Category Archives: Op-eds

David Howarth

David Howarth writes … Now is the time to reform our penal policy

By David Howarth | Fri 2nd April 2010 - 10:45 am

Last month the Howard League for Penal Reform launched its Take Action 2010 campaign, with the general election in its sights. The campaign reflects a growing consensus among experts and campaign groups that penal policy has reached a crisis point.

The Howard League’s campaign covers four policy areas – investment in the community not prison, ending short prison terms, justice for children, and creating a scheme of real work inside existing prisons. All four of these themes echo Liberal Democrat thinking and I very much welcome the campaign.

Billions of pounds are spent on maintaining our prisons and …

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Obhi Chatterjee

Open Rights Group flashmob serves disconnection notice on UK Music #DEBill

By Obhi Chatterjee | Thu 1st April 2010 - 9:14 pm

DEBill flashmob at UK Music
Filmmaker Obhi Chatterjee, one of the team behind the Lib Dem Spring Conference emergency motion on Freedom, creativity & the internet, describes the experience:

It was while following #DEBill on Twitter on the train that, with just over an hour to go, we discovered where we had to be at 12:15. In front of London’s Dominion Theatre, near Tottenham Court Road. Bring a police helmet and clipboard if poss.

My father had struggled to understand how we could have left home knowing only that we had to be in central London at a certain time. We had aimed for Trafalgar Square.

I recognised Open Rights Group‘s Executive Director, Jim Killock, from his Facebook photo. A few people were distributing imitation police helmets and clipboards. A journalist was asking people why they were there.

The sheet on the clipboard explained what we had to do and where we had to go: the Soho offices of UK Music, a short walk away.

Once there, we were to wander up and down outside the building, looking officious. Perhaps everyone was too good-humoured and smiling a bit too much for that.

Still, there were quite a few photographers and video cameras around to record the event.

Staff heading out of the building for lunch didn’t seem to be very conversational. I can’t imagine they mistook us for MI5 …

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Julia Goldsworthy

Julia Goldsworthy: we’re too centralised

By Julia Goldsworthy | Thu 1st April 2010 - 2:20 pm

The extent to which this country has become centralised is, for me, best summed up by one fact. According to evidence collected through the ‘Total Place’ pilots – a series of initiatives aimed at delivering better public services at lower cost by reducing overlap between organisations – only £350 (a mere 5%) of the £7,000 spent per head on public services each year is discretionary spending by local councils. This is the stark reality of localism after 13 years of Labour government.

By contrast, localism is at the heart of everything the Liberal Democrats stand for. It is part of our …

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Stephen Tall

Forget hung parliaments. This is the general election result which is truly scary.

By Stephen Tall | Wed 31st March 2010 - 11:45 am

For the last month the opinion polls have been suggesting a hung parliament is the most likely outcome of the forthcoming general election. This has spooked some of those “pin-striped Scargills”, who would much rather their Tory friends were able to start slashing public spending without the restraining need to build consensus ahead of what will be inevitably painful cuts.

It’s an odd argument: in previous serious crises, whether war or depression, most people in Britan have recognised the need for petty tribal differences to be set to one side. After all, we are supposed to be all in this together.

But in the last day or so, there seems to have been a slight upswing in support for the Tories on the back of Alistair Darling’s third budget. It’s far too early to say yet that it’s a real trend, but still – it looks more likely this week than it did last week that the Tories will sneak back in with a slim majority.

And that’s the result that should worry everybody.

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Ed Randall

Opinon: Wolf at the door – and about time too!

By Ed Randall | Tue 30th March 2010 - 5:45 pm

In his piece entitled “Back to the Future”. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times hits most nails on the head. He also sets a challenge for those who want to do more than occupy the green benches to the right of the Speaker’s chair.

He believes that Labour and Conservative politicians have simply turned their backs on the need to fashion and campaign for economic and social policies that equip the UK to meet the challenges of the decade ahead. The formula for economic growth that emerged under Thatcher, which was inherited and uncritically maintained by Blair and Brown, relied …

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Opinion: After the Crash – Re-inventing the Left in Britain

By Richard S. Grayson and Jonathan Rutherford | Tue 30th March 2010 - 2:45 pm

Jonathan Rutherford and Richard S. Grayson are the editors of a new book, After the Crash Re-inventing the Left in Britain, available to download as an e-book here. Here they write about why they think all progressive voters need to join together to defeat neo-liberalism in all walks of life.

