Category Archives: Op-eds

Clegg starts Public Negotiation: Phase 2

By Nick T | Thu 30th August 2012 - 9:21 am

Public Negotiation: Phase 1 kicked off on Thursday 26 January 2012. It ended on 21 March 2012. The deputy prime minister’s first demand was to allow the lowest paid to keep more of the money they earn next year by implementing more quickly the Lib Dem policy of raising the income tax personal allowance to £10,000. However badly the budget was presented, Clegg’s stance can only be judged a success: the policy was implemented significantly more quickly, with the threshold being raised by £1100 next April.

Yesterday, Clegg signalled the start of Phase 2, and it’s tax …

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Tagged bernard jenkin, nick clegg and tax | 22 Comments

Opinion: Prohibition 3 or how I learned to stop worrying and love failure

By Mark Wright | Wed 29th August 2012 - 3:54 pm

I am a non-smoker, apart from the odd birthday cigar. After initial misgivings about the details of the public building smoking ban in the UK, I have come to see it as the most significant and beneficial health change in human behaviour in many decades. It has transformed our public places for the better and helped thousands to give up.

Despite that, I have always been suspicious of the increasingly fanatical political drive against smoking. It has always had an undercurrent reminiscent of the 19th century Temperance movement that gave rise to the disaster of “Prohibition” of alcohol.

There can’t be a …

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Tagged drugs, prohibition and smoking | 11 Comments

Nick Clegg in Scotland: another opportunity for Scots to get to know him wasted

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 29th August 2012 - 2:25 pm

I am proper livid today. Nick Clegg came to Scotland yesterday. Not that you’d know from the amount of media coverage the visit attracted. There’s not much in today’s papers, although STV covered his visit to a factory in Jedburgh.

What would Scots have learned about our Deputy Prime Minister over the last year? People remember that he had paint thrown at him when he came up last August but his visits since then have largely gone unnoticed. That, I believe, is because we are being far too timid in what we do with him: every time he comes …

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Tagged mental health, nick clegg, pupil premium, Scotland and willie rennie | 15 Comments

Charles Kennedy MP writes: UK’s Air Passenger Duty is damaging our economy

By Charles Kennedy | Wed 29th August 2012 - 12:59 pm

The eyes of the world are now on the UK for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. We have heard a lot about the legacy of the Games, in terms of the rejuvenation of East London and getting more children into sport, but we also have a fantastic opportunity to create an economic legacy right across the UK. From my perspective, as a Highlands and Islands MP, we want all those visiting or watching the Games to see the beauty of our rugged coastline and mountains and be inspired to visit the outstanding beauty of the whole of the UK, …

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Tagged air passenger duty, Scotland and tourism | 26 Comments

Julian Huppert MP writes… Liberal Democrats need a clear policy on the future of aviation

By Julian Huppert | Wed 29th August 2012 - 10:25 am

Over the last few months, speculation over the Government’s aviation policy has filled countless column inches. The majority of it has been based on very little evidence.

Perhaps the lack of evidence isn’t surprising, given the way aviation policy has been formed during recent years. When Labour decided to build a third runway at Heathrow, they did so by completely ignoring the fact that, already, a quarter of all those in Europe who are affected by aviation noise live under the Heathrow flight path.

Not only that, but Labour decided to figure out if we could meet our carbon reduction targets after …

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24 Comments

Opinion: Who’s phoning who? (with apologies to Aretha Franklin)

By Marisha Ray | Wed 29th August 2012 - 9:15 am

A year ago I heard that six degrees of separation are now down to four courtesy of the internet and social media. Some, if not most, in politics are “connectors”, people who know many and who like introducing them to each other, who make friends fast, keep them for life and remember all about them; that’s not just true of politics, but of successful people in most walks of life.

Will there be any point in let’s say 12 years time, in keeping information on who has been in touch with whom during the previous year? I choose 12 to match …

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Tagged draft communications data bill | 4 Comments

Opinion: Rock Salmon and Chips anyone?

By Joe Bourke | Tue 28th August 2012 - 1:30 pm

Before the rise in popularity of Indian curries, kebabs and Chinese take aways, battered fish and chips were considered the British national dish. Rock salmon was a staple – among the cheapest offerings in fish and chip shops around the country. However, demand for “rock salmon” devastated the shark’s population off the coasts of Britain and France, where the spiny dogfish is widely considered to be critically endangered.

