There is a chance to introduce an imaginative new way of opening up the political process and public sector data to the public in the legislation currently going through Parliament to change the rules for Parliamentary boundary reviews.
As under the old rules, submitting proposals to the Boundary Commission, or commenting on their own proposals, will require access to electoral register and geographic data except for the most minor of comments (or debates over constituency names, which can generate deep passions). The better access you have to such information and the more sophisticated the computer tools you posses to manipulate it, …
By Iain Roberts
| Sun 5th September 2010 - 9:40 am
Dear Will Payne at the Daily Mirror,
If you’re going to run a big exposé about how an MP’s wife is working as a prostitute, do you think it might be worth mentioning before the very last line of the article that the couple separated in February (before the MP in question had even entered Parliament)?
I realise that, had you made it clearer, it would have been obvious that you only ran the story in a cheap and rather sad attack on the Tories, and to have the excuse to print pictures of the woman in question in her underwear.
By Iain Roberts
| Sat 4th September 2010 - 10:15 am
You know those children’s alphabet posters: a for apple, b for banana, that sort of thing? I recently came across an old Victorian example which, amongst some entries that would seem a little odd today (“V is for vulcan”) had the charming
I is an Irishman who climbs up the walls
Have we really moved on from the days when young children could be taught that an entire nation could be judged by a particular stereotypical activity, and not in an especially nasty way, but just as a …
Standing in the crypt of St Mary’s Church Lewisham asking local Lib Dem members to select me as their parliamentary candidate last summer I did wonder if my very pregnant stomach would put them off. During the selection campaign only one had asked me how I was going to do it with a new baby. “With the help of my partner, several doting grandparents and how about you too?”, was my reply.
Having fought an election campaign while pregnant, then through the first eight months of my baby daughter’s life, I want to let other women thinking of doing the same know that it is possible. It even has some advantages provided you get the help you need to do it.
Why should other Lib Dem Voice readers care? Because as Dinti Batstone highlighted in her research for the party into the under-representation of women among our MPs, ‘too many experienced female candidates self-select out just as their male contemporaries are fighting winnable seats’. And the main reason for that is the perceived incompatibility of the task with family life.
This thread is for you to say what you think should be done about the deficit.
How much do we need to cut the deficit by?
When should we start cutting?
Over how many years should we cut it?
Let’s leave the detail of what taxes to raise, what services to cut, and what the ratio should be between tax rises and spending cuts. There are other threads to discuss those issues.
Let’s also leave the partisan politics to one side. These are difficult questions, no one really knows the right answer. And the answers aren’t necessarily leftwing or rightwing. So …
By Simon Foster
| Thu 2nd September 2010 - 2:57 pm
The debate on whether to replace First Past the Post with AV for elections to the House of Commons certainly seems to be warming up. Both sides are seeking increasing media coverage, bloggers from both sides are debating on the internet, and public interest seems to be growing on the issue.
Yet there seems to me one thing missing – an appreciation of the role of the House of Lords, and how it might be reformed.
The reason for this is quite important – the House of Commons does not exist in a vacuum. The AS-level course I teach on …
By Carl Miller
| Thu 2nd September 2010 - 11:57 am
Conspiracy theories, an increasingly popular dinnertime conversation, are often otherwise dismissed and ignored. At most they are regarded as the amusing yet ultimately harmless hobby of a fringe, irrelevant few. They are neither of these things. They are a powerful social phenomenon. In many contexts they demolish trust between government and communities. In some, they are dangerous.
On Sunday, Demos released a report, The Power of Unreason. In it, we looked at the role that conspiracy theories play in radical and extremist groups. Analysing over 50 such groups, we found conspiracy theories to have a strong functional value that play …
The lovely phrase “spray on evidence” was coined in the late 1990s in frustration at the attitude towards evidence shown by many in the Labour government. Though officially the government was determinedly set on a course of evidence-based policy, many of those involved in policy making felt that evidence was being applied as a bit of glitter to justify policies rather than really shaping them.
Spray on history now seems to be the order of the day in much political punditry with the futures of the coalition, Liberal Democrats and Labour often talked about with several nods towards the past. A …
Next week, on 8 September, there ends the consultation period for a remarkable set of proposals from the Coalition Government entitled ‘Rebalancing the Licensing Act’.
Drink and the British are a potent and not altogether attractive combination. Drink and politics have been even less attractive. In my own city of St Albans it was routine for the Whigs and the Tories to fight each other in the streets, fired up with generous amounts of election day alcohol (the city later lost its right to have an MP at all because of electoral corruption).
