Nessa vigil

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 25th September 2021 - 12:30 pm

Last night a vigil was held in Lewisham for Sabina Nessa, the young teacher murdered as she took a short walk at around 8:30 on Friday 17th September to meet a friend.

Liberal Democrat Councillor Rabina Khan was there and posted the heartbreaking speech from Sabina’s sister, who showed incredible courage in speaking.

Former leader Jo Swinson, who lives in that part of London, said:

Women and Equalities spokesperson Wera Hobhouse:

Earlier in the day, Rabina had been on the Today programme, talking to Nick Robinson about the fact that when women of colour go missing or worse, their stories attract much less attention than when white, middle class women go missing.

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Charles Quinn

ALDC By-election Report: 23 September 2021

By Charles Quinn | Sat 25th September 2021 - 10:30 am

There were seven local by-elections on Thursday night. It was a mixed bag of results for the Lib Dems with some great holds but a very narrow loss too.

There were two great defences in Kendal as newly elected Lib Dem Councillors Jonathan Cornthwaite (Kendal North ward, South Lakeland DC) and Phil Walker (Strickland Ward, Kendal TC) both won with just short of 50% of the vote. Congratulations to Jonathan, Phil and the Lib Dem team in Kendal. The full results are below and you can find full breakdowns here.

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Tom Arms

Observations of an Expat: Russian Pivot

By Tom Arms | Sat 25th September 2021 - 8:30 am

While the world public’s attention was focused on submarine rows between allies and the rising Chinese threat, Vladimir Putin was making disturbing diplomatic and political moves to change the security map on the European side of the Eurasian land mass.

The focus of Putin’s efforts is Belarus and the faltering regime of Alexander Lukashenko. Ever since his clearly fraudulent elections, “Europe’s last dictator” has suffered riots, demonstrations, defecting Belarussians and Western sanctions. All of this presents opportunities and problems for Vladimir Putin and headaches for everyone else. A Lukashenko/Putin summit plus a major military manoeuvre underscored both.

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Michael Berwick-Gooding

Why our new policy on extending the £20 Universal Credit to the legacy benefits is important

By Michael Berwick-Gooding | Fri 24th September 2021 - 5:53 pm

On Sunday morning Conference agreed to not only make the £20 a week Universal Credit uplift permanent but to also extend it to the legacy benefits, such as Employment and Support Allowance and Jobseekers Allowance.

When the £20 uplift for Universal Credit was introduced it was stated that about half of claimants were on Universal Credit and half still on the legacy benefits. It will cost about the same to extend this uplift to those on the legacy benefits as it did to implement for those on Universal Credit. Most of these people on legacy benefits then are still on them now. There are many good reasons for people to wish to stay on them rather than transferring to Universal Credit.

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Jeremy Hargreaves

Federal Policy Committee seeks members for working groups

By Jeremy Hargreaves | Fri 24th September 2021 - 4:49 pm

Over the summer the party’s Federal Policy Committee has been thinking hard about our programme of future policy development, with a firm eye on attracting voters to support us, and the FPC has now approved the creation of three policy working groups. One will look at affordable housing, sustainable communities and development. A second will focus on social care and disability and the third on early years education and childcare in England.

The FPC is seeking applications from members to join the groups. You should apply by 5 October.

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Katharine Pindar

A distinctly Liberal viewpoint

By Katharine Pindar | Fri 24th September 2021 - 9:45 am

Did our Leader Ed Davey in Conference, and can we as members on the doorsteps, explain a distinctly Liberal point of view?

Ed told us we should say that we stand for a fair deal, and are decent politicians who care about you. We perhaps confirmed that at Conference with the passage particularly of the F24 motion, A Fairer, Greener, More Caring Society, which was built on the Themes policy paper.

Liberalism is certainly not populism, but we Lib Dems do incline to believe that a large proportion of the British public share our moderate, centrist views, together with our belief that the State is needed to enable all citizens to have the chance of secure, healthy and fulfilling lives. We don’t believe in the centralised over-powerful State sought by Socialism, nor the small-state attitude of Conservatism.

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Caron Lindsay

Liam McArthur launches consultation on Assisted Dying Bill

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 23rd September 2021 - 1:45 pm

Orkney MSP Liam McArthur has today launched a consultation on his proposal for a Members’ Bill which would enable assisted dying for terminally ill people in Scotland.

