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Category Archives: Op-eds

John Pugh MP writes on the health debate ahead at Lib Dem conference

By John Pugh | Fri 17th September 2010 - 5:10 pm

The Coalition White Paper on Health could be the top topic at the Lib Dems’ Liverpool conference. There is still time for delegates to have a genuine impact on future legislation.

Previous soundings on LibDemVoice.org have produced a thoughtful and largely critical postbag with the results passed on to the party’s Health Minister, Paul Burstow.

Paul, and indeed Nick Clegg, believe there is plenty in the White Paper Liberal Democrats should warmly support — such as the increased commissioning role for GPs, and the increased role of local authorities in public health. Others point out that Coalition agreements to have …

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Also posted in Party policy and internal matters | 8 Comments

The Independent View: a Digital Economy, can the Coalition Government make it a reality?

By Richard Rumbelow | Fri 17th September 2010 - 3:53 pm

Delivering a Digital Economy is a critical test for the new government. A pledge in the Coalition Government Agreement, the Departments of Business and Culture, Media & Sport now face the challenging task of ensuring broadband is rolled out across the UK by end of this Parliament. But why is access to broadband—and next generation broadband– so crucial?

There are two crucial econ-political reasons for the government to support the expansion of broadband. The coalition has emphasised repeatedly that broadband infrastructure and access to services, particularly for the UK’s business community, will drive the UK economy …

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Also posted in Conference and The Independent View | Tagged digital britain | 1 Comment

Opinion: Localism? They don’t know the meaning of the word!

By Chris White | Fri 17th September 2010 - 3:45 pm

Any Liberal Democrat will tell you he or she believes in localism. So it may be surprising that we have a ‘graveyard slot’ debate next Tuesday on what ought to be familiar territory.

What’s more, we are given to believe that the Coalition Government, despite what we always thought about the Tories, is also pursuing an aggressively localist agenda.

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

On a good day the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government does indeed talk the talk and walk the walk of devolving power. But he also has bad days. He has told councils that …

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Tagged communities and local government and localism | 8 Comments

The Independent View: Beware! A two tier state education system is being created

By Michael Bassey | Fri 17th September 2010 - 2:25 pm

Lib Dem MPs need to take a vital role restraining the exuberance of the Coalition’s secretary of state for education. His enthusiastic promotion of academy status for top ranking schools (as opposed to the previous government giving this to struggling schools) and his determination to get parents and others to set up state-funded free schools answerable only to himself, is in danger of creating a two-tier system of state education.

These innovations are driven by political ideology rather than by educational evidence and professional advice. They will undermine the erstwhile democratic attempts by local authorities, once supported by …

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Tagged education | 17 Comments

The Independent View: Political Innovation No.4 – opening policy research to the public

By The Voice | Fri 17th September 2010 - 1:10 pm

This is a guest cross-post by Ivo Gormley – originally posted on the Political Innovation site here.

Although Government claims to want our participation and wants us to appreciate its policies, it hides the evidence on which it bases its policies in fat documents and reports that are hard to read and only available free at special events at think-tanks around Whitehall.

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Also posted in The Independent View | 1 Comment

Ten questions for conference

By Mark Pack | Fri 17th September 2010 - 9:26 am

It’s a fair bet that much of the media coverage of Liberal Democrat conference will be of the form ‘THEY’RE DOOMED!’, with the more subtle coverage for the more discerning journalists being ‘Are they doomed?’.

That has, after all, been the standard media fare since long before the Coalition, since before Nick Clegg became an MP, since before David Cameron became an MP, since before Tony Blair become Labour leader and since before John Major became Prime Minister. My money isn’t on the old standard formula changing this time round for …

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Also posted in Conference | Tagged alan travis, electoral reform society, greg hurst, julian glover, mike hancock, nick clegg and trident | 14 Comments

Emergency motion: speak out on council housing

By Ben Johnson | Thu 16th September 2010 - 4:01 pm

We are unique amongst the main political parties in having a democratic internal structure. This weekend is our opportunity, denied to both Labour and Tory members, to decide the future of our party and proclaim what it means to be a Liberal Democrat.

