Category Archives: Op-eds

Is there something rotten in the state of candidate approval?

By Adam Noble | Mon 14th September 2020 - 6:05 pm

Sadly, the only surprising thing about the revelations about Geeta Sidhu-Robb is that something like this hadn’t happened before.

You see, there’s something rotten with our candidate selection procedures.

In the party at large, there’s a perception that candidates go through a rigorous approvals process. They don’t.

People believe candidates are vetted. They aren’t.

People believe our processes are robust and make sure we get the best candidates. They aren’t.

The simple fact is, all you have to do to become a LibDem candidate is to complete a pretty basic application form, get two other people to say you’re basically fine and then pass a not very rigorous approval day.

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Geoff Reid

Escaping from the authoritarians

By Geoff Reid | Mon 14th September 2020 - 2:32 pm

People who have come to this country because they cannot put up with the political trends in their homeland are often worth learning from. I have supporters in my ward from Eastern Europe who came to the UK despairing of the post-communist rise of the authoritarian right in their country of birth. Interestingly they want nothing to do with the Labour Party. It is the socialist element they are wary of. As for the present UK Government, I feel for my friends, whose citizenship ceremony I shared in, but who now say “But this is the sort of unacceptable government …

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Tim Trimble

Co-operation for a better electoral system- and a better country. Part 2

By Tim Trimble | Sat 12th September 2020 - 3:20 pm

In Part 1 I noted how the political atmosphere is changing in favour of Proportional Representation (PR) and cross party co-operation – but what about the potential benefits?

The Make Votes Matter website is a great resource, including details of the ways in which PR often leads to a reduction in inequality, better minority representation, greater political engagement and voter turnout and swifter and stronger action against climate change.  In short, -how PR leads to better government.

However, there are some recent and (perhaps) less well known studies which also highlight the value of PR.

In January 2020 the Cambridge University Centre for Future Democracy published its’ ‘Global Satisfaction with Democracy’ Report based on four million respondents from 3,500 country surveys. This covers a period of almost 50 years for Western Europe, and 25 years elsewhere. Whilst dissatisfaction has grown to an all time high globally since the mid 1990’s, the UK and the US (both still use FPTP) have registered extremely dramatic rises. By the end of 2019, dissatisfaction in the UK stood at over 55%, and at 50% in the US. When dissatisfaction is this high, it surely raises concerns that the polarising effects of FPTP make effective government unsustainable – witness armed militias on the streets in US cities.

The authors contrast this situation with another so-called Anglo-Saxon democracy, New Zealand, where dissatisfaction has decreased to just over 25% from an already relatively low level and make the point that this may well be linked to the switch from FPTP to PR in 1993. Other countries (e.g. Denmark, Switzerland, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany) using PR have high and increasing levels of contentment with their democracies. The evidence seems to point to a consensual balm that PR imposes on governments to make them more responsive to the needs of ordinary citizens.

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2020 – The year government took planning away from the people 

By Andy Boddington | Sat 12th September 2020 - 12:00 pm

2020 will be remembered for many things. The pandemic and flooding among them. It will also be remembered as the year they took planning away from the people. 

The government’s proposals in the white paper Planning for the Future and associated documents are bold. They will transfer many local planning powers from councils and communities to Whitehall and the planning inspectorate in Bristol. Ministers want planning by checklist instead of considered, albeit sometimes difficult, planning deliberations that lead to quality developments. 

There are sensible ideas in the government’s proposals but they are countered by its determination to take democracy and localism out of planning. 

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Tom Arms

Observations of an expat: Rogue Britain

By Tom Arms | Fri 11th September 2020 - 6:20 pm

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Britain is becoming a rogue state. In fact, it may already be one. The Johnson government’s threat to jettison the EU Withdrawal Bill negotiated last year and an alarming philosophy of “creative destruction” threatens to leave the UK dangerously isolated on the world stage.

This is bad for Britain and bad for the world.

The UK is one of the chief pillars of the post-war rule of international law which has underwritten the world’s longest period of relative peace and prosperity. Without these legal structures dictators are emboldened to embark without fear of serious reprisal on genocide, murder of political opponents, theft and even war.

The specific issue at stake is Boris Johnson’s Internal Market Bill which will be debated in Parliament on Monday.  Under the terms of the EU Withdrawal Bill which Johnson negotiated a year ago, there would be pretty much an open border between Northern Ireland and Eire, with a de facto customs border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

The terms were unpopular and a major British concession a year ago. But they were agreed and became a legally-binding building block on which to construct a UK-EU trade deal. Talks for that deal are now deadlocked over fishing rights, legal jurisdiction and competition rules; and Boris fans say that the only way to overcome the impasse is by threatening to break the previous agreement.

