Category Archives: Op-eds

Alex Hosking

FPTP is worse than you realised

By Alex Hosking | Wed 1st May 2024 - 8:17 pm

As we approach another election, it’s worth noting just how flawed First Past the Post (FPTP) voting is as a system for electing candidates in single-winner elections. David Cameron saw his career destroyed by not supporting Alternative Vote (AV), and now it appears Rishi Sunak will witness the rise of The Reform Party, potentially increasing the Tories’ losses at the election.

The biggest issue with FPTP isn’t merely that it encourages dishonest voting or that the concept of ‘most votes wins’ seems intuitive. Rather, its main flaw is that it can result in the election of the least popular candidate.

I have previously pointed out that first-past-the-post voting can indeed lead to the election of the least popular candidate. While discussing this in a forum with supporters of electoral reform, I was told, ‘That’s not true.’ It wasn’t that they insisted on this misconception; they simply assumed it couldn’t be the case until it was explained how. This isn’t an opinion, it’s a mathematically provable fact.

Unfortunately, some people, despite favouring other forms of single-winner elections, still view FPTP voting as at least an acceptable method for conducting elections.

In an election, our aim is to identify the most popular candidate, right? There’s an assumption that the FPTP winner is the most popular, while an AV winner might be more of a compromise. This narrative was propagated by the NoToAV campaign in 2011, with insufficient opposition from the Yes campaign.

In reality, the winner under AV is much more likely to be the most popular candidate. While FPTP often does elect the most popular candidate, it can also fail to do so. Although less common, AV can also fall short in this regard; however, it cannot elect the least popular candidate.

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Paul Walter

Doesn’t Rishi Sunak pay people to stop him doing stunts like this?

By Paul Walter | Tue 30th April 2024 - 2:00 pm

Embed from Getty Images

With Boris, I often thought that all you needed to know about him is the state of his hair. Having been brought up in a household of seven males, we had the morning hair procedure drummed into us. A bit of water, a comb, and do it nicely. All seven of us did it everyday and that was that. We carried a comb in our back pocket to neaten the old barnet during the day. So if someone in public life can’t master the hair neatening procedure then one begins to wonder if they are fit for office.

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Vince Cable

Made in Britain

By Vince Cable | Mon 29th April 2024 - 12:30 pm

In a factory in rural Durham, the government’s commitment to ‘levelling up’ and to manufacturing industry is being tested to destruction. The Hitachi railway manufacturing plant, employing 700 and thousands more in the supply chain, is threatened with closure. Procrastination over HS2, lack of joined up planning for the railway industry and Covid’s negative effect on travel have, together, led to a three-year gap in the company’s order book. The Japanese owners cannot realistically be expected to mothball the plant for three years and so it will most likely close.

I got to visit the plant (along with Lib Dem candidates including Aidan King the prospective Mayor for the North East). I went the day after Keir Starmer had been on a well-publicised visit, making reassuring, if non-committal, comments about the future of the plant under Labour. For me, the visit had deeper significance. A decade ago, I had opened the plant: then, a tent in a muddy field. Attracting Hitachi to build trains in Britain was one of the successes of the Coalition’s Industrial Strategy and, until very recently, it seemed to be an inspired investment decision for Hitachi.

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Amanda Clark

Caring for carers: what next?

By Amanda Clark | Mon 29th April 2024 - 11:15 am

It’s been a pivotal month for us carers in which our dedication to our loved ones has made the headlines for various reasons,  good and bad.

The good news was that Liberal Democrat MP Wendy Chamberlain’s Carer’s Leave Act finally became law on 6th April.

This provides all carers in employment with a new statutory right to take five days of unpaid leave from work each year to fulfil their caring responsibilities. Wendy, herself, said she would have wanted this to be paid leave but the principle is now enshrined in law and at least doors have been opened. 

 It must come as some relief to many families that are balancing having to work and care in this cost-of-living crisis. 

Both my husband and I worked full time to pay the bills whilst we were bringing up our two kids in the South East. We are proud of them both: one neurotypical, artistic daughter and our son who has Autism and a Learning Disability. 

Archie, now 21, needs constant care and supervision. Even when he reached an age that most teenagers could self-administer paracetamol and have a duvet day, we would have to take it in turns to negotiate time off with our bosses to look after him.  My husband used up countless days of Annual Leave when he was sick or I had an INSET day. We also needed to pay for a childminder after school as his special needs transport would deliver him home by 4pm and neither of us could leave work by then. 

As if that wasn’t hard enough, at the age of 16 he developed Epilepsy.

The months after this crushing diagnosis were made of nightmares while the neurologist tried to balance his meds. Right in the middle of teaching a French lesson, I would get a call from his school saying he had fitted, injured himself and they had called the paramedics. Trying not to panic, I would rapidly set work for the class, inform a colleague I needed to leave immediately and try to stick to the speed limit as I drove the twenty miles down the motorway to my injured son. The worst was time when he gave himself a black eye as he collapsed, convulsing on to a urinal – poor thing!

My Head Teacher was always supportive in the various emergency scenarios that arose but there was always the expectation that I would make up the time at some point with extra cover or more duties. It also came with the guilt that my colleagues had to compensate for my absences. 

I was, though, lucky and can imagine that other employers and employees may be less sympathetic. I really hope that the Carer’s Leave Act will remove the onus on us to make up for lost work time and lead to more empathy with colleagues. Quite frankly, we carers have enough on our plates. 

This new law is hopefully a stepping stone to so much more that can be done for the 2.4 million unpaid carers in the UK who save the economy an estimated £164 billion. 

Carer’s Allowance- changing to Carer’s Support Payment in Scotland, is now a meagre £81.90 per week or £4,258.80 per annum. For those of us lucky enough to live north of the border we can add in the supplements we get in June and December and we get a grand total of £4,836. That’s an hourly rate of 49p in England and Wales and 55p in Scotland -if you consider most of us are on duty day and night.

