Category Archives: Op-eds

Caron Lindsay

Peter Kyle knows fine Labour can’t win in Mid Beds

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 13th September 2023 - 10:55 am

Labour’s new Shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology showed that yesterday on the News Agents that he knows absolutely fine that Labour can’t win Mid Bedfordshire.

He made the bizarre claim, on the News Agents podcast that:

“If our candidate was gay, they’d be doing a family values campaign.”

He said that the we were running a “deeply personal” campaign against the Labour candidate in the by-election.

Labour can’t win there, but they can stop us. Is that really their aim?

Our response was:

People in Mid Bedfordshire are disappointed that Labour have chosen a London councillor as a candidate to represent their rural towns and villages. After Nadine Dorries, people want a local MP, not someone who has been parachuted in.

The Labour candidate resigned as a councillor on Waltham Forest Council last week, having been a Cabinet member there until 3 months ago.

Layla Moran took to Twitter to condemn Kyle’s comments:

Disappointing from @peterkyle. Lib Dems are proud to have brought in equal marriage ten years ago almost to the day and are allies of the whole LGBT+ community. To suggest we would weaponise equality issues is a utterly against our values.

And Tim Farron had news direct from the doorsteps in Mid Bedfordshire:

I was in Mid Beds today to support @EmmaMidBeds. On the doorstep, Labour voters were volunteering to me that they were going to switch to vote for Emma this time because she can beat the Tories and Labour clearly can’t. I’m even more convinced now that we can do this.

Of course my take from Mid Beds is partisan, but it’s based on solid evidence. 1) Labour voters are deciding for themselves to vote tactically for us. 2) Disillusioned Conservatives and others in this rural seat are keen to vote for Emma, but would never vote Labour.

The Lib Dem by election campaign team know what they’re doing. It’s by far the smarter, bigger and more engaging campaign. 4) Labour won’t win but they probably won’t lose their deposit and they could stop us winning. 5) Lib Dem activists need to go there en masse!

North Shropshire by-election winner Helen Morgan sent an email to party members:

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Ruth Bright

“Fat and anxious”

By Ruth Bright | Wed 13th September 2023 - 9:55 am

It probably wasn’t the greatest idea to read the searing Ockenden report (on maternity care at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust) whilst recovering from a gynae op myself. Reeling from the misogyny of my own experience there was so much evidence to point to the fact that I was not alone.

A year later I don’t remember much detail from the report, just the miserable stench of its accounts of patriarchal and hierarchical condescension towards women patients in their hour of need, sometimes with their newborn baby’s life hanging in the balance.  One comment, however, lingers in the memory: “Fat and very anxious”. 

A third or fourth degree in childbirth (a tear from the vagina to the anus) is legendarily painful. On p 132 of her report on the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS trust Ockenden highlights the following account: “In 2014 when a woman was reviewed in this clinic after a third degree tear the doctor wrote in the notes: “Well but fat and very anxious . Can try for a vaginal birth, risk of re-occurrence low”. This has echoes of a 2022 Panorama interview with a woman with a fourth-degree birth tear who, when she alerted doctors to the fact that she was passing stools through her vagina, was initially dismissed as having a “bit of a fanny fart”. 

Fat and anxious. This also stopped me in my tracks because it mirrored my own hospital notes from last year saying that I was “concerned about going up a dress size”. This was a clinician’s description of my request (after being gaslighted for 7 weeks) for an urgent review after a catastrophic reaction to the insertion of a coil which had seen me go up from a size 12 to a size 20 in a matter of days. I reached out for help on ten occasions, on nine of these I was told it would all settle down. Only on one occasion, at A and E, was I taken seriously. Much was made on the other occasions of my anxiety. Wouldn’t anyone be racked with anxiety when a medical device had caused them to expand like a barrage balloon without explanation?

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Ciaran Morrissey

Why we need housing targets for local authorities

By Ciaran Morrissey | Tue 12th September 2023 - 1:55 pm

Complex systems tend towards inertia. We struggle to see things in terms of counter-factuals. When presented with cause-and-effect, we don’t compare negative effects against negative effects of inaction or of alternative action, we compare negative effects with what existed prior.

The ULEZ charge illustrates this. Paying £12.50 every day to drive your old car through London may be better than living in a polluted city, but it is still worse in an immediate and personal way than not having to pay that £12.50 at all. Sadiq Khan pressed ahead with this regardless, surely in no small part to him being relatively confident he will win re-election anyway in 2024. Do we think Nik Johnson and Dan Norris are looking at the ULEZ backlash in London and thinking it’d be a sensible roll of the dice for them, electorally?

Complex systems tend towards inertia. It is the job of campaigners, activists, and politicians to overcome this inertia. In aspect of British politics is there so much inertia, to the detriment of so many people, than in our chronic failure to build houses.

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Paul Reynolds

Economic crisis: problems and remedies

By Paul Reynolds | Tue 12th September 2023 - 8:26 am

There’s an economic crisis underway. Several policy motions at Lib Dem Autumn Conference make reference to economic problems. The government’s current industrial strategy (‘Plan for Growth’) runs to 112 pages and reads more like an argument against reform rather than for it; perhaps fearful of being accused by the tabloids of ‘talking down Brexit Britain’ .

UK economic problems are deep-rooted; some even hundreds of years old. Political parties of course share the blame but that’s only a small part of the story. Perceptions of problems and remedies have changed over the many decades, independent of political oscillations. But we will need clarity and deep thinking beyond political partisanship to extricate ourselves.

