By popular demand… following David Davis’s shock decision today to quit both as Tory shadow home secretary and MP for Haltemprice & Howden – and force a by-election over Labour’s 42 days detention without trial policy – Nick Clegg has announced the Lib Dems will not stand against Mr Davis at the subsequent by-election.
Nick’s decision gained the personal backing both of the party president Simon Hughes, and the party’s chief executive and by-election supreme Chris Rennard. All three have made it very clear the Lib Dems will re-contest the seat at the next general election. They have apparently discussed it …
The media are increasingly turning to reporting strains within the Conservative Party over David Davsis’s dramatic resignation. For example, Nick Robinson on David Davis’s resignation:
David Cameron has lost control of his strategy. This was not his decision. He was not asked for his agreement. He was informed late last night by David Davis that he was going to do this come what may. That he was going to resign and trigger this campaign. This is not a campaign that Mr Cameron wants, it is not part of his strategy and indeed, I am told by senior Tories who know
Lib Dem Voice yesterday highlighted the contrast between David Davis’s passionate opposition to Labour’s attempts to bang up citizens for six weeks without telling them why, and the rather more lacklustre opposition of the Tory leadership:
I don’t doubt for one second the integrity of David Davis, the Tories’ shadow home secretary, in opposing Labour’s draconian 42 days proposal. He is one of many Tories who have shown themselves to understand the importance of defending hard-won freedoms. But what if Mr Davis weren’t to be the Tories’ home secretary? What then? Would his successor stick to his guns? That the
It is especially damaging, then, to learn that Tory MEPs have pressed their noses deep in the European trough … What impresses no one is the conduct of Sir Robert Atkins, an MEP for the north-west … As far as Conservative party chairman Caroline Spelman is concerned, the nature of the secretarial duties supposedly performed by her former nanny during 1997/98 seem to get murkier by the day … A party which will campaign for the next election on tackling Labour’s gross misspending has no room for MPs who waste taxpayers’ money themselves. Any candidate who
From The Guardian on how Gordon Brown won last night’s vote on 42 days detention without trial:
It was privately acknowledged the DUP had also pushed for a financial package to lift the burden of new water charges, speed up asset sales and exclude Northern Ireland from the Abortion Act.
How close did the Conservative Party come to backing Gordon Brown over extending detention without trial to 42 days?
From the voting figures (only one Conservative MP backed Labour, Ann Widdecombe) you might think that the party was pretty united and firm in its opposition. But that would overlook the disputes within the Conservative Party on their line, which even caused David Davis to talk about quitting the Shadow Cabinet:
David Davis is said to have told Mr Cameron that he would rather resign than support the Government’s efforts to extend the period of pre-charge detention beyond 28 days. George Osborne and
This Saturday, the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors are holding their second annual local government conference at Birmingham’s ICC.
Find out more on their website. There was a real buzz about this event last year, so we are all looking forward to the event again this year. The programme is jam-packed with sessions, with many events happening simultaneously.
We here at LDV will have a stall at the conference. We’ll be reporting live during the day, and I will have my trusty recorder. I’ll be taping several sessions and podcasting them later for any of our readers or users of the …
That Labour scraped home by just 9 votes in today’s 42 days detention without trial vote is thanks to the votes of the Democratic Unionist Party. The DUP leader Peter Robinson claims their stance was about principle, and nothing to do with any deals they may have been offered by the Government.
Well, maybe… though they’ve not convinced the Lib Dems’ Chris Huhne: “I think it is very much a hollow victory for the government – and at what cost, it sounds like lots of promises have been made – it is pork-barrel politics of the worst kind. I …
As I write, I haven’t yet seen the Commons roll-call of votes to find out how many (or indeed if any) Tory MPs joined Ann Widdecombe in voting with Labour on 42 days detention without charge. We do know, though, that the proposal enjoys the support of ConservativeHome.com, the provisional wing of the authentic Tory party:
Today’s terrorists attack without warning. They are willing to use mentally ill children as suicide bombers. They want to kill as many people as possible. They don’t want some of our territory. They won’t be satisfied until we are
Guardian Politics is currently leading with a story about the Conservative candidate in Henley – who works with a planning consultancy specialising in with a firm that builds on the greenbelt. This is rather unfortunate for a campaign where greenbelt development is particularly controversial.
