Category Archives: Op-eds

David Warren

Taking a gamble

By David Warren | Fri 7th December 2018 - 10:25 am

There has been a long running and heated debate over the controversial Fixed Odd Betting Terminals that are sited in virtually every betting shop across the country.

The debate centres arround a proposal for restricting the maximum stakes on these machines to £2 down from the current £100.

This is opposed by the gaming industry.

They along with other opponents of the reform argue that it will drive the gambling addicts to online betting and also lead to job losses due to betting shop closures.

It is a fact that the profits from FOBTs have fed the growth in shops often in areas of deprivation and a lot of the people playing them are losing money that they can ill afford to.

So simply reducing the stake may not solve the perceived problem and may also have unintended negative consequences.

Gambling attracts people from all sections of society.

However the group that is of most concern are the cash-strapped unemployed who have time on their hands and spend it in the bookmakers.

The FOBTs appear to offer a route to extra money which is so badly needed.

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8 Comments
Tom Arms

Observations of an ex pat: The Holmes Option

By Tom Arms | Fri 7th December 2018 - 8:55 am

Sherlock Holmes offered the solution to the current Brexit conundrum admirably when he told Dr Watson in the Beryl Coronet: “when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

At the moment the two possibilities before parliament are the deal negotiated by Prime Minister Theresa May and crashing out with no deal whatsoever. The latter would be the result of the rejection of the first if no plan B, C or D appears on the political horizon.

The first possibility will be rejected by parliament because it turns what used to be imperial Britain into a colony of a Europe dominated by historic enemies France and Germany.  The United Kingdom would be indefinitely tied to the EU and yet left without any say in the rules that govern it. Its ability to strike trade deals with other countries would be severely hampered and Northern Ireland would be effectively hived off. In return, the UK would regain control of its immigration policies.

We will call this deal Option One and, using the Holmes formula, rule it out as it is impossible that parliament will approve it.  So we move to Option Two, a no deal Brexit. First the plus side: Immigration is controlled. Trade deals can be negotiated. Payments to the EU are stopped. The European courts cease to have jurisdiction in Britain. Now the negatives: The economy will shrink by up to nine percent overnight. Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost as foreign companies move operations to EU countries. The pound will collapse. Inflation will rise. Troubles could restart in Northern Ireland and tariff barriers would go up between Britain and its main trading partners on the continent.  MPs would, in effect, be voting to make every single one of their constituents substantially poorer.

The only members of the House of Commons likely to consider Option Two are the members of the European Research Group. They total 62 out of 650 MPs. In fact, an overwhelming majority of the House of Commons—450—voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum. So Option Two can be placed firmly into the impossible box.

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Wera Hobhouse MP

Wera Hobhouse: The road to stopping Brexit

By Wera Hobhouse MP | Thu 6th December 2018 - 4:47 pm

As an MP, do I have to vote for any Brexit that is put in front of me in parliament?

My duty in our representative democracy is to listen to the people and respect their views. It is also to use my own informed judgement of what is the best for my constituents and the country as a whole.

So to the question, my answer is no. If any Brexit brought to parliament is, in my judgement bad for my constituents and my country, I should not vote for it.

The Prime Minister is using a different argument. She says we have to leave the EU even if it bad for the country because the people voted for it. She suggests that the dutiful thing for MPs in light of the 2016 referendum is to vote for something that we believe is bad for this country. On the contrary, we have a duty to do the opposite.

Does this mean we defy the will of the people? No, because British democracy is a representative democracy and not just a direct democracy.

What we MPs cannot do on our own, however, in light of the referendum in 2016, is to choose to stay in the EU. We can legitimately reject any particular Brexit deal in accordance with our judgement but we cannot move from there and cancel Brexit by ourselves. This is the true meaning of the referendum result.

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David Warren

COMPETITION: WHY BE A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT

By David Warren | Wed 5th December 2018 - 10:40 am

As a party with a long history we embrace the principles of Liberalism and since the merger with the SDP those of social democrats as well.

Outsiders often lazily describe the party as having liberal and social democratic wings.

The reality, of course, is a lot more complicated.

Internal pressure groups like the Social Liberal Forum and Liberal Reform represent different strands of thought within the party, but they are not disciplined organised groups.

