The current debate about allowing prisoners the right to vote seems very one sided. Most media coverage gives the impression that a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights is forcing the UK government to do something deeply unreasonable, and alternates between bashing the court’s ruling (or occasionally the whole idea of Human Rights itself) and bashing the government for giving in to it. Even Ken Clarke, who advocates giving many prisoners the vote, does so only
on the basis that it’s more palatable than paying them lots of compensation.
David Cameron’s comments over the weekend that he wants to cut tax but now is not the time gives a very strong indication as to what the overall impact will be of any new measures in next month’s Budget – no net tax cuts. But no net tax cuts is not the same as no tax cuts.
Two different ideas were also floated over the weekend, from credible looking sources even if they were also both formally denied by the government. They were to move even further towards the planned £10,000 basic income tax allowance and also to tax non-doms …
I keep banging on about the fact that there’s a fairly obvious programme in place by the Labour Party to steal our natural positions, both philosophically and in policy (see my article on LDV or my recent blog post). Their latest moves to ‘own’ the term progressive are another case in point.
However, as a branding expert (and a Lib Dem) I do find the news that Ed Miliband is considering rebranding the party he leads as ‘The Progressive Labour Party’ pretty funny – and wrongheaded.
There are essentially three reasons why an organisation rebrands:
As the Federal Party prepares for the Spring Conference, in Nick Clegg’s homeland of Sheffield, Liberal Democrat policy making, now we are in Coalition Government, is proving pointless.
The award of a National Defence medal, to hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been prepared to put their life on the line to keep the Nation safe and secure, was the first policy motion approved by the Liberal Democrat Party since being in Coalition Government. A veteran’s medal fund ensures there is no cost to the public purse surrounding this policy.
A review of service medals was contained in …
Here’s your starter for ten in our weekend slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…
Here’s an issue which often comes up when tax avoidance and evasion is talked about on this site. Is tax avoidance acceptable, i.e. is it morally acceptable to follow any and every legal means to avoid paying tax? And why (or why not)?
Society is rightly judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. But when it comes to caring for our ex-servicemen and women, it seems that this principle is all too quickly forgotten. As a former army colonel with nearly 40 years service I am well aware of the huge sacrifices, and the subsequent burdens, that are placed on our armed forces. None is greater, or harder to deal with, then the issue of mental health.
Injuries suffered in battle are completely different to those in normal day life and our brave men and women require special care. In the past there …
Julian Glover, writing on the Guardian website, has called the situation in the House of Lords well today. “This is a ceasefire not an armistice,” he says.
As of midday today (Wednesday), Lord “Charlie” Falconer appears to have retreated from the undertakings he was giving earlier in the week to expedite the Parliamentary Voting Systems and Constituencies (PVSC) Bill. Labour Peers are apparently determined both delay and elongate the Report Stage, so making it impossible for the AV referendum to take place on May 5th. As Julian Glover says, “the behaviour of a gang of timeserving Labour …
In common with many Liberal Democrats, I have opposed the Digital Economy Act since its introduction as a Bill during the dog-days of the Labour government.
Along with Bridget Fox, Obhi Chatterjee and an army of activists online and offline, I helped to get an emergency motion passed almost unanimously at Spring Conference last year that condemned the Bill, in particular for its provisions on website-blocking.
The motion also called for a working group to be created to draw up policy papers on information technology and intellectual property. I now act as chair of that working group, and you can find details of its progress at www.makeitpolicy.org.uk, among other places.
Education has always been particularly important to Liberals. Wales has always prioritised education but this great tradition has been left to slide.
Alarm bells rang when last summer, our GCSE and A level results fell behind England for the first time.
Now, two recent reports have exposed just how badly Labour and Plaid Cymru have mismanaged the Welsh education system.
Firstly, an international assessment of performance (PISA, run by the OECD) has shown that Wales is the lowest achieving nation of the UK and falling behind many European countries. Welsh students have fallen behind in reading, mathematics and science. …
Lib Dem Voice, the Local Government Chronicle and the Daily Mirror all featured a story recently about council leaders reaching the end of their tether with Eric Pickles. The event was a routine meeting of the Local Government Group Executive (LGA to you and me). I was one of those quoted as hurling my toys out of the pram. The Tories were more muted at that meeting but have nevertheless been pretty vocal elsewhere in their hostility to the Secretary of State for Local Government.
Surely it was ever thus? New Government comes in. Local Government gets its hopes up. New …
For the first time since his election as leader of the Labour party, I found myself agreeing with Ed Miliband during Prime Minister’s Questions this week.
With his new Shadow Chancellor sat next to him and in response to the news earlier in the week that the economy had contracted by 0.5% during the final quarter of 2010, Miliband urged David Cameron to think again over the upcoming spending cuts and VAT rise.