The government is fully aware of that such a move is a breach of international law. Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis admitted as much. It was confirmed by the protest resignation of Sir Jonathan Jones, the government’s top legal adviser. But they don’t care. Boris Johnson is fixated on British withdrawal from the European Union on his terms. This blinkered policy put him in 10 Downing Street and he is quite happy to sacrifice the rule of law to protect his political legacy and emerging brand of radical conservatism.

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Tim Trimble

Co-operation for a better electoral system- and a better country. Part 1

By Tim Trimble | Fri 11th September 2020 - 3:20 pm

Events of the last 12 months (think unlawful prorogation of Parliament, Covid-19 mismanagement, stalled Brexit talks, exams fiasco, threats to abolish the Electoral Commission and breaking International Law) demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt that the Johnson-Cummings administration is surely the most inept, incompetent and fundamentally dishonest in living memory. But should we be surprised? I would say no, as this government is only in place as a result of the First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system which is itself fundamentally dishonest.

  • How can it be right that one party gains 43.6% of the vote, but wins 56% of the seats in Parliament -and 100% of the power?
  • How can it be right that it takes 830,000 votes to elect just one Green MP? But 1.24 million votes (just 400,000 more than the Greens) give the SNP 48 MPs? Is an SNP vote really worth 32 times a Green vote?
  • How can it be right that just a few thousand votes in a small number of marginal constituencies are often the only ones that really matter?
  • Why have we LibDems only got 11 MPs when we should have 70 in a truly democratic, proportional system?

These democratic discrepancies are completely intolerable. We must act to make this a rallying point around which we work with all other progressive parties. Make Votes Matter is the key grassroots cross-party movement in the effort to get Proportional Representation (PR) for Westminster. They have already drawn together an alliance of organisations, trade unions, individuals, MPs and political parties. Almost all parties that is, except of course the Tories, for whom the system works wonders, and Labour who are a work in progress -see below.

Many commentators have lately been making the point that progressives need to work together on this as well as many other issues. So it has been heartening over the last few weeks to hear both Ed and Layla articulating their wish to work together with Labour for the common good. The key question is of course – ‘Are Labour ready to work with us?’ There are some promising signs.  At the very least, the electoral arithmetic, especially with the rise of the SNP, means that Labour need to think carefully about where their best option lies.

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Mary Reid

Is wearing a mask a civil liberties issue?

By Mary Reid | Fri 11th September 2020 - 12:41 pm

Some Libertarians in the US and elsewhere certainly seem to think so, and refuse to wear them. But we are not Libertarians, and as Liberals it is easy enough for us to justify asking others to wear masks by drawing on two principles described by John Stuart Mill.

In On Liberty Mill explores his political philosophy and expounds on the Harm Principle:

That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

In other words, the potential for harm can outweigh the loss of liberty.

In Utilitarianism Mill develops this from an ethical point of view and outlines the Greatest Happiness Principle:

… actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

Whenever we, as a party, debate policy that might impact on our liberties, members tend to use one or other of these principles as justification for their position. For example, discussions some years ago about whether to ban smoking in public inside spaces often invoked the harm principle – smoking can cause physical damage to people nearby who are not smoking, including the people who work there. On the other hand, the powers adopted should be minimal, that is set at the lowest level to be effective, which is why we support outdoor smoker’s areas, where the harm is limited to the smokers themselves.

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Stephen Richmond

Selling UBI: making it a good policy that wins us votes

By Stephen Richmond | Fri 11th September 2020 - 10:17 am

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This is a follow-on post to the one published yesterday.

The real issue with UBI is not economic; it has been shown to provide no disincentive to work and most people are just paying in cash via taxes and getting that cash straight back. It doesn’t really affect most household finances to any significant degree. Instead the problem with UBI is political. How do we make it popular and keep it simple? That’s what my proposal is about.

The elevator pitch is this: “Voters are clear that they want tax dodgers to pay their fair share. That’s why the Liberal Democrats want to use taxes that are hard for the super rich and corporations to avoid and then, to make absolutely sure everyday voters don’t get taxed unfairly, we’re going to send you each a cheque from the proceeds. Think of it as a VAT rebate.”