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Mark Valladares

29 April 2024: Welcome to my day – reminiscences of the Doctor…

By Mark Valladares | Mon 29th April 2024 - 7:30 am

The news that Dr Dan Poulter, the now ex-Conservative MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, has defected to Labour has come as a bit of a shock to many – and let’s face it, how on Earth could it have taken him so long to realise that the current Conservative leadership have no real interest in public services? – but I ought now to admit that the evidence was there as far back as 2010.

As the brand new MP for the constituency, elected that year, he came to the village as part of his “getting to know the patch” efforts – he was an “incomer” from Reigate and Banstead – and I had the opportunity to find out more about his politics. And, in truth, nothing he said then suggested that he would be any less at home in a Clegg-led Liberal Democrat party than in a Cameron-led Conservative Party.

What might have surprised me was that, with an obvious professional alternative – he’ll earn far more working for the NHS and, possibly, in private practice, than he ever would as an MP – he stuck it out in an increasingly alien Conservative Party. And not only that, he voted through a whole plethora of legislation that should surely have troubled him had he remained true to his supposed principles.

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John Grout

Liberal Democrats must push for recommendations of Fulford Report to be properly implemented

By John Grout | Sun 28th April 2024 - 1:00 pm

The report of Judge Coroner Sir Adrian Fulford was the conclusion of a long process that started well before the horrifying attack in Forbury Gardens in that warm summer after lockdown in 2020.

The attack rocked Reading and the communities around it hard; the report of the Judge Coroner should rock the country.  The process it concludes and summarises is a litany of failure after failure, from the clunking fist of state agencies such as the rotten Home Office right down to local, entirely understandable human failures on the ground which didn’t have good processes around them to stop them happening.

One thing that’s clear from the report is the siloed, hot-potato attitude of agency after agency, closing cases as they passed the attacker on to the next underfunded, constantly-fire-fighting agency so they could wash their hands of him.  Anyone who has worked in a complex organisation will recognise this classic symptom of chronic underfunding and toxic management.

Every time something like this happens, state bodies and agencies put out sombre statements of condolence, solidarity, and lessons being learned.  But as politicians trying to do the best for our communities, and particularly as Liberals, we need to demand better than this.

Every time something like this happens, equally, the same arguments are dusted off and wheeled out about better communication between organisations and agencies (obvious), better funding for them all (also obvious), and an inevitable increase in tough rhetoric about punishing this sort of thing, locking them up and throwing the key, giving ever more draconian powers to the police, and so on (depressing).

Our town will never be the same again after the events of 20th June, 2020.  So how do we make sure our response won’t be the same again either?

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Tom Arms

Tom Arms’ World Review

By Tom Arms | Sun 28th April 2024 - 10:05 am

United States of America

Here’s the problem facing the US Supreme Court: Should US presidents – in and out of office – have total or partial immunity from criminal prosecution for acts they committed while in the Oval Office?

Or does the failure to provide this blanket immunity expose past presidents to political vendettas by their successors or other political opponents?

Or would Donald Trump’s appeal for blanket immunity – in the words of Justice Elena Kagan – “turn the Oval Office into a sea of criminality.”

This week the Justices heard oral arguments from lawyers representing Trump on one side and Special Prosecutor Jack Smith on the other. The latter is attempting to bring the former president to trial for his role in the 6 January Capitol Hill riots.

The Justices will now go away and ponder the arguments and issue a decision several weeks from now. Court-watchers are split on what the decision is likely to be. Quite often one can determine the outcome from the questions the Justices ask. Not so, this time as the Justices are painfully aware of the impact of their decision on the actions of future presidents as well as those of Donald Jesus Trump.

Many observers think the Supreme Court will issue a split decision. This would please the Trump team as it would mean referral back to the lower courts and delay, delay, delay.

As the Justices ponder, they may consider the words of pamphleteer Thomas Paine, whose 1776 “Common Sense” had a major impact on the American War of Independence and the constitution which the Justices are sworn to protect. “Where,” wrote Paine, “is the King of America? In America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

United Kingdom and Rwanda

The British government has declared itself the final arbiter of reality. It has decreed that if it says that a country is safe then it is safe, regardless of whether it is or not.

Most everyone – except for the government of Rishi Sunak – agrees that Rwanda is not safe. Freedom House judges it as “not free”. Human Rights Watch says that protesting refugees have been fired on by Rwandan police. Others have simply disappeared. The Rwandan government is supporting the M23, a violent faction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which has been accused of war crimes.

For all of these reasons – and others – the UK Supreme Court in November ruled that the Sunak’s plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was “unlawful” because Rwanda is not a safe country.

So the government passed a bill which decreed that Rwanda is safe and the UK Supreme Court cannot say otherwise if the UK government say it is. A clear blow to the traditional independence of the British judiciary and its much vaunted respect for the rule of law.

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David Gray

Ofsted reports shouldn’t be reduced to a single word

By David Gray | Sat 27th April 2024 - 12:15 pm

The government’s decision to ignore a cross party committee’s recommendation to abolish one-word Ofsted judgements is the wrong one.

The pressure that school leaders and teachers feel in relation to Ofsted inspectors is huge. And it is not just those two days in which the inspectors are physically in the school; the intensity of being on ‘red alert’ for an imminent inspection can be just as bad – if not worse – than the inspection itself, not least because that period of time can last months if not years. The tragic death of Ruth Perry was a dreadful yet timely reminder of the stress placed on school leaders, and while legislation made in response to a single specific incident is rarely good legislation, this is hardly a new issue.

For schools in areas where competition is high, the difference between ‘outstanding’ and ‘good’ can be perceived as huge in terms of attracting applications from prospective students. But in reality, the actual difference on the ground can be very little, if anything at all. One school leader told me that their school, which had been judged as outstanding for a number of years, was downgraded to ‘good’, despite receiving an outstanding grade on the majority of Ofsted’s criteria. The narrative of the actual report was almost unwaveringly positive and in many cases glowing. Of course, to the outside eye, the school had declined since its last inspection, when in reality it had maintained, if not improved on, its excellent standards. One of the sections in the report hailed the school’s highly impressive arts department, with plenty of extra-curricular drama and music opportunities on offer for the pupils. However, these do not fit particularly well into the rigidity of Ofsted’s marking criteria. Off the record, inspectors suggested that, had the school ‘played the game’ of chasing specific progress measures, they would probably have avoided being inspected and thus remained ‘outstanding’.

