Category Archives: Op-eds

Jo Swinson MP

Jo Swinson MP writes…Equality is about more than ticking boxes

By Jo Swinson MP | Thu 17th January 2013 - 11:14 am

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) would never have become a valued and respected national institution if it was allowed to continue on the path it was on. Labour’s tired old way of working was turning equalities into a burden. When people heard the word equality they also heard bureaucracy and red-tape. Instead of being about fairness it was more about frustration.

If Labour’s method of ticking boxes and filling out forms led to equality, then why did they leave behind a society with so much inequality across the board? Twenty percent wage gaps between women and men, nonexistent social …

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Alan Levy

Opinion: We should elect all Liberal Democrat nominees to the House of Lords

By Alan Levy | Wed 16th January 2013 - 3:56 pm

In 2012 House of Lords reform failed. In 2013 it’s time for Liberal Democrats to show their continuing commitment to democratic reform.

We clearly can’t get the law changed at the moment but we can make a clear, unambiguous statement of intent. It’s just simple democracy and it’s easy; the membership should elect the Liberal Democrat candidates for the Lords. One simple motion at the party conference and a bit of commitment from the leadership is all it takes.

Well of course it’s not that simple, so let’s examine a few of the arguments against and the counter arguments:

This is just internal …

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William Hobhouse

Opinion: Euroscepticism is bad for UK manufacturing

By William Hobhouse | Wed 16th January 2013 - 10:59 am

In February 2012, Vince Cable flew to the US to meet with the Chief Executive of General Motors to make the case for why they should continue to invest in the UK for the long term. The BBC reported that the meeting may have played an important role in the company’s decision 3 months later to commit to invest in Ellesmere Port rather than at another of their EU plants.

It is lucky, perhaps, that this investment decision did not come up one year later. Vince would have had a few less cards in his hand. Michael Heseltine put it …

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Michael Moore

Michael Moore MP’s Westminster Notes

By Michael Moore | Wed 16th January 2013 - 9:25 am

Every week, Liberal Democrat Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Moore MP writes a column for newspapers in his Borders constituency. Here is the latest edition.

State Pension

One of the Lib Dem’s top priorities since forming the Coalition Government has been to reform the State Pension and ensure that people can expect a fair and decent level of support when they retire. This is why we introduced the pensions ‘triple lock’ so that every year pensions would rise by either inflation, 2.5% or earnings and end the paltry 75p rises we saw under Labour. As a result of this triple lock, …

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Eric Avebury

Eric Avebury writes: Assisted dying

By Eric Avebury | Tue 15th January 2013 - 5:06 pm

Over the last 20 years I have had a few close shaves that made me think about death, including a quadruple bypass, a burst colon, lung cancer and an aortic aneurysm. None of these were conditions that involved more than temporary pain and a fairly low risk, though as Hamlet’s mother says:

‘All that lives must die
Passing through nature to eternity.’

But then in August 2011 I was diagnosed with myelofibrosis, an incurable form of blood cancer, that ultimately leads to various unpleasant and painful symptoms, needing frequent blood transfusions to prevent the arteries seizing up with fibres. Would I then want …

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Ed Davey

Ed Davey writes: How we can tackle rising energy bills

By Ed Davey | Tue 15th January 2013 - 2:04 pm

Energy-bills-006As we enter the first cold snap of the year there will inevitably be a focus on the rising cost of energy – particularly after there have been inflation busting increases in gas and electricity tariffs of 6-10% over the past few months.

No country can stop the main cause of this – rising and high world prices for oil and gas. Yet we must do everything we can, to help people and firms struggling with these bills, especially the most vulnerable. And that’s why helping with energy bills has been and will be one of my top priorities.

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Zoe O’Connell

Opinion: The Burchill controversy – a mixed blessing for the trans community

By Zoe O’Connell | Tue 15th January 2013 - 12:44 pm

I have followed recent mainstream media events unfolding around the transgender community with a mixture of excitement, anxiety and sadness.

Excitement, because it is rare that trans issues get coverage that isn’t designed to portray us as perpetrators of some hideous evil. Even though the stories started with biased coverage in the Guardian about a doctor under investigation by the General Medical Council, it turned into something more positive when the #TransDocFail hashtag lead to LibDem Councillor Sarah Brown discussing the issue on BBC Radio. Even the continuation of bad reporting had a silver lining, when Julie Burchill’s

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Richard Davis

Opinion: Businesses, politicians and voters speak against a Brixit

By Richard Davis | Tue 15th January 2013 - 11:23 am

Map of the European UnionI have long been a fan of the Westwing, and I was recently reminded of a particular scene where President Bartlett faces a difficult decision on whether to reprieve a man on death row or not. His local priest tells him a tale of a man who prays for help, but refuses all assistance when it is offered, claiming that God would save him. However, on his death he is told by St. Peter that God had sent a multitude of people to help him, but he had not accepted any of their help.

