Dear Nick,
Well, not bad. The polls look better and on the doorstep I’ve not had a single person ask me why we got rid of Charles Kennedy.
The Bones Commission was a good idea. It was a less of a good idea to allow those who could be part of the problem (I only say could) set its remit. Equally, I’m not sure that the deadline for submissions was very generous and I don’t think the message got down to the grassroots. But let’s see what comes out of it. But it must be an interim step – to coin …
Both Nick Clegg and David Cameron tackled Gordon Brown on the consequences of the credit crunch for the economy. The Tory leader focused on the regulatory failures which allowed Northern Rock to become such a mess; the Lib Dem leader tackled the Prime Minister on home repossessions and the current ‘boom and bust’ in the housing market. Tick to Nick for picking the issue which matters most to the public.
The Prime Minister shaded his confrontation with Mr Cameron, looking pretty comfortable on his home turf of the economy, while unusually the Tory leader relied heavily on his notes for his over-long questions. Jonathan Calder at Liberal England is pretty scathing of Dave’s performance today:
… he is clearly not a master of the economics brief. His questions were wordy and Gordon Brown was armed with some good quotes to answer him. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Cameron’s case over the Financial Services Agency, you have to score the contest to Brown.
David Cameron’s second problem is that he is, er, David Cameron. The only time he threatened to engage public interest today was when he talked of the price of bread, milk and eggs. Yet if ever someone gave the impression of not knowing how much bread, milk and eggs cost, that person is David Cameron.
I always wondered, in a society where being “posh” is just about the worst sin out, if David Cameron’s background – and even more the fact that he looks like a public school boy – would count against him. This is one issue where it will.
Nick is looking more and more comfortable at PMQs as the weeks go by. He hasn’t tried to ‘do a Vince’, and skewer Gordon with a smart quip, but he is sticking doggedly to his task of interrogating the Prime Minister on the serious issues of the day with his two questions. Which, after all, is what PMQs is supposed to be for. Anyway, judge for yourselves… the Hansard text of their exchange is below:
Before we knew who was to be our new leader I rashly penned a piece on what I thought he should do in his first 100 days. Having been asked to reflect on how I think he has done, I went back to elements of my original musings.
Having taken a military perspective, I suggested that our new leader needed to have
* A thorough understanding of our ‘enemy’ – it is after all the ground they currently hold that we wish to take;
I think we have begun to see Nick’s strength in this area, although there is a way to …
Results of the latest poll from PinkNews are out, with Brian Paddick coming out the winner again. Interestingly, his margin of victory has doubled since the previous poll they conducted.
Vote shares in this online poll were:
Brian Paddick 48% of first preferences (+11%)
Ken Livingstone 32% (-6%)
Boris Johnson 13% (no change)
Others 7% (-5%)
After transfers of second preferences Brian won overall, as in the previous poll, though this time his final margin of victory was 11% up from 5% last time.
PR Media blog says so, so it must be true 🙂
(Leaving aside the slightly odd pop re. Steve Webb, yes it’s true – Jerome and his firm are helping the campaign which, as he’s one of the leading internet campaigners in the US, is pretty good news!)
John Ward, the Conservative councillor who talked about mandatory sterilisation for parents who have more children than he thinks they should have, has resigned as a councillor.
So Labour will be holding a consultation process on the benefits of a secondary vote, compulsory voting and voting at the weekends then? Well, I think I can guess what this exercise will say:
“It’s a wonderful idea, I’m suprised we didn’t think of it before!”
To which I would answer: “Because First Past the Post gave you two landslide majorities!”
Assuming that they continue with the late Roy Jenkins’ recommendation of Alternative Vote, it soon becomes obvious why Labour are now warming to the idea. At the next election (working on the new boundaries) Labour will start off with 349 MPs, …
After a turbulent couple of weeks for Senator Barack Obama’s campaign, things are starting to look up – he has been tested and emerged relatively unscathed from the inflammatory comments of his turbulent Pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
At least as importantly, the US media is beginning to focus on how unlikely it is that Senator Hillary Clinton might ultimately triumph, with the ruling out of Florida and Michigan ballot re-runs, and the acceptance that Democratic superdelegates must not over-rule the popular choice.
Here’s David Brooks in today’s New York Times:
Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects continue to dim. The door is closing.
…
Several issues have placed religion and it’s role in politics in the spotlight this week.
Labour has found itself in hot water over allowing a free vote on the bill that will allow the creation hybrid human-animal embryos. Meanwhile, across the pond, Barack Obama is assessing the damage done to his campaign by the comments of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. The Pope’s baptised an Italian born Muslim convert as part of his Easter message in what was a somewhat ill-advised piece of showmanship. Here on Liberal Democrat Voice we have had quite a lively debate around faith schools.
First, let’s set some parameters for the debate.
Religious faith, or lack of it, is a matter of personal conviction – but the business of government is to govern an entire society comprised of different levels and types of individual belief. Modern, democratic states must be secular (not atheist) in nature. This is especially true in the age of the ‘war on terror’, when fundamentalist ideologues try and portray secularism as merely a covert tool of Christian domination.
