Category Archives: Op-eds

Fred Carver

Opinion: Interesting proposal, Mr Kendall, but who is “us”?

By Fred Carver | Wed 16th February 2011 - 3:55 pm

George Kendall’s piece on Julian Assange was quite good. If it wasn’t I’d scarcely bother replying. And no, I am not Mr Assange’s spokesman, but as Mr Assange’s spokesman is quite busy I thought I’d jump in and attempt a defence.

Firstly I think Tunisia is a bit of a red herring here, and it would in any case provide only an empirical proof to say that Wikileaks is good or bad based upon one revolution or several. It would say nothing about the general morality. I’d much rather argue from general principles, as George Kendall then goes on to do.

As I can see it there are two elements to his proof:

  1. That some things do need to be kept hidden
  2. That the decision as to what those things should be should be taken by elected leaders.
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Chris White

Chris White writes: thoughts on the letter to the Times

By Chris White | Wed 16th February 2011 - 1:25 pm

Last week saw much excitement when 90 leading Liberal Democrat councillors wrote to the Times criticising the leadership of Eric Pickles. I was not one of them.

In 2009 I thought long and hard about the circumstances in which such letters are appropriate and as a result offer 6 tests:

  1. Is the objective clear?
  2. Is the objective likely to be more achievable as a result of the letter?
  3. Does it avoid attacking our own side?
  4. Is the timing appropriate?
  5. Is the medium appropriate?
  6. Does it avoid looking elitist and self-regarding?

The letter to the Guardian from members of the Federal Policy Committee during the Autumn Conference …

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Opinion: Taxing stuff – what George Monbiot got wrong

By Max Teuerman | Wed 16th February 2011 - 11:55 am

As a tax professional, it’s not often people ask me about what I do in my day job. Sure, people will occasionally ask me about their personal tax returns, but UK corporation tax on foreign companies and branches? Not even my insomniac friends are that masochistic.

So I was surprised to see my local party debating this very subject (or so it seemed) based on an article George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian. I was curious: I’ve worked in corporate tax for 17 years, for professional firms and companies, large and small, and contributed to consultations by HM Treasury and HMRC, including …

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Mark Pack

Forgotten Liberal heroes: Clarence Henry Willcock

By Mark Pack | Wed 16th February 2011 - 10:25 am

Listen to Liberal Democrats make speeches and there are frequent references to historical figures, but drawn from a small cast. Just the quartet of John Stuart Mill, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, David Penhaligon corner almost all of the market, especially since Bob Maclennan stopped making speeches to party conference. Some of the forgotten figures deserve their obscurity but others do not. Charles James Fox’s defence of civil liberties against a dominating government during wartime or Earl Grey’s leading of the party back into power and major constitutional reform are good examples of mostly forgotten figures who could …

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Mark Pack

Community politics: is it set to disappear as a core Lib Dem belief?

By Mark Pack | Wed 16th February 2011 - 8:55 am

One of the reasons – in fact, probably the main reason – why so many Liberal Democrats are relaxed about the Conservative Party leadership’s enthusiasm for the Big Society idea is the overlap between the Big Society and the traditional Liberal Democrat belief in Community Politics. That’s a topic I wrote about at greater length before Christmas, but what has struck me since is how little senior Liberal Democrats talk about Community Politics now.

Despite the frequent media discussion about the Big Society, which provides an opening to talk about the Liberal Democrat alternative/supplement (delete as you wish), Community …

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Paul Walter

Opinion: Labour’s preparations for the next hung parliament

By Paul Walter | Tue 15th February 2011 - 4:44 pm

Compass have published a document written by Dr Mathew Sowemimo called “The next hung parliament – how Labour can prepare”.

Dr Sowemimo is co-founder of The Social Liberal Forum network, established in 2008 to promote progressive policies within the Liberal Democrat party. He joined the Labour party in September 2010.

This document is generally very encouraging and forward-looking. Dr Sowemimo identifies a list of areas which were important in the May 2010 post-election period, and from which Labour should learn. These include:

  • Tone – as in Cameron’s inclusive tone towards Clegg, compared with Brown’s dismissive attitude to Clegg.
  • Don’t destroy

…

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Antony Hook

Opinion: An historical comparison – the Big Society vs the Great Society

By Antony Hook | Tue 15th February 2011 - 11:34 am

In the late 90s, Tony Blair’s New Deal deliberately adopted the name of US President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930s programme to increase public spending, create jobs, and escape the Great Depression.

