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Category Archives: Op-eds

Community involvement in housing is a great future for policy

By Elizabeth Jones | Fri 22nd September 2023 - 10:46 am

In the interests of transparency, I am not impartial (is anybody?). I am a volunteer director of a community land trust (not named as I am writing for the community housing cause in general). Also I am no longer a party member largely down to becoming exasperated with national party housing policies and the focus on being electable locally thus encouraging nimbyism. This policy could go further but is comprehensive and well thought out.

We cannot have arbitrary targets that are nationally set without paying the price. This cost was felt deeply during the COVID-19 pandemic with those in flats with no gardens, overcrowded with children and parents attempting schooling and working in 2/3 rooms. Local to me there was also a suggestion in my local area the unit targets be artificially met by implying micro pads could fill the gap in targets in affordable housing. This was of great concern as micro studios are worse than what many families are forced to endure in emergency accommodation. Most of our housing list is families; we don’t need commuter studios we need family homes.

However, today a leader I believed was part of the problem surprised me. Ed Davey has suggested exactly what is needed in the heart of many local authorities: A community-led approach to housing. This policy could have gone further and spoken more of the role of community land trusts and the role they could possess e.g. access to Community Infrastructure Levy and Section 106 Funds. These are usually incorporated local not-for-profits accredited by the FCA, so why not? They also are also by and large are committed to co-designing affordable housing at the most local level.

However, the reaction of many seems to be to ridicule and attempt to call this out for something it really isn’t. The disposal of current targets that count the numbers and bottom line rather than the quality is something to celebrate not scorn. Social housing is sorely needed and the private rental market is broken.

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Tagged ed davey and housing | 5 Comments

Dorothy Thornhill writes: A community-led vision to tackle the housing crisis

By Dorothy Thornhill | Fri 22nd September 2023 - 9:35 am

Housing and planning policy continues to provoke controversy across the country. The UK desperately needs more homes, particularly decent, affordable homes. But instead, too many politicians are only interested in point-scoring, attacking their opponents as either NIMBYs who will block any housebuilding, or in the pocket of developers who want to concrete over the countryside.

For years this Conservative government has paid lip-service to increasing housebuilding, but then repeatedly u-turned under pressure from their backbenchers, who simply don’t want new homes built.

It is in this context that the Liberal Democrats, at conference, will be discussing our new policy paper: Tackling the Housing Crisis. Our attempt to find a positive way forward in the face of a dysfunctional national debate.

The paper is positive about the need for new homes. It makes clear that councils should have well-evidenced 15-year housing targets – ensuring that there is no backsliding from building homes. Yet it also goes further encouraging the expansion and strengthening of Neighbourhood Plans, including genuine engagement with local communities in finding innovative ways of providing more homes and the sustainable expansion of existing towns.

As the former Mayor of Watford I’m well aware of how urban renewal and bringing back residential communities to town and city centres can be a sustainable housing solution that drives regeneration. But this development can only work if it’s combined with investment in infrastructure too. The government’s controversial new infrastructure levy is said to address this, but it will take a decade to be fully implemented.

We also need to ensure that we deliver homes that people can genuinely afford. Affordability is the major issue that no one is addressing. That’s why our paper is positive about delivering more social housing. It doesn’t shy away from setting a target for these homes, empowering councils with more powers to borrow in order to build. It is scandalous that the delivery of social homes has been given such a low priority.

In England’s beauty spots the issue of second homes and holiday lets is also not helping. This paper tackles that tricky question. People are entitled to buy properties from themselves or as a way of generating an income, but in some areas the market is so seriously skewed it prices out local people. So where councils can demonstrate that these homes are having a negative effect on their communities then they should have powers to address this including new planning classes to limit their numbers if needed.

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Tagged 2023 and housing | 12 Comments

The Independent View: WASPI is relying on the Lib Dems to lead the way for 1950s-born women

By Angela Madden | Thu 21st September 2023 - 8:29 pm

It is now eight years since we set up the Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI), to represent women born in the 1950s, whose state pension age was increased without proper notice.

As astute Lib Dems will know, the law was changed by John Major’s government in 1995, but neither his nor Tony Blair’s administration saw fit to tell women about these changes.

P60s were duly issued by HMRC each year, without a word about how women’s retirements would be affected. The DWP website continued to say the state pension age for women was 60 until 2016!

Liberal Democrats have been the leading party on this issue, taking the trouble to understand what our campaign is really about. Too often, ministers have hidden behind the completely false idea that we are arguing to reverse state pension age equalisation. Quite obviously, that would be absurd.

Our campaign argues simply that women were – through no fault of their own – heavily disadvantaged by the Department of Work and Pensions’ successive failures over some two decades. DWP’s own research in 2004 made clear that women simply didn’t know about the impending changes but still the Department did not get on with targeted mailings to those affected.

The impact of this incompetence and neglect is very real. In a recent survey of 8,000 WASPI women, we found that three in five had already given up work or cut back on their hours by the time they discovered their state pension would not be paid when they’d expected it.

As anyone in our age group knows, getting back into the workplace at that stage in life is often nigh-on impossible, and as such women found themselves falling back on meagre savings to see them through the gap from 60 to 66. No wonder one in three is now in debt and one in four has struggled to buy food or basic essentials in the last six months.

When we met with Lord (Dick) Newby recently to discuss the Liberal Democrat manifesto, he spoke for so many of us in saying it’s just unbelievable that this mess has yet to be sorted out. Since 2015, more than 250,000 of the affected women have died awaiting justice. Another dies every 13 minutes.

