Over the next few days, we will be publishing our twelve most read posts of 2016. Many thanks to the 533,000 people who have visited the site over the past tumultuous 12 months. 

Our 4th most popular post highlights Justice Secretary Liz Truss. Lib Dem peer Martin Thomas found an old LDYS newsletter from Liz’s days as a Lib Dem. A classic, I’m sure you will agree..

If it hadn’t been for one of our peers moving house, we might never have had this wee gem fall into our hands.

We know that new Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor Liz Truss was once a young Liberal Democrat activist before joining the Tories. However, we now have photographic evidence from an LDYS newsletter from the time of one Elizabeth Truss proudly holding up the LDYS banner on a mass trespass at Twyford Down in protest at the Criminal Justice Bill on 2 July 1994. Simon Hughes also took part.

This controversial piece of legislation was introduced by Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard and offended liberals by restricting raves, allowing inferences to be drawn from a suspect exercising a right to silence and strengthening unsupervised stop and search powers. Those latter powers were still being used until the Coalition years, when their use was curbed thanks to the influence of Liberal Democrats in government.

 

The newsletter savaged the Liberal Democrat opposition to the Bill in the Commons. Then Home Affairs spokesperson Robert Maclennan was criticised for “shamefully” supporting attacks on hunt saboteurs for not going far enough and Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs were told that their opposition was feeble. The Lords, on the other hand, inflicted four defeats on the Government’s proposals.

This is a wonderful piece of history. It’s good to see that the person in charge of justice in England has had her own history of peaceful protest at utterly illiberal measures.  Let’s hope that these early instincts inform her actions in office.

Martin Thomas, who passed us the picture, asked, with his tongue firmly in his cheek:

Are we at last at a new Liberal dawn in the Ministry of Justice, as our sleeper takes over from Grayling and Gove?

Also worthy of comment is that LDYS were proper insurgents back in those days. They didn’t mince their words. One of the songs often sung at the raucous end of Conference singalong, the Glee Club, is “The week we went to Brighton.” It’s basically about the 1994 youth organisation and how it annoyed Paddy Ashdown by putting down motions calling for the monarchy to be abolished and for the legalisation of Cannabis. Neither of these things seem quite so radical now, although only one has any public support and chance of becoming a reality in the near future.

Those were the days…