And here is the problem with the single-word judgements. It can only be based on very limited criteria, and this will rarely reflect the broad spectrum of curricular and extra-curricular options available at a school.

One of the main arguments put forward in favour of single-word judgements is that it makes things simpler for parents. This is debatable, but even if true, it is both patronising and misleading. Although not a parent myself, I know from speaking to those close to me who do have young children that schooling is one of their biggest priorities. It is something that parents think about before they even become parents. So to suggest that they may not have the time or inclination to read a few pages worth of information on local schools in the area is bizarre.

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Tom Arms

Observations of an Expat: War is Expensive

By Tom Arms | Sat 27th April 2024 - 10:01 am

The $61 billion in in military aid that the US Congress voted for Ukraine this week is in the nick of time. The Ukrainians were literally running out of bullets to hold back the Russian steamroller.

But war is expensive. How much bang can the Ukrainians get for their American bucks?

Let’s start with the workhorse of the battlefield – the humble 155 mm artillery shell and the Howitzers that fire them. For the past few months a steady stream of shells from North Korean and Russian munitions factories has meant that the Russians have been lobbing five times as many shells into the Ukrainian frontline than the Ukrainians have into the Russian.

It has been working. The Russians have gradually pushed forward all the way along the 620-mile front and have captured the town of Aadvika. But the release of the American aid means that the Ukrainians can now start firing back at an anticipated rate of 8,000 shells a day.

Each basic 155mm shell costs $3,000. The all-singing, all dancing precision-guided variety can set you back as much as $130,000 a shell. The Anglo-American built howitzer that fires them costs $4 million.

The howitzers have a range of up to 20 miles, which puts them near the front and in harm’s way. The popular HIMARS (the acronym for America’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) is deadly accurate up to 186 miles. This means its mobile launcher (cost $20 million each) can be fired from relative safety. But make each shot count. The missiles cost $434,000 each.

NATO has been reluctant to provide F-16 fighter jets (price $50 million plus approximately $4 million for each air-launched cruise missile). But the Americans have given the Ukrainians thousands of Avevex Phoenix ghost drones at $60,000 a drone. These can be used for reconnaissance or to carry a high explosive on suicide missions.

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Rob Parsons

The paradoxes of public health

By Rob Parsons | Fri 26th April 2024 - 12:48 pm

The promotion of public health is a liberal policy. It is an effective tool in the development of fairness and equality, it contributes notably to health and happiness (thereby reducing the need for, and the expense of, medical care; and reducing the cost to businesses of time off work), it enables people to have much more effective control over their own lives, and many of the activities associated with it resist financialisation, which is one reason why it is so unpopular in right wing circles.

It is also a wide ranging field. Healthy populations need good quality, warm, dry housing; good education; good food; good opportunities for both rest and exercise. On the other hand, reduction of social housing, the obsession with reducing education to league tables, corporate control over food prices and ingredients, the selling off of parks and playing fields, all contribute to reductions in public health.

Fundamentally, good public health reduces the impact of poverty, ignorance and conformity in people’s lives.

Public health requires a community based rather than an individualistic response. This again is a liberal value. While we champion the freedom of individuals, we also champion the notion that we live together in communities, and that we affect, and must support, each other. It is an effective sphere for government to do what we cannot do so well ourselves. It utilises “the power of government to change conditions that are constraining people’s freedom”.

As a country we allow the debate to be dominated by advocacy of a freedom that takes no responsibility, by far too much misinformation, and far too little information. (A very clear example at the moment is when both government and media notice that the number of people off sick has notably increased recently, and wonder why. Without ever mentioning Covid, which we know has severe long term consequences for many who have had it.) As a party we allow ourselves too often to be trapped within those terms rather than campaigning to change them.

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Lord William Wallace

Parliament’s second chamber – and the weakness of its first

By Lord William Wallace | Fri 26th April 2024 - 9:46 am

The House of Lords is indefensible in its current form of appointment patronage and bloated size.  Yet the failure of the Commons to check the way the executive governs or to ensure that Bills presented don’t become law until that make sense has made the current Lords, flawed as it is, essential to British democracy.  Yes, that’s deeply paradoxical: an appointed chamber standing up for democracy against ‘the elected House’.

We’ve just seen with the Rwanda Bill the Commons voting repeatedly to allow the government to declare that Rwanda ‘is a safe county’ without reference to evidence or changing circumstances.  Cross-benchers in the Lords, led by retired judges and distinguished lawyers, insisted that it is an offense against the rule of law to legislate that what we say is true whatever the evidence suggests.  On Monday the Lords, reluctantly, backed down, after sustained cross-party cooperation in resisting in which Liberal Democrats had played an active part.  30-40 Conservative peers had refused, in the more loosely-whipped Lords, to vote against amendments to what they accepted was an unworkable Bill.  But after the longest series of ‘ping pong’ exchanges that Parliament has seen for many years both crossbenchers and Labour accepted that the government had to prevail, and Liberal Democrats could do no more..

Parliamentary democracy is supposed to be about representative institutions (and courts) carefully limiting the power of the executive.  But the Commons provide almost no effective checks on executive power, as opposed to the theatre of staged confrontation that is Prime Minister’s Questions and major debates.  The size of the government payroll has steadily increased over recent decades.  Junior ministers have spread, moving from one post to another before they’ve finished learning their brief, to a point where most Lords ministers are now unpaid – since there’s a statutory limit on paid ministerial posts.  Parliamentary private secretaries were limited to senior Cabinet minister 50 years ago; they’ve proliferated, attracting ambitious MPs who hope that loyalty will bring promotion.  Trade envoys, deputy chairmen of the party, ‘tsars’ with allocated tasks, all subject to dismissal if they disobey the whip.  The Labour opposition maintains a shadow team almost as large, which means that in total almost a third of the Commons behave like front-benchers rather than concentrating on holding the government to account.

