Category Archives: Op-eds

The Independent View: Harnessing the “BuzzFeed” effect to boost turnout in the Euro elections

By Pete Mills | Tue 13th May 2014 - 11:50 am

Only 26% are certain to vote in the European elections, and 77% say they know less about the issues in a European election than a general election, according to the Hansard Society. At Unlock Democracy, we’ve been looking at new techniques to combat low turnout and the worrying lack of political knowledge about European institutions.

For the European elections, we worked with organisations from 14 countries across the EU to produce Vote Match Europe, an online quiz app which matches user to the parties that best represent their views in the European elections, based on the issues which they select as …

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Also posted in The Independent View | Tagged european elections 2014 and votematch | 13 Comments

Opinion: Get your voters out electronically

By Mark Pack | Tue 13th May 2014 - 10:25 am

It’s not a surprise to say far more people use social media now than when I first learnt political campaigning because Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the whole lot didn’t even exist back then. Nor even did (glory be, you might think) Internet Explorer. Back when a beta version of Netscape was cutting edge, the scope for successful online political campaigning was tiny compared to now, when there are more people on the electoral register who use social media than will vote next week.

But the story of the last few decades isn’t just about the rise of the online world. It’s also about the increasing problems with traditional ways of communicating with voters on the ground. Fewer phone numbers are in the phone book; fewer households have someone in when you call round; and fewer properties have accessible individual letterboxes.

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Tagged campaigning, elections, gotv, graphics and Mark Pack | 2 Comments

Devo 15: Lord Jim Wallace writes.. Next 15 years represents inspiring opportunity to build on devolution success

By Jim Wallace | Tue 13th May 2014 - 8:29 am

Before going in to address a class of first year law students at Aberdeen University, last November, the head of the Law School took me aside and said, “Just to be aware. Most of your audience can’t remember a Scotland without a Scottish Parliament.” And, of course, these students were only about four years old, when the first elections to that Parliament were held fifteen years ago last week.

To those of us who campaigned so long and hard to create the Parliament, it doesn’t seem so long ago.

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Tagged devo 15, devolution, jim wallace and Scotland | 4 Comments

Danny Alexander speaks out against use of armed and mounted Police in the Highlands

By Caron Lindsay | Mon 12th May 2014 - 3:45 pm

In February, I reported that Danny Alexander had spoken out about the use of Police horses in his Highland constituency. As a native of Inverness I shared his sense of horror that anti-riot policing techniques were being used in the peaceable and safe Highland capital.

Danny had written to the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill to express his concern about such unprecedented, heavy-handed policing, to to mention the cost of bringing the horses up from Ayrshire at a time when the service is closing local control rooms. He’s …

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Tagged armed police, Danny Alexander, inverness, mounted police, police scotland and Scotland | 4 Comments

Opinion: Hamas and the collapse of Palestine/Israel Peace Negotiations

By John Kelly | Mon 12th May 2014 - 1:00 pm

Two weeks ago the Israeli Cabinet declared that the peace negotiations over Palestine were halted in view of the reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. The fact that the Cabinet Meeting took six hours perhaps suggests that this was not a unanimous decision. Was it a reasonable decision?

Background on Hamas can be found here. The essentials are that it was founded with the aim of liberating Palestine from Israel and had an armed wing that has indulged in terrorism. (Sound like Sinn Fein and the IRA?) Nonetheless it won Parliamentary elections …

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Tagged eu, israel and palestine | 32 Comments

Opinion: All Europe liked Conchita: what Eurovision tells us

By Stuart Bonar | Mon 12th May 2014 - 10:20 am

Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst’s smiling face beamed out from my TV late on Saturday, and like so many people I thought her victory was great. As Lib Dem Voice’s own Caron Lindsay put it shortly after the show had ended, the Austrian’s song

might not have been the best on offer tonight, but her personality, her embodiment of liberalism and authenticity, combined with a pan-European desire to stick two fingers up to the illiberal east triumphed in Copenhagen…

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Tagged conchita wurst, eu and eurovision | 5 Comments

Opinion: A European manifesto of hope

By Antony Hook | Mon 12th May 2014 - 8:55 am

For me and many other people, being a Liberal is about politics based on hope.

One of my favourite definition of hope is that it stands for “Helping Other People Evolve”.

Helping, not forcing.

Evolving, because almost everyone can see some scope for change for the better in their life.

We are not talking about forcing people to change their lives against their will.

Nor do we say, “each to their own, I’ll sort out my life and if you have no chance of a better future that is not my problem.”

Liberal leadership, based on hope, is about giving people a chance to fulfil their potential.

