Category Archives: Op-eds

Caron Lindsay

Paddy has Brexit campaigners floundering on Question Time

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 22nd April 2016 - 11:08 am

Paddy Ashdown has been in very combative form on the EU Referendum. Actually, the one debate I would love to see would be Paddy vs Boris. Our former leader would show up the Mayor’s vacuous, disingenuous rhetoric for what it is.

Paddy is truly getting out there and taking the fight right to Brexiteers in a way that nobody else has managed. He’s been pretty punchy on Twitter for the last few weeks:

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Nick T

Review: Coalition, by David Laws

By Nick T | Thu 21st April 2016 - 1:01 pm

Coalition: The Inside Story of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government (Biteback; £25)

David Laws CoalitionIf journalistic reportage is the first rough draft of history, then the politicians’ memoir has a good claim to be the second — at least as far as contemporary political history is concerned.

Few are better placed to give the inside account of the UK’s first national coalition in living memory than David Laws. Laws was at the heart of the coalition before it had even been conceived, as part of a small Lib Dem team preparing for a hung parliament, and was then one of four Liberal Democrats to make up the party’s negotiating team when possibility became a reality in May 2010. From thereon in he bore witness to every significant decision made over the next five years, even though two of those years were ostensibly spent on the backbenches.

Laws has two other advantages, too. The first is the intelligence and insight that has earned him respect across the Lib Dem party — even from those with whom he often disagrees — and beyond. The second is his proximity to Nick Clegg, who allowed Laws access to his papers from his time as deputy prime minister in the preparation of this book.

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Neville Farmer

Your Liberal Britain: What would a Liberal Britain look like?

By Neville Farmer | Wed 20th April 2016 - 12:35 pm

Your Liberal BritainHow many times have you heard it? “What do the Lib Dems stand for?” I mean, it’s not as though Labour have been socialists for the last 20 years. There is clearly no such thing as one-nation Conservatives, or fiscally responsible Tories, or compassionate Conservatives. Yet the public seems to think they understand the main parties’ positions.

The typical voter thinks it’s the Lib Dems who have no stance, the piggy in the middle that invited the Cameron treatment for five years. Not a party of government, as our failed campaign slogan confirmed last year. Our position as a party is one of the reasons the Your Liberal Britain group was created. So, here’s my two penn’orth.

I joined the party because I believe that government is about nurturing and investing its citizens’ talents, not putting the fear of God into them, not reining them in or nannying them and certainly not spreading anxiety and mistrust.

Fundamental to our system of justice is the presumption of innocence. We are supposed to trust each other. But recent legislation doesn’t reflect that.

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Caron Lindsay

Cooking with Kirsty

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 19th April 2016 - 4:35 pm

Kirsty Williams faces her ITV leaders’ debate on ITV Cymru tomorrow at 8pm.

Away from the formalities of the campaign, she has been cooking with ITV Cymru’s political editor Adrian Masters. He’s been doing this with all the party leaders. I do hope he asked the men what their families thought of them being party leaders as well.

He helped Kirsty make Sloppy Joes.

Kirsty had a great story about being brought back to earth after meeting President Obama. If it had been me, I’d have wanted to talk about nothing else for about a year. Her husband, Richard, had something else he needed to ask, though:

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Caron Lindsay

Willie Rennie’s most embarrassing moments – and his favourite films

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 19th April 2016 - 3:05 pm

In London, they have the taxi thing, but in Scotland, the BBC are doing a Leaders’ Lift Challenge. As they travel up the lift in what I presume is their Glasgow HQ, people get on and ask random questions.

Here’s Willie Rennie’s. The answer to “Who would you most like to be stuck in a lift with?” is very sweet. And we find out about the transgressions in his past. Stealing apples, indeed.

This comes out as a BMG opinion poll had two bits of potential good news. First of all, 51% backed the idea of a penny on tax for education, which is the party’s key policy in this election. On hearing this, Willie said:

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Joe Otten

Brexiters have nowhere to hide on crime, policing, terror and intelligence

By Joe Otten | Tue 19th April 2016 - 1:38 pm

With the Brexit debate currently focusing on the question of trade, Brexiters are able to wrongly claim that the UK would enjoy better trade agreements outside the EU, sooner or later. This exercise in hand waving complacency is not available when it comes to our security.