To make matters worse for the Coalition, the outgoing director-general of the CBI accused the government of putting politics before growth. Sir Richard Lambert argued that “politics …
There are more Labour MPs called Ann than women Lib Dem MPs. There are more ‘David’s in the coalition cabinet than women. How can we dare to call ourselves a progressive party whilst continuing to operate tacit acceptance of male domination? And, just as importantly, why are more women not banging on the doors of power, trying to become PPCs and councilors? Why is the organisation I intern for, Women Liberal Democrats, limited to one part-time staffer and a fast-diminishing grant? Virginia Woolf famously wrote that women needed independent means in order to pursue professional careers – “a room of …
The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill has now had a longer Committee stage in the House of Lords than any legislation taken there since at least 1945. The Bill is not a particularly complicated Bill when compared with, say, the last Labour Government’s Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill. Labour’s last constitutional Bill covered thirteen different areas of constitutional reform (including an AV referendum) and was dealt with in the Commons in a few days by use of a ‘Programme Motion’ (guillotine).
The PVSC Bill has been subject to an extensive and well organised filibuster on Labour’s benches abusing …
Here’s your starter for ten in our weekend slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…
Though he is often thought of as the father of the modern welfare state in this country, William Beveridge in fact had other views on the matter. As he said of the Beveridge report, the aim, “was not security through a welfare state but security by cooperation between the state and the individual”. In other words, the state should assist people in achieving self-reliance (and so the contributory principle in the report) rather than being simply a benevolent charity writ large (and …
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day and the national event in London will bring together survivors from the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, politicians, religious leaders and dignitaries. In addition hundreds of local events will be held across the UK giving everyone the opportunity to get involved in some way.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust took over responsibility for delivering HMD from the Home Office in 2005 and six years on our aims remain the same as they did then – to ensure that we remember the victims and honour the survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution and those from subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and during the ongoing atrocities in Darfur.
This year’s theme
This year’s theme for HMD is Untold Stories and builds on the success of HMD 2010 which focused on The Legacy of Hope. In 2010 tens of thousands of people signed up and pledged to become part of this ‘legacy’, ensuring that the experiences of Holocaust and genocide survivors were never forgotten, and that we can all learn from the lessons of the past.
The Untold Stories theme ensures that these pledges become a reality. This year we have focused on listening to stories of suffering, persecution, but also hope. Importantly we heard many stories that have never been told before. Already we’ve lost millions of stories through acts of hatred and this year’s theme sends out a clear message that we cannot allow this to continue. Just some of the Untold Stories that we’ve heard can be seen in our film:
Kevin Hickson’s volume, The political thought of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats since 1945, may be a short volume from an academic publisher with an academic book price tag to boot (look out for cheaper second-hand copies) but its contributors include many political practitioners. With Vince Cable, Steve Webb, David Howarth , Richard Grayson and Duncan Brack amongst them, this book has a very strong representation of people at the coalface of policy making rather than simply those who know of it only in theory.
As Hickson points out in the book’s introduction, the policies of the Liberal Democrats – even more so than other aspects of the history of the party and its predecessors since 1945 – have had very little coverage in books, an omission which this volume sets out to remedy and which political fortunes in the year after the book’s publication has made all the more useful a task to tackle.
With the publication of the government’s anti-terrorism review just about to happen, and likely to include a large number of details, what are the key points to look for in judging how the review has gone?
So far, we know one outcome – the reduction in the maximum period people can be held without charge from 28-days to 14-days (which is in line with the Liberal Democrat manifesto). Yet to be published are the plans on control orders (the abolition of which has been another key Liberal Democrat demand) and on a host of other anti-terrorism legislation.
On 25 January 1981, four senior Labour politicians – Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams – issued the Limehouse Declaration, so called after David Owen’s East London home. It set out their plans which were to result in the formation of the SDP. As you can see, many of their policy concerns are still highly relevant:
Back in the early years of this century, the UK was at the forefront of testing out e-voting for public elections. An extensive series of pilots were held and then … e-voting fell out of favour, because the pilots were not a success for a wide range of reasons. The issue still keeps on popping up, so having recently come across again what I wrote back in 2003 about those pilots, those lessons are worth restating. Here is what I wrote back in the summer of 2003. Luckily the last paragraph turned out to be wrong.
By Tony Greaves
| Tue 25th January 2011 - 10:43 am
We are in a new situation which started with the coalition being negotiated. Nobody in the political parties had thought it through. It had to be made up as they went along and it is still being made up, week by week, month by month. It has had a major effect on the resulting policies. It has also had an effect on the ongoing processes of government.
