Ever since Boris won the 2019 General Election, there has been growing talk of the need for a “progressive alliance” to stop the Tories winning the next election.
Quite what this might involve is unclear. Some would like a national pact between Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens so only one party would stand in each seat, and others want simply to promote greater tactical voting and other parties to scale back their campaigning where another party is the main challenger.
Helpfully, the by-elections in both Batley and Spen and Chesham & Amersham give us some insight into how this could work and how voters might react.
Chesham & Amersham: a victory for tactical voting
Let’s take Chesham & Amersham first, where the Liberal Democrats started in firm second place. We fought a vigorous campaign and proved early Green party claims that they were going to be the main challenger wrong. People who were traditionally Labour voters, realising that their vote could make a difference, decided to tactically lend their vote to the Lib Dems – including some Party members and activists.
After more than a decade in the role, Willie Rennie announced this evening that he is standing aside as leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats.
Watch his statement here:
He leaves while he is still incredibly popular within the party – and the tributes he has received from outside it show how valued he is across politics.
When he took over in 2011, he inherited a party that had been given the hoofing of its life in the Scottish Parliament elections, reduced from 16 MSPs to just 5.
The small group he led had a big voice, though. Over the years, the Scottish Lib Dems have been the go-to people on issues like education and mental health. Willie’s dogged persistence, challenging Scottish Ministers week in and week out on issues like police centralisation, college places, mental health waiting times, childcare and free school meals shifted government policy on many occasions.
He stared wipeout in the eye in the Scottish Parliamentary elections of 2016. If you had told me we would emerge with 5 MSPs from that election after the disaster of 2015, I would not have dared to believe it. But he showed what he could do with a bright and optimistic campaign which include him launching the manifesto while running down a soft-play volcano and being interviewed on a slide. When his photocall at a city farm was overshadowed by two amorous pigs, journalists were given a packet of Percy Pigs each at the next big event.
His commitment to improving the party’s diversity saw him ensure that we had all women shortlists for both 2017 and 2021 elections, a gender balanced team of spokespeople and serious money invested in diversity projects in each year’s Scottish budget. He put his own neck on the line to get these measures approved by Conference. He needed a two thirds majority and he got it by basically ringing everyone who had registered and talking them round.
And he has travelled the length and breadth of the country so many times supporting candidates at every possible level of election. He’s encouraged people to stand who have now been elected. He has led campaigning with boundless energy, enthusiasm and a huge smile.
I am incredibly sad to see him go, but I can understand that after 10 years of unrelenting graft, he relishes the chance to do something a bit different. He’ll stay on as MSP for North East Fife, of course – but don’t expect him to stop speaking out on th issues he has championed.
And as a campaigner who has been responsible for many of the party’s successes over the past three decades, his skills in that direction will be in demand.
So what now?
The Scottish Executive will set a timetable for a leadership election in which any of the party’s other three MSPs will be eligible to stand.
But for now, let’s look at some of the lovely things people are saying about Willie:
This is the call of the Health Foundation charity in its final report this month from a long-running enquiry into the impact of COVID-19. Calling on the Government to address the root causes of poor health, the report makes clear that the investment required into people and communities will involve jobs, housing, and education, plus action to ‘level up’ health.
In the report, they say;
The pandemic has revealed stark differences in the health of the working age population – those younger than 65 in the poorest 10% of areas in England were almost four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those in the wealthiest. Recovery needs to prioritise creating opportunities for good health – a vital asset needed to ‘level up’ and rebuild the UK recovery.
In this weekend’s review, LDV’s foreign correspondent Tom Arms talks of events in Haiti, a basket case of a country whose presidents tend to come to an untimely end, including this week President Moise.
Joe Biden is continuing to withdraw from Afghanistan. Donald Trump is suing Facebook. Both difficult strategies.
The delta variant of Covid-19 is causing cases to rise rapidly around the world, especially in countries with low levels of vaccination. Vaccinating Africa must become a priority to save lives in the Southern and Northern Hemispheres.
Crowding together. Shouting. Singing. Welcome to the excitement of football. As England and Italy prepare for the Euro final, scientists are concerned that football is helping drive up Covid-19 infection rates by allowing potentially super spreader events such as the finals at Wembley and Wimbledon. It is predicted that seven million pints will be served during the Euro final tonight in pubs across the land. Health secretary Sajid Javid has suggested we might be heading towards 100,000 new cases a day. Did he take sporting events into account?