In addition to major policy announcements, there are six possible emergency motions listed in Conference Extra. Only one of these will be chosen for debate on Wednesday morning, following a ballot of conference attendees on Sunday.

Bermondsey and Old Southwark have submitted one of these emergency motions, and it is not without controversy. It is in direct response …

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Also posted in Conference | Tagged council housing and david cameron | 26 Comments

Opinion: BSF is dead – thank goodness‏

By Ed Fordham | Thu 16th September 2010 - 10:30 am

With the Conference season now upon us and with Labour preparing to crown their new Leader it seems appropriate that we lay to rest the myth that BSF (Building Schools for the Future) was some great effective scheme. In fact it was a bureaucratic joke with too few beneficiaries and huge expensive processes. The Liberal Democrat Conference is a good chance to cheer and toast the end of BSF and focus on education and pupils and real improvements.

It was 2005 and the local elections in London were scheduled for 2006. It was clear, we were clear, parents were clear, that there was a need for additional secondary school places in north west London in the Borough of Camden. The case for more places in the south of the Borough was also compelling – the campaign for a school ‘south of the Euston Road’ was pretty noisy and indeed compelling. And yet Camden Council had got itself to a place whereby it looked inactive, unable to articulate a more pro-active vision and lacking the political leadership to secure a new school.

I remember very clearly the conversation in Cllr Keith Moffitt’s front room in West Hampstead about the need for a new school.

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Tagged building schools for the future, camden and education | 6 Comments

The Independent View: Please make sure they really do end child detention

By Clare Sambrook | Wed 15th September 2010 - 1:27 pm

Liberal Democrats are understandably confused about whether child detention is ending or not.

Nick Clegg got the commitment to end child detention into the Coalition Agreement. Only last Thursday Sarah Teather promised: ‘Rest assured. It will be done.’ She also said: ‘We have to be careful not to rush into this as we are dealing with the safety and well-being of often vulnerable children and it is essential it is done properly.’

Quite how children’s safety might be served by not rushing to end a practice proven to wreck their lives is a mystery that suggests leading Liberal Democrats have been

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Also posted in The Independent View | Tagged chris huhne, damian green, malcolm stevens, nick clegg and sarah teather | 26 Comments

Opinion: it’s time for us liberals to fight back

By Daniel Furr | Tue 14th September 2010 - 4:45 pm

Labour’s timid leadership election highlighted one significant point. The opposition is getting hostile and vicious to the coalition, especially to the Liberal Democrats. Instead of compromising and trying to remain neutral it is time for us to show some teeth. We need to fight back.

Party activists and elected officials, in the Labour party, believe we despise the coalition and would rather be associated with them. The media are portraying this narrative too. But it is not true. Our special conference overwhelmingly voted in favour of being in government. Liberals have taken 800,000 people out of income tax, a pupil premium …

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118 Comments

An introduction to the Association of Liberal Democrat Co-operators (ALDCo)

By Peter Arnold | Tue 14th September 2010 - 2:27 pm

ALDCo is a Liberal Democrat pressure group whose aim is to promote discussion within the party on all aspects of co-operation. This concept includes the traditional co-operative movement founded in Rochdale in 1844, now known as The Co-operative, but it also includes social enterprises, mutual organisations, credit unions, co-operative housing schemes, and community and voluntary organisations all over the country that operate along co-operative lines, and provide local goods and services to people in the areas where they live.

Our belief is simple: people working co-operatively together can achieve far more than people working on their own. In short, teamwork always wins.

Britain needs …

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21 Comments

The Independent View: Political Innovation No.3 – assertion-flagging: for less partisan, prejudiced blogging

By The Voice | Tue 14th September 2010 - 12:00 pm

This is a guest cross-post by Andrew Regan – originally posted on the Political Innovation site here.