Thirteen years later, one assumes that David Cameron’s Big Society (that Jeremy Browne praised yesterday) at least partially invokes another significant American liberal reform era: the Great Society of President Johnson in the 60s.

I fear that substituting “big” for “great” represents a lesser moral ambition. The Kennedy-Johnson years in America were self consciously “a call to greatness”. Politicians talked of “new frontiers”, putting an end to war, conquering …

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Mark Pack

Predicting the future: we didn’t turn Japanese

By Mark Pack | Tue 15th February 2011 - 10:25 am

Shortly after the Conservative Party won its fourth general election in a row in 1992, a symposium met to consider the question of whether Britain – formerly a country with regularly rotating government between the two main parties – was turning into a political version of Japan, where the same party had been in power for nearly forty years.

Even between the event occurring and the publication of a book based on it, Turning Japanese? Britain with a Permanent Party of Government (eds. Helen Margretts and Gareth Smyth), political events in both countries had taken a dramatic turn. In Japan the LDP lost power, starting a period of much greater political fluidity with even subsequent LDP Prime Ministers struggling to restore their party’s previous dominance. Meanwhile in Britain the collapse of the Conservative Party’s economic policies following Britain’s enforced exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) quickly made the government appear very vulnerable, even if debates in Labour continued on whether, as John Smith preferred, one more heave was all that was needed or whether, as Tony Blair insisted on after John Smith’s death, a more radical reshaping of the party was required to win the next election.

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Mark Pack

Labour’s filibustering and the consequences for political reform

By Mark Pack | Tue 15th February 2011 - 8:55 am

A slightly shorter version of this piece appeared on OurKingdom last week:

The unprecedented filibustering by Labour peers (or rather more accurately, given the splits between hardliners and moderates about Labour’s ranks in the Lords, some Labour peers) of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill is having two unintended side-effects which will be important for the future of political reform.

The most obvious is the way in which Labour’s chosen style of opposition has driven Conservative and Liberal Democrat peers closer together. A more subtle form of opposition might have looked to divide the coalition partners, but repeated late nights …

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Jeremy Browne MP

Jeremy Browne writes: Why liberals should support the Big Society

By Jeremy Browne MP | Mon 14th February 2011 - 5:23 pm

I am instinctively very supportive of the Big Society. But it is not a new concept and I have another name for it. I call it liberalism.

My liberalism is a belief that power should start at the bottom and feed upwards. It is about personal empowerment, choice and, sometimes, quirky individualism. It is about self-pride, community and, often, a suspicion of authority. It is human in scale and organic in its development.

I have a nervous attentiveness to the need to protect this precious but delicate grassroots liberalism from the steam-roller of the overbearing state. What my liberalism is emphatically not is authoritarian or bleakly conformist. It does not idealise the placing of power at the top in the hands of the mighty and then working downwards. It is instinctively unsettled by orthodoxy and drab uniformity.

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Paul Scriven

Paul Scriven writes: we cannot let Labour off the hook on Council cuts

By Paul Scriven | Mon 14th February 2011 - 2:11 pm

Just like all local authorities up and down the land, Sheffield is facing the biggest reduction in our budget for many years as a direct result of the reckless spending carried out by the previous Labour Government. Not quite the ‘post Soviet meltdown’ predicted by Sheffield’s Labour MPs, but a reduction none the less.

Setting the budget has not been an easy process. Colleagues and I have been agonising over what to de-prioritise and what to protect, listening to what local people tell us they value the most whilst ensuring that the vulnerable in our community are protected.

I know that …

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Dominic Carman

Dominic Carman writes: Barnsley Central – a call to action

By Dominic Carman | Mon 14th February 2011 - 11:27 am

Six weeks ago, my son Charlie and I travelled up from London with Simon Hughes – to leaflet on behalf of Elwyn Watkins in the Oldham by-election. The campaign was fantastic: dozens of Lib Dems in a well-equipped campaign office and many more leafleting and campaigning on the streets. It produced an excellent result in difficult circumstances: Elwyn even increased his share of the vote to 31.9%.