Amongst our MPs, it has been a practice to align individuals regarding their attitude to the ground-breaking Orange Book.

If you are one of those who wrote for that particular publication, you will almost certainly find yourself described as an economic liberal.

Again, that is far too simplistic.

Charles Kennedy wrote the forward to that publication, and Vince Cable was one of the contributors.

Both come from the social democrat tradition.

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Tahir Maher

Who will Succeed Theresa May?

By Tahir Maher | Wed 5th December 2018 - 7:35 am

December 11th is when the government will present the Brexit deal that they have been negotiating for the last eighteen months to parliament. The EU has said that it’s this deal or no deal. The boasting of Tory ministers on TV programmes about six months ago that a no deal would be better than a bad deal may be a reality, and most sane politicians are more than worried regarding this outcome. If the deal is rejected on 11th December, there is no time to renegotiate another deal. There is effectively now no time to have a referendum, before we leave on March 29th, as a minimum of 10 weeks is required for any referendum and that’s after getting the legislation through parliament. If Theresa May does not get the Brexit deal through parliament, there is no time to ask the EU for an extension as that agreement needs to be accepted by the other 27 nations. To even have a general election if there is a vote of no confidence, parliament will have to alter the Fixed Term parliament act and the general election will not be before we have to leave the EU. The position we find ourselves in is perilous and the chance of automatically leaving the EU on 29th March 2019 (cliff edge Brexit) is becoming a dangerous possibility.

I can’t see how May is going to square the circle under these circumstances. It is more than likely that May will fail on 11th December to get her deal accepted by parliament. It’s then very possible that Graham Brady (Chair of the 1922 committee) will get the 48 letters from MP’s to trigger a leadership election. Alternatively, May could face a vote of no confidence. Even if she wins that but it’s close, she may well feel obliged to step down.

So, who would succeed Theresa May?

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Paul Walter

Devstatingly powerful Commons speech from Margaret Beckett

By Paul Walter | Tue 4th December 2018 - 11:28 pm

Last year in the “Article 50 debate” we featured the text of Kenneth Clarke’s Commons speech, because it was so good.

Today, we again highlight a speech from someone in another party. Labour’s Margaret Beckett made a calm but devastatingly powerful speech in the Brexit Commons debate. She lays into Theresa May’s Brexit negotiating strategy, saying:

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Edwin Black

The Problem of Centrism

By Edwin Black | Tue 4th December 2018 - 5:00 pm

Last time, we established the party’s lack of identity and direction stemming from the overuse of the term “moderate”. With this in mind, we can turn our attention to the problems that the term “centrism” presents.

The centre position is one that the party has found itself in since the 1920s, as an inevitability owing to the rise of Labour, with it being officially recognised in the 1980s during the Alliance as a selling point for possible coalition government. What, then, is wrong with this?

The first problem is similar to that of moderation – the conflation of terms. The term “liberal” has been wedded with the term “centrist” in a similar fashion. This comes from the idea that centrism is, somehow, an ideology unto itself. When it is not. Centrism is a position on the political spectrum but it does not have ideals or a worldview that underpin it.

The Left, collectively, is not an ideology, and neither is the Right. Rather, they are groups of ideologies that run along similar ideas and liberalism, with its myriad and varied schools, is an ideological spectrum unto itself, able to stretch across Left and Right. One would not call a radical a right winger, and an Orange Booker is not leftward. To put it this way – if tomorrow the party dropped all of its liberal trappings and went, instead, toward social democracy and progressivism it would still find itself in the centre. Not because these are “centrist” in scope but simply because the party as an entity is squashed between Labour and the Conservatives.

But this, I acknowledge, can be seen as nothing more than pedantry. A more pressing problem is found in the inherent instability of the centre. Due to the reliance it has upon the Overton Window it is impossible to remain truly in the centre for very long. Indeed, it shifts leftwards and rightwards, or even shatters under the weight of what is considered to be “common sense” and “conventional wisdom”. The Conservatives currently claim the centre as the country occupies a status quo that favours them. Labour, once they win, will, if their plans work out, be able to claim it after the first term. The Liberal Democrats, however, occupy the same space as we did a decade ago, and therefore no longer representative of anyone in wider society, apart from some disconnected special interest groups. In short, during these polarised times, the very term “centrism” becomes meaningless.

