Category Archives: Op-eds

M P Hoskins

Brexit: yes, it’s personal

By M P Hoskins | Mon 10th July 2017 - 5:08 pm

 

One of the things that most struck me about the arguments made by the supporters of Brexit during the EU referendum was that they seemed, in their essence, to be based on emotion. There were many arguments put forward for Brexit that presented it as a rational economic choice, but these arguments were clearly secondary, almost an afterthought, to the ones based on British exceptionalism and distrust of anything foreign.

And yet when you pressed Brexit supporters, as I quite often did, on these points and suggested that perhaps those of us supporting the EU both in the UK and in other Member States also had an emotional attachment to the project, this was pooh-poohed out of hand.  It was implied that, whereas the UK was entitled to indulge its childish Anglo-centric sentiments, foreigners would bow to practicality and Brexit would prevail. This is the basic construct behind the “German carmakers, prosecco” argument, essentially that neither German nor Italian exporters would want to lose the trade with the UK and therefore they would put pressure on their governments to come to an agreement. Likewise, I often heard it said that Spain depended on what was called “British expats” for so much of its income that it would do nothing to upset the Brexit applecart.

Time has proven that these arguments are not only irrational and patronising but actually wrong. It is childish and limiting to recognise your own emotions without recognising them in others too.

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Ruth Bright

Dementia Tax – Project Fear

By Ruth Bright | Mon 10th July 2017 - 8:55 am

Dementia has been a big part of my life. Over the years I have worked with people with dementia in some of our most deprived communities in south London – Brixton, Elephant and Castle, Peckham, Old Kent Road and the surrounding (often high-rise) estates.

I have therefore felt very torn by the party’s recent headlong charge for the populist line on the “dementia tax”. As a (naturally pretty tribal) Lib Dem of three decades standing I recognised a fantastic campaigning issue that might help claw back a few coastal “retirement” seats. However, I also knew that the inaccurate use of the term dementia tax (it is neither a tax nor is it about dementia) causes pain to many for whom this is not just a line in a press release but something real and near at hand.  People with dementia have a cognitive impairment but they are not stupid; they can and do take in political messages. Politicians need to think of the deep distress their negative campaigning can cause to many of our 850,000 fellow citizens who are living with this disease.

During the election the party launched a “Theresa May Estate Agent” website that quoted the  example of a “lady from Runcorn” who at the first symptoms of dementia had her home whipped away by the government. This achieves the triple whammy of being misleading about dementia, misleading about the current system and misleading about the (then) prospective system. If only we had moderated our language on this. For a start the dichotomy between “free” coronary care and “paid for” dementia care is false. Thanks to the voluntary sector (usually funded by health services or councils) many people with dementia get significant help and advice for free. If you are diagnosed with dementia early the stereotype of a tragic husk of a dementia victim slumped in a chair is completely untrue. There is no cure for or reversal of dementia but the NHS funds drugs which can have a plateauing effect on the symptoms of Alzheimer’s for many years. Lots of dementia care from MRI scans to memory clinics is completely free of charge.

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Caron Lindsay

Vince: I won’t be winning the Bad Sex Award

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 9th July 2017 - 9:28 pm

Vince went from Marr to Pienaar’s Politics this morning..

It started seriously enough and he delivered The Message that there is a great opportunity for us as the other parties are divided. The Brexit train is not unstoppable, he said, and there are significant risks to a disorderly Brexit.

He says there is a sense that people do want to work together to stop things like leaving Euratom. The key is what happens in the Labour Party. The contradiction between him being the hero of young people while working with the Tories to bring about hard Brexit will be exposed.

He says that we may be faced with a completely unacceptable Brexit outcome and people will want the opportunity to vote. With extra young people on the register, the balance of public opinion may be shifting.

He said that all of this could mean an upheaval of the political system and we might just be at the centre of major political transformation like Macron did in France.

He dealt with the age question then. Thankfully, there was no sign of the “culture of youth” stuff he was coning out with last week. He returned to talking about Gladstone who was 82 when he last became PM. Vince said he feels young and has a good team around him. He’s just been through an arduous election and he feels great.

Talk turned to realignment of politics. We aren’t expecting defections but the tensions between the moderates and the revolutionary socialists were, he said, profound.

