Category Archives: Op-eds

Toby Fenwick

Opinion: Go for a freefall nuclear force

By Toby Fenwick | Mon 27th January 2014 - 3:50 pm

Former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates recently decried the UK’s conventional force cuts making it clear that the UK’s ability to conduct global operations as a major US partner would be threatened. In doing so, Gates was pointing out the obvious implications of the Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir Nick Houghton’s December speech at the Royal United Services Institute.

I was therefore heartened by Sir Nick Harvey’s recent LDV post, where he accepts that the conventional force cuts will constrain the international role to which he aspires. He then logically makes the …

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Ed Davey

Ed Davey writes… Power to the people

By Ed Davey | Mon 27th January 2014 - 12:01 pm

Power to the People! Edward Davey and Greg Barker in BrixtonFor those of you old enough to remember, ‘Power to the People’ was the battle cry of ‘Wolfie Smith’, Robert Lindsay’s character in the BBC sitcom ‘Citizen Smith’. The running joke of the series was that while he had radical and revolutionary ideas, the delivery side was left somewhat lacking.

What I’ve announced today is both radical and sets out how community energy will be delivered. Astonishingly, it’s Britain’s first ever community energy strategy and will empower …

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23 Comments
Mark Pack

Opinion: Lessons from 1979

By Mark Pack | Mon 27th January 2014 - 8:32 am

Leaving through some kindly donated old copies of Liberator from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, there is a distinct sense of déjà vu. Calls to revive Community Politics. Urgent pleas to reinvent liberalism for a modern age. Complaints about how the English Party is run. Provocative comments from Simon McGrath triggering hostile rejoinders. (Although it did amuse me to find that one passionate argument against the party ending up a centre-right pro-capitalism outfit came from one Gavin Grant.)

Some of the issues covered have been lost in the gaps of history. Others are still very …

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30 Comments
Paul Head

Opinion: Football, Freedom of Speech and the Y-word

By Paul Head | Sun 26th January 2014 - 10:20 am

spurs yid armyIn the last few days, the Crown Prosecution Service has taken the decision to charge three Tottenham Hotspur supporters with “using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour or disorderly behaviour”. The charges relate to the use of the word “Yid” by the fans.

The decision to charge the fans should be a cause of major concern to anyone who values freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

For those unaware of the history and context behind the use of the word by Spurs fans, it’s worth a quick …

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Rob Parsons

Opinion: The male voice on Female Genital Mutilation

By Rob Parsons | Fri 24th January 2014 - 5:19 pm

Please note that the second paragraph of this article contains some graphic details of the procedure of FGM which some people might find distressing.

I’m very glad to see Liberal Democrats at the forefront of the drive to rid this country and the world of female genital mutilation (FGM), one of the most horrible expressions of male power over the female. The debate about it, around the world, as well as in this country, is often blurred by comparisons with male circumcision, which many people also campaign against actively (and in my view rightly). When the topic of FGM comes …

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Tagged and | 79 Comments
Sarah Ludford

Sarah Ludford MEP writes…Being “In” Europe crucial for jobs and living standards

By Sarah Ludford | Fri 24th January 2014 - 1:00 pm

When the Liberal Democrats say we’re the party of ‘In’, it’s not because we worship symbolically at the altar of EU institutions. It’s because being In Europe is vital to achieve real policy goals, of which the most immediately important is jobs in Britain. This is the clear message coming from major employers, like Ford, Nissan, Siemens and BAE Systems, which have all warned against pulling Britain out of Europe.

According to a recent YouGov poll 6% of British companies said they would go out of business if we left the EU. This translates into almost 10,000 firms closing and 300,000 people being out …

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Lynne Featherstone

Lynne Featherstone writes… Lib Dem action on tax helps to ease the cost of living

By Lynne Featherstone | Fri 24th January 2014 - 11:55 am

International Development minister Lynne Featherstone writes a monthly column for one of her local newspapers. Here is the latest one…..

There are so many perks of living in Haringey – vibrant high streets, good transport links, wonderful parks and views – to name but a few!

But on the downside, our bin collections, roads and other public services are notoriously bad. Haringey Council – which is run by Labour – has been rated the worst in London.

