Category Archives: Op-eds

Chris Fox writes – Internships: a small step in the right direction

By Chris Fox | Thu 2nd June 2011 - 5:27 pm

The Liberal Democrats’ Chief Executive, Chris Fox, has written this post in reply to yesterday’s piece by Gus Baker from the Intern Aware campaign.

At a recent meeting of all party staff, the majority of people said they had begun their career as an intern. It was testament to dedication and commitment, but also proved that internships give people unrivalled access and experience of one of the country’s most highly competitive careers.

There is no denying that internships in both business and politics have for a long time hindered social mobility, promoting the culture of contacts over ability and often only benefiting those people wealthy enough to live without a wage. The use of interns, which on occasion, quite frankly borders on exploitation, has given rise to a culture that Westminster is only open to the rich and well-connected.

The Liberal Democrats do not have clean hands. As a party with very limited resources, but very dedicated supporters, we have too often taken advantage of ever-willing interns. We know this is not sustainable.

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Tagged internships | 12 Comments

Opinion: How can the community politics approach reform the Coalition?

By Bill le Breton | Thu 2nd June 2011 - 10:25 am

“All change, all change here!” That was the shout of the bus-conductor as we reached the terminus. If only we had realised what a profound philosopher he was. For he is no more, nor is his role, nor the structure of society he inhabited.

Change and how to cope with it is at the heart of every human decision. The conservative wishes to take a measured step based on hard facts taken from experience. The progressive predicts the shape of the future and confidently proposes a radical leap.

By contrast, the community politician, the ideas behind whose activism we have begun …

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Tagged bernard greaves, community politics and gordon lishman | 8 Comments

Opinion: Anti-reform peers shame our party

By Stuart Bonar | Wed 1st June 2011 - 1:51 pm

I confess. I am usually a bit of a loyalist. I believe the time I invest campaigning for the Liberal Democrats is best spent publicising our good ideas and our opponents’ bad ideas, rather than picking fights with fellow party members. On Lords reform however I feel forced to engage in an internecine war of words with some of our peers.

The Times newspaper recently commissioned a poll of members of the upper house to gauge their views on reform. It’s no surprise of course that our coalition colleagues, the Tories, are dead set against anything as vulgar as democracy creeping ...

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Tagged constitutional reform, house of lords, john lee and lords reform | 26 Comments

Opinion: So what is this Community Politics all about then?

By Bill le Breton | Wed 1st June 2011 - 10:25 am

Party President, Tim Farron recently published on this site a very well received piece reminding us that we have, close to hand, the greatest opportunity in the history of our party.

He also observed that, “our biggest collective failure recently – from the grassroots to the cabinet – has been that too many Lib Dems have drifted from the sort of community politics that we have prided ourselves on in the past, or else been too busy to practice”.

Community politics is a much misunderstood concept practiced by many as an electoral technique and belittled by others as ‘pavement politics’.

I hope the …

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Tagged bernard greaves, big society, community politics, gordon lishman and tim farron | 3 Comments

Opinion: Themes for a radical manifesto

By George Potter | Tue 31st May 2011 - 11:52 am

Yesterday, George Potter blogged about the need for the Liberal Democrats to have a radical manifesto for the 2015 General Election. Today he sets out his suggested themes:

I suggest that we limit our 2015 manifesto to two main themes. The first should be the proper implementation of community politics – and we need to emphasise what this means. Community politics is not just a strategy for winning elections; it is a philosophy for empowering communities and giving people control over their lives. It is about giving people freedom from dependence on the council, and the government and the rest. And it doesn’t just apply to geographical communities, it applies to other communities as well, such as workplaces. We need to develop the ideas of community politics and emphasise how they can be implemented. This policy, as it happens, isn’t too hard to develop. There is a wealth of thought and writing about community politics in the party’s collective memory so we need merely look around us for ways in which community politics can be translated into a manifesto.

The second theme, however, should be something far more radical.