The symptoms are all around us. Disposable income is collapsing as mortgage payments, rents, energy, food prices, and now taxes, are all rising. Credit card debt is accelerating. Investment is in serious decline; since 2019 British businesses have invested less, as a percentage of GDP, than any other major economy. The Bank of England forecasts that business investment will further fall by around 2 per cent in 2024. By most measures GDP performance is the worst in the G7. UK debt sustainability is worsening. Debt service is set to exceed total NHS spending within three years. Tax revenues are just a third of GDP, and only half the population pay income tax.

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Sushi protests show Hong Kong’s spirit is unabated – but it’s not enough!

By Christopher | Mon 11th September 2023 - 12:54 pm

Recently, there has been a sudden surge in the popularity of sushi and sashimi in Hong Kong. Long queues can be seen outside sushi restaurants, and the sashimi and sushi in supermarkets are quickly sold out every day. This is happening after the Hong Kong government announced a ban on imports of Japanese seafood. The Japanese Consulate in Hong Kong has expressed its gratitude on social media to the Hong Kong people for their “rational consumption.” In present-day Hong Kong, under the implementation of the national security law, citizens have found a way to express their lack of trust in the government through collective consumer action.

At the beginning of this year, the Hong Kong government lifted all the restrictions that were imposed due to the pandemic. As a result, some groups applied to the police for permission to hold protests. On International Women’s Day and Labor Day, they planned to organize events with only a few hundred participants. However, the police put pressure on the organizing groups, claiming that there were many threatening comments on their social media platforms, suggesting the intention to use violence against the police during the events. This eventually forced the groups to cancel their planned activities. Subsequently, media outlets published investigative reports revealing that all those threatening comments originated from pro-government internet users or fake accounts.

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Mark Valladares

Welcome to my day: 11 September 2023 – everything changes yet nothing does…

By Mark Valladares | Mon 11th September 2023 - 7:29 am

Regular readers might have wondered where I’ve been for the past month or so (and for those of you who didn’t, I’m afraid that you going to get the answer anyway).

It is perhaps a marker that I’m growing older that I’ve been away on grandparent duty. Given that I have no children of my own, it’s an interesting reflection of how family life has changed with the advent of the right to divorce, or the emergence of non-traditional family structures, that allows someone like me (childless by choice) to step into the role of “Grandpa” to a small child. And, whilst I approach the role with a combination of love and trepidation, it’s been fun thus far.

I’m also undergoing some upheaval here at home, which I might explain at some point, but the key word at the moment is change.

Sadly, our politics isn’t doing much of that. A new face or two, yes, but the Government seems determined to faceplant itself at every opportunity – whether it’s legionnaire’s disease on the Bibby Stockholm, crumbling concrete in our schools, hospitals and other public buildings, or the lack of funding certainty for that bedrock of historic Conservative support, farmers.

It’s an indication of two of the key flaws that this Government exhibits, a lack of long term thinking and a failure to understand how things work in real life.

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David McDowall

The gratuitous humiliation of women, the Occupation’s new weapon of war?

By David McDowall | Fri 8th September 2023 - 4:01 pm

Trigger warning: This post describes serious abuse of women and children.

Two months ago (13 July), I shared Save the Children’s report on Israel’s seriously abusive treatment of Palestinian children.

Unfortunately, it isn’t only children. We need to face up to Israel’s increasingly abusive treatment of Palestinian families. One of Israel’s most dauntless journalists, Amira Hass, whose mother’s Diary of Bergen-Belsen, 1944-1945 is one of the profoundest records from the death camps I know, has shocked readers of Israel’s liberal newspaper, Haaretz, with a harrowing account of a raid on a Palestinian home (£) in the small hours of 10 July. Around fifty troops surrounded the Ajlun home in Hebron and forced entry. It is the terror inflicted on the women and children, who were separated from the men, particularly the strip-searching of the women, which is so alarming.

Hass writes,

Two masked Israeli women soldiers with rifles and an attack dog forced five female members of a Palestinian family to strip naked, each one separately…. The soldiers threatened to release the dog if the women did not comply, the family says…. The children (fifteen aged between four months and 17 years) were screaming in fear the entire time. Amal (one of the five) told the soldiers to pull the dog back because the children were afraid of it; she then took off the rest of her clothes.

The four others had similar experiences. According to Hass, Zeinab recalls,

When I objected, they came near me with the dog in a threatening way. I heard Diala (another of the strip-searched women) yelling to me from outside the room that I should do what the soldier said. After that, I undressed. The soldier told me to turn around. I only turned halfway around, and then she brought the dog near me again. I was shaking and crying. At one point, the children were left alone in the living room without their mothers and in the presence of the armed soldiers.

The IDF reports finding an M16 rifle and ammunition in the house. The male members of the household were searched but not required to strip, so there was clearly no reason to force the women to do so.

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Abrial Jerram

Local Lib Dems can restore people’s trust in housebuilding

By Abrial Jerram | Fri 8th September 2023 - 1:23 pm

I live in a ward represented by four Lib Dem councillors, where there are 3,952 new homes (out of ∼5,200 homes in the ward), primarily built due to local plans written by the then Lib Dem-led council. However, in 1,800 conversations on the doorstep in the ward, (thanks connect), only one has contained objections to the scale of housebuilding. I’m not claiming that NIMBYism does not exist, just that it’s a much less prevalent view than stereotypes would suggest and that there is a consensus that the development has improved our area.

After all, this is an affluent, suburban ward, which was gained from the Conservatives, where stereotypes, especially those based on all parties’ campaign literature (including ours), would suggest that NIMBYism would be a popular if not prevalent view.  So why is this not the case here? In real terms, the answer to that is that the development has allowed the local GP surgery to move out of a portacabin to a new and more suitable location, and also, where there was one local primary school, there are now three local primary schools and a secondary school. Also, there’s a new cafe, library, community centre, parks, etc. and even though there are things that could have definitely been done better the broad consensus about the positive impacts of the development remains strong.