The Common Fisheries Policy was introduced by the European Union in the 1970s to ensure a profitable and sustainable fishing industry – an objective in which it has completely failed.

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Tagged common fisheries policy, european commission and fishing | 18 Comments

Opinion: Dealing with critics on our own terms – graduate contributions

By Nik Alatortsev | Tue 28th August 2012 - 11:21 am

At an ALDC conference a number of weeks ago now I was encouraged by Nick Clegg’s call to be brave enough to “deal with our critics on our own terms” rather than accepting the (often false) basis for their criticisms and trying to explain away the difficult choices our party has had to make since May 2010.

So it got me thinking: why not develop our own narrative about the issue that has arguably caused us the most grief?

By accepting the premise of calling the charges incurred by students entering university from this year “tuition fees”, we tacitly accept that these are indeed fees which students pay for their tuition. Which gives the impression – thanks to all the uproar at the time the system was reformed, back in late 2010/early 2011, from the Labour Party and the NUS – that these are indeed upfront charges that students have to pay to go to university.

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Tagged tuition fees | 33 Comments

QE “benefits the better off” say Bank of England – so why are we still doing it?

By David Thorpe | Mon 27th August 2012 - 3:15 pm

In the first comprehensive report it has conducted into the impact of its Quantitative Easing (QE) policies on the UK economy, the Bank of England says that QE has “prevented a deeper recession” but that the policy “benefits the top 5% of households”.

It is the contention of this article that the central bank is broadly correct on both of those points-which begs the question, why is the Bank of England intent on pursuing the policy in the future?

I have previously written that QE has had the effect of preventing a deeper recession by effectively ending the credit crunch, but that it is limited in its capacity to deliver growth.

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Tagged bank of england and quantitative easing | 16 Comments

Tim Leunig writes… Housing priority Number 1: reversing the rise in the age of first-time buyers

By Tim Leunig | Sun 26th August 2012 - 2:15 pm

Sir Adrian Montague’s report on housing, published earlier this week, calls for a larger private rented sector. This is a very bad idea because being a private renter is the least popular tenure choice in Britain. Only 2% of people wish to be private renters, compared with 82% who want to own, 14% who want to live in social housing, and 5% in other tenures (see here for details). I bet that Sir Adrian is not a private renter.

The private rented sector has its place, most notably for young people who have yet to settle down. But thanks …

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Tagged adrian montague and housing | 39 Comments

The English Baccalaureate is a Mickey Mouse qualification

By Sara Bedford | Fri 24th August 2012 - 1:35 pm

Almost two years ago, a fortnight after my daughter confirmed her GCSE choices; Michael Gove announced his latest bright idea for the nation’s schoolchildren. The English Baccalaureate was originally intended to ‘be the equivalent of the old School Leaving Certificate’, but the EBacc, as it became known, has turned into just another of Gove’s personal follys, greeted with less than lukewarm enthusiasm by pupils, teachers, parents and employers.

I’m all for pupils studying a good range of subjects, at a level that reflects their abilities and supports their future studies and career paths. But the EBacc does nothing for pupils or schools, except provide another stick to beat them with, as Gove always intended. The cat has been let permanently out of the DfE bag with the ‘clarification’ that the EBacc is intended as ‘a performance measure’ and ‘not a qualification in its own right’.

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Tagged EBacc, education, gcses and michael gove | 24 Comments

Opinion: Moderates vs Radicals: the battle for the Liberal Democrat soul

By Sean Davey | Fri 24th August 2012 - 10:26 am

Why did you join the third party? The party with no hope of winning the election? The party who now linger at 10% in the polls, under constant attack on all sides?

Many commentators openly wonder why there is a Liberal Democrat party at all. In an unforgiving two-party system these doubts are not so easily dismissed: how is it that as a small, stubborn party polling just a core vote barely in double digits we are able to sustain our existence, and why do we?