This is not just about the European Arrest Warrant, responsible for the

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Steve Trevethan

Value for Money and Power Education

By Steve Trevethan | Tue 19th April 2016 - 8:55 am

No action can have a single consequence.

Can the stated purpose of an action distract us from considering its several unstated/understated consequences?

Can unstated consequences be unstated purposes?

Can/does the iceberg profundity of the governmental decision/action to academise all English schools have a single consequence/purpose?

Academisation of our schools involves more than education. It also involves money, property, power, politics, cartel-control, democratic freedom, governance and accountability, to name but some of the areas of our lives it affects/controls, now in the future.

Some questions:

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John Marriott

We need to challenge some of those Brexit statements

By John Marriott | Mon 18th April 2016 - 3:34 pm

 

Well, the ‘official’ EU referendum campaign has finally begun. Funny, it appears to have been going on for months already.

I was interested to see the images of the two official campaigns juxtaposed the other day in the BBC report on my TV screen. The ‘Leave’ campaign was illustrated by old footage of Tories Grayling, Gove and Whittingdale etc. manning the phone lines, whereas the ‘In’ footage showed Tory, Labour and Lib Dem politicians, including the Prime Minister, doing the same thing. For an organisation that has tried so far to be unfailingly impartial in its reporting of the campaign in its ‘phoney war’ stage, I have a feeling that the BBC has possibly given the ‘In’ campaign a visual leg up, by showing its multi party nature. Now, whether we get politicians of different parties actually sharing a platform as we did in 1975 is a different matter.

So far, the arguments for and against have been pretty well rehearsed. We should park immigration for a moment, which could be the deciding factor, but which will still pose problems for us whether or not we stay in the EU. As an EU pragmatist, who thinks that, on balance, leaving the EU now would be a massive gamble, I do have to say that some of the arguments being put forward repeatedly by the Brexiters need challenging.

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Liz Lynne

Who makes the decisions in the EU?

By Liz Lynne | Mon 18th April 2016 - 1:38 pm

 

I have become increasingly frustrated that so many people, including journalists and UK politicians, do not seem to know how the EU actually works and who is responsible for making the decisions on legislation. Over and over again I hear that unelected bureaucrats are in charge and people endlessly talk about the democratic deficit. The reason they do that is that they have been fed this misinformation by the majority of the press and media for years.

I thought it was about time to try and put the record straight. Having been both an MP and then an MEP I can genuinely say that I had more power to shape legislation as an MEP than I did as an MP even though I was a front bench spokesperson.

Most legislation in the EU has to be passed by both the MEPs and the Council which are made up of Ministers from each Member State that is why I get so frustrated when people say that unelected bureaucrats make the decisions. They are usually under the misapprehension that the Commission are the ones who actually legislate.

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Lord William Wallace

In the Spring …

By Lord William Wallace | Mon 18th April 2016 - 12:23 pm

 

In the Spring every Liberal Democrat activist goes out delivering and canvassing.  To pass the time, and increase the interest, many of us play mind games about the political tendencies of the streets and houses we are approaching, trying to anticipate what we may expect.  In Bradford we have to anticipate first of all whether the front door and letter box will be at the front or the back – well, we hardly ever open our own front door in Saltaire, though the letter box is there. In generations past, front doors  in West Yorkshire were only used for weddings and funerals; now, you are more likely to encounter thick piles of clothes and shoes which prevent the person you wanted to talk to from getting close enough to open it.

The most successful game I ever played, with others in our group, was in an affluent area of Sheffield Hallam in the 2010 campaign: guessing the sort of reception we would get, and the likely political leanings, from the make of the car in the drive. BMWs indicated solid right-wing views, Mercedes only slightly less so.  Minis denoted concern not to hog the road or to look aggressive, Peugeots had a definite tendency towards Liberalism, and Volvos were a pretty sure bet.  When one of my nephews was lodging with us a few years later, and looking for a car to buy, he explained to me how each make and model of car carries a particular image that the purchaser buys into: male, female, assertive, family-oriented, socially aware.  This reassured me that I had not been idly associating choice of car with political tendency.