The Liberals famously lost the 1874 General Election because …
By Stephen Tall
| Wed 1st September 2010 - 8:50 pm
My Voice colleague Iain Roberts has already blogged about this afternoon’s big political news that William Hague’s special advisor Christopher Myers has quit his post following allegations — vehemently denied by both — that they might be having an affair.
Iain writes: “We at Lib Dem Voice wish both the Hagues and Christopher Myers well,” and I agree 100%. However, there are two further points I’d make.
The questions were fair enough…
Paul Staines blogged about the issue on 24th August, using the Freedom of Information Act to ask three questions inquiring as to the suitability of Mr Myers acting …
By Iain Roberts
| Wed 1st September 2010 - 7:44 pm
Allegations have recently been posted on Paul Staines’ blog Order Order (where he blogs under the pseudonym Guido Fawkes) about a relationship between William Hague and one of his special advisors, Christopher Myers.
These allegations have led to Myers resigning from his post and to the Hague’s releasing a full and frank statement which include revalations they would, I’m sure, have rather remained private about the problems they’ve had in their attempts to start a family. The allegations have been categorically denied by William Hague.
We at Lib Dem Voice wish both the Hagues and Christopher Myers well.
The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts:
It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives everyone who wants it a platform for global communication; and it makes it possible to discover local online dialogue.
It changes citizen expectations of government. When I can follow news from my neighbour’s blog on my phone, why can’t I get updates on local services on the mobile-web?
By Stephen Tall
| Wed 1st September 2010 - 4:25 pm
No, I haven’t read Tony Blair’s A Journey yet (though it should be waiting for me at home). I haven’t even had time to read more than a handful of the preview articles, such as The Guardian’s trailer. With that confesion of near-total ignorance of A Journey established, I think there are three points worth making…
1. It’s an Event.
The decision that Mr Blair’s book would not be serialised (apparently modelled on the strategy for Alastair Campbell’s diaries) has made publication day much more of an Event-with-a-capital-E, the political anoraks’ equivalent of a release of a new Harry …
By Iain Roberts
| Wed 1st September 2010 - 3:33 pm
There was an interesting little piece in the Guardian few days ago suggesting that local authorities could save £51 million by moving some council employees to Open Office* and ODF**, and away from Microsoft Office and their document format, with the total savings rocketing to £200 million if every council employee in the country moved over.
This sensible proposal came from Cllr Liam Maxwell who’s reponsible for IT in the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, and I’m sure Cllr Maxwell would be the first to acknowledge it’s not a new suggestion. The office suite – as a commodity …
When bloggers meet, I often find that old allegiances (be they left right, or Unionist/Republican often dissolve into a different political spilt. Those of us who imagine that we ‘get’ the read-write web against the political colleagues that we have who, we believe, fail to foresee the possibilities or the threats.
I’ve occasionally witnessed left-right-and-centrist bloggers in (non) violent agreement with each other – not about political direction, but about what is possible in harnessing the power of the web. About how a more effective participative political culture can bring about a range of subtle changes – to reverse the broken politico/media relationship out of some of the cul-de-sacs that it appears to have stuck in.
Today, a few of us have come together to launch a project called ‘Political Innovation’. It’s for anyone who has ever asked themselves ‘why is politics still done like this?’
We’ve put a call out through our personal networks for initial contributions and we’ve already had promises of more than ten essays suggesting serious political innovations that are based upon an understanding of what interactive social media and the web can achieve.
Fans of the alternative vote system would do well to look at the result of the Australian election. Australia and Fiji are the only two countries in the world to use AV. The two main parties got about 80% of the vote. A record* 2 million+ people voted for minor parties, that’s around 17% – a 50% increase of the number of people not voting for the big two.
And the result? Well the two main parties got 145 seats and the minor parties 5.
Now at this point defenders of AV will be saying “yes we know AV isn’t that good …
Last August, the then Labour government commissioned a KPMG report into the future of NHS Direct (along with some other related NHS services). The report has been submitted to the current government, though not published.
So if Labour MPs and members were saying how the government must publish the KPMG report right away to see if it justifies the plans to migrate NHS Direct over to the planned 111 service, fair enough.
But for many in Labour to be demanding that the NHS Direct plans be abandoned without knowing the outcome of the KPMG report is tantamount to saying, “Who cares …
I was pleased to see the news this morning that Bjorn Lomborg’s views on climate change have shifted, particularly as his scepticism has often been rather thoughtful. In particularly, he opened up an important debating by pointing out that money spent on stopping global warming needs to be judged against not only global warming’s likelihood and likely impact but also against the benefits that could be got from spending the money in other ways, such as improving basic health services across the developing world.