The election approaches and Britain begins the long haul out of deep recession. In such a crisis, one would expect an alternative to neo-liberalism to be riding high in the polls. Instead, the party which is ahead, the Conservative Party, offers no alternative. The Labour leadership differ only by degrees.  …

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Also posted in Books | 2 Comments
Philip Sheldrake

In Vince Cable We Trust

By Philip Sheldrake | Tue 30th March 2010 - 11:50 am

A pretty obvious statement to make on this site, “In Vince Cable We Trust”, but it’s also the name for a new campaign established by a small group of marketing, communications and technology professionals with the single stated aim of making Vince Cable the next Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The group is apolitical. In fact, despite being the leader of this merry band, I have voted for all three main parties at some point in my life. But with all government departments’ policy making being strangled by the emptiness of the public purse, the role of Chancellor of the Exchequer will …

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Stephen Tall

Ask the Chancellors: the post-match analysis

By Stephen Tall | Tue 30th March 2010 - 9:29 am

Let’s start off with the sentence you’d expect me to write: Vince Cable won last night’s Channel 4 Ask the Chancellors debate. There, I’ve said it.

Of course, it’s not just me saying it. It’s also The Guardian (“Vince Cable draws first blood”), the Telegraph (both Ben Brogan and Janet Daley), New Statesman (“Cable triumphs”), Channel 4 (Cable “man of the match”), Financial Times, Spectator and Independent (“Cable comes out on top”). And I’ve probably missed a few others.

Vince Cable

Vince started off with two big advantages, and two big disadvantages.

First, the advantages: he understands the economy, and how to convey a message to voters, like no other British politician. He looks the part – a very reasonable, persuasive bank manager – but he can also twist the knife with a turn of phrase that leaves its victim sprawling and the audience smiling.

The second advantage was a much simpler one: he was stood in the middle of the set, and – as a tall man – was able to dominate the proceedings, by turns interrogator, at other times umpire. But always in control.

Now to the disadvantages.

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11 Comments
Chris White

Opinion: As another New Labour project dies, what will replace it?

By Chris White | Mon 29th March 2010 - 10:50 am

On 31st March regional assemblies will be abolished. There will probably be neither bang nor whimper.

I will be sad. This was one of the projects of New Labour that nearly took wings. And it leaves a void in both regional governance and in our own party’s thinking on what we do about devolution.

In the longer term there are also questions about the viability of the Union – if Scotland, Wales and to a much lesser extent London are allowed (if that is the right verb) to run themselves, why can’t the rest of England? More to the point, why must …

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Don Foster MP

Don Foster MP: Standing at football grounds

By Don Foster MP | Sat 27th March 2010 - 1:45 pm

Football fans are getting a raw deal. 1.4 million who want to play football can’t due to scant facilities. Season tickets for top clubs are a rip-off; costing 5 times more than in Spain and Italy. Disabled fans are treated shamefully. Only two Premiership Clubs meet the recommended level of number of spaces specially designed for wheelchair users. The game is disappearing from free-to-air TV.

And fans can’t stand at matches, though many want to. According to the Football Fans’ Census, 91% of fans think they should be able to choose to stand.

Of course, none of us can forget …

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Caroline Pidgeon

How long can Boris Johnson carry on defending the indefensible?

By Caroline Pidgeon | Sat 27th March 2010 - 10:20 am

Caroline Pidgeon is a Liberal Democrat London Assembly Member and member of the London Fire Emergency and Planning Authority (LFEPA)

Walking out of a meeting as a protest is something I would not normally recommend, but last week I felt had no other option and left a key budget meeting of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA). Both the Lib Dem leader on the Fire Authority, Councillor Ed Butcher from Haringey, and I knew we had to make a protest at the decision of the Conservative Chair Brian Coleman to prohibit TV cameras from filming the meeting, and Coleman’s decision to …

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Stephen Tall

Is this the general election result that would usher in electoral reform?

By Stephen Tall | Sat 27th March 2010 - 8:45 am

So the polls are narrowing, the Tory lead tottering along within the range of 2-7%. As we all know, the Tories need to poll at around 40% to be sure of a working majority, or else they will have to significantly out-perform their national ratings in the key marginal battlegrounds.

