Lib Dem party president Tim Farron has caused something of a storm within the party by co-signing a letter in his capacity as Vice Chair of the ‘Christians in Parliament’ group urging the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw their ruling “that the Healing On The Streets ministry in Bath are no longer able to claim, in their advertising, that God can heal people from medical conditions.” The controversy is easy to understand, as it pits two tenets of liberalism against each other: free speech and rational scepticism.
Personally, I am very happy to defend Tim Farron’s stance. Here’s three …
When I was a student between in the middle of the last decade the Liberal Democrats were the party of choice. That was because under Charles Kennedy we were seen as a radical centre-left alternative to the Labour party that championed the causes of the young.
It’s unlikely that many would have guessed that only five years after I left university we would be two years into a coalition with Nick Clegg at the helm. However, it is precisely the move into Government with the Tories that has alienated so many of the people who once saw themselves as Lib Dems. …
I am fully aware of the evils of alcohol: believe me, I’ve spent my fair share of nights out on the town (and now have the dubious privilege of living above a dodgy nightclub in an otherwise pleasant area), so I have seen first-hand what binge drinking looks (and sounds, and smells) like. It is not a pretty picture, and in addition to being a blight on neighbourhoods in town centres up and down the country, it is a huge health nightmare.
But how do you solve this problem? To quote from Yes, Minister, the Government’s response rather looks like a …
A group of 240 doctors recently threatened to stand against leading members of the government in the next election, in protest at the NHS Bill (Now the Health and Social Care Act). They are ‘shocked at the failure of the democratic process and the facilitating role played by the Liberal Democrats in the passage of this bill’. They follow the example of Richard Taylor MP, a consultant physician who won his Wyre Forest seat from a junior health minister in 2001, campaigning against the closure of the …
This year, there’s a lot of concern about public service cuts and rises in taxes for certain groups. This, to me, indicates the problem facing anyone in government – the British public wants better public services and lower taxes.
I fully believe that the electorate is not stupid. But, right now, it’s somebody else’s problem – how to square the circle between wanting good public services and as much cash as is needed to achieve this, and paying as little tax as possible. These aims are mutually exclusive in the main, and certainly as exercised by New Labour and Tory.
One of the themes in the loosely constructed narrative the Liberal Democrats have deployed in recent months has been industrial democracy – in catchphrase terms the promotion of the John Lewis economy.
This presents a radical, if embryonic, approach to the private sphere and a unique contribution to the debate on how to rescue capitalism. Looking at how to adopt the themes of this approach to the public sector should be the next logical step. First, though, we have to resolve the …
I remember Peter Cruddas, co-treasurer of the No2AV campaign and the No campaign’s single biggest donor. Without him they never could have afforded those sick baby billboards.
Shortly afterwards in June 2011 he was rewarded with a prestigious position as co-treasurer of the Conservative party. Now he lies at the centre of yet another donor scandal, this one leading right to the Prime Minister’s door and is potentially as serious as the cash for peerages scandal under Tony Blair.
To read part 1 of Chris’s note to his (as yet unknown) successor as chief executive of Centre Forum click here. Here’s the second, concluding part.
Yesterday I set out three areas of policy where there is a need for liberal thinking to be developed as a note to my successor as Chief Executive of CentreForum, the liberal think tank. Today I set out three further areas and a challenge.
Early Years policy
CentreForum has always placed a high priority on “early years policy” as an engine of social mobility. All the evidence points to the critical importance of years 0-5 …
Liam Byrne famously left a handover note to his successor as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, David Laws, saying “There’s no money left – good luck!” I was reminded of this as, after a very enjoyable 21 months as Chief Executive of CentreForum, I start on Monday as one of Ed Davey’s Special Advisers at DECC. I suppose the think tank equivalent would be “There are no ideas left – good luck!”
In fact that is far from being the case. One of the joys of running a think tank is that there is never a shortage of ideas to be …
Here’s your starter for ten in our weekend slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…
The details of the budget have been trailed extensively in the media and the blogosphere. We’ve had the increase in the personal income tax allowance, we’ve had the ‘granny tax’ and we’ve had a new stamp duty level of 7% for homes worth more than £2m. There were always going to be winners and losers in this fiscally neutral budget. But arguably the one measure that affects every self-respecting Briton is …
Andrew Duff, Liberal Democrat MEP for the East of England has written for EU Observer about his attempts to change the electoral system for MEPs. He wants to see 25 MEPs elected on a pan European basis, a proposal he believes will improve the legitimacy of the Parliament:
Now the Union is moving to greater fiscal discipline and the probable installation of a more federal type of economic government which will have to be made directly accountable to Parliament. But do we sincerely believe that the European Parliament has attracted the desirable levels of loyalty and identification of the EU citizens
Last weekend wasn’t a good one for the environmental agenda.
First came a DECC press release containing proposals that will give rise to a new ‘dash for gas’ in the UK. The announcement means that new gas power stations will not need to be more efficient or less polluting. It is part of the Treasury’s anti-green agenda which holds the misguided view that green policies are anti-growth and increase costs for businesses and households. This is despite the fact that recent hikes in power bills have been largely due to large increases in wholesale gas prices.