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Also posted in News | Tagged eastleigh, labour party and nick clegg | 57 Comments

Opinion: Britain has become a corporate state, not a free society

By Daniel Furr | Fri 24th August 2012 - 8:52 am

In the months after the financial crisis in 2008, I recall a conversation with an American friend of mine; we discussed the fallout and numerous rescue packages by countries. Financial media outlets, such as Bloomberg and CNBC, described the capital injections into financial institutions as a sign we are “all socialists now” – according to my American companion, this was far from the truth. In reality, Western economies have turned the page to fascism, not socialism.

When he mentioned this to me, I confess, it was rather amusing to listen to; very sceptical of such claims, until the request to research the facts myself led me to a worrying conclusion. The truth of matter is that we are not far off from what British fascists in the 1930s thought the financial sector should administrate to the rest of society.

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Tagged bank of england, banking, economy, fascism and libor | 51 Comments

Opinion: It’s not such a bad thing if we’re a nation of idlers

By Robin McGhee | Thu 23rd August 2012 - 2:25 pm

An extract from a forthcoming book appeared in the Evening Standard last week. The book the Standard quotes from is Britannia Unchained, a collection of essays by senior backbench Tories. Dominic Raab, Priti Patel and Chris Skidmore might not be household names yet, but they are young, right-wing and tremendously ambitious for themselves and the Conservative Party.

According to the Standard article, the authors believe Britons today need more “graft, risk and effort” in order to make Britain part of the “superleague” of nations. “Once they enter the workplace”, the young Tories argue, “the British are among the worst …

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Tagged bertrand russell, economy and wellbeing | 17 Comments

Paddy Ashdown talks about his new book “A brilliant little operation”

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 23rd August 2012 - 12:57 pm

I had to stifle a giggle as Paddy Ashdown strode on to the stage at the Edinburgh Book Festival and said:

What are you lot doing here at ten in the morning?

There was a certain irony at this coming from the man who notoriously held meetings at the crack of dawn when he was party leader.

The morning after his “why the world will never be the same again” talk, he was back to tell us about his new book, “A brilliant little operation”, about the founding raid of the Special Boat Service, the special forces unit where he would later serve. …

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Tagged edinburgh book festival, paddy ashdown, reviews, second world war and special boat service | 1 Comment

Julian Huppert MP writes… Britain deserves an affordable railway

By Julian Huppert | Thu 23rd August 2012 - 11:20 am

Our rail fares are among the most expensive in Europe, and they keep going up. Between 1997 and 2010 rail fares went up by an astonishing 66% – well above inflation.

If next year’s planned rail fare rises go ahead, some passengers will hand over up to 15% of their wages for the pleasure of travelling to work.

Since the Labour party introduced above inflation fare rises in 2003, these increases have become a yearly occurrence. Indeed, Labour Party policy is still to have above-inflation rail fare increases every year.

We say that rail fares are already too high. We would cap rail …

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Tagged george osborne and railways | 14 Comments

Lynne Featherstone MP writes… George Galloway’s comments on rape are totally unacceptable, and they have an effect

By Lynne Featherstone | Wed 22nd August 2012 - 3:23 pm

In recent days, on both sides of the Atlantic, there have been not one, but two expressions of the kind of attitudes on rape you had hoped died with the Dark Ages.

First, a US Republican Senate Candidate, Todd Akin, suggested that most women do not become pregnant after being raped as their body can, and I quote, ‘shut that whole thing down’.

Then Britain’s own George Galloway, while offering his opinions on the Julian Assange case, took it upon himself to assert that certain acts of sexual violence are nothing more than ‘bad manners’, and that having …

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Tagged featured, george galloway, julian assange, rape and todd akin | 49 Comments

Opinion: Why schools should be allowed to sell their playing fields

By Matt Hemsley | Wed 22nd August 2012 - 2:25 pm

As the Olympic Games concluded, the debate on school sports has risen to the fore. The Prime Minister, it seems, is a big fan of competitive sport being played in primary schools. This, he says, will lead to a real Olympic legacy.

Since the Prime Minister started outlining his plans, the government has come under pressure to defend the sales of school playing fields – a robust defence of the 21 sell-offs was put forward by the Department for Education. Then it became 30. The media – and the Daily Telegraph in particular – has launched campaigns to save school …

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Tagged education, physical education, school playing fields and telegraph | 5 Comments

Opinion: Time for Liberal Democrats to stop saying “No”.

