Category Archives: Op-eds

Opinion: the big society broken record

By Mike Dean | Tue 16th August 2011 - 10:07 am

Our society really is big. And it suffers from no lack of definition. It’s a big society. It’s a broken society. It’s a big and broken society. The big society needs to save our broken society. There is such a thing as society, but it’s not the same as the state. And once, there was no such thing as society at all. There’s as good a choice of societies as you’d find at a student freshers’ fair.

Cameron’s election campaign was fought on his two favourite societies – the big one and …

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Iain Roberts

Searching for the cause of the riots is asking the wrong question

By Iain Roberts | Mon 15th August 2011 - 3:08 pm

When events like last week’s riots and looting occur, we assume that something that was previously working must now be badly broken. What has changed in the last few years that has brought the rioters and looters onto the streets?

Government cuts? MPs expenses? Greedy bankers? Broken society?

Maybe.

Or perhaps there’s less need to panic and more need to take a measured view.

Might it be that this sort of trouble – relatively common in societies – is similar to earthquakes? Tiny earthquakes and tremors occur across the world most of the time and we barely notice. …

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Ewan Hoyle

Opinion: Our flawed drug laws are at heart of riots

By Ewan Hoyle | Mon 15th August 2011 - 10:07 am

David Davis MP, in his appearance on the Question Time “riots special” said: “There are estates in Alan Simpson’s constituency where there are youngsters the age of 12 or 13 who got £30 a day paid for delivering drugs on whose estate the man to look up to was the drug dealers”

Brian Paddick: “Exactly”

Davis “because he had a big car and he lived well. And if we create circumstances like that it’ll be no surprise we get the problems we’ve had in London and the Midlands and the North in the last week.”

This is a fairly astute recognition of …

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Tim Leunig

Tim Leunig writes: Riots, Justice and Reconciliation

By Tim Leunig | Sun 14th August 2011 - 2:25 pm

Natasha Reid, a 24 year old graduate, was in McDonalds in Enfield on Sunday night. She noticed that Comet was being looted, and went in and helped herself to a £270 television. There is no suggestion that she caused any damage, or was violent in any way. She realised that what she had done was wrong, and handed herself in to the police.

She has been found guilty, and will be sentenced on 1 September. District judge Elizabeth Roscoe told her that her remorse would ‘very much go in your favour’ but warned that she could still face prison because of the ‘serious nature’ of the case.

That would not be appropriate. What Natasha Reid did was wrong, but, bluntly, since she got home with the television, and does not appear to have been caught on camera, she could probably have got away with it. She chose to confess, a remarkably brave thing to do given that sentencing was likely to be harsh.

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Mark Pack

Book review: Andrew Murrison on the military covenant

By Mark Pack | Sun 14th August 2011 - 9:09 am

Taking its title from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, this book by Conservative MP Andrew Murrison is rather a mixed bag. There is much that is interesting and thoughtful in his study of how wider society views and treats the military in Britain, but that is rather let down by a meandering structure which results in some topics being returned to frequently, the flow within many chapters being unclear and indeed the actual origins of the military covenant being largely unmentioned. We get a little detail of who first wrote the words and when, but almost nothing about what triggered the …

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Stephen Tall

The rightward shift of British and European politics

By Stephen Tall | Sat 13th August 2011 - 5:55 pm

The two biggest issues politicians have to grapple with — the economy and law and order — have dominated the headlines in the past fortnight. First, we saw the collapse of market confidence, triggered by recognition that the US and Eurozone debt crises could cripple economic growth for years to come. Then we saw the collapse of social confidence, as rioters took to the streets for days on end with seeming impunity.

This should be fertile territory for the Labour party. The Coalition Government has looked if not weak, then certainly not in full control. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Boris …

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28 Comments
Stuart Bonar

Opinion: A brave tax proposal

By Stuart Bonar | Sat 13th August 2011 - 4:15 pm

Back in June Mark Pack suggested that now is a good time to start debating tax ideas for the next manifesto. So, let me throw in two ideas: one brave, one not so brave.

Ready reckoners published online by HM Revenue & Customs make it easier to play the role of armchair Chancellor, so that is exactly what I am going to do.

My first idea is to increase inheritance tax by 5% to 45%, raking in an extra £350m, and then spend £300m of that to cut the reduced rate of VAT to 4%.
…

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Tim Leunig

Tim Leunig writes: Why are utility companies hitting the poorest hardest?

By Tim Leunig | Sat 13th August 2011 - 11:23 am

Global gas prices are going up, and prices for UK consumers are going up too. Gas suppliers are raising prices by around 18-20%.

Consumer price rises are inevitable when the wholesale price goes up. But my supplier, E.ON, has structured its price rises to hit the poor more than the rich. They are doing this by raising the cost of gas much more for small users than large users.