His Bill would have safeguards, including:

  • Two doctors independently confirm the person is terminally ill, establish that the person has the mental capacity to request assisted dying,  assess that the person is making an informed decision without pressure or coercion
  • Two doctors ensure the person has been fully informed of palliative, hospice, and other care options.
  • The person signs a written declaration of their request, this is followed by a period of reflection
  • The person must administer the life-ending medication themselves; It would continue to be a criminal offence to end someone’s life directly
  • Every assisted death would be recorded and reported for safety, monitoring, and research purposes.

Liam said:

“In my time as an MSP I have heard from many dying people and grieving families who have been failed by the current blanket ban on assisted dying. I have watched other countries, such as Australia and New Zealand put new laws in place to ensure their citizens can have a peaceful and dignified death and I believe that the time is right for Scotland to look again at providing our dying people with more choice at the end of life. The consultation sets out a blueprint for how we can do this safely and compassionately.”

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Michael Kilpatrick

Conference progress on a Federal UK: levelling up the Liberal Democrat way

By Michael Kilpatrick | Thu 23rd September 2021 - 12:12 pm

As a member of the Policy Working Group chaired by John Shipley, delivering the motion F21 A Framework for England in a Federal UK, I volunteered to write this follow-up to Sunday’s Conference debate. This is my consolation prize for disconnecting my audio and embarrassingly failing to speak in the debate myself – somewhat riling, given my work on regionalism and federalism since 2015.

It seems, however, that I need not have worried about the result from a personal perspective. After a clear, explanatory opening speech by Prue Bray, many contributors spoke in favour of a strong tier of English regions constitutionally equivalent to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as states of a federal UK, providing for a union that would work better in terms of fairness, localism, empowerment, democratic accountability and, importantly, creating constitutional stability between the home nations.

This is not to say that the Working Group’s views were unanimous. We recognised the need to present several options, not just one proposal. We excluded English regions with separate legal jurisdictions, as different from each other as Scotland is from England, as lacking popularity and seen by some as dangerous. The choice was between a single English state or a set of regional states and then a further decision on the nature of an all-England legislature. By a two-thirds majority Conference chose regional federal states and an English legislature separate from the federal structure, formed by regional representatives rather than a directly elected national body.

Accompanying that, Conference endorsed a Union in which at least half of tax revenue would be spent by sub-national bodies, competing with Canada and Germany as two of the most fiscally decentralised countries. We also outlined – not exhaustively – the sort of powers that the federal states should have.

Our answer to the Tories’ “levelling up” is that we have an actual plan: a massive shift in power towards local and regional authorities and a fair distribution of resources across England and the UK as a whole, taking money away from Whitehall and giving more local control over finances.

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Paul Tyler

Lord Paul Tyler writes….Reflections on 65 years as a party member

By Paul Tyler | Wed 22nd September 2021 - 11:52 am

As with so much else in politics, our conference this year was by turns very different and strikingly similar to the first I attended some 60 years ago. This year’s conference was beamed into my living room; my first Liberal Assembly took place in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh. This year’s conference took place in the shadow of Western humiliation in Afghanistan. My first took place when Britain was still reeling from the Suez scandal.

Either way, this year’s was my last as a Parliamentarian. The House of Lords is a place of many anachronisms, and I wouldn’t like to risk becoming one of them. Since I turn 80 at the end of October, the moment has come – after 65 years as a party member – to take a back seat.

Don’t despair: this is not just a forlorn trip down memory lane, but a reflection on how the present and future should be faced, after that experience. In the 1950s and 1960s the UK political landscape was remarkably two dimensional. In General Elections a large majority voted for – and against – the two major parties. In the former decade that total was regularly well over 90%. Even in my first parliamentary contest in 1966 some 89.8% of those who voted supported Labour or Conservative candidates.

Canvassing experience reflected that dichotomy. “My husband is in the union, we’re Labour” or “We’re in business, we’re Conservative”. In Cornwall and Devon there was a very welcome variation: “Our family have always been Methodists, we’re Liberals”. Only very much later, during my 1982 Beaconsfield by-election campaign, did I encounter the show-stopping response “We are not interested in politics, we’re Conservatives”.

All that has fundamentally changed. The population, and especially the regularly voting component, are nowhere near so consistently aligned. Their motivation is far from that previous clear economic/social divide. Their support churns around between elections, and even during the last few days of a campaign.