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Tagged pensions and state pension age | 21 Comments

Lib Dems for Ukraine

By John Sweeney | Thu 21st September 2023 - 7:25 pm

We have potholes. They have craters. We have a cost of living crisis. They have a cost of dying crisis. We have hospital waiting lists. They have a list of bombed hospitals. As I write this in Kyiv, Vladimir Putin is trying to kill me. Not just me but everyone in the Ukrainian capital. To be fair, Russia’s hypersonic missiles, sorry, elderly Russian ironmongery, keep getting shot out of the sky. But the war in Ukraine is not over by a long chalk. The charge sheet of Russian barbarism gets grimmer by the day: targeting civilians, torture, execution, rape, castration.

The values of Ukraine are our values: democracy, liberalism, we don’t just respect the other – we fight for them. Together, we must stand against the Fascist International. Our job as Liberal Democrats is to keep up the pressure on the Conservative government and remind the rather too many people in the Labour Party that the word of Vladimir Putin is not reliable, to put it mildly. That’s why we are setting up the Liberal Democrat Friends of Ukraine.

Three policies stand out. We must support Ukraine with the military hardware necessary for the defeat of Russian fascism. We must make Britain as welcoming to Ukrainian refugees as the European Union is: if you have a Ukrainian passport, you can stay and live and work in Britain for three years, just as you can in Germany, Italy, France, across the whole union. We must burn down Londongrad and send Russia’s ill-gotten gold to help rebuild Ukraine.

I am no arsonist. But Londongrad – where Russian oligarchs hide their dirty money – is a danger not just to Ukraine but also to our own democracy. For far too long, the Labour and Conservative parties let Vladimir Putin get away with murdering people in Britain because they liked the sheen of Moscow gold.

Senior figures in Labour and the Tories have been far too close to the Kremlin and its proxies for comfort. Tony Blair made a catastrophic mistake when he identified radical Islam as a greater danger than Russian fascism. To secure cover for the “war on terror” he went out of his way to cosy up to Vladimir Putin.

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Tagged 2023 autumn conference and ukraine | 3 Comments

The UK needs to be a lot smarter to challenge the rise of authoritarian regimes

By George Cunningham | Thu 21st September 2023 - 6:08 pm

Chinese President Xi told President Putin at their summit in Moscow this year: “Right now, there are changes, the likes of which we have not seen for 100 years. And we are the ones driving these changes together”.

Repressive regimes – such as China’s under the CCP, Russia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and others – are linking up. Democracies around the world are being subverted. War is raging in Ukraine. China and Russia are in cahoots together, in particular enlisting many developing countries from the Global South to their cause through their disinformation and misinformation campaigns.

That’s why the FCC has agreed that I propose an amendment to the F23 pre-manifesto motion on behalf of the Federal International Relations Committee (FIRC) which calls for the UK to have a comprehensive strategy to challenge regimes such as that led by the CCP in China. My article in the latest Liberator gives the full background.

I also support FIRC’s emergency motion on China to be selected at the ballot for debate at autumn conference.

Back in 2019, the European Commission was already calling China a “systemic rival”. This summer, President Xi’s intentions became even clearer when he boycotted the G20 summit, which unites major developed and developing economies, in favour of posing as the leader of the beginnings of an alternative world economic system at the BRICS summit as well as lobbying the Global South at the G77+China summit of 135 developing countries.

China’s new Global Development, Security and Civilisation Initiatives say that China’s development model shorn of human rights is more suitable for developing countries, that Western military alliances are a threat to world peace and that criticising the CCP is a racist assault on the Chinese people.

As many authoritarian governments grow wealthier, and the West’s clout weakens, an urgent new approach is needed if the post-Western global order for human rights and the rule of law is to remain centre-stage.

What Must We Do?

This party believes that the UK must always stand on the side of democracy, human rights, international law and multilateralism.

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Tagged 2023 autumn conference and china | 2 Comments

China – national security threat?

By David Chalmers | Thu 21st September 2023 - 4:48 pm

I first visited Hong Kong in the summer of 1989, a few weeks after the massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. At the time the people of Hong Kong feared for their future, whilst the rest of the world considered how to deal with a regime prepared to shoot its own people to remain in power. Over the next decades I would come to work and live in China, receiving the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2002 for developing the Economist’s business in China. Whilst recognising that we were dealing with an autocratic state and rightly concerned at its human rights record, we considered that by engaging with China – and in my case helping Chinese businesses align their commercial practices with those of the West – we were helping to create a new partner in the global world order.

However, since Xi Jinping’s ascent to power over a decade ago, things have gone backwards. Instead of a partner China is increasingly setting itself up as an adversary to the West, set on undermining the liberal world order. Within our own liberal family, some condemn our engagement back then with China – arguing that we should have foreseen what was coming. On a recent trip to Berlin, I met up with an old friend who at one time ran the business operations of Siemens in China. I asked him for his thoughts on whether we had got it so wrong back then. He defended our actions, but with our knowledge now of China’s recent behaviour, we cannot carry on with business as normal. Germany that has invested 10 times more in China than the UK and therefore has much more to lose, is having to face some tough decisions.

In recent years we have seen the Chinese Communist Party CCP prepared to resort to ever more extreme measures to maintain its grip on power. In its repressive treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang – classed by many as genocide – to its crushing of Hong Kong’s civil liberties, to the oppression of civil society in mainland China itself – it has become ever more autocratic. In today’s Hong Kong commemorating the victims of Tiananmen Square in public – a major public event up until only a few years ago – will now land you in jail. People are afraid to criticise the government even in the privacy of their own homes. The CCP has clamped down on activities within China itself that it feels unable to control. Shanghai Pride – an amazing weeklong celebration attracting thousands of LGBT people from across China – was closed down last year. It’s main organiser having to flee the country or face arrest. A similar fate has brought thousands of Hong Kongers to live in the UK.

And in our battle with Putin’s Russia which is primarily aimed at stopping the spread of liberal democracy, where Ukraine is the front line – China has aligned itself with Russia. We should be under no illusion that should Russia succeed in its plan, that the invasion of Taiwan will be next on China’s agenda.