Voters really are clear that they want higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. This reframes the discussion in economically populist terms (something Liberal Democrats tend to hate doing but works) but it doesn’t change the policy at all. It remains good economics and it really does allow us to shift towards using taxes the wealthy and corporations find hard to avoid. The Scandinavian countries, for example, make heavy use of goods and services taxes for this reason.

Now I know Lib Dems are going to want to use Land Value Tax. That’s economically sound obviously, but that’s selling two hard things at once. I’d propose this:

We would give a universal basic income of £40/week to everyone in the first year of the parliament, paid for by raising VAT. That would rise by £40/week each year of the parliament until we hit £200/week in the final year. That’s £10,400 in that final year, presumably 2028 so £10,400 will be worth slightly less than now due to inflation. By the time we get to the final couple of years we can use LVT to get up to the full amount. VAT plus a UBI is progressive and the Scandinavians have shown it doesn’t slow economic growth.

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Callum Robertson

In the wake of the BLM movement, Police and Crime Commissioners need to be leaders in building the relationship with minority communities

By Callum Robertson | Thu 10th September 2020 - 5:18 pm

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Here’s how they can do it:

On May 25th, George Floyd was brutally murdered by American Police Officers, sparking protests in the USA that then spread across the world, including to here in the United Kingdom where protesters highlighted racial disparities in stop and search statistics and UK complicity in the slave trade.

In 2012, the first Police and Crime Commissioners were elected across England and Wales with responsibility for producing a crime plan, managing the police budget and most importantly, bringing a directly accountable figurehead to policing here in England and Wales. It is the latter point which makes the 2021 set of Police and Crime Commissioner elections that are being held in the shadow of the Black Lives Matter movement, so important.

When the Black Lives Matter protests in the UK begun, they highlighted above all else, a deep-rooted anger about the very real inequality of treatment that minority communities have faced when it comes to criminal justice issues. It is because of this inequality of treatment, that minority communities rightly need to feel they can trust the police again.

This anger is exacerbated by stop and search statistics that show BAME communities being disproportionately targeted, undermining those communities’ trust in the police. Whilst at the same time, hate crimes are consistently rising. This has created a situation where a mutual trust between the Police and minority communities is vital part of the challenge of tackling the number of hate crimes.

As Police and Crime Commissioner have been since 2012, the publicly accountable faces of policing in England and Wales, the responsibility of building the trust between minority communities and the police falls to them to show leadership on.

As one of the candidates for Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner in Essex. I have set out a three-step plan to begin the work of tackling racial injustice in the criminal justice system. These steps are by no means the finished article, but they encompass the crucial first steps of listening, acting on concerns and being proactive on known inequalities.

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The Voice

Liz Jarvis on her experience of unemployment as a single parent

By The Voice | Thu 10th September 2020 - 12:24 pm

An article with the headline “I lost my job in the last recession. I know how difficult it will be for single parents this time” is compulsory reading, especially when written by a journalist who is also a Lib Dem member.

Liz Jarvis gives a very personal account of the impact of the recession on her and her family:

Every time more job losses are announced during this crisis I think of all the people behind the headlines, the lives affected, and the knock-on effect for local communities. I lost my job in the last recession and all opportunities seemed to vanish overnight. As a single parent of one, my little family’s financial situation quickly became very precarious indeed. For six months I struggled to find any regular paid work at all, and I was at risk of losing the roof over our heads.

The speed at which all this escalated was terrifying. As the bills mounted up I started to dread every text message, every phone call, every letter. The credit crunch had already bitten. I sold what I could and sometimes skipped meals so my son could eat. We had been on our own since he was 18 months old and being able to provide for him was massively important to me.

Like those excluded from government support during this crisis and the “forgotten freelancers”, because I had been on a contract I wasn’t entitled to much in the way of benefits, and had never been in the position to save for a deluge of rainy days, I applied for countless jobs and temp positions without receiving any reply. Christmas saw me scouring recruitment sites.

And she goes on to consider the current crisis and its impact, especially on women:

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Stephen Richmond

Which UBI should we support?

By Stephen Richmond | Thu 10th September 2020 - 10:15 am

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In his recent piece HERE George Kendall asks us which Universal Basic Income proposal we should choose and how can we say if it’s affordable? How should UBI advocates respond?

What I intend to do here is set out how I believe we should assess each UBI proposal that comes our way; however, the first step is to accept the principle of UBI at conference and acknowledge it needs to be a high enough amount to live on. My conclusion will be that an “out of the box” proposal like that from Compass is actually just fine but that Lib Dems should debate several options once we’ve accepted the principle.