Most political bloggers are motivated to fight what they see as bigotry, prejudice, and ill-informed, unjustifiable assertion.

This is a fine and noble cause, because the spreading of false beliefs – without the evidence to support them – is bad for all of us, as is the displacement of informed argument by mere rhetoric. All the more so when the perpetrator …

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Also posted in The Independent View | Tagged blogging | 5 Comments

Fixed-term Parliaments: better by standing orders?

By Mark Pack | Tue 14th September 2010 - 10:26 am

Last week Malcolm Jack, the Clerk of the House of Commons, got a little flurry of media coverage for his evidence before a Parliamentary committee considering the proposed legislation for fixed-term Parliaments. “Parts of the government’s plans to bring in fixed-term parliaments are vulnerable to legal challenge” was how the BBC reported it.

It is understandable why that got the headlines, but lurking in the detail are important questions about how Parliament operates and whether its administration is competent. Jack’s evidence, and concerns about the legislation, really fall into three parts.

First, as might be expected from an official whose …

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Also posted in Parliament | Tagged Fixed Term Parliaments Bill, graham allen, jack straw, malcolm jack and nick boles | 11 Comments

Opinion: The pressing need for libel reform

By Lord Anthony Lester | Mon 13th September 2010 - 10:27 am

Our libel law is complex, costly and out of date. It lacks certainty and sweeps too broadly in ways that threaten freedom of speech. That is why I have prepared a Defamation Bill to act as a catalyst enabling the coalition Government to give effect to their commitment to review libel laws, and to give Parliament the opportunity to make better law.

Recent calls for libel law reform have come from the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee Report Press Standards, Privacy and Libel, the Ministry of Justice Working Group on Libel, and the Libel Reform Campaign led by a coalition …

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Tagged evan harris, libel and lord mcnally | 1 Comment

Opinion: a brief history of MP job-shares… and why we need them

By Dinti Batstone | Sun 12th September 2010 - 6:28 pm

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So when I heard Caroline Lucas trumpet MP job-shares on Friday morning, part of me was delighted. But the suggestion that political job-shares are a radical new idea from the Greens had me spluttering into my Lady Grey.

For the record, here’s a brief history of Liberal Democrats advocating MP job-shares:

Nick Clegg on Mumsnet in January

Baronesses Ros Scott and Kate Parminter in a Lords debate on 21 July

…and yours truly in a speech to party Conference 2009, on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in February, on Lib …

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Tagged equalities | 27 Comments

The press and the right of reply

By Mark Pack | Sun 12th September 2010 - 5:56 pm

Here on Liberal Democrat Voice we’ve often covered the work of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), including the motion being proposed at party conference on it and a response to motion piece from the PCC itself.

It isn’t only on Liberal Democrat Voice that the PCC has been given a full column to express its views. Last week’s edition of the party’s newspaper, Liberal Democrat News, also contained a column from the Press Complaints Commission, this time in the form of its chair Baroness Buscombe.

On reading it I was moved to pen the following letter, which appears in the …

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Tagged journalism and press complaints commission | Leave a comment

Opinion: radical approach needed on International Development

By David Thorpe | Sun 12th September 2010 - 2:03 pm

International Development must surely be a Ministry which any aspiring cabinet member would view positively.

A Department where there are plenty of opportunities for easy publicity and there is money to be disbursed, with fewer of the potential banana skins of the other departments.

But the announcement that the coalition are to ‘ring fence’ spending on this department should not prevent Liberals from questioning the current minister, Andrew Mitchell, and the orthodoxy concerning how the budget is spent.

One thing which unites Lib Dems of all stripes is a commitment to decentralisation, yet the framework for distributing the International Development budget is skewed …

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Tagged international development | 11 Comments

Opinion: which is the biggest disgrace – the marriages or the sentence?

By Nick Perry | Sat 11th September 2010 - 11:39 am

St Leonards on Sea has had its share of the national news recently – Banksy has been to visit and has left his moniker on our seafront; and in the last few days we have had a local vicar sentenced to four years in prison for his part in a sham weddings scam which has broken immigration law and also, it seems, a Marriage Act from the 1940s.