Worse than this, the government whips have adopted the practice of blocking MPs who are expert but potentially independent-minded from appointment to Bill committees.  The result is that government bills sail through the Commons at speed, often unamended and as often with significant sections unexamined due to ‘guillotines’ on time allocated.

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The Voice

Drama in Scotland – could there be a Holyrood election?

By The Voice | Thu 25th April 2024 - 8:35 pm

Who would have thought that Scottish voters could face two national elections this year – and the first one for the Scottish Parliament before the too-long awaited Westminster poll?

If First Minister Humza Yousaf is forced to resign in the next few days, if the SNP can’t agree on a successor, if the Parliament can’t agree on a new First Minister within 28 days, then Scottish voters could be going to the polls on 4th July.

The SNP has been sharing power with the Scottish Greens for the past two and a half years with Green Co-Conveners Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater holding ministerial office. This morning Humza Yousaf handed them their jotters in an early morning meeting before announcing to the world that he had decided that the SNP would be better off going it alone as a minority Government.

You have to wonder whether he had thought through the implications for his own future. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that someone would put up a motion of no confidence and equally predictable that the party that he had just unceremoniously booted out of Government would not find it in their hearts to support him.

As things stand, his best hope is a tied vote next week, relying on the casting vote of the Presiding Officer to save him. But even that can only be achieved by doing a deal with Ash Regan, his former leadership rival who went off and joined Alex Salmond’s socially conservative, populist Alba party. And even if he survives the vote, clinging to power by your fingernails is not the best way to lead your party into a UK General Election.

You have to wonder why he let that happen.

There are undoubtedly some in the SNP who have been wanting rid of Humza since he was elected.

Last year’s SNP leadership election was so close with Humza only just beating Kate Forbes. Deep divisions were exposed within the party. Now the SNP can take a fair amount of division. They are a very broad church. But the only thing they really care about is independence and when they are divided on how to achieve that, and the prospect of it ever happening is moving further and further away, they are going to implode.  It’s hard to think of anyone in their ranks who could come close to bringing them together.

Their Government is failing at pretty much everything, as Alex Cole-Hamilton said in no uncertain terms at First Minister’s Questions today.

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Adam Belcher

A smoking ban isn’t “unconservative” – but it is illiberal

By Adam Belcher | Thu 25th April 2024 - 12:57 pm

Oxford University Liberal Democrats graduate and worst prime minister ever, Liz Truss, raised eyebrows last week by describing the government’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill as “unconservative”. This is rather odd, because the Conservative instinct has always been to ban the things they don’t like. They didn’t like the idea that children might find out that gay people exist, so they banned teachers from talking about them. They didn’t like that people in Scotland might be able to self-identify as trans, so they banned the Scottish government from allowing it. And, most pertinent to what I am writing about now, they don’t like (most) recreational substances, so for the past several decades they’ve wedded themselves to the disastrous so-called War on Drugs.

Conservatives have a very shallow understanding of what freedom is, and when a conservative starts talking about freedom, alarm bells should start ringing. What these rebel Tories mean by freedom is the freedom for people like them to continue doing the things that people like them have traditionally done, such as hunting foxes, making racist jokes, or in this particular case, smoking tobacco. It generally does not include things that people who are not like them want to do, such as protesting peacefully, being transgender, or smoking cannabis. Unfortunately for them, Rishi Sunak has realised that he’s only got a few months left in Downing Street to scrape together some sort of meagre legacy, and so now Truss and her friends are experiencing the cognitive dissonance that comes from a conservative government approaching smoking in a conservative way.

So no, Liz, our esteemed former comrade, a smoking ban is not un-conservative. Banning a health risk and deploying our overstretched police in a futile forever-war against it is actually a very conservative thing to do (and also a very Labour thing to do, but that’s neither here nor there). Conservatives have never understood true freedom; that is the liberal domain. Which is why-…. Wait, what do you mean, the Lib Dems voted for this?!

Let’s backtrack a bit. I was raised with a pretty simple message: drugs are bad and I shouldn’t do them. I’ve still never done them. However, when I was seventeen, I discovered that some of my friends had smoked cannabis. The idea that they could be treated as criminals for this disturbed me, and it was a big moment in my teenage journey towards embracing liberalism. I joined the Liberal Democrats a few months later, and I’ve enthusiastically supported our position on cannabis ever since. Friends in the party have been campaigning for legalisation for far longer than I have.

To be very clear, the failure of the parliamentary party to oppose this smoking ban has possibly fatally undermined our campaign on cannabis. Watching the leadership tying itself in knots trying to explain how these positions somehow aren’t incompatible by means of weapons-grade centrist nuance was embarrassing.

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Nick Baird

The Conservatives have just announced a big increase in defence spending – how should the Lib Dems respond?

By Nick Baird | Wed 24th April 2024 - 12:45 pm

Yesterday Rishi Sunak announced a plan to substantially increase UK defence spending, up to 2.5% of GDP by 2030. This announcement moves the Tory position from an aspiration to achieve this “when economic circumstances allow” to a firm plan with actual budget cash numbers from this year through to 2030.

The timing is interesting – it is less than two months since the Government passed its Spring Budget without any attempt to fund this aspiration, but since then two things have happened. One is that Keir Starmer moved Labour’s policy position to match the unfunded “aspiration”, and (perhaps more importantly) the Daily Mail ran a sustained campaign demanding a defence spending increase.

Beyond the spin and hyperbole of the speech and press release, the Government has also issued a supporting document with more detail, available here and the simultaneous release of this slick and glossy document indicates the Government has been working on this for a while.

In many respects, this is a sensible plan which actually aligns quite closely with the Lib Dem policy “Liberal Values in a Dangerous World” adopted at this year’s Spring Conference, including investing in people to tackle the recruitment and retention crisis within the Armed Forces and civilian MOD, providing a long term procurement pipeline to give industry confidence to invest in capacity and R&D, and reiterating the importance of alliances.