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Andrew Venning

Is Liberalism Dead?

By Andrew Venning | Mon 18th April 2016 - 9:10 am

Every day as I read the news and listen to the radio I dread the erosion of Liberal principles across the globe and there seems to be an increase in extremism and antagonistic attitudes toward the most seemingly inoffensive issues. Due to the growth of fascism both in the UK and particularly across Europe it feels as if Liberal ideology is utterly at threat.

The LibDem fight back is about more than a party but an ideal. We need to convince people that we can moderate as well as keep the door ajar to our left wing allies. We must fight the corner for workers and the poor and those lives that have been utterly ruined by the Conservative party cuts. We must keep a balance of sensible politics and reject extremism in any form, right or left. It is not a healthy route to achieve political, social and geopolitical cohesion. Liberal ideas must be kept alive and not end up squeezed out and squashed into nothingness.

The ideas of being Liberal must be at the nucleus of our thinking, behaviour and actions. We need to embrace our historical “founders” Erasmus, Montesquieu, John Locke, Simone de Beauvoir or whoever else you choose as your own personal poster person for liberalism. We need to keep the best of their ideas alive. If we don’t, we risk losing the liberal ideal and getting left behind.

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Vinous Ali

Visiting the Northern Greece refugee camps with Tim Farron

By Vinous Ali | Sun 17th April 2016 - 10:55 am

Refugee camp Northern GreeceOn Monday I flew out to Greece with Tim ahead of his visit to the camps in the North on Tuesday. Hours earlier UNHCR informed us they would no longer be able to facilitate the visit of a ‘high-profile’ individual given the security concerns after the clashes the day before. I tried desperately to reassure them that it was not exactly a ‘high profile’ visit, there would be no security team, huddle of staff and no media crew following him around– something that I don’t think they really believed.

So we flew into Greece with ‘fluid’ plans let’s say.

I spent Monday night manically emailing all the contacts I had working in the field to see if we could line up briefings for Tim the next day and had a surprising response. Everyone was very keen to meet Tim to tell him what they were doing and what they needed from the UK Government. One organisation who wasn’t even currently in Idomeni, the informal camp we visited on Tuesday morning, came over especially to give Tim and an overview of what was happening on the ground day in, day out.

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York Membery

In conversation with David Laws

By York Membery | Sun 17th April 2016 - 8:55 am

The former Liberal Democrat MP and government minister discusses his new book about the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government, says what he would do differently in hindsight, and looks into his crystal ball to see what the future holds for the party…

Your new book about the Coalition has certainly made a few waves following its Sunday newspaper serialisation – the right kind of waves?

I think inevitably there is a temptation in the press to shed light on things which are currently topical, such as Tory divisions on the referendum. But the primary reason I wrote the book was to give an accurate, historic account of the Coalition and a proper explanation of our part in it – and if the serialisation results in more people reading the book, so much the better.

It sounds like you’re, by and large, proud of what the Lib Dems achieved in government?

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Paul Walter

Is being an MP a rubbish job?

By Paul Walter | Sat 16th April 2016 - 7:54 pm

Nigel Morris in the i reports:

Lonely MPs are finding it almost impossible to balance their jobs with ordinary family life, according to a survey of politicians who quit Parliament at last year’s election.

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Paul Walter

Timely reminder – when the Guardian’s attempt to influence US politics backfired spectacularly

By Paul Walter | Sat 16th April 2016 - 11:54 am

Owen Jones in the Guardian recently wrote an article entitled: “I signed an open letter to Donald Trump, and you should too”:

Trump’s unapologetic embrace of racism, xenophobia and misogyny vindicates all of those ugly prejudices the world over. And millions of Americans are horrified about Trump. They deserve our solidarity and support. There is, after all, another United States, one forged by immigrants and transformed by courageous Americans who fought racism, sexism and homophobia. That is a United States millions of us believe in. And that is why we should sign this letter.