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Edwin Black

The Problem of Moderation

By Edwin Black | Tue 4th December 2018 - 2:10 pm

A question that has plagued the party since inception and has, in recent years, come to the forefront is the question of identity. How do the Liberal Democrats define themselves? It seems to me that when members and supporters speak about the topic the same two words repeat themselves – “moderate” and “centrist”. As a result, these words have become synonymous with the term “liberal”. This article, the first of two, will cover the problems I have identified with this synonymity, the first target being the term “moderate”.

The main problem lies in how the term is actually used. For example, when one takes a diet of moderation all things are accounted for and everything is presented on the plate in equal measure. This approach, however, is not one that quite works within internal party political discourse. When we mention, say, Ken Clarke we can quantify him as being a “moderate Tory”, a believer in conservatism with a leash. Owen Smith is a “Labour moderate”, a social democrat rather than a democratic socialist – a Labourite with a leash. They still belong to the Right and to the Left but they do not take their ideologies too far.

Yet when it comes to a Liberal Democrat the same cannot be said. Who can, or could, be described as a “moderate Lib Dem”? This term would be akin to tying a tight leash around a short leash in a mobius strip of stasis.

So, then, one can only be “moderate” relative to the rest of the party or ideological camp that one finds oneself in. Now this is established we can get to the root of the problem, one of the party’s actual ideology, or ideological spectrum. The other parties can have moderates as they have ideological principals that underpin their ideas. Moderates, just like everyone else around them, agree with the means, goals, and ends of the parties they represent.

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George Potter

What do the local elections tell us about Lib Dem prospects?

By George Potter | Tue 4th December 2018 - 12:39 pm

When it comes to local election results, punditry usually heads in one of two directions. Either the local elections will be held up as an ironclad prediction for the next general election result or they are an utter irrelevance which tells you nothing about how people will vote in national elections.

Strangely, which of the two positions punditry tends towards seems to be very much linked to whether the local elections have been bad or good for the party backed by the pundit in question.

As you might expect, of course, the truth lies somewhere in between – and the data can actually tell us something useful about Liberal Democrat prospects at the next general election, whenever that may be.

For decades various teams of political scientists have been working out National Equivalent Vote Shares (NEVS) based on local election results. That is, they take the raw figures and make adjustments to take account of the fact that local elections take place in different parts of the country each year (for instance, most of the councils which had elections in May this year won’t have elections again until 2022).

This means that the NEVS is, broadly speaking, a reliable snapshot of support for each party UK-wide at the time of the local elections.

However, this does not mean that a NEVS is the same thing as how the party will perform in a general election. In the case of the Lib Dems, we have routinely underperformed our NEVS from the previous year in a general election.

The table below shows the Lib Dem performance in each of the past six general elections as well as our NEVS in the year before’s local elections. As can be seen, typically the Lib Dem vote has dropped by 1 to 7 points between the local election and the general election – and the two general elections with the lowest drop were dominated by the Iraq War and Cleggmania respectively, making them fairly atypical.

GE Result Year Before’s NEVS Difference
1997 17% 24% -7
2001 19% 26% -7
2005 23% 27% -4
2010 24% 25% -1
2015 8% 13% -5
2017 7% 14% -7

 

So, given that the typical drop has been 6 or 7 points, what does this tell us about Lib Dem prospects at the next general election?

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David Becket

Peoples’ Vote – are we ready?

By David Becket | Mon 3rd December 2018 - 5:40 pm

If there is a Peoples Vote it is not clear that Remain would win. For Remain to be guaranteed to win we would be much higher than 10% in the polls.

Our leaders need to understand what is driving people to support Brexit, and have some answers.

Campaigning in this Brexit Capital of the Midlands (Newcastle under Lyme), the reasons people want Brexit are obvious. Some of the reasons have an element of truth; others are totally false, fuelled by the Brexit Campaign and the tabloid press.

Some of the arguments they put forward that we must provide answers to …

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Michael Taylor

The case for Trades Unions

By Michael Taylor | Mon 3rd December 2018 - 8:17 am

There has been for some time a substantial number of Liberal Democrats who think that Trades Unions are an anachronism. They are wrong.