There are a couple of important things currently missing from the Government’s plans however. One is that the Government’s announcements so far do not commit to reverse the current cuts to the Armed Forces, for example in the size of the Army or the Typhoon fighter fleet. These are crucial issues, as the only way the UK could have more capacity available to fight a big war in the next 2-3 years is to reverse planned cuts now.

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Michal Siewniak

9th May – Was it worth it?

By Michal Siewniak | Wed 24th April 2024 - 11:16 am
One of the most amazing and precious things in our lives, in my view, is that we meet so many different people. Some encounters might be difficult and challenging, others can be inspiring and fulfilling.
We all have a wonderful story to tell. We have all embarked on this incredibly rewarding and rocky journey; a gigantic life adventure. Each one of these stories is unique and special in so many years.
In May, it will be 20 years since Poland and 9 other European countries joined the EU. So many European migrants left their countries of origin and settled in the UK. These individuals became our friends, neighbours, partners, wife, husbands or work colleagues. We have learnt a lot from each other, haven’t we?
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Lord William Wallace

Are we part of ‘the Deep State’?

By Lord William Wallace | Tue 23rd April 2024 - 10:00 am

If you have been reading reviews of Liz Truss’s self-justifying new book, you’ll know that she was defeated as Prime Minister by the sinister forces of the bureaucratic deep state. Michael Gove has for years called the same phenomenon ‘the blob’.  Others on the populist and irrational right call this ‘the liberal conspiracy.’  In the House of Lords some weeks ago, Peter Lilley began to attack the ‘liberal conspiracy’ that was preventing honest Conservatives from following ‘the will of the people’, and became almost incoherent when our benches began to laugh.  He clearly believes that these conspiratorial forces are real, and powerful.  How many of those in the Telegraph and Mail and on social media who write profusely about this actually believe in what they allege, as opposed to using it as a convenient way to attack ‘the Guardianistas’ and the reasoned consensus, is hard to tell.  But there’s no doubt that the message does convince some of its listeners that democratic institutions are biased against them, and that only their populist heroes can represent the pure people against the corrupt establishment – to which you and I all, according to them, belong.

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Robin Stafford

Health Podcast – The Elephant in the Room

By Robin Stafford | Mon 22nd April 2024 - 5:45 pm

In the latest of the Green Book podcasts we’ve looked at health, not from the usual angle of the NHS itself but at the health of the UK population.  If you missed it last month, you can still catch up. 

Why is it that we have one of the unhealthiest populations amongst developed countries? What might that mean in terms of demand and costs in the NHS, apart from all the wider social and economic consequences?  

It’s not as if this is news, as it has been covered in detail by people like Sir Michael Marmot, with his reports going back to 2010, and others before that.  Is it just about more money and resources for the NHS – or are we missing something in how and where we tackle the problems?

Norman Lamb chaired the session, having been a Lib Dem MP and health minister as well as the current chair of a health trust.  Joining him was Wendy Taylor who was a clinical oncologist as well as a current councillor in Newcastle with a particular interest in public health. Joining them we had two guests who are currently writing a book on the subject, which they have loosely titled ‘The Elephant in the Room’.  Roy Lilley and Ed Smith both have business backgrounds but have led and worked extensively with health trusts and both public and private health bodies.  Whilst being strong supporters of the NHS, they see the impossibility of dealing with the ever-escalating demands of an unhealthy population.  

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Tom Arms

Tom Arms’ World Review

By Tom Arms | Sun 21st April 2024 - 9:23 am

United States of America

Self-inflicted cracks are starting to appear in the MAGA edifice. The two Republicans wielding the sledgehammers are Alabama’s conspiracy theorist Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and, of course, Donald Trump himself.

The former president, has time and again, demonstrated a total disregard for the rule of law, or at least its application to his affairs. Next week the judge in his New York trial, Juan Merchan, will decide whether Trump is guilty of contempt of court for repeatedly breaching a gag order against his making comments about witnesses, jurors, the judge, the judge’s family or any court officials.

It is a legal courtesy for opposing legal teams to give a day or two’s advance notice of witnesses to give the lawyers time to prepare. The prosecution has asked the judge that they be allowed to withhold the information on the grounds that Trump is likely to issue intimidatory comments on his Truth Social platform. The judge has agreed.

Marjorie Taylor Greene – who has been dubbed “Vladimir Putin’s Envoy Extraordinaire to the US Congress” by Democrats and moderate Republicans – appears determined to totally destroy Republican credibility. Her main target is the $60 billion aid package for Ukraine which has been held up for months by far-right MAGA Republicans in the House of Representatives.

The package is expected to be approved this weekend. But Ms Greene is determined to make a last ditch effort to kill the aid bill with a series of outrageous amendments, including: No humanitarian aid for Gaza, withdrawal from NATO, no support for a two-state solution, and – best of all – a demand that any member of Congress who votes in favour of aid for Ukraine be conscripted into the Ukrainian army.

Ms Greene and the other members of the right-wing Freedom Caucus have managed to alienate moderate Republican congressman who are expected to cross the floor to vote with Democrats to pass the aid bill. Republican Congressman Derrick Van Orden said that he and his colleagues were “sick and tired” of being “bullied” and “blackmailed.”

Europe

America’s “cancel culture” came to Europe this week–and then cancelled itself.

Cancel culture, is a term used by mainly US conservatives to decry the efforts of liberals to block (or “cancel”) public appearances by right-wing speakers. The tactic has become especially popular American university campuses where left-wing student demonstrations have forced the cancellation of speeches by right-wingers.

Conservatives – quite rightly – see this as an attack on free speech.

This week the Edmund Burke Foundation, a conservative American think tank/pressure group, was hosting a conference of right-wing European luminaries in Brussels. Or at least, it was until it encountered the cancel culture of a series of Brussels mayors.

Trouble started the weekend before the event when one of the mayors of Brussels 19 districts decided that the Euro-sceptic foundation’s National Conservatism Conference would not be welcome in his district which included the EU institutions. He feared that the speakers’ anti-EU, anti-immigration and anti-LGBT views would attract violent counter demonstrations. So the venue was shifted to a building near the European Parliament where another district mayor turfed out the organisers.