Yesterday, I outlined some of the issues that impact on how we make policy as Liberal Democrats, and some very interesting comments came from that, for which I am grateful. Today, here are some thoughts of my own, which build on those comments and on my own thinking…
Whilst Federal Policy Committee has been attempting to reconcile the variety of tasks to be addressed, the Party has seen the emergence of a number of ginger groups. Added to the long-established, but increasingly dormant, Liberal Vision, which appears not to have developed much beyond being a small group of libertarians with …
Michael Gove’s and Sir Michael Wilshaw’s plans to use Ofsted to drive up standards in schools have been much vaunted in the press recently.
Hit squads of inspectors started arriving in schools in January to force the ‘satisfactory’ schools into special measures and to force schools to rapidly rid themselves of their ‘satisfactory’ teachers. The fact that ‘satisfactory’ is a categorisation used for all qualities of service about which there is no cause for concern and which often includes highly regarded practices which don’t tick the boxes Ofsted has defined for higher classifications (especially in teaching) does not concern them.
There’s no need to adjust your screens, it is true; we’re on the way to introducing a flat rate pension for all of £140 a week. You might be thinking you’ve heard this before; well you’re not wrong, except in opposition we used to call it the ‘Citizens Pension’.
We are on the verge of delivering on another key manifesto promise after the Chancellor announced in yesterday’s budget the coalition’s intention to give pensioners £140 a week. While this morning’s headlines are heavily slanted to the reduction of the 50% tax rate, and the ‘granny tax’, nestled away inside …
David Cameron’s announcement that he was planning on getting private enterprise to fund roads in the UK has to be a contender for the worst idea since the Potassium Teapot.
While, in principle, the idea of private enterprise building new roads isn’t necessarily a terrible idea, any private involvement in refurbishing existing roads, widening motorways or improving junctions would be a financial mess.
In this case, private enterprise would borrow some money (probably from a pension fund), widen the motorway or make the junction better, then get some sort of pay off from the Government based on road/junction usage.
Here are my personal pick of the top 9 points from this year’s Budget…
1. A definite Lib Dem win on raising the income tax threshold
Raising the income tax threshold — indeed, the biggest ever uplift, to £9,205 — is undoubtedly a big win for the Lib Dems. It’s two months since Nick Clegg made the unusual move of publicly calling on the Coalition to move “further and faster” on taking more of the lowest-paid out of tax, the number one Lib Dem manifesto priority at the last general election. Evidence from the first ‘snap’ budget poll shows 92% …
The big substantive Liberal Democrat wins that yesterday’s budget contained will be familiar to regular readers by now. However, I think it’s worth highlighting once again just how big a deal the increase in the personal allowance announced yesterday is. A rise of £1100 is unprecedented, and means that those earning the minimum wage and working full time will have seen their income tax bills halved because of the Liberal Democrats.
Before Nick Clegg intervened publicly back in February to call for the threshold to be raised faster than previously anticipated, the working assumption was that it would be raised by …
Nearly two years into the Coalition, and with the Health and Social Care Bill now on its way to Buckingham Palace for Royal Assent, now seems a good time to reflect on the future of ideas within the Party.
There will be those who will wonder why a self-confessed bureaucrat, not known for a yen for policy wonkery, would be worrying about such things. And I guess that they would have a point. But from a process perspective, I suggest that the way that we make policy is now flawed.
At the moment, the hub through which virtually all policy passes is …
In a significant victory for the Liberal Democrats, the Chancellor effectively introduced a 25 per cent minimum rate of tax in the Budget.
Under the changes, he will limit how much people offset their tax bills by investing in businesses or donating to charity.
Anyone seeking to claim more than £50,000 of tax relief in any one year will have a cap set at 25 per cent of their income from 2013.
Accountants said this means the wealthiest will have to pay at least 25 per cent of their income in tax. Although the highest rate of income tax is 50 per cent, reducing to 45 per cent next year, some wealthy people reduce their bills to almost nothing using different reliefs available from HM Revenue and Customs.
The introduction of this major change to the tax system is one of the main reasons why, as I wrote yesterday, if you are on more than £150,000, you will pay an extra £1,300 a year in tax on average as a result of this Budget.
The news that the UK’s February borrowing figures were the worst on record did not exactly provide the Budget mood music the Chancellor was hoping for. Then again, the stark reminder that the UK is living well beyond its means serves to buttress his arguments about the need to control spending. There is no money to spend, and even with the current deficit-cutting fervour from Number 11 the UK remains at the whim of global bond markets.
So how did George do? The stamp-duty increase on homes worth more than £2 million is eminently sensible, but must be accompanied by the …
Last weekend, in common with many Team London activists, I was out delivering literature for the upcoming mayoral election.
In a recent Ipsos MORI poll, commissioned by BBC London, some 59% of respondents cited jobs; growth and the economy as the most important issues that Londoners say will help them decide who to vote for in the upcoming mayoral election. This chimes with my own experience of feedback on the doorstep.
Tackling crime (49%), improving public transport (38%) and building cheap homes (37%) were the other top issues.