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Paul Walter

Who to trust on the economy? The CBI or Dr Fox with his kamikazee Brexit?

By Paul Walter | Sun 9th July 2017 - 1:51 pm

This week, it was very welcome to hear the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) calling for the UK to remain in the Single Market and Customs Union once it leaves the EU, until a full trade deal is in place.

This seems to be simple common sense to me.

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Caron Lindsay

Vince Cable on Marr: I can see a scenario where Brexit doesn’t happen

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 9th July 2017 - 12:18 pm

Almost-leader Vince Cable was on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show this morning.

Here are some clips:

I like the way that he casually pointed out  that the last Liberal leader to have a coronation was the mighty Jo Grimond.

He said he was optimistic about the party’s future.

Our position on Brexit is “a longstanding principled position which will become increasingly in line with the mood of the country.

Even though he is the only candidate, he said that we will see the Vince Cable manifesto. He was also keen to talk up the strong team behind him, which was another good sign. There have been criticisms before that he’s not a team player – although, to be fair,  he has tended to be right when he deviated from the message during the Coalition years.

Asked if he would take the party in a different direction from Tim Farron, he said that Tim did a very good job, built up our membership but he situation has moved on from where we were two years ago. Brexit dominates the national agenda and he would  have to approach that consistently but in a different Parliament with different dynamics.

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Joe Bourke

Adult education and skills training

By Joe Bourke | Sun 9th July 2017 - 8:58 am

Since the election there has been much angst among Liberal Democrats over the party’s position on University tuition fees.

Martin Lewis is said to be among the most trusted source on personal finance with the general public. He has recently posted a detailed review of tuition fees arguing:

The student loan isn’t a debt; if we changed its name to the more accurate ‘graduate contribution’ this myth busting guide would be less needed.

What is missing, however,  from much of the debate over tuition fees has been the ongoing training needs of the 60%+ of school leavers who are unable or choose not to take a degree course.

Skill shortages are having a detrimental effect on the UK’s productivity and this needs to be addressed urgently in order to meet immediate economic and workforce challenges, including those arising from Brexit. The UK faces a particularly acute issue in the thousands of adults who lack English, maths and digital skills, creating a serious barrier to their progression in employment, training or education. This is compounded by the diminishing availability of adult education opportunities and the inequality of access to provision where it does exist. The current level of provision does not support the needs of our economy or our society. Add to this the pace of technological and demographic change and the need for a fresh new approach to adult skills and learning becomes crucially apparent.

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Caron Lindsay

Interesting use of language, Vince

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 8th July 2017 - 4:29 pm

Our “almost leader”, Vince Cable is certainly getting himself noticed this week.

He had the right wing press spluttering with outrage with this comparison in a New Statesman interview:

So how did he react to his former cabinet colleague Theresa May condemning “citizens of nowhere” in her Conservative conference speech last year?

“I thought that particular phrase was quite evil. It could’ve been taken out of Mein Kampf,” he replies. “I think that’s where it came from, wasn’t it? ‘Rootless cosmopolitans’? It was out of character for her.”

It’s not Godwin’s Law if it’s true, now, is it?

He’s been talking to Business Insider too. I was particularly interested in this turn of phrase when discussing potential coalitions. He’s holding to the line we fought the election on – no coalitions. But look at this:

“We are not remotely contemplating coalition with the current Labour Party or with the Conservatives,” he told BI.

“We’re in a fundamentally different place on the biggest issues of the day of which Brexit is the most important.  When you’re in fundamental disagreement you can’t meaningfully talk about coalition.”

Note that he said “the current Labour Party” with no such qualification for the Conservatives.

It sounds like it might be different if the Labour Party were to rediscover its sense of internationalism and pro-Europeanism. It seems like he’s slamming the door in the Tories’ faces and throwing away the key but where Labour are concerned, he’s shoving the key at the bottom of his sock drawer just in case we should need it one day.

Those of us for whom the words “centre ground”cause our hearts to sink will also be pleased with this:

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The Voice

What have our lot been up to in the Commons this week?

By The Voice | Fri 7th July 2017 - 10:46 am

We’ve had Jamie Stone’s maiden speech, but what else have our MPs been up to in Parliament this week?

Jo Swinson  intervened on Emily Thornberry to make a point about the recognition of Palestine.