The coalition was put together in five days. An important lesson must be that future coalition-building in this country after an election really ought to take place at a slightly more measured pace, and …
Media coverage and comment so far since the Bill was published last week has been largely about GP commissioning, and the abolition of Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities. Naturally there will be risks associated with such an enormous transfer of financial responsibility, but we should most certainly not overlook the underlying localist and patient-centred philosophy, and the opportunities for GPs to become more engaged with a wider health and wellbeing approach in every locality.
GP practices operate in local communities, and councillors are elected to represent those same communities. How should we work with them more …
The long awaited outcome of the review of counter-terrorism and security powers is to be announced this week. Already last week, the expected and widely trailed outcome was confirmed that the length of time for pre-charge detention has been halved from 28 to 14 days – this 28 day power will lapse on Tuesday. It now appears that Theresa May will announce the outcome of the review on Wednesday, after Cabinet presumably discusses the issue on Tuesday.
The most thorny issue for the Liberal Democrats is what will go and what will remain of the highly controversial Control Order regime. David …
Here’s your starter for ten in our Saturday slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…
One of the achievements of the Liberal Democrats in Coalition Government so far has been to ensure that no Trident replacement is orders during this Parliament. At the next election the party will be able to say, “We said we opposed Labour and Tory plans for replacing Trident – and those plans haven’t happened”. But is that going far enough; should Britain retain nuclear weapons at all – and if not, when and how should it give them up?
The Guardian‘s splash about the first meeting of the party’s newly elected Federal Executive makes for rather generous coverage of a completely unexceptional decision by the FE.
That the first meeting of the newly elected committee, faced with deciding what motion to put to the Spring Conferences, goes for saying that the party should fight the next general election as an independent party is about as unsurprising an outcome as you could expect. But if The Guardian wants to give heavy coverage to the Lib Dems and Conservatives not being one and the same, that’s not exactly the worst the …
By Iain Roberts
| Thu 20th January 2011 - 12:29 pm
Crime was down again in the year to September 2010.
Recorded crime shows falls across the board, with the exception of sexual offences which are up slightly. As ever, changes in recorded crime can be affected by changes in definitions, by the way the police do the recording or by the willingness of victims to come forward, but there are no major shift in any of those which would lead us to think it isn’t a real change. (In some previous years there have been quite significant changes, some of which have made crime look higher than it really was).
By Paul Burstow
| Thu 20th January 2011 - 10:25 am
The greatest enemy of truth is not the lie but the myth. This could have been written with our health proposals in mind. Let me start with the myth that our plans are ‘revolutionary’. The ‘revolutionary’ label embodies neatly what many people wrongly envisage to be untried and untested changes to the NHS. Swamped by all the myth, misunderstanding and mistruths, the facts have struggled to get heard. So let me give you a few of the facts.
Under the previous Labour Government healthcare spending increased significantly. But where Britain spent big, other countries spent better. That is why Britain has …
It’s unusual for my morning radio alarm to bring me to wakefulness quite so abruptly as it did today with the coverage of MP Graham Allen’s report on giving disadvantaged children the best start in life. Something so important being given leading coverage is good news.
Although it probably isn’t news to most working the sector, nor many Liberal Democrats I suspect, it is very welcome that high-profile, cross party attention is now being given to idea that early intervention to improve social and emotional development will yield great dividends for
the child and society later in its life.
The last article I wrote conjoured up a utopian vision of Liberal Democrat e-campaigning. However, it might not be a realistic aim for individuals or groups who lack social media expertise, or time, to develop a fully fledged social media presence. How, then, should Liberal Democrats prioritise the different elements of social media?
The first choice is an absolute no-brainer. If you do nothing else, start a Facebook page. Don’t mistake a Facebook ‘group’ for a Facebook ‘page’. Though they share some features, they are different beasts. A local Party group should have an ‘official’ Facebook page. Individuals may …
Although I found Johnny’s post really interesting, I must admit to feeling a twinge of disappointment – not at the vital discussion of the party’s positioning, but that the word ‘capabilities’ in Johnny’s title referred to those of our party, and not to those of the residents (constituents? stakeholders? members?) of Nick’s new target demographic.
My lament isn’t meant as a criticism of Johnny’s article, nor …
Graham Evans Whatever the message, we need a leader who can clearly enunciate it, and not simply make party policy on the hoof. Ed Davey's intervention on the issue of local...
Peter Davies "Wanting to tear down historical statues , monuments , portraits, sanatise books etc ….It’s what the Taliban did in Afghanistan." It's also something Cromwe...
PM If Brexit is the cause of all our problems in the UK, what is the cause of the similar, or even worse, problems in France, Germany, Belgium, Italy etc?
The ...
David S Even if one's conclusion after examining all the complexities of the Civil War (which is a good deal more than "monarchy vs. democracy") is that Cromwell was a ...
Pawel Urbanski Much-needed piece. You are right that young people are the audience, but I am not sure Europe is the way in. The polling you quote shows they already agree with...
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