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Category Archives: Op-eds

Can the long-term decline in government investment spending be reversed?

By Nick T | Mon 21st March 2016 - 12:54 pm

If actual government investment spending bore any relation to the amount of time politicians spent talking about it, Britain would surely have one of the highest rates of government investment in the world. In fact, for all the talk there are few signs of a reversal in one half of the most notable trend in Britain’s public finances over the last half century: the decline of government investment.

I say one half because there is another part of the trend, and it is the flip side of the same coin: the general trend of increasing spending on social security.

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Tagged featured and investment spending | 25 Comments

Progressing with evidence-based politics

By A Liberal in Leeds | Mon 21st March 2016 - 11:41 am

The Liberal Democrats are the party of evidence-based politics. We form our policies not based on blindly-followed ideology, but by proposing workable solutions to society’s problems. In my view this is what makes our party great. With this in mind, I broadly welcome our approach to the public versus private sector debate, which I’ll address in the latter part of this post.

However, Conference’s vote to approve fracking in Scotland is concerning in comparison to the party’s renewed opposition in England. I welcome this opposition for two pragmatic reasons. Firstly, there are serious short-terms risks to fracking, such as water pollution. This is a serious risk, because the private companies which frack love to cut corners, as has been seen in the US. Until such time as there is fracking regulation with real teeth, supporting fracking is a massive. Simon Oliver recently wrote an excellent explanation of findings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh report here on Lib Dem Voice. Basically, fracking could be done well in the UK, but won’t be due to the weakening of regulations. Selective citation of the report in the Scottish debate seemed to use the evidence to justify a response, not having a response based on the available evidence. That isn’t how our party debates should work.

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Tagged evidence-based policy | 22 Comments

Reflections of a conference first-timer

By Diane Reddell | Mon 21st March 2016 - 9:12 am

Hi! My name is Diane and I am disabled. Now I have made that confession, I would like to share my reflections of being a first time attendee at conference.

A few months before the conference I deliberated whether or not to attend the spring conference in York. Due to my disability I required support to attend the conference and this can be quite costly as most things are for disabled people. Also I was unsure what actually happens at conference and I was concerned that I did not have enough knowledge to fully engage with the motions being put forward.

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Tagged access fund and liberal democrat spring conference 2016 | 13 Comments

How are you getting on with Tim Farron’s membership recruitment challenge?

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 20th March 2016 - 2:52 pm

When we went into the rally at Conference 9 days ago, there were two bits of paper on our seats. Och, that’ll just be Euro campaign tat, I thought. Actually, it wasn’t. Tim issued a challenge to everyone in the room. These bits of paper were membership forms and he told us to get out there and recruit two members each by the end of this month.

Leaders have made such challenges before and not much has come of them. You see, it needs us to actually make the effort and once the passion of the rally has died down and we’ve got into the bar, we forget all about it. But we shouldn’t.

Why should we bother?

There are three very good reasons why we should get out there and recruit as many people as possible.

The more the merrier

You might be looking at a garage full of Focus leaflets wondering how you are going to get them all delivered before the next leaflet is ready. You might be the only Lib Dem in the village wondering if you are ever going to have company. There isn’t a circumstance in which having more people is going to anything other than a very good thing. More people to share the load. More people to help you achieve more than you ever thought possible. More people who have different friends and contacts and networks.

New ideas

You can just see what the amazing people who have joined us since May have brought us. It was brilliant to walk into rooms in York and see lots of people I’d never seen before. They have brought with them creativity and new ideas, things like Your Liberal Britain and Lib Dem Pint which have become part of the party’s vocabulary. They didn’t even exist this time last year. Heavens, Lib Dem Pint is so popular, it’s even happened in Glasgow. Amazing people came our way, like Becca and Wendy and Joyce Onstad and Jim Williams. At the Conference rally, Dr Saleyah Ahsan spoke so powerfully about her work as a junior doctor, inviting us to stand with her through a gruelling shift – eating when she does, going to the toilet when she does. I doubt many of us would last.

And look at fantastic people like Lauren Pemberton-Nelson who ran such a spirited campaign in the Faraday by-election in Southwark.

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Tagged featured, membership, recruitment and tim farron | 17 Comments

Shas Sheehan talks to the heroes of Calais and Dunkirk

By The Voice | Sun 20th March 2016 - 12:25 pm

Baroness Shas Sheehan went to Calais and Dunkirk with some supplies a few weeks ago. She is going again this week and invites you to help her get supplies together.