Reading the coverage today closely, it does seem as if the extent to which he has changed …
Within milliseconds of the Coalition announcement of the plan to replace NHS Direct with a new non-emergency NHS service, Labour politicians were up in arms.
Because this plan from the Coalition obviously bears absolutely no relation to Labour’s plan, as spelt out on page 35 of the party’s 2010 manifesto.
A new national 111 telephone number will make nonemergency services far easier for people to access and book.
This, we need to understand, is totally different to replacing NHS Direct. What Labour had in mind, as they planned their £44 billion savings, must have been to keep NHS Direct just as …
I’ve been critical these past few weeks of the news media’s obsessional search to put a cigarette paper between Coalition politicians: mostly these have been the product of journalists’ desperation to fill space.
But today’s interview in the Observer with Lib Dem chief secretary to the treasury Danny Alexander is, I think, significant for the future of the Lib/Con partnership.
… Alexander makes clear that total tax revenue will have to remain at least at current levels throughout the parliament to put the nation’s finances back in order.
“I think the tax burden is necessary as a significant contribution to
“A healthy pedestrian mowed down by a runaway omnibus” – Trevor Wilson’s metaphor to describe the fall of the Liberal Party between 1916 and 1931 is quoted approvingly by Professor John Shepherd, co-director of the Labour Research Unit at Anglia Ruskin University, in a fascinating article in the summer issue of the Journal of Liberal History.
One of the Coalition memes doing the rounds among some of the commentariat is that, by embarking on a partnership with the Conservatives, the Lib Dems have sealed their own fate, that a split is inevitable. After all, the argument goes, Lloyd George’s …
The news that a motion criticising free schools was to be debated at the Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference caused a rush of excitement among journalists looking for their next “coalition splits” angle. This lazy interpretation ignores the strong tradition within the Liberal Democrats of having open debate and grassroots influence on policy. Although I disagree with the motion, I welcome the chance for our party to debate the pros and cons of free schools.
So far too much of the public debate on free schools has been uninformed by the high-quality evidence that exists on the effects of free schools. In the document at the end of this post I show that the common criticisms of free schools (including those made by the authors of the motion) are not supported by the evidence. Indeed, free schools have benefited pupils overall where they have already been operating and there is no reason to think that England would be different. I hope that as many delegates as possible will read the evidence before the conference debate.
There are many reasons for the Lib Dems to support free schools but I will focus on one particularly good reason here (others can be found in the document below).
The current school system perpetuates inequality. Richer families have a much better chance of getting their children a good education than poorer families. Admissions to most state schools are based on proximity, which results in house price premiums of up to 26 percent. It also means that existing residential segregation is reflected in many state schools.
Free schools are likely to broaden choice for poor families in particular, partly because at least half of the groups interested in setting up free schools want to work with poor children. A lot of the criticism of school choice is based on the fear that poorer families will not be able to navigate the system. But there is no reason that the system has to be as complicated as it currently is in England: ballot-based or first come, first served admissions work very well in the USA and Sweden and are easy to understand. It is already Lib Dem policy to stop schools cherry-picking pupils, and this should apply to free schools too.
The experience of school choice in other countries does not support the idea that poor families can’t take advantage of it. On the contrary, when catchment areas were abolished in New Zealand low-income families were more likely to send their children to a school outside their old catchment area than middle- or high-income families. And in Edmonton, Canada, more than half of pupils go to a school other than their nearest one.
I am drafting an amendment to make the motion in favour of free schools, provided that Local Authorities have strategic oversight of schooling (though no veto on free schools); that free schools cannot cherry-pick pupils; and that the funding system is fair and does not increase the burden on already cash-strapped Local Authorities. I would welcome comments on the draft as well as signatories so that it can be debated at Conference. I can be contacted at n.c.w.smithgmailcom.
Niklas Smith is half-Swedish and has followed the development of free schools with interest. He was Junior Treasurer of Cambridge Student Liberal Democrats 2009-10.
The media are constantly looking for signs of policy splits within the Coalition. Across policy fields – the economy, welfare, housing, defence – the search is on for contradictions and conflicts, whether real, manufactured or imagined. While many of the stories have been given an airing here, one that passed relatively unnoticed was last week’s discussion of rail fares.
Transport Secretary Philip Hammond hinted that the current fiscal situation is so severe that it may be necessary to re-examine the formula restricting regulated rail fares to increases of no more than RPI+1%. The suggestion was that this might increase …
What would a minority Conservative government look like?
It is now widely accepted, by Jack Straw among many others, that a coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats would, sadly, have been unworkable.
The numbers didn’t add up, we suffered real difficulty – whichever account you believe – negotiating with Labour, and there was the ever-present threat of nationalist lobbying.