Henley byelection: Tory candidate lobbying for planning firm while backing green belt
John Howell, the Conservative candidate in the Henley-on-Thames byelection, is campaigning to keep the green belt while acting as a lobbyist for a planning company that advises housebuilders on contentious land and property deals.
Howell, who is citing fighting development in Oxfordshire’s green belt as one of the key reasons to support him in the byelection on June 26, was accused of “grade-A hypocrisy” by the Liberal Democrats.
Coincidentally, this unfortunate fact also appears on the front of the next Lib Dem newspaper, and electronic copy of which also dropped through the electronic letter box of Lib Dem Voice.
Last week, the Cinderella at the Prime Minister’s Questions’ ball was the Government’s plan to extend to 42 days the length of time citizens can be held without being told what terrorist offence they are alleged to have committed. Not this week. Both Nick Clegg and David Cameron led on today’s Labour bid to shred our civil liberties.
Nick led on two fronts. First, that it’s absurd of Gordon Brown to suggest the House of Commons will continue to exercise oversight in such exceptional cases as present themselves as the evidence necessary to make that decision cannot (obviously) be presented to MPs.
We have won the argument against extending the period in which suspects can be detained without charge. The only question now is whether we win today’s vote.
My guess is that it will be close, but that we will win thanks to some courageous Labour rebel MPs who are resisting the 21st century equivalent of the thumbscrew, an early morning call from Gordon Brown. A key factor will be whether the Democratic Unionist party succumb to bribes or not, but their opposition to internment in the past shows that they are more principled than some suggest.
It’s hard to believe, but Ed Balls was once credited with being a champion of ‘new localism’ within this Labour Government. This was what Mr Balls said back in 2002, before he was elected an MP, and was Gordon Brown’s right-hand at the Treasury:
In today’s complex world, it is simply not possible to run economic policy or deliver strong public services using the old, top-down, one-size fits all solutions. Excessive centralisation saps morale at local level. It destroys innovation and experimentation. It fails to allow different policy areas that must in fact be interconnected to be joined up”.
Which Lib Dem MPs received the most media mentions between 1st March and 31st May, 2008? To find out I trawled Lexis-Nexis’s online database of all UK national newspapers (and a huge number of regional ones), feeding in the names of each of our MPs in turn, and seeing how many returns were generated.
To qualify, the MP must have been mentioned either as a Liberal Democrat or Lib Dem. This will disadvantage those MPs who are working their regional media hard, but whose names do not appear under the party’s banners. Sorry, but them’s the rules.
Anyway, here’s the list in descending order of media mentions (with their Dec ‘07-Feb ‘08 positions in brackets):
The recent London elections made it very clear that, if the Lib Dems are to avoid becoming the victims of a mighty squeeze at the next general election, we are going to have to do more to engage with disenfranchised Labour supporters, and worry less about trying to take seats off the resurgent Tories.
Although we have scored notable successes against Labour (Hornsey, Brent, Manchester Withington, etc.) in recent years, they have not been of the number or scale of our victories over the Tories in the latter part of the 1990s.
The GMB trade union has started cutting its direct financial support for Labour MPs. It plans to withdraw funds from a maximum of 35 MPs and yesterday announced the first six. Probably of most interest to Liberal Democrat members and supporters is the inclusion of Durham MP Roberta Blackman-Woods on the list as she is sitting on a majority of only 3,274 over the Liberal Democrats.