What makes costing UBI complicated is that normally governments take in tax revenue and spend it in return for some particular thing. For example we might decide to spend another £100 billion on the NHS and we must decide if that thing, i.e. the extra NHS services we get as a result, are worth the cost, the £100 billion. UBI isn’t like that. In UBI the government takes in, say, £500 billion and then hands out that same £500 billion. We don’t get a product or service and most of us get some amount of the cash we paid in back as… well… cash.

If I hand you £100 and you then hand me £100 I’m not £100 worse off am I? If I hand you £100 and you give me £80 I’m not £100 worse off, I’m £20 worse off. That’s very different from spending £100 and then getting a mobile phone. Is the phone worth £100? Can you get a good phone for £100? Those questions don’t make sense with UBI in the way they do with healthcare.

Instead what we are “purchasing” is a guarantee of no poverty for any UK citizen and the cost is not the whole tax bill but instead it is any loss of incentives to work and any inflation that may result. This is where evidence really matters! We are an evidence based party so lets consider the evidence.

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Humphrey Hawksley

China and its challenge to Liberal Democracy

By Humphrey Hawksley | Wed 9th September 2020 - 5:00 pm

Anti-Chinese rhetoric is growing, and it is amazing how seamlessly our enemy number one has shifted from Islamic extremism to an expansionist China with barely the blink of an eye. 

No longer do we have a War on Terror but the spectre of a new Cold War. 

Accusations against Chinese President Xi Jinping are beginning to mirror those against Middle Eastern dictators when complexities of cultures and societies were concertinaed into cartoon-style characters of evil such as with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. 

We all know what happened there and, unless we are vigilant, we may be walking into another disastrous trap. 

With gulag-style camps in Xinjiang and the crackdown against political dissent in Hong Kong, such criticism against China are justified. 

The question is, however, what can liberal democracies do that is effective. 

A first step is to look more at ourselves and reestablish liberal democratic values that in the past two decades have fallen into a sorry state of repair. 

Liberal democracy was once heralded as a beacon for delivering security and freedom. Failure in the Middle East and North African conflicts has shredded that reputation. 

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Julian Huppert

Julian Huppert writes….’The Generous Society’ – a vision for a liberal Britain

By Julian Huppert | Wed 9th September 2020 - 4:00 pm

Liberalism has offered a lot to the UK over the decades. Liberal thinker John Stewart Mill was an early champion of female suffrage and the abolition of the slave trade. The last Liberal Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, started the modern welfare state; the Liberal William Beveridge’s totemic report led to the creation of the National Health Service, and the great Liberal economist John Maynard Keynes set out how economic tools operate and could be used to benefit citizens.

Liberalism is still a crucial philosophy now – possibly the only antidote to the authoritarian, centralising tendencies coming from some on the economic left and right, and the best response to surveillance capitalism, excessive consumerism, and the perils of an over-free market.

However, at the present time it is not well articulated. Its values are too often conflated with neo-liberalism or libertarianism – two very different world views, for all their linguistic similarity. The Liberal Democrats, who still carry the banner of liberalism, have stumbled in recent years, too often lost in discussions of the Coalition and seen as fundamentally pro-European, rather than fundamentally Liberal. It has failed to articulate a clear liberal vision for too long.

There are liberals in almost all UK parties, and among those who do not feel connected to any political movement. Some do not realise that they are liberals, because they have not yet seen a clear description of what a liberal is, and what the underpinning drive is for liberalism.

It is for all these reasons that we set out to produce a vision for what Britain could be. Entitled ‘the Generous Society’, it dreams of a country where we can all be generous, to ourselves and to each other. Our vision is to see individual freedom, human diversity and ingenuity, and natural beauty flourish and advance within a generous and free society.

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Kevin Langford

GDP share; a more timely and effective alternative to Universal Basic Income

By Kevin Langford | Wed 9th September 2020 - 3:00 pm

That’s your bloody GDP. It is not ours’. Thus a Brexit supporter expressed their detachment from the national economy in 2016.

This proposal addresses both the perception and reality behind this comment. It provides poorer households with a bigger share of GDP, achieving a more deliverable redistribution of income than a Universal Basic Income. It makes more people feel that this is ‘our GDP’. It also steers the national conversation about growth towards ‘net zero’.

UBI and its problems

A conference motion calls for the party to campaign for UBI.

