Thorne Godinho is a member of the Democratic Alliance, the Lib Dems’ sister party in South Africa.
Since 1997 the United Kingdom has brought in new laws that many fascists would wholeheartedly admire. Civil liberties, individual freedoms, personal autonomy and private property rights are ignored by the Labour-run government – who would rather pursue their idea of a better society, than a free one.
Tony Blair’s dynamic leadership, coupled with the more centrist vision of his party, won New Labour the election in 1997; but 13 years of Labour rule has shown that the former socialist party is still essentially …
Since the World Cup of 1966 there has been a number of occasions for the British to hear the first lines of the former German national anthem: “Deutschland über alles. Über alles in der Welt” (“Germany above all, above all in the world”). Should a new line been added in the wake of the recent Greek crisis, and in the wait for the next one? Then it would go as “German above Europe”.
As the third major country in the EU, with France and Germany, the UK opinion and leaders should pay heed, even if this distracts a bit from home …
It’s not often you’ll find me agreeing with Labour’s uber-spin-doctor, and Tony Blair’s apologist-in-chief, Alastair Campbell. But precisely because he helped write the New Labour election-winning manual, he is highly attuned to the failings in the Conservatives’ attempts to plagiarise it, and in particular David Cameron’s and George Osborne’s habit of mistaking tactics for strategy.
The latest example he highlights on his always-entertaining blog is the Tories’ attempts to force Labour onto the defensive by promising to reverse the increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions:
Amongst the plethora of writing on the 2008 US Election, I came across this observation:
“After every debate the media narrative was determined by the first two questions and answers.”
(J. Heilemann & M. Halperin, “Race of A Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House”, Penguin Viking).
I decided to see if that hypothesis holds true for the recent Chancellors’ Debate as a clue as to whether it will apply to our forthcoming Party Leaders’ Debates.
The first question, asked by a trainee solicitor, in the Chancellors’ Debate was,
“This is a job interview; what personal qualities do you have that make you better …
I am a 10 year old girl and I want to offer a child’s perspective of the election. I watched the last Prime Minister’s Question Time and National Insurance tax was the main subject of the debate. In fact, it seems to be the main subject of the election so far.
Is this election between Red and Blue over the effects of the recession on big business? Let me tell you what this election means for a child starting out in life. Big businesses recruit graduates from red brick universities. These universities, in turn, recruit students who are capable of undergoing a tough degree course. These students often come from private schools or the grammar state school systems. Where does the fairness exist?
Elections should be about change and a vote for a better run country on matters such as the NHS, housing, poverty, climate change, help for children, crime, security, personal liberty, terrorism, disability issues, equal rights and globalisation.
George Osborne and David Cameron are given to policy stunts which they should know by now will come back to haunt them. I’ve written about it before on Lib Dem Voice.
And this time they really have messed up big time. Should they win the election they will undoubtedly live to regret their foolishness on National Insurance and, most especially, the public sector savings they have cavalierly claimed can easily pay for it.
The people who know about these things – not company bosses who are quite understandably interested in reducing their company tax bills – have come out against Osborne and Cameron’s electoral cynicism and imprudence.
Skeptical Voter is a non-partisan project aimed at helping UK voters make an informed choice by documenting where each candidate stands on science, secularism and evidence-based policy.
Over the past few months we have been developing the Skeptical Voter wiki, a candidate database that works along similar lines to Wikipedia. Anyone can create or edit an entry, and our volunteers have been busily collating information about the views of incumbent MPs on issues ranging from the abolition of the blasphemy law to climate change science.
The Skeptical Voter wiki is already a rich source of information, with …
The Internet can be a nasty place at times, either with jabbering monomaniacs of Comment is Free threatening to collapse in on themselves and create a pit of nihilistic despair which will consume the Earth long before the Large Hadron Collider ever does; to minor local disputes or questionable professional decisions which flash around the world quicker, and generating more anger than reports of Frankenstein’s monster lurching towards the village.
Secure behind our computer screens, we can descend into an accentuated form of road-rage safe in the knowledge that we do not even have to worry about our opponents …
Gordon Brown has today announced one of his election pledges: Labour has no plans to make our tax system fairer. Or has he put it: Labour will hold the basic income tax rate at 20 pence in the pound.
Lib Dems, too, are committed to keeping the basic rate of income tax at 20p. But, unlike Labour, the party would make a priority of lifting the personal tax allowance to £10,000, ensuring millions of low-earners and pensioners will stop paying taxes altogether.