I am interested in and listening with great care to what the right hon. Lady is saying about recognition of Palestine, and particularly about what the Government’s position was some years ago. Does she share my concern that, given the Minister’s comments today, it seems that that position has moved and that recognition is being ruled out until the end of talks on a peace process rather than

…

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Tom Arms

Observations of an ex pat: Minced meat in Hamburg

By Tom Arms | Fri 7th July 2017 - 8:55 am

Stability. Order. Security. That is what these big multinational summits are meant to project.  They are designed to reassure the lower orders (that’s you, me and a few billion others), that Planet Earth is in safe hands as it hurtles around the sun at 66,000 miles per hour.

I am not reassured. In fact, a look at the G20 Hamburg line-up has left me seriously worried.

North Korea now has an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, nuclear weapons and a juvenile dictator with a bad haircut. But Russia, China and America cannot agree on how to deal with him.

Russia, the United States and its allies are on the cusp of coming to blows over Syria and Ukraine. India and China are the same over their border at the rooftop of the world.

Then there is China against everyone over the South and East China seas. Saudi Arabia is trying to squeeze Qatar into submission and under attack for human rights abuses in Yemen and support for Islamic extremism. Russia has a corruption problem, gay problem and human rights problem.

Italy has a potential bankruptcy problem. The UK has a Brexit problem compounded by a leadership vacuum.

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Andy Cooke

The stitch-up – our dodgy electoral system

By Andy Cooke | Thu 6th July 2017 - 9:57 am

We have to plan for success. We can’t sow our crops the day before harvest. In 2010, our demand for PR was dropped because it would appear to the general public to be a quixotic ditch in which to die – simultaneously esoteric and self-serving.

So we have to prepare the ground well in advance. To take every opportunity to discredit the stitch-up that passes for an electoral system in this country. Make no mistake about it – it is a deliberate stitch up; that’s what we’ve got to ram home. It is literally a stitch-up designed to entrench establishment parties (specifically the Conservatives), conceded in exchange for allowing poorer people to vote. That’s not spin or distortion, but historical fact.

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Alistair Carmichael MP

Alistair Carmichael MP writes…The truth about those “secret Tory talks”

By Alistair Carmichael MP | Wed 5th July 2017 - 1:15 pm

A couple of weeks ago I was due to meet with one of my counterparts in the Conservative whips office. These meetings are routine and are not normally the subject of comment.  This particular meeting was intended to deal with allocation of offices between the parties for MPs to use. In fact the meeting did not go ahead although I DID meet the Government Chief Whip’s Private Secretary (known inside the bubble as the usual channels).

The meeting that did not happen (mundane though it was) somehow found its way into the Daily Mail who proceeded to speculate wildly about whether the meeting was indeed a sign that the Lib Dems were now cosying up to the Tories to stitch up a secret coalition deal.

Of course at that time the Conservatives were trying to negotiate a deal with the DUP, negotiations were going badly (due mostly to their own mismanagement).  Briefing the press in this way was a mark of the desperation with which they were seized.

So when I read in the Times yesterday that Tim Farron’s chief of staff Ben Williams had met with his No 10 counterpart Gavin Barwell last Thursday I took it with a pinch of salt. Not least because I knew that Ben was in Leeds on Thursday.

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James Moore

Obituary: Annette Hendry

By James Moore | Wed 5th July 2017 - 11:55 am

Veteran Liberal Democrat campaigner and former Councillor, Annette Hendry sadly passed away on Wednesday 31st May after a long battle with cancer, at the age of 74.

It’s very sad that my first ever article for Lib Dem Voice should be this, but I wanted to celebrate Annette’s life and all she achieved. Annette was one of my local liberal heroes.

She met her husband Alan while she was reading English at University College London and the couple eventually moved to Reading for Alan’s job. Annette started her long service to the community in Reading by teaching English as a foreign language to the new arrivals from the sub-continent. They later had three children, Douglas, Anne and Neill.

Her passion for helping people led her to take on a second degree in Social Work at Oxford Brookes University, which meant she was able to become a social worker at what is now Bracknell Forest Council, where she worked with with troubled teenagers, dysfunctional families and children in care, which she found incredibly rewarding and life enhancing.