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Tagged eu and european elections 2014 | 2 Comments

Opinion: Liberalism and tolerance win the Eurovision Song Contest

By Giles Goodall | Sun 11th May 2014 - 7:57 pm

There’ll no doubt be a lot of the usual ‘why do they hate us’ headlines in the UK following our disappointing showing in last night’s Eurovision Song Contest. 17^th place was indeed below par for one our strongest songs in years and a polished performance on the night by 27-year old Mollie Smitten-Downes.

But such introspection – rather typically for Britain on matters European – misses the bigger point. Far more interesting was the winner: a gay, bearded transvestite from Austria called Conchita …

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Tagged conchita wurst, eu, european parliament elections 2014 and eurovision | 22 Comments

Opinion: The “Bedroom Tax”: a great socialist policy?

By Patrick McAuley | Sun 11th May 2014 - 3:00 pm

One thing escapes most political commentators when critiquing the merits of the Bedroom Tax. It is, of course, a great socialist policy.

Of course most commentators accept New Labour introduced the Bedroom Tax through the Local Housing Allowance policy from 2003 to 2008. The mistake commentators make is that they believe LHA to be an ideologically compassionate conservative policy, instead of democratic socialist one.

The argument has two parts. The first is relatively straight forward. For a socialist common ownership (of which …

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Tagged bedroom tax, housing and labour | 39 Comments

Opinion: Yes, Labour really has given up on winning votes from the Conservatives

By Mark Pack | Sun 11th May 2014 - 12:00 pm

I’m not fully signed up to the mockery for Labour’s recent TV and online films mocking Nick Clegg. Why? Because for all the naff content themselves, the broad message of them has been massively reported in the media, reaching a much wider audience than the films themselves.

I doubt that was a deliberate strategy as you can’t count on calibrating something to be just bad enough to get lots of coverage but not so bad as to sink under it. It’s a handy silver lining, however, especially as it diverted …

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Tagged general election 2015, labour and the incredible shrinking man | 34 Comments

Opinion: The irony of Labour’s “shrinking man” Party Election Broadcast

By Ed Stradling | Sat 10th May 2014 - 3:05 pm

Labour’s Party Election Broadcast has attracted plenty of attention since its launch on Wednesday, with its comedy portrayal of Nick “Claggy” as the un-credible shrinking man.

Much has already been made of the PEB’s negativity, and its silence on the question of Labour’s actual policy relating the EU (or indeed anything else) which, since the party receives public funding to develop such policy, might be considered unfortunate.

All might have been forgiven if viewers had dissolved into laughter upon watching the film, but aside from “can we hunt him?” …

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Tagged labour and party election broadcasts | 17 Comments

Libby Local Episode 18: Standing up for Demsbury

By Libby Local | Sat 10th May 2014 - 10:56 am

“Hey Libby. Are you standing? I’ll vote for you!”

I was puzzled by the shout and thought I had not heard it correctly. I was struggling to concentrate on anything after the events of the morning, else. I waved and walked on.

I was angry, almost in tears as I dragged my way up Crow Hill. I was very grateful when the bus stopped and the driver invited me on board his overcrowded bus.

“You look exhausted, Libby,” he said …

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Tagged featured | 3 Comments

“Label the behaviour not the person”: why we shouldn’t call Ukip a racist party

By Stephen Tall | Sat 10th May 2014 - 8:15 am

For once I’m going to agree with Nigel Farage. Speaking at a rally this week, he pleaded with the media and public, “from this moment on please do not ever call us a racist party. We are not a racist party.”

As rallying cries go, it’s not the most ambitious. But, then, Ukip’s not an ambitious party. As Farage himself happily boasts, it has just two policies: withdrawal from the EU and bringing back grammar schools. It doesn’t really matter, though. Ukip is defined by what it’s against, not …

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Tagged british future, featured, nigel farage, racism, sunder katwala and ukip | 107 Comments

Opinion: The Debt Trap

By Linda Jack | Fri 9th May 2014 - 5:20 pm

Yesterday I attended the launch of the Children’s Society‘s ‘The Debt Trap’ campaign, coinciding with the publication of their accompanying report, produced with Step Change, the free debt charity. Some of its findings are truly shocking and should give us all pause for thought. In one of the richest countries in the world 2.4 million of our children are living in homes with problem debt with an additional 2.9 million families with dependent children having struggled to pay their bills over the past 12 months. …

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18 Comments

Opinion: Why do UKIP and the ONS ignore my son?

