The cover of Bruce Riedel’s The Search for Al Qaeda shows a group of armed men working their way up a hillside overlooking a beautiful valley that stretches away to rolling hills. It captures the wonder and the tragedy of Afghanistan in one frame.
The book itself is similarly crisp, packing a wide-ranging history of Al Qaeda and its key figures into only 150 pages of moderate size print. It is penned by an ex-CIA man of thirty years service who was frequently closely involved with the figures and events painted in the book, but not so closely as to make the reader fear it is more a justification of his career than a fair account of events.
I have succeeded in tabling a topical question for the House of Lords tomorrow:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether, and if so how, they will raise concerns about the imprisonment of the Nobel Peace Prize Winner Liu Xiaobo during the Prime-Minister’s visit to China.
This follows me raising the issue on the World at One and in the Guardian because my view is that doing good business in not incompatible with publicly calling for respect for human rights and freedom of speech.
Liu Xiaobo needs to know that people in Britain are appalled that he was sent …
Lib Dem MP Jeremy Browne’s appearance on BBC1’s Question Time last week prompted critical comments for refusing to condfemn control orders, instead saying that the Coalition’s decision on control orders will await the outcome of the government-commission anti-terrorism review of Lib Dem peer Lord (Ken) Macdonald. Here Jeremy responds to his critics…
When I appeared on Question Time last week, I acknowledged that, confronted with a real terrorist threat from ideological zealots hostile to all of our liberal ideals, the government may sometimes, in its response, have to wrestle with the difficult tension between liberty and security. My goal is …
I confess that I cringe a little inside when I hear politicians from one party claiming that their’s is somehow more honest, more decent and better at keeping their promises than another.
Lib Dem politicians have certainly fallen into the trap from time to time, but they’re not alone: every party has its moments (with many Labour people being particularly convinced of their moral superiority at the moment, if some of the comments on this site are anything to go by).
It’s easy to see how people genuinely come to believe it’s true. As I noted a few days ago, we’ve …
I have no natural will to oppose the party leadership – I am, above all, a Liberal Democrat because of our unique party structure and the balance of opinion that allows it through its democratic structure to express a comprehensive view through its representatives. I am one of us because I believe in our ability to hold these representatives to account.
But even internal democracy is difficult to manage – occasionally we don’t work our structure well, and in some recent moves our natural process of internal compromise/external compromise seems to have been reversed. While the technology exists to carry out rapid-fire online and telephone membership votes on party policy, we have not yet built such a system and as such we rely on our Executive and representatives to listen to branches and party organisations and take their views as mandate for or opposition to a given policy.
Now that we are in a position of power, this sensitivity must take on a more concrete form than simple quelling emails or the occasional LDV article. Our problem is that reinvigoration through power of the party at parliamentary level has not been translated into a reinvigorated sense of democracy and power extended to all parts of the party. Conference is simply not regular enough to do us service in our bold new position.
By Paul Burstow
| Tue 9th November 2010 - 11:05 am
Much has been made of the tough choices Liberal Democrats have had to make since we entered government. But not enough has been made of the victories we’ve gained. Unlike the last Labour administration, this coalition is delivering on its promises to reform health and social care for the better.
Let’s start with social care. The funding of care and support is one of the most urgent of all social policy issues we face as a society. Make no mistake; the way we organise and pay for care for older and disabled people is a broken. That’s why we’re taking action …
We had news yesterday that a former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate has announced his defection to the Labour Party. So I think it only fair to provide a bit of balance: I joined the Lib Dems last week because I believe they offer the best opportunity for providing fair government.
I believe in democracy and I feel that the Lib Dems are the most democratic of the three major parties. The Lib Dem base is, by and large, ordinary people who want their voices heard, not big business and not the unions both of whom want their own agendas …
“If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.” Barack Obama
“Our party has long prided itself on its commitment to education as the great leveller; the best way to create social mobility and equality of opportunity in society” – words written by Jo Swinson MP in her article yesterday.
I agree with her, and that’s why I disagree that a near tripling of fees meets that commitment. That’s why I will be lobbying MPs to vote down the measure in the House of Commons in December.
Foreign Secretary William Hague apparently pledged on Thursday to alter Britain’s law on universal jurisdiction – a move which could again bring up the question of Liberal Democrat MPs voting against Government motions.
