Just a few minutes ago, I watched as Nancy Pelosi brought down her gavel on the US House resolution to impeach Trump a record second time.
That means, the President is referred to the US Senate for a trial chaired by the Chief Justice, where a two-thirds majority is needed to convict President Trump of “inciting an insurrection”. The timetable appears to suggest that a Democratic-controlled Senate will consider the matter after President-elect Biden is sworn in.
Extraordinarily, ten Republicans voted for impeachment in the US House. This included Rep Liz Cheney – which is very significant. This was the most bipartisan impeachment in the history of the United States.
We are, by nature, political outsiders. None of us has been able to find a home in the establishment parties that dominate our political landscape. The political climate – electoral system, media, financial backing- is not favourable to us either. We struggle to get our voice heard, and our limited grip on power is always in peril and often short-lived.
As an endangered species, we would merit the David Attenborough treatment and as any endangered species need to husband carefully and efficiently our resources to survive. We survive by campaigning effectively on causes that matter to us and the electorate. However as Dorothy Thornhill said in her landmark report on the 2019 election “winning seats in elections has too often come second to internal discussion and management”, pointing out that “resources are being deployed on committees concerned with operational ..minutiae and their purposes and agendas at all levels of the party-national, regional and local”. The Thornhill report called for a review of the governance of all areas of the party.
Interestingly Dorothy in the report describes herself as “not an insider”, but even a party of outsiders needs its insiders. We should be grateful for those prepared to sit through the committee hours keeping the party’s cogs turning year after year as leaders, MPs and other stellar luminaries explode temporarily onto the scene, as membership waxes and wanes.
On Sunday we brought you the news that Christine Jardine’s Private Member’s Bill to give NHS workers the right to remain in the UK.
Sadly, today, the Tories tried to kill that hope by cancelling all sitting Fridays until the end of March. At best this postpones when the Bill will be heard.
Christine’s Bill proposed that all health and social care staff from outside the EU would be granted indefinite leave to remain, enabling them to avoid the hellscape that is our immigration system and granting them rights enjoyed by British citizens.
Christine vowed to fight on, though:
Like the rest of our wonderful NHS and care staff, hundreds of thousands of people from other countries are on the frontlines of the Covid pandemic, putting themselves in harm’s way to make sure we get the care we need.
The UK should say, loudly and unequivocally, that those who have put their lives at risk for our country are welcome to live in it. That’s what my Bill would do, and I am deeply disappointed that the Government is not even letting it be debated in Parliament.
I am not giving up. I will urge Ministers again to make Government time available to pass this urgent legislation, which has cross-party support.
The idea that anyone who has worked so hard to save lives during this emergency might one day be forced to leave should be unthinkable.
The increasing polarisation of politics across the globe is concerning for many reasons. The storming of the Capitol felt like a defining moment in this trend, while our government’s hollow pleading for the nation to unite over their shoddy Brexit deal has done nothing to bring opposing sides together. One area where this polarisation is becoming increasingly worrying is over Covid-19 measures. The world is not made up of Covid-denying conspiracy theorists and authoritarian-loving lockdown fanatics, but whenever a debate crops up, the position you take on that debate will inevitably see you lumped into one of those categories.
Most people accept that the temporary suspension of some liberties is a tragic necessity. But scrutiny has never been more important. John Harris’ excellent Guardian article goes into this at some length, so I will add the dimension of my own experience to this.
Over the last year the pandemic has brought home just how much time we spend – and waste – travelling. How many hours are eaten up stuck in traffic or on trains or buses, just going about our daily lives. Instead of responding to our needs, towns and cities demand that we shape our lives to suit them, and too often that means long, inconvenient, polluting trips.
How much better would it be if all the places you needed to visit regularly were within 15 minutes of your home: shops, cafes, restaurants, medical centre, park, playground, leisure centre, cinema and theatre as well as school and work. And all accessible without a car.
That’s the vision Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo is following.