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Tagged general election manifesto | 22 Comments

Opinion: The need for a radical manifesto

By George Potter | Mon 30th May 2011 - 11:52 am

In 2015, as we approach the general election, it will be exactly 70 years since the 1945 general election. When we draw up our 2015 manifesto, we need to remember the lessons of 1945.

That election saw the Labour party, after several years in a coalition government for reasons of the national interest, cast aside the memories of the wartime government to win a landslide majority based on a radical, optimistic manifesto that laid out a glowing vision of the future. Say what you like about the Labour party of old, at least they could not be accused of lack of …

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Tagged general election manifesto | 50 Comments

Opinion: Constitutional reform? Time to look at it another way

By Ed Maxfield | Sun 29th May 2011 - 3:17 pm

I have read a great deal of liberal-left angst about the AV referendum in the last few days.

Everyone concludes that the Yes campaign was poorly led. Beyond that you pays your money and you takes your pick as to what the key factor was in the massive defeat. You might share the view that insider networks undermined the campaign (although to me this mainly seems to be about saying the wrong sort of insider networks were in control, an argument that factions on the left have relied upon since Trotsky). You might even indulge the conspiracy fantasists and …

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Tagged av referendum, constitutional reform and house of lords | 41 Comments

Opinion: Taking a battering in the polls was the best thing that could happen to us

By Andy Thompson | Sat 28th May 2011 - 3:55 pm

You may think that this is a rather perverse and even nonsensical statement for any Lib Dem member to make but stick with me if you will and I will explain why.

For as long as I can remember, the Liberal Democrats have been the party of protest in two ways. Firstly as the safe option for a protest vote because secondly, we were seen as a party of perpetual opposition. We were the cross on the ballot paper that puts two fingers up to the government of the day without really changing the political landscape. We were the party of …

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42 Comments

Opinion: The Lib Dems should pursue more populist policies

By Zadok Day | Fri 27th May 2011 - 3:53 pm

So, an elected House of Lords; a massive victory for our party from a historical viewpoint, and a good reason for longstanding party members to feel warm and fuzzy as our support collapses in the north. Yet is it the badly-needed policy victory that we can take to the electorate as a compelling reason for voting Liberal Democrats? Not by miles.

Call it the dissatisfied carping of a relative newcomer to the party, but I can’t help but notice our distressing tendency to be insular and self-obsessed at times like this, giving critics’ barbs of ‘liberal elitists’ extra sharpness. It’s most certainly not Nick Clegg’s fault; it would be endemic in any political party regaining power after a century without. Yet he is as guilty as any grassroots member of putting party before country at the moment, blindly driving us into a rut that seems set to continue as the wins of our participation in the Coalition are ever more drowned out by failures of communication.

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39 Comments

Mark Valladares writes: ELDR Council, Dresden 2011: it was the best of times, it was the wurst of times…

By Mark Valladares | Fri 27th May 2011 - 2:07 pm

Last week, I described ELDR Council as being rather like our Federal Executive. I was wrong, but I’ll come back to that…

Having dropped Ros off at a VIP lunch, I made my way to a room in a distant and poorly signposted corner of Dresden’s shiny new Congress Centre, cunningly designed to make it virtually impossible to tell which floor you are actually on, for a delegation pre-meeting. It was agreed that there was very little in the way of controversy to be expected.

By mid-afternoon, we were all ready to go, and we took our seats on the centre-left …

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Tagged Annemie Neyts-Uyttebroeck and eldr | 1 Comment

Chris White writes: I have just received an email from Simon Hughes

By Chris White | Thu 26th May 2011 - 4:18 pm

I have just received an email from Simon Hughes. It said:

It’s been a great month for Liberal Democrats who are setting the pace on the green agenda!

It doesn’t quite say it’s been a great month for ‘the’ Liberal Democrats but most people will read it that way and think vaguely of my one and only Kipling joke:

If you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs…then you haven’t understood the true seriousness of the situation.