On Saturday, I was selected as the PPC for the forthcoming Barnsley Central by-election, to be held on March 3rd. At the 2010 general election, the Lib Dems came second to Labour in …

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Also posted in Parliamentary by-elections | Tagged , , , , and | 3 Comments
Tom Brake

Tom Brake writes: The Freedom Bill is a staging post towards an even freer society

By Tom Brake | Sun 13th February 2011 - 11:17 am

The Freedom Bill is clear evidence of the Liberal Democrats setting the political agenda and making a positive difference to how we live in Britain.

It’s our robust answer to unwelcome and unwarranted intrusions into our everyday lives. It starts the dismantling of an overbearing surveillance state and restores British civil liberties that we used to be able to take for granted.

At the heart of the Bill is a commitment to safeguarding and protecting individuals and national security. What has felt to many like an obsession of the state to monitor our every waking moment is broken down by the …

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Charlotte Henry

Opinion: Young Liberal Democrats – Life After the ‘F’ Word

By Charlotte Henry | Sat 12th February 2011 - 7:24 pm

The last year has obviously been a rather interesting one in which to be a Liberal Democrat, particularly a young one. Sadly, as a result of some coalition decisions, notably the increase in tuition fees, some young people have chosen to leave the party. More worrying are the people that may now never join. I have always believed that the Liberal Democrats are the party that best advocates policy for young people. However, the question remains, how do we engage more young people in our party after fees?

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Tim Neale

Opinion: Tories are funding Labour’s squeeze

By Tim Neale | Sat 12th February 2011 - 2:56 pm

There was an interesting article in the Guardian on Saturday.
It describes the upcoming anti-AV campaign. The Labour dominated anti-reform organisation has no intention in discussing the issues. Instead they will target Nick Clegg.

The dinosaurs have abandoned reasoned argument. A mock up of the proposed anti-reform website has the statement, “Under AV the only vote that will count is Nick Clegg’s.” Typical of the hyperbole that characterises British politics at present, and sadly not a surprising.

Since losing the general election, Labour have gone negative on the Liberal Democrats in general and Nick Clegg in particular. They calculate any voters abandoning …

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Stuart Bonar

Opinion: Slaying Big Brother and Big Government in one go

By Stuart Bonar | Sat 12th February 2011 - 1:02 pm

We know the facts by now. We are borrowing north of £100 billion every year, with our national debt having now topped £1 trillion. To finance all that we are paying £120 million every day just to pay the interest on that debt – enough to build a new school every day or a new hospital every week. Only the most shameless of deficit deniers would argue that we do not need to find cuts.

So, let me offer up one idea for a cut that has lots of potential across the country: council-run CCTV camera cars. These mobile CCTV …

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Mark Pack

The weekend debate: How do we make government think long term?

By Mark Pack | Sat 12th February 2011 - 8:55 am

Here’s your starter for ten in our weekend slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…

“We must think long term” is a common cry in politics and government. Far easier said than done, but whether it is investing in early years education, making decisions over building new physical infrastructure such as railways, setting rules for pensions or a myriad of other decisions, government repeatedly makes decisions which only work well if they are stuck to for a long period of time and whose positive impact may not be directly felt for many years. For example, the failure …

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Dinti Batstone

Dinti Batstone writes: Cheap shots at multiculturalism generate more heat than light

By Dinti Batstone | Fri 11th February 2011 - 3:53 pm

Last Thursday, generations of Chinese in Soho welcomed the Year of the Rabbit in time-honoured traditional ways. Yet we didn’t hear David Cameron demonise Chinatown as a ‘segregated community’ living ‘apart from the mainstream’. On the contrary, the annual lion dance spectacle has become an essential fixture in London’s calendar, enjoyed by people from many different cultures.

The Oxford dictionary defines multicultural(ism) as “of or relating to or constituting several cultural or ethnic groups within a society”. Note the word “within”. Yet there’s a growing tendency to rubbish multiculturalism, treating it as synonymous with the failed Labour policies referred …

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Richard Morris

Opinion: Coalition needs a new approach to collective responsibility

By Richard Morris | Fri 11th February 2011 - 3:12 pm

In my recent piece on LDV, a fairly gentle poke at the rebranding of the opposition, two themes emerged from those with opposing views. They can be summed up as ‘Why don’t you lot ever disagree with the Tories’ and ‘get your own house in order first’.