But the practicalities mean we are doomed to deliver a very small and disappointing version of a very big and (somewhat) controversial idea. The UBI promise of a reasonable income for everyone is not achievable. Recent work by sympathetic academics has shown how far we can (and can’t) get. Even if we raise higher rate taxes a lot and get rid of personal allowances (so that for most people there is no net benefit) to fund a UBI, we cannot sustainably pay a UBI of much more than £3000. At this level, many poor people would lose out unless all or most current means-tested benefits stay in place – thus forgoing one of the significant supposed advantages of UBI. And even to get to £3000, we would likely have deployed the money from all of our tax-raising ideas on this one concept cutting out anything else we might want to do.

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Lib Dem Mum

Lib Dem Mum 5: Horrified about immigration

By Lib Dem Mum | Wed 9th September 2020 - 11:55 am

Do you have a problem for Lib Dem Mum? Email [email protected] or DM @lib_mum on twitter in complete confidentiality – only Lib Dem Mum sees messages to these accounts. No one in the team at LDV has access (and for the avoidance of doubt Lib Dem Mum’s views are her own and not those of the LDV team).

All correspondents will be acknowledged, and if you are published you will be given a pseudonym.

I am very excited this week, dears, because I received an actual letter, rather than an email or a DM! I have typed this out myself, but you can see a photo of the original – in green ink and everything – on my twitter account here.

 

 

Dear Lib Dem Mum,

I am writing to you to ask about the horror that is immigration into the UK. What do we need to do to make it easier for people to immigrate into our country and to make the country more welcoming to people who would like to live here?

Yours ever

Horrified by Immigration, Manchester

Dear Horrified

(I hope you don’t mind if I call you Horrified)

You are quite right to highlight that immigrating to the UK is a tortuous, uncaring, expensive, bureaucratic nightmare; the Home Office are unnecessarily cruel and heartless; and the current Home Secretary does utterly evil things when it comes to dealing with immigrants – continuing a tradition that has dogged the last several governments of whatever stripe – yes, even the one with us in. I admit I’m paraphrasing your point a little, but I do not think unfairly.

There’s a lot we need to do to make it easier. I, personally, would start by repealing all anti-immigrant laws (yes, even that one, no, I don’t care if it has some tiny benefit alongside its racism and horror). We’ve only had them for 115 years, we won’t miss them. Then, I would abolish the Home Office. Its actual useful functions (issuing of passports and so forth) could be done by other departments, and its core is too entrenched in racist dogma now to be allowed to survive, and has been so for many years whether the party in charge is red or blue. Thirdly, I would require all newspaper corrections to be printed on the same page and in the same font weight as the original incorrect item. This would have a range of benefits beyond forcing the racist sections of the press to be less racist, but it would help in that regard too. There are a lot of additional educational and cultural changes I would like to make too…

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Anton Georgiou

Let’s tackle entrenched inequality with a Universal Basic Income

By Anton Georgiou | Wed 9th September 2020 - 10:45 am

As a local Councillor in one of the most diverse wards in London, I am acutely aware of the entrenched inequality that exists within certain sections of the country. This has been further tragically exposed by the current coronavirus crisis. My ward, Alperton, is amongst the hardest hit in Brent, with one of the highest death rates in the borough.

Government studies which show the disproportionate way that this virus is impacting certain ethnic groups and also a Brent commissioned poverty report published in August, seek to shed a light on why my borough was so gravely impacted. In some respects, it was a perfect storm – high levels of poverty, exploited front line workers, many of whom are from ethnic minority backgrounds and overcrowded, poor housing that allowed the virus to rip a hole right through our community; one that will take a lot to heal and recover from. 

It is clear that the only way to recover and ensure that the most vulnerable groups are safeguarded into the future is to seek to address the inequalities that exist in our country. That is why I wholeheartedly support the introduction of a Universal Basic Income. A guaranteed annual income for every citizen provided by the Government.

As a party, the Liberal Democrats have always been at the forefront in calling for major social change to tackle the big issues we face. It is absolutely right we do so again now. 

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David Warren

Green Growth

By David Warren | Wed 9th September 2020 - 9:15 am

Given our current low poll rating, a number of fellow Liberals have expressed concern that we might soon be overtaken in popularity by the Green Party, some have even taken an interest in joining them. We certainly face competition from the Greens for the votes of those looking for an alternative to the old Conservative/Labour duopoly so they cannot be ignored but how much of a threat are they really? Well, internationally Greens have been making progress in a number of countries in the wake of the accelerating climate crisis, in places like Germany, Australia and New Zealand they are the third party in parliament, helped of course by the fairer voting systems that are used there. So what is the position here in the UK and should we be worried? On the face of it, we are well ahead with 11 MPs to the Greens 1 and our local government numbers at 2,500 dwarfs theirs which stands at less than 500. The only place where they have built a significant base in Brighton where they have their single MP and a sizable council group which has included a spell running the authority. A period that was not without controversy, including as it did a confrontation with its workforce and a failed attempt to fight government funding cuts.