To be fair on Simon and his team, we do need reminding that there is more to this coalition than AV, Lords reform …

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Tagged aldc, carbon budget, energy bill, green investment bank and simon hughes | 9 Comments

Shaffaq Mohammed writes: From a boy in Kashmir – to Leader of Sheffield Lib Dems

By Shaffaq Mohammed | Thu 26th May 2011 - 3:20 pm

On election night in Sheffield, we had a painful evening, losing hard-working local councillors and good friends. They were defeated by a protest vote against the tough decisions forced upon the Government by the financial mess they inherited from Labour.

When we entered the general election, we understood the seriousness of the financial crisis the country faced. We knew that whoever entered Government after the election faced a difficult first few years. Yet, as Liberal Democrats we took a brave decision to enter a coalition in the national interest and we must stick to our five year commitment. One thing the people of Sheffield do not want is a return to the 1980s.

I know first hand what it was like to grow up in Sheffield in the 1980s. My father, a steelworker, was made redundant by the actions of the Thatcher Government.

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Tagged sheffield | 3 Comments

Opinion: What is worrying Labour and the Tories? Part 2

By Chris Nicholson | Thu 26th May 2011 - 12:55 pm

Yesterday Chris Nicholson looked at what is worrying Labour. Today he turns to the Conservatives.

What’s worrying the Tories?

The consensus view after the local elections was that the Tories had done amazingly well and so had the least to worry about. But amongst strategists there are some very real concerns. The General Election had shown that Cameron’s attempts to de-toxify the Tory brand was still work in progress. Despite all of David Cameron’s efforts enough people were still unsure about the Tories to deny them a majority. Michael Ashcroft’s recent polling shows that there is still considerable work to do …

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Tagged david cameron and nick boles | 16 Comments

Opinion: Why do we allow new-born babies to be circumcised?

By Richard Clare | Thu 26th May 2011 - 10:45 am

As a Liberal, I believe that religious freedoms are important and need legal protection, but they are no more important than any other kind of personal freedom. People should be able to live according to their religion as long as it exists within accepted law just as people should be able to live according to whatever other ethics or ideas they have as long as doing so exist within the law. We must never fall over ourselves trying to grant special freedoms on a religious basis that we wouldn’t afford to any other citizen, nor must we deny freedoms simply …

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43 Comments

Opinion: The PCC are to blame for the Ryan Giggs fiasco

By Joe Taylor | Thu 26th May 2011 - 9:53 am

At Conference last September, I proposed a motion that called for new rules to beef up the PCC, making it more independent of newspaper editors and giving it real powers to regulate the wilder elements of the press. The motion called on Lib Dem ministers to act now in the face of a growing number of legal injunctions that were being fuelled by lack of confidence in the regulator. In the long run lack of action would stand to restrict press freedom, I argued, because it would give weight to calls for an illiberal privacy law whereby politicians could …

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Tagged baroness buscombe, press complaints commission, ryan giggs and superinjunctions | 25 Comments

Opinion: What is worrying Labour and the Tories? Part 1

By Chris Nicholson | Wed 25th May 2011 - 3:25 pm

Amidst all the concerns which Liberal Democrats have about future electoral prospects, particularly after the local election and AV referendum results, it would be easy to think that everything in the garden is rosy for Labour and Tories who both made substantial gains in the local elections – it is not.

What’s worrying Labour?

For all the spectacular gains which Labour made in the Northern cities and industrial towns – mostly from the Liberal Democrats – in Parliamentary terms this would amount to, at best, less than a handful of MPs. In Liverpool, Hull and Newcastle the Liberal Democrats do not have …

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Tagged blue labour, ed miliband and lord glasman | 9 Comments

Dealing with the political weather: three lessons to learn

By Mark Pack | Wed 25th May 2011 - 11:18 am

Chatting recently to a Liberal Democrat colleague, I fear we sounded like a second-rate version of the Monty Python four Yorkshireman sketch. That there were not four of us, none of us are from Yorkshire and I’m no John Cleese probably didn’t help the imitation as we exchanged tales of past poll ratings (10%? I remember when we used to dream of 10%) and the travails of leading figures (Speeding? You were lucky – what about missing Parliamentary debates due to drink? Pah, that was luxury. What about conspiracy to murder?).