Well you know, I think they have a point.

Even as a strong supporter of the coalition, I’d long disagreed with the ‘not a cigarette paper between us‘ approach to government. We get tarred with policy we don’t agree with, get no credit for Lib Dem inspired legislation, and fail to build up …

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George Kendall

Opinion: Interesting proposal, Mr Assange, but when will you let us vote on it?

By George Kendall | Fri 11th February 2011 - 1:47 pm

Wikileaks has a theory, that “if acting in a just manner is easier than acting in an unjust manner, most actions will be just.”

Their argument has been strengthened by what has been hailed the “first Wikileaks revolution” in Tunisia. For those who want the corrupt autocracies in the middle East replaced with democracies, this may be seen as a ringing endorsement of Wikileaks.

But is it as simple as that?

Wikileaks talks about the “unintended consequences of failing to publish”, but, of course, there can also be unintended consequences to publishing.

When diplomats of a democratic country send frank briefings …

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Mark Pack

Britain at the Polls: four parts standard fare to five parts novel analysis

By Mark Pack | Fri 11th February 2011 - 10:25 am

The rise of online political coverage has done no harm to the mini-publishing boom brought about by a general election. In addition to the one-off books and the relatively new series there are some long running series that churn out a new edition for every general election. The Nuffield series is the most famous and longest-running but the Britain at the Polls series is a worthy and complimentary series. Its latest offering, Britain at the Polls 2010 (edited by Nicholas Allen and John Bartle), provides something extra even in the face of the latest Nuffield offering, The British …

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Also posted in Books and General Election | Tagged and | Leave a comment
Prateek Buch

Opinion: If State multiculturalism has failed, what should take its place?

By Prateek Buch | Thu 10th February 2011 - 2:20 pm

Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech on security and tackling terrorism in Munich in has re-ignited a debate over whether ethnic and racial segregation is the root cause of so-called home-grown terrorism, in particular the species that manifested itself so tragically on July 7th 2005 in London. Given my ethnicity (I’m the UK-born son of Hindu Indian immigrants) you may expect me to be apoplectic over the tone and content of Cameron’s rhetoric; at least I should be according to Labour’s Sadiq Khan MP, who accused the PM of ‘writing propaganda for the English Defence League.’ Yet I find …

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Mark Pack

Dear BBC…

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

Dear BBC,

I’d like you to reconsider your decision to ban the use of the word “reform” when your staff are reporting or commenting on the proposed changes to the voting system for the House of Commons (as reported in The Independent last month).

Given that the phrase “electoral reform” has been a widely used term for decades to describe all sorts of different proposals to change the electoral system and given that it has been widely used by proponents on all sides of those exchanges too, I’m surprised that you now are of the view that it isn’t an appropriate …

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George Kendall

What the think tanks are saying: The IPPR on “How much is Labour to blame?”

By George Kendall | Wed 9th February 2011 - 4:46 pm

(On 14 January 2011, the IPPR published a paper by Tony Dolphin, Senior Economist and Associate Director for Economic Policy at the IPPR entitled Debts and Deficits: How much is Labour to blame?)

Tony Dolphin makes a key point in his paper, that Labour did not seem to realise how much it was relying on revenues from sources associated with rampant lending, such as the City and the housing market.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t develop this point.

Using the Treasury figures for the budget deficit, between 2007 and 2009, the deficit leapt from £37bn to £123bn. These figures are cyclically adjusted, …

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Meral Ece

Meral Hussein-Ece writes: Has multiculturalism failed?

By Meral Ece | Wed 9th February 2011 - 3:32 pm

When did the phrase multiculturalism become synonymous with extremism and segregation? According to the Prime Minister David Cameron, the ‘doctrine of multiculturalism’ has led to communities living separate lives, away from the mainstream and not integrating.

It is blamed for the erosion of ‘basic British values’, and that Muslims – because when we now talk about multiculturalism, what the debate now turns on is that Muslims do not adopt mainstream British values.