On her last visit, she spoke to some of those heroic volunteers who have given up months of their time to help the refugees survive the Winter. Here’s the video she made.

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Tagged calais, dunkirk, refugees and shas sheehan | Leave a comment

David Laws on Marr: I want to expose how NHS chief was leant on to encourage debate on NHS funding

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 20th March 2016 - 10:59 am

It’s the second week of David Laws’ coalition revelations serialised in the Mail on Sunday. This week we have him telling us that:

To take them in turn:

You have to wonder why we bought and publicised the £8bn figure, too. It’s all very well for David Laws to tell Andrew Marr today that Norman Lamb was always sceptical about it, but I seem to recalls making a massive thing about how we were the only party who was going to meet the £8bn request in full. If we knew that the figure was nonsense then, why on earth did we not say loudly and lay out the choices that the nation faced in a much more realistic way?

On Marr, David Laws emphasised how the Lib Dems helped IDS veto Treasury requests for further welfare cuts, confirming that Osborne saw it as a cash cow.There are problems with this analysis, though. Danny Alexander seemed to be hand in glove with Osborne on a lot of this stuff, at one point calling people affected by the Bedroom Tax “bedroom blockers.” Also, a lot of the really awful ideas, from the rape clause to the capping at two children were IDS’s idea.

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Tagged coalition, david cameron, david laws, eric pickles, george osborne, ids and theresa may | 20 Comments

Baroness Liz Barker writes: The Tory threat to UK foreign policy

By Baroness Liz Barker | Sun 20th March 2016 - 8:55 am

Lynne Featherstone and Lindsay Northover were outstanding DfID Ministers. During their tenure, with the support of Liberal Democrats in both houses, and throughout the party, for the first time, radical commitments such as an to end Female Genital Mutilation by 30% by 2018 were included in UK Government policy. Furthermore, those Liberal Democrat ministers, insisted that commitments to the rights of LGBT people and people with disabilities be central to FCO and DfID policy and programmes.

They did so, not just because of our unshakeable commitment to human rights, but because the UK’s unique history with the Commonwealth nations and relationships with European partners, give an unparalleled position from which to be an influence for good in the world.

This summer, the UK government has an opportunity to attend the 2016 Global LGBTI Human Rights Conference, which will be co-hosted by the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Government of Uruguay. It will involve the main international donors who support and fund LGBTI programmes. It is a rare opportunity for the UK government to leverage the political commitment of the coalition government by involving other governments, and the private sector, in developing good practice guidance on funding, supporting NGOs to bring about change on difficult subjects.

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Tagged disability, foreign policy, house of lords, human rights and lgbti | Leave a comment

Farron and Rennie react to IDS resignation

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 19th March 2016 - 10:20 am

Well, that was a surprise last night. I was lying in my bed feeling ill, as I have been for days, when the news came through that Iain Duncan Smith had resigned. My instinctive reaction was to worry. IDS was probably about as good as it gets when it comes to the Tories and social security. His replacement is likely to have even less of a social conscience.

I totally accept that the bar is not very high here. I do wonder how somebody can happily cut £30 a week off sickness benefits just weeks ago, introduce the benefit cap, limiting of Employment and Support Allowance, Bedroom Tax and impose the Universal Credit cuts and finally resign over the issue of disability benefit cuts which looked like they were being kicked into the long grass anyway. IDS’s resignation letter talks a good fight in the last paragraph, where he asks what we’ve all been saying for years, whether we really are all in this together, but it justifies many of the things that most Liberal Democrats found unacceptable. This, of course is before you even get to the capping benefits at two children and the “rape clause” that requires a mother of a third child to prove rape in some unspecified way before she can get benefits for her third child. And don’t get me started on benefit sanctions. Have I missed anything?

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Tagged disability benefits, iain duncan smith and tim farron | 24 Comments

Cynical opportunism all round on Tampon Tax deal

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 18th March 2016 - 4:13 pm

And so, the Tampon Tax looks like it’s on its way to the home for ridiculous, misogynistic laws in the sky. And it’s all thanks to George Osborne and David Cameron. Ah, no, say the Brexiteers, the whole idea that we had to go begging to Europe to get it fixed is plain wrong.

