Category Archives: Op-eds

Merlene Emerson

Opinion: 100 years on from the Xinhai Revolution

By Merlene Emerson | Sat 1st October 2011 - 2:25 pm

Today is 1st October, the National Day of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This year is also the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, which in celebrations in July, was marked by a 90 minute speech by the Party’s General Secretary Hu JinTao.

Perhaps more significantly, this year is the 100th anniversary of the XinHai revolution, that had begun with the Wuchang uprising on 10 Oct and led to the abdication of the last Emperor of the Qing Dynasty.

Dr Sun Yat-Sen, hailed by all as the father of democracy in China, had …

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Jonathan Featonby

Opinion: Hammond is misguided if he wants to raise the speed limit

By Jonathan Featonby | Sat 1st October 2011 - 12:58 pm

So it seems that the media have cottoned on to the fact that the Government is considering increasing the motorway speed limit to 80mph, up from the current 70mph.

If they had been paying attention, they would have realised that this isn’t exactly breaking news. Back in June this year, Mike Penning, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport, said that the Department for Transport were looking at the impacts of increasing the speed limit. In response to an Oral Question from Stephen Mosley, he said that:

“The existing limit has been in place since the ’60s. We will weigh

…

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Paul Head

Opinion: “Too male and too pale” – Why shortlists and the Leadership Programme are not the answer

By Paul Head | Sat 1st October 2011 - 11:21 am

The problem of our Parliamentary Party being “too male and too pale” was brought up again at conference and I couldn’t help leaving with the feeling that we are edging towards another fight over whether we should introduce more proactive methods to help combat the chronic under representation of women and ethnic minorities among our MPs.

I was most struck when Paddy Ashdown, during the Guardian debate, seemed to shift from his previously held position and advocate the introduction of shortlists or “zipping” if the current leadership programme failed to make any significant impact.

I am completely opposed to the introduction …

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David Thorpe

Opinion: Why free university tuition for all is deeply regressive in today’s Britain

By David Thorpe | Fri 30th September 2011 - 3:50 pm

Political speeches are usually replete with statistics, numbers culled without context and thrown in the path of critics like metaphorical stingers strewn across a motorway.

But one statistic from Nick Clegg’s conference speech which deserves to live and breathe in its own right is that in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham (where I currently live) more than half of children progress from school to university. In the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (where I lived before moving to Hammersmith) the figure is that just 4% of children go to University. These Boroughs are thirty minutes away from ach other …

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Mark Pack

Updating Community Politics: the role for social capital

By Mark Pack | Fri 30th September 2011 - 10:25 am

My short answer in response to David Boyle having only two cheers for Community Politics is: “I agree”.

The slightly longer response to David is: “I mostly agree, but “.

The nearly long enough to justify a blog post version is…

David Boyle is right to raise the concerns he did, and had he been in the hall he would have not only heard Gordon Lishman himself express similar concerns but also the excellent news that Gordon is intending to draw in a wide group of people to some of that thinking and updating that we all think is necessary.

For me at …

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Chris White

Chris White writes: What would you do with £250 million?

By Chris White | Fri 30th September 2011 - 9:33 am

This is the lottery dream, of course. Give quite a bit to charity. Pay off the mortgage. Buy a yacht and invest the rest sensibly for the future.

It’s not so clear what you do if you’re a government department.

Councillors across the country are waking up to the astonishing news that the Department for Communities and Local Government has been opening cupboards and jamjars and has managed to find £250 million it had not previously accounted for.

Not new money from the Treasury. Not money from other projects. But shiny, otherwise unused, cash.

So: what does the Department do? Allocate it …

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Prateek Buch

Opinion: Dr. Balls makes the right diagnosis, offers the same old failed prescriptions

By Prateek Buch | Thu 29th September 2011 - 3:53 pm

Leading commentators on the political economy must have been flattered to hear many of their principles and policies given lip service by Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls this week in his speech to the Labour party conference. Flattered only to be deceived, sadly, as lip service is all he paid; underneath the rhetorical support for a reformed political economy promoted by the likes of Will Hutton, the Institute for Public Policy Research, Ha-Joon Chang and others, Balls’ prescription for the UK economy amounts to little more than tinkering with the same old policy levers that haven’t worked in the past.

Mr. …

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Harry Matthews

Opinion: Votes at 16 – let’s follow the Isle of Man’s example

By Harry Matthews | Thu 29th September 2011 - 2:29 pm

It is great news to hear that, after extending the franchise to 16 year olds in 2006, the Isle of Man is going to the polls today – and for the first time including 16 & 17 year olds!

