Today, the Prime Minister took on the “pen-pushers and busybodies” whose red tape is threatening hundreds of Royal Wedding street parties up and down the country. In language rather untypical of a Prime Minister, particularly in recent years, he said:
“I hope people are able to join in and celebrate and I am very much saying today that if people want to have a street party, don’t listen to people who say “it is all bureaucracy and health and safety and you cant do it.” It is very important to understand if anyone wants to have a street party you don’t need a food license, you don’t need an entertainment license, you don’t need to have written documents about closing your street, you don’t have to pay for street closures, you don’t have to have special health and safety permission because there are councils out there telling you you do need these things – you don’t.”
Very nice of the Prime Minister to step in. But somehow I imagine few sighs of relief being breathed across the country, people giving up their fights with local councils and digging out their bunting.
On 8th April Norman wrote an interesting article here entitled “The NHS: safe in our hands”. That article is a good basis on which to discuss a few of the problems with the bill and the Government’s approach so far.
We should be clear that Norman Lamb is one of the good guys, who spotted earlier than most the problems with the White Paper and the Bill, and has been very clear that it requires radical surgery. He has also been particularly concerned, and this week expressed this publicly, that the pace of change is financially (and …
If you’re Labour, and want to be an MP in a safe seat, switching to the Lib Dems would be a bad move. Perhaps you like authoritarian policies on law and order, and prefer to avoid difficult decisions on the deficit. If so, the Lib Dems isn’t the party for you.
But maybe you think politics isn’t black and white, that there is good and bad in all the parties, and so working together is a good thing. Perhaps you think that the government should do what will work on law and order, rather than pander to the tabloid press, and …
Last Wednesday saw one of the few debates on the issue of AV that are taking place in the run-up to the referendum. Vince Cable paired up with Ken Livingstone to speak for the Yes side, and for the No position Lord Michael Howard teamed up with Olympic Gold Medallist and prominent Labour supporter Martin Cross (with a very humorous Clive Anderson in the Chair).
After Vince opened the debate with a brief overview of the issue, Lord Howard made a good and impassioned speech. However, there seemed to be a contradiction in what he said which thankfully Clive Anderson picked …
Here at Eaglescliffe we have a great airport on our doorsteps – still known as Teesside Airport to most of us despite the best efforts of the owners to change it to Durham Tees Valley. From my house I can take a 10 minute walk in the other direction to a railway station with a reasonably frequent service going past the airport on its way to Darlington.
The airport has a railway station too – ideal you might think. Think again. Trains stop there once in each direction on Saturdays and now on Sundays too. …
In both Rwanda and then, initially, in the former Yugoslavia, international peacekeeping troops were dispatched and then largely stood by as widespread, murderous violence took place around them. A mixture of weak mandates, limited military deployments and prioritising the safety of peacekeepers over those they were meant to be protecting meant little was achieved until – in the case of Yugoslavia – greater military force was deployed by the international community.
That lesson has strongly influenced many international interventions since – don’t intervene unless you are willing to do so with significant military firepower. The desire to minimise loss of lives …
I have a secret to admit. I quite like big organisations.
Of course – as you would expect of a liberal – I think power should be kept at as local a level as possible, that organisations should be responsive to individuals, and so that smaller is frequently better – and that individuals’ freedom and rights get trampled on when Big Brother gets free rein.
But faced with the reality of actually trying to change the world, …
The news broke over the weekend that an announcement is imminent on the policy surrounding the lifetime ban on donating blood for any man who has ever had sex with another man.
The writing on the wall appears to be that gay men who have not had sex for a decade might in future be allowed to give blood.
This decision was the likely outcome of the scientific review into blood donation, when I researched the issue for an op-ed slot on Pod Delusion live. It was one of the things I mocked in front of a live pub audience. …
As readers of Lib Dem Voice will know, it has long been our party’s aim to create a transport system in this country that moves people towards low carbon options, including modal shift to public transport. This is not only crucial to achieve our environmental goals, but is also important to move away from our reliance on oil from, in particular, politically unstable countries.
So how do we do this at a time of austerity, when the Department for Transport has had to reduce its budget by £638million? We need to be smarter. We need to look at …
Here we go again. As Barack Obama hits the online campaign trail for his 2012 re-election campaign, expect a trickle, then a steady flow and finally a flood of posts about how Obama’s online campaigning should be copied by everyone from your pet cat to your grandparents.
On past form, many will gloss over the big differences between US and UK politics and the differences between a campaign headed up by the first non-white President and one aiming to make people buy your brand of shirts.
But as the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones, one of the more perceptive commentators on Obama online first …
It’s less than a month to go until Election Day in England, and for the Parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales. Many of you have been out on the doorstep, talking to people and showing them what we are achieving both nationally and locally.