Annette was active in the Liberal Party, then the Liberal Democrats, and was a tenacious campaigner for the Party in the 1970s, 80s and 90s until finally becoming Councillor for Peppard ward on Reading Borough Council in 1999, a role she held until 2007. She was also a long-standing Chair of the Caversham Branch of the Greater Reading Local Party.

As well as being a Councillor she was a school governor and strong advocate for the Reading Citizens Advice Bureau which she became a trustee of.

I only joined the Liberal Democrats in late 2011, but Annette was one of the first people I met and we were soon friends. Ever cheerful, she simply got stuff done, both as a Councillor and as a general campaigner. I always knew I could rely on her to help organise an event or campaigning session. She was a liberal to her core. One particular moment will always stick in my mind when she took umbrage with another Liberal Democrat who was expressing some not so-Liberal views – I’ve never seen anyone go so white. Behind her cheery disposition was a very strong core liberal belief when things were wrong they should be fixed and addressed.

I asked some Local Party members to describe Annette:

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Joe Bourke

A progressive alliance round Land Value Taxation?

By Joe Bourke | Wed 5th July 2017 - 8:55 am

The Grenfell Tower fire has focused attention on the extent of the crisis in the UK social housing system.

Reverend Paul Nicolson of Taxpayers Against Poverty comments:

There are rows of empty “investments” in London, and the four big builders have 600,000 unused plots in their land banks.

The Liberal Democrat 2017 Manifesto included genuinely progressive housing proposals

  • a new national Housing and Infrastructure Development Bank,
  • increasing housebuilding to 300,000 homes a year
  • allowing councils to end the right to buy, lifting the borrowing cap and targeting “buy to leave” empty homes with a 200% council tax.
  • penalising land-banking with with a penalty on failure to build after three years of winning planning permission.
  •  a “community right of appeal” in cases where planning decisions go against the approved local plan.
  • a “rent to buy” model, where rental payments give tenants an increasing stake in the property, leading to outright ownership after 30 years.

However, the manifesto incorporated only a single sentence with respect to LVT. “We will also consider the implementation of Land Value Taxation.”

Labour’s manifesto went a little further with respect to describing its LVT intentions promising:

 We will initiate a review into reforming council tax and business rates and consider new options such as a land value tax, to ensure local government has sustainable funding for the long term.

The Greens promised “Action on empty homes to bring them back into use and a trial of a Land Value Tax to encourage the use of vacant land and reduce speculation.

The SNP have previously included LVT proposals in their manifesto and at their spring conference this year adopted a resolution “must include exploring all fiscal options including ways of taxing the value of undeveloped land” in its gradual land reform programme.  Other parties like Plaid and the Alliance Party have incorporated LVT proposals in the past.

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Will Parker

‘Occupying’ the missing middle is not enough – Lib Dems must build it

By Will Parker | Mon 3rd July 2017 - 6:06 pm

Vince Cable recently said that if Lib Dems can “occupy that enormous ground in the middle of politics we’ve got tremendous opportunity”.

He’s only part right. To occupy is to inhabit a space that is otherwise vacant. There is a missing middle in British politics but that’s the point – it’s missing. There’s nothing there to inhabit. First it needs to be built in terms of a reality in Parliament and an idea based vision. This requires leadership.

So before Vince gets carried away with talk of the “political winds blowing in the Lib Dem’s favour” he would do well to remember that 7.4 per cent of the vote and 12 MPs isn’t much to work with. It’s a stump – and the centre ground cannot be rebuilt by it in its current form. He should then ask: Who are the Lib Dems? What are they for?

Here are the answers he should come up with. The Liberal Democrats are the party of the radical centre, not some confused wet-lettuce centrism.

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Geoffrey Payne

SLF Conference London 15th July – all Lib Dems invited – we need to talk!

By Geoffrey Payne | Mon 3rd July 2017 - 4:35 pm

 

The theme for this year’s conference “The Retreat from Globalisation “ was conceived 6 months ago. The country had voted for Brexit and the US had elected Donald Trump, albeit on fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. Since then however Liberals have seen off the threat from the far right in both Holland and France, but more recently in the UK general election both of the pro Brexit parties, the Tories and Labour, made big gains.