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Caron Lindsay

The “trailblazing, hell-raising rule breaking Rennie”

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 15th April 2016 - 4:28 pm

Another Friday, another day Willie Rennie wins the internet.

I don’t think there has ever been such fun at a manifesto launch ever.

The Scottish Liberal Democrats’ manifesto is centred around opportunity in so many ways. Children are at the very heart of it, so it seemed appropriate that the event took place in a soft play event in Edinburgh. And if you are going to go there, you need to get into the spirit of the place. You can’t afford to look too stiff and sober. And Willie didn’t.

The team got three specific things right. First a bit of humour, reminding everyone how you won the internet last week too.

And, let’s be honest, it’s a bit of a treat to imagine hard-nosed political hacks being asked to wait in a room like this:

Finally, if you have a leader who can do a 3 second pitch while going down a slide, then that’s a talent you have to exploit.

Jamie Ross from Buzzfeed absolutely loved it:

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The Bearing Group – helping to build a more liberal UK

By Anonymous Lib Dem | Fri 15th April 2016 - 3:00 pm

In the wake of the electoral wipe out of the Liberal Democrats in May 2015 I was thoroughly disappointed. Disappointed by a national election campaign that was lacklustre and had lost the pulse of the British public. Disappointed by the voters so easily caught up in the scaremongering of a Labour/SNP alliance. Disappointed at those who ran to the Conservatives in blind hope of a stable economy that had been achieved not through Tory cuts but Liberal Democrat moderation.

In all honestly I lost faith in the ability of the Liberal Democrats to deliver the liberal Britain we need. The PR disaster was so staggeringly absolute that it seemed to sound the death knell for liberal politics at a national level for years to come. I was delighted that my expectations were exceeded by the surge of membership and a new leader who seems to have real change on his mind.

However, in that gap I decided to take a step myself – towards doing my best to personally shift public discourse back towards liberalism in a way not bound to the fortunes of political parties and the party political tactics which grow increasingly divisive as more parties join the fray. That initiative created The Bearing Group.

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Baroness Emma Nicholson

Baroness Emma Nicholson writes…We must maintain momentum to end sexual violence in conflict

By Baroness Emma Nicholson | Fri 15th April 2016 - 11:59 am

On a ferociously hot day in Baghdad a few months ago, I listened as a young Yazidi girl slowly and carefully told me her horrific story.

Captured by the monstrous Daesh when her village in Northern Iraq was overrun, Nadia had been sold to the highest bidder, an elderly thug called Selman, who proceeded to rape this poor girl on a daily basis. Any resistance was met with fists and boots.

As we finally abandoned the sweltering heat of the garden for the cool of the hotel lobby, Nadia burst into floods of tears as she told me about one particularly gruesome day.

Selman had become outraged at her attempted resistance to his vicious sexual assaults which left her battered and bruised. So in revenge he allowed all six of his bodyguards to drag her into the bedroom and rape her. One after the other, over and over again.

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Claire Tyler

Claire Tyler writes…We need to invest in all our young people

By Claire Tyler | Thu 14th April 2016 - 2:02 pm

When it comes to the big debates on education, invariably the focus is on schools and universities. It’s all about academic success, exam league tables and access to higher education. On the rare occasions that the focus isn’t on institutions, it’s on apprenticeships. The attention governments of all hues have paid to these flagship policies have obscured one very important fact: the majority of young people—53%—do not follow the ‘traditional’ academic route into work.

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Alice Thomas

Offshore 101, or: Can we please stop asking David Cameron to resign?

By Alice Thomas | Thu 14th April 2016 - 12:56 pm

One of my favourite things about the Liberal Democrats is members don’t just get stuck into debates – they go looking for the evidence to back up what they’ve got to say. That’s why this week’s furore around what David Cameron did or didn’t do has been so frustrating.