With coronavirus case numbers still growing strongly (though perhaps slowing a little according to symptom tracking) and the NHS struggling to cope with the numbers of people needing hospitalisation already, driven by the much lower case numbers of 2 or 3 weeks ago, this is clearly the most dangerous time of the whole pandemic for any of us to contract the virus; there is every chance, wherever we live, that the NHS may not be able to give us the treatment we might need.
Acceleration of the vaccine programme is of course essential and the delay to second doses to give more people the protection of a first dose is a proportionate response to a crisis of this magnitude. But it will take until mid February to vaccinate (first dose) the most vulnerable 15 million people, accounting for 88% of deaths. So we should expect a big drop in pressure on the NHS by mid March. But that is 7 weeks away. For now, growth in the virus is adding pressure faster than vaccination can relieve it.
The Conservative Party is now racing to disassociate itself from the US Republican Party and Donald Trump. In the Times on January 8th James Forsyth did his best to argue that Boris Johnson was a very different politician from Trump. But he did not deny that the political, personal and financial links between the American Right and the British Conservatives have been growing closer for many years, and that right-wing foundations and think tanks in the USA have worked hard to infiltrate British Conservatism.
This first struck me many years ago, when at Heathrow at the beginning of a short parliamentary recess and waiting for a plane to Washington (full disclosure: I was going to a conference sponsored by the German Marshall Fund and the Transatlantic Policy Forum). There were over a dozen Conservative MPs boarding alongside me, none of them foreign policy specialists, going to a Heritage Foundation conference and to meet Republican Congressmen and advisers.
In debates about the nature of England and “Englishness” some, with justification, have turned to George Orwell. But there is an earlier 20th century literary figure who is worth listening to, even if only for one quotation. In 1992, for the third and final time, I stepped up to the plate as a reliable parliamentary candidate for hopeless northern seats. This was in the Eccles constituency, part of which was formerly in the Salford South constituency represented by the Liberal MP Hilaire Belloc from 1906 to 1910.
The 1992 Good Beer Guide contains an entry for the Ashley Brook in Salford: “New pub, cleverly blended into adjacent, terraced properties. Licence was first sought in the 1920s, but a local campaign, led by a methodist minister, helped permission to be granted in the 90s! Good wheelchair facilities.” For once local people at the opening ceremony outnumbered bosses from the brewery (Joseph Holt) and their guests. As I pulled the first pint, I quoted the pub-lover, churchman and writer Belloc, “When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.”
I might have known that after I had written about Obama’s inauguration speech earlier, how I would fall down the rabbit hole of the Obama White House You Tube Channel.
I came across the unveilings of the official portraits of George W and Laura Bush. Now, I am not a fan of him or his presidency at all. It is, however, very difficult not to love Laura.
Despite all that, when you watch all the speeches from the Obamas and the Bushes, you pick up a real warmth between them.
There was not a lot of common ground between them when Obama took office, but he went to great pains to point out how helpful Bush had been to him, then and since, and how there was quite a rapport between all the living occupants of the Oval Office. It is enjoyable to watch.
I think back to 1992, when Bill Clinton won after a pretty fraught election campaign with not a lot of love on either side. The first President Bush was similarly helpful and graceful to his successor and they struck up an enduring friendship as a result.
Obviously, this is not going to happen this time round, but Donald Trump, as in so many other ways, is very much the aberration here.
We need to see more examples of people with totally opposing views can behave with grace towards one another without compromising their principles. We need to follow the example of our own Charles Kennedy, whose friendship with Labour spin doctor Alistair Campbell had been so important to both of them, as we found out after he died. Charles had been subjected to the most appalling abuse for his opposition to the Iraq War, yet away from the heat, those two had a close personal friendship.
As we prepare to welcome Joe Biden as US President a week on Wednesday, I thought it might be an idea to look back at previous inaugurations.