So how do we make sense of what is going on and where do we go from here? There are no simple answers so I would like to invite you to our day conference in London on Saturday 15th July. At the time of writing it looks like Vince Cable will be confirmed as our new leader soon unless a surprise candidate puts themself forward. Vince has confirmed that he will be attending and for most of us this will be the first opportunity we have to find out the direction he wants to take the party. In return we can ask questions which, depending on you, may or may not include a controversial matter that the Radical Association has (successfully?) campaigned on recently.

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Bernard Aris

Dutch UK correspondents warn that the mood among EU expats has really soured

By Bernard Aris | Mon 3rd July 2017 - 2:49 pm

 

In his Sky interview on Sunday (quoted by Caron Lindsay in her earlier post), Sir Vince Cable warned that the Wimbledon tournament is hit by a serious strawberry crisis. British strawberry fields will (forever?) remain unattended because the people (EU workers) needed to pick the fruit have scampered home, afraid of the uncertainties of staying in the UK where both May and Corbyn keep pursuing a hard Brexit, never mind May’s sweet-talking at the recent Brussels summit (which was roundly dismissed, if not disbelieved by Juncker, Tusk and German prime minister Merkel).

In the Dutch liberal quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad of Saturday 1st July, the anthropologist and journalist Joris Luyendijk (famous for his Guardian blogs and international bestseller “Swimming with sharks” about the worrying ways of thinking and operating in the City of London banking sector) gives an assessment of the mood among well-educated, professional EU citizens that should alarm any Briton who wants the British economy to flourish.

And in the biggest Dutch daily, de Telegraaf of 23d June, Dutch expat and former Telegraaf UK correspondent Arnoud Breitbarth (now working in the British musical industry) voices frustration (“we’re treated like second class citizens from the moment the Brexit Referendum was announced”) and despair at possibly having to leave the UK where they’ve lived for decades.

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Greg Ardan

Why it’s perception that matters

By Greg Ardan | Mon 3rd July 2017 - 12:22 pm

 

There has been plenty of analysis and commentary on the Liberal Democrats at the 2017 election. There were significant positives from some great seat gains.  But it is difficult not to be disappointed by the low vote share nationally.

Much has already been said as to why, which I won’t repeat here. I’d like to instead focus on three specific areas which pose – the third especially – a broader long-term question for the party.  Namely that of how the public perceive us, and what they think we are truly “for”.

The first point concerns increasing polarisation. Of course there is still a centre ground. However, it’s clear that an increasingly large number of people do support the Conservatives’ hard-Brexit, continued austerity and increasingly nationalistic swing to the right. Likewise there’s an increase in those in favour of Jeremy Corbyn’s brand of socialism and high public-service spending, funded by significant tax hikes to higher earners and UK businesses.

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Paul Walter

What is the government’s exact majority?

By Paul Walter | Mon 3rd July 2017 - 10:58 am

Since June 9th, I’ve been keeping a little spreadsheet to show the exact majority of the government.

First of all, the question arose: ‘What is the working majority of the government?’ That is, if the DUP don’t vote with the government but simply abstain (because they don’t want Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister). My calculations suggest this working majority is four, based on the following assumptions:

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Neil Lewis

Five General Election lessons from a newbie

By Neil Lewis | Mon 3rd July 2017 - 9:08 am

 

I joined the Lib Dems in 2015, stood for Chester Police and Crime Commissioner in 2016 and for Bromsgrove in the 2017 General Election. Both were tough but fabulous experiences and I was hugely grateful for the opportunity to stand for our shared Liberal Democrat values and for the great local support I received.

So what lessons did a newbie learn in this General Election?

  1. All is not lost!

Yes, our vote share was disappointing – but from my conversations on the street, and also as the latest evidence, we were squeezed – dreadfully! So, we know the votes are there… for next time.

I campaigned in a strong Conservative seat and met people who shared our values but felt a Lib Dem vote would make no difference. Here’s what seemed to persuade them;

“… every Lib Dem vote counts because the BBC and media allocate TV and Radio time based on the number of votes we get – so, if you want to hear less of Nigel Farage and more of Tim Farron, you must vote Lib Dem…”

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Mutualisation of public services needs to go up the agenda

By Adam Penny | Sun 2nd July 2017 - 3:00 pm

One of the most interesting developments in domestic politics of recent years is the return of the debate over nationalisation in many public services: notably rail and utilities.

Labour’s 2017 manifesto put nationalisation firmly back on the agenda. Seeing as that is the case, I would argue that this offers the opportunity to make a strong case to the public for the largely ignored, but very credible model that mutualisation offers.