However, (and it seems almost always) we are rather slow in enriching our democracy, whether it be changing the voting system, reforming the House of Lords, or extending the franchise to 16 & 17 year olds.

It is something both Liberal Youth & the British Youth Council have campaigned hard for. Even our Leader, Nick Clegg, who holds special responsibility for …

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The Voice

A Radical Activist Grandma writes… Lib Dems must make their voice heard on mental health and disability issues

By The Voice | Thu 29th September 2011 - 12:15 pm

Suzanne Fletcher had an experience many Lib Dems have experienced at the party’s conference: she’d prepared a speech but there was not time to call her during the debate. However, Lib Dem Voice is delighted, with Suzanne’s permission, to share her thoughts with our readers…

The speech I didn’t make at Lib Dem conference on the Employment & Support Allowance (ESA) and Work Capability Assessments
First of all congratulations to the Disability Consortium for their well-run campaign to get people to come and vote in this debate, although I was certainly going to be here anyway, along with my colleagues from Stockton, …

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Mark Pack

Why Ivan Lewis isn’t completely wrong about journalists

By Mark Pack | Wed 28th September 2011 - 7:48 pm

The fiasco over Shadow Culture Secretary Ivan Lewis’s call for journalists to be registered has rather obscured what should be a good point of debate: the degree to which journalists or editors should be held personally responsible for what they do.

As I wrote earlier in the year about media regulation:

There needs to be a much greater sense of individual, personal responsibility by journalists and editors for how they behave. This is best illustrated by the classic doorstepping exercise trawling for a story that many newspapers carry out. That sort of exercise can be justified – it is, after all,

…

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Alex Paul Shantz

Opinion: Lib Dems need to wake up to drastic implications of legal aid cuts

By Alex Paul Shantz | Wed 28th September 2011 - 2:55 pm

Lib Dem Voice last week featured a brief post on the Coalition’s plans for legal aid reform. But this is an important change that’s been passed with barely a murmur from any Lib Dem MPs, when in fact it strikes at a principle at the heart of the party – civil liberties.

The bill in which this change is contained, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, is currently making its way through the House of Commons. For something that will have fairly drastic effects on many people’s access to justice there has been relatively little talk …

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Brian Paddick

Brian Paddick writes… Policing the riots

By Brian Paddick | Wed 28th September 2011 - 11:50 am

I am on the horns of a dilemma. I served Londoners in the Metropolitan Police for more than 30 years and loyalty to my former colleagues runs deep. As a sergeant, I faced bricks and petrol bombs on the streets of Brixton in 1981. So I know what officers went through during the recent riots. I later became one of a small cadre of advanced trained public order senior officers who took charge of policing protests and big events in London. So I know the strategies and tactics for dealing with riots. Yet I, like most Londoners, was disappointed by …

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Ed Long

Demonstrating how the Lib Dem policy of raising income tax thresholds IS an irrefutably progressive step

By Ed Long | Wed 28th September 2011 - 10:20 am

Another week, another attack on Lib Dem tax plans. This one comes from Kayte Lawton, Senior Research Fellow at the IPPR, whose publication on Coalition Tax Policy concludes that raising income tax thresholds is regressive in its impact.

What do terms like ‘regressive’ or ‘progressive’ mean? Quantitatively, it’s a little difficult to define: we’re not talking about a single number, but about a distribution – the shape of a graph. If we consider net gains to an individual and order our data by income percentile, then a progressive distribution of gains would slope down from left to right; if we’re …

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Mark Pack

I want to hear a speech from Tim Farron that I disagree with

By Mark Pack | Tue 27th September 2011 - 5:55 pm

Over on his blog Jonathan Calder makes a good point about the speech-making abilities of Liberal Democrat President Tim Farron:

My impression of Tim is that he is very good at saying things people agree with. So in Cumbria he is against second homes and in favour of farming subsidies and Kendal mint cake…

Now that Tim Farron is being spoken of as a possible party leader, he needs to risk the odd unpopular speech. Someone in that class cannot always be telling people what they want to hear.

Tim </a srcset=…

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George Potter

Opinion: What Nick should say about tuition fees at the 2015 general election

By George Potter | Tue 27th September 2011 - 4:25 pm

More than any other issue, tuition fees have damaged the view of our party in the country as a whole. For what it’s worth, here’s what I think our leader should say about fees when going into the next general election:

I would just like to say a few brief words about tuition fees.

As a party, we entered the last election with a promise to oppose any increase in tuition fees. As a party, we then broke that pledge. That was wrong.