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Tagged 2023 autumn conference and china | 2 Comments

Can Parliament take back control?

By Nick Harvey and Paul Tyler | Thu 21st September 2023 - 3:07 pm

In a futile attempt to prevent Boris Johnson’s defenestration last year Jacob Rees Mogg tried to browbeat his ministerial colleagues by demanding that a change of Prime Minister required a General Election. Johnson himself seemed equally deluded that he had achieved a personal mandate in 2019 to which no successor could lay claim.

Our constitution – at the moment at least – doesn’t work like that. We don’t elect a President. We vote for individual MPs who collectively give authority to an executive team, and (in theory) hold them to account.

But is it working like that ?

In recent months a range of commentators from across the political spectrum have identified a series of faults and follies, which call in question our democratic norms. With some 53 years of parliamentary service between us we attempt a more comprehensive analysis in our book “Can Parliament Take Back Control?”, published this week.

Amidst all the other challenges which politicians will face after the next election the damaged relationship between Parliament and the executive may seem relatively less urgent. Yet the insidious shift of power from the former to the latter in recent years may prove to undermine the very foundations of Britain’s democratic constitution.

In so doing, it could make it increasingly difficult to secure public support for practical responses to those other challenges.

This book highlights the various ways in which governments have neutered, side-lined and ignored Parliament to an extent which now demands a deliberate restoration of the balance of power. We suggest that events since 2015, in particular, have caused slippage towards the “elective dictatorship” about which Lord Hailsham warned in his Dimbleby Lecture in 1976. Hence our subtitle: “Britain’s Elective Dictatorship in the Johnson Aftermath”. The text of the Lecture is reprinted as an Annex with the encouragement of the present Lord Hailsham.

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Tagged 2023 autumn conference, featured and Parliament | 2 Comments

A fair housing target is a fairer democracy

By Nicholas Chan | Thu 21st September 2023 - 1:40 pm

Our Liberal Democrat London Mayor challenger Rob Blackie, wrote a great article on determination to meet housing targets. His first statement “Britain spends more on housing benefits than any other rich country,” hits the mark on the choice we can make: increase home ownership and maintain a fair democracy for Britain.

We can continue spending on housing benefits, but our current model has a few issues. First, our social housing strategy has shifted towards rental accommodation in the private sector. No longer are councils owning sufficient housing to provide affordable rentals. This meant shared ownership and social credits to rent privately were the only solutions. The former further distorts the market as, in essence, gives free public money to expand property developers into bigger landlords. This is the kind of market distortion faced in Berlin where most Berliners used to rent. They are effectively providing quantitative easing to property developers. The latter, private rentals, is funding an unregulated market to exploit the less privileged. Because of the security this had offered to the private lessor, they find it easier to simply offer a shelter without the necessary up-keep while monthly rentals are directly paid into their accounts by the council. It is effectively a secured, fixed-deposit investment for private lessors; so secured they have no incentives to upkeep the property they leased out. This is quite similar to New York City where the rent ceiling exacerbated the issue.

The solution can only be ownership. The responsibility of a citizen can be driven either through harsh and unjust punishment or through providing a sense of belonging. The logic is infallible because of social psychology. The state can employ harsh laws to imprison rule breakers with long incarceration or allow for the creation of individual opportunities where each has a stake in the society they can treasure.

A democracy can be built upon the rule of law. But a liberal democracy must be sustained through private equity.

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Tagged housing, housing targets and rob blackie | 5 Comments

What have the Liberals ever done for us?

By Duncan Brack | Thu 21st September 2023 - 12:00 pm

The Liberal Democrat History Group has just produced a new publication – What Have the Liberals Ever Done for Us?

From the very earliest days in the seventeenth century through to today, the Liberal values of liberty, equality, community, internationalism and environmentalism have underpinned what Liberal governments achieved in power, what Liberal and SDP and Liberal Democrat MPs fought for in opposition, and what Liberal Democrat ministers achieved once more in government.

This booklet is a concise summary of Liberals’ and Liberal Democrats’ greatest achievements over 350 years of Liberal history. Chapters cover human rights, fair votes, government reform, gender equality, international, economy, education, welfare, health and environment, together with a comprehensive timeline. As Ed Davey writes in the preface, ‘When you need to put your feet up after door-knocking, or to energise yourself for the next delivery round, read it to remember what we stand for and what we have done with the votes that people have lent us – and be inspired to campaign for even greater achievements in the future.’

We are launching the booklet at the History Group’s fringe meeting at Bournemouth, where Layla Moran MP, Sarah Olney MP, Wendy Chamberlain MP and Baroness Barker, chaired by Lord William Wallace, will choose their favourite Liberal achievements. The meeting takes place after the rally, at 8.15pm on Saturday in the Meyrick Suite in the Conference Centre. (Register here for Zoom access for those not at conference.) The booklet will be available to purchase at the meeting (at a special price!) and from the History Group stand in the exhibition (and, after conference, via our website).

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Tagged 2023 autumn conference and liberal democrat history group | Leave a comment

Politics should be about the people – it’s crucial we secure democratic reform

By Tom Brake and Klina Jordan and Neal Lawson | Thu 21st September 2023 - 10:42 am

While Labour strategists will tell you that nothing can be taken for granted, the bulk of the media and much of the rest of the Westminster bubble has already declared Labour the winner of the next general election.

With still probably one year to go before the voters get a look in, it is striking how much the opposition is able to set the political agenda. Journalists remark on the sense in which the opposition now seems to be making the political weather, as if this happens entirely independently. To paraphrase Boris Johnson, ‘the herd has moved’.