There is no disputing that there are many flaws with the privately-owned models that have been adopted for many public services, but equally it’s worth remembering that fully nationalised industries have had more than their fair share of problems.

In both cases, it stems from the innate conflict between the interests of shareholder interests and the interests of the workforce. In the privatised case, the interests of the workforce become a peripheral issue in favour of maximising returns, often leading to short termism, lack of public accountability, and a disenfranchised and disinterested workforce.

On the flip side, the weakness of nationalisation is that government control of the organisation means that management is heavily influenced by public opinion, which inevitably leads to a situation where unions can politicise the issues towards favouring the interests of the workforce over and above the interests of providing a good service to the public. Rewind 40 years and we can see these problems at their worst, with the nation pretty much crippled by the dominance of unions influencing public opinion and making sensible management in the public interest all but impossible.

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Caron Lindsay

Vince on Sky News: We’ve got to stop extreme Brexit

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 2nd July 2017 - 12:36 pm

Vince Cable gave his first big interview as probably-the-next-leader of the Lib Dems to Sophy Ridge on Sky News this morning. You can read the full transcript but here are some of the highlights.

It was, as you would expect, a reasoned, calm and accomplished performance. He certainly comes across as the grown-up in the room.

First of all, he was asked about austerity and whether or not it could continue. You could, he said, spend more money wisely:

I think what there is a big public mood for, and I think it’s right, is that we shift the balance and instead of just cutting, cutting public spending we have people willing to pay more tax and indeed my party campaigned in the general election saying a penny in the pound on income tax for the health service and I think people are up for that kind of change.  Similarly public sector pay, I mean you can’t just have unlimited public sector pay but we should be lifting public sector pay above the present cap which pushes people’s incomes down in real terms and again we argued in the election for a phased increase and so at least people’s pay – teachers, nurses – is protected in real terms.  I would also argue that it makes sense to use government’s borrowing capacity at very low interest rates to do more investment, you know, social housing, infrastructure – these are things that we could do very sensibly within sound public finance.

Asked about tuition fees, he says that we need to look at how the system has worked, but there are bigger priorities for education at the moment. He also pointed out that more needs to be done for the young people who don’t go to university. I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more from him on that in the meantime.

Well the Labour party have a ridiculously populist programme which doesn’t really stand up to investigation.  I mean if you don’t have any form of fees, who pays for universities?  How do you end this discrimination between the 40% of students who go to university and who would be subsidised as opposed to the 60% who don’t?  So that would be highly inequitable.

But we have to be careful of doing things for populist reasons:

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Party members question Vince Cable on Brexit, freedom of movement and single market

By Andrew Hickey | Sat 1st July 2017 - 10:15 am

It now appears that Vince Cable will be unopposed in the upcoming party leadership election, and so party members will not receive the opportunity to quiz him at hustings on his record and policy views>

Many of us within the party are concerned by this. We believe that in a democratic party, it is imperative that the leader receive proper scrutiny. We need to know that the candidate is up to the job. The leader of the party must be able to deal with uncomfortable questions.  As we’ve seen in the recent election campaign, the inability to give a straight answer to a simple question can be fatal to a leader.

The party leader must also be able to speak for the party and to defend party policy, especially when it comes to the most important issues of the day. In particular, many people have expressed concern about Vince’s statements to the New Statesman calling for an end to single market membership and freedom of movement, which appear to go against both party policy and the party’s constitution.

>For that reason, a number of us have put together an open letter to Vince Cable, the full text of which can be found here. This letter has been signed so far by hundreds of party members, including a substantial number of parliamentary candidates, councillors, and local party exec members. These are the people on whose support a new leader will need to rely, and so those people in turn need to know that the new leader is worthy of such support.

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Humphrey Hawksley

Get clever, get brave and reform to win

By Humphrey Hawksley | Sat 1st July 2017 - 8:43 am

As the Liberal Democrats are about to take on a new leader, one question looms large. Why, in its various incarnations, has this mainstream political party failed to win power for almost  a hundred years?

While we blame variously the right-wing press, the voting system and so on, the truth may lay closer to the party itself that needs structural modernization in three distinct areas – mission, message and management.