It’s coming home but could coronavirus also be coming home with the fans? Maybe Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid want that. Could the Euro final be a booster jab that gets us closer to herd immunity.
York has become the first city in the UK to sign up to the Good Business Charter – a pioneering imitative that puts fairness, representation, diversity and a shared commitment to our environmental responsibilities at the heart of our economic strategy.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, City of York Council has had a clear focus on working closely with the business community, supporting small and micro businesses, and promoting our unique approach to economic development – the ‘York Way’.
Recently an independent evaluation of the Council’s £1.14m micro grant scheme revealed that since its introduction in March 2020, 294 local businesses were saved from closure and over 500 families and employees from falling into personal and financial hardship.
This week’s by-elections present a very mixed picture, along with some crucial lessons in defending our held seats. With eight vacancies to fight, we stood in six, succeeding in one. We lost our one defence in East Devon, in what was a disappointing result. Nevertheless, good campaigns were fought elsewhere, and we can celebrate a good town council gain.
There two Green gains on Thursday, we stood in one and not the other. The lesson is it’s always better to stand for the sake of giving voters a real choice, rather than getting any misplaced ideas about deals and pacts.
America believes in exporting its Democracy. And it has sought to do so right from the start. Congress regularly ties aid and trade packages to political change in developing countries, too often ignoring local conditions.
For many years America was seen by other countries as that “Shining City on the Hill” first mentioned in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and later repeated by Puritan leader John Winthrop and, more recently, by President Ronald Reagan.
Its War of Independence inspired the French Revolution, liberation movements in South America and elsewhere in the world. The stirring words of the Declaration of Independence are mirrored in similar documents across the globe.
But changes in American electoral politics means that the rest of the world is now questioning America’s claim to the moral high ground, and those questions undermine the success and stability of democracy elsewhere in the world.
The Government appears to have forgotten why, the predominantly Conservative, Coalition Government introduced the “triple lock” whereby the State Pension increases in line with earnings, prices or 2.5%, whichever is the greatest.
It was an attempt to reverse the 30 years of erosion since Margaret Thatcher replaced the “earnings link” with a “prices link”. And after only ten years there is a long way to go to restore the pre 1980 relative value.
Prices are about the cost of static living. Earnings are about the standard of living and quality of life. As the economy grows so too do the expectations and necessities of life. For example, very few people had fridges in 1950; it would be difficult to manage without one today.
Having written 150 blog posts on coronavirus since March 2020, and as a recipient of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, I was eagerly looking forward to the publication of this book. When it dropped into my Audible inbox this morning, I immediately began listening as I ploughed on with my daily business of a councillor while living in self isolation. I was not disappointed.
Sarah Gilbert is Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University. Dr Catherine Green is also at Oxford, where she is an Associate Professor in Chromosome Dynamics at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics. Together they tell the story of how the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine was developed in record time amid a pandemic that affected their lives as much as everyone else’s.
Their message is: “We went faster because we had to.” That was despite at times feeling the strain of “an unedified mix of science, politics and emotions.”
On Monday 12th July the Commons will debate the 2nd Reading of the Higher Education (Academic Freedom) Bill. This Bill, which closely follows the recommendations of two Policy Exchange papers and of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, provides for the Office for Students (OfS) to regulate and enforce rules on free speech within universities, and establishes the new post of ‘Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom’ in the OfS. It gives students, staff and visiting speakers the right to sue universities and student unions for alleged breaches of free speech, with fines to be imposed. The OfS may also impose penalties.
This is a culture war bill. The evidence that threats to free speech in universities are greater now than they were 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago is thin. The Policy Exchange papers are heavily dependent on US sources and examples – yet another example of the increasing capture of English Conservative thinking by US Republican ideas. Gavin Williamson decries an attempt to prevent an ambassador speaking at a university – but my wife as a Young Liberal demonstrated to block the South African Ambassador speaking in Oxford in 1963. He deplores the withdrawal of an invitation to Amber Rudd by an Oxford student society; but I recall at Manchester University in 1968 students disrupting the Education Secretary when trying to speak at an official university event.
Ecocide, unlike Geocide, has yet to be embedded in international law.