Let’s hope that we get to 20th January without any more of the scenes we saw this week. There may well be drama in Congress as the Democrats attempt a second impeachment, but the last thing anybody needs is more injury or loss of life.
I’m thinking back 12 years to Obama’s inaugural speech. I will never forget it. But that is partly because our hamster Puffball died during it, not just for its inspiring and hopeful qualities.
Then LDV co-editor Stephen Tall said that he came across as the “ultimate pragmatist CEO”:
Was this speech a mesmerising tour de force which will rank among his best? Not for me. But that’s not a bad thing at all, because what the speech did demonstrate was a sense of uncompromising purpose – and I’ll take that over highfalutin oratory from the most powerful leader in the world. For sure, there was the soaring promise:
The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
But what struck me more was the sense of the ultimate pragmatist CEO, impatient to fix what he sees as broken:
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works – whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
I was still learning to love him. Obviously I was delighted that he had been elected, but I have always been a Hillary fan. Somewhere there’s an alternate universe where we are now at the end of Obama’s first term as 45th President with her having been the 44th. That would have been a lot better.
Obama was just starting to inspire me. His inaugural speech certainly made me warm to him more as I wrote on my own blog.
Obama’s speech still had the idealism and the confidence that we have come to expect from him, but this was tempered with sobering realism and a call to all Americans to give of their best to deal with the unprecedented challenges ahead.
You could actually see George W Bush squirming as his legacy was laid bare in a few well chosen, but very frank words. “Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet”
There were two phrases that I thought were the signs of the new age. “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” So it’s goodbye Guantanamo. The poisonous vernacular of the war on terror is replaced with “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Well, I loved it.
And if this is true, then bring it on: “To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.” I hope Israel was listening and will be made to think about the way it consumes the resources of the middle east. It would be good if clean waters flowed in Gaza.
Another theme of the speech was personal responsibility, and embracing your duties as a citizen to help the nation succeed. “For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.”
The two things I really loved most of all about the speech was the inclusion of non-believers in the list of value systems at one point and the addition of curiosity as one of the “values on which our success depends.” I like the willingness to abandon conventions as novel solutions are sought for challenges.
Our NHS is under more pressure than it has ever been. As I write, brave nurses, doctors, cleaners, porters, health care assistants are putting in superhuman effort to keep people alive, to comfort them and their families when they can’t and to treat more critically ill people than they have ever had to at the same time before.
And all the time taking the risk that they could be next to be lying there struggling to breathe.
It’s exhausting. And it comes after many of them bust a gut during the first wave. Then they barely stopped to rest before trying to catch up with the routine procedures and tests that they had not been able to do.
After ten months of relentless pressure, many are at breaking point. They are seeing suffering on a scale that they had not imagined.
Every day on my social media, I hear about at least one person who I actually know in real life being admitted to hospital.
As I think of them and hope that they will soon be restored to good health, I think about the stressed health professionals and support staff treating them.
Many of those staff are not UK nationals. Those who aren’t EU citizens with the protections of settled status have the hellscape of our horrendous immigration system to navigate. Every so often, their visas will have to be renewed. That is a hellishly stressful and expensive process.
If you came in to the country on a spouse visa, that will set you back £1500. And you’ll have to pay it again to renew it after two and a half years. You also have to pay £624 PER YEAR in NHS surcharge.
So, that’s nearly 5 grand for the first five years. Then you can apply for indefinite leave to remain. That will set you back another £2400.
We’re at pretty much £7,500. On a nurse’s salary? Are you having a laugh? And if you have kids who are not UK nationals, you have to pay for them too.
Right from the start of the pandemic, Lib Dem MP Christine Jardine has been trying to get the Government to give indefinite leave to remain to healthcare staff and their spouses and children.
This week, her Bill is debated reaches its next parliamentary stage. It says:
BE IT ENACTED by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—
Indefinite leave to remain
(1) An eligible person has indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom.
(2) The Secretary must, on request from an eligible person, issue physical documentary proof of that indefinite leave to remain as soon as reasonably practicable.