Cheered on by wealthy donors, the two big parties will spend the next year battling it out over a tiny slither of the electorate, quickening the pace of democratic disenchantment. Yet behind closed doors, much of the (so-called mainstream) media herd has already staged its own private coronation of Sir Keir Starmer and is now engaged in jockeying for access to the party they are sure will form the next government.

And, on one level, you might think ‘fair enough’. But obscured by the media’s ‘laser-like focus’ on electoral conjecture are the voters. Politicians work for us, and yet somehow, too often, our interests are mediated through the presumed winners and losers of an imagined election.

The Mid Bedfordshire by-election is the same story in microcosm. All the focus is on the horse race, on which challenger has a better claim to the seat. Sidelined are the feelings of voters about the first genuinely competitive election in their constituency for a generation – one in which all voters can be confident their vote will make a difference to the outcome.

Opinion polling and surveys can help us fill in some of the gaps: we know that people feel as if politicians are all the same, that their vote doesn’t change anything. We know how, when presented with the option of an electoral system in which all votes count, or a House of Lords that is accountable, people are eager for change. And we know how repelled most residents of Mid Beds were by the contempt shown to them by Nadine Dorries. This is replicated across the country.

But if we are serious about doing something to address the sorry state of our democracy, the challenge is clear: how to work together to ensure the voices of the people do not get drowned out between now and the next election.

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Tagged 2023 autumn conference, compass, liberal democrats for electoral reform, make votes matter and unlock democracy | 3 Comments

Mark Pack’s September report to members

By Mark Pack | Wed 20th September 2023 - 4:00 pm

Many unexpected events, good and bad, have happened to our party during this Parliament. If you’d asked me in January 2020, I don’t think any of us would have expected that three and a half years on, I could write a report to members about how our first-in person autumn Federal Conference this Parliament was coming up and about our chance to secure, just after it, our fifth Parliamentary by-election gain from the Conservatives.

It’s been quite the journey since our last in-person autumn conference. That was also in Bournemouth but back in the very different political times of 2019. We’re on the third Conservative Prime Minister of that time and – at time of writing (!) – seven Secretaries of State for Education.

But most importantly for our party, we’ve made huge progress since then in rebuilding our organisation and starting a sustained, long-term recovery.

We’ve made net gains in every round of council elections this Parliament. Alongside our four new MPs, we’ve also won control of more councils – taking the number of Lib Dem majority authorities to a tally higher even than it was before we went into government in 2010. We have a new scheme to support the new generation of candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds and we have a much expanded network of staff supporting grassroots campaigners right across the country. New, and much better integrated, website and email tools are being rolled out and, after over thirty years of people saying the Federal Board and its predecessors was too large, we finally did something about it.

But there’s much more still to do, starting with the need to turn that run of four by-election gains into a run of five next month. Find out more on how to help Emma Holland-Lindsay and the Mid-Bedfordshire by-election campaign on her website.

Rebuilding trust in politics

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Tagged Mark Pack and president | 1 Comment

Liberator 419 is out

By The Liberator Collective | Wed 20th September 2023 - 2:00 pm

You can download Liberator 419 for free here:

Find out the latest news in Radical Bulletin, while our Commentary wonders what the point is of the Liberal Democrat policy process and Lord Bonkers gives his view of the world.

You can sign up to be notified when each Liberator comes out here: or visit our stall at Bournemouth

IT EVEN HAPPENS HERE

Serious poverty can be found even in the outwardly affluent Chesham and Amersham constituency. Sarah Green reports

ONLY LOCAL HEROES

Is stressing a candidates’ local connections really the best the party can do? David Grace looks at the conference agenda and fears the worst

NO TIME FOR TIMIDITY

The NHS is in crisis, water and rail privatisations have failed and Brexit is destroying living standards. It’s time for politicians to take the gloves off, says Paul Hindley

NO PLACE LIKE HOME COUNTIES

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Tagged liberator and liberator magazine | 1 Comment

How a Universal Basic Income could make Britain more liberal

By Hina Bokhari AM and Julia Hines | Wed 20th September 2023 - 11:55 am

The news of a trial of universal basic income in Jarrow and East Finchley sparked a true watercooler moment. For a party like the Lib Dems, it is important to recognise what that means. It wasn’t a viral meme to like, or share, and it wasn’t a culture war issue that triggered rage, or anxiety. In conversations in staff rooms and pubs, in social media spaces from LADBible to Gransnet, people were talking about an idea.

There are lots of reasons why. The cost of living crisis, obviously; the fear by every political party that they interrupt the Tories whilst they are making mistakes has led to a dearth of ideas; and, finally, the pandemic. Arundhati Roy wrote in April 2020 “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

The idea is simple to grasp. It is money that is always there, if your life changes, or you want to change your life. It appeals to both optimists and pessimists. Post Covid, we all know that our lives can change in a moment. UBI supports those in need, with the dignity of liberal choices.

This national conversation echoes the support we found on the doorstep and in focus groups.

The trial will not tell us everything we need to know about basic income, but it will tell us a lot about damage the current welfare system causes. The gap between losing your job and receiving Universal Credit is a minimum of 5 weeks, and can be up to 12 weeks. Very few people can sustain that wait without getting into debt that is almost impossible to climb out of. Sanctions cause the same problem. Being unable to feed your family, owing money everyone you know, is bound to make you feel worthless and a failure. When a bill you cannot pay lands, you will panic. The cure is not antidepressants or mindfulness. The cure is money. The thousands of people queuing at foodbanks are not there because they need help to shop. They know how to do that, they just lack the means.

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Tagged featured and universal basic income | 17 Comments

Growth: We’re there!

By Peter Wrigley | Wed 20th September 2023 - 8:58 am

I can’t find out when Gandhi said: There is enough for everyone’s need, and not for everyone’s greed,” but it must have been before 1948 because that’s when he died. Yet, still 80 or so years later, rather than concentrating on better sharing of the world’s munificence, we are still looking for yet more economic growth as a free pass for “enriching” everyone without anybody paying the price.