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John Knox

A sensible strategy for the Scottish election

By John Knox | Tue 8th September 2020 - 7:40 pm

The Liberal Democrats should be able to prosper mightily in the Scottish parliamentary election on 6th May. But only if we stop attacking the SNP.

The SNP are unassailable. They are riding at over 55 per cent in the opinion polls, boosted by Nicola Sturgeon’s impressive performance in the Covid-19 emergency. And by next spring, they will be able to surf the wave of anger over Brexit and the expected surge in unemployment.

The Nationalists will blame the Johnson government for all the problems and the lack of resources to tackle them. In that they are quite right and it would be counter-productive for the Lib Dems to take a different tack. It’s misleading and dishonest to suggest the Scottish government can fix our schools and hospitals, and the potholes in the roads, with the austerity budgets they’ve been given by Westminster. Yes, the SNP could put up taxes to raise more funds but not by a significant amount.

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Paul Walter

Ed gets his listening tour off to a great start by dishing out fish and chips

By Paul Walter | Tue 8th September 2020 - 1:54 pm

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Paddy did a listening tour back in the early 1990s. Because it was Paddy, it was very sleeves-rolled-up, get-stuck-in. And, of course, typical Paddy as well, he wrote a book about it.

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James Belchamber

Our principled and distinctive position on Europe makes us relevant – don’t abandon it in pursuit of Express voters

By James Belchamber | Tue 8th September 2020 - 9:30 am

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“Support for Brexit is collapsing” screams an article from Business Insider back in June, noting that a majority of Brits want to stay in the EU. Good for us?

“Lib Dems FINALLY listen to Britain as Ed Davey says demand to rejoin EU ‘for the birds'” bellows an article from the Express this weekend.

Ah.

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Judith Rogerson

Priti Patel should know that there’s no such thing as an ‘activist lawyer’

By Judith Rogerson | Mon 7th September 2020 - 12:45 pm

During the working day I am a lawyer. For most of the rest of my time I am an activist. But I am not an activist lawyer. Despite the dangerous arguments that have been bandied around by the Conservative-run Home Office over the past week, Priti Patel should know that this is something that just doesn’t exist. The reality is that, under our legal system, the personal views of a lawyer won’t have an impact on the outcome of a case.

I’ve always privately held liberal political views and for the past four years I’ve been an active Liberal Democrat. It’s something I often get asked about by colleagues behind the scenes but I’ve always taken care to keep my politics out of my work. It would be wrong for my personal views to influence the legal advice I give or how I argue a point in Court.

One of the most common questions I’ve been asked is why I would be willing to put my legal career on hold to become a Liberal Democrat MP. Why would I give up something that I enjoy and have worked hard to achieve, in exchange for – let’s be honest – a pretty precarious, highly pressured and intensely scrutinised job in Parliament?

My answer has always been this: there’s an important difference between the roles of barristers and politicians. It comes down to whether or not our own personal views have any influence over the cases and causes that we take up.

As activists and politicians we fight for the causes that we personally believe in. But as a barrister it is my job to fearlessly argue my client’s case in accordance with the law. What I personally think does not matter, and should not matter. And that’s why this idea of ‘activist lawyers’ is such a nonsense.

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Lloydie James Lloyd

Lib Dems adopting re-join would cause Johnson to rejoice

By Lloydie James Lloyd | Mon 7th September 2020 - 8:15 am

I am passionately pro-European. I wish we were still part of the EU. I want our party to remain the most pro-European in the House of Commons. Most of all, however, I want us to actually win the argument over Europe, because if we see a future for Britain in Europe, we need to create one that ordinary people feel meets their hopes and dreams, not one that tells them how wrong they are for not supporting us.

The phrase “politics is about winning hearts and minds” means the hearts and minds of those with whom we initially disagree. It’s …

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Joe Otten

Europe and democratic consent

By Joe Otten | Sun 6th September 2020 - 3:38 pm

Although the text is yet to be chosen there will be a policy debate at our virtual conference (have you registered yet) on our Europe policy going forward.