Secularism is a cornerstone of moder democracy, it is a founding principle of democratic nations and direct and principled break from a past in which rulers claimed legitimacy from divine inheritance. It is more than just a fancy word, it must be at the heart of democracy because it is the principle of the predominance of the people’s will over patronage allegedly handed on down from the heavens.
It is not essential to have religious faith to share a set of moral values or indeed to ‘belong’; it is easier and far more healthy to unite around human centered values in beliefs, such as belief in the innate capacity of humanity to better itself. More often than not, religion does more to divide than unite, as we are seeing day-after-day in the world at large.
It coheres a specific ‘group identity’ but part of that process is unity against the other groups. Saying religion is a unifying force is a bit like saying a love of football unites a nation – try telling that to a room full of Tottenham and Arsenal or Manchester United and Manchester City fans.
Julia Goldsworthy, Lib Dem MP for Falmouth and Cambourne, says yes. Facebook says no. But Julia isn’t taking no for an answer.
mySociety, the folk behind TheyWorkForYou.com, today launched its first ever campaign – to make Parliament publish bills better – in the nicest, politest possible way:
Free our Bills! The Nice Polite Campaign to Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21st Century Way, Please. Now.
You can find the website here – www.theyworkforyou.com/freeourbills – and Lib Dem Voice encourages readers to follow the link and add your signature. Here’s a snippet to give you a taster:
It’s time for Parliament to improve its act and start publishing these vital documents properly in the first place. Quite apart from the fact
…
Later today, party leader Nick Clegg will be launching the new Liberal Youth organisation – the new name for LDYS.
Here’s what the press release says:
LDV is hoping to bring a series of podcasts from the campaign trail this April in the run up to a big set of local elections across the country. (If you don’t know who’s having elections, Keith Edkins has a handy trailer. “Cheshire West and Chester” sounds like a clumsy name for a local authority!)
You can use this to promote your local campaign, appeal for help, and tell us what’s happening in your neck of the woods.
There are two ways to take part: volunteer to take part in a telephone interview or just get on the blower to the …
Following serialisation of the highlights in the Sunday papers, you can now buy Brian Paddick’s autobiography, Line of Fire
The blurb says:
Now freed of the constraints imposed by his professional responsibilities Brian Paddick reveals the full extraordinary story of his life and career. From early days on the beat, including searing experiences such as the Brixton riots, he went on to gain successive promotions despite what many in such a traditional organisation would have perceived as the ‘handicap’ of his sexuality. And yet he himself would argue it was another
…
It’s time for a new poll on this site, and this time the question is:
Do you support the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill’s proposal to allow animal-human embryos for medical research?
Cast your vote in the Poll section in the column to the right.
The final results to our previous poll were:
Do you think a party political leadership can work as a job-share?
Yes 75 (19%)
No 329 (81%)
A significant overhaul of electoral legislation to give voters a second vote, open polling stations at weekends and make it compulsory to participate is being proposed by the government to increase turnout and improve the legitimacy of the Commons.
Ministers will begin a consultation effort on the plan after local elections in May, and hope the measures will increase the authority of MPs and reduce voter disengagement. In the 2005 general election, only 61% of those eligible participated. Under the alternative voting system, ballot papers would allow for a second preference vote which would be redistributed from the lowest-scoring candidate’s share
…
“Acting swiftly to reduce carbon emissions across the world could be as economically imprudent as it would certainly be morally reprehensible.” Andrew Tyrie, Conservative MP for Chichester, 5 March 2008
Hat tip: Rupert’s Read
Or so the headline in the local rag says.
Lib Dems in East Middleton are planning to ballot local residents about the future of controversial Councillor David Murphy. The ‘mini-referendum’ will simply ask the question – “Do you believe that Councillor Murphy should be residing in South-Western Europe at tax-payer’s expense?” The Lib Dems have also revealed that Councillor Murphy has less than a week to stand down to avoid a costly by-election.
Local Councillor Irene Cooper said: “People round here are quite rightly furious at Councillor Murphy’s behaviour. I feel he should stand down immediately. I know that local people
…
A few years ago, we in the Lib Dems were billing ourselves as Britain’s most wired political party – I remember all too well because I had to watch my typing very carefully or risk printing tens of thousands of leaflets calling us Britain’s most weird political party.
Our netted reputation is going from strength to strength.
First, Lib Dem MP Steve Webb, himself no stranger to the internet, caused a stir by showing Lib Dem MPs were better represented on Facebook than those from other political parties.
Then, just a few posts ago, Mark Pack demonstrated our MPs have a …
That’s the question posed by a new piece of academic research which shows just how much richer Conservative (though not Labour) MPs have ended up by the time they died:
While the role of money in policymaking is a central question in political economy research, surprisingly little attention has been given to the rents politicians actually derive from politics. We use both matching and a regression discontinuity design to analyze an original dataset on the estates of recently deceased British politicians. We find that serving in Parliament roughly doubled the wealth at death of Conservative MPs
…
Welcome to Bank Holiday Catchup – reading Lib Dem Voice so you don’t have to.