The measurement of an economy’s growth via its GDP is largely a post 1945 obsession. When he was the UK’s Chancellor R A Butler alerted us to the fact that, if we could achieve growth at the rate of 3% per year we could double our standard of living in 25 years. Harold Wilson and the Labour party, in the campaign for the general election of 1964, promised all sorts of wonders, and they wouldn’t cost us a penny: they’d be financed out of growth.

Waring shots about this painless panacea were fired by the Club of Rome and its publication of “The Limits to Growth” in 1972. The earth’s resources are finite and more and more production risks poisoning it . It’s not a question of “Will the planet survive.” It almost certainly will, but not necessarily life as we know it, or perhaps any life at all.

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Tagged climate change, economic growth and economy | 8 Comments

Bournemouth: a landmark Conference

By Joe Norris | Tue 19th September 2023 - 12:29 pm

Bournemouth is going to be a landmark conference for young people in the Liberal Democrats. This is the biggest opportunity in years for the party to answer the question on every young person’s mind as the general election approaches:

Is the party going to leave us behind?

With three key items on the agenda for young people, Conference will have three votes to decide what message it wants to send to the future generation of the party.

The first comes in the form of Federal Policy Committee’s (FPC) F31: Tackling the Housing Crisis policy paper. As James Bliss writes in Betrayal of a Generation, the Party’s sneaky attempt to abolish the national housing target, only two years after Conference committed to it, is a ‘signal and a big red flag to young people that the Liberal Democrats still aren’t for them’.

The Party could be choosing to send a strong message to young professionals that the Liberal Democrats are the party for them. Instead, the Parliamentary Party is insistent on subjecting the wider Party to the NIMBY policies that they hope will get them re-elected in their hyper-localist campaigns to be super-councillors. They are turning their backs on even pretending to be interested in championing liberal solutions to the nation’s biggest problems, in exchange for shoring up support in areas that are already orange.

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Also posted in Conference | Tagged young liberals | 13 Comments

In support of robust and respectful debate at conference

By Candy Piercy | Tue 19th September 2023 - 10:59 am

“It’s a disgrace that someone can say something outrageous like that in a debate at Conference! They should be thrown out of the Party! How can I put in a complaint? I want them expelled!” I have heard this question time and time again over the years during Federal Conference.

The answer is simple. If you believe you need to make a complaint about the behaviour of a member of the Liberal Democrats, go to the party website and put in a formal complaint to the Lib Dem’s Independent Complaints Process. A decision will then be made by the Senior Adjudicators about whether the complaint should be heard, or whether it should be dismissed.

In debates things are often said that are downright annoying and may be deeply upsetting to hear, especially from another Party member.

However, we must remember that the very nature of a debate is to invite opposing views. The Lib Dems are a Party which values free speech. Therefore, we cannot invite debate at conference and then routinely discipline our members, because of what they say on the platform.

People do put in complaints after Conference about things that were said in debates. The reality is that unless you can demonstrate in your complaint that a person may have broken the Members Code of Conduct or is likely to have brought the Party into disrepute, the complaint will be dismissed.

If you can demonstrate a possible breach of the Members Code of Conduct, such a complaint would almost certainly be accepted for consideration by an Independent Panel of Adjudicators.

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Tagged 2023 autumn conference, complaints process and featured | 2 Comments

Emily’s story – why Lib Dems must protect the human rights of Hong Kongers

By Anonymous HK1 | Tue 19th September 2023 - 6:55 am

I could only have ever joined the Liberal Democrats when I came to the UK from Hong Kong. Long before others, Paddy Ashdown fought for our right to come to the UK as British Nationals, and now Ed Davey and our parliamentarians continue to speak out to protect Hong Kongers and support those arriving in the UK. Some are dissidents, some come because they have family members here, but all are horrified at the behaviour of the CCP and the Hong Kong Authorities over recent years, killing democracy and removing human rights.

Perhaps a real-life story will explain. “Emily” was a young mum who used to live in Hong Kong. Back in 2019, like most people in the city, she joined the peaceful protests against the Hong Kong government. She was fighting for not only her own civil liberties, but also for her family, particularly for her newborn child, so they could enjoy living in the city without fear.

But the Hong Kong National Security Law in 2020 and the crackdown of protest movements changed everything. Before, the city was a dynamic place with freedom guaranteed. Now, the city is under suppression. As Carrie Lam, the former Chief Executive, once said, “They have no stake in society which so many people have helped to build.” Protests against the government had become very risky, if not outrightly banned like the Tiananmen Square vigils.

“Emily” could not see the future of her family staying in the city, and followed her democratic beliefs. She decided to flee to the UK under the British National Overseas (‘BN(O)’) visa scheme – which Paddy had championed.

Once here she wanted to apply the right to abode for her newborn baby, so her child could live in an environment free from the fear of being arrested. When she spoke to the officials in the Home Office, astonishingly (& wrongly) they told her because her new-born child was born in Hong Kong, she needed to attend the Chinese embassy to obtain the relevant Chinese travel document before she could carry on with the application.

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Tagged featured, home office and hong kong | 2 Comments

Was your car made using slave labour?

By Robert Harrison | Mon 18th September 2023 - 12:27 pm

Last week European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyden, announced a probe into China’s electric vehicle industry which apparently have benefitted from massive state subsidies. But it’s not only such subsidies that should worry us – production in the Chinese car industry ignores human rights and climate change, and the European car industry is complicit.

The global shift in manufacturing from Europe and North America to Asia has been well-documented. As factories have closed in the UK and the EU, the same companies have built up their manufacturing capability in China as well as trained and created a network of …

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Also posted in Conference | Tagged china, electric vehicles and modern slavery | 3 Comments

If you back our immigration policy, you should vote to keep a housing target

By Simon McGrath | Mon 18th September 2023 - 9:23 am

In 2022, the population of the UK grew by 606,000. In the year ended June 2022, 173,520 new homes were built in England. The mismatch between the two figures is one factor in rising rents.