The question is whether to adopt an immediate ‘rejoin’ policy, in the spirit of our ‘revoke’ policy at the last election on the simple grounds that we regret leaving the EU and would like to rejoin it, or whether it is a better idea to seek a closer relationship with the EU as a short term goal and to leave rejoining for a time when the prospects of success are better.

I …

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Joe Dodd

How you can help save the Au Pair programme

By Joe Dodd | Sat 5th September 2020 - 8:55 am

Spending a year as an au pair in Berlin was one of the best years of my life. I made lasting friendships, learned a language and gained a lot of sympathy for the challenges of parenting. 

The experience of au pairing abroad at a young age has been enjoyed by young people for hundreds of years. Long before the Erasmus student exchange program was born, Europe’s youth have been swapping their home for a year in Rome, Paris or London. At the same time, thousands of families benefit from the au pair program with affordable childcare and the opportunity to exchange cultures and languages. 

German au pairs will continue to spend a life changing year in Paris, and Polish au pairs can enjoy a summer as an au pair in Dublin. In the UK, this is all about the come to a stop because of Brexit. 

According to the British Au Pair Agencies Association (BAPAA), the number of au pairs coming to the UK has already plummeted by seventy-percent. 

This is because au pairs from EU member states have been able to arrive in the UK without a visa under the rule of free movement of people. As the Tory government is hellbent on putting a stop to free movement, the centuries old au pair program is collateral damage. 

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Tom Arms

Observations of an expat: Shifting Arabian sands

By Tom Arms | Fri 4th September 2020 - 8:09 pm

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The recent establishment of diplomatic relations and business ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates raises a host of questions, hopes, problems, issues and consequences.

Is it good or bad?  In the constant shifting sands of the Middle East where tribal loyalties overlap with religious and ethnic rivalries it is probably best to say that it is a bit of both, and the need for a supreme balancing act will continue to be the order of the day.

The UAE has at least partially opened the diplomatic floodgates and other Arab countries are expected to soon follow. It is reckoned that the next Arab country to establish links with Israeli will be the Gulf island kingdom of Bahrain. King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa was among the first to congratulate both Israel and the UAE on their bold move. The reason? Sunni king Al Khalifa is terrified of Iran. The Persians have long claimed the island as part of their territory, and 60 percent of the population is Shia.

Next on the likely list is Oman. The late Sultan Qaboos regularly acted as a mediator between Arab and Israeli interests. In 2018 he hosted a visit to Muscat by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Omanis have been praised for their regional diplomacy, not only between Israel and the Arab world, but also between Iran and Arabia.

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Jack Fleming

Fighting a losing battle: why Lib Dems should back the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill

By Jack Fleming | Fri 4th September 2020 - 6:45 pm

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On Wednesday, Caroline Lucas, the sole Green Party MP at Westminster, did what she does best. She tabled a private members bill.

The Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill would mandate that the UK:

  • goes further in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, reflecting our historic emissions and relative capacity to rapidly decarbonise;
  • takes steps to protect and restore biodiversity and soil;
  • accounts for overseas activity (e.g. in supply chains) in emissions accounting;
  • acts on the basis of currently available technology, rather than hypothetical future solutions;
  • establishes a citizen’s assembly to build consensus around specific policy actions.

These provisions are the price we must pay if we are to bear our full responsibility for the climate change. We cannot rely on sci-fi ideas which may never be realised, or ask those least responsible to bear the greatest burden. We may have devoted little attention to biodiversity, habitats and soil in the past, but these have profound importance, supporting food chains and acting as carbon sinks, not to mention being intrinsically valuable.

Even the citizen’s assembly, which I am temperamentally averse to as it allows government to abdicate their responsibility to lead, here serves only an advisory function, helping to build consensus without the usual risks of direct democracy.

There’s much to support and little to criticise.

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Charlie Du Cane

Take heart: this time it will be different

By Charlie Du Cane | Fri 4th September 2020 - 5:06 pm

In the year and a bit I have been involved in the Lib Dems, I have noticed one particular train of thought that percolates in the minds of many members. In their eyes Paddy Ashdown is a now legendary leader of almost Arthurian stature, who led us in a golden era as we swept back to relevance in local and national politics. Whilst there is much truth in this, this train of thought often doesn’t stop there, but evolves in a secondary, more negative direction.