Exchanging stories of past problems can be fun – especially …

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Tagged chris huhne, david laws, featured, guido fawkes and paul rainger | 18 Comments

Tim Farron writes: Enough doom and gloom, we have the greatest opportunity in the history of our party

By Tim Farron MP | Tue 24th May 2011 - 12:53 pm

I don’t know if you noticed, but the elections on May 5th weren’t all that good for the Liberal Democrats. There was that business of the referendum defeat too. In much of the country we got an absolute pasting.

Journalists and non-political friends keep coming up to me with pained expressions, asking if I’m all right, speaking to me as if I’ve just suffered a bereavement. I smile back and tell them to get stuffed – I’m used to 2 things as a Liberal this last 25 years 1) losing stuff 2) not giving up!

So I for one am not prepared …

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Tagged community politics, ed miliband, nick clegg and opinion polls | 44 Comments

The Independent View: Where is the promised aid money being spent?

By Joanne Crouch | Tue 24th May 2011 - 11:52 am

In the run up to the 2011 G8 summit in Deauville, France, this May, international humanitarian organisation Concern Worldwide is pushing for commitment and clarity on the agricultural aid promises pledged by G8 members in the 2009 G8 summit in L’Aquila.

Back then, the British Government alongside the other G8 countries committed $22 billion in aid to be distributed over three years as part of the L’Aquila Global Food Security Initiative. The British commitment in particular was for £1.1 billion. These numbers may appear substantial, however they pale in comparison to the $30 billion per year that the UN Food …

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Also posted in The Independent View | Tagged andrew mitchell and international development | 4 Comments

John Hemming MP writes: This country has allowed too much secret justice to develop

By John Hemming MP | Tue 24th May 2011 - 10:22 am

What Ryan Giggs wished to kept secret was a trivial issue that has been widely publicised as a result of him having the injunction. It was estimated that some 60% of the population knew who he was.

However, last week he started through his lawyers the process of enforcement of the court order. That was being done through getting from Twitter the details of people who had posted entries on Twitter. Anyone who wanted to keep their identity secret could do so. Hence the only targets they would get are people who live in England or Wales and have posted …

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Tagged giles coren, parliamentary privilege, ryan giggs, superinjunctions and vicky haigh | 46 Comments

Opinion: A child dies every 20 seconds from lack of clean water

By Antony Hook | Mon 23rd May 2011 - 3:51 pm

On 19 May, the summit of European-Africa-Caribbean-Pacific parliamentarians (the ACP-EU Assembly) at Budapest called for action to alleviate the global crisis in clean water supply.

One in six people in the world have no access to clean water. 2.5 billion are without clean sanitation and 1.5 million die every year from water contamination.

The report presented to the summit found that there are three main causes of water pollution: industry, agriculture and sewage. In developing countries 70% of industrial waste is dumped untreated into water. The most common source of water pollution, however, is faecal matter.

One of the Millennium Development Goals …

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Tagged ken clarke, millennium development goals, twitter and water | Leave a comment

Stephen Williams MP writes: Backbench committees and the louder Lib Dem voice

By Stephen Williams | Mon 23rd May 2011 - 2:53 pm

There has been much talk in recent weeks about how Liberal Democrats show our distinctiveness and make the party’s voice heard more loudly in government.

A key part of this is the role of the Lib Dem parliamentary committees, one of which I co-chair.

These committees are not simply talking shops. They perform two important functions: making our influence felt within government and preparing the ground for party policy in the future.

Increasingly, the fruits of these committees are being seen.

The Coalition Agreement is the contract that underwrites this government. It sets out the policy agenda agreed between ourselves and our Coalition …

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Tagged alan beith, Backbench committees, Centre for Policy Studies, centreforum, coalition agreement, david cameron and jenny willott | 5 Comments

Opinion: Can we campaign on Lords reform?