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Caron Lindsay

Conference best bits: Fraser Graham on our party’s values

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 22nd September 2021 - 7:05 am

Edinburgh South Chair Fraser Graham delivered this cracker of a speech in the debate on What Liberal Democrats believe on Sunday morning. Where are the limits of free speech and how should our party deal with the boundaries?

Conference, I joined this party in 2016 because of one issue – Brexit. The reason I am still here is because of the values and principles our party upholds.

This speech is somewhat of a paradox. It should be completely unnecessary, because I’d take it entirely for granted that any true liberal would have no objection to the values put before you, either in the paper, the motion or the amendment.

But in this current climate, where members of the LGBT+ community, MY community, are facing almost constant daily attack through the media, on twitter and even here, at conference, we NEED to be bold, and firmly plant our flag as a party that is standing up for the rights of those we need to support and protect.

On Liberty, the paper states “We embrace freedom of thought and speech, and argue for stronger protection against those who abuse free speech, use it to promote division and hatred, or spread falsehoods and ‘fake news’.”

This is crucial. Free speech is not freedom to discriminate without consequence. It’s not freedom to be given a platform to espouse views which are actively harmful, or freedom to hound people on social media to the point of taking their own life. We need to be clear on this and push back against those who demand to be able to say whatever racist, transphobic, homophobic or ableist claptrap they desire without fear of consequence.

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Caron Lindsay

The Lib Dem Conference Roll of Honour

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 21st September 2021 - 3:30 pm

I was at a loss to understand why I was so absolutely knackered at the end of Conference last night. It’s not as if I had had to drag my sorry, Glee-Club hungover backside the length of the country as I would have been if I’d been at an in-person conference. It’s not as if I had had about 15 hours’ sleep over the past 5 nights of “networking.”

Certainly, sitting in front of a screen for 12 hours a day is pretty exhausting. So, I guess, is the emotional energy used up wishing I was actually with my friends in the Goat and Tricycle in Bournemouth or Smokeys in Brighton.

But that was pretty much all I was doing. For those organising Conference, it was much harder. Spinning the plates over the four days of the virtual Conference is pretty intense for Federal Conference Committee. They have to deal with all the speakers’ cards, manage the debates, deal with unexpected tech problems, make decisions about what separate vote requests, requests for references back etc to take.

So, Federal Conference Committee, take a bow. You did a superb job. Those based in the Docklands HQ  that I remember seeing over the weekend included Jennie Rigg, Jon Ball, Bex Scott, Chris Adams, Cara Jenkinson, Chris Maines and Joe Otten. This does not mean I agreed with every single one of their decisions, because that would be weird, but I do want to pay tribute to their hard work.

One person I want to single out was also there. It was new Committee Chair Nick Da Costa’s first Conference in charge and by all accounts he did a great job. My spies tell me that he was the most supportive and appreciative manager and he was also quick to respond to queries from Conference attendees on social media.

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By Gove, my LUD is planning to level up!

By Andy Boddington | Tue 21st September 2021 - 11:30 am

In last week’s reshuffle, Robert Jenrick was booted out of cabinet and Michael Gove nudged across to take over the housing and planning brief. His duties as secretary of state now also include the struggling levelling up agenda. So the department that was most often called the housing ministry has been renamed the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, DLUHC, perhaps pronounced duller huck. Given the ordering of priorities in the title it seems inevitable that the department will be known as the Levelling Up Department, or LUD, though some may think that acronym LUDicrous. Indeed, it has attracted both criticism and satire.

Gove’s main job is to prevent the Blue Wall collapsing by rolling back Jenrick’s failing planning reforms. He must also secure the Red Wall by making levelling up happen. That’s tough for a man, although born in Aberdeen, who is identified with Blue Wall Tories. And there is already concern that local government will suffer yet again now it has been dropped from the department’s title. Michael Gove may feel he has a collar around his neck, tasked with delivering what his boss Boris Johnson could not.

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Caron Lindsay

Justin Trudeau gets away with his gamble

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 21st September 2021 - 10:56 am

After a $600 million election that Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t need to call, voters have delivered virtually the same result as in 2019. Trudeau failed to re-gain the majority he won in 2015. In fact, his Liberal Party is likely to lose a seat and the Conservatives will gain a seat.

I had been hoping that the New Democrats would have won more seats to anchor the Liberals to a more progressive path, but they are projected to only gain 3 seats.