Had there not been an EU Referendum coming up in just over three months’ time, I suspect women would have been paying the extra 5% for some time to come. Because of an unlikely alliance between a few right wing Tory outers and Labour feminists, the Government has been forced to take action so that they don’t look like reactionary idiots.

Except they do.

George Osborne is no more a feminist than Brexiteer Steve Baker. If he was, he’d have done something about this long before now. The fact is that the Tory inners and outers are being as cynically opportunistic as each other. The “inners” are saying “Oh, look at this rabbit we’ve pulled out of the hat”, never mind that the rabbit should have been set free decades ago. The “outers” are doing the EU bad thing

And then there’s Nigel Farage, a man who was happy to take money for his party from a man who thinks that trouser-clad women are “hostile” jumping on the anti Tampon Tax bandwagon. He’s using its demise to argue that that we should be setting our own taxes, forgetting that it was a bunch of men in a room, including us, who set it in the first place.

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Tagged tampon tax | 11 Comments

What the Liberal Democrats could learn from Obama, Sanders and Trudeau

By Anne Curie | Fri 18th March 2016 - 1:58 pm

As a young American woman who has interned in the Canadian Parliament, volunteered for American campaigns and is now working in the British Parliament, it has been interesting following the 2015 British Parliamentary elections through a variety of lenses. The recent change of government in Canada and the ongoing presidential election in the United States seem worth unpacking, in order to delve into possible lessons which could be learned by Liberal Democrats from these other spaces.

I propose that there are lessons worth learning from two American Democrats, President Obama and Bernie Sanders, as well as Canada’s new Prime Minister Trudeau. For the former, the reasons may be self-evident. President Obama rose from a relatively unknown position into an incredibly influential presidency. For Bernie Sanders, it is worth understanding how another political outsider has once again come to challenge Hillary Clinton in her bid for the presidency. Though he will likely lose the primary, Mr. Sanders has been a formidable opponent from a stance that rarely would be noticed in the United States. With regards to the Canadian elections, I would like to explore the ways in which a party can move from a third-party position into a powerful government in the way the Liberals have done under Trudeau.

There are three characteristics which President Obama and Bernie Sanders have shared in their campaigns: they excel in grassroots organising, they offer clear messages of hope, and their platforms are cohesive. The first point, grassroots organising, is something which Liberal Democrats would benefit from greatly. Bringing staunch supporters out to volunteer in elections is a powerful force to reckon with, especially in university areas. In my home state, Ohio, both Obama and Sanders effectively coordinated university students to participate in the electoral process as vocal volunteers. From what I have seen, it seems that the Liberal Democrats could recruit a significant amount of volunteers from universities for the 2020 elections. This is a lesson sorely learned by the Liberal Democrats in the aftermath of the 2010 elections. Understanding the implications of reversing stances on university tuition prices is a hard lesson, but it does offer a high incentive for maintaining consistency in the future.

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Tagged barack obama, bernie sanders, canada, Justin Trudeau and us | 12 Comments

Baroness Shas Sheehan writes…Moral leadership needed on refugee crisis

By Shas Sheehan | Fri 18th March 2016 - 12:55 pm

This refugee crisis is the biggest movement of people since WWII. It needs visionary people with big thinking to get to grips with it, because make no bones about it, it will need to be tackled and a head in the sand attitude will not make it go away. So, it is a proud day when the leader of our party, Tim Farron, makes it a centrepiece of his keynote speech at conference and receives a standing ovation for it.

Politics is the art of the possible – but only when we have the leaders to make the possible happen.

The only western leader with the cojones to step up to the plate has been Angela Merkel. But she has been let down by other European leaders – not least our own Prime Minister, hiding behind the skirts of dysfunctional Dublin III regulations.

A little prodding behind Murdoch press headlines shows that last weekend’s elections in Germany, in spite of a spike in the far right vote, were far from a disaster for the pro-refugee German leader.

Britain and France make much of the “pull factors” – that making conditions just that little bit more humane will be a magnet. What utter rubbish. As though people flee their lovely homes, their lives, their careers, with only what they can carry – just to get the next phone upgrade.