By Rob Blackie | Mon 23rd May 2011 - 12:27 pm

Let’s face it, Lords reform doesn’t come up on the doorsteps often, however important it is.

But there is one group of people in Britain who Lib Dem Voice readers know, who care deeply about Lords reform. Campaigners for AV, who most of us have spent the last 6 months working with, are overwhelmingly in favour of Lords reform.

So today we can all use Lords reform as a great campaigning opportunity. Simply create a local petition (like this one) to make sure that your local MP votes for and campaigns for a 100% elected Lords.

Then send this petition to …

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Tagged constitutional reform, house of lords and lords reform | 13 Comments

Opinion: Clegg should hit the ejector button

By Scott Hill | Sun 22nd May 2011 - 5:50 pm

Scott’s piece is a continuation of this post from yesterday.

Whilst most coalition disagreements to this point have remained contained, the AV referendum managed to trigger vocal friction. The Conservatives funded, and strongly supported, the ‘No’ campaign. The Lib Dems were passionately backing reform of the voting system through the ‘Yes’ campaign. Let the conflict begin. Initially, David Cameron agreed not to get involved in the referendum. However, following strong early support in favour of a ‘Yes’ vote, he chose to step in. He caused hostility by accusing his coalition partner of “broken promises” and urged the general public to …

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69 Comments

Opinion: However unfair it is, Chris Huhne should step down

By Simon McGrath | Sun 22nd May 2011 - 2:49 pm

Another morning with the papers dominated by stories about the ever more complicated driving arrangements of Chris Huhne who is now (said to be) saying he can’t remember what happened on the evening in question.

There are accounts of his ex wife’s movements that day, maps showing who was where and allegations that he has asked others to take his points in the past. Perhaps inevitably there are claims of other extra-marital arrangements in the past.

Like everyone else apart from those directly concerned I have no idea whether any of this is true but that is no longer the …

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Tagged chris huhne, nick clegg and william hague | 105 Comments

Opinion: Clegg’s conundrum

By Scott Hill | Sat 21st May 2011 - 3:18 pm

Following the embarrassment of losing 695 English councillors, 11 Scottish parliament seats, 1 Welsh assembly seat and a resounding 68% of the country voting against the AV referendum, the time has now come for Nick Clegg and his party to leave their unpopular coalition with the Conservatives. The British public have retaliated against Nick Clegg in a monumental fashion, begging the question, has it been worth Clegg’s efforts getting the Liberal Democrats to Downing Street?

Nick Clegg has faced an uphill battle since joining forces with David Cameron’s Tories last May. Following his meteoric rise after the televised leader’s debates, …

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57 Comments

Opinion: we need an enquiry in the AV referendum

By Simon McGrath | Fri 20th May 2011 - 3:53 pm

The Yes 2 AV campaign was a disaster. It was the worst managed political campaign since Michael Foot’s General Election campaign in 1983 and it probably means we will not be able to have electoral reform for many years.

There seems to be a growing tendency simply to ascribe our defeat simply to the lies of the No campaign but that would be too easy and in any case lies are hardly unknown in political campaigns. There seem to have been failures in the Yes campaign; from the highest level – formulating a coherent narrative about the need for …

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Tagged av referendum and post mortem | 20 Comments

Opinion: Cease this injustice

By Jonathan Baldie | Fri 20th May 2011 - 2:53 pm

I was outraged to find out yesterday in my copy of The Times that the University of Edinburgh, my alma mater, has been selling off internships with Members of Scottish Parliament (MSPs) for an eye-popping £5,750.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly would love the opportunity to undertake such work, but at such a price I cannot. This is disadvantage defined, as those who can afford it can have such an educating experience.

The internship involves completing “three academic courses which are classroom based, followed by a research project supervised by a member of the Scottish Parliament and an …

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Tagged edinburgh university, internships, Scotland and scottish parliament | 4 Comments

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