Nothing can justify breaking a promise like that. Nothing. We made a mistake and we have been punished

…

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David Boyle

Opinion: Only two cheers for community politics

By David Boyle | Tue 27th September 2011 - 2:35 pm

I wasn’t there to hear the Birmingham conference back the community politics motion on Tuesday. I had meant to be but had to go back to London early.

It was one of those pieces of sacred Liberalism that you daren’t speak against, but I would have done. I’m not sorry it was passed but the party must also understand that there is another side to it.

Community politics may be a revolutionary doctrine, but BAD community politics – and we have practised some of that occasionally, let’s face it – damages the party and damages the political process.

I know I’m …

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Ed Randall

Opinion: Is the Chancellor ready to listen to the best economic brains in the Cabinet?

By Ed Randall | Tue 27th September 2011 - 12:28 pm

Having just left one party conference, where I was able to deliver my message on the shortcomings of the Coalition Government’s strategy to revive the UK economy and to promote my alternative take on the official Lib Dem approach to party policy development, in advance of the next General Election, (see Facing the Future ), I am now waiting to hear what George Osborne has to say at the Tory party conference in Manchester, in just a few days’ time.

Labour really is – as Alistair Campbell has recently put it – the third most interesting party in the …

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William Hobhouse

Opinion: Putting Liberal thinking into practice on taxation

By William Hobhouse | Tue 27th September 2011 - 10:50 am

Liberal thinking on tax is based on the principle both that the state has a duty to protect the poor and vulnerable, and that the state can help bring the best out of each individual.

The practical aim of Liberal Democrat tax policy therefore is to help to lift the less well off towards the average. This is not achieved only by handouts – which would be Labour’s priority – but by having a tax system that encourages work and aspiration for the lower paid.

Liberal Democrats are implementing our manifesto commitment of a £10,000 income tax threshold. This is …

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Stephen Tall

Labour’s odd messaging: how the party was for reversing Coalition cuts before it was against them

By Stephen Tall | Tue 27th September 2011 - 9:15 am

Mark Pack has already highlighted the pitfalls of political opponents commentating on other parties’ conferences. And he’s right of course. But it didn’t stop him, so I won’t let it stop me…

I am genuinely puzzled by Labour’s key messages based on the first two days of their conference. Day 1 kicked off with the Big Announcment by Ed Miliband that Labour is now committed to doubling tuition fees (dressed up as only The Observer could as Labour committing to ‘slashing’ fees).

Regardless of what you think about the policy, and I think I’ve made my views clear …

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Tim Leunig

Tim Leunig writes: The problem with Labour’s proposed tuition fees cap

By Tim Leunig | Tue 27th September 2011 - 7:40 am

Ed Miliband has seized the initiative at the start of his conference, announcing that Labour would cap student fees at £6,000 per year. This policy is superficially attractive, and is clearly designed to win over LibDem supporters who remain angry at the rise in tuition fees.

Today I have published an analysis of Labour’s proposal. It uses the Business Innovation and Skills graduate income “ready reckoner”, which is based on data from the ONS Labour Force Survey. The underlying data are as good as they can be, although of course predicting graduate incomes in 30 years time is a dangerous …

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Mark Pack

Ed Balls has a new take on having your cake and eating it

By Mark Pack | Mon 26th September 2011 - 9:19 pm

There are two problems with a Liberal Democrat like myself blogging about Labour Party conference. First, as I’ve so often seen from the other side of the fence, an outside blogging about another party’s conference frequently misreads what is really happening. And second, no blogger can compete with Hopi Sen and his cat.

So caveats deployed and on to the confusion that Ed Balls’s speech today left me in. For he had two messages: first, that Labour can’t promise to undo the government’s cuts and, second, that many of the cuts are wrong. Either on its own would be a …

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David Parkes

Opinion: Ed Miliband’s tuition fees announcement – more a headline than a policy

By David Parkes | Mon 26th September 2011 - 5:35 pm

On the eve of the Labour Party conference, Ed Milliband announced in an interview with The Observer, that he plans ‘to slash university tuition fees by a third’, by reducing the cap on tuition fees to £6,000. It’s a headline that appears to have been mistaken for a policy.

These past 15 months Labour has being decidedly light on policy. This surprised no-one. It was said of the previous Brown Government that Labour had run out of ideas; no-one seriously expected the ‘backroom boys’ who picked up Gordon Brown’s mantel to come up with new thoughts any time soon.