You should already have your big messages in place, and number one has got to be your local record of service – all year round, not just at election time.
But what about the coalition? I’ve been making visits to Lib Dem council groups up and down the country (Stoke, Warrington, Newcastle and Redcar in just the last …
If, like me, you’re an admirer of Nick Clegg — his grit, honesty and openness — there will have been plenty to admire this week. If, like me, you occasionally despair of Nick Clegg — the frankness can turn into a gaffe — there will have been plenty to make you despair this week.
First of all, the Best of Clegg…
As Nicholas Watt notes in the Guardian, Nick has been ‘finding his feet’, and ‘starting to show in public what he has always claimed in private – that he stands up to Cameron’. This has been clear from the …
There are lots of ways to make the case for a fairer voting system for electing MPs, but I think I may have come up with the most novel. I was in the staff kitchen at work the other day when colleagues starting chatting about the referendum, triggered by a newspaper article about it. They were split between the YES camp and the NO camp, both drawing on what seemed like standard arguments deployed by both campaigns.
I started trying to win over the antis, but wasn’t really getting anywhere. Then a thought occurred to me. I was peckish at the time, about to head out to buy something for a very late lunch. It was the sort of time in the afternoon when the range of sandwiches at the nearby Pret A Manger starts to dwindle – maybe they’ll have run out of smoked salmon, BLT, chicken avocado or whatever else.
“I’ll buy everyone here a sandwich from Pret. You can choose what you want using either first-past-the-post, or the alternative vote. If you choose first-past-the-post then you get one choice and if it’s run out then you get nothing. If you use the alternative vote then you can, of course, let me know what you want ideally, but if they’ve run out of it you can let me know what you want as a second and third choice.”
You’ll be unsurprised to learn that they all decided to use the alternative vote, and I think this little exercise won over the sceptics too.
Of course if you meet someone who wants a less sandwich-based explanation of how the alternative vote works, I can heartily recommend this video that Jonathan Wallace shot of me setting out the case for change and explaining how the alternative vote works. Take a look:
We have 4 weeks to go until the most important ballot of our lives and the Yes! To Fairer Votes campaign is in full swing now, but we still need our activists to get stuck and help the campaign in the final push to the finish line.
This week in the Yes! To Fairer Votes campaign the tempo has been stepped up! On Wednesday night we saw Vince Cable and Ken Livingstone battle it out for the Yes! team against the No team’s Michael Howard and the interesting choice of a former Olympic rower (who was apparently in the boat with …
The NHS is our most treasured institution; designed by a Liberal it is based on a great British idea – that we will care together, collectively for one another in our time of need. Treatment free, when you need it, not when you can afford it. That’s an idea that must never be undermined.
People want to see Liberal Democrats in government protecting and improving the NHS, and this week we have shown that’s exactly what we are doing. The government is pausing – stopping the clock on its NHS reforms to listen, reflect and improve the legislation – in direct …
The Boundary Commissions: Redrawing the UK’s map of Parliamentary constituencies first came out in 1999 but got a much newer paperback edition as boundary reviews have come back into the news in recent years. It easily wins the title of best book on the topic by being pretty much the only one, but even against competition it would be a worthy tome.
The speed with which technology has developed is shown by the book’s acknowledgements, which thank JANET for having made collaboration between the authors easier – JANET having been one of the early computer networks which let people at …
And so we reach the end of my day at Lib Dem Voice Towers. If you’ve come away impressed at the good things that Liberal Democrats are doing and planning around the country, if you’re feeling enthused and want to do more to help your local campaign, if you’ve enjoyed reading the varied selection of articles we’ve done today, then this day has done what I wanted it to do.
The polls are not great. The media are giving us a bit of a kicking but we can’t let that become a self fulfilling prophecy. We need to be out there …
Campaigning in Ceredigion is rather unique. The big beasts of 20th century British politics, the Conservative and Labour parties, hold no sway here. It’s a battle instead between liberals and nationalists and the Welsh Liberal Democrat candidate Elizabeth Evans is proving to be a formidable opponent to Plaid’s Elin Jones.
The ‘poster’ war, which is always a central feature to this unique constituency’s electoral battleground, was in full swing early on. Over the years, it’s always been opportune to show that momentum is on your side by getting those road-side …
It is fairly common in American Universities for 3rd year students to go abroad for a semester. Although I had many options, I eventually decided to come to Edinburgh, Scotland to intern with the Scottish Parliament. The way my program is structured is that there was class for five weeks, an internship in parliament for 4, then once parliament dissolved we began working on a campaign up until polling day. So that’s how, on March 22nd I came to be working with Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Edinburgh Central. When I first met Alex I was sitting in …
In Reading, with council elections taking place most years we are used to campaigning all year round.
But this year is different.
For the first time we are defending our record in power at local (and national) level.