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Tagged calais, dunkirk, germany, humanitarian aid and refugee crisis | 2 Comments

The party is listening to young people

By Kimberley Stansfield | Fri 18th March 2016 - 10:55 am

Among Liberal Youth members’ criticisms of the recent York Conference, there is the frequent accusation of inherent ageism against the younger members of the party; as a 23 year old ‘young’ member I find this is overstated. Whilst there was one notable instance in a debate of a young man being called ‘naïve’, this is by no means the norm. Furthermore, the reaction in the room seemed to show the audience siding with the younger member. Of course there are members who dismiss the opinions of those younger than themselves, however to place this at the feet of the party itself is misguided. We cannot align some less-than-polite tweets and comments on social media with the establishment of the party as a whole.

In my experience of Liberal Democrat Conference, I have felt overwhelmingly welcomed by the Lib Dem community especially as a younger member. Often remarked is how nice it is to see lots of young people getting involved and this was evident in York. There was a considerable number of young brilliant speakers in all debates, including some very brave young women in the diversity motion. I am proud of all the ‘youth’ that spoke out as I am sure the majority of the party is as well.

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Tagged ageism and liberal youth | 7 Comments

The party needs to live its values in the way it treats young members

By Charlie Kingsbury | Thu 17th March 2016 - 7:12 pm

Imagine being a member of a political party which prides itself on policy crafted by individuals which are valued in their own right, not for their morally arbitrary characteristics. It shouldn’t be too hard to imagine, because it is what our party sells itself as. Now imagine that upon joining that party you are told that actually what you are is just a good pair of legs to deliver leaflets, that you should instead accept that some people know better than you as a consequence of again arbitrary characteristics, and that regardless of your actual experiences that people are right to make assumptions about your knowledge, intelligence, and capacity for thinking into the future.

I would imagine that sounds fairly grim to you, and of course I would naturally agree. The sad thing is that this is a reality for young members of our party which they experience almost daily. It is no more obvious than at party conferences, where regardless of one’s education, training and vocation, that one is deemed “naïve” as a consequence of one’s youth.

I’d like to say I was heartened by the gasps and boos following one such example during the fracking debate, and I dare say the speaker responsible will have learnt her lesson. However, the problem persists within the party, and was evidenced the next day on the controversial debate concerning AWS and ADS. Young speakers from both sides of the debate recalled times where either themselves or their friends had experienced unwanted advances and sexual harassment, only to be told later either that they were plainly wrong, or that they knew nothing about true sexism.

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Tagged ageism, ir cymru, liberal youth and welsh liberal democrats | 49 Comments

Are we in a fracking mess?

By Simon Oliver | Thu 17th March 2016 - 3:12 pm

Over the past few weeks you could be forgiven for assuming that the party is in a bit of a mess on the fracking issue. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Scottish and Welsh devolved governments both had a moratorium on fracking on the basis of inherent risks in the technology, with unquantified dangers of seismic disturbance and pollution of water tables, as well as (still unaddressed) risks of waste material transport, treatment and disposal. Permitting planning authorities to reject fracking on these grounds is important. Both our Welsh and Scottish parties supported these moratoria. When a moratorium was debated at Westminster before the election, many of the 58 votes against were from the non-government Lib Dems.

However, as many have said, the evidence for these risks being unavoidable is weak. Fracking can be done safely, from a purely technical point of view. The massively over-interpreted RSE report said so.

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Tagged fracking, lynne featherstone and willie rennie | 15 Comments

Baroness Sally Hamwee writes…Another win for humanitarians in the Lords

By Sally Hamwee | Thu 17th March 2016 - 1:41 pm

I bumped into the Lords Home Office minister immediately after one of the Government’s socking defeats on the Trade Union Bill, consoling himself that losing by 17 in the vote on an Immigration Bill amendment time-limiting immigration detention was almost a victory.

But the Government lost – we won! The amendment was led by crossbencher Lord Ramsbotham, who was Chief Inspector of Prisons and so knows whereof he speaks, supported by the Labour and the Liberal Democrat front benches: 63% of our peers voted compared with 46% of Labour’s. Of course it may not stick. The Bill will go back to the Commons where the Government could ping it straight back to the Lords (parliamentary ping-pong), or propose a compromise or changes ranging from the substantive to the technical (or accept it unchanged – but that almost never happens), but it cannot be ignored.

There is much to be said about immigration detention and the conditions in immigration removal centres. I will simply note the paradox which causes detainees so much despair: You have no hope, as you don’t know when you might be released, and at the same time you have no certainty as you might in fact be released tomorrow.