(3) No fee may be charged for issuing a proof under subsection (2)./ol>
Simple. The right to stay for free for those who have been braving the pandemic, taking that risk, and their families.
Here she is introducing the Bill back in September:
The party has released a campaign video and we can expect more in the next few days:
For years now we’ve rolled our eyes around mid morning when Donald Trump woke up and found his phone and Twitter app. “Oh god, what now?” we would groan as we read the latest instalment of populist bile.
This week, entirely predictably, it all got dangerous and people lost their lives. Families are mourning loved ones whose deaths were entirely preventable. And the events which led up to them were highly predictable.
Twitter, who have for years hosted his most outrageous statements without taking action finally lost patience with Trump, permanently banning …
Donald J. Trump’s political career is very likely over. But Trumpism lives on.
The disrupter-in-chief, conspiracy theorist extraordinaire and the world’s most outstanding example of a self-deluded politician has finally gone too far.
He clearly incited thousands of supporters to march on the seat of American government in an attempt coerce elected representatives into overturning the election result. The assault on the US Capitol while senators and congressmen met to confirm the results of the November vote, was an attempted coup, insurrection, sedition and treason.
Trump’s baseless claims that the election was a fraud were the inspiration behind the riots. His speech – and that of Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr and others – clearly incited the crowd. His actions were a clear breach of his oath to protect and defend the US constitution.
The events of 6 January, and the two months that preceded it, set a frightening precedent which undermines democracy in America. And because the United States is seen as both the cradle and protector and chief advocate of global democratic values, it undermines laudable efforts to make other governments more representative.
The United States now looks more like a banana republic of the sort it regularly criticises than the “shining city on the hill” that it claims to be.
As awful as the Capitol Hill riots were, even more disturbing are the results of Hill HarrisX opinion poll conducted on 6-7 January. According to this survey 59 percent of the voters polled disapproved of Trump’s handling of the riots. Great, you might say, that is a clear majority. But the flip side is that 41 percent of the electorate approved of Trump’s actions.
Despite the fact that the riot was a clear attempt to undermine the constitution, the rule of law and the democratic processes of government, a whopping 41 percent of the electorate thought Trump did the right thing.
At the end of last year, Ian Kearns and I published a short report called Citizens’ Britain: a radical agenda for the 2020s. The title was in homage to Paddy Ashdown’s book of the same title from 1989, and the core of the approach remains exactly the same: we see the task of liberalism today as being to put more power in more people’s hands. We quote Paddy to start the report:
A society cannot be free and is very unlikely to be successful for long unless the men and women in it have real power to determine their own destiny. The one thing that unfailingly gives me satisfaction in politics is to watch those who have been taught they are the subject of others’ power, rise to meet the challenge of power in their own hands – and then be unbelieving at what they are able to do.
The tools and the methods do change with the times, however. So in the spirit of making this tangible, and building on what they are already doing, here are three proposals for Ed and the HQ team as they rebuild the party.
1. Care is a good focus – but do it with people, not just for them
It’s clear that Ed is staking a lot on the issue of care, and with good reason. His own story makes him highly credible, and it is a huge priority issue with the public (even ahead of Covid, according to some research).
A Citizens’ Britain approach could equip us to work on this in a big, inclusive, participatory way. I’d love to see us launch a “National Care Conversation”, gathering stories of personal experiences from carers and those who depend on it; generating ideas for the future of care from everywhere (perhaps working in partnership with the brilliant Social Care Future campaign); and then tasking an independent Citizens’ Assembly, representative of the national population, to make recommendations as to what policies should be enacted.
We could then respond to these recommendations at our conference, with a view to adopting them as our policy. This would frame us as the party that aimed to put power in more people’s hands, in the context of this vital issue.
We are part of a wide fellowship in search of an intrinsically fairer economy and social outcomes. We stand explicitly for the ‘well-being of the individual’.