Week in, week out, Haringey Labour seem to lurch from one crisis to another. They failed to meet their own targets for making our local …

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Richard Dyer

The Independent View: Vince Cable should make sure all companies are bound by new transparency law

By Richard Dyer | Fri 24th January 2014 - 10:45 am

Consider this question – what is the difference between a T-shirt from Tesco and one from TopShop? Lib Dems will undoubtedly have their own style preferences.

But for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Minister Vince Cable there’s an important distinction. Cable is seeking to weaken proposed EU rules that would require companies to report annually on risks their operations pose to communities and the natural world, such as accidents, pollution and human rights. The new non-financial reporting directive could be a game-changer on a path towards more sustainable production.

It should ensure that a firm like Tesco, as a large …

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Also posted in The Independent View | Tagged , and | 2 Comments
Paul Tyler

Lord (Paul) Tyler writes… Transparency Bill – Government concessions

By Paul Tyler | Thu 23rd January 2014 - 3:01 pm

Yesterday Lords amendments came to the Commons for consideration. The Government has accepted the principle of my amendment on including Special Advisers (SpAds) in the regime of transparency about who lobbyists get to meet in government. However, the Conservative Party refuses to ‘switch on’ this provision at this stage, and probably for the duration of this Parliament.

The Government therefore brought forward an amendment which will allow Ministers to bring those who meet SpAds into the register of lobbyists, but they will remain out for now. David Cameron says ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’. Since two of the big lobbying scandals …

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Ed Davey

Edward Davey MP writes…Lib Dem led British diplomacy paves way for global climate change deal

By Ed Davey | Wed 22nd January 2014 - 6:28 pm

Liberal Democrats in Government are having a huge impact on tackling climate change, and today you’ve seen concrete evidence of how we’re winning the debate – not just in the UK, but across the EU and potentially beyond.

The main prize is huge – we’re working towards a global climate change deal that will be discussed at the critical 2015 talks.  But how do we get there?

Firstly, I got cross-Government agreement on an ambitious UK position. We have pushed for a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions across the EU by 2030. We want this increased to 50% if the rest …

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Also posted in Europe / International | Tagged and | 15 Comments

Opinion: So who are those Rock the Boat people?

By Grace Goodlad | Wed 22nd January 2014 - 11:30 am

Rock the Boat logoEleven months ago the Liberal Democrat world was tipped on its axis when Channel 4 broadcast reports from women making serious allegations of sexual harassment against one of the Party’s most senior, loved and respected figures.  As the sorry tale unfolded it was clear that the party had failed to deal with the complaints they had made and had failed to let anyone involved in the terrible situation get justice. It became clear that we, as an organisation, had a cultural problem and no idea of how to get our house in order.

As one would expect – if you know Lib Dems at all – the grassroots spoke, and James Shaddock set up a Facebook group called “Rock the Boat.” It grew rapidly and now has over 400 Liberal Democrat members.  The idea was that sometimes you have to say or do uncomfortable things to stop sexual harassment – whether that is to speak out about your own experiences, write policy motions, tell your friends if you think they are behaving inappropriately, or even reflect on your own actions and behaviours and perhaps change them after some soul searching and analysis. Sadly, eleven months ago it became quite obvious that when people had spoken up on sexual harassment, they had been told “Don’t Rock the Boat” – hence the name.

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Michael Moore

Michael Moore MP’s Westminster Notes

By Michael Moore | Wed 22nd January 2014 - 10:25 am

 Liberal Democrat MP Michael Moore writes a regular column for newspapers in his Borders Constituency. Here is the latest edition. 

Free Childcare

My colleagues in the Scottish Parliament have been making the case for extending child care provision in Scotland for some time. So the fact that from August 2014 thousands of two-year-olds in Scotland will be entitled a free childcare place for 15 hours a week is excellent news for families across the Borders.

This means that we now catch up with the situation in England where the Liberal Democrats have helped to deliver a similar plan for two years now. The …

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Also posted in Parliament and Scotland | Tagged , , , and | 1 Comment
David Boyle

Opinion: The demise of the middle classes

By David Boyle | Wed 22nd January 2014 - 8:55 am

I was on a policy panel recently, when I heard somebody dismissing the idea of ‘choice’ in public services as a sop for the middle classes.