Robert Winnett at The Daily Telegraph’s Three Line Whip blog gives us the low-down, and Sam Coates at The Times’ Red Box blog has this to say:
Jon Oates, the party’s director of policy and communications, is returning to the world of lobbying, and (re-)joining Bell Pottinger. Jon has been a steadying influence on the party through difficult times, and is widely recognised as one of the most talented and friendly people in the party. Although he is sorry to go without fighting an election (he was a Ming appointment) he couldn’t hang on until 2010. His loss will
Cllr Christine Wakefield, the Chairman of Ashfield Labour Council Group, has joined the Liberal Democrats. This local coup follows a number of recent election successes that have led to the Liberal Democrats taking minority control of Ashfield District Council.
Cllr Wakefield said “I joined Labour because I thought they were the party that stood up for ordinary hard-working families.
“It is now clear that their policies, like scrapping the 10p tax rate, are really hurting people. With food and fuel bills going up too, many people in Ashfield are really struggling to make ends meet. Most people I
A second member of David Cameron’s shadow Cabinet faces a Parliamentary sleaze investigation after it emerged that his office is secretly funded by the head of a controversial oil company…
Vitol, which was Iran’s largest petrol supplier until last year, has been prosecuted after admitting paying bribes to Saddam Hussein’s government in exchange for valuable oil contracts from the Iraqi regime. It was fined $17.5 million (£8.8 million) by an American court.
Duncan Brack and Ed Randall, authors of the Dictionary of Liberal Thought, have kindly agreed to let us publish extracts on Lib Dem Voice. Last month, Distributism. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop.
The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is a UK-based think-tank dedicated to the promotion of economic or classical liberalism. It describes its mission as ‘to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems’. The IEA is one of a small number of think-tanks world-wide that can claim to have had a significant impact on public policy, both in terms of contributing to a transformation of the general climate of opinion in the UK and the implementation of specific policies.
Last Monday, 2nd June, a group of ‘ten green bloggers’ assembled in my office at Westminster to plan to take over the universe. Or if not that, perhaps at least to save the planet.
I have been aware for some time that the Lib Dems’ Facebook campaign on getting the Climate Change Bill toughened up hasn’t really caught fire in the way that I hoped. So I was delighted to be able to bring together a cross-party group of people who share the same commitment to the environment, but also have expertise online / in communications, or who are well …
Despite the excitement of a power cut in this bit of south London earlier on, this week’s Something for the Weekend is here. Right here. Just carry on reading from here.
We’re all going on a summer weekend of enforced Britishness
Labour Minister Liam Byrne put his foot in it with the Scots this week, being forced to backtrack before he’d even made the speech he was promoting.
He had floated the idea of turning the August Bank Holiday into the festival of Britishness Fife MP Gordon Brown’s been so keen on – and what could be more Labour than attempting to instil patriotism through centrally-dictated celebration.
But it was quickly pointed out that the August Bank Holiday in England and Wales is at the end of the month while Scotland’s is at the beginning of the month. (The BBC’s clumsy turn of phrase: “the August holiday is on a different date in Scotland to what it is in England and Wales.”)
According to the Beeb, the Minister said he had just been doing what Labour Ministers seem to spend much of their time on: trying to “get the debate started”. And according to theguardian, he believed that a weekend of Britishness would “help frame the progressive case for controlled immigration” – something to which the British population would no doubt love to dedicate a weekend.
MP cautioned for climbing over van
Liam Byrne’s West Midlands Labour colleague Rob Marris, the MP for Wolverhampton South West, has also been in the news this week.
Readers of Colin Ross’s site may recall that Mr Marris – Colin’s MP – had been arrested in April and charged with causing criminal damage after climbing over the bonnet of a parked van to get to a bus.
Mr Marris has now admitted the offence and accepted a conditional caution. My favourite quote is from the CPS’s district prosecutor: “The van was not parked to his liking.”
I’m opening… I’m closing…
Readers up-to-date with all the latest in exciting internet technology and stuff like that will probably already be avid users of Twitter. For those that aren’t, here’s something to make you change your mind: Twitter updates from Tower Bridge.
If you’ve not already seen it, I recommend taking a look at the Henley by-election blog which, in a by-election first, the Acting Returning Officer David Buckle and his team are using to explain their vital role in the election and their work in the run up to polling day on June 26th.
Surely no-one involved in politics could be geeky?