They have raised the price of the first 2680 kWh by 46%, but the price of additional units by only 15%. This means that the poor – and the green – will see …

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27 Comments
Jo Swinson MP

Jo Swinson MP writes: Determination, courage and kindness in response to riots shows true British society

By Jo Swinson MP | Sat 13th August 2011 - 10:04 am

Everyone across our country has been horrified at the scenes unfolding on our TV screens, and, for some, outside their homes and workplaces.

Watching from Glasgow, I was certainly relieved that the riots did not spread to Scotland, but I think it is unhelpful for anyone, especially the First Minister, to express any feeling of superiority about that. My constituents are feeling solidarity with the victims of the violence, and with everyone who is afraid in their own community as a result of the riots, not gloating that this hasn’t been happening in Scotland.

The question that everyone is …

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David Thorpe

Opinion: abolishing the 50p tax rate makes no economic sense

By David Thorpe | Fri 12th August 2011 - 2:25 pm

Slower than anticipated growth has seen a rush of commentary proposing changes the government need to make to ‘deliver growth’.

If there is one macroeconomic lesson which should be learnt from the 2008 crisis it is that not all growth is good. It is relative easy to manufacture a bubble, call it growth, and claim to have “abolished boom and bust”.

Sustainable growth is much harder to achieve, but one idea unlikely to achieve it is the proposal by some Tory commentators to abolish the 50% tax rate.

There are probably strong moral and political arguments for and against …

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32 Comments
Paul Walter

Opinion: What just happened?

By Paul Walter | Fri 12th August 2011 - 1:16 pm

On LDV yesterday, Stephen Tall wrote on the causes of the “riots”, concluding:

This was purposeless lawlessness. And there’s little point in blaming today’s current crop of politicians, of whichever hue, for that state. This is a deep-seated problem in our society, a failure of families and community and the economy and politics.

While I would normally agree, I hesitate to do so. There is a great danger in coming to generalised conclusions so early on.

My head is still reeling a bit from the past few days. As John Humphrys said this week, August is normally a very quiet month. This …

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36 Comments
Simon Oliver

Opinion: How the market will decide our energy future

By Simon Oliver | Fri 12th August 2011 - 9:49 am

Recently articles from both the TUC and CBI have bemoaned the burden of increasing energy costs on energy intensive businesses. Both organisations make the rather obvious error in thinking that a carbon price will inevitably drive the cost of energy upwards. In fact, the opposite is true. The stronger the price signal, the faster the market works to balance supply with demand.

The supply of fossil fuels is finite. Conventional oil has already peaked its supply (as admitted by the chief economist of the IEA) and tar sands and fracking are far too damaging to the environment to continue as …

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Matt Gallagher

Opinion: The dangers of acting without knowing the facts

By Matt Gallagher | Thu 11th August 2011 - 7:00 pm

By now, there cannot be many people in this country who have not heard about the disturbances across England this week. The scenes of wanton criminal damage and violence, the deaths and injuries, the families made homeless and businesses destroyed, have re-opened a debate that clearly was not resolved last time we witnessed such levels of disorder.

Questions are already being asked about the underlying causes of the trouble, and how it was dealt with. No doubt those arguments will continue for some time to come. Everyone has a theory and everyone thinks they have a solution. What is clear is …

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13 Comments
Mark Pack

Local liberal heroes: Daniel Brown

By Mark Pack | Thu 11th August 2011 - 10:25 am

Earlier in the year, I did a series of posts profiling forgotten liberal heroes (to which a couple of other people also kindly contributed), looking at some of those who achieved great things for liberalism in their time but have been unjustly forgotten – such as Margaret Wintringham, the very first female Liberal MP.

There is also another group of people who I think are often unjustly obscure – those local campaigners who are often at the heart of their local community and local party, delivering liberalism and helping others, but as their stage is a local one they are often unacknowledged in the wider party.

So welcome to a new series, profiling some of those local liberal heroes from around London. The first is Brent councillor, Daniel Brown.

For Daniel, liberalism was a family affair as his mother was already a party member when he joined (and she too was a Lead Member when the Liberal Democrats led Brent Council). Becoming a councillor seemed the natural progression for someone who wanted to do more than talk about liberalism.

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Stephen Tall

What caused the riots? It’s more than just the economy, stupid.

By Stephen Tall | Thu 11th August 2011 - 8:57 am

Aditya Chakrabortty has a pretty compelling article in today’s Guardian scrutinising the political responses to the past few days’ rioting under the concise headline, UK riots: political classes see what they want to see. He summarises the binary analysis that has dominated:

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David Parkes

Opinion: Leading Labour figures guilty of the worst kind of opportunism

By David Parkes | Wed 10th August 2011 - 11:57 am

London burns and communities reel from successive nights of violence and looting, rumour is rife, facts are scare. All we know that peaceful vigil held for Mark Duggan, who was shot dead by police on Thursday night, somehow was hijacked by an angry mob and his death became the catalyst of nights of violence, which have now spread to other parts of the capital and country.