According to an Israeli Embassy official, Hague told Benjamin Netanyahu that the coalition will be moving as fast as it can to amend the universal jurisdiction law, with the aim being that a draft amendment will be put before parliament in the coming months.
The move comes on the back of Israel’s postponement of all strategic dialogue with Britain as a protest against the current law.
The numbers of animals used in experiments has been rising steadily over the past few years; up to 3.6 million in 2009 (whilst the number of individual procedures is far higher). It represents the presence of a vast amount of suffering. In its Programme for Government the Coalition promised to ‘work to reduce the use of animals in scientific research’. Our work has been supported by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) who warmly welcome our pledge, which is undoubtedly overdue.
But how does the Coalition intend to turn aspiration …
The law gives very broad scope to contentious and aggressive claims, partly because – as Arthur Balfour succinctly put it when pushed to expand the law in 1905, “It is evidently not easy to go further, if only because of the difficulty of distinguishing between the mis-statements which are due to malice and those which are due to mere stupidity.”
The offence was introduced in 1895 with, until then, the only offence under election law regarding false statements about candidates being if you falsely claimed that someone had pulled out as a candidate.
It is worth considering what, however, would be the position if even this narrow legal offence did not exist. Imagine case, say, of a candidate campaigning to oust a Labour MP and making false claims about the Labour MP being a supporter of terrorism. The Labour MP loses, sues for libel and wins. During the court case it is revealed that the victorious candidate always knew the claims being made about the now ex-MP were false but even so deliberately decided to include them in leaflets distributed during the election.
Without the sort of offence for which Phil Woolas was found guilty the victorious candidate might have to pay up in libel damages but could continue as an MP. (Eagle-eyed readers will have noted by this point that there are some important difference between the Representation of the People Act 1983 and libel law, but they don’t affect this example.) They would be able to continue speaking and voting in Parliament, drawing a Parliamentary salary, accruing a Parliamentary pension and so on for the next few years. Would that be a satisfactory outcome?
Your answer to that determines whether or not the principle of provisions like those in the Representation of the People Act 1983 is right. I think it is – we should give very broad scope to the public getting to determine who wins and loses in elections, but that is not the same as saying that anything goes.
Those who argue otherwise are wrong and, in fairness to Labour, it should be pointed out that the vast majority of the online coverage from Labour bloggers has been to condemn what Phil Woolas did. I also had the experience of listening to Harriet Harman on the radio at the weekend and agreeing with her. She is right that what we know Phil Woolas did has no place in politics even if he manages a successful legal appeal. What puzzles me, however, is that very little new came out during the case. There have been some interesting details – such as the forged diary, the evidence of the Labour Party agent being called “not reliable” by the judges and the complaint about a cat. At heart, however, what we now know Phil Woolas did is what we always knew he did, which makes Ed Miliband’s decision to appoint him not merely a Shadow Minister but one for immigration, all the odder. Hopefully, however, that will soon become no more than a curious political footnote.
As for political campaigning more generally, I don’t think the ruling will have a major impact – nor should it, because the law should only be for exceptional cases. Leafing through the advice I’ve co-authored for candidates on what you should or should not say in political literature (which was quoted in the court case and described by Phil Woolas as “naive”!), there does not look to be anything that needs changing based on this case. In that, there’s nothing new – for when the original provision was brought in by the 1895 act, the Liberal Party’s then election manual, Woodings, was updated to mention this new offence. It rightly noted it but did not make a song and dance about it for it was rightly considered then, as has been the case, to be a provision that only covers unusual and extreme cases. As the Judge put it in the 1911 case which hinged on this offence:
The primary protection of this statute was the protection of the constituency against acts which would be fatal to freedom of election. There would be no true freedom of election, no real expression of the opinion of the constituency, if votes were given in consequence of the dissemination of a false statement as to the personal character of conduct of a candidate.
The law has been in place for 115 years. That Phil Woolas is one of only a very small number to fall foul of it shows not that the law is too broad but that his behaviour was so awful.
Credit, by the way, to the judges for their understanding of how easy it is to find coverage of election candidates online – para 123 of the ruling shows a familiarity with the internet that counters some of the stereotypes about an out of touch judiciary.