In the neoliberal times in which we live, one of the main neoliberal aims is to weaken wage earners so that companies can force down wages, leaving lower wage earners poorer and at the mercy of unscrupulous employers. The result is zero hours contracts and poverty wages.

Trades Unions are a block to this neoliberal aim so, starting with Thatcher, they set about weakening unions and deterring people from joining them. …

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Caron Lindsay

Why Delia could be the People’s Vote campaign’s most potent advocate

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 2nd December 2018 - 11:49 am

Three weeks on Tuesday, I’ll be preparing my family’s Christmas dinner, as I have done for the last three decades, by following the instructions in my battered and splattered copy of Delia Smith’s Christmas. You know, I bought the updated version a few years back, but it’s the old one I always reach for.

In a dark cupboard, as I write, it’s Delia’s Christmas cake that’s slowly maturing, helped along with the occasional injection of brandy, waiting for me to ice it on Christmas Eve.

We’ve started every New Year for decades with her Filet de Boeuf en Croute. In fact there was one year we didn’t and that was a bloody awful one. We won’t be doing that again.

You get my drift. Generations of cooks have grown up to instinctively trust Delia. Her recipes work and they’ve become engrained in many a family’s rituals.

So when she appears on the political programmes telling us that Brexit is a recipe for chaos and we should have a People’s Vote and choose to stay in, with the same passion as she’s enthused us into buying every cranberry or lime in the country in years gone by, we’re going to listen to her.

Here she was on the Andrew Marr Show this morning:

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Caron Lindsay

Are you stressed out by Brexit?

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 2nd December 2018 - 10:29 am

A social media post by a friend of mine, citing Brexit-induced stress for lack of sleep made me realise this week that I feel the same way. Even if I don’t reach for my phone to check the headlines if I wake up in the middle of the night, the impending disaster facing the country is never far from my mind.

Then this morning an email arrives in our inbox telling us about Headspace’s new meditation packs for stressed out British people with one targeted at the almost three quarters of us who cite Brexit as something that is worrying them.

I’m not sure that a few moments’ meditation will help with the worry about what happens to our already crumbling public services if, as every forecast suggests, we will be worse off and we don’t have the people here to work in them.

I guess those of us who want to stay in the EU should be stressed. While the chance to get out of this mess has never been bigger, there’s a pretty tortuous process ahead over the next few weeks to get there. It’s a bit like the three dimensional chess they played on Star Trek: The Next Generation. When is the best time to play the People’s Vote card? In the Times on Friday, Matthew Parris said that Tory MPs should wait until after the deal has been defeated to come out for another vote and definitely shouldn’t do it now:

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Katharine Pindar

Liberal Democrats should promote a better Advent

By Katharine Pindar | Sun 2nd December 2018 - 8:55 am

Has Britain ever had an Advent with less expectation of a happy arrival?

On December 11, general expectation is that Theresa May’s EU Withdrawal Bill will be defeated. Nobody can tell what will happen next. All that seems certain is that no political grouping will be completely satisfied. There can be no fulfilment of much-touted aims, only grudging compromise.

Besides, for Christians, the joy this year surely should be qualified. To be shopping extravagantly now and feasting lavishly then, for those who can afford it, doesn’t feel right when there are 420 Trussell Trust food banks supplying more than a million people each year, and food parcels will shortly be packed for the children of the poorest families.

It doesn’t feel right to rejoice, when the recent report of the UN rapporteur Phliip Alston has shown the extent of suffering among the 14 million British people living in poverty, with so much of the decline in their fortunes set in train by our Government.

Liberal Democrats have to promote the vital measures we have agreed and put forward to tackle these towering problems, much discussed in recent articles on this site. But what our country is also surely waiting for is the restoration, the second coming, of its rightful values.

Values which have been ignored by the Government, says Philip Alston, in considering the likely impact of Brexit on people in poverty as ‘an afterthought’; and in meantime overturning ‘key elements of the post-war Beveridge social contract’ by inflicting misery on the working poor, on single mothers, on people with disabilities, and on ‘millions of children who are being locked into a cycle of poverty from which most will have great difficulty escaping.’