“If Paddy couldn’t do it nobody can,” goes the refrain. In other words, under Paddy we had strong leadership, a world class organisation and growing numbers in the polls, but we still failed to get the key political reforms that would have allowed us our fair place at the table of national life. In 1997 we broke through in terms of seat numbers, but the dreaded First Past The Post system delivered an oversized majority to the party we thought we could be going into coalition with, and they ignored a report they had commissioned recommending electoral reform. Then, when a chance for Government did come round, it was with our traditional enemies, and nearly destroyed us, a calamity from which we have yet to recover.

In other words the system proved too strong for us to take on, and our attack on it left us in pieces on the floor. So why do we continue to bother trying?

To me, this line of thinking is a very valid analysis of what happened to us from 1988 to 2015. We did indeed try and fail to take on a system that proved too robust to conquer. However it leaves out one crucial thing- and on this point we should take comfort and get ready to fight again, and this time win.

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Michael Kilpatrick

Constitutional reform: a coherent national policy or not?  – Part 2

By Michael Kilpatrick | Fri 4th September 2020 - 3:00 pm

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In 2014 the Liberal Democrats endorsed Policy Paper 117 calling for a federal United Kingdom. It said that having an English Parliament would create a terribly imbalanced federation. It must follow that English Regions would be the constituent parts alongside Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There can be no part-federalised England: if one understands the West Lothian Question, one must appreciate the absurdity of replicating it any number of times and ways within England itself. The remaining alternative is not to propose federalism, in which case the party would have wasted six years, abandoning its aims and objectives.

Unfortunately, Paper 117 was circumspect in proposing the regionalism it implied was necessary. The proposed devolution-on-demand is neither a route to structural coherence nor fair to anyone other than those who are first to grab the powers they want. It is a purely locally-led, “bottom-up” free-for-all which sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to a “top-down” imposed solution. However, it is not a Liberal answer, it is a chaotic libertarian one. Furthermore, devolution is becoming a dirty word, characterised by successive governments creating or abolishing local government structures on a whim. It is therefore time to stop talking about devolution altogether. We need federalism and we therefore need a process to regionalise England – fully and rationally.

Federalism motions (based on English regionalism) were twice submitted to Federal Conference in 2016, to no avail. These followed co-ordinated motions passed by NW England and East of England regional conferences in 2015, decrying chaotic, arbitrary devolution and calling on the party to make progress on a model for a federal UK. Subsequent calls to get Policy Paper 130 to cover regionalism more extensively fell on deaf ears. The meagre 400 words on devolution-on-demand seemed more laissez-faire than the proposals of Paper 117, arguably a backwards step.

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Michael Meadowcroft

Leadership

By Michael Meadowcroft | Fri 4th September 2020 - 12:24 pm

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I received my first message since his election from Ed last Thursday. It was an appeal for money so no change there! It also used this very annoying computer program which inserts my first name at various places. If it is supposed to make me feel that the leader has composed a letter personally for me, it fails miserably. No doubt every one of the 118,000 members knows full well that it is a standard letter to all of them from a computer programmed to add first names. I wish our headquarters would stop treating us as infants and stop this practice. I shall simply delete every such missive in future.

I intend, of course, to support Ed fully in his immense task but, like a number of other contributors to Liberal Democrat Voice, I have my concerns having watched his acceptance speech. I felt that Caron Lindsay’s posting on Sunday hit the nail on the head. A new leader’s acceptance speech is a huge opportunity to make his or her political position and agenda clear in a few pithy well prepared sentences. It will always be carried by the news media. Ed missed the opportunity and his speech was extremely trite and mundane.

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David Warren

The road map to 2024

By David Warren | Fri 4th September 2020 - 10:16 am

We are all heartily fed up with this government but unfortunately we are likely to have to put up with them for some while yet. When we do get the chance to kick them out which will probably be sometime in 2024 and we need to be in the best possible shape to do so.

Right at the top of the list has to be some level of cooperation with the Labour Party. Having spoken to hundreds of members during the recent leadership election I can testify that there is overwhelming support for this regardless of which candidate was being supported. Both Ed and Layla set out a similar vision as to how this could work and that needs to be put into action ASAP. It doesn’t mean the withdrawal of candidates anywhere – that would be counterproductive – but it does mean trying to re-employ the approach so successfully deployed by Paddy Ashdown in the run up to the 1997 General Election. Of course the price for us must be a firm commitment to electoral reform.

The other lesson we must learn is that building any relationship will take time, so we need to unite behind our new leader and give him time. I appreciate that many fellow Liberals found the result personally devastating. As an enthusiastic supporter of Layla I was disappointed but I am determined to put it behind for the greater good; millions of our fellow citizens are suffering under this cruel government and we need to get them out.

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