It’s a question that’s been playing on the minds of Lib Dems for some time: how can the party translate the popularity of the party’s deputy leader and shadow chancellor Vince Cable into votes for the Liberal Democrats?
Of Vince’s popularity there is no doubt. Two recent opinion polls (one for PoliticsHome.com, the other by Ipsos Mori) showed him well in front of his Labour and Tory rivals for the Treasury post, Alastair Darling and George Osborne.
And it’s not just members of the public. Just this week, a group of non-Lib …
For many years the researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have been investigating the relationship between wealth, inequality, and measurements of a good society. The measurements of a good society would be low levels of crime, low levels of teenage pregnancy, good health in terms of long life expectancy, low levels of obesity – and many other measures besides.
During their research they have published books on this, and finally they published the book “The Spirit Level“, which has had the biggest impact of all.
There are many countries that are poor, and clearly they need economic growth in order to …
It’s one of the most famous party election broadcasts of all time – John Cleese’s classic 1987 appeal to the British public to reject the extremism of left and right as represented by ‘Loony Labour’ councils and Mrs Thatcher’s Tories, and opt for the reasonable party of the centre, the SDP/Liberal Alliance.
For those who’ve never had the chance to enjoy it, please scroll to the bottom of this post, and re-live it in all its glory. (And wonder at the fact that party election broadcasts used to be 10 minutes long – yes, that’s right, 20 years ago political parties were foolish enough to believe the public actually had an attention span).
What’s most striking about the Cleese message is the deliberate emphasis on the Alliance as a moderating force in British politics. An honest broker in whom the British people could place their trust to ensure neither Labour nor Tory narrow-mindedness could wreak wilful destruction. Cleese commits the Alliance to breaking up the cosy rules of British politics that have so well suited the Labour/Tory duopoly for so many years.
Breaking the cosy rules of two-party politics
It’s two decades since this broadcast, but the themes are starkly familiar.
For example, there’s the Alliance pledge to halt petty partisan tribalism by agreeing to work with the other parties where we agree with them.
Well, Vince Cable early on called for a ‘government of national unity’ to help the nation through its worst recession in 60 years. More recently, Nick Clegg urged the formation of a cross-party Council of Financial Stability to agree the timetable and scale of deficit reduction.
Example two from the Cleese broadcast: the Lib Dems are the only party not beholden to special interests.
Spool forward two decades, and Labour still is in hock to the unions, desperately reliant on Unite, Unison and the GMB to finance its general election campaign. And does anyone really believe the Tories – the party of non-dom peers and candidates like Lord Ashcroft and Zac Goldsmith – will stand up to their “pinstriped Scargill” friends in the City?
Yet Nick Clegg has pledged to take tough action on those banks which break promises to lend money to businesses and householders, while Vince Cable has made it plain how the Lib Dems would intervene to make unions and businesses sit down and talk. It’s a lot easier to arrive at the correct solution if you’re not worried whether it will affect your party’s cash flow.
Not everything has stayed the same in the last quarter of a century, of course. Both Labour and the Tories have tacked further to the centre (not least because of the desire to pick up those voters who were attracted to the Alliance).
But the fundamental point remains: Labour and the Tories are complacently content for politics to stay the same, to see-saw between red and blue. It’s an argument the Lib Dems have freshened up in the past week, with the launch of the party’s subversive Labservatives campaign, a Web 2.0 successor to the Cleese broadcast.
A moderate square for the radical circle
It’s an interesting campaigning dilemma for the Lib Dems. In many ways, we’re party which has the most radical manifesto: a Lib Dem government would re-cast the taxation system, and re-mould the political system. Yet our natural voter base, and the party’s general disposition, is moderate, incremental, pragmatic.
Is this such a bad thing? Not really. The only way in which you can attract support for a radical manifesto is to win trust that your programme will work and is better. It’s at least in part why the party adopted community politics: prove to people you can fix the drains, repair the roads, run the council … and they might just trust you to run the country, too.
Well, it’s just the same at national level. At this election, the Lib Dems have the opportunity to position ourselves squarely in the centre of the key debate which will determine most people’s votes: the economy.