Though sadly, the Lib Dems lost control of my local council during the coalition years, (housebuilding rates have declined since), similar development is now taking place neighbouring Lib Dem run South Cambridgeshire. They have both started and completed over 4,000 homes in their first term (significantly more than before Lib Dems took control) and are now putting in place a local plan containing tens of thousands more (∼58,000).

This all means that I get to be part of a local team (and its predecessors over the last 20 years) of which I can be proud, not a universal experience among Young Liberals to whom the housing crisis is very present.  This is a local team that has done a lot for just one ward to tackle the housing crisis (go read  Janey Little’s excellent article on that if you haven’t) and has made an appreciable difference to local public services including on things that Lib Dems campaign on elsewhere – GP appointment availability, the condition of school buildings, lack of local amenities, affordable housing.

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Community is at the heart of everything we do in South Hams

By Julian Brazil and John Mckay | Thu 7th September 2023 - 2:51 pm

Julian Brazil

South Hams is a rural district neighbouring the port city of Plymouth on the south coast of Devon. With a resident population nearing 90,000, it is also a magnet for holidaymakers and second homeowners, owing to tourist hotspots such as Salcombe and Dartmouth.

For almost a quarter of a century, the Conservatives enjoyed uninterrupted control of South Hams District Council. That was until May’s local elections when the Liberal Democrats were elected to power for the first time in the district’s history. We achieved this off the back of a manifesto pledging to put partnership with the local community at the heart of everything we do.

After 24 years of Tory rule, it was clear things needed to change and in drawing up our manifesto we recognised this meant entering into a genuine partnership with the community to deliver that change. It is a form of devolution – we want to push decision-making and local democracy to the lowest possible level.

In recent years, local authorities across the UK have been outsourcing services which should be kept in-house. This often has disastrous consequences, as we have seen with the state of adult social care and children’s services nationally. The previous Conservative administration’s decision to outsource rubbish collections in South Hams, along with their refusal to recognise they had got it wrong, certainly contributed to their election defeat.

John McKay

As an administration, we are determined to be more pragmatic in our approach. In South Hams, we are blessed to have community groups that are full of expertise, passion and drive. These groups are doing work that the council could never afford, or have the capacity to deliver. We have found that by engaging with these groups and harnessing their enthusiasm, they can deliver much-needed community services, which are better than anything the council could offer and at a fraction of the price.

One example is Kingsbridge in Bloom, a community group which looks after open spaces in the town of Kingsbridge. With a small pot of grant money from the council, they clean and tidy and make Kingsbridge look fantastic. They are a group of around 80 local residents, friends old and new, and they take real pride in what they do. It has enormous benefits for their wellbeing.

There is also Sustainable South Hams, an amazing community interest company which was started by two local people and has now spread into every small parish in South Hams. The group is a key part of the council’s climate change and sustainability work and helps to connect and support everyone in the area running sustainability projects. They host assemblies – from which lots of new groups have spawned – and have people across the district looking at rivers and engaging with local farmers, as well as running community composting and rewilding projects.

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Ciaran Morrissey

Restriction is not empowerment

By Ciaran Morrissey | Thu 7th September 2023 - 12:31 pm

When I was in Year 5, Jamie Oliver confiscated our turkey twizzlers and re-vamped school dinners to stop us from getting fat. We learned about the food pyramid, about good fats and bad fats, and about the importance of a balanced diet. PE was compulsory and we learned about calories, kinetic energy, how to exercise safely. In PSHE we learned that around one in three cigarette smokers will die from smoking. We learned how harmful alcohol was for both physical and mental health. We had Talk To Frank, a government service which gave us the low-down on all the dangers of drugs. Which is why it’s always confusing to me when every new public health proposal is veiled in the language of empowerment.

If the goal was empowerment, then we hit that long ago. Empowering people to make their own decisions necessarily means understanding that some people will make different choices even when faced with the same circumstance. An empowered person is not forced into any particular choice but may exercise their own agency to make their own decisions as they see fit.

Removing these choices, placing barriers to them, or otherwise nudging, cajoling, and strong-arming people away from certain choices, is the opposite of empowerment. It’s telling people that they are not free to make their own choices, or that, if left to their own devices, they’ll make the wrong choices. The reality is that, when it comes to health, most people are making informed decisions which align with what they want to do.

You can make an argument that people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions, but it is not a particularly liberal argument and I’d hope this party would not entertain that at all.

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Lord William Wallace

William Wallace writes: How rotten is our democracy?

By Lord William Wallace | Thu 7th September 2023 - 9:05 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.

His remedies come close to Liberal Democrat policy.  ‘We need to look at the underlying structural problem in our British way of doing politics…the “Winner Takes All” system is at the core of our problems.’  Our voting system, combined with the government’s control of parliamentary business, leaves limits on executive authority dependent on the self-constraint of ministers – and that has broken down in the past seven years. ‘Parliament needs to rediscover its backbone and reassert its freedom.  Good government and better decisions depend on the proper exercise of power.’

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Helen Morgan

Helen Morgan MP writes: It’s Liberal Democrats who build homes

By Helen Morgan | Wed 6th September 2023 - 12:36 pm

Taking on the housing brief for the Liberal Democrats has been a huge privilege. One of the biggest challenges my constituents face is the lack of affordable housing; nearly a third of my casework is about unsuitable, temporary or downright dangerous housing, and my colleagues report the same. Our government lacks ambition on housing, it has repeatedly taken the easy road, failing to tackle the crisis facing millions across the country.