During the 2008 election, our candidate Brian Paddick, polled a little less than 10% of …
The increase of £1,100 is worth £220 to 21 million working people – taking the total income tax cut for working people delivered over 3 years by the coalition to nearly £550 a year. Two million people will pay no income tax at all. By going ‘further and faster’ as Nick Clegg promised, we’re getting real help to millions of hard-pressed people at a time when they need …
I have always supported Home Rule, involving a new constitutional settlement giving equal status to England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and thereafter each nation would promote what each considered to be the most appropriate governance arrangements within a federal state. For Scotland that meant not just the establishment of a Scottish Parliament but the transfer of the maximum amount of legislative, administrative and financial powers consonant with being a nation within a federal state.
Like most Scottish Liberals, I supported the Party’s policy position as set out in Jenny Robinson’s 1976 pamphlet: Scottish Self-Government. I was one of the overwhelming …
As debate ahead of the Budget rages on about the merits of tax allowances and tax credits, a CentreForum report published this week provides new, detailed analysis of both.
The media has focused on the plight of the ‘squeezed middle’, Ed Miliband wants to help the “squeezed middle” and Nick Clegg is concerned for “alarm clock Britain”. But ‘Taxing decisions: the debate between tax credits and personal allowances’ uses modelling to illustrate the implications of tax allowances more rigorously and objectively than the day-to-day analysis of Fleet Street or Westminster.
The report’s authors, Thomas Brooks and Chris Nicholson of CentreForum, and …
There have been a couple of posts recently on where campaigning ideas should come from and whether those campaigns can be directed centrally, first from Scott Hill and then from Robin McGhee And another, which I refuse to link to because it does not appear to publish comments, mocked us for our backwardness in brand management.
Campaigning and not policy is the life blood of Liberal Democrat politics. A policy however right or valuable is inanimate. A campaign establishes connections and energizes movement. That is perhaps why you cannot chose for Liberal Democrats THE campaign they should be waging in March in 2012 or in any other month for that matter. That was the lesson I learnt when an acting Chief Executive of ALDC in the late 1980s.
The best use of aid for International Development has been a controversial topic recently, with rows over the need for aid to India spilling onto the front pages – many of them spectacularly ill-informed on both sides. That issue is complex – but at least you can rely on Liberal Democrats to think about it carefully. In 2010, I chaired a policy working group on international Development, which argued that the UK should focus on supporting good governance, sovereignty and accountability to the poor, so that countries could move away from aid dependency. As India has all of those, we argued that aid to India could stop now. However, with more people living below the poverty line in India than the whole of Africa, the counter-argument is also strong. In the end an amendment from House of Commons International Development Select Committee Chair Malcolm Bruce, calling for aid to continue for now, was supported by conference.
Twenty five days of debate in the chamber of the House of Lords have now concluded on the Health and Social Care Bill. Our health team in the Lords has been involved in numerous meetings, events and correspondence discussing the Bill over the last eighteen months. We made it plain throughout the process that we could not have voted for the Bill without significant series changes that Liberal Democrats and professional organisations demanded. We believe that great care is now needed over how it is implemented in order to avoid the dangers of which many have warned and in order to restore the confidence of professionals in the NHS.
Today is Third Reading in the Lords of the Health and Social Care Bill. That this is one of the longest, most complex and contentious piece of legislation of this Parliamentary session barely needs restating. That it is unloved in many quarters is a statement of the obvious. And of course you only have to read the many articles and threads on Lib Dem Voice about the Bill to know that views still vary widely on whether it is necessary to address the fundamental challenges faced by the NHS.
Having been a member of the Lib Dem team in the Lords – working alongside far more experienced colleagues than I – I do know that the Bill has improved out of all recognition from the Bill we received from the Commons. Of course it does not bear the hallmarks of a Bill that has come from a Lib Dem stable – because it didn’t – but that is the nature of coalition government. And whilst I fully recognise that some in the party would rather part 3 of the Bill dealing with competition didn’t exist, I think it’s necessary.
The right-wing populist policies of the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, have created real concern over a growing constitutional crisis within the European Union (EU). His Fidesz party secured a two-thirds majority in the 2010 elections giving Viktor Orban, total authority to pass legislation.
Since then, he has been much criticised across the EU, in particular, for his new law setting unacceptable limits on media freedoms. He has also declared the country’s previous constitution invalid and passed legislation with no consultation, declaring a new constitution requiring that all judges older than 62 retire – a cynical ploy thought to favour …
Roland @Jeff - “ ‘Can leasing companies, such as Motability, reclaim VAT?’:”
Yes, as can any company supplying aids to the disabled, which is what Motability ...
Roland @Simon - For a tax haven, a “resident” is a bank account, the actual physical residency of its owner is irrelevant…
However, I understand your frustrat...
Chloe From a gilded opulent palace , in a walled enclave , the Pope speaks .....
Peter Martin @ Simon,
What would be a realistic estimate?...
Simon Costain @Roland Well, yes that's what low earners think too - but they, like you, overestimate the number and wealth of resident high earners...
Here’s your starter for ten in our weekend slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…
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