A quieter week than many, but we still had time for all the usual, and much much more. Guest contributors included fast-becoming-regular Darrell Goodliffe marking the anniversary of the war in Iraq; Linda Jack talked to us about taxes; Martin Land looked at the polls and Bernard Aris gave a welcome perspective on the Gurkha medal campaign.
All your regular contributors were represented too: Stephen brought us Obama; Richard brought us Paddick; Alix suggested a Liberal rapid response unit to …
Welcome to the 57th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (16th-22nd March), together with a quintet hand-picked by Lib Dem blog readers you might otherwise have missed.
Let’s get straight down to it, in descending order of popularity:
There’s a classic Tony Blair quote that’s been doing the rounds ever since Labour started promoting ID cards:
At the Labour party conference in 1995, Tony Blair demanded that ‘instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards as the Tory Right demand, let that money provide thousands more police officers on the beat in our local communities.’ (Wikipedia)
This quote is wonderfully double-edged as it shows the strange dance both the Labour Party and Conservatives have done on the issue since 1995. The Tories were pursuing an ID scheme in 1995 which got dropped by the Labour party when they came into power in 1997.
By 2005, the Labour Party had changed sides, and brought in a new bill for ID cards worse than anything the Tories had intended, which the Conservatives supported.
By 2006, the Tories had changed sides, and David Cameron decided to oppose the new scheme, bringing both the Tories and the Labour party to a complete reversal of their positions in one handy decade.
Now a new quote has emerged from a Lib Dem on Cix transcribing the then shadow chancellor Gordon Brown speaking to Labour conference in Blackpool in 1996.
The UK Parliament’s website lists email and website details for all the current MPs. A series of spots checks shows the data to look accurate (though of course there may be one or two errors in there somewhere). So I’ve been counting. And then, of course, I’ve drawn three barcharts.
They show in turn, what percentage of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs:
…
Congratulations to Lynne Featherstone, who has become, she believes, the first British MP to use the Twitter instant messaging system, just slightly less than one year after I first suggested on my blog, and in the forums here (party members only).
Those of you unable or unwilling to read the forums will be unaware that the idea was initially dismissed out of hand by influential party bosses, before they went on to embrace it wholeheartedly. Now the entire Innovations Department is happily twittering away.
Barely a month afterwards, the party used Twitter for a highly successful if under-used
The Easter weekend row over Labour’s refusal to say if they will let their MPs have a free vote on legislation which allows the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos for research rumbles on. The BBC website today reports speculation that at least one Catholic cabinet minister, Paul Murphy, would quit rather than support the bill; Ruth Kelly and Des Browne are also mentioned.
Both the Liberal Democrats and the Tories have confirmed a free vote will be granted to their MPs, though the Lib Dems’ science spokesman Evan Harris has made clear his views on the issue:
From a religious
…
Top punter Mike Smithson is tipping readers of his politicalbetting.com site to watch Brian Paddick in the London mayoral election. With the collapse of support for Ken Livingstone, he now thinks Brian is the only man who can save London from a Boris Johnson mayoralty. You can read Mike’s comments here. The Nick Cohen comments Mike refers to are on his site.
I was filled with pride about our party when I saw Nick Clegg speaking to those furious Gurkha veterans outside the Houses of Parliament, and when he brandished a Gurkha medal during Prime Minister’s Questions. Gordon Brown showed himself a glorified book-keeper in his response.
From his Dutch-Indian mother, Nick could have known that the Dutch have always been somewhat more pragmatic about our “native troops” from our Asian colonies, the Dutch East Indies.
Almost the first part of present-day Indonesia the Dutch occupied was the archipelago of the Moluccas. The Moluccans started cultivating spices for our East India Company (VOC). We noticed that they were fierce fighters; so when we made the Dutch East Indies a Crown Colony and integrated it in the Kingdom of the Netherlands (1816-30), we very soon mobilised Mollucan men in our Royal East Indian Army KNIL.
Here’s a sample of what David Cameron has said before:
David Cameron will unveil plans tomorrow for a new “three strikes and you’re out” rule (January 2008)
For persistent offenders, the public deserve a break from their behaviour (April 2006)
Now here’s the thing. Can you guess who was caught cycling through a red light and without a helmet in 2007? And was then caught again cycling through a red light, with an eye-witness reporting “instead of apologising, his whole attitude was one of arrogance”? And then we have today’s news, complete with photos:
The Tory boss
…
One of the striking figures to emerge from the fire sale of Bear Sterns, formerly the fifth largest US investment bank, is the huge gap between its assets and debts. It had $11.8 billion in capital, which might sound a lot … until you add up its debts, which came to $395 billion.
The underlying problem is that, in the search for profits, Bear Sterns kept on lending out far more money than it actually had, making up the difference by borrowing money from other firms, who were willing to lend money to Bear Sterns on the basis that it did …
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Jeff 
Nick Baird 
David Wright 
Sarah 
David Raw 