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Caron Lindsay

Some thoughts on the passing of a decent President

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 1st December 2018 - 10:55 am

I’ll be honest, I was distraught when George H W Bush won the 1988 presidential election. I had so been hoping for an end to Republicans in the White House after 8 years of Reagan. I didn’t think his Vice President was going to be much of an improvement. I was annoyed that hard-hitting negative advertising combined with poor strategy and misjudgement of what constituted a good photo opportunity had cost Mike Dukakis.

Four years later, I stayed up all night watching the results, elated as Bill Clinton won a commanding victory. By that time, it wasn’t that I couldn’t stand Bush. In fact, I’d grown to respect his ability to form international alliances and show restraint and generally be a safe pair of hands at a time fo the most amazing global transformation. I was saddened how he had been pushed to the evangelical right by a bruising primary contest in a party which was then showing that it was capable of going to some very dark places.

Of course, as America’s economy suffered and people got poorer, he didn’t respond with the sort of social democrat policies that I would have liked. Then again, neither did Clinton. America just never has been in that place. I have never been able to understand why the provision of health care that’s free at the point of use by the state is such a controversial idea.

But Bush’s presidency had been a force for international good. I was glad that his Secretary of State James Baker was at least prepared to try to curb the excesses of the Israeli Government and to get people round the negotiating table, laying the groundwork for the Oslo Accord. 

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Lord William Wallace

William Wallace writes…A way to bring our national community together

By Lord William Wallace | Fri 30th November 2018 - 10:25 am

I am a man of the people. You are part of the metropolitan liberal elite. They are enemies of the people, citizens of nowhere.

That’s the populist self-characterization that more and more right-wing politicians are now making. It’s an easy appeal to the ‘ordinary’ person against the sophisticated, over-educated and privileged. It works very well even when wielded by old Etonian Oxbridge graduates like Boris Johnson, or former city traders like Nigel Farage. The terms ‘elite’ and ‘establishment’ are elided, and blended with ‘liberal’, into a hostile image of people who claim superiority because of their expertise and knowledge, against those who prefer instinct and ‘common sense’.

There was a wonderful example of the genre in the Daily Telegraph of November 23rd, a letter under the headline “This ‘No Brexit deal’ by the political elite treats the majority who voted Leave with disdain” – signed by 15 Conservative peers, eight of them hereditary, three of them with peerages dating from the 17th century or earlier. If these are men of the people, I’m the king of Scotland. There was another in the Sun on Sunday, on November 25th, from Lord Digby Jones, one of the most self-important members of the House of Lords: ‘the British people – as if they needed further confirmation after what has gone on over the past few months – have been let down by the political class and the establishment elite.’ We should ridicule such claims whenever we see them.

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Aria Babu

Medical MDMA: Radical but reasonable

By Aria Babu | Thu 29th November 2018 - 12:30 pm

Recently, British regulators and lawmakers have started to acknowledge the health benefits of certain, previously banned, substances. Cannabidiol (one of the chemical constituents of cannabis but with virtually all of the stuff that gets you high – THC – removed) has been legal since 2017. As of the first of this month, doctors have been able to prescribe cannabis-based products for medical use.

These are moves in the right direction. Cannabidiol has been shown to have anti-anxiety, anti-inflammatory and anti-pain benefits. As the evidence currently stands, it seems to have less harmful side effects than many of the medicines already used to treat such problems (e.g mainstream anti-depressants and opiates).

Other, currently illegal drugs have started to show promise too – especially for helping people with mental health problems. Small doses of LSD and magic mushrooms appear to have very much the same effect as antidepressants, but with fewer side effects.

I’ve seen the drugs-related discussion in the Liberal Democrats largely centre on principles of bodily autonomy and whether the government has much business in policing what adults can choose to do with their time, money and bodies.

But in doing this we overlook a much more important reason to support the legislation and regulation of certain types of drugs. As a party serious about mental health and serious about evidence-based policy we should be at the forefront of the case for the medical applications of ecstasy and magic mushrooms. At the very least we should be pushing for more research into the effects.