And if they don’t succeed? Well, that will clearly be a disaster for David Cameron’s leadership which has been predicated on the fact that he’s the Tories’ talisman. A hung parliament with a minority Labour/Tory government, perhaps with the tacit consent of the Lib Dems, appears at this stage the …

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Also posted in General Election | Tagged | 9 Comments
Bridget Fox

Digital Economy Bill latest – two cheers for the LibDem team

By Bridget Fox | Fri 26th March 2010 - 8:08 pm

As Liberal Democrat Voice has reported in depth over recent weeks, there was a surge of debate around the party’s response to the Digital Economy Bill, leading to our open letter from PPCs, and the emergency motion passed at conference. Great joy.

Then it all went quiet.

There has of course been a little matter of the Budget. MPs and candidates have been, quite rightly, out on the hustings and the doorsteps. But if our Parliamentary party were otherwise engaged, the blogosphere was not. The dedicated campaigning of the Open Rights Group was joined by the 38 Degrees lobby. They have objected not only to the content of bits of the Digital Economy Bill, but also the obvious concerns about its process.

If nothing else, this Bill has highlighted to a new generation of voters the urgent need for Parliamentary reform. The unelected second chamber; ridiculous rush, horsetrading and lack of debate of the washup; the way a Government elected with a minority of the vote can railroad through legislation – all of this must change.

The Open Rights Group anti-disconnection rally took the issue from the screen to the streets, and I was delighted to be invited to speak on behalf of our party. As I told the crowds, we started campaigning for Freedom of Information against a Tory government; now we are campaigning for free exchange of information under Labour. When you deal with a death, there is a cycle of emotion from grief through anger to acceptance. When it comes to the death of our freedoms under Labour, as Liberal Democrats we may be aggrieved, we are angry, but we will not accept it.

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Ed Randall

Opinion: Opportunities abound and our opponents have rarely been so uncertain and unconvincing

By Ed Randall | Fri 26th March 2010 - 4:31 pm

Alistair Darling’s pre-budget and pre-election speech was well done. Good knock about in which he steered clear of presenting a budget. David Cameron’s response not only rivalled Darling’s in terms of vacuity, on economic policy, but was too angry by half given the emptiness of his own party’s plans and proposals.

Nick Clegg did fine. It wasn’t a riveting parliamentary performance but it was a workmanlike and honest response to the budget speech, and it did what Nick and Vince must have hoped it would do: it got out the LibDem message efficiently and ensured that key LibDem sound bites …

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Iain Roberts

£104 to read the Times online – how will the blogosphere react?

By Iain Roberts | Fri 26th March 2010 - 8:20 am

News International announced this morning that, from June, we punters will have to cough up £2 a week to read the Times and Sunday Times online – a cool £104 a year.

The sound you hear is bloggers choking on their breakfast cereal.

The move makes a lot of sense for News International.  True, their online readership will plummet.  But, unlike most bloggers, Murdoch’s willy-waving is based on the size of his bank balance, not his number of unique visitors.  Online advertising, for everyone except Google, hasn’t proved to be the magical money-making machine we were promised, and there’s only so much …

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11 Comments
Alex Foster

Guardian readers switching to Lib Dems in droves

By Alex Foster | Thu 25th March 2010 - 11:56 am

Wednesday’s editorial for the Guardian – which I found online here – is one of those pieces you see all too often in the Guardian, the time honoured preparation of the nose peg. Hold your nose, disregard the stench and put the cross by the rose.

It tries to find some vestige of hope in the Labour party, one thing remaining that is still worth voting for. But it’s the penultimate paragraph and not its conclusion that rings truest:

The party’s activists and MPs are so obviously convinced of their own decent intentions and past record that they fail to

…

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Iain Roberts

Home Office offers comedy response on terrorism legislation

By Iain Roberts | Thu 25th March 2010 - 9:10 am

We are pleased that the committee recognises our commitment to human rights, which are at the heart of our counter- terrorism legislation.

That’s the Home Office response to a cross-party parliamentary committee which has criticised the Government’s terror legislation and the nearly-nine-year public emergency we are still in.  Who said satire was dead?

The question is, and has always been, how best to balance the need to keep society safe against the human rights of those who, whether innocent or guilty, may be caught up in those efforts.