We are no longer in our comfort zone but it is exciting to be able to deliver for residents on the really key issues such as housing and social mobility where Labour failed.
And as Andrew Stunell MP, Minister for Local Government observed when he came to visit us last week it is a record of …
Being a first time candidate is a daunting experience, but a hugely rewarding and humbling one.
I was one of the youngest people to ever go through the candidate approval process, at just 17. Many people were surprised that I bothered, given I couldn’t stand for election yet anywhere, but in all honesty, I wanted to get it done and out of the way, so that when opportunities (such as the one I’m about to describe) occurred, I would be able to take full advantage. My advice to others is don’t wait for that ideal seat to come up before you …
Sophie Bridger is the President Elect of Liberal Youth Scotland. LYS brought a motion on Equal Marriage to Scottish Liberal Democrat Conference in 2010. It was passed and our manifesto launched on Tuesday has a commitment to open up marriage to same sex couples and civil partnerships to heterosexual couples. Sophie looks at the future for civil partnerships.
When the subject of gay marriage is approached, you’re hard pushed to find a Liberal who disagrees. The right to marriage, complete with religious ceremony, should be available to all. But when it comes to civil partnerships, I often find people are slightly …
Cllr Abi Bell is Deputy Leader of Hull City Council. She writes about how the Council has gone from the worst in the country to the best under Liberal Democrat administration.
Another year and another election in Hull. It seems like only yesterday we were fighting the General Election. Last year we missed out on winning the Hull North constituency from Labour by just 600 votes – securing the 4th best swing from Labour to the Lib Dems in the country and turning what was once an unassailable Labour stronghold into one of the country’s most marginal constituencies.
Some of you may have wondered where the prolific blogging from me has gone. However, in the words of Mark Twain, “The reports of my (blogging) death have been greatly exaggerated.”
I’ve had an awful lot to say these last few months but I’ve been saying it to a diverse political and non-political audience, all to get as many of them as possible to say the same thing at the ballot boxes on 5th May. That one word is sometimes thought to be alien to many in Northern Ireland and that word is “Yes!”
If the Yes campaign for the referendum was a car what kind of car would it be? I have a hunch it might be a 2000 vintage Skoda: making steady but unspectacular progress, hampered by an image problem and at risk from more aggressive and agile competitors. Of course in the early 2000s, the Volkswagen group transformed the fortunes of the sturdy Slovak auto with an imaginative re-brand. Does the Yes campaign need to re-think the way it gets its message across? Here are three reasons why I think it might have to:
It is interesting to note last weekend’s election results from Germany in the context of Nick Clegg and David Laws’ attempts to turn the Liberal Democrats into an economic liberal party. There is an economic liberal party in Germany – it’s called the Free Democratic Party (FDP). On Sunday in state elections in Baden-Württemberg and in Rhineland-Palatinate they got trounced. In the former poll they barely made it into the state parliament with 5.3% of the vote; in the latter they didn’t cross the 5% threshold and are no longer represented.
As a supporter and campaigner for a Yes vote in the referendum on the 5th of May, I have often faced the argument that, “I support a proportional system, but AV is not proportional, so I will be voting No”. A prima facie logical argument – if you do not like AV, then why on earth would you vote for it? Big names in the world of electoral reform have signed up to this “No to AV, Yes to PR” ethos, including Lord David Owen, one of the Gang of Four. According to the No to AV, Yes to …
When I was appointed Pensions Minister last May my first priority was protecting current pensioners. It was widely assumed that the spending review would see cuts to a range of forms of help that pensioners receive. But despite the spending pressures, the budgets for bus passes, free television licences, free prescriptions and the Winter Fuel Allowance have been protected at the level set out by the previous government. Better still, where Labour had planned to cut Cold Weather Payments to £8.50 per week we have made them £25 permanently to protect the most vulnerable when the temperature is below …
Simon Costain I'm guessing around a thousand high net worth individuals are resident on the Isle of Man for tax purposes, though others suggest up to 3,000
Low earners on ...
David Wright While Trump's "gift of the license to manufacture Patriot air defence missiles" is welcome, it won't stop a single Russian missile aimed at Ukraine this year or...
Matt Wardman Thanks for the piece, Tom.
I tend to disagree on the NATO summit. Listening to serious reports (my goto since February 2022 has been the Telegraph's Ukraine ...
theakes Considerable concern in Democratic circles that Trump will call the coming election rigged, cancel the States results won by the opposition and then impose mart...
Peter Martin @ Roland,
I'm not sure I understand your comment. Every company which is registered for VAT can reclaim VAT on purchased items. The question is whether VAT s...
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The nearest beach to Leicestershire and Birmingham
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Convicted fraudster was introduced as Farage's chief of staff
Simon Costain 
David Wright 
Matt Wardman 
theakes 
Peter Martin 