The Greens will stay on two but not the same two as last time as their vote share fell. They held their former leader’s seat in Vancouver and gained one in Ontario where the Liberal candidate was not supported by the party after a scandal but there was no time to replace him on the ballot. Internal divisions led to them losing their original two and having a pretty miserable election. Their leader will not be in Parliament as she went from 2nd (in a by-election) to 4th in her seat.  Thanks to Em Dean for providing me with more detailed information.

The odious UKIP style People’s Party have more than doubled their vote.

From CBC in Canada:

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has won enough seats in this 44th general election to form another minority government — with voters signalling Monday they trust the incumbent to lead Canada through the next phase of the pandemic fight by handing him a third mandate with a strong plurality.

After a 36-day campaign and a $600-million election, the final seat tally doesn’t look very different from the composition of the House of Commons when it was dissolved in early August — prompting even more questions about why a vote was called during a fourth wave of the pandemic in the first place.

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Michal Siewniak

“Poverty of trust”

By Michal Siewniak | Mon 20th September 2021 - 11:18 am

A very good friend of mine from Croatia (thank you, Hrvoje!) has recently invited me to an international online meeting, attended by 40 + different business leaders from around the world. The main theme for the session was the importance of building and strengthening the trust. The meeting, and in particular some of the expressions used, was quite revealing.

Whilst going through the process of being approved as a candidate in the next local elections, I had an opportunity to spend one Saturday morning with some of my colleagues, who are very experienced campaigners.

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Richard Joy

COP26: Likely to save the planet?

By Richard Joy | Mon 20th September 2021 - 9:14 am

Now, I’m not the sort of person that resorts to hyperbole for a dramatic opening sentence but, in case you hadn’t noticed, the future of the planet is hanging in the balance. This is not the statement of a wild-haired fanatic, living with badgers and chanting cross-legged in the woods but a widely acknowledged scientific fact. For the last few years a growing list of eminently respectable people have been warning us that urgent action is required: Sir David Attenborough does it, HRH Prince Charles regularly does it, António Guterres, the ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations definitely does it, even peers of the realm do it. Given irrefutable scientific evidence and the reverberating voices of powerful and respected people, then surely, you would think, something is going to change. We know the causes of climate change. We know what action needs to be taken. So, what is stopping us?

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Caron Lindsay

Party strategy motion passes – with amendment securing local members rights on standing candidates

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 19th September 2021 - 8:52 pm

This morning Conference passed the party strategy motion. One of the Federal Board’s key tasks is to bring a motion on party strategy to Conference for approval.

This one had lots of good stuff in it on developing a strong narrative, improving diversity and menber experience, developing our campaigning capacity and having a “one party” approach where we co-ordinate our effort.

There were four amendments, all of which passed and, I think, substantially improved it. Lib Dems for Racial Equality called for this party to finally pull its finger out and implement the Thornhill and Alderdice reviews and get out and engage with ethnic minority communities. The Parliamentary Candidates Association called for greater support for candidates and 10 members called for our progress towards net zero as a party to be expedited.

These three passed with little opposition. The drama was all around an amendment proposed by Federal Board member Simon McGrath. It called for us to stand a candidate in every seat at the next General Election unless local members agreed not to. Anyone who bears the scars of the Unite to Remain effort in 2019 will probably have some sympathy with this. However, others, including me, felt that it would bind any attempts to stand down in some places where it would be sensible to do so. I generally think we should stand everywhere, and I think that voices calling on us to stand down are generally from parties who wouldn’t do the same in return, but I felt we should give ourselves the flexibility.

ALDC Chair Prue Bray made such a good speech in support that I asked her if we could publish it. It’s just rammed with good sense about how we should work together and I love it.

I want to get rid of this government. Not because it’s Conservative but because it’s dreadful. It’s dreadful because it isn’t liberal, in its policies, values or behaviour. I want a liberal government, or at least one that we can exert the maximum liberal influence on. And the only way to get that is to get more Lib Dems elected. Labour aren’t liberal, nor are the Greens, the SNP or Plaid.

It’s us or nothing.

We won’t get more Lib Dems elected if we don’t stand, however tempting a pre-election pact might look. Unite to Remain looked tempting. It didn’t deliver anything.

When the battle is over, when the votes are counted, that’s the time to make pacts to further the progressive cause. And that’s why I strongly support amendment 3.

There are people who don’t agree. That’s fine, I don’t mind challenge. What I mind is people who tell me I am wrong without producing any supporting facts, and then go off and do whatever they want even if it’s completely against the interests of the party.