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Tagged asylum, detention and immigration | 6 Comments

How can we tell we don’t live in a truly liberal Britain?

By Joey Dunlop | Thu 17th March 2016 - 10:28 am

Often with questions like these, people use their own experiences to illustrate the lack of (in this case) liberalism in the country. I’m going to do the opposite. This won’t be an answer with figures and alternative models behind it, but it’s this personal experience that motivates me to fight for the Liberal Democrats.

I was brought up in a regular middle class household; both my parents had secure jobs and owned their own house (albeit with a mortgage). My parents were from working class families who struggled to make ends meet, but they were classic examples of showing hard work pays by securing places at university and then respectable careers as a classical musician and in the civil service.

Because of this stability and complimentary working hours, they were both able to encourage my intellectual interests and support me in my work. This meant I secured a place at a great state secondary school in London, and then a place at Oxford University.

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Tagged your liberal britain | 3 Comments

Why a culture change is a necessary pre-requisite to gender balance

By Rachel Edwards | Thu 17th March 2016 - 8:55 am

I’m glad to be in a party where sexual harassment is taken seriously, and I don’t doubt that everybody has good intentions. Let me explain why that isn’t nearly enough.

A man walks into a bar. He buys a drink. He chats with a friend about the policy debate they’ve both come from, and they have a lively disagreement. He contemplates getting food. He gets talking to a young woman who he finds attractive, but she doesn’t seem interested so he doesn’t push it. He gets another drink.

A woman walks into the same bar. A strange man twice her age hits on her. She goes up to the bar to buy a drink, where a man she kind-of-knows hits on her. She’s talking to her friend about a policy debate, and another man she’s never met comes up, joins in the debate in an extraordinarily condescending manner, and she can’t quite tell if he’s hitting on her but she wishes he would take the hint and leave. She goes back up to the bar, where a drunk stranger makes a pass at her.

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76 Comments

Still waiting for true diversity

By Jonathan Hunt | Wed 16th March 2016 - 7:59 pm

Conference must be congratulated on passing the Diversity motion on Sunday. But contentious issues and some mysteries remain. One is why have we taken 14 years to get round to all-women short-lists for constituency selections, when they became the law of the land in the 2002 Sex Discrimination Act?

In theory, any local party could have operated all-female short-lists at any of the three general elections since then, safe in the knowledge they were legal, passed by Parliament. Had that happened, the battle for all-BME (now BaME) lists could have begun at least a decade ago.

Perhaps before Parmjit Singth Gill, only our second ethnic minority MP in 120 years, could have been given proper support in the general election of 2005. The party gave the impression of not giving a tuppeny bowel movement about full diversity or wanting BAME MPs. They hung him out to dry, with the self-fulfilling prophesy that he would lose.

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Tagged bame representation, diversity and electing diverse mps motion | 13 Comments

Caroline Pidgeon writes…This is a “microwave” budget from Osborne

By Caroline Pidgeon | Wed 16th March 2016 - 5:14 pm

This is a ‘microwave’ budget from George Osborne. He has just re-heated many announcements already made.

Some announcements can be welcomed – albeit cautiously at this stage as we haven’t seen the precise detail. Devolution of Business Rates and the proposals for financing infrastructure projects from land value increases are things the Liberal Democrats have long argued for.

Those of us in London had already been told last week that Crossrail 2 was going ahead and that there would be a need for Londoners to match fund the development costs. The increase in the share of business rates retained by London will help fund this vital new project, but a £1.9billion cut in TfL funds, as a result of Sadiq Khan’s fares policy, puts at risk important investment in London’s future transport needs.

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Tagged budget 2016 and london | 5 Comments

Lib Dems should be criticising SNP as well as Labour over failure to oppose Snoopers’ Charter

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 16th March 2016 - 11:47 am

The Party has produced a couple of graphic quite rightly having a go at Labour over their abstention on the IP Bill.

and

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Tagged snoopers charter and snp | 11 Comments

The science behind diverse shortlists

By Belinda Brooks Gordon | Wed 16th March 2016 - 10:29 am

During the debate on diversity the speeches on all sides were so moving that I felt compelled to share some of the science behind WHY we needed this motion and why I am so proud of everyone who spoke in that debate.