Our Party – more than any other – is the one which has been happy about immigration. We also have a policy on asylum seekers which would mean we were welcoming more asylum seekers to the country. Given that, it seems quite extraordinary that the Federal Policy Committee is seeking to remove a target for new homes from our policy.

They say that …

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Also posted in Conference and Party policy and internal matters | Tagged housing policy | 34 Comments

Welcome to my day: 18 September 2023 – changing perspectives…

By Mark Valladares | Mon 18th September 2023 - 7:33 am

There’s been a lot of debate about the Party’s proposals on housing policy for the past week or so, as evidenced by the series of articles on this website. There’s another today from Simon McGrath, who has rather controversially linked one area of Party policy to this one. It’s controversial merely because the Government don’t do that sort of joined up thinking.

The subject is of particular relevance to me this week, because I’ve just moved house, leaving my small, perfectly formed village in the Gipping Valley for a new home in the centre of Ipswich. Housing policy isn’t just about …

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Caron’s guide to the Craziness of Conference – updated for Bournemouth 2023

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 17th September 2023 - 12:06 pm

In less than 5 days, after a gruelling 6:40 am flight, I hope to be in beautiful Bournemouth, my favourite Autumn Conference venue. We last met there in 2019. It was fantastic to see my friends in York in March, but Autumn Conference has the length and girth to satisfy even the most ardent activist.

I have revamped my Guide to the Craziness of Conference for this year. Enjoy. And if you have any questions, ask away in the comments.

Federal Conference is probably the best fun that you will ever have in your life. You will thoroughly enjoy every exhausting moment. If you’re new, it can be a bit overwhelming until you get used to the sensory overload. I had a long break from going to them and when I returned, in 2011, I spent the first day wandering round in a state of wide-eyed amazement, like a child in a toy shop.

So, with that in mind, I thought I’d throw together a fairly random list of tips and hints for getting the best out of the annual cornucopia of Liberal Democracy. If you have any other Conference survival tips, let me know.

If you have any questions, there are lots of places to get answers. There’s Federal Conference Committee helpdesk in the Bournemouth International Centre. And if they can’t help, ask someone on one of the party organisation stalls in the exhibition – if they don’t know the answer, they’ll probably be able to point you in the right direction.

1. Plan your days

The Conference day has a huge variety of things to do. As well as the debates in the hall, there’s a comprehensive training programme and a massive fringe. There are spokespeople Q & As. There are competing fringe choices to be made. You can guarantee that you will never be bored and that several things you want to see will be on at the same time. Spend some time now poring over the Agenda and Directory to work out what you don’t want to miss.

Some events aren’t in there because they aren’t official conference meetings. Layla Moran is being interviewed by Iain Dale and Jacqui Smith for their hilarious For the Many podcast. Who knows, they might even say something nice about the Lib Dems! If you want to join us, buy your ticket here.

Be aware as well that you can eat quite well for free by choosing the right fringe meetings – look for the refreshments symbol in the directory.

Believe me, it’s much easier if you sort out your diary in advance. The best laid plans will always be subject to a better offer or meeting someone you haven’t seen for years randomly in a corridor, but it’s best to at least try to get some order into the proceedings. The Conference App is a real help for this. You can download it from whichever App store you use on your phone (search for Lib Dem Conf). Fully updated now for Bournemouth, it allows you to add events to your schedule and has all the papers loaded on to it.

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Tagged 2023 autumn conference and featured | 9 Comments

National targets are essential to tackle the housing crisis

By Rob Blackie | Sun 17th September 2023 - 8:56 am

Do we face a housing crisis in Britain? It might not seem like it if you bought your house 20 years ago, but for everybody renting, or trying to buy, it’s out of control.

Consider these astonishing facts.

Britain spends more on housing benefits than any other rich country.

New houses in Britain are smaller than every other western European country. Dutch people, who live in one of the world’s most densely populated countries, live in houses 21% bigger than Brits.

Britain’s homes are cold and damp and expensive to heat too. Recent studies show that we have among the worst insulated in Europe too.

And while London looks like the richest part of Britain, it has the second highest poverty rate when you account for housing costs. Even if you are on the typical London full time salary of £33,000, you will, on average, spend more than half of your post tax income on rent.

All of these reflect decades where we haven’t built enough homes.

Since 1990 Britain’s population has increased by 10 million people. Our housebuilding hasn’t kept up. We have so little spare capacity that Britain has fewer empty homes than Finland.

New evidence shows that all housebuilding, even for the richest people, brings down prices for everybody, as it sets off a chain of moves through sequentially cheaper housing. For instance in Auckland, New Zealand, when they allowed more housebuilding, rents fell 25% relative to Wellington, where this didn’t happen.

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Tagged 2023 autumn conference, featured and housing | 24 Comments

Britain, what’s wrong?

By Michal Siewniak | Fri 15th September 2023 - 3:06 pm

Most parents might find (I know that we often do!) morning routine tricky at times; getting ready for work, waking up children, making sure that there is enough food in the fridge for breakfast and lunch. If anyone has kids in two or three different schools, “morning madness” becomes even more challenging or “interesting”.

We are the first full week in with our two eldest daughters and unfortunately, their school bus, which picks up children from different parts of Welwyn Hatfield, broke down twice in literally a couple of days. Yep, it does happen, I understand. However, after paying £825 (!) for one annual bus pass and almost £300 for an autumn term ticket (with a small discount), I would expect much better, much better service provision.