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Caron Lindsay

Conference votes for improvements to disciplinary process and votes down Steering Group

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 19th September 2021 - 7:26 pm

The Federal Board report usually goes through fairly uncontroversially. However, there has been a bit of drama at the past two conferences. In Spring important board business relating to the disciplinary process was withdrawn at the last minute after a serious error was discovered.

This delayed desperately needed improvements to the disciplinary process until now. You can find out more about the detail here in the Board report.

Thankfully, those changes, which make the process quicker, less stressful on those using it and on those administering it and clearer, passed easily this afternoon.

Last Summer, the Federal Board started operating in a different way. One of the Thornhill Review’s 78 recommendations was to improve the governance of the party and make the Federal Board smaller. The Board decided to delegate most of its powers to a small, mostly not directly elected people. As a directly elected Federal Board member, I opposed it from the outset. If such a centralising power grab was being done in a council, we would be up in arms about it. I always think it is very important to live our values and I don’t feel that the Steering Group project does that. We are a member led organisation but we concentrated power into too few hands.

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The Voice

WATCH: Ed Davey’s speech in full

By The Voice | Sun 19th September 2021 - 3:04 pm

WATEd Davey has just spoken to Federal Conference. He had a specially invited live audience of around 100 people at a venue in Canary Wharf.

Here is the text in full:

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Caron Lindsay

The speeches that got away – Suzanne Fletcher on accessible housing and freeing Brownfield sites

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 19th September 2021 - 10:30 am

Unfortunately I missed the housing debate last night as for once I put party over Party. My sister insisted on having two of her children during Federal Conference and I can almost never celebrate with them because I am at Conference. So I took advantage of the chance to do so.

By all accounts the debate was excellent, thoughtful and passionately argued. The issue was whether we should have a national target for house building, which the motion proposed, but ALDC’s amendment did away with. Conference voted to keep it so we are committed to building at 150,000 homes suitable for social rent out of a total of 380,000 per year. I am so pleased that got through. Too many young people find it impossible to find somewhere decent to live that they can afford and we have to be ambitious about resolving that.

But there are two points that weren’t really part of the debate. Stockton’s Suzanne Fletcher wanted to raise the need for accessible housing and freeing up brownfield sites. This is what she would have said if she had been called:

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Tom Arms

World Review: Afghanistan, child labour and vaccine passports in France

By Tom Arms | Sun 19th September 2021 - 8:30 am

In this weekend’s World Review, Tom Arms reports the Taliban is proving to be a loose coalition that is quickly falling apart along centuries-old tribal lines and more contemporary political axes. He turns his attention to the impact that Covid is having on child labour in the developing world. And he reviews how Marcon’s insistence on vaccine passports turned France from an country opposed to vaccination to one where 74% of adults have had at least one dose.

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Tim Farron MP

Tim Farron: Time to end pointless housing targets

By Tim Farron MP | Sat 18th September 2021 - 12:00 pm

Be honest. When did you last collect a campaign leaflet from the doormat, see a six-figure housing target, and scream, “this is the Party for me!”?

Probably never.

Why? First, because everybody knows housing targets are empty slogans. No Government has hit their magic number since 2007, but they’ve never been held accountable for missing it. Second, every Party picks the same number… or tries to out-do the other lot by 50,000.

On Saturday evening, Conference will debate and vote on Policy Motion F20: Building Communities. I’m supporting an Amendment to the Motion which increases local authorities’ compulsory purchase powers, ensures that 40% of new build houses are social homes, and erases the proposed national target of 380,000 new homes per year.

And if anybody suggests the removal of this target is in any way NIMBY, they are… well, let’s put it politely – they’re totally wrong.

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Simon McGrath

We must stand a candidate in every constituency at the next General Election

By Simon McGrath | Sat 18th September 2021 - 11:26 am

Our Party has something to offer everyone in England Scotland and Wales and therefore it makes sense that we should stand a candidate in every seat (our friends in the Alliance Party do a great job in Northern Ireland).

That might seem like common sense – but at the last election we participated in the Unite to Remain Agreement by which we, the Greens and Plaid Cymru (Labour refused to participate) agreed to stand down in some constituencies – and it was a disaster. Not only did it make no difference to the results, but the way in which our local parties and PPCs were told they were standing down with no input from them caused huge problems.

If you agree we should stand a candidate everywhere, please support Amendment 3 to motion F23: Party Strategy, 10.55 on Sunday morning.