Ecocide, as envisaged, would perhaps be reserved for extreme forms of our everyday Planet Abuse and directed at corporates and government leaders whose policies wreak so much damage. Even so, the chances of such condemnation becoming law are minimal – and the chances of it acting as any deterrent, even less. Like so much else in the hot air of climate debating circles, the notion of Ecocide is as purely symbolic as national flag waving or political greenwashing.
On the other hand, everyday Planet Abuse is more easily understood by individual citizens and communities. For sure, there are challenges in tracking useful metrics: many places and people will see different priorities, and we are still a very long way from the general taboos that progressive societies try to muster for, say, Domestic or Racial Abuse.
We pride ourselves on the idea that party members make policy at Federal Conference. There is an idea that any member can write a motion, get the required support, and submit it to Conference and the members will then discuss it. This is not quite reality. The 30th June was the deadline for submitting motions for Federal Conference.
Imagine you have spent weeks working on your motion. You submitted it for drafting advice and have made some of the suggested changes. You got the support needed to submit it and have submitted it. Now you wait to hear if it was selected. (You are not told when a decision will be made, but you expect it will be within a couple of weeks or so.)
In the report on the selection of motions meeting of Federal Conference Committee for last September’s Conference, we can see that eight policy motions were selected, with two more reserved for motions on Europe and Covid, and two for emergency motions. Plus a couple of business motions and a couple of consultative sessions.
There were 32 policy motions rejected. So, after all that work your motion is rejected. The odds are against you. Oh well, there are always amendments to work on once the agenda is published.
It is wonderful that the “civic tradition” of children from the Polish Saturday School in Welwyn Garden City continues!
Last weekend, a group of children and a few members of staff visited the Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council. Children had another opportunity to visit the Council Chamber, meet the Leader of the Council, newly elected Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Welwyn Hatfield.
Today I did something unusual for a Liberal Democrat councillor. I thanked local residents for being patriotic.
The area I serve always likes to join in big events. People make huge efforts at Christmas and major national occasions. At the moment, the place is consumed with football fever and many houses are flying England flags of all shapes and sizes. Football truly is coming home in Oakley ward.
That’s why today I delivered a letter of thanks to every home displaying an England flag.
Jane Bonham Carter, the Lib Dem Lords Spokesperson for DCMS has attacked government plans to sell off Channel 4, which “was created to be a disruptive, innovative force in UK broadcasting.”
The Conservative plans to try and sell off Channel 4 are disgraceful and will diminish the organisation.
In this weekend’s review, Tom Arms looks at the dilemmas that faced Joe Biden as he ordered an attack on pro-Iranian militia in Iraq. In another dilemma, Biden could hold up any talk of a UK-US trade deal if he thinks that the Good Friday Agreement is threatened or damaged by Boris Johnson’s tactics on Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, prosecutors are getting closer to Donald Trump. The charging of a Trump Organisation employee could provide more information about Trump’s financial dealing. The organisations’ assets will also be frozen and banks are likely to call in their loans. former South African President Jacob Zuma has been jailed for contempt of court. And Israel is providing an object lesson in Covid complacency.
Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson Christine Jardine has warned that thousands of businesses are facing uncertainty as furlough begins to wind down and the business rates holiday ends, while restrictions remain in place.
How are businesses supposed to have confidence in a Government that promised to do whatever it takes, but is withdrawing support too soon? Now thousands of businesses are being left facing reduced support while still unable to operate fully to pay their bills.
FPC has had an unusual burst of work to finish up June, with three meetings within a week, one of them a full-day awayday.
I’ll start with our plans for future policy development work, which we discussed at our in-person awayday in the last Sunday in June. It was fantastic to be back all together, with the great majority of members coming. We all really enjoyed the energy of being able to work together in person rather than sitting individually at home on Zoom, which like everyone else we’ve done exhaustively over the last sixteen months.
A couple months of ago, Oxfordshire changed. For the first time in 16 years, the Conservatives no longer had a majority on the County Council and instead, an alliance was formed between the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and the Labour Party to form an administration. We named this the Oxfordshire Fair Deal Alliance, and I was elected the Leader of the new council.
For many years, I have been asked by voters why the opposition parties can’t work together to effect change. In the Witney by-election of 2016, Robert Courts won 45% of the vote – why, I was asked then, did Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems not get together and offer an effective and united challenge, breaking the Conservative dominance of local politics? Perhaps that might have worked, but at the time, that was not an option. But now, maybe things have started to shift.