So the alternative was a Conservative minority government.
And what would this government have been able to pass through parliament with the support of the next biggest party Labour? What policies would be implemented by a minority Conservative government with Labour’s blessing?
A poll conducted by LDDPR last month got some positive exposure last week with a mention in Antonia Senior’s opinion piece in thursday’s Times “Over to you: Tell me why drugs must stay illegal.” It was also referred to at greater length in Mark Easton’s excellent blogpost “Drugs Policy: The British System” the day before.
I feel it is important for the results of this poll to be explored further as some of the implications are profoundly important for the progress of the debate on drugs policy in this country and beyond.
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 I wrote back in 2006 of a Demos publication from 1997. (Can you tell I was trained as an historian?). The main message of the piece has stood the test of time pretty well – thinks tanks (and others) are frequently pretty awful at getting big picture predictions right. The one part that hasn’t is the picture of Demos as an organisation whose best days were behind it. It has recently had a resurgence, with Richard Reeves moving from being its director to one of Nick Clegg’s top aides and in total 11 of its 25 advisory board members now have government roles.
For no particular reason other than I recently found a second-hand copy on sale cheaply, I have just finished reading Demos’s 1997 collection, Life after politics.
Although these days Demos – with its reports on the crucial importance of hairdressers to modern society – tries a little too hard to be different and thought provoking, it was in its heyday one of the most successful think tanks in the UK. Leading lights such as Geoff Mulgan – the editor of this collection – went on to exercise significant real political power under New Labour; he spent time as Director of Policy at 10 Downing Street and also headed up the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit for several years.
A staple stock in trade of think tanks is analysis that ends up concluding that other people have got things wrong, aren’t preparing for the future correctly and don’t understand what is coming. Yet think tanks rarely look at their own record. So – nearly a decade on – how does Demos’s work shape up? Where they really right in what they were foretelling? Or would a government that followed its recipes ardently ended up getting things horribly wrong?
So, a new era dawns! Not only with an unusual election result, but with a Queen’s speech unusually peppered with political slogans and dumping blame on predecessors. Since this is the only transport we have into the immediate future, we must hope that it is not too uncomfortable a ride.
And yes! It is a new era, isn’t it? All party leaders have promised us an end to the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and dishonourable practices which sullied the reputations of our Members of Parliament latterly. One of the three main planks driving the coalition programme is fairness. Well, we shall see. It …
Large head and shoulders photographs did, however, previously feature heavily in our election literature – on leaflets if not posters. For decades many leaflets look like this effort from Sir W Lacon Threlford who was standing for election as a City of London Alderman in 1935:
Pausing for a moment of sympathy for the clerical …
There is a myth that a desire to balance the books is a virtue only of right-leaning governments.
There is myth that those who want to shrink the state are more concerned than others about how the state raises money.
Deficit deniers in one corner – state shrinkers in the other.
But Liberal Democrats can act to reduce the deficit and be positive about the role of the democratic state.
What prompts any given government to run a deficit is usually circumstantial, prompted and encouraged by economists reading the runes. Reaganomics was based both on huge deficits and reducing the role of the …
It is clearly absurd for anyone to be better off on benefits than in work.
The solution most commonly proposed (whether explicitly or not) is to make benefits harder to obtain and/or to reduce their level.
There is no particularly strong evidence to suggest these approaches might work. Even if they did, they would lead to the creation of an even larger and more alienated under-class than we currently have, with all the social dangers the follow.
A better approach would be to try to integrate more of the unwaged and low-paid properly into society.
Currently, a significant proportion of our population feels marginalised …
Jenny Barnes How about joining in fewer discretionary wars. Stop the MOD wasting money. Cancel Ajax and the planned F35a purchase. Mothball or use for spares one of the airc...
Mick Taylor @Russell. The UK already has almost the worst state pensions in Europe even with the triple lock. We pay out millions in supplementary pensions, housing benefit...
William Wallace Jana:
Investing in strong research and development in key sectors (which is where China is soaring ahead), rebuilding training, apprenticeships and early edu...
David Raw @ Russell "First, by dumping the triple lock".
Are you sure you've posted this on the correct website, Russell ? In the meantime I sincerely hope you never ...
Laurence Cox Our motto should be "not just higher taxes but fairer taxes". Individuals should be taxed exactly the same on their income whether that comes from earned income...
For no particular reason other than I recently found a second-hand copy on sale cheaply, I have just finished reading Demos’s 1997 collection, 
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Has the Chancellor set the tone for a Burnham administration?
"His glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice": On being the monarch's second son
Jenny Barnes 
Mick Taylor 
William Wallace 
David Raw 
Laurence Cox 