This seems to bear some resemblance to the current situation with Cameron floundering on what to do with the European Union. The problem is that recent polling has shown that the Conservative party is losing votes to UKIP and so his backbenchers believe the only way to regain those ‘lost votes’ is to be harder on the EU and call for a Brixit (British exit from the EU).

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Steve Webb MP

Steve Webb MP writes… A truly radical pensions reform

By Steve Webb MP | Mon 14th January 2013 - 4:25 pm

As LDV readers will no doubt be aware, this year marks the 105th birthday of the 1908 Old-Age Pensions Act. Through this Act, Lloyd George introduced the first state pension to Britain, providing 5 shillings (£0.25) a week for those over 70. Fast forward nearly forty years to another great Liberal, William Beveridge, and the National Insurance Act of 1946 that gave birth to the modern state pension. Beveridge’s original idea was for a single, simple, decent state pension, paid after a lifetime of National Insurance Contributions and not subject to a means-test.

Beveridge’s principles have been subject to a sort …

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Kirsten de Keyser

Opinion: Straphanging now takes a quarter of your wages – what do the continentals do?

By Kirsten de Keyser | Mon 14th January 2013 - 9:54 am

Virgin trainHappy New Year Britain! Stand by for more cuts! cuts! cuts! Except in rail fares. There it’s a case of “let the train drain you dry”. As part of the festive fireworks, rail fares exploded by 4.3% so, if you are privileged enough to have a job at all, you can kiss good-bye to up to a quarter of your pay packet just to get you to work.

A season ticket will cost as much as 23% of gross salary or, put another way, you’ll effectively have to work till …

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Lee Dargue

Opinion: Liberal Youth has changed for the better and I see promise of more

By Lee Dargue | Sun 13th January 2013 - 4:45 pm

Following Sean Davey’s thought-provoking post on the upcoming elections of new Liberal Youth officers, I wanted to offer support and some further thoughts. In agreement, Sean is right to point out that LY cannot allow its incoming officers, along with the existing ones, to indulge in coasting or long-winded bickering and risk over-shadowing the hugely important work of LY in campaigning.

Sean also raises the issue of LY’s lack of diversity as a problem. I totally agree that we can’t allow things to stay as they are, and after some initial concerns I back the Candidate Leadership Program. However, …

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Lynne Featherstone

Lynne Featherstone writes… Education, education, education

By Lynne Featherstone | Sun 13th January 2013 - 9:50 am

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

Lynne Feahterstone visiting a Haringey primary school. Some rights reserved. http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynnefeatherstone/3010645357/My mother and father were not that enthused about education. Going out to work as soon as possible and earning a living came higher up on their agenda. When you had known poverty as they had – earning took precedence over learning. I went to my local school – Highgate Primary. (We are talking over fifty years ago). Luckily for me …

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Has Nick Boles given the kiss of life to localism?

By Andy Boddington | Fri 11th January 2013 - 3:51 pm

Announcements come out of the communities department at all times of the day and night these days it seems. Rather before most of us were awake on Thursday morning, the department slipped out a statement that may just breathe life into the flagging localism project.

Coming hours after the appearance of planning minister Nick Boles on Newsnight on Wednesday, the statement gave a firm commitment that communities will soon benefit from development on their patch.

The plan is that parish and town councils will get a sizeable share of the community infrastructure levy imposed on most new developments. At …

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David Thorpe

Opinion: Liberals must learn the lessons of Thatcher

By David Thorpe | Fri 11th January 2013 - 2:49 pm

It is a truth often acknowledged that Tony Blair and David Cameron, in moving their respective parties to the centre ground, left a gruelling obstacle on the road to a truly Liberal Britain.
But it’s not from those leaders that the next generation of Liberal Democrat’s must learn, rather it is from a leader who would regard liberalism as a dirty word, and many Liberal outcomes as inimical to her view of society, Margaret Thatcher.

The lesson for Lib Dems is that Thatcher understood that the less well off are just as aspirational as those born to wealth. The Tory method …

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Mark Blackburn

Jessops – is administration a euphemism for obliteration?

By Mark Blackburn | Fri 11th January 2013 - 1:12 pm

Sadly, yesterday another retailer went into administration, this time Jessops, the high street camera chain. For the time being it continues to trade but the jobs of its 2000 employees in 200 stores are under threat. Surprisingly, Christmas can be a bad time for retailers – rents are due on Christmas Day and if the expected bumper sales don’t materialise, the money may not be there to pay them.