Both of these school-bus incidents made me think. First of all, in most European countries, children’s school journeys are subsidised by Local Authorities. I find it staggering that we talk so much about the impact of climate change and the environment in the UK and yet, a number of families simply have no choice but to drive as all the other ways to commute are far too expensive.

Moreover, after coming back from my summer holidays, it felt at times like returning not to a G7 or G20 economy but to a country that is literally falling apart. Yes, I know; the grass is always greener on the other side and all global or European economies are also struggling in one way or another. However, many families in the UK are not “living but surviving” as one of my friends told me recently. The inflation, cost of living crisis, filling up petrol or mortgages are still affecting millions of families. It must be extremely difficult for many people, not only on lower incomes but also those, who until recently, lived relatively comfortable lives.

Furthermore; where is the accountability, integrity and honesty that were promised by Mr Sunak? What happened with 40 new hospitals? Has the stop the boat slogan been implemented? I don’t think that any of us would last a week in any job after performing so badly and/or after a complete lack of competence to address some of these key pledges.

There are almost 8 million (!) people on the NHS waiting list. Yes, the NHS, “national treasure”, often described as the white elephant in the room, needs deep reforms and it can’t and won’t continue as it stands. However, it is just NOT good enough that people need to wait in ambulances to get any treatment. Even today, the Prime Minister admitted that he will not be able to meet the target of reducing waiting times, which he set out in his speech when he took office. Did he apologise? Of course not. He blamed the industrial actions.

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Tagged featured and rishi sunak | 13 Comments

Scotland needs urgent action on overdose prevention centres

By Euan Davidson | Fri 15th September 2023 - 12:00 pm

It is not often that an announcement from a Scottish Government appointee makes me cheer, but the news that the Lord Advocate has finally given the green light to proceed with Overdose Prevention Centres did just that.

The fight to tackle Scotland’s drug death crisis has been a long and often fractious one. Too often, it has been dragged into the constitutional quagmire that bogs so much progress down. Both of Scotland’s Governments have let the victims of this crisis and their families down too many times. Whether it was the Scottish Government’s decision to decimate rehab budgets or the stubborn refusal of the Tories to accept the evidence that mass criminalisation is failing the most vulnerable.

So, finally, we have a ray of light after the Lord Advocate has said that it is not in the public interest to prosecute these much-needed services. Quite why it has taken this long to arrive at that conclusion is anyone’s guess, but this is a welcome step nonetheless.

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Tagged drugs, health and overdose prevention centres | 3 Comments

Surviving not living?

By Katharine Pindar | Fri 15th September 2023 - 9:57 am

It was shocking to hear Prime Minister Rishi Sunak say again at Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesday, as he said before, that there are fewer people living in poverty in this country today thanks to Conservative governments. He will not face the fact that poverty is actually worsening for millions of people in the UK.

Last week an independent cross-party group called the Poverty Strategy Commission reported that six million low-income families are ‘surviving not living’, forced to endure unacceptable levels of poverty. The report, an interim one A New Framework for Tackling Poverty, states in its Foreword that:

Poverty in the UK is too high, and the experiences of many people in poverty are now getting worse.

In the Executive summary it continues,

Despite significant action from governments of all colours, particularly over the last three decades, the overall rate of poverty in the UK has remained stubbornly high, (with) a third of children in poverty, and 7% of the population in deep poverty.

It adds,

Deep poverty has become more prevalent.

They write,

… a social contract does not currently actually exist in the UK. However, broad principles of an implicit social contract can be inferred from existing government policy choices.

They also state that benefits are set at a level that are insufficient for those who rely on them to avoid poverty.

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Tagged poverty, Poverty Strategy Commission and rishi sunak | 32 Comments

UK Trade Unions rally in solidarity: resounding support for Ukraine at TUC 2023

By Jack Meredith | Thu 14th September 2023 - 4:01 pm

This past week at the 2023 UK TUC Congress, trade unions stood in solidarity with Ukraine in the face of the fascist russian invasion, passing a motion from the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign.

The motion, moved by GMB, seconded by ASLEF and supported by the NUM, supports the immediate withdrawal of russian* forces from all Ukrainian territories occupied since 2014; Ukrainian unions’ calls for financial and practical aid from the UK to Ukraine; a peaceful end to the conflict that secures the territorial integrity of Ukraine and the support and self-determination of the Ukrainian people; the full restoration of labour rights in Ukraine and a socially-just reconstruction and redevelopment programme that embeds collective bargaining and rejects deregulation and privatisation; TUC work, and facilitation of affiliates’ engagement, with the main Ukrainian trade union centres (FPU/KVPU), and acknowledges the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign.

Amidst the support for Ukraine, however, there was a minor pushback from the RMT, NEU, UCU and FBU. None supported the motion, with RMT, NEU and UCU choosing to abstain and FBU voting against, adding that they “do not think the escalation of war is in the interests of the russian or Ukrainian working class”. This is despite russia having carried out annexations, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine since 2014.

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Tagged trade unions, tuc and ukraine | 4 Comments

The Housing Crisis and Land Value Taxation

By Tony Vickers | Thu 14th September 2023 - 1:51 pm

In submitting our amendment to the motion on Tackling the Housing Crisis (F31), ALTER is not wanting to change anything called for in the policy paper that will, we hope, be adopted nearly unanimously. Our purpose is to remind Conference that we can and must use our existing policy on tax reform, namely Land Value Taxation (LVT), to solve the underlying cause of the crisis.

We call for the commitment in the 2013 policy paper Fairer Taxes, endorsed by Conference that year, to be honoured. This was to conduct “early in the next Parliament …. a full-scale review to look at how (LVT) might best be implemented”. We do not suggest any new tax policies but merely call for FPC to do what Conference asked it to, which we feel is entirely appropriate given the motion’s subject.