In case you missed it, the Independent has covered the case of Revd Alex Brown in detail. It transpires that no-one has been able to identify the motive of this errant …

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Tagged crime and prisons | 12 Comments

Dear Nick Clegg…

By Mark Pack | Sat 11th September 2010 - 9:26 am

Dear Deputy Prime Minister,

I read your speech from Thursday to the Committee on Standards in Public Life with interest. It is good to see the progress being made in many areas of political reform, including the commitment made in the speech that, “in the New Year we will produce draft legislation to complete the modernization of the House of Lords”.

Much else too in the speech was good to read, but I think you are missing an important issue about how the changes to election expense rules introduced for the 2010 general election are driving political parties in the wrong direction.

To …

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Also posted in Election law | Tagged david heath, election expenses and nick clegg | 5 Comments

Opinion: Tobacco control

By Stephen Williams | Fri 10th September 2010 - 2:28 pm

As Liberal Democrats we are unique in our commitment to personal freedom. Our battles for liberty have gone hand in hand with a dedication to social progress. We want freedom but not a society that walks on by.

Getting this balance right is a central part of our party’s policy consultation recently launched by Health Minister Paul Burstow.

It asks whether tobacco should be one of the main areas of focus for public health. The answer to this was given very clearly in the inquiry by the All Party Parliamentary Group for Smoking and Health, which I chair.

We heard evidence that …

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Tagged NHS, paul burstow and smoking | 93 Comments

Worth a second outing: What should you be getting up to on the internet?

By Mark Pack | Fri 10th September 2010 - 10:27 am

Welcome to a series where old posts are revived for a second outing for reasons such as their subject has become topical again, they have aged well but were first posted when the site’s readership was only a tenth or less of what it is currently or they got published and the site crashed, hiding the finest words of wisdom behind an incomprehensible error message. Today’s is a review of a book first published in 2008 which is still going strong.

Should politicians blog? Does it matter if a local party has a website that allows comments or not? Is it …

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Also posted in Books and Online politics | Tagged charlene li and josh bernoff | 1 Comment

Our litmus test of the state of UK politics today

By The Voice | Thu 9th September 2010 - 10:12 pm

This is a joint posting by Left Foot Forward, ConservativeHome and Liberal Democrat Voice

Litmus The leading blogs of left, right and centre, Left Foot Forward, ConservativeHome and Liberal Democrat Voice have teamed up to publish a special, limited edition newspaper – Litmus – looking at the key issues facing Britain today, which will be distributed at the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat Party conferences.

It may not have been the Internet election that many had predicted but websites and social networks played a greater role than in any previous election. The blogosphere, in …

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20 Comments

Opinion: the future of the Clean Tech Industry is in our hands

By Merlene Emerson | Thu 9th September 2010 - 4:25 pm

“Beijing’s plans for renewable energy could blow a hole in Britain’s eco-industry”, wrote Sunday Times writer Danny Fortson (5/9/10).

I struggled to understand the angle of the story: surely we should be delighted to know that rather than more dirty coal powered plants polluting the atmosphere and choking China’s population, she is now investing in wind power with a vengeance?

By the end of last year, China already had an installed base of 25GW which is a fifth more than all of Europe. And by 2020, her government expects to generate 150 GW from wind turbines or 6 times …

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7 Comments

Sarah Teather: Coalition is committed to ending child detention

By Sarah Teather | Thu 9th September 2010 - 3:39 pm

There has been some speculation that the Government is prepared to walk back on its commitment to end child detention.

I want to say, clearly and on the record, this is not the case.

Nick Clegg has rightly described the locking up of children for immigration purposes as a moral outrage. More than 1,000 children were detained in this way during Labour’s last year in government, often for months on end.

Today, the charity Medical Justice has published a report documenting the physical and psychological harm that children suffer in prolonged detention. It makes grim reading. They studied 141 cases since 2004 and found that just over half had suffered some form of psychological harm, including three girls who attempted suicide. They also found the majority had physical problems that were caused or exacerbated by their detention.