There were massed choirs, bands, marching soldiers, clapping children, thousands and thousands of red and yellow balloons and a military flypast. Some 72,000 hand-picked and thoroughly vetted party members packed into Beijing’s Tianmen Square to perform a carefully choreographed warm-up act for a speech by President Xi Jinping to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party.
The main thrust of Xi’s address was that the Communist Party was now China and China was the Communist Party. The two entities have been declared indivisible. The Mandate of Heaven has fallen on the shoulders of the party’s leadership and that the only way that China can continue to develop and take its natural leading place in the world is through dogged loyalty to the diktats of the Chinese Communist Party.
First – huge congratulations to Kim Leadbeater. Brand new to politics, she was absolutely thrown to the wolves in this campaign, but she survived it. The fight between Labour and Galloway was bitter and divisive, the last thing this community needed. I hope that Kim will be a compassionate and healing MP and I wish her luck.
Honestly, as someone who has been campaigning and knocking on doors in this election, the result has come as a huge shock. I thought the Conservatives would walk it. Perhaps that tells you something about the areas we targeted – our locally held ward of Cleckheaton and our adjacent target of Birstall and Birkenshaw are very much Tory leaning. Our campaign focussed on keeping that local election vote with us, rather than letting it slide back to the Tories.
Andy Haldane, about to leave the Bank of England where he has long been its respected chief economist, told the audience at Policy Exchange, the Conservative think tank, on Monday June 28th that ‘Levelling Up’ should now be the central issue in our domestic politics. That’s a radical statement, which should make Liberal Democrats think carefully about how we develop our response to this challenge.
Haldane pointed out that there are only two EU member states where inequality between the richest and poorest regions are as high as in the UK: Romania and Poland. He noted how economic (and social) imbalances across the UK have widened over the past 30-40 years. He did not add (though Liberals would underline) that gross inequalities undermine social order and democratic government. His broad agenda includes investing in education and skills, encouraging local enterprise and innovation, and a far larger British Business Bank, in addition to improving transport infrastructure and housing. And he emphasised that this agenda cannot simply be directed from the centre: it requires regional and local initiative, with substantial powers and finance devolved.
On Tuesday Sir Michael Marmot issued his latest report on regional and local inequalities, focussing primarily on England’s North-West. This further spelt out the gulf between the wealthiest and poorest in our society, including the wide differences in health and life expectancy between prosperous and deprived communities. His agenda for change is similar to Haldane’s: investment in education, local public services, job creation and housing, in addition to the government’s current plans for improved infrastructure. ‘We need to spend for future generations’, Marmot told the BBC.
Boris Johnson promised to level up Britain – and to ‘Build Back Better’ after the pandemic – without defining what that meant or how it would be paid for. Others, outside partisan politics, are now spelling out what will be required if the promise is to be fulfilled. Polls show that many who voted Leave five years ago saw Brexit as the opportunity to rebuild British industry (blaming the EU for globalization, foreign takeovers and technological change). They also show that Johnson’s rhetoric on levelling up resounded with voters in ‘red wall’ seats.
During the referendum, voters were promised Westminster would have greater power to scrutinise legislation. Liberal Democrats recently made valiant attempts to hold the government to account for its post-Brexit trade deals.
European Union era deals are being “rolled over” by the government. These recycled deals contain review mechanisms that can be triggered if parties breach human rights and democracy clauses. Yet, in the case of the Cameroon deal, those mechanisms were not triggered despite decades of election-rigging, corruption and more recent human rights abuses. What hope is there that the Conservatives will consider current atrocities as sufficient to suspend the rolled over deal? When Lib Dems asked why Parliament was allowed no scrutiny, they were told that MPs had a 14-minute debate in 2010. So much for post-Brexit sovereignty.
In addition, a new report by Global Rights Index finds that five of the 10 countries rated as the ‘worst in the world for workers’ have been given trade deals by Britain in the past two years. The UK-Australia deal has been widely condemned by environmentalists, animal welfare charities and farmers.
The debates initiated by Sarah Olney and Lord Purvis revealed the time warp in which the Foreign Office and Department for International Trade exist. The trade ministers, Graham Stewart MP and Lord Grimstone, gave a masterclass in arrogance and delusional 1950s thinking. They assume that foreign governments respectfully take notice when visiting British ministers raise human rights issues. But in the absence of the carrots and sticks of diplomatic persuasion, the UK’s pompous words have little effect.