Obviously it’s not going to get any easier for ‘bricks and mortar’ store chains with the continuing increase in online sales, but there’s a more fundamental problem – apart from the massive …

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Giles Goodall

The Eurosceptic tide is turning. Lib Dems must be in the vanguard

By Giles Goodall | Fri 11th January 2013 - 10:21 am

We have become used in recent months to unrelentingly bad news about our relationship with Europe. ‘UKIP now the third party’, ‘Majority would say no to EU’ and ‘UK heads for the Brexit’ have become commonplace headlines. But while the current polls and general debate are still far from positive, several recent developments suggest the tide is starting to turn on the antis – and are enough to give cheer to pro-Europeans from all sides.

First – in case you missed it – the Obama administration has made clear in no uncertain terms to its concern about the UK’s Eurosceptic …

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Also posted in Europe / International | Tagged , and | 40 Comments
Bill le Breton

Opinion: Bullseye banzai

By Bill le Breton | Fri 11th January 2013 - 8:51 am

In the spirit of the season, I thought I’d do my own Mid-Term Review and not keep it secret.

Back on the 14th November 2012, I wrote a piece for LDV on how Shinzo Abe, the clear favourite to become Japan’s next PM, was telling the Bank of Japan to deliver 3% growth in the money measure of GDP (NGDP) on pain of having its independence withdrawn. NGDP in Japan had been virtually static for twenty years – a sort of Great Stagnoflation.

How’s Mr Abe doing just eight weeks on? Well, he’s Prime Minister, he’s told the …

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George Kendall

Helping you keep your New Year’s resolution

By George Kendall | Thu 10th January 2013 - 6:07 pm

Made a New Year’s resolution? No? No matter. Why not make one now? To campaign early and often in the run-up to May’s elections.

And to help you keep it, we’ve three more Regional Action Days, with more to come.

These events are designed to give you the best possible experience, well-organised, with free food and the chance to campaign with leading campaigners from across the region.

Don’t worry if you don’t have campaigning experience. These days are especially for you, to give you an enjoyable way to pick up new skills.

Can’t make the whole day? Then come for as much of it …

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Opinion: The Justice Secretary has got it wrong on privatisation of probation services

By Sandra James | Thu 10th January 2013 - 2:45 pm

Why do governments always assume that they will save money by privatising the public sector?  The Probation Service is now in Chris Grayling’s sights with his plan to hive off low risk offenders to charities and private enterprise leaving the rump Probation Service to concentrate on high risk offenders.

High risk offenders are the sex offenders, domestic violence perpetrators and offenders on indeterminate sentences whose risk prior to release from custody is subject to constant review. As a former probation officer this was my bread and butter work – and incredibly stressful it was too.

I understand that under the Coalition …

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Prateek Buch

Opinion: AllTrials.net – a crucial campaign on data transparency that will save lives

By Prateek Buch | Thu 10th January 2013 - 1:26 pm

Medicines save and improve lives, can also cause great harm if inappropriately deployed. To decide which drugs are safe, and which might work in which circumstances, regulators, doctors and scientists need access to all the results from all trials conducted on all drugs that are in use – but this data is all-too-often missing as a result of commercial practices that put millions of lives at risk. A new campaign seeks to bring this largely hidden scandal in medical science, revealed in Dr. Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Pharma, to an end – and with it the needless harm …

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Hannah Bettsworth

Opinion: SNP’s ill thought out proposals discriminate against young people

By Hannah Bettsworth | Thu 10th January 2013 - 9:00 am

Drew's first driving lesson - Some rights reserved by akarmyMark McDonald, SNP MSP for North East Scotland, has recently proposed unjust new restrictions on young drivers. His proposals would mean that 17-25 year olds, regardless of driving experience, would be banned from driving between 11pm and 4am every day, as well as preventing them from carrying passengers in their vehicles.

This is based on a discriminatory assumption that young people are generally bad drivers. Even although there is a higher risk as

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Caron Lindsay

AD LIB issue 2 – Swinson and the F word, Hussein-Ece on diversity, inside the spin room – and cake

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 9th January 2013 - 1:24 pm

Ad Lib 2nd issueSo, the second issue of AD LIB, the monthly magazine which has replaced Lib Dem News, hit subscribers’ doorsteps over the weekend. I reviewed the first edition which went to all  members in December. I felt that it was a good effort, but there were some mistakes. The last Lib Dem Voice survey showed a mainly favourable response to it.