This will not be allowed to continue.

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Tagged child detention | 18 Comments

Opinion: our MPs need to be demonstrating consensual politics and challenging opponents on AV

By Chris Jenkinson | Thu 9th September 2010 - 1:15 pm

Based on my timeline on Twitter I was not the only Lib Dem member paying attention to the AV debate in Parliament and getting frustrated at some of the comments made by Labour and Conservative MPs against the alternative vote referendum. I can’t have been alone in noticing a significant absence of Lib Dem MPs being as engaged in the debate in Parliament as I was on Twitter.

This got me thinking – are we doing our best to minimise unforced errors and build relationships with those we will be campaigning alongside in the AV referendum and to limit Yes …

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Tagged av referendum and electoral reform | 10 Comments

Opinion: the sordid world of electronic voting

By Neil McGovern | Wed 8th September 2010 - 4:13 pm

When I was picked to stand as a candidate in the local elections, one of the most sobering realisations was the law and procedures in place to ensure the integrity of the ballot. The rules and regulations, safeguards and cross checks are strict and rightly so. A question remains on how compatible this safety is with electronic voting. The camps are very divided on this, but what is agreed is the principles of openness, accountability and challenge of the process we use to elect our representatives.

A few months ago, news came out that serious security problems had been found …

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Tagged electronic voting and india | 16 Comments

The Independent View: Political Innovation No.2 – the politics of buying things

By The Voice | Wed 8th September 2010 - 12:00 pm

This is a guest cross-post by Dominic Campbell – originally posted on the Political Innovation site:

Well, you wouldn’t still be reading had I called it the politics of procurement now would you? (no, stop – don’t go!). No-one who engages with government procurement comes away impressed with it. It’s a process that wastes £billions and rewards process over outcomes.

Yet we all know that, deep down, it’s a symptom of a political problem. It is a system set up to manage …

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Also posted in The Independent View | Tagged dominic campbell | 5 Comments

Decision time on energy for the Coalition

By Ian Manders | Tue 7th September 2010 - 3:57 pm

Energy is precious – surely? The UK faces a decline in gas and oil output from the North Sea and for the first time in decades is importing the bulk of its fossil fuels. Despite long-term subsidy, renewable energy only satisfies a tiny part of the energy demands of the UK.

So, you would think we would be using our precious energy stocks efficiently, would you not? Everyone knows that our buildings are draughty and expensive to heat – but did you know how inefficient our electricity supply system is? Do you know how much energy is thrown away before it …

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Tagged energy | 10 Comments

Disaster for Labour as one in five desert the party

By Iain Roberts | Tue 7th September 2010 - 2:25 pm

The anti-Lib Dem meme of choice on the opinion polls has been of voters deserting the party. Our opinion poll ratings are down compared to 6th May and it must be a disaster for the party which would, if many Labour activists’ fevered fantasies were to come true, disappear for good.

Except that idea’s looking more and more stretched.

The Independent runs a ComRes poll today showing the party’s poll rating up two percent to a very respectable 18%. If the poll is accurate, hundreds of thousands of voters have switched from the other parties to the Lib Dems …

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Tagged opinion polls | 47 Comments

Naughty, naughty, Guido – let’s check that poll again, shall we

By Iain Roberts | Tue 7th September 2010 - 1:24 pm

Paul Staines, who blogs as Guido Fawkes, seems very keen indeed to persuade his readers that the public’s right behind him on his pursuit of William Hague over the allegation of improper activities with his former special advisor.

Keen enough, it appears, to take a rather inventive approach when it comes to interpreting the opinion polls.

When you ask a question in a poll and the result comes back as 46% yes, 12% no, most of us would take that as an indication that the public’s in the “yes” camp.

Not Staines. He’s taken all the “don’t knows” – many of whom may …

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Tagged guido fawkes and william hague | 15 Comments

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