With the centre ground deserted, we have been handed an open goal, but have yet failed to score. Unless we act now with fast, brave and clever leadership, that goal will be scored by others.

First, the mission.

After the referendum, thousands of new members joined, believing the Liberal Democrats would design a new, big picture vision for Britain’s future and they wanted to be part of it. Instead, they were told to deliver leaflets on issues such as pot-holes and speed bumps because: “This is how we do things.”

Many began drifting away.

At September’s conference, I asked delegates how they thought we could win government.  “I don’t think we want that,” summed up a long-standing member. “It would be against our values.”

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Andy Cooke

How should we approach future coalitions?

By Andy Cooke | Fri 30th June 2017 - 4:10 pm

If we do decide to take part in future Coalitions, one thing that does need to be resolved is how to approach them.  Make no bones about it – we were nearly annihilated.  Play it like that again, and we could be doomed to oblivion.  Yet if we choose never to go into Government again, we’re doomed to impotence.  Scylla and Charybdis had nothing on this.

Last time the voters viewed us as having “got into bed with the Conservatives” rather than partners in something different.  The Rose Garden set the image: a love-in rather than a business partnership. One with us seen as the weak partner: dominated rather than dominant.  This might elicit sympathy, but voters won’t flock to who they see as the victim.  They seek out strength in their leaders.  Consider how Labour portrayed Nick Clegg (unfairly) in “The Incredible Shrinking Man” in 2014’s European Elections.

We’ve had analyses on what went wrong.  Nick Harvey’s “After the Rose Garden” has detailed prescriptions and is well worth a read.  George Kendall posted ideas in the direction I was thinking, and Bill le Breton highlighted that a workable and successful approach already exists for hung Councils, hung Parliaments and hung Assemblies in “Life in the Balance”, by ALDC.

Things that come out again and again include making the transactional nature clear, exposing linkages with wins, losses and trade-offs.  Keeping your distance (an arrangement, not a marriage) makes it harder to portray you as weak and dominated.  

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Joe Bourke

What does the latest Social Attitudes Survey say to Liberals?

By Joe Bourke | Fri 30th June 2017 - 11:58 am

The 34th British Social Attitudes survey has found 48 per cent of Britons would back the government increasing taxes to bolster spending, the highest support for such measures since 2004. Britons think the government should prioritise spending on health (83 per cent), education (71 per cent) and the police (57 per cent).

The key findings of the report are summarised broadly as a country that is becoming:

Kinder: after 7 years of government austerity, public opinion shows signs of moving back in favour of wanting more tax and spend and  greater redistribution of income. Attitudes towards benefit claimants appeared to have softened, with the proportion of people saying benefit claimants don’t deserve help dropping from 32 per cent in 2014 to 21 per cent in 2016, the lowest level ever recorded by the survey. People particularly favour prioritising spending on disabled people.

Not soft-hearted: the public in general continues to take a tough line on the response to threats at home and abroad. More than half of Britons want the authorities to be given strong powers to respond to terrorism and crime, and record numbers want defence spending increased.

After pensions being protected from austerity, the public are losing sympathy with the idea that this should be a priority for further spending.

The public takes a dim view of benefit fraud and tax evasion, with many thinking that exploiting “legal loopholes” is also wrong. Further, more people consider benefit fraud wronger than tax evasion. While the proportion who prioritise more spending on increasing the benefits for disabled people has risen, there is little support for more spending on benefits for the unemployed, perhaps because half of people think the unemployed could find a job if they wanted to. Only 16 per cent of those surveyed said they would back more spending on the unemployed.

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Tom Arms

Observations of an ex pat: Torture

By Tom Arms | Fri 30th June 2017 - 8:50 am

Torture is bad. Well, there is nothing like stating the obvious. Nothing like shouting a truism from the digital rooftop.

Except that for 58 percent of Americans it is not a truism. It is not a position which they support. In fact, they support torture. Perhaps because their president claims “it absolutely works.”

This is despite the opposition of CIA experts and Defence Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis who made it perfectly clear to Donald Trump that he could either have torture or Mad Dog at the Pentagon. But he couldn’t have both.

So the president backed down. Or has he?

This week the Associated Press reported details of what are known as “Black Sites” run by the United Arab Emirates and based in lawless South Yemen. Black sites are secret bases where people are sent to be tortured.