The motion points out that “successive governments have pursued policies that benefit homeowners”. However there is no proposal to correct that imbalance between owning and renting. Our amendment emphasises that it is land value and not the value of “bricks and mortar” that is the cause of this fundamental unfairness. It is the major homebuilders and landowners who most benefit: obscenely and without economic or ethical justification.

Governments in England – both Conservative and Labour – have failed to review the grossly unfair Council Tax despite it being the main source of local and regional inequity in housing costs for occupiers. Whilst tax policy was outside the remit of the working party, it should have been able to point this out without us seeking to amend this motion.

The paper identifies the “main drivers of the housing crisis” as principally not overall supply but about:-

Provision of social housing
Economic prosperity of the area
The role of finance.

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Tagged 2023 autumn conference, ALTER, housing and land value tax | 2 Comments

Electoral reform has momentum: 2024 is our best opportunity

By Richard Wood | Thu 14th September 2023 - 12:02 pm

The campaign for fair, equal votes is bread and butter politics for most Lib Dems. The idea that governments can win power on a minority of votes while other parties go significantly under-represented weakens the claim that the UK is a representative democracy. This is seen time and time again, with 2019 a particularly brutal example where the Conservatives gained a majority on just 43% of the vote while our own party gained over a million votes but fell back in the Commons.

First Past the Post leads to unrepresentative parliaments and unrepresentative governments – frequently resulting in policies that most voters are unhappy with, but which appeal to marginal seat voters. We know what the solution is: Proportional Representation, with STV as our preferred model.

PR treats voters equally, shown by countless fair elections around the world, but for decades our cause has been dismissed and ignored. The system is stacked against us of course. The current model deters those in power from implementing real change, but reform is possible. Just look at New Zealand where the country is going to the polls in October safe in the knowledge that the party political distribution of seats will by and large reflect votes won across the country.

The UK could very well be on the cusp of a New Zealand moment of its own where First Past the Post is rejected in favour of a system of Proportional Representation. For the first time in a long time, there’s a real sense that change could very well come to Westminster.

There was some sense of that in 2010 but the odds were even more stacked against us back then. Being in power with a party so opposed to reform limited our options from the outset. Many of the challenges then still persist but there are some major differences.

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Tagged 2023 autumn conference, electoral reform and proportional representation | 9 Comments

Betrayal of a generation

By James Bliss | Thu 14th September 2023 - 9:31 am

In the aftermath of the 2010 General Election, in which the party stood on an explicit platform to abolish tuition fees and many MPs made the doomed NUS pledge, the party took the catastrophic political decision to reverse track within the coalition to raise fees. Regardless of the individual merits of the tuition fee reforms as a policy, and however much the party went blue in the face shouting “graduate tax” at anyone that would listen, the decision – the betrayal – tainted the party in the eyes of young people and the wider electorate and was an early domino to the inevitable 2015 collapse.

However, the real lasting damage that tuition fees made to the party was not the policy itself or the 2015 election result, but that the party stopped trying to appeal to young people and many young people stopped bothering to even consider the party as a possibility.

Anyone who has been a student in the past 13 years knows the degree to which young people just do not care about the party, it isn’t anger or disgust, it’s indifference. I have spent years sitting on fresher’s stalls in vain and organising anti-Brexit activity through vapid “cross party” groups, because the party fails to hit through with young people. On paper the party should be exactly what young people want, progressive, anti-Brexit, pro-LGBTQ+ rights, pro-drug reform, pro-PR, you could go on endless ways the party aligns with the views of young people – except housing.

Housing is yet another issue that young people, by which I don’t primarily mean students but young professionals going up into their 30s, are massively affected. Decades and decades of failures around housing, be it overall numbers, density in urban areas, house sizes, planning committee nimbyism, lack of renter’s rights – I could go on for hours, literally – have left young people at the mercy of private landlords and with no prospect of ever owning a home of their own.

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Tagged housing, students and young people | 23 Comments

How rotten is our democracy?

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 13th September 2023 - 11:49 am

This is the question Isabel Hardman poses at the beginning of her review of Chris Bryant’s new book, Code of Conduct: why we need to fix Parliament – and how to do it. Hardman’s own book, Why we get the Wrong Politicians (first published in 2018 and updated for a paperback edition in 2022) had already covered much of the same ground – on the ‘toxic culture’ of Westminster politics, the power of the whips over individual MPs, the neglect of parliamentary scrutiny of government legislation and decisions in favour of efforts to become ministers, and above all the strains on personal relations and family life.

Bryant – chair of the Commons Committees on Standards and Privileges until this month – writes in an easy, personal style, but his underlying anger at the corruption and the toxic culture of Westminster politics is evident. He starts with the Commons’ handling of Owen Paterson’s censure for ‘paid advocacy’ for companies which were paying him more than £100,000 a year. 250 MPs voted to reject the Standards Committee recommendations, with support from Johnson as prime minister and Rees-Mogg as leader of the House. ‘I felt that Parliament itself was on trial’ in that vote.

In the context of historical comparisons with past parliamentary scandals, he concludes that ‘this is indeed the worst Parliament in our history. More than twenty MPs have been suspended or have left under a cloud. Rules have been flouted… Ministers have lied and refused to correct the record…’ There is ‘a widespread sense that politicians believe the rules don’t apply to them.’

He sees ‘something rotten’ in the structure of the Westminster system, with far more ministers than in comparable democracies, dependent on prime ministerial patronage. Unchecked prime ministerial power allows corruption to spread through PPI contracts, through the allocation of levelling-up funds and through the appointment of friends to paid public offices. He details the lies Boris Johnson as PM made to Parliament, the bullying habits of government whips, the conflicts of interest that arise through moves from ministerial office to private directorships and consultancies. He reports the massive outside earnings that former ministers and PMs make – noting that in the first three months of 2023 Johnson registered £3,287,293 in outside earnings.

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Tagged book reviews, chris bryant and democracy | 6 Comments