We are democrats. Democracy binds our society together, but struggles to do so when our day to day experience of economic life does not accord with our values of mutual support and well-being. A plural democratic society requires a plural economy and politics but we do not have either.
I founded a not-for-profit organisation advocating the use of our existing housing stock to create affordable tenancies, and identified it as an intervention to societise the housing market, correcting its imperfections (homeswithinhomes.org). I realised we need systemic change in favour of society and our common good, a system that co-exists with capitalism and statism in all its forms but is uniquely identifiable and attributable to a philosophy elevating collective values of equality.
These values will appeal to a significant part of the general population, they are core Lib Dem values. We are uniquely placed to give a voice to such market based, societal economic reform and by doing so can help develop a unique economic platform reflecting Lib Dem ideology, of equality and liberty, with l believe, mass electoral appeal.
Our economy developed during a period when there was no universal franchise, nor meaningful women’s or minority rights and little societal perspective. This history, based on outdated notions of ownership and control, of private share ownership on the one hand and state control of production on the other has driven us towards economic and political polarities; we have an economy that is not mixed enough.
It is almost exactly 17 years – though it seems longer – since tobacco advertising and marketing was banned in the UK. It is equally easy to forget that a reluctant Blair government was forced, finally, to act by a private members bill in the Lords by our then health spokesperson Tim Clement-Jones.
It was not right to let the tobacco companies outspend any government health messaging about the dangers of smoking – leading so many young people to an earlier grave.
So what are we to make of advertising now that undermines our expensive efforts to save the climate? Perhaps by advertising SUV cars as if they were good for the environment, when they actually clog the roads and clog the lungs of vulnerable children – making covid worse too?
I believe this might be an opportunity for Lib Dem councillors and campaigners to extend their campaign against cigarette advertising – and clearing their neighbourhoods of unsightly billboards at the same time?
What powers to local authorities have? Well, they certainly have some:
Over advertising billboards and screens located on council-owned land.
Over planning consent for advertising infrastructure – like the energy-guzzling digital billboards – and some advertising content.
Via passenger transport executives (such as Transport for London, Transport for Greater Manchester, Merseytravel, etc) which have control of advertising policies, and which are accountable to local democratic bodies such as Mayor’s offices.
About 1,500 local authorities in 29 countries have now declared a climate emergency. These declarations, taking place at every level of government, are leading to the development of local, regional and national climate emergency action plans.
Embed from Getty Images
As a fan of US Congressional language, I was pleased to hear Vice-President Pence going through the electoral college certification process this morning.
Each state is taken in turn. Their envelope has been opened. Their certificate has been checked by the clerks to check that it is all in order – right date, right signature, right text – that sort of thing, I suppose.
Over and over again, for each state, VP Pence repeats the same officialese:
This certificate from State X, the Parliamentarians advise me, is the only certificated vote from the state, it purports to be a return from the state and is annexed to a certificate of authority from the state according to a point of ascertained electors.
Post-Covid and after the delivery of Brexit, our country needs radical reforms of the kind Sir William Beveridge proposed for the end of the Second World War. He wanted a comprehensive programme of reforms, to cover the social injustice and unfairness he saw around him. The reforms should result in alleviating poverty, limiting disease, stopping homelessness, improving education and providing jobs for everyone who needed them.
These are the areas in which radical reform is needed again today. The social contract that existed between government and people in the post-war world has broken down and requires renewing. The Liberal Democrats as the heirs of the Liberal Beveridge are uniquely well placed to demand a new Beveridge-type reform plan.
A business motion has now been sent to the Conference Committee for possible debate at our March Conference. Entitled Beveridge-2 Plan within a Social Contract, it calls for the party to pursue a campaign for a Beveridge-type Plan of radical reforms. The Plan should seek solutions for all the social ills which afflict our country and which have worsened so much recently. It must focus on relieving the growing poverty and restoring full employment, on providing integrated and sufficient health and social care, on ensuring that there are enough homes including social housing available at affordable cost, and on remedying the growing deficiencies of education for all children.