However, what …

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Chris Nicholson

Opinion: If the cap doesn’t fit, don’t wear it

By Chris Nicholson | Mon 26th September 2011 - 2:25 pm

The NHS Emergency Motion which was not debated at Conference in Birmingham had a clause that stated the cap on Private Patient Income (PPI) by NHS Foundation trusts should be retained. Shirley Williams has since stated that this is one of four main aspects of the bill which she will be trying to change in the House of Lords.

But Lib Dem peers would be wrong to press for retention of the cap. Even for those who want to preserve a strongly public sector provided NHS the retention of the Private Patient Income (PPI) cap makes no sense.

The cap limits the …

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Paul Walter

Opinion: Ed Miliband starts off his conference week with a damp squib

By Paul Walter | Mon 26th September 2011 - 10:15 am

Many years ago I knew Tom Baldwin when he was a cub reporter on my local newspaper. He is now Ed Miliband’s chief communications guru. He’s a smart cookie, so I am surprised that Baldwin and Ed Miliband have decided to use the traditional opportunity for a trumpet fanfare for their conference week (i.e the front page of The Observer) to announce a distinctly underwhelming policy.

“It’s the economy, stupid” – no more so than at a time like this. So why waste your golden chance for a big media blast by returning, dog-like, to the site of your own …

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Karen Wilkinson

Opinion: Legal Aid – the new NHS?

By Karen Wilkinson | Sun 25th September 2011 - 2:45 pm

The aspect of Conference I most value is the opportunity to hear first hand from Ministers, MPs and Lords the thought processes and details of what we are doing in Government and to see them listen to the feedback from those who are delivering the relevant services on the ground.

A fringe debate on the NHS I attended this week was a great example of that – an open, constructive, intelligent exchange of differing views which left a clear sense that our party in government is listening and acting and has a plan.

Contrast that with the fringe meeting convened by

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Paul Childs

Opinion: Catching the Liberal Democrat conference bug

By Paul Childs | Sun 25th September 2011 - 9:40 am

When I first decided to go to Liberal Democrat Conference last autumn, I have to admit I was a little swayed by it being in my home town, but being a Federal Conference First Timer I did have concerns about not knowing anyone. Luckily, a friend who is also a conference veteran (at both LibDem and Labour I must add) took me under his wing and even humored me when going to training sessions.

I also met up with some people in both Liverpool and Glasgow and managed to bend their ears about issues, as well as adding new and interesting …

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Maureen Rigg

Opinion: Who will keep us safe from the men in black with big guns?

By Maureen Rigg | Sat 24th September 2011 - 4:55 pm

Party conferences are different when you’re in government as we found out at Liverpool last year. I didn’t go to Sheffield in spring but I heard from good friends that some of the demonstrators there were very aggressive and made it difficult for people with mobility problems to safely access the conference.

This year at Birmingham I saw something new again – machine guns being carried by police outside the conference. This wasn’t by officers patrolling the streets outside the secure zone. No, it was inside, where people had already come past 3 separate checks that …

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David Merlin-Jones

The Independent View: One of Vince Cable’s greatest actions to date

By David Merlin-Jones | Sat 24th September 2011 - 2:50 pm

Sunday saw some good news. It was announced that Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is to set up a new engine plant factory in the West Midlands, creating up to 750 jobs. This coup was delivered in no small part thanks to the Business Secretary Vince Cable plucking up the courage to intervene directly and offer JLR government money. It could even be argued that this is one of his greatest actions to date.

What part did Cable play? He helped JLR secure a £10 million grant for the plant. Clearly, this was not the be all and end all of …

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Jeremy Browne MP

Jeremy Browne MP writes: Supporting those who have lost loved ones overseas

By Jeremy Browne MP | Sat 24th September 2011 - 11:23 am

Losing a loved one is a difficult and sad burden to bear. But when that death is under suspicious circumstances abroad, the situation can be even more bewildering and traumatic.

During my time as a Minister in the Foreign Office, I have met a number of families who have had a relative murdered in a foreign country. Speaking to these families, MPs and NGO’s highlighted to me the need for the Foreign Office to do more to support these families in difficult times. I made a commitment to Parliament last year to review the support we offer for British nationals …

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James Taylor

Opinion: The Laws of Politics for the Scottish Lib Dems (Part II)

By James Taylor | Sat 24th September 2011 - 8:50 am

The Scottish Liberal Democrat conference is coming up in the next couple of weeks and having spoken at it in previous years I am unable to attend on this, the first with Willie Rennie at the helm.

However I spent some time this weekend contemplating if any of the Laws of Marketing that I use in my day job could be applied to the Scottish Lib Dems. I recognise in doing this I may be burnt at the stake by some of my more open-toed Liberal friends, but feel free to discard whichever of the Laws …

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