At the moment we’re facing a cost of living crisis making both renters and mortgage holders deeply worried about staying in their homes, a Levelling Up Bill that has been amended beyond recognition because the Government is too weak to face down its rebels, and yet another broken promise to make life better for renters by banning no-fault evictions.

I have worked hard to champion Liberal Democrat values by amending the Levelling Up Bill to review the broken Business Rates System, to ensure that new homes are built to a decent standard so bills and emissions are low, and for local authorities to be able to set tougher standards for new homes than national ones. Yet the Tories have blocked us every step of the way.

The proliferation of second homes and holiday lets is also harming holiday destinations, from London to York, and the Lake District to Cornwall. Local people are being priced out of the market and in rural areas communities are dying, local services like schools or GP surgeries are becoming unviable, and local shops and pubs are closing. Once again the Conservatives have failed to protect communities, instead protecting the right of people to buy second homes unchecked.

In my constituency, I have stood up for residents of new build properties against dodgy developers who have broken their promises. One developer didn’t build a sewage system leaving new homeowners with an extortionate bill to remedy the situation through no fault of their own. I have  repeatedly called for the end to “fleecehold”, where management companies increase fees extortionately when managing communal areas in new developments.

With all this in mind, I am delighted to be bringing forward the paper “Tackling the Housing Crisis” to this Autumn conference. This paper wants to build homes urgently, it gives significantly more powers to local authorities to build the homes we need and also to hold developers accountable when they don’t build. We will deliver smaller homes for those who want to get their first home or downsize rather than the executive mansions developers make the most profit on.

It will give local authorities binding local targets to build homes, that are independently-assessed to ensure that councils cannot avoid their responsibilities, alongside a national target for social homes – the homes we desperately need and that the government can actually build.  My constituents are desperate for new homes, particularly social homes and I’m delighted for the Liberal Democrats to be advocating for them.

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Lord William Wallace

William Wallace writes: Michael Steed, his Liberal history

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 6th September 2023 - 6:58 am

Liberal Democrats in Kent, Yorkshire and Manchester in particular will remember Michael Steed as a candidate, councillor, and activist on many issues over more than 60 years.  Others will recall him as party president in 1978-9, as a regular attender of party conferences in spite of being wheel-chair bound by a neurological disease that resisted precise diagnosis, and latterly as an active member of the Liberal History Group and of its journal’s editorial board.

Michael grew up on a farm in Kent, went to a local independent school, and took six months before he went to Cambridge University in 1959 to work on the continent, coming back a convinced European and internationalist. After narrowly losing election to the presidency of the university Liberal Club he became president of the Union of Liberal Students (then a separate organization from the Young Liberals).  There he cultivated closer links with ‘the World Federation of Liberal and Radical Youth’ and its Swedish president, Margareta Holmstedt.  They married some years later, and set up home in Todmorden.

He was, however, always as much of a scholar as a campaigner.  He was a student of David Butler at Nuffield College Oxford from 1963-65 (alongside Alan Beith), and then for many years a lecturer in government at Manchester University.  As a student he already demonstrated an astonishingly detailed knowledge of parliamentary and local government elections.  He contributed the statistical appendix to the Nuffield election studies through many elections, in later ones in cooperation with John Curtice.  Teaching about the British constitution and commitment to political and electoral reform linked his professional and political lives.

Michael was on the radical wing of the 1960 Young Liberals, becoming vice-chair of NLYL’. He campaigned on apartheid in South Africa, on gay rights and on joining the European Community. He fought his first parliamentary campaign in the Brierly Hill by-election in 1967, gaining less than 8% of the vote. From his study of constituency histories and results he then decided that Truro was one of the most promising prospects, and travelled down to fight it in the 1970 election – disappointingly coming third.  He came closest to entering Parliament in the bitter Manchester Exchange by-election in 1973 – a safe Labour seat, almost entirely council housing, where Labour reacted furiously to what councillors saw as a Liberal ‘invasion’, in the wake of by-election wins elsewhere.  After an enthusiastic campaign in a seat that had had no Liberal activity (and which Labour had taken for granted) he gained 36.5% of the vote.  Typically, he afterwards wrote an academic article which noted that the real winner had been the 56% who had not voted.

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Geoffrey Payne

The United States is spiralling into either a Trump dictatorship or civil war

By Geoffrey Payne | Tue 5th September 2023 - 8:41 am

At the beginning of the year various BBC correspondents gave their predictions for the year ahead. Conspicuous by its absence was any prediction that Trump would get indicted this year and the monumental impact that would have on US and international politics. I for one wondered how they could miss something so obvious?

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Chris Bowers

We need three or four stand-out policies!

By Chris Bowers | Fri 1st September 2023 - 5:59 pm

Four by-election wins in little over two years, an encouraging set of council results in May, the governing party suffering dreadful poll ratings – it’s a time of optimism for the Liberal Democrats! Or is it? Sorry to prick the bubble, but there’s an elephant in the room.

That elephant is our national opinion poll rating, which is resolutely refusing to rise above the 10-12% range. With the Conservatives doing so badly, a feeling that a once-in-roughly-15-years change in government is approaching, and the reality of the Brexit disaster becoming clearer by the day, we should be up to 20% if not higher. Why aren’t we?

There’s another elephant in the room. We want a hung parliament at the next election, and the number of ‘don’t knows’ in current polls and stay-at-home Tory voters in recent elections suggests this is still possible. It will take a fair bit of tactical voting. But to persuade people to vote tactically, and for the Lib Dems to play a part in some power arrangement that gets us a change in the voting system, we have to tell people what we stand for. At the moment, the leadership of the party is not doing that.