By Mike Biden | Fri 9th May 2014 - 2:55 pm

Absolutely fed up with UKIP quoting only one side of the story – they have done it for years over the cost of the EU without taking into account the cash returns through the CAP, research grants etc.- I decided last night to check the immigration statistics.

Latest figures appear to be 27th February 2014 from the ONS. The ONS, like UKIP, conveniently forgets that Britain is IN the EU. British migrants, such as my son who went to work in Paris two and half years ago …

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11 Comments

Opinion: Getting a better deal for consumers from nuclear power

By Toby Fenwick | Thu 8th May 2014 - 12:56 pm

Following the vote at last September’s conference, the party now supports new-build nuclear power. This has been a hard road for many, but ultimately the UK needs to replace the 82% of UK nuclear generation capacity that is due to decommission by 2023. This is fully 51% of all UK low-carbon generating capacity, and unlike renewables today, nuclear can provide baseload generation.

It is this combination of baseload capability, capacity at lower cost than the cheapest renewables means that nuclear …

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Tagged featured and nuclear power | 27 Comments

Opinion: Scrap Sunday trading laws to boost the high street and the economy

By Gareth Wilson | Thu 8th May 2014 - 10:41 am

After yet another mad dash with the family around the shops last Sunday afternoon I read with great interest that members of the All Party Parliamentary Retail Group have recently tabled amendments to the Deregulation Bill currently going through Parliament to remove restrictions on Sunday trading and the launch of a new consumer-led campaign group to lobby MP’s to support these proposals.

Introduced in 1994, the limited Sunday opening hours for shops over 280 square metres were designed to protect local convenience shops from the bigger supermarkets. Fast forward 20 …

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Tagged sunday trading | 61 Comments

John Pugh MP writes…Why MPs should be interested in the protest vote

By John Pugh | Wed 7th May 2014 - 4:15 pm

Grown up politicians are supposed to be be bit sniffy about the protest vote. It’s a common axiom at the moment is to say the Lib Dems have lost the ‘protest vote’.

‘Protest’ voters are considered to be unthinking souls who don’t like what they see but have no coherent view of what should be in its place and thus are doomed to be unhappy with whoever is in power. A party can secure the support of these unreasonable people so long as they are not in power and …

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Tagged political engagement and protest voters | 28 Comments

Why people vote for Liberal Democrat Councillors

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 7th May 2014 - 1:38 pm

Following on from yesterday’s launch of the Liberal Democrat campaign for the local government elections, I thought I’d offer a few reflections on why people vote for Liberal Democrat councillors. Why is it that in places like Three Rivers in Hertfordshire and Oadby and Wigston that the Liberal Democrats have been in power for years on end?

Big hearts and hard work

Our councillors are embedded in their communities. They know what’s going on, they keep themselves in touch with what people are thinking and they listen to …

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Tagged featured, independent, jeremy browne, liberal democrats and local government elections 2014 | 8 Comments

Opinion: The Gender Agenda: What Liberal Democrat Women can do for women candidates

By Alice Thomas | Wed 7th May 2014 - 10:31 am

On May 22nd I’m fighting my first local election as a candidate. I’ve been stuffing envelopes and knocking on doors for other people for 8 years, but with a seat on Islington Council in the balance, this time it seems a little more real.

But I’m lucky. I’m fighting – and fighting hard – alongside a councillor with 8 years experience, and an experienced campaigner who’s already fought a by-election. The ward has two Lib Dem councillors out of three, and if we all get elected, …

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Tagged Liberal Democrat Women, local elections 2014 and the gender agenda | 116 Comments

Julian Huppert MP writes…Let’s bring the “polluter pays” principle to government decision making

By Julian Huppert | Tue 6th May 2014 - 5:49 pm

All too often Government departments get decisions wrong. Most notorious are the Home Office and the Department of Work and Pensions. Many people will be well aware of the anguish faced by those awaiting Employment and Support Allowance appeals, and the same is true for those waiting to see if they can stay in the country, or bring in a spouse.

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Tagged department of work and pensions, home office and justice | 14 Comments

Opinion: 485 million, 26 million or 4,000? UKIP’s immigration confusion

By Stuart Bonar | Tue 6th May 2014 - 10:26 am

So, Mr Farage, which is it? In the debates with Nick Clegg, you claimed 485 million of our fellow Europeans could come to Britain. On your wretched billboards, you claimed 26 million are eyeing up our jobs. Now, on leaflets that are dropping through letterboxes, you claim 4,000 EU migrants are landing on our shores each week. These are very different numbers.

