Category Archives: Op-eds

Mark Pack

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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Lord Anthony Lester

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Our libel law is complex, costly and out of date.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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Dinti Batstone

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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Mark Pack

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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David Thorpe

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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Nick Perry

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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Mark Pack

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 , and | 5 Comments
Stephen Williams

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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Mark Pack

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 and | 1 Comment
The Voice

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

LitmusThe 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
Merlene Emerson

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

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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Chris Jenkinson

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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Neil McGovern

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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The Voice

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 | 5 Comments
Ian Manders

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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Iain Roberts

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 | 47 Comments
Iain Roberts

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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Mark Pack

Boundary review data and tools should be opened up to the public

By Mark Pack | Tue 7th September 2010 - 12:45 pm

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, …

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Also posted in Election law | Tagged | 1 Comment
Iain Roberts

A letter to the Daily Mirror regarding MPs whose former partners now work as prostitutes

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.

I …

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Iain Roberts

I is an Irishman who climbs up the walls

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 …

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10 Comments
Tam Langley

Opinion: Can pregnant women stand for Parliament?

By Tam Langley | Fri 3rd September 2010 - 2:23 pm

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.

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George Kendall

Opinion: so you want to be Chancellor?

By George Kendall | Fri 3rd September 2010 - 11:57 am

This thread is for you to say what you think should be done about the deficit.

  1. How much do we need to cut the deficit by?
  2. When should we start cutting?
  3. 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 …

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Tagged | 17 Comments
Simon Foster

The Independent View: the Alternative Vote – what about the House of Lords?

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 …

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Carl Miller

The Independent View: Confronting conspiracy theories is a classic case of civic society trumping central government

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 …

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Also posted in The Independent View | 29 Comments
Mark Pack

The verdict from history: bring back Gordon Brown

By Mark Pack | Thu 2nd September 2010 - 10:57 am

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 …

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Chris White

Opinion: Coalition’s boozy consultation

By Chris White | Thu 2nd September 2010 - 9:50 am

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 …

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Stephen Tall

Half a defence of Paul Staines (aka @guidofawkes)

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 …

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Iain Roberts

Paul Staines, William Hague and questions for bloggers

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.

Claims are often made for …

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The Voice

The Independent View: Towards interactive government

By The Voice | Wed 1st September 2010 - 5:52 pm

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

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?

…

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