AP reported that there are at least 18 Yemeni black sites and at least 2,000 suspected Jihadists have disappeared into them. The secret prisons are inside military bases, ports, an airport, private villas and even a nightclub.

The means of torture are excruciatingly cruel. There is of course the tried and tested waterboarding and various techniques involving electricity, rape, clubs and fists. In one case the victims were locked for days in a container with the walls smeared with human faeces. One of the favourite techniques is to tie the victim to a spit and roast them over an open fire.

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Duncan Brack

The leadership of Charles Kennedy

By Duncan Brack | Thu 29th June 2017 - 10:12 am

As nominations open for the sixth leader of the Liberal Democrats, the Liberal Democrat History Group’s meeting next Monday takes a look back at the record of its second: Charles Kennedy.

In many ways Kennedy’s period as leader, from 1999 to 2006, was a success. His opposition to the Iraq War – heavily criticised at the time by both the Labour government and the Tory opposition – proved entirely justified and in the 2005 general election he led the party to its highest vote since 1987 (22.0 per cent) and its highest number of seats since 1923 (62). He was a popular figure with the public, appreciated for his quick wit, self-deprecating manner, and careful understatement in an era when respect for mainstream politicians was rapidly eroding.

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Sal Brinton

Sal Brinton writes… What you need to know about the leadership election

By Sal Brinton | Wed 28th June 2017 - 10:10 pm

You can tell that we are in the middle of a Leadership Election. All the Lib Dem social media forums are buzzing, rumours abound, and there are plenty of discussions going on about the next Leader of the party.

As President I have to remain completely neutral in any Leadership contest because I represent all 104,000 of you to the Leader. I am very aware that many thousands of you will never have been through a Leadership Election before, so I thought it might be worth an attempt at explaining our processes.

Any candidate has to get at least 10% of our MPs to support them by 5 July, and thereafter get nominated by 200 paid up members from at least 20 local parties or official party bodies (Specified Associated Organisations such as Young Liberals, Lib Dem Women etc ‘SAOs’). These nominations must be submitted by 20 July when nominations close.

At the moment, the nomination forms have only just been circulated to the MPs, so anyone planning on standing is now going to have to come out to the membership to get your nomination.

Any candidates will have teams round the country asking for your support, so don’t be surprised if you get a request. 200 nominations doesn’t sound a great number, but speaking as someone who has had to get those nominations in twice for the Presidential elections, it isn’t as easy as it sounds! Remember, you can only nominate one candidate. 

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The Voice

WATCH: Christine Jardine’s maiden speech

By The Voice | Wed 28th June 2017 - 5:28 pm

Christine Jardine made her maiden speech this afternoon. The text will follow when it is available.

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Bernard Aris

May’s Brexit setup denies remaining EU states what she wants to recover for Britain: sovereignty over their nation(als)

By Bernard Aris | Wed 28th June 2017 - 4:10 pm

As the Brexiteers slogan “take back control” clearly shows, the taking back of government control not only over your own territory, but also over the whole of your population, nation, (in short: “national sovereignty”)  is a central plank in the whole, over-ambitious and under-estimated, undertaking that is Brexit.

But in Theresa May’s proposed treatment of EU citizens in the UK, she in two ways denies the governments of the continental states who, very sensibly, choose to remain in the EU (and, conversely, some British citizens) what she herself wants to “take back from Brussels’ clutches”: national sovereignty.

She does that first by insisting that the fate of EU inhabitants of the UK will exclusively be decided by British courts (and authorities), and that London will (negotiating with  Brussels) co-decide the cutoff date of the 5 year term you need to get a “settled status” in the UK.

And, because she and Brussels agree that it will be a mirror image operation, the fate of UK citizens in continental EU states is thus left to their respective national courts. Well, the courts in Poland and Hungary are being transformed into the servants of regimes that have heavy prejudices against fundamental West European and British values like the Trias Politica of separate powers, liberal democratic values, western education (George Soros’s university) and women’s rights (work beside family life, abortion). The less agents, carriers of western ideals and freedoms living in Poland and Hungary, the better, is the way Orban and Kaczyński think about guarding what they call the sacred “National Identity” of their “embattled” nations. See the way they marginalized liberal opposition amongst their own citizens, and how Kaczynski’s people humiliated Tusk (and Orban the professors/students of Soros).

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