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Paul Walter

Sri Lanka: A presidential attempt to subvert parliamentary democracy

By Paul Walter | Thu 29th November 2018 - 10:31 am

My photo of the entrance to the Sri Lankan President’s House in Colombo last week

I’m just back from a glorious holiday in Sri Lanka. Going around this beautiful island, one could have been forgiven for not realising that there was a national constitutional crisis going on. Every where was peaceful and there was no sign of even the odd protest placard, even in the capital of Colombo. The Sri Lankan people are extremely friendly and peaceful. I did notice some particularly passionate TV debates, as I flicked around the channels to find the cricket, and the papers were full of the latest machinations in Parliament.

I hesitate to summarise the details of the Sri Lankan constitutional crisis. Wikipedia provides an excellent narrative.

In the words of the BBC:

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Tahir Maher

Christmas Competition

By Tahir Maher | Wed 28th November 2018 - 10:35 am

To celebrate and get in the mood for the festive season I thought that we could have a writing competition.  As many of you (on average at least 4,500 members visit the Lib Dem Voice site every day) write articles, read them or comment I propose a Christmas Article Competition.

The proposed Competition Rules are:

  • An Article should not be more than 550 words;
  • The article in each of the specified areas will be jointly judged by representatives identified as experts in that area by Lib Dem Voice and Lib Dem editors;
  • The starting date for the competition starts as of today to 17th December;
  • The title of your article for the competition should start with the words “Competition: … followed by the title of your article”

Basic criteria when assessing each article will be:

  • The originality of the article;
  • That the article is within the stipulated maximise length required (550 words);
  • Generally, how well has the article presented its argument on the subject matter;
  • We will only accept one submission for each subject area per person (as stated below);
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Michael Berwick-Gooding

What policies should we have in response to the UN report on UK poverty?

By Michael Berwick-Gooding | Wed 28th November 2018 - 7:35 am

I am suggesting a replacement for Universal Credit.

We have discussed recently on LDV <https://www.libdemvoice.org/not-even-a-tin-of-baked-beans-a-visitor-shows-the-need-for-radical-reforms-59181.html> the report by Philip Alston the UN’s Special Rapporteur on poverty and human rights on poverty in the UK <https:www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Poverty/EOM_GB_16Nov2018.pdf>.

He points out that 14 million people in the UK are living in poverty, 4 million of them 50% below the poverty line and 1.5 million are destitute. How can we be letting this happen when we are the fifth wealthiest country in the world?

It is recognised that Universal Credit is a contributory factor in causing people to live below the poverty line. Therefore we should scrap it and restore all the pre-2012 benefits including the national Council Tax Benefit. We should introduce a new benefit, National Credit, to replace Tax Credits for people in work. We are already committed to restoring the pre-2016 work allowances to Universal Credit. The pre-2016 work allowances should apply to the new benefit: we should go further and increase them for those without another eligibility status so a single person can keep the first £30 a week and the second earner £20.

The taper for the new benefit should be 63%. Everyone receiving the new benefit will automatically be eligible for Housing Benefit if they pay rent, and Council Tax Benefit, if they pay Council Tax, and these will be withdrawn at a combined rate of 63%.

The report also points out that “Universal Credit has built a digital barrier that effectively obstructs many individuals’ access to their entitlements”. This new benefit should be claimable by phone, at a Jobcentre or via the Internet. Claimants must have the choice to be paid either every month or every two weeks. Housing Benefit should continue to be paid directly to the landlord.

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Suzanna Austin

97000 people per year

By Suzanna Austin | Tue 27th November 2018 - 11:55 am

Content warning: Sexual violence 

In England and Wales every year approximately 85,000 women and 12,000 men are raped; that’s roughly 11 rapes (of adults alone) every hour of every day.  When you look at the number of adults sexually assaulted each year in England and Wales that number jumps to nearly half a million.  Economically the cost of sexual offences in a year is estimated to be £8.46bn.  

1 in 5 adult women will or has experienced some form of sexual violence.  The numbers of people affected by sexual violence are so large that it is doubtful that there is a single person in Britain unaffected in some way – whether they realise or not is a different matter.  

Along with societal taboos and much needed anonymity, issues surrounding sexual violence crimes remain very shrouded in mystery.  It is this that helped me decide to share some of what it feels like and how the tentacles of power keep inflicting pain long after the initial crime.