This is what motivated a group of committed, loyal but very concerned Lib Dems to meet in York during spring conference to throw around ideas aimed at encouraging the leadership to give the party a clearer identity going into the next election. There’s no shortage of approved policies, but they need trumpeting, in particular the need for us to be the party committing to rebuild relationships between Britain and the EU, before someone else on the political stage denounces Brexit first (don’t rule out Starmer or Sunak doing so if it serves them).

The follow-up to that informal gathering in York is a formal fringe meeting in Bournemouth on Saturday 23 September to be chaired Layla Moran MP. Entitled ‘Shouldn’t we be doing better? – the need for bolder messaging’, the country’s leading psephologist and pollster John Curtice will explain how his polling shows that the Lib Dems should be scoring much higher. Curtice also believes we didn’t blow the 2019 election on our ‘revoke Brexit’ stance but by not standing for anything else, which reinforces the idea that we need three or four policies the public associate with us if they’re to lend us their votes.

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Michael Hall

Tackling the Housing Crisis – Policy Paper 155 – Motion F31

By Michael Hall | Fri 1st September 2023 - 3:54 pm

This policy paper deserves careful study in advance of our Conference in Bournemouth, as it contains many good ideas for tackling the housing crisis, which must be one of the most important priorities of a Liberal Democrat-led Government.

The section on the very important and complex issue of leasehold reform at the end, has been included in the chapter on The Planning System, and says “(we) would fix the flaws in the current planning system by…” and there follow four bullet points, of which the last is “Abolish leasehold for residential properties and cap ground rents to a nominal value.”  The law relating to leaseholds is not, of course, actually part of the planning system, and this subject of leasehold reform would have merited a chapter of its own, or indeed a whole policy paper.

The authors of this policy paper do not seem to be proposing simply to abolish residential leases, so that leaseholders no longer own an estate in land, and can be evicted without a court order.  Reading between the lines it appears to be suggested that leaseholders should automatically be given commonholds instead of their leases.

However, paragraph 11.6.1 suggests “introducing changes to the planning system to curb the worst excesses of England’s leasehold system”. So, it seems it is not intended to change property law, but only planning law. But planning law does not relate to freeholds, leaseholds or commonhold. It is about controlling the use of land, rather than the ownership of land.

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Mary Reid

Schools crisis – sheer incompetence

By Mary Reid | Fri 1st September 2023 - 11:02 am

The timing could not have been worse. This is the most stressful part of the school year for teachers and Heads, getting the buildings ready for the new intake, checking all the tech, induction for new staff and planning a term’s worth of lessons. For pupils there is some anticipation and excitement, tinged perhaps with a bit of anxiety, as they prepare to move into a into a new school or a new class next week.

So it beggars belief that the Government should announce this week that a large number of schools in England have defective buildings which must not be used. Oh, and there is no funding to cover the hire and construction of temporary classrooms.

Of course, it would be understandable if this problem had only just come to light, but the Department for Education has known about the potentially defective concrete (RAAC) since 1994, and they knew that the concrete used only has a lifespan of 30 years. It’s a type of lightweight aerated concrete that was presumably cheap to use at the time. In 2018 they sent some vaguely worded warnings to schools but did not provide any advice or means to rectify the fault. So it is not new information that has emerged this week.

And yet some 100 schools were only told yesterday that they have to take immediate mitigating action because of the RAAC in their buildings. In some cases ceilings can be propped up as a temporary measure – although getting that done will be disruptive and will take some time – but others will have to close and replace whole rooms immediately.

Even worse, the list of schools affected will not be published, so parents have to wait to hear from their children’s schools directly about the impact, if any. Dealing with upset and angry parents just gives Heads a further headache. Some children will actually have to decamp to neighbouring schools, which will only add to the disruption.

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Yue He Parkinson

The more isolated the CCP is, the fewer human rights Chinese people have

By Yue He Parkinson | Thu 31st August 2023 - 3:44 pm

We liberals have promoted internationalism, yet recently we are in a dilemma – how to cope with China? If we isolate the China government their people are going to suffer from their government and our China policies.

The West is gradually finding a realistic way to cope with China. Not only is China’s help  needed in areas such as climate change and economic instability, but also Chinese people’s human rights will be protected by the non-isolation of China from the West. Their human rights have rapidly gone down to nearly zero: they can only follow the CCP’s orders, but no rights to speak truth, to complain, no way to escape when the economy is going downhill.

I was born, educated, and worked in China before I studied in University of Bristol in 2004. It took me about 20 years to understand democracy, human rights and freedom which are absent in China. My life in two countries told me one truth: British and Chinese society share nearly nothing in common, the conversations between the two counties are very much like Chicken-Duck talk (Chinese slang, means no way to understand each other).

I keep in close touch with my Chinese friends every day. I have watched their life getting worse and worse since Covid-19, but it’s impossible to get my observations published in Western media who require evidence and data.

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Charlie Murphy

‘Crisis’ doesn’t cut it anymore: Britain’s housing is breaking us

By Charlie Murphy | Thu 31st August 2023 - 12:59 pm

The term ‘housing crisis’ has been in the political lexicon for a long while – it first entered Hansard, the record of speeches and debates in Parliament, in 1919. This gives us some sense of normality when we discuss it as a party and when we consider policy approaches to housing, even in the current crisis which is rooted in the 1980s.