Now, there are two rather odd aspects of this.

The first is that, depending on what you mean by choice – and every political party has its own distinct meaning – it isn’t actually true.

The polling I carried out during the Barriers to Choice Review showed that nearly 90 per cent want ‘choice’.  It is just that they are often muddled about what that actually means.

The second is that I hear this kind of sentence in …

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Antony Hook

Opinion: Why I am against Grayling over Criminal Legal Aid

By Antony Hook | Tue 21st January 2014 - 5:16 pm

As a candidate for the European Parliament my focus is on EU-related issues: trade, climate change and cross-border crime. But some national issues are, in my view, so pressing that I cannot ignore them.  Among these are Chris Grayling’s proposed cuts to criminal legal aid, so severe they threaten whether defendants will have proper representation at all.

On 6 January, I was in Oxford to support a protest against these cuts.  Concurrent protests happened at courts all over England & Wales. The campaign aims to raise public awareness and persuade parliament to say ‘no’ to Grayling, as Parliament did over Price …

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Linda Jack

Opinion: Closing the gap

By Linda Jack | Tue 21st January 2014 - 4:10 pm

closing the gapYesterday was an important day for anyone concerned about the state of mental health care in this country. It was also an important day for me as not only did I find myself agreeing with Nick for the fourth time in a fortnight (scary but true) but I could applaud a coalition policy.

Just over a year ago I lost my younger sister Sarah, who was suffering from schizo affective disorder.  As a family we had grown up with a bi-polar father at a time when so few of us, or the wider population, understood the condition. With my sister we understood more, but were only too aware of how little others did. I haven’t written about Sarah yet as it is still too painful – that is a story for another day. But, I have always taken a particular interest in mental health and bringing mental health services up to the standard of the rest of the health service. Even for someone like me (who is not particularly afraid to challenge), my interaction with the services has been horrendously frustrating and myself and my family nearly always felt as if we were being totally ignored. Getting anyone to do anything was like constantly banging your head against a brick wall, exhausting, frustrating and painful.

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Opinion: Step forward true liberals

By Anonymous Liberal | Tue 21st January 2014 - 12:10 pm

Males

True liberalism is hard. Sometimes we don’t understand this. Lacking an urgent, reformist edge, we let others define us. Our milder critics used to style us sandal-wearing fruitarians who knitted their own CND badges. Hostile tabloids called us dangerous deviants.

Oddly, we were comforted by these perceptions. Underlying them was a sense that Liberals are relaxed and open to all-comers. But this vision of our tolerant Party has two problems.  Tolerance can degenerate into shoulder-shrugging passivity and turning a blind eye. And we’re not that open anyway.

We’re a Party of ageing, white males. Just like we used to be.

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David Howarth

Opinion: What does ‘bringing the party into disrepute’ mean?

By David Howarth | Tue 21st January 2014 - 9:00 am

The suspension and threatened expulsion from the party of Chris Rennard for ‘failure to apologise’ takes the Rennard affair into a new and much darker place. Even those of us who think Chris should apologise should stop and think about where this is taking us.

Alistair Webster’s statement seemed to me to be entirely sensible, but there was one issue Alistair should have said more about, namely what can count as ‘bringing the party into disrepute’. That issue is crucial because on it depends the rights of minorities in the party to stay within it. If, for example, disagreeing with the …

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Paul Reynolds

Opinion: Shocking complacency in UK banking reform

By Paul Reynolds | Mon 20th January 2014 - 8:44 am

In British politics there is one area of policy where popular sentiment and dire need strongly coincide. Banking reform.

Opinion surveys seem to suggest that it is Chancellor Osborne’s ‘Achilles Heel’. Indeed, senior ‘expert’ LibDems have expressed concern over the last three years about the pace of reforms. Now Labour has jumped on the bandwagon, and may reap electoral benefits. YouGov polling of a few weeks ago found…

… 67% thought was ineffective. Only 18% were confident that changes to the banking sector over the last few years were enough to stop a repeat of the banking crash. The

…

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Daisy Benson

Opinion: Time to concentrate on making our party fairer

By Daisy Benson | Sat 18th January 2014 - 11:00 am

Bad things happen in political parties just as they do elsewhere – the important thing is to learn from your mistakes and make every effort not to repeat them.