What do we hear from Labour politicians? Calls for calm? Space for the IPCC to carry out their investigation into the shooting? No, instead we have them lining up to link the violence to the …

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Ron Aitken

Opinion: Lessons learned the hard way will have to be re-learned following the riots in Tottenham

By Ron Aitken | Wed 10th August 2011 - 10:36 am

As a young research assistant I was in Northern Ireland on the day of the June 1987 General Election, campaigning for the re-election of my boss the Rev Martin Smyth, Ulster Unionist MP for South Belfast and head of the Orange Order.

Elections in Northern Ireland were always conducted in a way mindful of possible violence or terrorist attack, and an RUC patrol intercepted a car in the vicinity of a school being used as a polling station. The IRA occupants of the car were found to be armed and an explosive device was also found. Mr Smyth was in the …

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Mark Pack

The flaws in Ed Miliband’s media policy are no cause for rejoicing

By Mark Pack | Wed 10th August 2011 - 8:49 am

It isn’t often that the members of one party should be worried about a proposed policy from a rival party’s leader collapsing under examination. However, David Elstein’s demolition of Ed Miliband’s proposal to limit ownership of newspapers by circulation should not provide more than a passing smile to Liberal Democrats, for it highlights the difficult of coming up with any meaningful change in the rules over newspaper ownership.

As David Elstein puts it:

Ed Miliband has proposed a 20% limit on ownership of national newspapers, measured by circulation. As the Sun’s circulation is more than 20% of all national newspaper sales, that would require News International to close The Times and either sell the Sunday Times or reposition it as a non-national newspaper (by ceasing to publish in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, where would-be readers would have to subscribe digitally). Even then the Sun’s circulation would need to be forced down, perhaps by restricting access to newsprint. In all likelihood any such measure would result in the combined circulation of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday rising above 20%, so requiring similar measures to be targeted at them.

Banning a newspaper from appearing in parts of the UK? Making it illegal for a newspaper group to buy ‘too much’ paper? There are just too few newspaper titles with a mass audience for restriction on ownership by circulation to be practical.

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Richard Flowers

Opinion: Mike Hancock has grave concerns for a gay constituent facing deportation to Uganda

By Richard Flowers | Tue 9th August 2011 - 6:55 pm

Robert Segwanyi is a gay man from Uganda. Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda, and Robert was imprisoned and, he says, tortured because he is gay.

In June last year, he escaped and fled to Britain.

Now the UK Border Agency want to send him back.

UKBA does not accept he is gay and a judge rejected his appeal claiming that there is no risk to gay people in Uganda.

This is what Amnesty International said about Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Laws:

Both the current law and the proposed new law violate a number of human rights including the rights to equality and non-discrimination, privacy, liberty and

…

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David Allen

Opinion: Frankensteinomics

By David Allen | Tue 9th August 2011 - 9:58 am

Why are Western politicians failing to tackle the debt crisis? Partly, because they do not know why things got this way. So they do not really know what to do. We need better understanding.

At the risk of sounding like an airport paperback I offer – Frankensteinomics! The global economy, I contend, is like Frankenstein’s monster – bloated, dysfunctional, and kept alive only by repeated jolts of artificial stimulation.

The mad scientist who first showed how to apply the electrodes was Maynard Keynes. Using State spending to jolt the economy out of depression …

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Brian Paddick

Brian Paddick writes: Lessons from the Tottenham riots

By Brian Paddick | Tue 9th August 2011 - 7:53 am

What can be learnt from the riots in Tottenham this weekend?  There have been many controversial police shootings in recent years but this would not appear, on the face of it, to be one of them.  The matter is being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and from my experience that might be part of the problem.  There are also deeper issues that need to be addressed.

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Richard Clare

Opinion: Tottenham points to wider policing problems

By Richard Clare | Mon 8th August 2011 - 1:34 pm

The last couple of evening riots in London, starting in Tottenham and working their way across the capital, seemingly sparing no town in its wake has left us in shock. People are being injured, the police and innocent bystanders as well as the rioters and looters. Again and again though, the question that people keep asking is “What’s going on?”

They are right to ask. Unfortunately, the riots have occurred while a high number of our leading politicians are out of the country. David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson, Nick Clegg, they all could have spoken with authority on the …

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Mike Tuffrey

Mike Tuffrey writes… London isn’t working – and the Mayor is asleep on the job

By Mike Tuffrey | Mon 8th August 2011 - 10:23 am

Today 397,000 Londoners are unemployed and looking for a job. As a region, we have the lowest level of skills in the workforce, based on NVQ Level 1 and above. And the problems are getting worse, as we fail to recover fast enough from the cardiac arrest that Labour’s last years in office dealt to the national economy.