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Tom Arms

Observations of an Expat: Underwater Problems

By Tom Arms | Sat 18th September 2021 - 8:30 am

The Anglo-American decision to sell nuclear submarines to Australia has launched a new round of geopolitical musical chairs with long-lasting repercussions.

The Americans, Australians and British are very happy with their new seats and the new nuclear sub deal and the creation of a new alliance called AUKUS.

The French are furious with the three allies. They have been left standing on the outside. It completely scuppers their $50 billion deal to sell the Australians electric submarines. It also weakens the Franco-British defence agreement that had become one of the pillars of the Western Alliance. “It is a stab in the back,” exclaimed the furious French foreign minister Jean-Yves le Drian.

The Chinese are, of course, livid.

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Duncan Brack

The two Davids: Steel versus Owen – Fringe Friday 17:30

By Duncan Brack | Fri 17th September 2021 - 4:11 pm

The Journal of Liberal History is organising a fringe meeting on Friday at 17:30. Sir Graham Watson (Steel’s former Head of Office) and Roger Carroll (former SDP Communications Director) will discuss what went wrong in the relationship between the Liberal and SDP leaders that led to the failure and break-up of the Alliance. Chair: Christine Jardine MP.

The meeting coincides with the publication of the autumn issue of the Journal of Liberal History.

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Latest issue of Liberator published

By Liberator Collective | Fri 17th September 2021 - 10:30 am

The September 2021 issue of Liberator, Alistair Carmichael writes on vaccine ID cards, Norman Baker writes on trains and David Grace suggests we have a strategy without a strategy. Claire Tyler questions whether we are brave enough to pay for social care and Rebecca Tinsley writes on Sudan, Islamists and women. Alan Sherwell champions Universal Basic Income, Robert Brown says federalism could keep the UK together and Geoff Reid introduces us to green carrots.

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Time to stand up for Liberal Democracy: Fringe launch 17:35 Friday

By Ian Kearns and Jon Alexander | Fri 17th September 2021 - 7:00 am

As we Liberal Democrats begin our annual conference, held entirely online for the second year, we must recognise that we do so in the context of existential threat to the political system that gives our party its name.

30 years ago, Francis Fukuyama declared the victory of liberal democracy, and “the end of history”. But now history is very much back, with authoritarianism on the rise in Britain and across the world.

This context, we believe, means that it’s now time for the Liberal Democrats to stand up as the party of liberal democracy – and for leader Ed Davey to set out a meaningful vision for the country, instead of relying solely on local action to make incremental “Blue Wall” gains. As Nelson Mandela famously said:

Vision without action is just a dream; action without vision just passes the time; vision with action can change the world.

A new collection of essays, Citizens Britain: towards the renewal of liberal democracy, will be launched at a conference fringe event today.

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Samuel Jackson

Swedish-style fixed term Parliaments

By Samuel Jackson | Thu 16th September 2021 - 7:40 pm

The 2011 Fixed Term Parliaments Act (FTPA) established fixed quinquennial parliamentary terms, transforming the means of dissolving Parliament from a prerogative power exercised by the Prime Minister to a parliamentary process requiring two-thirds support in the Commons.

The major criticisms of the FTPA are chiefly about its shortcomings and the politics surrounding the act, namely for supporting the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition, propping up the lame duck Second May Ministry, and its argued status as a dead letter due to the 2017 and 2019 elections with the latter being held by circumventing the FTPA via a simple-majority one-line bill. Such criticisms are bad faith arguments against the FTPA, merely stated ulteriorly in favour of the restoration of the prerogative power to dissolve Parliament.

One of the reasons that our party supports proportional representation for Westminster elections is that it would prevent early elections from being called for the governing party to benefit from an incumbency advantage and strong poll numbers as under First-Past-The-Post. However, this does not mean that PR should replace the FTPA entirely, an act that is not flawed in of itself but because its measures do not go far enough. If anything, complimenting PR, additional measures should be taken to strengthen the FTPA.

There may be an approach to fixed terms that has not before been considered for this country. In Sweden, quadrennial fixed term elections using part list proportional are held for the Riksdag. Sweden’s Prime Minister has the power to call an election part-way through a parliamentary term, but it would be an extra election, not an early election. Hypothetically, with the last Riksdag election being held in 2018, if an extra election were to be held now in 2021 due to the collapse of the current government, an election would still have to be held in 2022 instead of the election cycle being reset, the next election due for 2025.

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