Recently, serious events forced us as a party to hold up a mirror to ourselves and in a number of areas we were found wanting.

As Helena Morrissey author of Processes and culture within the Liberal Democrats and recommendations for change herself said

Liberal Democrats recognise that the allegations alone and the circumstances surrounding them mean that the Party failed to live up to its own ideology.

Our ideology aka our values …

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24 Comments
Julian Huppert

Julian Huppert MP: Another promise kept – Nick Clegg announces more than doubling of young offenders’ education time

By Julian Huppert | Fri 17th January 2014 - 10:05 am

If people are to be in jail, one of our priorities is to make sure that when they leave prison, they won’t come back. We realise that the best way to do this isn’t about draconian sentencing; it’s about providing people with skills. That’s why in our 2010 manifesto we said that we’d increase the number of hours prisoners spend in education and training.

Today, we’ve achieved another goal – Nick Clegg has announced that through a new system of Secure Colleges, young offenders will see the time they spend in education more than doubled.

This really matters. At any one time …

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Also posted in News | Tagged , and | 5 Comments
David Boyle

Opinion: Why local banks need Lib Dems to act

By David Boyle | Fri 17th January 2014 - 8:15 am

It hardly seems worth Ed Miliband’s time to actually make the speech on economics today, because it has been previewed, leaked and debated – almost sentence by sentence – all week.

There was a debate about the middle classes on Tuesday.  Then there was the important commitment to competition in the banking sector, where he flagged the idea of a market cap, an important idea – but there are three practical problems with it.

First, there is a danger that it will lead to the big banks dumping poorer customers – though equally, there will be more banks available for them to …

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Paul Tyler

Lord Paul Tyler writes: An update on the Lobbying bill

By Paul Tyler | Thu 16th January 2014 - 8:15 pm

The Government’s Transparency Bill is nearly complete.  It is a very different Bill from that introduced to the House of Commons in the autumn.  Full marks to Tom Brake who, while robustly rebuffing the more hysterical accusations about the Bill, has listened, and worked hard inside government to secure a sensible package of improvements.  The first was in the House of Commons, where MPs voted to ensure the definition of non-party campaigning remained the same as for the last thirteen years.  If this were a ‘gagging law’, then so too was Labour’s PPERA of 2000.

In the Lords, we have concentrated …

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Brian Paddick

Brian Paddick writes… The curious case of Chris Rennard

By Brian Paddick | Thu 16th January 2014 - 2:55 pm

For the record, I abhor anyone who uses their power to take advantage of others and that includes men over women, let alone men who are in positions of authority. Chris Rennard denies any wrongdoing and an independent review of the evidence has concluded that there is less than a 51% chance that the allegations could be proved beyond reasonable doubt. As I still hold the record as the highest-ranking openly gay police officer in the UK, hopefully people will accept a degree of neutrality in my observations.

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Nick Harvey

Nick Harvey MP writes… Robert Gates poses stark defence question to UK: Do we want to be a real military partner or a nuclear power and nothing else?

By Nick Harvey | Thu 16th January 2014 - 1:58 pm

Former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning decrying the UK’s defence cuts. He said the squeeze meant the UK could no longer be a ‘full spectrum’ military partner of the US, acknowledging that our relationship with the US has been fundamentally altered.

A sceptic would quickly dismiss the comments of a man currently promoting his memoirs, but Gates makes a wider point about what exactly we want to be doing with a smaller defence capability.

Both Labour and the Tories continue to cling to the idea that we should maintain a full-scale Cold War …

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Adam Corlett

Opinion: Making allowances – 12 conclusions about the Personal Allowance policy

By Adam Corlett | Thu 16th January 2014 - 12:28 pm

CentreForum today published ‘Making allowances’ – a paper all about the Lib Dems’ flagship policy of raising the income tax Personal Allowance. Here are some of my conclusions – some obvious, some more obscure – to help inform future tax cuts.