Familiarity with the term ‘housing crisis’ is harmful to how we view the scale of the problem. Housing has been a ballooning problem for decades, arguably the label of a ‘crisis’ has been justified for much of this time. Though we are now reaching a cataclysmic level of housing stress which is severely damaging our living conditions, our economy and our politics. We all recognise the symptoms: a low growth, high-cost economy with stagnant real-terms wages and a perilous public purse.

For some time, Brits have endured some of the most cramped living conditions in Europe and North America. In England specifically, the average home is 71.9 square meters – Canadians typically live with double this space at 150 square meters. On mainland Europe homes are more modest but still considerably larger than the average English home – Italians see an average of 108 square meters. We can do better than this.

There’s an engine driving British homes ever smaller and it is one you will probably recognise from a leafleting round almost anywhere in the country. Properties which used to be a family home are now two or even three front doors or doorbells to the same building, often as flats or increasingly as HMOs. The rise of HMOs being a response to acute housing stress, often resisted by local authorities with a keen eye on the number of licenses they will grant. 

As our homes grow smaller, we see ever more stories from the rental market about families sharing desperately inadequate rooms, often impossible to heat and sometimes caked with mould. Yet constricting the supply of HMOs or subdivided homes is to constrict the market even further for young people desperate for a place to call home, it limits even the short-term pressure valve on the simple problem that there are just not enough places to live.

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Jane Dodds

Jane Dodds writes: Basic Income is a liberal idea and we must reclaim it

By Jane Dodds | Thu 31st August 2023 - 10:42 am

As a long-standing advocate of Basic Income I was incredibly excited that my native Wales was the first part of the UK to pilot this policy idea. I have supported the Labour Government in this process and am following developments with optimism.

The pilot is centred around young people leaving the care system. This is a particularly disadvantaged group of youngsters who ordinarily would be more or less left to their own devices when they reach their 18th birthday and are no longer considered children by the system.

There is already evidence that the generous £400 per week package is being used by these young people to go on courses, or to put down a deposit on a flat. One young person has used it to pay for driving lessons.

Even though the scheme has been criticised constantly by Conservatives in Wales, who say among other things that these young people will be taken advantage of, there is no evidence so far of that happening.

The scheme has been in place for a year and there is another year to go. The trial is being evaluated independently by Cardiff University and I am convinced that it will show that a Basic Income is good for people, for communities and for the economy.

Which is also why I am disappointed that our own party, which led the way in the UK by making Basic Income official party policy back in 2020, now appears to be backsliding in its commitment to this very liberal idea.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, a Basic Income is a regular and unconditional payment to every individual in society, as a right of citizenship.

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Hina Bokhari

Hina Bokhari writes…Cargo bikes are an important tool towards cleaner air

By Hina Bokhari | Wed 30th August 2023 - 12:31 pm

Over the last few months, a heated debate has been taking place over the expansion of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to outer London.

While this debate has continued to rage, we shouldn’t forget there are other ways in which we can reduce air pollution in London and other towns and cities across the UK.

One of the most interesting, but least reported methods for reducing air pollution in our cities is the use of cargo bikes.

Cargo bikes are bicycles that allow you to carry cargo (or heavy loads) easily, with electrically assisted models being able to carry loads of up to 250kg. The goal of their use in London has been to move freight and delivery transport away from polluting road vehicles and towards a more sustainable, clean air friendly and congestion free model – in many ways adapting the model pioneered by food delivery companies like Deliveroo for much larger goods.

This is important because freight vehicles (large goods vehicles and heavy goods vehicles), make up 17% of total miles in London, but have a disproportionate impact on emissions and air quality. This amounts to a quarter of the total carbon emissions from transport, and around a third of the total nitrogen oxides and particulate matter from road transport.

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Caron Lindsay

Vince Cable: The net zero consensus is over

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 30th August 2023 - 9:50 am

How do you save the planet when we no longer agree on key measures to save the planet? These questions are posed by Vince Cable in his latest column for Comment Central. As Vince often does, he poses questions that some Liberal Democrats will find difficult, particularly in relation to North Sea Oil licences and relations with China.

Consensus between the parties is key to making long term plans to save the planet, he argues.

He sets out how far the Conservatives have fallen on climate change:

It was Margaret Thatcher who originally embraced the global warming issue and wider environmental stewardship and who demonstrated by championing the Montreal Protocol on the Ozone Layer the force of British leadership. David Cameron (initially) and Boris Johnson continued this tradition. The resigning Environment Minister, Zac Goldsmith, has told us, however, that this Prime Minister is simply uninterested. Or hostile. Or cynically preparing for what I call the CAT strategy in the coming election: climate; asylum; and transgender; a culture war campaign.

He outlines a series of uncomfortable trade-offs that he says we must be prepared to make to get to Net Zero.

One of those trade-offs is cost. Nothing fuels populist anger more than regressive levies on environmental bads. For families whose sole practical, means of transport is an old banger, environmental taxes are resented, no matter the impact on the planet or local air quality. Politicians may choose to press ahead but they cannot ignore the negative side effects. In practice, the trade-offs are more complex. The environmental levy paid on fuel bills to provide support for new renewables was criticised for increasing energy bills but has helped to drive down the cost of offshore wind to a point that it is now consistently cheaper than gas.

He says that nuclear must also be part of the package:

Indeed, hostility to this impeccably zero carbon and energy secure domestic source has been led by the same green campaigners who oppose fossil fuel use. What we need is a portfolio of different, low carbon and secure sources including new renewables, nuclear and carbon capture.

This will cheer those within the party who are challenging our longstanding anti nuclear energy policy. Last year a motion to include nuclear power as part of an energy security package was put to Scottish Conference and referred back.