Don’t trust Labour to target government waste? Don’t trust the Tories to cut public spending wisely? Well, the Lib Dems are the party you can trust – and Vince Cable is the guy you can trust – to act as a moderating influence on the extremist tribal dogma of the other two parties. And by doing so, we can make the argument that only the Lib Dems have the vision to transform politics for the better.
After three years of ifs, buts and maybes since the “election that never was” debacle in 2007, we’re going to be put out of our misery this week.
The phoney war that has been fought out by the political class, to the bemusement of the electorate, is one of the least appealing aspects of our elitist political culture.
With this in mind, I must admit to being pleasantly surprised by responses from candidates to the general election policy comparison web initiative DEMREF 2010, which, for my sins, I have hurriedly got together in recent months.
A relatively inexpensive (£1.1 million) project kicked off in 2007. The idea was for local authorities on each side of the English Channel to work together for mutual benefit in some specific and limited areas.
Identification of the challenges in the Channel area and publication of a document defining the strategic orientations for the horizon 2007 – 2013;
Deployment of tangible initiatives structured around five themes:
* Tourism: creation of a common database on target tourist populations.
* Fishing and fish resources: constitution of a consultative regional council for fishing in the Channel area.
* Integrated coastal
As the Conservatives look set to help Labour push the flawed Digital Economy Bill into law before the election, Mike Simpson, Lib Dem candidate for SW Surrey, questions his opponent in the election – the Conservative media spokesman.
Dear Mr Hunt
Digital Economy Bill: another Parliamentary scandal?
A lot has been written about the growing gulf between the voting public and their representatives, voter apathy and low turnout. Candidates and the media do their best to engage voters but it’s an uphill slog. At this election in particular a low turnout is a real risk because people have been put off voting at all by a succession of scandals.
A lot has also been written about how the internet may help candidates connect with voters. Who knows whether this will be seen as the first ‘e-election’. But it has struck me for a while that candidates’ online campaigns …
Last week’s Daily Telegrapharticle attacking YouGov’s polling raises some disturbing issues about the quality of political debate as we fast approach the general election.
Firstly, the article’s authors seem to have no understanding about how polls should be conducted. They complain that the raw data in one large aggregated survey “were…‘weighted’ using an undisclosed YouGov formula which reduced the lead to sex per cent .” But all reputable pollsters know that their sample will not usually be representative of the population, for example by having too few women or too many Guardian …
As with all polls, what follows comes with caveats. Only three polling companies – YouGov, Angus RS and Mori – this past month asked questions specifically to find out the public’s views of the three main party leaders. And each asks variants on the basic question – do you think Clegg/Brown/Cameron are doing a good job – to come up with their figures, so comparison ain’t easy. But, still, we don’t indulge in polls often, so here goes …
Here, in chronological order, are the results of the four polls published in March asking the public to rate the three major party leaders:
With our intelligence and enterpreneurship we create micro-chips and send crafts into space, but the creation of jobs for the disadvantaged seems out of reach. The rich countries in the world still have a huge pool of unemployment and poverty at the bottom of society. A close analysis gives the insight that we actually create unemployment and poverty ourselves.
The following table gives the legal minimum wage in the US (dollars), in the UK (pounds) and in Holland (euros) as key examples for the rich world. The table is best understood from the principle of “don’t tax sweat”.
That is, workers at the minimum should be exempt from levies.
The Liberal Democrats should be applauded for focusing on business in their new policy paper, Enterprise in a fair society. In the context of the current economic crisis, the document reminds us that businesses produce the wealth that not only raises living standards, but also funds health, education and so on – a lesson arguably ignored by New Labour as they burdened firms with more and more taxation and red tape.
There are some excellent ideas. Of particular note is a proposal to incorporate a sunset clause into each new business regulation so that it is time limited. This could …
March may have 31 days, but it saw an extraordinary 39 polls conducted. So frenetic has been the activity, we at Lib Dem Voice even published a mid-month report to keep track of their findings. And despite all the hyped-up headlines – both in print and online – of minor fluctuations signifying some grand new trend which will transform the electoral arithmetic, the reality is that remarkably little changed in March.
As you can see from the full list of polls conducted in March, in chronological order of publication:
Tories 39.0, Labour 29.0, Lib Dem 15.0 (Opinium)
Tories 38.0, Labour 33.0, Lib Dem 16.0 (3rd March, YouGov)
Tories 38.0, Labour 32.0, Lib Dem 19.0 (4th, YouGov)
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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. …
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 …
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.
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 …
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...
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