The Panama Papers are fascinating to me, as a lawyer and a would-be tax specialist. It looks likely that when the dust has settled there will be evidence of money laundering, of tax evasion, of tax avoidance and of regulatory failings. But so far most journalists and commentators are throwing around words like fund and trust as if they’re the same thing, and treating tax avoidance, tax evasion and money laundering as equivalent acts. Unfortunately, much of the social media discussion so far has accepted these red herrings.

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Paul Walter

Is Leeds showing the way forward on prostitution?

By Paul Walter | Wed 13th April 2016 - 1:50 pm

Considering our own forward-thinking policy on prostitution, I wonder if readers approve of the scheme currently being run in Leeds. The BBC reports:

A suburb in Leeds is the first place in the UK where it is permitted for women to sell sex between specified hours. The “managed approach” was introduced to try to control the trade.

…in this specified network of roads, street prostitutes can sell their services from 19.00 to 07.00 BST, without being stopped by police.

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Paul Walter

Africa’s Super Sunday

By Paul Walter | Wed 13th April 2016 - 12:20 pm

Recently on holiday in West Africa, I was somewhat torn. There was a strong temptation to leave my political conscience in a left luggage locker at Gatwick. Indeed, I think I did to an extent. I was, after all, on holiday and, being in a rural “eco lodge”, I was able to mix with ordinary Africans and provide some support to the local economy.

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Paul Walter

St Ives referendum – Is this the way forward to stop seaside idylls being ghost towns?

By Paul Walter | Wed 13th April 2016 - 10:50 am

The idyllic, but seagull-dive-bombed, seaside town of St Ives is holding a referendum, as the BBC reports:

On 5 May, the council will ask residents to vote on a new town plan, which includes a promise to restrict second home ownership.
If the vote is passed, new housing projects will get planning permission only on condition that the homes are reserved for people to live in full-time. Developers will not be allowed to sell the buildings to anyone who has a residence elsewhere.

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Paul Walter

The government’s EU “remain” booklet hits the doormats…and it is spookily reminiscent of its 1975 counterpart

By Paul Walter | Wed 13th April 2016 - 9:50 am

P1010392 (2)Here’s the very booklet I received yesterday from Her Majesty’s government. It’s a rather dry looking document, but the message is clear, as it is repeated, more or less, three times on the cover of the booklet:

Why The Government believes that voting to remain in the European Union is in the best decision for the UK.

…on the front and:

The Government believes that voting to remain in the European Union is the best decision for the UK.

and

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Caron Lindsay

Seven candidates and an electorate of three – the strangest by-election ever?

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 12th April 2016 - 7:53 pm

By next Tuesday, we’ll have a new parliamentarian, a new hereditary member of the House of Lords. A House of Lords by-election is being held following the death last month of Eric Avebury, who is already very much missed.

I’m not going to lie, that doesn’t sit terribly comfortably with me. The idea that you could get a place determining the laws we all have to live by just because you were lucky enough to be your parents’ firstborn son is the first big problem. The second logically follows on – it’s an all male electorate deciding from an all male field.  Half of me wonders if we couldn’t have just said “No, this is archaic, we aren’t going to do it.” However, is it really that much worse than a parliamentary chamber that’s appointed? We don’t like it, but there’s a lot of good work it can do. We’re saddled with a majority Conservative Government stitching up the political system in its favour despite having been elected by just over a third of the electorate. The Lords have frustrated them on several occasions over really important issues like housing, immigration and tax credits.  Another Liberal Democrat on the benches has to be a good thing.

There are seven candidates for the place and an electorate of just three, the remaining Liberal Democrat hereditary peers, Dominic Addington, Patrick Glasgow and Raymond Asquith.

Ballot papers are available from today and the result will be announced on Tuesday 19th. Electoral Reform Services have been engaged for the not very onerous task of counting the ballot papers and determining the result.

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Joe Otten

Brexit as political arson by David Miliband

By Joe Otten | Tue 12th April 2016 - 10:40 am

It isn’t the done thing here to link to opinion pieces in the newspapers by Labour politicians. So much that I’m not even sure what category to use. We have LibLink for links to articles by Liberal Democrats, and we have the slightly oddly named “Independent View” for articles by non-members.