By Chris Richards | Wed 22nd August 2012 - 10:55 am

If you Google “Lib Dems say no”, this is the result you get. Beyond the recent headlines on new runways you will see that this phrase is widely used in our campaigns. In the same search, click on Images to emphasise the point. One would be forgiven for thinking that this phrase is printed on our membership cards. This phrase is deeply conservative and does nothing to help with our problem of explaining what the Lib Dems stand for, something I recently argued we urgently need to do.

At the next election an opportunity to set that vision our …

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Tagged campaigning, liberal democrats and strategy | 12 Comments

Opinion: It’s time for Assange to stop using WikiLeaks as a smokescreen

By Nick Sutton | Tue 21st August 2012 - 11:15 am

On Friday, three women in Russia were handed two year prison sentences for walking into a Moscow cathedral and performing a three minute protest song about the rotten state of their government, led by one man (Putin) in some shape or other, for nearly 13 years. The verdict has been condemned by the UK, US and German governments, human rights groups and the EU, who see this as a real test of Russia’s and Vladimir Putin’s credentials as a the leader of a ‘democratic’ state, something that has been …

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Tagged bradley manning, ecaudor, featured, julian assange, rape, sweden and wikileaks | 102 Comments

What do we Lib Dems want from a reshuffle?

By Stephen Tall | Mon 20th August 2012 - 9:45 am

While the massed ranks of the mostly right-wing political commentariat obsess about the imminent Cabinet reshuffle, Lib Dem interest has been relatively muted.

In one sense this isn’t surprising.

As it stands, 18 of the party’s 57 MPs are on the government payroll, so Nick Clegg has little room for manouevre even among the middle ranks of government. And with only five cabinet positions (four if you exclude Nick himself as Deputy Prime Minister) there’s even less wiggle-room at the top table. Nonetheless, this reshuffle will most likely be …

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Tagged coalition agreement, Danny Alexander, featured, fraser nelson, lynne featherstone, nick clegg, nick harvey, reshuffle and steve webb | 39 Comments

Opinion: Liberal Youth take on a Dictator… with teddy bears

By Harriet Ainscough and Sam Fisk | Sat 18th August 2012 - 2:10 pm

In Belarus, a country within Europe and bordering the European Union, Alexander Lukashenko’s regime continues to stifle free speech and fend off calls for democracy. We’ve previously posted about how clapping in the street can earn you an arrest, now it seems a photo with a teddy bear can do that too.

Last week a Swedish PR firm parachuted teddy bears holding messages about democracy over Minsk, democracy in an attempt to break through the heavy media censorship. This caused a diplomatic dispute, with Lukashenko asking all Swedish diplomats within Belarus to leave. Since then two journalists have been …

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Also posted in Europe / International | 3 Comments

On Twitter, Leveson, media standards… and Labour MP Ian Austin labelling Russell Brand “a disgusting, sleezy [sic], horrible creep”

By Stephen Tall | Sat 18th August 2012 - 12:13 pm

I love Twitter and I hate Twitter. At its best, it is a brilliant way of enjoying a shared moment with friends and friends-of-friends, whether glorying in the Olympics or bitching about X-Factor. At its worst, it is a bile-filled bearpit, where opinions are sprayed with scant regard for their accuracy in the race to be first or funniest or most outraged.

For fans of cognitive dissonance, it’s a wonderful window-on-the-world which explains much about how and why the media works as it does. Lord Justice Leveson would have learned much from observing a life-in-the-day-of Twitter.

He would, for example, see …

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Tagged featured, ian austin, leveson inquiry, russell brand and twitter | 4 Comments

Adrian Sanders writes… What progress has been made towards achieving full primary education for all children?

By Adrian Sanders | Sat 18th August 2012 - 9:49 am

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were created by the world’s richest nations and institutions to tackle the major problems facing the developing world. The second goal states that by 2015 all children should be able to complete primary school. This was an ambitious goal as primary enrolment rates in 1999 were under 60% in some countries.

Current primary school enrolment stands at 90%, however progress varies over the developing world. The enrolment rates of wealthier regions like Latin America have remained roughly the same over the last decade staying around 95%, but poorer regions have seen much larger improvement since the …

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Also posted in Europe / International | Tagged international development and millennium development goals | 11 Comments

Have I gone mad?