I guess the 485 million figure is simply the total number of people who could legally come to the UK. But how is this different from pointing out that the 64 million people who live in the UK are all perfectly free to move to, say, Totnes? Should Totnes Town Council leave the UK so it can impose border controls? Should National Rail blow up the railway line at Dawlish to slow their arrival? Should the Government impose restrictions on internal movement within the UK just in case? Of course not, because 64m people aren’t about to move to Totnes, even though they’re free to do so, just as 485 million Europeans are not going to come here to Britain.

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Tagged featured, immigration and ukip | 40 Comments

Opinion: Astra-Zeneca and a Fairer Society

By Mike Biden | Tue 6th May 2014 - 8:46 am

The approach by Pfizer to acquire Astra-Zeneca raises yet again the question of what criteria should be used to evaluate the merits of large international corporate acquisitions. I would argue that too often the real issues are lost in xenophobic arguments about the loss of national champions – though that is a legitimate concern in this instance.

No compelling rationale for this merger has been put forward. The Directors of Astra-Zeneca do not see one. Straight forward commercial agreements between the companies to buy and sell individual assets, drugs patents or to …

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Tagged astra-zeneca | 29 Comments

Could Labour and Tories unite to pass tougher knife crime sentencing? How should Liberal Democrats react?

By Caron Lindsay | Mon 5th May 2014 - 11:30 am

Last Friday, Joe Otten wrote about the leak of letters revealing that the Liberal Democrats were opposing Tory plans to introduce a six month mandatory sentence for those convicted a second time for carrying a knife.

Today’s Daily Mail makes two claims. The first is that Labour is getting ready to “humiliate” the Liberal Democrats by siding with the Tories and they could pass this together. Secondly, they say that Nick Clegg was “bouncing off the walls” when he discovered the leak.

We know from the feature on …

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Tagged crime, knife crime, mandatory sentencing, nick clegg and nick de bois | 13 Comments

35 years since Thatcher: A trip down Memory Lane

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 4th May 2014 - 3:22 pm

On 4 May 1979, Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street for the first time. The sun that shone down on her on the steps cast a decade long shadow. The culture of selfishness, instilling a belief that there was something wrong with paying taxes for good public services, pervades today. In recent years, only the Liberal Democrats of the major parties have gone into an election advocating a rise in Income Tax, albeit a tiny one, to invest in education.

We seem to be embroiled in this cycle of underfunding our services, complaining about them and then underfunding them some more.

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Tagged margaret thatcher, nostalgia and shirley williams robin day | 18 Comments

Caron’s Sunday Selection: must-read articles from today’s papers

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 4th May 2014 - 9:42 am

Here are a few stories from today’s press to challenge, infuriate and inform:

John Rentoul’s General Election Preview in the Independent describes Paddy Ashdown’s role as providing “romping gravitas”:

The South African Ryan Coetzee, a former MP in South Africa for the opposition Democratic Alliance, is Nick Clegg’s head of strategy. There was a bit of a synthetic fuss recently when journalists noticed that his £110,000 salary as a special adviser is paid by the taxpayer. It was his idea to raise Clegg’s profile by challenging Nigel Farage to public

…

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Tagged press round up | 4 Comments

Opinion: An open letter to UKIP voters

By Paul Reynolds | Sat 3rd May 2014 - 9:28 am

Dear UKIP voter

Although you are probably not an avid reader of the Lib Dem Voice website, this letter may get to you through the usual ‘viral’ internet ‘system.

The opinion surveys suggest that there are three main reasons for people like yourself voting UKIP.

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Tagged eu, european elections 2014 and ukip | 107 Comments

…or you could vote for not having an opinion

By Joe Otten | Fri 2nd May 2014 - 6:41 pm

On Wednesday I went to my first hustings as a European Parliament candidate (number 3 on the Yorkshire and the Humber list). When the Green candidate announced that he supported staying in the EU, I had a quiet conversation with the Labour candidate sitting next to me.

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Tagged brexit and green party | 24 Comments

Opinion: Get your hands off my pint, Nigel

By Ben Nicholls | Fri 2nd May 2014 - 4:53 pm

Despite some of the quite appalling statements they’ve provided us with in recent weeks, I’m getting fed up of hearing UKIP supporters described as nutters. I’m no psychiatrist: it’s hardly my place, or that of anybody else, to decry someone as a nutter. But more importantly than that, I’m fed up of it because it’s insulting to everyone who supports UKIP, and it gives them a cast-iron reason not to place their cross elsewhere.

As a recently-selected Lib Dem PPC, I obviously don’t agree with UKIP. I’m pro-Europe, primarily because I’m …

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Also posted in News | Tagged ukip | 13 Comments