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Tom Arms

Tom Arms’ World Review

By Tom Arms | Sun 27th August 2023 - 7:42 pm

Mutineer Yevgeny Prigozhin – and the nine other passengers on his private plane — this week joined a long and growing list of “Putin’s Bodies.” Those on the grisly register share one common fatal flaw: They dared to cross the Russian president.

The tally starts with 1,300 innocent victims. It was 1999. Putin was yet to become president. But as prime minister and head of the FSB he needed a false flag operation to win support for his war in Chechnya. It is alleged, therefore, that he bombed a Moscow apartment building and blamed it on Chechen terrorists. Three hundred died and 1,000 were injured. Putin got his war.

Politician Sergei Yashenkov made the mistake of uncovering evidence linking Putin to the bombing. He was shot in the chest in 2003. Former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko also accused Putin of the apartment block bombing. He was poisoned in London in 2006 with polonium-laced tea.

Journalists are a favourite target of the Russian president. Paul Klebnikov, chief editor of the Russian edition of Forbes, was busy writing a series on Kremlin corruption when he was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2004. Anna Polikovskaya accused Putin of turning Russia into a police state. She was shot in the lift of her apartment building in 2006. Natalia Estemirova specialised in exposing human rights abuses. She was abducted outside her home and later found in a wood with a bullet in the head.

Human rights lawyer Stanislaw Markelov was walking down the street with his friend Anastasia Buburova when they were both gunned down in 2009.

Russian media mogul Mikhail Lesin was in Washington and on the verge of cutting a deal with the FBI on corruption charges. He was found beaten to death in his hotel room in 2015.

Boris Berezovsky fled Russia for exile in Britain after daring to challenge Putin. He was found dead in his Berkshire home. The inquest returned an open verdict. Boris Nemtsov accused Putin of being in the pay of corrupt oligarchs. He was shot in the back on a Moscow street in 2015.

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Tom Arms

Observations of an Expat: The Almighty Dollar

By Tom Arms | Sun 27th August 2023 - 3:35 pm

The Almighty Dollar is a bit too mighty for a growing number of countries. They want to curb it.

That was one of the driving forces behind this week’s 5-nation BRICS meeting in Johannesburg and the reason why another 40 want to join the latest political/economic organisation. Six of the applicants were admitted to the club this week.

BRICS is the acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—the current membership of the 14-year-old organisation. It controls 26 percent of the world’s GDP as opposed to the G7’s 30.7 percent, although the G7 is dropping and will drop further faster with BRICS expansion.

For BRICS you could easily substitute China which dominates the BRICS economies. And for G7 just say America. Which means the two economic groupings have become political/economic weapons in the Sino-American clash.

BRICS has thus become a diplomatic vehicle for the Chinese attempt to constrain the dollar as the world’s reserve currency or replace it altogether.

It has its work cut out for it. The dollar is indeed almighty. Eighty-seven percent of the world’s trade is conducted in dollars. The currencies of 65 countries are pegged to the value of the dollar and the American greenback is the official currency of five US territories and 11 foreign countries.

Being the world’s reserve currency bestows advantages on the US economy and the government that controls it. Chief among them is lower borrowing costs on the international market, which allows America to carry a bigger public spending debt then other countries.

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Caron Lindsay

Nadine finally quits – how you can help Lib Dem Emma Holland-Lindsay win Mid Beds

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 27th August 2023 - 10:21 am

Nadine Dorries first announced her intention to resign her parliamentary seat “with immediate effect” on 9th June. And then she decides to actually do it 79 days later while I’m out celebrating my 35th wedding anniversary, returning to the scene of the crime for an absolutely delicious meal and some even lovelier cocktails.

So this means that the formal starting gun will likely be fired on the by-election campaign to replace her when Parliament resumes on 4th September. However, the Lib Dem campaign to get our brilliant candidate Emma Holland-Lindsay elected has been going on since the day after Nadine made her original announcement. Within hours, campaigners were gathering and swapping leaflets in supermarket car parks and the like.

If, as expected, the by-election takes place on 5th October, the publication of Nadine Dorries book about the downfall of Boris Johnson on 28 September, and any serialisation before, is bound to grab some headlines.

Ed Davey was questioned on whether the Lib Dems were the challengers on the For the Many Live podcast with Iain Dale and Jacqui Smith in Edinburgh:

He said he was feeling good about the prospect of a Mid Beds by-election as Labour party members there had told them they were voting for us. He said he wasn’t sure that we were going to win, but we were definitely the challengers. There was no way, he said, that people in the predominantly rural constituency were going to vote Labour to get the Tories out. He accused Nadine Dorries of an abuse of Parliament for her behaviour.

Last night, Ed said:

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Callum Robertson

We are crying out for a fairer Pupil Premium deal

By Callum Robertson | Wed 23rd August 2023 - 6:55 am

On the Sunday morning of conference, the Liberal Democrats will present our plan for education, ahead of the next General Election, with an exciting array of new announcements, today, I want to focus on the most important one, reducing inequality of outcome in education, a policy problem that has only been exacerbated by covid.

Since the 1800’s, people have been tirelessly campaigning for a fair education settlement, for liberals this comes down to our core principles that no one should be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.

Nothing encapsulates this more than our very real change we achieved in government, the Pupil Premium, a system of targeted funding to disadvantaged pupils.

Alongside the expansion of Free School Meals, the introduction of Pupil Premium worked as an effective incubator for social mobility. When introduced by the Liberal Democrats in the 2010-15 government, figures showed that attainment between advantaged and disadvantaged students narrowed by 4%, with the Sutton Trust calling for Pupil Premium to be the key lever in narrowing the attainment gap.