By Mark Pack | Fri 17th August 2012 - 12:39 pm

I’m wondering if I’ve gone mad.

There’s this issue that I just can’t think about without one question occurring to me. For me, it is blindingly obvious, absolutely basic and impossible to avoid if you want to talk about the issue.

And the thing is, it doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone else.

I’ve read plenty of media stories about the issue, and I’ve not found one that asks, answers or even obliquely mentions this blindingly obvious question.

The problem gets worse than that, however.

I’ve waded through lots of public comments on the …

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Tagged featured and journalism | 50 Comments

Opinion: Are we being taken for a First(Group)-class ride?

By Prateek Buch | Thu 16th August 2012 - 10:55 am

As someone who has used the west coast mainline regularly for the past fifteen years (and would have done so more if the cheaper fares were more readily available), I can testify to a significant improvement in reliability and levels of service in recent years. Much of this was of course down to the £9bn and more of public investment in upgrading the line, and much was down to Virgin themselves – I carry no torch for Sir Richard but there’s little denying that Virgin trains, expensive though they undoubtedly can be, ran what became a reliable, punctual, comfortable service.

But …

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Tagged FirstGroup, railways, richard branson, trains and transport | 19 Comments

Opinion: Deregulate Sunday trading to go for growth

By Theo Clifford | Wed 15th August 2012 - 9:36 am

The Coalition needs to get over its obsession with small businesses – and deregulate Sunday trading
With the recent fragility of the Coalition, it’s easy to forget that the Lib Dems do agree with the Tories on some issues. If we didn’t, it would have been impossible to forge a workable government in the first place. Mounting instability over constitutional reform makes it all the more important that the two parties can work together where their philosophies do align. One of those areas is economic and regulatory policy. Despite some notable blind spots, the Conservatives do share our belief in the strength of the free market to provide long-run economic growth. While many regulations are necessary and right, the Coalition should be able to work together in order to eliminate arbitrary and damaging rules that distort rather than level the economic playing field.

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Also posted in News | Tagged coalition, mark pritchard, small business, sunday trading, usdaw and vince cable | 55 Comments

Opinion: Understanding the housing policy buzz

By Paul Reynolds | Tue 14th August 2012 - 4:52 pm

It has been widely suggested that a government-engineered housebuilding boom may end the recession and bring electoral success to the Tories or LibDems in 2015 (depending on who gets the credit for it). Experts have been scrambling to answer the question of why there is such a shortage of housing, what the obstacles to housebuilding really are.

The Coalition government has so far focused on schemes to help first time buyers and provide housebuilders with finance. These approaches tend to assume that the major obstacle to expanded housebuilding is lack of loan finance due to a banking system still in …

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Tagged housing and planning | 79 Comments

Opinion: National Citizen Service – value for money?

By Paul Rowen | Tue 14th August 2012 - 2:41 pm

Throughout the summer holidays up to 13,000 16 to 17 year olds across England and Wales will be taking part in the second year pilot of the National Citizen Service.

This is the Coalition government’s flagship youth development programme described by David Cameron as: “A kind of non-military national service. It’s going to mix young people from different backgrounds……Above all its going to inspire a generation of young people … what they can achieve and how they can be part of the Big Society.”

The scheme is a three week programme in which young people spend the first two weeks living away …

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Tagged National Citizen Service and youth | 7 Comments

Nick Clegg should say no to any link between state funding and boundary changes

By Stephen Tall | Mon 13th August 2012 - 7:12 pm

It’s August, so I’m not going to take too seriously kite-flying suggestions by Benedict Brogan in the Telegraph that Nick Clegg might consider rescinding his threat that the Lib Dems will vote against boundary changes (following the Tories’ decision to break the Coalition Agreement over Lords reform) in return for a deal on party funding which would include state aid for political parties:

Here’s how it was presented to me: over the next year or so Mr Clegg will find a way to back the boundary review when it comes up for a vote in the Commons. In exchange, Mr

…

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Tagged benedict brogan, boundary changes, lords reform, nick clegg and party funding | 19 Comments