Not a pretty picture for our great capital city, powerhouse (so we keep saying) of the whole UK economy.

In fact, weren’t the Olympics meant to help drive forward our economy? A couple of news stories from July sum up for me what’s wrong …

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The Voice

Media reform in the UK

By The Voice | Mon 8th August 2011 - 10:00 am

Anthony Barnett (Our Kingdom), Sunny Hundal (Liberal Conspiracy), Mark Pack (Lib Dem Voice) & Will Straw (IPPR) write…

July 2011 will be remembered as one of those rare moments where the nation came together in shared outrage and disgust. The hacking of Milly Dowler shocked the country and led to a series of unprecedented events which would have seemed inconceivable just weeks before. The drama culminated in the resignation and arrest of several News International executives and senior police officers; the termination of a 168-year old national newspaper; and the appearance of a humbled Rupert Murdoch before a public hearing.

The various …

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Caron Lindsay

Opinion: CentreForum’s parenting report is a step in the right direction

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 7th August 2011 - 2:55 pm

Liberal think tank CentreForum has produced a report, Parenting Matters, which advises the Government to do more to promote better quality parenting, specifically targeted at those families who need it most.

Much of the publicity surrounding the report concentrated on its “5 a day” campaign which suggests that parents should:

    1. Read to their child for 15 minutes
    2. Play on the floor with their child for 10 minutes
    3.  Talk to their children for 20 minutes every day with the television off
    4. Adopt positive attitudes to their child and praise them frequently
    5.

…

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David Thorpe

Opinion: A Liberal idea for welfare reform

By David Thorpe | Sat 6th August 2011 - 9:53 am

Its not often an article which seeks to promote the Liberal agenda gets to use Alan Sugar and Peter Stringfellow as case studies.
But the millionaire duo, are, through no fault of their own, examples of all that is wrong with the approach successive governments have taken to welfare provision.

As Lord Sugar explains, he receives, despite never having applied for it, the winter fuel allowance available to all people over the age of 60.

The businessman even explains that he subsequently spent more than an hour on the phone trying to give the money back, only to be told that he …

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James Fearnley

Opinion: Overplaying the power of the “people’s petitions”

By James Fearnley | Fri 5th August 2011 - 11:48 am

The e-petition mechanism to allow a new public petition service has gone live and media coverage about its merit and importance has gone mad. Let’s not over-emphasise the significance of this move and let’s not downplay the power of solid, rational argument.

I disagree with Sir George Young: this won’t give the public a megaphone as such and to say that it will is an exaggeration. What it may do is potentially provoke debate on contentious topics for which Parliament at present has neither the political will, nor the time, to dedicate to matters such as capital punishment, abortion, civil liberties …

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Simon McGrath

Opinion: Don’t make Guido’s day

By Simon McGrath | Fri 5th August 2011 - 10:23 am

What an enjoyable holiday Guido Fawkes must be having. While he is sunning himself in France he is also managing to create a ludicrous fuss in the UK with his campaign to use the new e-petition website to ask for a vote in the Commons on Capital Punishment.

For some reason this seems to have got Lib Dems in particular into a tizzy – blogging, tweeting and generally upsetting themselves about this, to no purpose at all.

Here‘s the thing: there is no chance whatsoever of a vote in the Commons supporting the return of the death penalty. None. …

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Martin Shapland

Martin Shapland writes: A petition to retain the ban on capital punishment

By Martin Shapland | Thu 4th August 2011 - 8:36 pm

You can tell it’s silly season. The top story today is that a petition on the Death Penalty is at the top of the government’s new e-petition site. You might not have noticed that the petition with the most signatures says – ‘Retain the ban on Capital Punishment.’

Yes I launched the petition; no this isn’t a vanity project. Paul Staines (AKA Guido Fawkes) and the Daily Mail, which have both launched campaigns to restore the death penalty, need to be opposed. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and most Members of Parliament happen to be on holiday.

It might …

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Julian Huppert

Julian Huppert MP writes: Hargreaves and site-blocking: a good start

By Julian Huppert | Thu 4th August 2011 - 3:27 pm

I was pleased when Vince Cable announced, yesterday, the government’s response to the Hargreaves Report. Like many people who are interested in IT & IP, I was pretty worried that it might turn out to be another damp squib, where an eminent academic publishes a set of excellent proposals, only for the government to fail to act. This, of course, is what happened after the Gowers Review.

Thankfully the Coalition is supporting all ten of Professor Hargreaves’ recommendations. They are important copyright reforms that could add as much as £7 billion, or 0.6%, to the UK economy – …

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