Studies show that from birth, girls lose out to boys. In the ‘Baby X’ trials where a baby is referred to as ‘Dana’ or ‘David, or dressed in pink or blue irrespective of their gender, adults treat the babies differently.

At the age of 11 months, in studies where mothers are asked to estimate their infants’ crawling ability on a sloped walkway, mothers of boys over estimate and mothers of girls under estimate how well their child will do. Parents’ beliefs about what their child is capable of influences what parents expect of their children.

The reason for this, according to Professor Virginia Valian in her book ‘Why so Slow‘ is due to gender schemas and the accumulation of advantage. Gender schemas are cognitive constructs that lead to over-valuations of men and under-valuations of women.This misevaluation occurs despite the intention to measure actual achievement. Most people sincerely mean to be meritocratic, and ignore gender, ethnicity, or disability, when making judgments. But the data suggest people overrate some groups and underrate others.

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Tagged diversity and electing diverse mps motion | 38 Comments

Postcard from Orlando: Hillary sweeps the board with big wins in Florida and Ohio

By Simon Foster | Wed 16th March 2016 - 9:08 am

Hillary Florida GOTV

What do Florida, North Carolina and Ohio have in common? They’re AWS, which means All Winning States on this side of the pond. As I write (0515!GMT) Hillary appears to have won Illinois and Missouri by a margin that would have any agent worth their salt screaming “Recount,” at the top of their lungs.

Whilst Florida was always polling strongly for Hillary, the big prize tonight was Ohio for her campaign. After the shock loss of Michigan last week, Hillary’s campaign needed a big win in the rust belt. In Ohio, she got it.

The two states are significant. Ohio is the ultimate swing state, crucial to Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012. Florida has even more of a history since George W Bush’s controversial “win” in 2000. At a rally for his wife on Monday, former President Bill Clinton said “You don’t need to explain to Floridians the importance of voting.”

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Tagged bernie sanders, donald trump, hillary clinton, marco rubio, primaries and us | 28 Comments

100 Days to go to secure our place in Europe

By Catherine Bearder | Tue 15th March 2016 - 4:39 pm

There are now just 100 days to secure Britain’s place in Europe. There is so much at stake. If we leave, the country faces a future of uncertainty, isolation and diminished influence in the world. If we stay we will secure opportunity, prosperity and security for future generations and we can lead the way in shaping a better, more liberal Europe.

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7 Comments

Tim Farron MP writes…The liberal challenge on immigration

By Tim Farron MP | Tue 15th March 2016 - 11:55 am

It’s not often that regional elections in other European countries get much attention in our press, let alone become headline news. The fact that elections yesterday in a handful of German states made front pages here today demonstrates the unusual situation Britain and Europe find itself in. It also highlights the growing need for strong, liberal voices across our continent.

Those of you who heard my speech on Sunday, or in fact have heard me speak since I became leader, will hopefully have a sense of my beliefs on the refugee crisis and on the wider issue of immigration. Our government has tended to bury its head in the sand, but with no short term end to the conflicts scarring the Middle East and climate migration on the rise, we cannot let a policy of ignorance be maintained.

More than ever, it is our responsibility as liberals to stop the immigration debate descending into hard line, xenophobic rhetoric that sets community against community. The relative success of Alternative fur Deutschland in these German elections shows how challenging that can be. Especially when the “pro-immigration” parties in Germany still vastly outweigh the anti, just one story makes better headlines than the other. Similarly, here in the UK, we would be foolish to think the decline of UKIP will see an end to the blaming of the other.

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Tagged featured, immigration and tim farron | 34 Comments

A Fresh Homecoming

By Mark Moore | Tue 15th March 2016 - 9:53 am

Yesterday I watched in awe as Tim Farron delivered, what I believe was, a passionate heartfelt speech to round off the Liberal Democrat conference in York. It was the a speech that confirmed to me all the reasons as to why just a week earlier I had joined the Liberal Democrat party after much soul searching.

My Liberal journey began, in many ways, when I was in my early teens in the mid 90’s when the nation was getting swept up in New Labour. Having been raised in an era of Tory rule, Thatchers Britain, and my parents having somewhat radical right wing views New Labour were a breath of political fresh air.

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5 Comments

Shortlists and Privilege

By Helen Belcher | Mon 14th March 2016 - 7:11 pm

On Sunday, Conference voted for all-women shortlists. As part of the debate, I gave a speech outlining how my experience showed that lots of men simply aren’t aware of the privilege they have. I was surprised that this speech would immediately precede the rare event of a leader’s speech in a debate. Tim – I hope I set them up all right for you!