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Robert Johnston

The Digital Single Market should enable users and innovators, and not constrain freedom

By Robert Johnston | Tue 27th November 2018 - 8:55 am

In the rather dry text of the Proposal for a DIRECTIVE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL on copyright in the Digital Single Market there lurks, behind the good intentions, an information restricting and illiberal set of proposals. The infamous Article 13. The objections of the technically informed and creative internet users were ignored last June by the majority in the European Parliament who passed the proposal by a sizable majority and the final vote on the directive is immanent.

Article 13 risks being nothing more than an act of corporate welfare; with big business standing to gain while individuals see little benefit and potential disadvantage. The argument that this legislation primarily benefits the creatives and other innovators, who produce content that is currently being shared on the internet without permission, is flawed. 

More often than not, copyright of such content is not owned by the creators themselves but large corporations, such as Universal Music Group, who then pay artists a percentage of the profits made from the copyrighted material. It should be the responsibility of these corporations to ensure that their artists are fairly remunerated for their work, and that responsibility should not be shifted unfairly onto platform providers such as Facebook or YouTube. In addition, there are wider, perhaps unintended consequences. According to cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier, “Aside from the harm from the provisions of Article 13, this infrastructure can be easily repurposed by government and corporations – and further entrenches ubiquitous surveillance into the fabric of the Internet.”

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Paul Walter

People’s vote: the vital importance of preferential voting

By Paul Walter | Mon 26th November 2018 - 2:00 pm

The possibility/probability of a people’s vote seems to be increasing.

Minds are starting to be focussed on what would be on the ballot paper in such a referendum. A good guess seems to be:

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Oliver Craven

A radical, liberal safety net

By Oliver Craven | Mon 26th November 2018 - 12:15 pm

Two polls since the last General Election have investigated people’s views on introducing a Universal Basic Income. Populus found at the end of July this year that 41% of those surveyed supported the idea with only 17% opposed. The rest were either neutral or didn’t know. This polling also helped illuminate what the public feel would be the costs and benefits, with 49% agreeing it would reduce the stigma of claiming welfare but 45% being concerned about it being unaffordable. If the Liberal Democrats are to back a UBI it is therefore vital that we set out how we will …

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Ben Chapelard

An open letter to Greg Clark

By Ben Chapelard | Mon 26th November 2018 - 10:34 am

Dear Greg Clark,

Let’s be frank. Brexit is a complete mess. You and I both knew this a long time ago. The government’s Brexit withdrawal only confirms that the Brexit fantasy is collapsing under its own contradictions.

Greg – in your heart of hearts do you genuinely believe that the PM’s agreement is in our best interests? Be honest – do you really think your government’s arrangement is better than our current EU deal?

In 2016 we both campaigned to Remain. We even managed to put a Lib Dem sticker on you! You were ardent in your beliefs that we …

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Ben Whitlock

The Liberal Democrats are part of ALDE, and will stay a part of ALDE

By Ben Whitlock | Mon 26th November 2018 - 8:37 am

Two weeks ago liberals from across Europe gathered together in Madrid to debate policy, receive training and pass a new manifesto for next year’s European Parliament elections. This new manifesto reflects the commitment of liberals from across the EU to our shared European values. It is a manifesto which seeks to bring all Europeans together; and because of the efforts of European Liberal Youth (LYMEC)’s delegation, it reflects the views and aspirations of young people from across the continent. Indeed, there were few delegations as active or as well prepared as LYMEC’s.

At …

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Mark Valladares

An unexpected weekend of inspiration in darkest Staffordshire…

By Mark Valladares | Mon 26th November 2018 - 7:18 am

I’m on my way home from a weekend away as you read this, having spent the weekend in the fringes of the Winter ALDC Kickstart event. I say ‘fringes’ because I didn’t actually participate in any of the training, wasn’t either a mentor or being mentored, and indeed only attended the dinner and part of the final plenary.

So, how could I have been inspired by an event I was barely at?

It’s a funny thing, but being around a group of people, some of whom I’ve known for quite a long time, some of whom are complete strangers, but all of …

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Caron Lindsay

Vince: We stand with women who have experienced physical or sexual violence

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 25th November 2018 - 9:30 pm

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. From now until Human Rights Day on 10th December. there are 16 days of activism against gender based violence.

UN Women suggests 16 ways we an all help, from telling our stories to raising awareness to helping women affected by violence.

