Category Archives: Op-eds

You can’t be truly free if you are constantly fighting illness without the support that you need. That is why Liberal Democrats are so passionate about making sure that people have the right mental health support.

For five years during the coalition years, Liberal Democrat ministers were at the helm of pushing through positive change. Norman Lamb, as the Minister responsible, totally got it. Of the many things he did, the Crisis Care Concordat was a really good example of helping people when they most needed it .

He also fought for parity of esteem between physical and mental health.

In doing this he had the full backing of Nick as Deputy Prime Minister who made sure that he put as much funding as he could into mental health.

What I liked most about Norman’s many interviews on this subject, though, was his forthrightness. Rather than pretend everything was fantastic, he always said that what was happening wasn’t good enough and what he wanted to change.

Every year on the first Thursday in February, Time to Change hold Time to Talk Day.It’s aimed at ending the stigma around mental health and enabling people to be more open about the impact that mental ill health has on them.

It won’t come as much of a surprise that John Rentoul forecasts doom and gloom for the Liberal Democrats. He has never been much of a fan. In an article ifor Indy Voices, he says:

This I think is part of the most important reason the Lib Dems are cast down so low. That “ephemeral group of supporters that always clusters round anything new” is clustering around Jeremy Corbyn now. After Labour did unexpectedly well in last year’s election, Corbyn is the new, improved, exciting special offer in British politics.

We know that in the last few days, former Lib Dem London Assembly member Stephen Knight and former Tees Valley Mayoral candidate Chris Foote-Wood have left us for Labour, so could there be some truth in what Rentoul says?

Well, as Mark Pack pointed out last month, there is evidence of a fair bit of traffic the other way. 

Where Rentoul is right is that our voice simply isn’t getting heard.

Then there is Cable’s invisibility. It is fashionable to say that Prime Minister’s Questions isn’t as important as it used to be, but it is still a potential platform. The Lib Dems’ loss of third-party status in the Commons to the Scottish National Party is significant. During the coalition, Clegg got to sit next to Cameron and very occasionally to stand in for him. Now the Lib Dems don’t even have the two questions automatically allocated to the third-largest party, and so Cable doesn’t have the weekly chance for journalists to say, as they did of Angus Robertson – although not of the SNP’s current leader, Ian Blackford – that he showed Corbyn how leading the opposition is done.

It’s a bit more than that, though.  We are simply being cut out of the story. Journalists would much rather write about the Tory civil war or the differences in policy in the Labour Party than about the party with a clear, distinctive opposition to Brexit and a totally different approach to the other two. Rentoul admits that many of those supporting Labour aren’t sure of their policy on Brexit.

Some Labour supporters care a lot and are desperately disappointed with Corbyn’s insistence that the referendum must be respected, but most of them seem to be focused on the campaign to stay in the single market. Others care a lot but don’t really know what Corbyn’s position is, or they assume his opposition to a “Tory Brexit” means he is with them.

Nobody talks about how Labour has enabled the Tories at every stage in their pursuit of a hard Brexit.

If you look at the big Sunday political programmes, there isn’t one single Lib Dem on today. Marr, Peston, Sky, Sunday Politics, Westminster Hour are all Lib Dem free zones. Last week, you couldn’t switch on the tv or radio without coming across Henry Bolton, who, for the moment at least, leads a party that has no MPs and is barely registering in the polls.

This is absolutely not down to lack of effort on our part.

So what can we do to try and be heard? There are two big things we need to concentrate our efforts on.