Back in June, we reported on some of the heartfelt tributes paid to Elspeth, Lady Campbell of Pittenweem, after her death.
Anyone lucky enough to have been invited for lunch at their house were in for a treat. Great food and brilliant chat. Elspeth had an office in Scottish Lib Dem HQ for many years where she was a unique and sparkling presence. She was unfailingly kind and would have us in stitches with funny stories. We all loved her.
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.
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.
The ALTER (libdemsalter.org.uk) fringe at Bournemouth will be held from 13.00 in the Sherborne Suite, Bournemouth Marriott Highcliff Hotel on Saturday 23rd September 2023.
The fringe is focused on the white paper published by the News | Albright Stonebridge Group that asserts Land Value Capture can finance Ukraine’s reconstruction, reduce corruption and boost productivity.
The white paper notes the following key takeaways:
• A broad consensus of economists throughout history have supported land value capture – collecting the increase in land value that results from public spending on infrastructure and other services – as
It has been an eventful week for by-elections with principal elections on both Wednesday and Thursday – and even a good town council gain for us on Monday night too!
The only place to start however is on Shropshire Council with our amazing gain on Thursday night in Worfield ward – taking the seat from the Conservatives with a 33.5% increase in the Lib Dem share of the vote. The Conservative share of the vote fell by 27.9%.
Congratulations to Cllr Andrew Sherrington and the Lib Dem team on winning in such spectacular fashion.
Shropshire Council, Worfield
Liberal Democrat (Andrew Sherrington): 400 (48.1%, 33.5%)
Conservative: 392 (47.1%, -27.9%)
Labour: 40 (4.8%, new)
Elsewhere on Thursday we put in some solid performances and made sure there were Lib Dems on the ballot paper in all of them.
There were two by-elections on Newcastle-Under-Lyme BC. In Audley ward Andrew Wymess increased the Lib Dem vote share by 8.7% to finish a very strong third with 355 votes. In Knutton ward Aidan Jenkins stood for the Lib Dems (we had not stood a candidate in the previous election) and got just shy of 20% of the vote. Labour held both wards.
Well done and thank you to Andrew, Aidan and the team in Newcastle-Under-Lyme.
Newcastle Under Lyme BC, Audley
Labour: 732 (46.1%, -6.7%)
Conservative: 438 (27.6%, -14%)
Liberal Democrat (Andrew Wymess): 355 (22.4%, +8.7%)
Independent: 63 (4%, new)
Newcastle Under Lyme BC, Knutton
Labour: 153 (49%, +1.1%)
Conservative: 99 (31.7%, -2.8%)
Liberal Democrat (Aidan Jenkins): 60 (19.2%, new)
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.
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.
Our Parliamentary team have been doing some research into the prevalence of RAAC concrete in hospitals. It seems seven hospitals have been named as having the material in their construction, and nearly two million people live within their catchment areas, so could be potentially affected. The hospitals between them employ 43,000 staff who are therefore also at risk. Four of those seven hospitals are classed as ‘mostly composed of RAAC beams’.
However this is by no means the true extent of the problem, as, in total, 23 NHS trusts are affected by RAAC. Data from the House of Commons Library does not give the names of 11 of those trusts which have more than one hospital, where not all of the hospitals will have a RAAC problem. Nor does it name a further five trusts which are affected.
This is not all new information. Back in March Lib Dems demanded emergency funding to fix hospital roofs in the Budget. They are now calling for an urgent boost to the funding to make hospitals safe and usable.
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.
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.
Another Conservative MP has resigned this morning. Chris Pincher, MP for Tamworth, was suspended some time ago for groping two men, and he has just lost his appeal against suspension. He had previously said that he would step down at the next General Election but he now says he is resigning immediately.
Assuming he is not doing a Dorries, we could be looking at a double by-election on 19th October, which has now, at last, been set as the date for the Mid Bedfordshire contest.
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.’
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.
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.
I’ve helped at the odd by-election (!) but normally I don’t see the candidate during brief visits to the HQ to pick up bundles of Focii.
At Mid Beds this week, I have had a double candidate “I Spy” score. As we were watching “Rookie” on Sunday evening, Emma Holland-Lindsay actually phoned me on our landline phone (which these days is a bit like the Carlsberg complaints phone).
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?
Sad news dropped into my inbox this afternoon. Michael Steed, President of the Liberal Party from 1978-79, died this week.
From Young Liberal anti-apartheid activist who was once prevented by the South African authorities from delivering aid to Sharpeville to eminent psephologist who provided the stats for the British General Election Guides up until 2005 to radical social liberal who was ardently pro-European but not blind to dangers of concentrated power in the way the EU worked, he spent his whole life working for liberalism, and was elected as a councillor in Canterbury in 2008.
He was also one of those brave liberals who fought for gay rights well before it was fashionable to do so. He helped fight the early battles that won the freedoms we take for granted now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This week’s Government meeting with China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs will be the first visit of any UK Foreign Secretary to China in five years.
Commenting on James Cleverly’s planned visit to Beijing on Wednesday, Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesperson, Layla Moran said:
James Cleverly should think again about whether this is the signal the UK should be sending out.
At this very moment China is perpetrating genocidal crimes against the Uyghurs, increasing aggressive activity towards Taiwan, and pursuing illegal bounties against Hong Kong pro-democracy activists in our country.
The Guardian reports that:
Michael Gove is planning to rip up water pollution rules that builders have blamed for exacerbating England’s housing crisis but which environmental groups say are essential for protecting the country’s rivers.
The housing secretary, with Thérèse Coffey, the environment secretary, will announce the move on Tuesday, according to several people briefed on the plans, alongside hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of extra funding to mitigate the potential impact on England’s waterways.
The decision will spark anger among environmentalists, who say it will further add to water pollution, as water companies are already dumping raw sewage into rivers
…
Are you going to Lib Dem conference next month? Conference starts at 9am on the Saturday morning, so if you want to be there and not miss anything you probably need to arrive the day before.
So what is happening on the day before on Friday evening? Well the conference program will not mention anything because conference has not started yet. There will be hundreds of Lib Dem members in Bournemouth, but nothing is happening.
Apart from one event that we in Social Liberal Forum (SLF) are organising. For every in-person autumn Lib Dem conference the SLF have organised their pre-conference dinner and we would like to welcome LDV readers to come and join us. We are delighted to announce that our guest speaker at this event will be Sarah Green MP, winner of the Chesham and Amersham by-election and a former director of the SLF. This will be a great opportunity to meet other conference representatives before conference starts.
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.
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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