This month there has been an earthquake in the Wikio Political Blog Rankings Top 50; almost a third of the sites have moved by more than 20 places, and roughly another fifth by more than 10 places. There are plenty of new entrants, and quite a number of sites seem to have simply “tanked” in this list.
Mark Pack asked if there had been a change in the algorithm this month, so I’ve done this guest post. The answer is that yes, the algorithm has been “tweaked”, in Wikio’s words. The main tweak seems to …
From the moment in 1999 when Kosovo with its mass burials and brutal imagery shocked the world – especially Europe, which had not had a war on its soil since the defeat of Hitler – the term ‘War Crimes’ has come back into the lexicon with a vengeance.
Until then, the words brought to mind the Japanese in Manchuria and Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but hardly anything closer in time.
Conflict in the Balkans brought with it a whole new dimension of war. Ugly new phrases like ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ appeared. Albanian Kosovar civilians, especially women, became …
By Prateek Buch
| Sat 6th November 2010 - 12:46 pm
You don’t usually raise an eyebrow when Lib Dems stand up for civil liberties – it’s what we do, it’s what we are. We even know that there are liberal-minded Tories (you, stop sniggering…) with whom the greatest common ground we share is on defending the freedoms, rights and liberties we enjoy; just look at the civil liberties paragraphs in the Coalition agreement.
It is right, however, to raise an eyebrow – possibly both – at the widely anticipated rebellion over whether to retain or rescind control orders for terrorist suspects; not just at the timing, coming so soon after …
Coalition: esp. in Politics. An alliance for combined action of distinct parties, persons, or states, without permanent incorporation into one body.
During the general election, if you asked my politics class who they would vote for if they could vote, the result was almost unanimously Liberal Democrat, with the occasional Conservative blip (but I’m fairly sure that those people merely said Conservative because they thought David Cameron was good looking. No comment.) Now? Now it’s a different story.
Take today, for example, discussing the peculiarities of the US political system. “I don’t understand how two parties can rule a country,” Classmate A …
Phil Woolas has vowed to fight on to keep his parliamentary seat of Oldham East and Saddleworth, following the ruling on Friday that voids his General Election victory and bans him from standing as an MP for three years.
He no right of appeal against the judges’ decision, but wants to take it to judicial review, though on what grounds isn’t clear.
Mr Woolas would like us to think that the judgement is not only wrong but fundamentally damaging to political discourse – that it will allow politicians to get away with all sorts whilst their opponents cower, unwilling to risk …
So, another week, and more policies announced that are definitely not Liberal Democrat in origin. Particularly one close to my liberal heart on the issue of paying for University education. Now that debate will rumble on and on, but I want to look more closely at whether the Lib Dems did indeed “sell out” on their principles, or whether they …
If you remember, this is the opening frame of the party political broadcast the Lib Dems aired just a few days before standing for election in May. You may remember it: Nick Clegg wondered around what appeared to be the set of “I am Legend” on a day when the prevailing wind was coming from the foolscap factory wearing a jacket 8 sizes too big for him. The tagline, the message, indeed the point of the advert was “no more broken promises” – the …
Whenever I utter the phrase ‘free trade’ within those Liberal Democrat circles in which I am permitted to mix, the reaction is akin to that which I might get if I suggested making it compulsory for all party members to worship statues of me.
And that’s a pity (the reaction to the free trade, not the statues) because most people when they meet an advocate of free trade, mutter darkly about the effects of ‘light touch regulation’. But free trade and light touch regulation are not the same, indeed in many ways they are inimical to each other.
By Stephen Tall
| Fri 5th November 2010 - 11:57 am
At face value, the figures released by News International this week showing that The Times and Sunday Times had registered some 105,000 customer sales since its paywall was erected in July sounded like good news. As analysts attempted to decipher the company’s ‘fuzzy numbers‘, doubts began to creep in.
Understanding those paywall figures
The reality appears to be that roughly 50,000 individual users have subscribed to gain access to the newspapers’ content, whether online or through the iPad app or the Kindle edition. The other c.50,000 customer sales are for single-use or pay-as-you-go access to the website, and will …
The Australian Parliament building in Canberra is a gem of democratic political architecture. Australia’s capital city was facing the need to expand and replace its existing Parliament building. But where to put the new one? The old one had deliberately been placed at the foot of the hill in Canberra, so that politicians would not be looking down on the public. Now the only suitable free space left was on top of that hill. The solution was clever: chop the top off the hill, build the new Parliament and then stick the top of the hill back on top of …
One of the lasting legacies of the Liberal Democrats in power will be the efforts to push through what has been named the ‘Freedom (Great Repeal) Bill’.