The Lib Dem view, and now the view of the joint committee …

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Chris White

Opinion: quangos, centralisation and less democracy – who’d have predicted that from Labour?

By Chris White | Wed 24th March 2010 - 7:15 pm

The mountain laboured and brought forth a mouse. But not a very nice or useful mouse.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has at last produced a ‘policy statement’ entitled ‘The Modernisation review of public libraries’. There is little radical and little of benefit to the public, indeed precious little modernisation. The library establishment and quangoland by contrast have much to be pleased about.

The paper contains a long list of instructions for local authorities and even specifically for local authority chief executives: no role for councillors here. Local authorities must set flexible opening hours to suit the needs of local …

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Dave Dyke

The Independent View: England Left Forward – the reason for its foundation

By Dave Dyke | Wed 24th March 2010 - 3:50 pm

One of the major successes of the past 13 years, depending on your point of view, has been devolution. The establishment of Parliaments and Assemblies has transformed the governance and the culture of three of the four nations within the Union. However, this has left a big question at the heart of government, which ash also had a knock-on effect culturally:

How should England be governed?

This is often referred to in the media as “The English Question”. It is a question that the major political parties have, so far, avoided answering in a satisfactory manner. In fact, the major parties seemed to avoid any …

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Also posted in The Independent View | 36 Comments
Mark Pack

Low earner Liberal Democrats: the rural dimension

By Mark Pack | Wed 24th March 2010 - 10:20 am

In talking about the low earner Liberal Democrats this week, I have emphasised the urban aspect:

It’s a group of people that is not that often explicitly addressed in Liberal Democrat policy debates or campaigning and messaging discussions, expect in as much as they are part of the millions who would benefit from the party’s policy of raising the income tax threshold to £10,000.

Yet these low earner households have been the bedrock of many of the party’s biggest electoral successes in the last decade. The party’s control of a string of large cities – Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle, Bristol and so

…

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Mark Pack

The low earner Liberal Democrats

By Mark Pack | Tue 23rd March 2010 - 10:20 am

Yesterday The Voice ran an op-ed from the Resolution Foundation’s Sophia Parker about the, “9.4 million working-age ‘low earners’ – those people living on an average household income of £15,800 while remaining broadly independent of state support.”

It’s a group of people that is not that often explicitly addressed in Liberal Democrat policy debates or campaigning and messaging discussions, expect in as much as they are part of the millions who would benefit from the party’s policy of raising the income tax threshold to £10,000.

Yet these low earner households have been the bedrock of many of the party’s biggest electoral …

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Sophia Parker

The Independent View: five key priorities for the UK’s low earners

By Sophia Parker | Mon 22nd March 2010 - 3:20 pm

Today, the Resolution Foundation launches our open memo to the next government.  In it, we propose five key priorities which we believe will improve outcomes for the UK’s 9.4 million working-age ‘low earners’ – those people living on an average household income of £15,800 while remaining broadly independent of state support.

These are families who may not be the poorest in society, and they are not in crisis. Nevertheless their economic independence is fragile and they are living at the very edge of their means. 56 per cent have experienced a drop in income since the start of the recession – and …

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Mark Thompson

The Liberal Democrat general election prospects: what does history say?

By Mark Thompson | Mon 22nd March 2010 - 12:22 pm

I was having a look at data from previous elections recently with a particular focus on the number of seats and percentage of votes gained by the third party in the last few decades.

The first thing that is clear and which I already knew is that in the last three general elections, the Lib Dems have consistently increased their number of seats. The figures are:

1997: 46 (+26)
2001: 52 (+6)
2005: 62 (+10)

The huge leap in 1997 is often put down to our improved targeting campaign techniques championed by Chris Rennard.

There is something else interesting in the figures which I had not …

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Also posted in General Election | Tagged and | 20 Comments
Mark Pack

Word of mouth election? That’s so 1997

By Mark Pack | Sun 21st March 2010 - 10:16 pm

Douglas Alexander’s soundbite about wanting to make 2010 the “word of mouth” election has got a fair amount of coverage in the last few days, such as in this mostly thoughtful piece by Andrew Rawnsley.

Why do I only say “mostly thoughtful”?