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Peter Wrigley

Thoughts on “For A Fair Deal”

By Peter Wrigley | Tue 22nd August 2023 - 10:26 am

“For a Fair Deal” is the party’s pre-manifesto policy paper, to be debated at the Brighton Conference. You can read it in full here.

You’d think that, after 13 years of Tory misrule, and with the clowns in charge of the asylum for the past four, an opposition policy paper for the next election would be suffused with anger, outrage and frustration. Instead, this paper, to be discussed at conference, reads like a bland wish-list from some nice people. But, there again, maybe the working party has judged the mood of the electorate better than I. Look …

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Caron Lindsay

LISTEN: Ed Davey on For the Many Live at Edinburgh

By Caron Lindsay | Mon 21st August 2023 - 11:56 am

Ed Davey’s appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe is now available online.

He talked to Iain Dale and Jacqui Smith for their For the Many podcast.

Ed was in cracking form, very funny, bright and relaxed.

He came on stage while Iain and Jacqui were having a bit of a barney about women’s football. I had tweeted Jacqui after Iain told Harriet Harman that one thing that men could do better than women was play football. She got a lot of mileage out of that over the various shows. Anyway,  Ed was full of support for the Lionesses.

Jacqui then challenged Ed to come up with an act of heroism after Keir Starmer helped find a dog while he was on holiday in the Lake District. She might not have been expecting him to come up with an actual example, but he did rescue a woman from the path of an oncoming train.

Jacqui challenged him to get Iain Dale, who has said multiple times that he’s not sure who to vote for at the next General Election, to commit to voting Lib Dem. Ed is smarter than to fall for that trap, and, while he outlined lots of good reasons to vote Lib Dem, he recognised we might not gain Iain’s support.

Iain challenged him on why our national polling isn’t reflecting our by-election success. He pointed to local election success and the fact that we were talking to people about the issues they cared about.

His top task, he said, is to get the Conservatives out of Government.

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Tom Arms

Tom Arms’ World Review

By Tom Arms | Sun 20th August 2023 - 10:01 am

Donald Trump

Donald Trump will never see the inside of a prison. Neither will he be fitted for an orange onesie.

Not because he is innocent. Based on the evidence I have read to date, he is guilty as Hell. And I am sure a lot more will come out during the numerous trials he faces.

No, he will remain a free man for several reasons. One is that his lawyers will use every trick in their legal library to delay, delay, delay. They will appeal against the Washington venue for the trial there. They will also claim that the Washington judge is biased. The same with New York.

Their objections will be dismissed. But justice requires that they be heard and that takes time.

Next, there is the jury selection. One recent trial took several months to select the jury because they went through over a thousand potential jurors. In the case of Trump, the difficult is in finding 12 people in politically polarised America who do not have an opinion of the man and his election lie.

Even if a jury is selected, a venue is agreed for all four trials and impartial judges are found, there is a reasonable chance that a dedicated MAGA supporter will find their way onto a jury and block a guilty verdict.  Unanimous jury decisions are required in American trials. That is a high bar for the Trump prosecutors.

Let us suppose he is found guilty on a felony charge in a court by a jury somewhere in America. The verdict is then likely to outrage and activate his MAGA base to such an extent that Trump wins the 2024 election. If that happens he will simply pardon himself and his many co-conspirators. The case in Georgia will be more difficult because he can only give pardons for federal crimes and Georgia is a state crime. But his highly paid lawyers should be able to find a loophole.

If they don’t, there is the appeal process. If Trump is found guilty he will appeal. The appeal process can extend for years, possibly up to and beyond Donald Trump’s allotted time on this Earth.

Russian spies

Spies, spies, everywhere – especially the Russians. Which is not surprising. They had a huge spy network in Tsarist days. It was massive under the Soviets and, of course, Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany.

There is also the fact that Russia is at war, oops, I mean conducting a “special military operation” (SMO) in Ukraine. The SMO means that Russia needs intelligence on who in NATO is supporting what, when, where, how and why in Ukraine. Also, who they can support to espouse the Russian cause, scatter seeds of division and discontent and maybe even overturn a government or two.

And finally, if the war escalates, how best to attack NATO.

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Tom Arms

Observations of an expat: Enemy of my enemy

By Tom Arms | Sat 19th August 2023 - 10:57 am

The well-worn phrase “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” has ancient roots.  It dates back 7,000 years to the Sanskrit literature of India’s Vedas. The Romans and the Koran adapted it to their political needs.

In Modern times it has been repeatedly applied. Possibly the most famous examples are Churchill and Stalin, and Mao and Nixon.

This weekend President Joe Biden will use the well-worn diplomatic axiom to try and persuade the leaders of South Korea and Japan that they should bury deep-rooted historical animosities to unite against the common enemies China, North Korea and Russia.

All three leaders will gather at Camp David on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They are expected to issue a communique agreeing to closer economic ties, intelligence sharing, a Tokyo-Seoul-Washington crisis hotline, a first ever joint statement of principles and trilateral military exercises.

What they will NOT do is agree to a formal treaty. Neither will Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida formally apologise for Japanese atrocities committed before and during World War two.

There are lots of good and obvious reasons for Japan and South Korea to be friends. Both of them are threatened by China and North Korea and, to a lesser extent Russia. From the US point of view there are 85,000 American troops costing an estimated $15 billion. Washington desperately wants Seoul and Tokyo to shoulder more of the burden.

The South Koreans and Japanese have the means to assume a bigger role but until recently have lacked the will. Japan is the world’s third largest economy and fourth largest military establishment. Fast-growing South Korea is not far behind, ranking 13th in the world GDP list and sixth on the size of its defense establishment.

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