Over the next 16 feel free to share your experience or tell us what you are doing to help stop gender based violence. Send any posts to [email protected] in the usual way.

It was really good to see Vince make a statement in support of this today:

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Caron Lindsay

Dear Theresa, If your deal is so great, why not let the people vote on it?

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 25th November 2018 - 11:14 am

As I write, the European Union has just agreed the Brexit Deal. I’m a bit sad that it’s all happening on what would have been Charles Kennedy’s 59th birthday. He’d have had something to say about all of this.

Ahead of the meeting, Theresa May wrote to the nation telling us why we should all back her Brexit deal. Unfortunately, her letter is all spin and no substance. She paints a picture of a happy, reconciled nation moving forward after Brexit. She uses this phrase “works for everyone” a few times. She might as well have promised a unicorn on every street corner. Jeremy Corbyn’s Magic Money Tree was more real than the benefits open to us after Brexit. May’s own foreign secretary, on Andrew Marr this morning, couldn’t say that we’d be better off after Brexit. He only went as far as the deal “mitigates most of the negative impact.” If that is the best we can do, why bother. Why not just forget the whole thing?

The biggest problem with her deal is that we actually have no idea what we will end up with further down the road. Most of the big decisions – on future trade, on Northern Ireland, take place after we have left. Imagine getting married without having some common ground on whether you are going to have children, what sort of life you are going to live, where you are going to live?  That would be a recipe for disaster. So is this deal.

Anyone who remembers the last time that lot left office will remember that public services were on their knees and the gap between rich and poor was enormous. Their cuts to public services, particularly in the last three and a half years that they’ve been on their own, and their cruel slashing of social security give the lie to any desire to make a country that works for everyone. We really can’t trust them with our future. Most egregiously, she spins us a line on the NHS:

Instead, we will be able to spend British taxpayers’ money on our own priorities, like the extra £394 million per week that we are investing in our long-term plan for the NHS.

I’ll leave it to Sarah Wollaston, Conservative MP for Totnes, a GP herself,  to debunk that one.

What annoys me most is the bit about how wonderful it is to end free movement. That will have a massive impact on areas like NHS and social care. We are going to end up having real staffing problems in the NHS. The  Royal College of GPs backed a People’s Vote the other day, citing concerns about patient safety:

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Mark Paine

Why I joined the Liberal Democrats

By Mark Paine | Sun 25th November 2018 - 8:51 am

I first joined Labour back in the mid Eighties whilst I was still at school. As a working class West Midlander with an interest in politics and left wing beliefs growing up in the Thatcher Years, Labour seemed the obvious choice. For years I was incredibly proud to carry the same membership card that my family had carried for generations; I campaigned, I delivered leaflets, I attended meetings. Then something happened. The party that I had joined and supported for decades seemed to transform overnight into a far-left, doctrinaire personality cult where questioning the leadership in any way was a Thought Crime. I watched as the mood became steadily more toxic, policy became evermore reminiscent of a 1970s student union and the antisemitism and misogyny of some of the members, particularly amongst those attracted by Jeremy Corbyn became more apparent.  As the psychodrama of Corbyn’s Labour got worse, I stopped feeling proud to be a party member and I found it increasingly difficult to advocate voting for the Labour Party. Increasingly, I questioned whether I could vote Labour myself, let alone campaign for them. Then came the day that I had to finally follow my conscience and leave Labour. For the first time since my teens and like so many others in recent years, I was politically homeless. 

For some time, I looked for a new way to remain politically engaged, particularly to fight to keep the UK in the EU. I kept coming back to the Liberal Democrats. Surely I could not possibly join THEM – they had been in coalition with the hated Tories and they had no policies apart from electoral reform. Expecting to find it Tory-lite, I read the 2017 Manifesto and to my surprise found myself agreeing with large parts of it. Then I read about Liberalism in general and the history of the Liberal Party and found even more that I liked. As a teacher, I had already seen the positive influence of the Liberal Democrats in areas such as the introduction of Pupil Premium and free school meals for infants. A worrying thought hit me; I liked these policies and I really liked the values and guiding philosophy – was I really a Liberal Democrat and had I been in the wrong party for years? The answer was obvious. 

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