What is the evidence for this statement? The majority of Muslims in the UK are well-integrated and support and promote democracy, equality and British rule of law.

I wasn’t …

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Mark Pack

Crime maps: Simon Jenkins has persuaded me

By Mark Pack | Wed 9th February 2011 - 1:55 pm

I’ve been a bit ambivalent about the idea of crime maps, both because of the many categories of crime missing completely from them and also because the provision of a map in itself risks being seen as the final step rather than a preliminary step in making government more accountable and responsive to the public.

But that ambivalence was ended by Simon Jenkins. Not quite in the way he expected, I suspect, for his piece last week arguing vigorously against crime maps ended up persuading me that they are a good idea. That is because all but one of his …

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Mark Pack

Ship of Fools: lessons from the Irish crash

By Mark Pack | Wed 9th February 2011 - 10:25 am

Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger is a coruscating account of how the Irish boom turned into biter bust. The sharpness of the prose as O’Toole recounts a tale of property boom, tax evasion and dodgy banking practices both entertains and obscures.

Along the way we have a blizzard of names and details about tax dodging, back handers and absent regulation. We also have the bitter irony of the failed exposure of politicians. When politicians were exposed yet their political careers continued unimpeded, the message to other politicians was – look, it does you no …

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Chris White

Chris White writes: Hodge’s troubling amnesia

By Chris White | Wed 9th February 2011 - 9:55 am

Margaret Hodge was on the Today programme yesterday morning on behalf of the Public Accounts Committee. She lambasted the Government for its policies on the widening of the M25. Money had been wasted, we were told, because the option of using the hard shoulder had not been pursued. Moreover a shocking £80 million had been spent on consultants. She was also disobliging about PFI.

Many may agree with this. But what was not said was ‘Which Government?’ Ms Hodge carefully said ‘They’ at all times. What she meant of course was ‘We’. It was the Labour Government of which she was …

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Gareth Epps

Opinion: A Bigger Society in Reading

By Gareth Epps | Tue 8th February 2011 - 3:48 pm

The Big Society is, at best, an abstract concept. Nonetheless, it poses interesting and different questions for Liberal Democrats involved in local government and the voluntary sector.

In Reading, we have taken a principled decision to maintain overall levels of funding to the voluntary sector as part of our Conservative-Liberal Democrat joint administration. In fact, there is a small increase, alongside benefits in kind in the form of low-cost accommodation to the voluntary sector. This is set against a small decrease in the final year of a Labour administration whose warm words about the voluntary sector were not matched with genuine partnership.

The Reading approach, too, is one that is all too rare in other local authorities. In many parts of the UK, such as nearby Wokingham, the voluntary sector has been the subject of some of the sharpest cuts at all, seen as a soft target for cuts. For many voluntary organisations, this year has been the most traumatic for the sector for many years. With so much radical change in the air, community leaders as well as local government have needed to provide leadership that balances an understanding of communities with an understanding of the sector’s needs. Unfortunately some senior national figures with links to the Labour Party, such as ACEVO’s recently-knighted former Lambeth councillor Stephen Bubb, have taken to politically-motivated doom-mongering which is not going to help anyone.

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Diana Wallis MEP

Diana Wallis MEP writes: Turning Julian Assange from poacher to game keeper

By Diana Wallis MEP | Tue 8th February 2011 - 12:13 pm

As Julian Assange reappears in court this week and as the Wikileaks saga continues to play out in the national media I am tempted to ask if Julian Assange is the new ‘Catch me if you can’ figure of the internet. Not the iconic image of imposter Frank Abnagale Jnr as portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in a pilot’s uniform striding through the airport with glamorous air hostesses in the film, but a correspondingly, bright, articulate and believable Robin Hood of the internet. In short: an attractive rogue with a frighteningly forensic mind.

The ending could be similar: finally captured by his antagonists having maybe taken a step too far, but with them having a sneaking admiration for him. One only has to look at the previous legal case in which Assange was involved, in Australia, where he walked free after years of prosecution attempts to obtain a serious conviction against him. In that case the judges admitted that all his hacking activities up until then amounted to nothing more than ‘an intelligent inquisitiveness’!

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