Returning to conference as Deputy Prime Minister in 2010, Clegg triumphantly declared that “In November, we will publish a Freedom Bill to roll back a generation of illiberal and intrusive legislation.”
The Liberal Democrat draft addresses some of the most obvious anti-campaigning laws. For example it proposes …
Some time ago a TV ad reported the bemusement amongst Martians at human behaviour with mashed potato. They fell over themselves laughing at how we humans grow potatoes in the ground, collect them, peel them, boil them in water, cut them up and then smash them to pieces before eating them. Very bizarre behaviour! Martians began to worry whether humans were sane or not.
Now the Martian press is equally dumbfounded at reports coming from planet Earth that humans are cutting their own production economies because they say they don’t have enough money.
Last week I talked about the role reversal facing the Liberal Democrats, with the party’s traditional stronger record at political tactics than strategy having been flipped around. In that, and the subsequent post Part 2 of the Nick Clegg reshuffle, I highlighted some tactical communication needs the party must get better at. Given my own habit of pointing out that people should not just criticise but should also offer solutions, here are my own suggestions.
Middle-ranking ministers need to communicate more
The large majority of Liberal Democrat ministers are not in the Cabinet. However, the departmental communication structures are set-up to …
Today the Government has outlined its response to the Browne review, and the future of higher education funding. This is arguably the most challenging issue for Liberal Democrats in the coalition so far.
Our party has long prided itself on its commitment to education as the great leveller; the best way to create social mobility and equality of opportunity in society. The flagship “penny on income tax for education” was one of the reasons I joined the party in 1997. My first conference speech was in a debate about student funding, as we passed our policy …
Mark has invited me to write (yet another!) guest-post on Lib-Dem Voice about the Political Innovation project. Specifically, this one is to promote the events that we’re doing in Edinburgh and Belfast over the next few weeks – details can be found here.
The agenda? Well, these are ‘unconference’ events – largely bereft of big-name speakers or tied-down timetables. It’s a good deal more democratic than that, and anyone who hasn’t been to one of these type of conferences is particularly welcome. It’s a very democratic way of organising a day, and one that, ironically, works very well in …
At the heart of politics lie battles over meaning. In an uncertain world there is plenty of scope to contest the definition of problems and the perceived effectiveness of solutions. Under Labour we came to think of agenda management as “spin”, and to condemn it. But the Blairites were simply the most egregious and effective exponents of the political arts. All politicians face decisions about the message and how one would ideally like it interpreted.
This seems particularly pertinent in relation to current discussions about affordable housing. We’re seeing the government providing some creative readings of what is on offer.
Some people agreed with my supposition, others for various reasons disagreed. It was the third set of responses that surprised me. That it was the very fact that Vince could win that made him a poor choice – because the allegedly approved strategy in London was to find a candidate ‘who understands that their role is not to try and win the mayoral election but to help our …
No. I don’t like Vince Cable’s announcement today on higher education either.
Nevertheless, Party Policy is clear: we want fees to go. This means that we don’t need to spend a six figure sum on a special conference just to repeat ourselves. Or to say we’re cross with Vince. Nor is there any need of a grand public statement in the Guardian letters page. Or a row at Federal Policy Committee.
FPC is still asking itself what it is for. On the one hand, it must get on with developing new Party policy – but with sharply limited resources. On the …
Party A is in politics to gain power so they can put their policies and principles into action. Without power, what they can achieve is limited so they – sensibly – are willing to compromise and indulge in some give-and-take.
Some policies are dropped or changed because to not do so would see less of the programme getting through over all. Deals have to be done, compromises made, unexpected situations dealt with – this is the real world, after all.
The party pushes through some policies it doesn’t really believe are in the the best interests of the country – because they’re …
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...
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
The Joy of Six 1603
Methodism at Horton, Gower
Latest voting intention and leadership ratings opinion polls
Graham Evans 
Peter Davies 
PM 
David S 
Pawel Urbanski 