1) The costs are huge. The coalition’s Personal Allowance increases have cost £11bn, and the Lib Dems’ minimum wage tax target would cost at least the same again. With this combined total, we could (roughly) reduce VAT to 15%; scrap council tax or business rates; easily deliver quality universal childcare; or

…

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Tagged , , and | 16 Comments
Phil Bennion

Phil Bennion MEP writes: It’s time we had a sensible, evidence-led debate on EU freedom of movement

By Phil Bennion | Thu 16th January 2014 - 11:45 am

Freedom of movement is one of the EU’s most cherished achievements. It has given millions of people the opportunity to work, study and retire across the continent and has brought huge economic and social gains.

But the recent debate has taken a serious turn for the worse. Both the Conservatives and Labour are dancing to the tune of UKIP.

It falls to Liberal Democrats to set the record straight and defend the benefits that freedom of movement brings, including for the 2 million or so British citizens who live across the EU. These are not just retirees in Spain or Portugal, but …

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Mike Biden

Opinion: Is Europe “falling behind” – or is it leading the way?

By Mike Biden | Thu 16th January 2014 - 9:43 am

Where did George Osborne get his figures from? Who writes his speeches?

A quick look at Wikipedia offers four sources of data for GDP per capita in 2012.  The first and simplest comes from the IMF (as it omits odd places such as Monaco and Liechtenstein).

Of the top 30 no less than 14 are members of the EU, 7 are major oil producers, 3 are the great trading hubs of  Hong Kong, Singapore and Switzerland and the remaining 6 are Australia, Canada, United States, Japan, Iceland, and Israel.

At 23rd in the list the UK is …

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Helen Flynn

Opinion: UKIP – let’s have a debate about low skills

By Helen Flynn | Tue 14th January 2014 - 5:04 pm

strawberriesThere has been an inconsistency between two highly prominent policy areas that has been niggling away at the back of my mind for quite some time now.  UKIP needs to take note.

So, take two policy areas and also take into account the temperature (at least according to the Daily Mail, etc) of the voters.

The first area is education.  Schools that do not match up to the floor levels at Key Stage 2 and at GCSE are pounced upon by Ofsted.  They require improvement or are put into special measures.  All children must get 5 good GCSEs.  They must progress and they must aspire.  Think of the slogans that populate the UK and US education policy discourse: “no child must be left behind; “every child matters”; and social mobility is regarded and upheld as a kind of rebalancing panacea to address all social ills and help narrow the gap.

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Mark Pack

Opinion: Leaderless parties don’t make for good partners in hung Parliaments

By Mark Pack | Tue 14th January 2014 - 12:30 pm

Ed-Balls-and-Ed-Miliband-006The recent Twitter-flirtation between Nick Clegg and Ed Balls was in itself not hugely significant, even if it was a welcome burst of public banter taking the place of off-the-record briefings.

Politicians, after all, manage to be polite to each other far more often than Prime Minister’s Questions might suggest, and the ability to behave (occasionally) like a well-mannered, polite adult is part of what makes them politicians who get insulted in the comments on blogs rather than commenters who insult politicians  in the comments on blogs.

However it is symptomatic also …

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Caron Lindsay

The three dimensions to Alistair Carmichael’s speech: positive vision of UK, incoherent nationalist ideas and future powers

By Caron Lindsay | Mon 13th January 2014 - 4:54 pm

Alistair Carmichael speech Jan 2014Alistair Carmichael’s keynote speech and subsequent question and answer session in Stirling today touched three different dimensions of the constitutional debate, the last of which should cheer any Liberal Democrat heart. Up until now, roughly, the nationalist campaign has been all about painting a pretty picture of how all our problems would disappear if we controlled our own destiny, and in dismissing all searching for detail and questioning as scaremongering. The pro UK campaign has been about robust analysis of the SNP positions, but it hasn’t even made my heart sing and I’m voting for them. It’s been all head and fact and evidence based and worthy,  but it’s not appealed to the emotions.  The parts of Carmichael’s speech trailed overnight heavily emphasised what Scotland gains as being part of the UK, though. Were we about to see a change of emphasis?

The positive vision for the UK

It’s not just about money, said Alistair. It’s about what the 4 nations of the UK have built together. He said Scotland gets more out than it puts in which will no doubt have the nationalists in a tailspin of indignation – but the same is the case for all the countries which make up the UK, greater than the sum of their parts.

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