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Katharine Pindar

Tell the young: look to the Lib Dems not Labour for progressive politics

By Katharine Pindar | Fri 19th April 2024 - 10:30 am

The Labour Party appears now to be following a Tory-light policy. Keir Starmer has ditched the £28 bn pledge to follow Green policies, regardless of the needs of young people to be able to consider their many years to come of living with climate change with some hope. And of their immediate extreme needs, for decent and affordable housing, it is the Young Liberals who strengthened the Lib Dem housing policy passed at Bournemouth last September (F31, ‘Tackling the housing crisis’) with a demand for thousands more social dwellings to be built.

On taxation, the two main parties seem to be converging, despite the Tories’ greater inclination (not fulfilled) to cut taxes. Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor, will keep to modest projected spending, obeying the same fiscal rules as the Government. The Tories have stolen the Labour proposed taxing of Non-Doms policy to help find funds for the NHS, and the Labour response is only to close the policy’s loopholes, such as not allowing a half-year pause before taxation begins. What other measures can Ms Reeves take? She plans to tackle tax avoidance, apparently, by greatly adding to the numbers of HMRC staff to investigate it. Since 56% of the tax avoidance is supposed to be from small businesses, the owners of such businesses must fear where her demands will light. Her aim is to cut the tax gap by £5bn by the end of the next parliament by that means. She has no policies for major gains from taxation despite the vast needs of our country today.

The one major objective to which both parties are adhering, to avoid adding to the National Debt through extra borrowing and increased taxation, is a questionable one. The required growth of GDP, set back by the limitations of Brexit, can only come from major investment, with government backing for example businesses utilising new technology, and greater promotion of industries increasing wind, tidal and solar power.

It is our party which is up to the job. In our councils up and down the country, Liberal Democrats are grappling with the problems caused by the deficiencies of funding for the hospitals, local government services, the pay of carers and of teachers, and for house building. The policies passed at our conferences demand better provision to meet the many national needs of our run-down country, and we are not afraid to demand the taxes necessary to pay for them.

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Simon McGrath

Biographical Directory of Parliamentary candidates

By Simon McGrath | Thu 18th April 2024 - 12:59 pm

Following a reference in the Journal of Lib Dem History I recently came across the most extraordinary labour of love, a biographical directory  of   people who have been  Liberal, SDP and Lib Dem parliamentary candidates from 1945 – 2019.

This is a 20 year piece  of work by Lionel King who I find from the directory is 87 , fought  Kidderminster in  1964, Sutton Coldfield in  1970, and Walsall South 1987, is  former chair of Birmingham University Liberal Society, worked as a teacher and then TV/Media lecturer in FE and held many roles in the Birmingham and  West Midlands Party.

The directory is divided into 14 parts, by region  and gives a fascinating insight into the range of people attracted to become our Parliamentary candidates over the years. In my own constituency of Wimbledon for example I could read about Alick Kay who stood for us in 1945 and was a former independent member of the New South Wales Parliament, George  Scott who ran in 1964 who fought two parliament by election for us in Middlesborough East and West both in 1962 and who is decribed as “very tall and slim, he tended to be rather aloof in bearing, not a strong public speaker”, Alison Willott in 1992 and 1997 who was a professional concert singer and mother of Jenny Willott who became Lib Dem MP for Cardiff Central and finally Paul Kohler candidate in 2019 (and current PPC ) and his campaign to  Save Wimbledon Police station.

The collator of all this Lionel King would love to hear from candidates with more up to date information (his email can be found in the directory). You can find the directory here:

https://liberalhistory.org.uk/resources-type/election-candidates-directory/

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Zagham Farhan

We should be ashamed of our failure to oppose the Smoking Ban

By Zagham Farhan | Thu 18th April 2024 - 10:15 am

The recent Tobacco and Vapes Bill, that passed its first reading in the Commons with an overwhelming majority, is decidedly anti-liberal and anti-freedom; and I’m extremely upset that the party leadership decided not to take a stand on this. When I first joined the Liberal Democrats, one of the primary reasons was that I believed us to be the last remaining party in this country to be fundamentally pro-Freedom, and to hold that as a core and imperative value. It seems that this is slipping through our fingertips.

The bill aims to do a number of things – my particular contention is with the idea of banning smoking for life for those who are turning 15 this year – thus making them a ‘smoke-free’ generation. It’s action on vapes is a separate matter, that I won’t address here. There are so many issues with this action, for anyone who cares about individual liberty.

Firstly, to smoke is an individual choice. Over recent decades, the wealth of scientific evidence has concretely proven the overwhelmingly devastating health impacts of tobacco – and I would argue almost no one legitimately disagrees with the idea that those who smoke know that its harmful. However, steps have been taken – such as the limiting of advertising and the proliferation of health advice – that have resulted in smoking rates also dropping significantly. In essence, people who smoke know what they’re doing. Restrictions on smoking in indoor places have also had an impact on second-hand smoking, again contributing to the idea that those who smoke are only harming themselves.

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Linda Chambers

Why Lib Dems should support measures to limit smoking this week

By Linda Chambers | Mon 15th April 2024 - 3:41 pm

I am writing in both a personal and professional capacity urging you to support the Tobacco and Vapes Bill due for second reading tomorrow. 

As a Liberal Democrat Councillor in Hull, I am the Portfolio Holder for Adult Services and Public Health and have responsibility for reducing smoking in a part of the country with some of the highest rates, with 500 people every year dying from smoking related illness. The impact is profound in a low-income community like Hull, and the cost to our local economy is around £390 million a year. 

I am an ex-smoker. I worked as a nurse for over 40 years; most of it in critical care in the operating theatres. There I witnessed over time the devastating effects smoking had on people’s lives. Often when going off duty I would pass patients all lined up outside, still smoking. Seeing this happening I made several attempts to quit smoking myself, but it was not easy.  My husband, Mike, did not give up smoking but supported me in my attempt.

I did not manage to quit before smoking permanently damaged my health and I now have COPD, a condition common among those of us who smoked for many years.