This month’s edition is jam-packed full of things which interested me. There’s something for even the most connected-to-the-hive-mind Liberal Democrat as well as the mildly …

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James Harper

Opinion: We must prevent another immigration “legacy”

By James Harper | Wed 9th January 2013 - 11:53 am

Is there an amnesty for illegal immigrants? Keith Vaz seems determined to prove that there is, although so far without success. But the reality behind the bluster is rather more serious.

In 2007 the Home Office ‘found’ (or so the apocryphal tale goes) 500,000 asylum cases which had not been dealt with, ‘lying around’ in a room in the depths of Lunar House, Croydon.  This backlog was termed the ‘legacy’ of unresolved asylum cases.

A new department was set up and given the grisly task of looking at and resolving these cases, some of which had been untouched for over 10 years. …

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Stephen Tall

So, about that Lib Dem wipeout in 2015 then…

By Stephen Tall | Wed 9th January 2013 - 7:45 am

GB-election-map2Ask most commentators about Lib Dem prospects at the next general election and a couple of words are sure to crop up sooner or later: either ‘wipeout’ or ‘annihilation’.

I understand why. Look at the opinion polls and the party is bobbing around the 10% mark. Compare that to the 23% we won in 2010, get your uniform national swing slide-rule out, and you can see why many folk, even quite sensible ones like Peter Kellner, will say something like this…

The Liberal Democrats are facing political extinction with

…

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Tim Purkiss

Opinion: Where do we now stand regarding mental health provision in the NHS?

By Tim Purkiss | Tue 8th January 2013 - 11:42 am

nhs sign lrgMany people are clearly still very angry at, what they perceive to be, Liberal Democrats waving through Conservative plans to fragment and privatise the NHS – despite it not being in the Coalition Agreement – and believe that, within that, mental health treatment in the NHS will inevitably suffer.

I do not think that anybody who reads these pages will believe that the party can regain every vote which we have lost because of the NHS Bill.

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Chris White

Opinion: Pickles pensions off councillors

By Chris White | Tue 8th January 2013 - 9:21 am

The winning Kendal Town CouncillorsSome of you may have heard this brief anecdote before.

Some years ago a civil servant appeared in St Albans attempting to sell some ‘new’ ideas from the Government of the day about local government. He stood up before various district and county councillors in Hertfordshire and announced that ‘in future the Government wanted councillors to represent the people to the town hall rather than the other way round.’

He said it without malice or irony and as a result was not lynched – turning up some years later to dismantle the Audit Commission.

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Stephen Tall

Reviewing the Mid-Term Review. It’s hit and miss. But the biggest miss are the wasted opportunities

By Stephen Tall | Mon 7th January 2013 - 8:50 pm

coalition mid term review 2013I’ve had chance only to scan-read today’s Coalition Mid-Term Review (with its rather grudging, adjective-free title, Stuck Together in the national interest), but here are some initial impressions…

The economy takes centre-stage…

This may seem a statement of the obvious. And yet it’s worth comparing with the May 2010 document, Our programme for government (ahh, that Rose Garden-inspired ‘our’) in which subjects were sorted alphabetically so that you had to wait until chapter 9 to read about ‘deficit reduction’. Back in those days the …

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Paul Walter

Opinion: Child benefit changes – get over it

By Paul Walter | Mon 7th January 2013 - 9:54 am

The participants of talk radio were seething this morning, as people complained that they will lose child benefit if they are earning over £50,000. There was one particular man on Radio Berkshire shouting at his phone about it.

I think we need to step back here. Child Benefit’s predecessor, Family Allowance was introduced in 1946. Part of the reason for this was to encourage or, at least, facilitate the repopulation of the country following the killing of the war. The government was particularly keen on people producing boys. My own family duly did their patriotic duty splendidly by producing seven …

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David Hall-Matthews

Opinion: 2013 – Time to think afresh about International Development?

By David Hall-Matthews | Sun 6th January 2013 - 10:15 am

Lynne Featherstone in Zambia. Photo: some rights reserved by DFID http://www.flickr.com/photos/dfid/8220719712/Another year, another set of attacks on development aid in the right-wing press. Prompted by a spectacularly ill-informed paper from Civitas, the Telegraph, Mail and Spectator tried once again to argue, without evidence, that high proportions of British aid are wasted.

The truth is that, under the Coalition, far more attention has been paid to value for money in aid spending than ever before. What is more, there’s little need to speculate about where

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Mark Pack

Tim Gordon scorecard, 1 year on

By Mark Pack | Thu 3rd January 2013 - 9:50 am

Tim GordonLast January I wrote an open letter to the party’s then new Chief Executive Tim Gordon, setting out four priorities. One year on, how are things looking?

Here’s what I wrote (with introductory pleasantries skipped), with each of the four points followed by an update and a score. Read on to see how Tim has been doing…

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