That’s because it’s a good piece, but also displays a weakness so common in contemporary British political commentary. It’s the feeling that it’s more important to talk about what an American did a couple of years ago than how the British political system has worked over the last few elections.

Because if you want “word of mouth”, and you know …

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Helen Duffett

The Leaders’ Wives obsession: why it’s missing the point

By Helen Duffett | Sun 21st March 2010 - 9:23 pm

Tonight it’s Nick Clegg’s turn for a Sunday evening party leader’s interview – with Mary Nightingale on ITV1 at 10:15pm.

Miriam Gonzalez Durantez (Nick’s wife) also appears in the programme. At first I was dismayed that Miriam might be wheeled out as yet another politician’s wife, dreading revelations about socks or other foundation garments…

Until I watched her in this extract :

I don’t like that name: “political wife”. I’m the wife of a politician… I don’t have a role. I’m just married to him…

…It’s a personal choice and I think it’s perfectly possible to have a normal life

…

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Stephen Tall

Pollwatch – State of the Parties: Lib Dems 18%, Labour 31%, Tories 38% (Mar. 2010 so far)

By Stephen Tall | Sun 21st March 2010 - 4:45 pm

With 15 polls already published so far in March, it’s time for a mid-month reality check on the state of the parties. Some parts of the media watch the polls with breathless excitement, investing even the smallest fluctuations with a significance well beyond what they can bear: a bad-tempered PMQs, a 24-hour Westminster Village row, an ad campaign – any and all of these are sometimes said to have affected the polls.

Well, maybe. But most poll movements are within the margin of error, so it is only looked at over a reasonable period of time that you can detect whether there has really been any significant movements between the parties. So let’s look at the polls published in March to date, in chronological order of publication, to see if we can detect any trends:

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Also posted in Polls | 6 Comments
Robert Draper

The Independent View: A new electoral system

By Robert Draper | Sun 21st March 2010 - 12:50 pm

We all understand the disproportionate effects of first past the post (FPTP), but what about the distance it puts between voters and politicians?

The size of constituencies used in FPTP, and the even larger ones used in STV, mean that politicians can’t hear the voices of individual communities clearly. The link between voters and MP gets weaker the larger the size of the constituency they are elected in.

There is only one electoral system that will make the gap smaller and deliver proportional results, non-contiguous first past the post. For an explanation on how this works, click here.

…

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Also posted in The Independent View | 19 Comments
Julian Astle

The Independent View: A Lib-Con coalition? Don’t hold your breath

By Julian Astle | Fri 19th March 2010 - 9:20 am

In the past week, the Conservatives have been talking up their chances of doing a deal with the Liberal Democrats if the forthcoming general election fails to deliver them a working majority. Conservative shadow business secretary Ken Clarke has even suggested that “Nick Clegg is a conservative”. David Cameron meanwhile regularly describes himself as a “liberal Conservative” and has claimed that on a range of policy issues, “there’s barely a cigarette paper between us”.

But in a new report from CentreForum, the liberal think tank, we argue that the two parties’ similarities …

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Jack Holroyde

Opinion: Today is a good day to be a Lib Dem

By Jack Holroyde | Thu 18th March 2010 - 11:35 am

As dawn broke over Bronte House, South Kilburn, I realised.
I realised that with this beautiful sight (the dawn, not Bronte House!), change was coming.

My local MP will soon cease to be Sarah Teather (Lib Dem, Brent) and soon will be Ed Fordham (Lib Dem PPC, Hampstead & Kilburn). Boundary changes mean that the tiny triangle of estate that I call home is being cut and pasted into the new Hampstead & Kilburn constituency. So, it feels a little like moving home.

But looking at the wider picture – change is coming.
Let …

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Jim Killock

The Independent View: The Digital Economy Bill should not be pushed through without proper scrutiny

By Jim Killock | Wed 17th March 2010 - 12:50 pm

Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, writes about the Digital Economy Bill:

The Open Rights Group would like to thank the Lib Dems for taking a strong policy stance against the Digital Economy Bill’s disconnection and web blocking proposals.

The biggest danger now is that Parliament will not debate or amend the Bill at all. After the budget, the Bill could be passed with little or no debate, as the election must be called within the next few weeks. The result could be that the Bill becomes law in very bad shape.

The Lib Dems have a very significant role …

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Also posted in The Independent View | Tagged | 12 Comments
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