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Tom Arms

Tom Arms’ World Review

By Tom Arms | Sun 14th April 2024 - 9:36 am

Middle East

A quick round-up on Gaza, Israel, Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, America and everywhere else that is affected by the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.

President Biden’s “outrage” following the killings of World Central Kitchen aid workers resulted in an apology and two new aid routes: The Erez Crossing and the port of Ashdod in southern Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that as a result 400 aid trucks went through to Gaza immediately after the presidential fury. UN officials said the figure was actually 223.

Disenchanted State Department officials – of which there are a growing number – say that …

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Tom Arms

Observations of an Expat: Tyranny of the Majority

By Tom Arms | Sat 13th April 2024 - 9:31 am

“Democracy,” Winston Churchill famously said, “is the worst form of government – except for all those other forms that have been tried.”

Then there is democracy unchained, or without the restraints of the rule of law and free speech.  Also known as “the tyranny of the majority” or the “will of the people” or, perhaps, “democracy flawed.”

These are elected governments with political leaders who have harnessed to their own pursuit of power a perceived threat to the majority, or a growing, vociferous and politically motivated minority.

There are far too many examples to choose from but let’s focus on Hungary, Russia, Israel, India and the US for starters.  In each of these countries, the leaders (or wannabe leader) have won the support of the majority of the population either through lies or by allying themselves with a social movement which promotes one section of society at the expense of another.

Technically speaking, Israel is a democracy with carefully monitored and oft-held elections. Its American supporters are keen to point out that it is the only democracy in the Middle East and this makes the Israelis their only rock-solid ally in the region.

Twenty percent of Israel’s voters are Arabs. As the occupying power, Israel is also responsible for two million Palestinians in Gaza and another two million on the West Bank – none of whom have a vote.  Their rights and concerns are totally ignored by Benjamin Netanyahu because his political base is conservative Orthodox Jews. The Israeli Supreme Court has attempted to protect Arab rights. As a result, Netanyahu is beavering away at dismantling the court and its powers.

Vladimir Putin was recently re-elected President of Russia with 87.5 percent of the vote. Such a large figure is of course suspect, but most observers accept that Putin would have won regardless. He has successfully portrayed himself as the only possible leader of a nation under attack from wicked, grasping Western enemies. His answer is that the best defense is a good offense which means the pursuit of Russian imperial ambitions.

Viktor Orban has cast himself in the role of anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic saviour of ethnic Hungarians and European Judeo-Christian values. “We must state,” said Hungary’s right-wing prime minister, “that Hungarians do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed; we do not want our own colour, traditions and national culture to be mixed with that of others.”

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Lord William Wallace

It can only get nastier until the election

By Lord William Wallace | Fri 12th April 2024 - 5:26 pm

It’s not surprising that polls suggest that many young people in the UK now despair about democratic politics. The partisan Westminster debate has become more and more negative. Prime Minister’s Questions have been getting worse week by week, throwing insults across the floor.  The Conservative Party has run out of positive themes to appeal to the public, and is falling back on attempts to discredit all of its opponents.  The right-wing media are in full hysterical mode, while conspiracy theories, culture wars and ideas about ‘Christian nationalism’ flow from across the Atlantic along with American finance to support Tory factions and think tanks.  And the Labour leadership is sufficiently intimidated by the right-wing media that it is responding cautiously and nervously – as are we.

I am as frustrated as other party members by the apparent timidity of both Labour and our own party leadership in the face of this right-wing onslaught.  But I’m also painfully aware of the ruthlessness and effectiveness of media monstering, and the closeness of the alliance between Conservative HQ and the right-wing media.  As soon as the Post Office scandal hit the headlines, CCHQ set out to pin the responsibility on others.  The Mail responded by going for Ed Davey, supported (of course) by the Telegraph and GB News – with the Standard giving him a frontpage monstering a few days later.  If he’d apologised immediately that would have fed the attacks and maintained the front-page coverage.  There’s nothing fair about tabloid press campaigns.

Conservative researchers have combed through cases Keir Starmer had any involvement with as Director of Public Prosecutions, hoping to find some dirt to throw – so far without much success.  So their press attack dogs are doing their best with Angela Rayner’s council house sale.   The Mail has given this front-page treatment several times in the past fortnight.  It’s an indication of what the Conservatives get away with that the allegations on Rayner taking advantage of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right-to-buy’ on her council house came from Lord Ashcroft, who has avoided paying infinitely larger sums in tax through offshore havens like Belize.

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Mark Corner

A Tale of Two Polls

By Mark Corner | Thu 11th April 2024 - 9:02 am

There have been two much-publicised polls in recent days which have produced headlines in the press for their common message that the Conservative government is in deep trouble. A Survation Poll suggested that there would be just 98 Conservative MPs after the next election. The other, a YouGov Poll, suggested that the Conservatives would win 155 MPs. Quite a large difference, but in either case adding up to huge Conservative losses, and that is what the media have concentrated on. If they’ve mentioned any other party, it has been the Reform Party and its effect as a ‘spoiler’ of the Conservative vote.

What was much less commented upon was the fact that these two polls, both published at the beginning of April, and both based upon interviews conducted during mid-March, were widely divergent in their estimates of how the third and fourth parties (in terms of seats in the House of Commons) would fare. The YouGov poll suggested that the SNP would win 19 seats, a substantial loss compared to 2019, while the Lib Dems would win 49, restoring them to third-party status. The Survation Poll, on the other hand, had the SNP maintaining third-party status, losing only 7 seats (from 48 to 41), while the Lib Dems, despite doubling their seats to 22, remained very much in fourth position.

It might be thought that the massive discrepancy over the projected seats for Lib Dems and the SNP in these two polls would arouse some interest in the media. Yet it hasn’t. The only thing that hit the headlines was the coming Labour landslide (of which the politics guru John Curtice appears to be 99% certain now) and the huge Tory losses. No one pretends that these aren’t the main finding of the two polls, but the question of who comes third and fourth matters too.