Speaking of geeks and of blogs, as we were, Liberal Democrat Voice’s own Mark Pack, finding he had some time on his hands, has joined the team of bloggers at PoliGeeks. Mark’s first post is here.
CCTV is everywhere
Courtesy of Popbitch comes perhaps the least appropriate place in Barcelona for a CCTV camera:
Prime Minister’s Questions is on Wednesday at noon. Our representative on Question Time on BBC One on Thursday is Shirley Williams.
And finally
To play us out, a celebration of British/Englishness (he blurs the distinction) from American nerdcore rap artist MC Lars. I warn you now the sound quality isn’t great. But it is the only song I know that mentions Guildford.
Welcome to the 68th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (1st-7th June), together with a hand-picked quintet you might otherwise have missed.
Let’s get straight down to it, in descending order of popularity:
Labour’s Julie Morgan MP had a brave attempt to introduce a Private Members Bill to lower the voting age to 16 talked out by Conservative MPs on Friday. Her Bill was a cross party effort backed by Jo Swinson among others. Regrettably, there were not enough supportive MPs present to force a closure vote (100 are needed) and this is partly down to the lack of Liberal Democrats in Parliament that day.
I was one of those who set up the Votes at 16 Campaign back in 2002, bringing together a wide range of supportive groups including the UK Youth Parliament, British Youth Council, Barnardos and YMCA. There are a total of more than 30 different groups and many thousands of individual supporters who back the campaign.
From the start, we faced quite a mountain of opposition. Much of it was genuinely focussed on the issue, but there was also a fair amount that was based on irrational prejudice and most of this comes from the Conservatives.
It is fair enough to ask whether young people at 16 are ready to vote and whether those that choose to exercise such a right are capable of doing so with the minimum of reliance on celebrity endorsement and pressure from family members. I would argue that the majority are fully capable – much more capable than 18 year olds were just a few years ago. A compulsory part of the national curriculum in all parts of the UK is now citizenship education (although it is delivered with varying quality). So young people are encouraged to debate issues that matter to them with their peers. They are also meant to understand what each of the parties stands for and how elections work. I would argue that there is no better time to engage them than immediately after this compulsory learning ends.
As mentioned previously, Mayor of London Boris Johnson is running up very big bills for consultations to help him and his team settle into the job. Unfortunately, he now also seems to have forgotten just how much the bills are because he told the BBC today that:
I don’t think we’ve spent half a million so far: I think that may be the total of their annual salaries, something like that.
In short: wrong. Indeed, given how short the period of time is that many of the consultations have been employed for, giving their equivalent full annual salaries would give a …
OK, I admit it, I have misquoted Nick’s speech to the LibDem City Forum last month – but not by much. This was the most Euro sceptic speech by a LibDem leader in living memory.
Let me quote him precisely: “the UK is enjoying the benefit of currency flexibility and the devaluation of the pound against the Euro is giving a stimulus to manufacturing.” Doesn’t sound like someone who wants to join the single currency, does it? He acknowledges that things may change, but he doesn’t exactly go out of his way to make it sound likely: “conditions may …
Tim Rogers Nick. Time is the essential element here. Only with time will we be able to see if it worked. Voting for us at elections at all levels will require us to unders...
Ian Patterson It’s all down to the difference between fluffy seats where we can do well in parts of UK and the larger number of non fluffy seats where we do not. As the las...
Nick Baird Hi Tim - that may be a reasonable assessment of where we are now, but it also confirms the problem. When you talk about "those Conservative voters" that's an ac...
Tim Rogers Nick It was only a matter of time before the Conservative party woke up to the position they found themselves in. Badenochs is no longer under threat. She has ...
John C Congratulations! I've chalked up a mere 10 years, but what a 10 years it's been (in a good way)....
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Peter Kellner: Zack Polanski should have won at a canter
Liverpool near bottom of the league for recycling
Labour's recovery in by-elections continues.
Vote Tory, get Reform?
Looking good!
Tim Rogers
Ian Patterson
Nick Baird
John C