The motion proposes a radical way forward to create the Plan. It requires the party to immediately establish a Commission, to consider urgently how our policies may be grouped and developed to constitute the new Plan, asking progressive politicians and academics to contribute to it. The Commission would then report to Conference next autumn on how the work is developing, with a recommendation that the Policy Committee develop a Consultation paper on the Plan for the Spring Conference next year.
Behind the future economic and political relationship between the UK and the EU, and the (mis)management of the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of how to revive the towns and cities of the north of England (and its other marginal communities) will loom in 2021 as one of the key issues in UK politics. Resentment of industrial decline, followed by cuts in funding for local government, education and transport, fuelled support first for leaving the EU and then for deserting Labour. Boris Johnson has pledged to invest in bringing prosperity back to former industrial communities. Keir Starmer is feeling his way towards regaining their support, more by embracing their conservative values than promising massive spending. But what do Liberal Democrats have to offer them?
This raises existential problems for all three parties. Johnson’s promises imply a larger state, with higher taxes, engaging in rebuilding local and regional economies – anathema to the small-state libertarians who now crowd the Conservative backbenches. Starmer is struggling to reconcile the metropolitan liberals who provide much of his activist base with the social nostalgia these communities cling to. But we, too, are a party of university towns and graduates, liberals in the widest sense: we cannot follow Starmer in attempting to embrace rediscovered ‘working class values’, which in any case many of the younger generation in such communities do not share.
We do however have determined local activists in many of these neglected communities, with hopes of winning local elections in May or June. So what should our platform be, consistent with our values? Can we make the future of local democracy itself an issue that will appeal? The Conservatives clearly despise local government: their preference for awarding contracts to multinational companies rather than partnering with local authorities to handle responses to the pandemic has been an expensive disaster. Bullying local government on school closures has been as bad. Moving bits of central departments to ‘red wall’ seats while keeping power in London is a poor substitute for devolving power. But we need to think carefully how best to present a case for stronger local government and less direction from London, if we want to win over discontented voters.
It’s not a name that trips readily off the tongue. It’s a big hall with about a hundred statues in it, in the US Capitol building in Washington DC. Each state is allowed to choose two statues, which they can replace if wanted.
When I was shown round it in 2019, I noticed Rosa Parks. Her statue was not chosen by her home state, Alabama. In an exception to the rule, she was placed there by unanimous vote of both chambers of the Congress. That speaks volumes.
It Appears Democrats Have Won Control of the Senate
As of this post, there is still no official projection in either U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia, but the New York Times’s needle is very confident that both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff will win.
The last piece I contributed to Lib Dem Voice appeared a couple of years ago in August 2018 and was entitled Why Aren’t We Doing (Much) Better? That posting (which does seem, at least in part, to have been vindicated by subsequent events) was prompted by a critical analysis of party performance in The New Statesman: this one, which could reasonably be accused of being “Why aren’t we doing (much) better 2”, is prompted by a critical analysis of party performance in The Spectator. Not, interestingly, from The Spec’s ever-growing army of cultural warriors of the libertarian right, but from that pillar of Europhile liberal Toryism, Matthew Parris.
Mr Parris is saying that we Liberal Democrats haven’t said one new or critical or penetrating thing since the last Election. Who can reasonably disagree with him? The scars of 2019 (and 2015, and 2017) go deep within our party, and there has inevitably been an extended period of introspection. Both ourselves and the Labour Party are now in the very uncomfortable position of recognising that in the autumn of 2019 the majority of active party members wanted to take positions on Europe that proved politically disastrous. Those wise older LibDem hands who warned against the Revoke position lost the relevant conference vote by a landslide, with consequences that grew more apparent everyday: as a party we were unquestionably tough on Brexit, but on the (politically more resonant) causes of Brexit we were, and arguably remain, absolutely nowhere.