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Chris Northwood

The culture war of the “gender-critical” has broken the NHS

By Chris Northwood | Wed 10th April 2024 - 12:55 pm

The Cass Report, billed as an independent review into NHS provision of transgender provision for adolescents was published today. I’ve read the summary and recommendations (the whole report runs to over 300 pages), and running throughout it are the scars of the so-called “culture war”—a social movement where transphobes who hold so-called “gender critical” beliefs have been campaigning to marginalise trans people and roll-back hard won protection in equality law.

The report itself acknowledges the toxicity of debate around transgender healthcare. I’m going to try and be fair to the report here and deal with it as neutrally as I can. Transphobia does not seem to be seeping out of its pores in the same way that a recent Department for Education consultation did, which explicitly framed the discussion through the lens of the “gender critical” philosophy.

It is undeniable the harm that the culture war fuelled by transphobia has caused, and this comes through in the report.

Anti-trans campaigners are litigious and well-funded (allegedly by far-right American fundamentalists), and using these legal weapons has been effective in securing their campaign goals in places with a management culture focussed on risk management and minimisation.

The result of this atmosphere of fear created by the anti-trans movement is one the review describes as a situation where other services in healthcare are scared to do anything when gender dysphoria is present. Instead, everyone is referred to the specialist gender services for unrelated or co-existing conditions, which they might not be able to deal with. This is well-known in the trans community as “trans broken arm syndrome“. This is true in both children and adults.

There is no doubt that in part this is due to the fear within the healthcare community of being dragged into the frontline of the culture wars, which has had the chilling effect of marginalising trans people so that only the gender clinics can help.

The Cass Review strongly advocates moving away from single specialist centres to a regional model of trans healthcare, closer to primary care. This is also something many trans people and advocates (including myself) believe would be a better system of healthcare delivery, but it describes the current situation as far from that. Other recommendations in the report are fair assessments of the current situation. In the void left by the failure of NHS healthcare, private providers like GenderGP have emerged, but their standards of care fall short of best practice (trans streamer F1nn5ter recently did a video about this). The Cass Report is right to be critical of this, and this is one of the biggest indicators of how current NHS provision fails.

Much is made in the report of the lack of quality research covering transgender health. Transgender health has often been seen as at best niche, and at worst, something to be actively destroyed. During Nazi rule, the world’s first and leading research centre was ransacked and the research burnt, as well as trans people being among the identities targeted in the holocaust. Other research has overly focussed on transgender women and bears an undercurrent of the fetishisation that we’re often targets of, yet remained influential in the field for decades.

One example of this is that there has never been a longitudinal study of the impact of progesterone alongside estrogen in feminising hormones, which are routinely denied due to evidence showing no effect on breast growth, but anecdotally has an effect on mental health, which has never been evaluated. The assumption of medical researchers that trans women are only interested in breast development, and not in the mental health benefits of the hormone which is available to cis women, is one example of research being rooted in trans misogyny.

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Paul Reynolds

Ukraine: are we absolutely sure we want a wider war? Part II

By Paul Reynolds | Tue 9th April 2024 - 4:32 pm

Embed from Getty Images

It has become quite mainstream now to portray Russia as an evil regime, about to invade Western Europe, that needs to be defeated at any cost (i.e. nuclear war … even though some such advocates don’t understand that implication). Until recently this was seen as a fringe conspiracy theory.

Sure, Russia has a pretty appalling power structure with a lawless mafia-ised system clustered around the Presidency, with it’s tentacles around Europe, Mid East and Africa. It is also technologically advanced, especially in military and space spheres, and has vast natural resources, managed centrally. Russia is not Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. It is formidable, and limiting its ‘ethnic Russians’ propagandised mischief-making, (eg Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Donbass and the Baltic States), without getting to a counterproductive World War, requires a sophisticated carrot-and-stick approach.

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Paul Reynolds

Ukraine; are we absolutely sure we want a wider war?

By Paul Reynolds | Mon 8th April 2024 - 4:25 pm

In war it is good to remember two bits of age-old wisdom, if unnecessary deaths are to be avoided; ‘know your enemy’ and ‘don’t believe your own propaganda’.

Ignoring these two adages led to the West’s humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, and Western-led conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Saharan Africa and Yemen, which have all been catastrophic for Western interests.

We now have a parallel in Ukraine.

As I wrote in LDV on 11th Feb 2023:

In April Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said ‘We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine’ and ‘Ukraine clearly believes that it can win, and so does everyone here’. At the end of the previous month the US President called for the removal of President Putin from power.

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Mo Waqas

Sometimes sorry just isn’t enough

By Mo Waqas | Sun 7th April 2024 - 1:08 pm

Wednesday was a day filled with sorrow and reflection as I learned about a tragic event unfolding in Gaza. A missile strike by the Israeli Defence Force claimed the lives of seven individuals associated with the World Central KitchenAid organization. Among them were three British citizens: John Chapman, James Anderson, and James Kirby. My heart goes out to the families of those who lost their lives in this catastrophe, particularly those working tirelessly to alleviate the severe food shortages plaguing the people of Gaza.

The mission of World Central Kitchen, to feed the most vulnerable under dire conditions, where some have had to resort to animal feed for sustenance, is nothing short of heroic. This calamity, however, casts a shadow on their noble work, revealing the precarious nature of providing aid in conflict zones.

The admission by IDF Chief Herzi Halevi, attributing the strike to misidentification, does little to assuage the gravity of the situation. The meticulous targeting of vehicles marked with the World Central Kitchen emblem seems to point to a breakdown not just in the fog of war but in accountability and oversight by one of the world’s most technologically advanced militaries.

In a separate, equally disturbing event, a suspected Israeli strike demolished the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria. This act, resulting in the death of seven members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), escalates tensions further and breaches the sanctity of diplomatic missions, a cornerstone of international relations.

These events have reignited the discourse on the Israel-Palestine conflict, underscoring the urgent need for peace and the problematic nature of ongoing arms sales to Israel. Calls for a ceasefire from former Supreme Court Justices and reconsideration of support for UNWRA highlight the potential complicity in serious violations of international law.

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