But sometimes, hang the taxonomy, this is important enough to link to anyway.

David Miliband steps away from arguments over the costs of membership and Brexit, of whether we could get back the agreements on trade, policing, etc, that Brexit would tear up, the implications, if any, on immigration. Instead he looks at the bigger picture.

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Benjamin Sims

Why, after a year of being involved with the Lib Dems, I’ll be renewing my membership

By Benjamin Sims | Mon 11th April 2016 - 6:51 pm

I was sad to see Josh Lashkovic’s article explaining why he won’t be renewing his membership. I was one of the enthusiastic newbies he refers to; I met him in that summer of 2015, and I thought he was a great guy with interesting ideas for ways the party could move forward after its electoral wipeout.

I’m a great enthusiast for the idea of the Lib Dems as a startup, and I share his desire for the party to change. My experiences over the last year though have been completely different to his, and I’d like to explain where I think he’s wrong and see if he might reconsider.

Just because we need new methods, doesn’t mean we should throw out the old ones

I have indeed knocked on a lot of doors and I’ve delivered a lot of leaflets. But just because those methods are old doesn’t mean they’re obsolete. My first full campaign was, yes, ‘another council by-election’ and we did ‘spend evenings and weekends knocking on doors’. But we came second somewhere we’d never had a candidate before (a new entrant disrupting an established market, you might say) and we learnt a lot.

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Chris Key

The erosion of British local democracy

By Chris Key | Mon 11th April 2016 - 2:54 pm

 

Slowly but surely, local democracy is being eroded away by the Conservatives and crumbling into the sea, like parts of the British coastline. Not everyone in Britain knows this is happening. Here is how…

The decision of forcing all schools to become academies, far from improving local democracy, will see decisions taken by Academy Executives who may live hundreds of miles from your school. Take the example of the E-ACT Academy trust, which has decided to remove local governing bodies entirely.

According to the Local Government Association, there is a forecast need for over 880,000 new primary school places in the UK over the next 10 years. This will require coordination and planning to ensure new schools and places are located in areas of need, rather than the free-for-all which will now ensue. In future, when parents of children at academies want to complain, they will have to go to a mandarin in Whitehall and getting a timely response and action will be as easy as getting Ryanair to give you compensation for a delayed flight.

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Mark Pack

Looking for more women

By Mark Pack | Mon 11th April 2016 - 12:58 pm

Margaret WintringhamThe Liberal Democrat History Group faces a double bind when it comes to finding authors and topics for our articles, books and meetings cover the history of the Liberal Democrats and our predecessor parties.

The superficial explanation is that our output is bound to be dominated by men because that is how political has been. Just look at the ranks of male party leaders, for example. And look at how nearly all the biographers of our party leaders have been men. So whether we’re looking at topics or authors, you might think we’re bound to be dominated by men for understandable reasons. No problem there. Move along please.

Except it there is rather more to it than this, for when you scratch under the service it is clear things do not have to be quite this way.

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Jonan Boto

The EU Referendum – Don’t believe UKIP, believe Sir Winston (and his fellow Liberal Democrats)

By Jonan Boto | Mon 11th April 2016 - 11:22 am

Current soundbites aren’t doing this vote justice…

The arguments are well rehearsed by now. Boris’ land of milk, honey from Canada and ‘Nike tick growth’ versus Cameron’s doom, despair and economic shock. The land of Farage and UKIP freedom fighters versus job-destroying years of negotiation on separation terms (Canada’s EU trade deal: 7 years and counting).

The EU is fairly imperfect, and EU free movement makes immigration policy that much more difficult (although over 50% of migration to the UK comes from outside the EU). Cameron’s renegotiation, grand tour of Europe, and media-focused town halls are a fair attempt to address issues. But they don’t quite do it for me. (Why not travel the UK instead, to better understand people’s concerns and bolster the renegotiation?) As for UKIP, forget them: they have become the damn establishment, and their MEPs don’t even turn up for UK interests (see FT 2014 analysis).

There’s one statesman, however, I would go into battle with. So, what would Churchill have said?

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