This is the first in a series of articles exploring how we can improve the places we live and work
Entire neighbourhoods in Maartje van Putten’s city were being demolished to make space for the motor car, and still it demanded more. Bicycle use was falling year-on-year. Worst of all, road deaths were soaring.
The place was Amsterdam, the year was 1971. 400 children had died on the roads in the Netherlands that year – an agonisingly high toll. It could have continued, as it did in most other countries. Instead, Maartje and thousands of other Amsterdammers – including many mothers worried about what the future held for their children – decided to take a stand.
Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the child murder) was a grass-roots movement and Maartje van Putten was its first president. They marched, they blocked roads, they even got arrested. Many motorists were outraged: how dare these people take away their right to drive wherever they want at any time. But campaigners persevered. They sat down with politicians, they talked, and in time the politicians listened.
Ed Davey wasted no time in denouncing the trade deal signed by Boris Johnson because it will be “bad for jobs, business, security and our environment“.
This is a view that is not universally shared even though UK businesses trading with the EU will now face a host of new rules, regulations and red tape. Business leaders argue that the alternative – No Deal – would have hurt the UK economy a whole lot more. The biggest relief has been expressed by the car manufacturers for whom an end to tariff-free access to the EU would have been a disaster. As it is tariff-free access to the EU continues. And an added bonus is the fact that they are now free to capitalise on market opportunities in lucrative non-EU markets like China and India.
I love sport, football in particular. Although I had an opportunity to serve as a local councillor in Welwyn Hatfield, I occasionally feel that I am a “spectator”, not a “player”, when it comes to my voting rights in the UK. In a way, it is a shame that although I have been living here for almost 16 years, I have always paid taxes, I have always worked and I have not been a “burden”, I have never had a chance to cast my vote in GE or, more importantly, in the EU referendum. When I first visited the Houses of Parliament, I was told that “taxation equals representation”. Really? I don’t think so.
I don’t have any predictable abilities or a magic wand. I am also aware that we have only a few days ago ended the transition period and therefore the “dust has truly settled yet”, however if someone asked me to guess what will happen in the UK in the next 5-10 years, I would say that:
Of late there has been a surge of Right-wing media, twisting and distorting facts or even just blatantly lying, clearly hoping that the old adage attributed to Mark Twain “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” still holds some weight.
As Conservatives push their message, the opposition parties must be smarter, there is no point in responding directly to try to put right their ceaseless mantra of misinformation, little point in reacting or name-calling. Instead, we must be faster, more cautious, and cleverer.
A long time ago, students on my English Language and Literature course were invited by the Language professor to come to the next lecture with a new word that had been coined in the previous year. I knew exactly when mine had appeared and who invented it. A certain Jo Grimond had said we needed an Ombudswoman. I shan’t go into the gender politics here, but my example had a short shelf life. Others had more clue about new words which would last.
However the crucial aim was getting us to recognise the fluidity and development of the English language which has been going on since Chaucer’s version of English triumphed over a number of other regional varieties. Grammar and syntax can change but at a much slower pace. Even slower are changes in spelling.
The first sentence of the Preamble to the Liberal Democrat constitution, oft quoted, sets out the sort of society we want to see:
The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.
No-one – that’s a high bar, and it’s not qualified by national boundaries. Tackling poverty is a central part of what we are about.
In December, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published its third report into destitution in the UK. Updated to include the impact of the pandemic on already high vulnerable people, it makes horrifying reading. Why, in one of the richest countries in the world, do too many people not have the ability to access the basics of food, shelter and clothing? Why do we tolerate it? And what can we do to change things?
Let’s look at some of those conclusions from the JRF Report, which should make every single government minister feel utterly ashamed.