For the first 40 years of my life I lived as male. Transitioning to female in 2004, and starting my own software company at the same time, showed me what I had anticipated – that I had to work much harder to be treated as worth listening to. It didn’t come as a shock to me, as I’d observed this since childhood – in fact, it was one of the reasons I used to delay transition. But I know other trans women who have been surprised by this side-effect.

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Tagged all-women shortlists and diversity | 23 Comments

What would a truly Liberal Britain look like and what improvements would it bring to people’s lives?

By Dick Newby | Mon 14th March 2016 - 5:51 pm

A truly Liberal Britain would be based on the concept of freedom of the individual and the understanding that this freedom can only be fully realised if everyone is supported to maximise their potential.

So.

It would celebrate diversity rather than stigmatising it. This would enable everyone to develop without suffering from the fears, frustrations and indignities which discrimination brings.

It would continue to skew spending on education towards poorer pupils, improve support for childcare and make it easier for children from modest backgrounds to get the best possible higher education or vocational training. This would give the best chance for every individual to fulfil their potential not just in terms of their career but also as participating members of society.

It would have comprehensive public health programmes and treat everybody needing medical help equally. This would reduce the life expectancy gap between rich and poor and, for example, greatly improved support for people with mental illnesses.

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Tagged your liberal britain | 10 Comments

Liberal Britain is a country where vocational education is taken seriously

By Thomas Liebers | Mon 14th March 2016 - 4:29 pm

Embed from Getty Images

‘Good for Youth, Good for Business’ is the title of a publication by the European Alliance for Apprenticeships that contains a small selection of organisations, examples and projects linked to apprenticeships in the EU, including examples from Britain.

What makes this relevant to a truly Liberal Britain?

In my view you can tell we don’t yet live in a truly Liberal Britain because:

Apprenticeships are still seen as “second class” in relation to a conventional degree.

Why does it matter?

The word liberal is often associated with freedom of choice, with tolerance, with personal liberties.

I believe strongly that young people in particular should feel free to choose an educational and career path that provides them with fulfilment in line with their interests and talents. In a truly Liberal Britain there are no occupations that are more respectable than others.

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Tagged apprenticeships, vocational education and your liberal britain | 7 Comments

My personal reflections on York

By Tobie Abel | Mon 14th March 2016 - 1:00 pm

Spring conference ended on a beautiful afternoon here in York, and whilst colleagues were journeying back to their own constituencies, as a local resident of the city I thought I’d spend the time saved in the commute to jot down some personal highlights.

The rally on Friday served up some great speeches from new Lib Dem members, notably from broadcaster/ army officer/ junior doctor Saleyha Ahsan who spoke passionately in defence of her profession (the medical one) but conflated the junior doctors pay strike and privatisation of the NHS.

Saturday was mostly fringe for me, and I attended the Private Renters event hosted by ‘Generation Rent’ intending to vent my spleen about the older generation treating property as a pension investment. Lots of other attendees were landlords keen to point out the impracticalities of rent controls or the unfair nature of existing regulations. Bah, try raising a family in a flat with one month tenancy notice mate! This issue is clearly going to be back at conference soon.

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Tagged liberal democrat spring conference 2016 | 11 Comments

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Where next for the Lib Dems in London? (Josh Lucas Mitte)
Winning Britain’s Cities: A Liberal Vision for Urban Britain (Patrick Stillman)
Tom Arms’ World Review (Tom Arms)

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Recent Comments

theakes
We should throw the kitchen sink at Holborn by election we could come second if we did and set the Greens back. Echo of Newcastle last week....
David Raw
@ James Flower Ah, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, city of my birth, proves my point. Where you work (as opposed to 'flying the flag') you can win, whereas the people you...
Alex Macfie
The political chatterati may view the Holborn & St Pancras by-election as a proxy for the next London Mayoral election, but the locals will just see it as a...
Peter Davies
Although our target may be the assembly (and specifically the assembly list) the media will report it as purely a contest for mayor. Nothing we say will be repo...
expats
@Matthew Harris 1st Sep '26 - 6:49pm... Matthew, As I wrote, "it doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks", so why you seem to think that the Maldive...