I am at disbelief at Vince Cable’s assessment of the atrocities faced by the Uighurs people and the allusion of self-censorship based on emotional feelings in his article in The Independent yesterday.
The Uighurs are indeed facing a crisis and consequences of genocide that requires international attention. The 38th parallel between North and South Korea can sometimes be comparable to a pristine natural reserve, but one will not celebrate such as an achievement. The economic progress in China may also be a beauty. However, it is pushed forwards by the same autocratic regime that self-inflicted a famine causing the death of 1/3 of its population. Should then the fortune of economic progress be a remedy in consideration of atrocities and corruption by parties in the Chinese regime?
Vince noted he accepted sterilisation occurred to Uighurs in Xinjiang, however denies it amounts to genocide. I disagree with this interpretation. Indeed sterilisation is an occurrence to support the One Child Policy. Yet, the Uighurs population is noted to be put into forced sterilisation programmes in facilities where they do not have the freedom to venture about or out. These are the concentration camps appearing around Xinjiang noted by satellite pictures and filmed by the BBC.
Vince’s argument is that because there are other races and people of different beliefs who are caught up with the acts of sterilisation, therefore when ethnic Uighurs faced internment at facilities and then are put through sterilisation, ergo the lack of genocide. If this interpretation is correct, then one can apply a denial to Auschwitz because more than one group of people are being systematically mistreated and killed. I find the notion of denial disturbing and will utmost disagree to any denial of genocide.
WOMAD – the independent World of Music and Dance festival became the latest victim of the Coronavirus last night. Organiser and musician Peter Gabriel said on the event’s website:
It is with great regret that we are cancelling WOMAD ’21 today (28th June). Without the simple support of a government insurance scheme or the guarantee of Test Event status, we cannot continue and put WOMAD’s long term future at risk. We feel that our audience, artists, staff, and contractors, who have been amazingly supportive throughout all this, will understand the need for us to act to guarantee our survival.
The festival was due to start on 22nd July – 72 hours after Government restrictions are due to end on the 19th July. All that WOMAD were asking for was a level playing field – to become a Government test event and qualify for Government backed insurance to be underwritten in case the festival was cancelled.
As Membership Secretary for LDCRE, it’s my job to get you to join LDCRE. If you just needed that reminder then click here – and welcome to the campaign!
I should write something more.
As Roderick Lynch, first Chair of LDCRE and a key driver behind the campaign, is prone to saying – the clue is in the name. We are not simply an SAO for members from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds – we are the SAO for members that want to Campaign for Race Equality. Of ALL creeds and colours, and every background.
In 2019 Boris Johnson won a landslide victory. It left him with total power to inflict a heartless Brexit. Our young people face barriers if they want to study or work in Europe. Many people have found their lives badly affected.
How did this happen? What lessons can be learned from the 2019 election?
Firstly, Boris offered certainty after several years of Brexit indecision. Voters knew what they would get if they voted for him. Some ‘remain’ voters just wanted things settled.
Secondly our electoral system rewards big parties. The Tories won only 44% of votes, but they were the biggest party and won easily.
The amazing Liberal Democrat win in last week’s Chesham & Amersham by-election was the first electoral setback the Conservatives have had since 2019.
So it’s not surprising that it has sparked a fresh wave of debate across non-Conservative politics about what can be learned from it, one of which is around varying types of a progressive alliance.
It’s important to understand WHY people are talking about a progressive alliance in the first place. For me it starts with three key reasons –
The Conservatives have won 4 successive General Elections and judging by the opinion polls and recent election results, they are in a strong position to make it 5 in a row. The prospect of a Conservative government for most of the 2020s fills many with horror.
Graham Evans Whatever the message, we need a leader who can clearly enunciate it, and not simply make party policy on the hoof. Ed Davey's intervention on the issue of local...
Peter Davies "Wanting to tear down historical statues , monuments , portraits, sanatise books etc ….It’s what the Taliban did in Afghanistan." It's also something Cromwe...
PM If Brexit is the cause of all our problems in the UK, what is the cause of the similar, or even worse, problems in France, Germany, Belgium, Italy etc?
The ...
David S Even if one's conclusion after examining all the complexities of the Civil War (which is a good deal more than "monarchy vs. democracy") is that Cromwell was a ...
Pawel Urbanski Much-needed piece. You are right that young people are the audience, but I am not sure Europe is the way in. The polling you quote shows they already agree with...
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