With more than a half (54%) of the whole destitute population being sick or disabled according to our quantitative survey, COVID-19-associated delays in the processing of DLA renewals and PIP claims and appeals had a detrimental effect on the mental health and material wellbeing of people in receipt of or applying for these benefits. The loss of face-to-face contact with health and other services often hit participants with mental health or drug or alcohol problems especially hard, as they felt much less benefit from online or telephone-based support. The difficulties of contacting local authorities on unaffordable telephone lines was a particular problem during lockdown when council offices were closed.
A household’s ability to manage relationships well through the COVID-19 crisis depended very much on space they had at their disposal. Overcrowding and lack of access to outside space affected many of those we spoke to, and parents who were interviewed reported that the effect of lockdown on their children was overwhelmingly negative. Some participants lived in inadequate or shared forms of accommodation, which made social distancing requirements challenging to fulfil. Several interviewees had paid rent arrears with credit cards to stave off eviction, and others were awaiting eviction once the protection offered by the eviction moratorium had ended.
Some things helped, though. The extra £20 per week on Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit, along with increased working hours for some key workers, helped take some people out of destitution. Only into poverty, though, which is just as unacceptable. The removal of conditionality elements for Universal Credit – the suspension of the requirement to prove that you are spending all your time looking for work – had a beneficial impact on stress levels and mental health too. The ban on evictions helped remove the threat of homelessness, although they didn’t stop arrears accumulatingBut these are the things that the Government is stopping.
He said: “Most of the people I know that take heroin and almost all of the ones who have died, have come from childhood trauma. Heroin, drugs and alcohol, are a way for them to deal with that.
“There needs to be a shift in society from seeing these as deaths of ‘junkies’ to deaths of abused, traumatised kids who turned into adults.
“That’s why I’m an advocate of decriminalisation. If you take the criminal element out of it, you take the stigma out of it, take the labelling out of it and recognise that they’re people who need help.”
This is something Liberal Democrats have been calling for for years and it could become a key issue in the Scottish elections this year. The SNP Government cut drug and alcohol rehab services early on in this term. Although the funding was later reinstated, the consequences in terms of homelessness and deaths were serious.
Support for assisted dying is growing and the election of more progressive MSPs could make it possible to introduce legislation after the next elections, scheduled to take place in May. Lib Dem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton is quoted in this Scotsman article:
We wouldn’t want to launch a bill unless we were confident that we had the numbers.
But every successive Parliament has a seen a shift towards this to the point that we are at the tipping point into majority. We just need a few more like-minded progressive MSPs to join our ranks.
This is a dignity that we should be affording to Scots at the end of their lives.
Fans of Russell T Davies’ writing will be interested in this article he’s written in the Observer to coincide with his new tv drama, It’s a Sin, about when AIDS first became prevalent in the 1980s, with the heartbreaking impact of not only the disease but the prejudice and stigma which was allowed to grow up around it.
But me? I looked away. Oh, I went on marches and gave a bit of money and said how sad it was, but really, I couldn’t quite look at it. This impossible thing. There are boys whose funerals I didn’t attend. Letters I didn’t write. Parents I didn’t see. Late last year, I bumped into the father of a good friend who’d died in 1992. We chatted, politely, hopelessly, and I flailed around, wondering how to apologise after all this time for not going to the funeral. But then I realised it hardly mattered. No one went. The shame had been so great that they only had 25 people for a lovely, lively lad, dead by 28.
They were comparatively lucky to have had a funeral at all. Back then, there were undertakers who refused to handle the bodies. Crematoriums that turned people away in case their staff were contaminated. Some lonely funerals happened at night, so no one could see.
Families split up by the Home Office’s harsh deportation policy speak to the Observer
Jeff Peter Wrigley 31st Jul '26 - 6:21pm:
Pope Leo does it quite well.(though he doesn’t have to get re-elected.)
An example to follow by those w...
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paul barker Current projections suggest that Immigration will be "Over by Xmas", with more people leaving than arriving . The Party that talks about this before it happens...
Dav We can look to recent reforms in the EU where they have begun implementing a range of measures aimed at strengthening border controls with more resources, co...
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