Weekly Catchup 3rd – 9th March

Your handy weekly guide to all that’s good on LDV.

Well, what a week. Europe dominated the early part of the week. We had inconsistent Tories, inconsistency from IWantAReferendum, inconsistency from the Lib Dem parliamentary party, (well, 13 of them) – but at least the sure and certain knowledge that Britain is behind us. Not that you’d necessarily know that from our comments this week. And of course, the Tories were more split than we were, but that somehow didn’t seem to make it into the media much. And contrary to what …

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Opinion: The issue is not faith schools but freedom of conscience

There has been a lot of comment on Lib Dem blogs lately attacking the faith school system and religion in education. I want to use this opinion piece to offer a different and more liberal perspective on secularism. Secularism to me means that the state has no business deciding on matters of religious truth, and no business telling parents what faith, if any, they ought to bring their children up in.

While I am no believer myself, what matters to me in politics is whether somebody shares tolerant liberal values, whether they are in favour of a critical and questioning approach to problems or simple obedience to authority. It may seem too obvious to be worth saying, but there are religious people and atheists on both sides of that question.

So I would like to see us adopting a policy towards religion in education that has three characteristics:

1. The state does not decide for parents how they should raise their children.

2. We should not attack schools that are well run and have good results. It is my view that in the case of successful faith schools, this is largely due to selection. But then why should a selective faith school be treated differently to a selective community school? And is it not safe to assume that faith schools take a uniformly less broad and less tolerant view of faith than non-faith schools.

3. There should be choice within schools. We have to admit that for all the talk and good will in the world, there is very little choice of school for many people. It should therefore not be assumed that a choice of school represents an endorsement of a school’s faith identity (or lack thereof).

Faith is not just an issue for faith schools. Community schools are also required, in nearly all cases, to assume that their pupils are broadly Christian and are not permitted – in the rules for seeking a “determination” from the SACRE – to canvass for the actual religious views of children or parents.

Let me repeat that.

Schools are not permitted to find out what faith allegiances parents and children actually have. This is illiberalism of the absurdest degree. So rather than focussing – as the faith schools debate usually does – on who runs schools, I wish to focus on the rights of parents and pupils to equality within the system whether they are Christian or not.

Posted in Op-eds | 190 Comments

CGB Blog awards – full coverage

After a lengthy pause for a train journey home, a chance to edit the tapes very slightly, and the time taken to upload the file, Lib Dem Voice is very pleased to present a full recording of the proceedings on Saturday evening – including as an added bonus, a quick webinar from Lib Dem blogging expert Mary Reid.

Congratulations to winners Lynne Featherstone, Alix Mortimer, Jo Christie Smith and Betsan Powys.

A full list of all websites mentioned in the report will follow below very shortly is below

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Round up of conference blogs

More people than ever have been blogging from Conference – here’s a quick round up of some of the excellent non-LibDemVoice coverage on the LD blogosphere.

The Lanson Boy has some excellent photos here, here and here.

Don Liberali is a hoot as always as is the Lib Dem’s favourite fluffy elephant.

In an interesting experiment with new media, Richard Gadsen live-twittered the leader’s speech.

Lynne Featherstone reacts to finally winning a prize after so many nominations.

From Lincoln not Liverpool, Ryan Cullen picks up on Auntie’s conference coverage.

Local blogger and campaigner Paula Keaveney has news of …

Posted in Conference | 5 Comments

Something for the Weekend: Long-haired lover from Liverpool

Welcome to Something for the Weekend, which this week comes to you live from Production Office 1 in the Artists’ Village, deep in the heart of Liverpool’s new Arena and Conference Centre.

On the Something for the Weekend speakers’ podium today: bikinis; a liberal singalong; the steam pipe trunk distribution venue; and more!

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Glee Club podcast

Many thanks to the A Capella Glee Club, the handful of conference delegates who hadn’t had enough singing at the actual Glee Club by 1am and continued for a further two hours into the early hours of the morning, long after the staff had cleared away the chairs and shooed us out.   I always feel it’s not really Glee Club unless you’ve actually injured your vocal folds.

Here is the A Capella Glee Club (all 5ish of us) performing Glee Club classic “Losing Deposits”

Posted in Conference and Podcasts | 6 Comments

Diary of a Conference Virgin (aged 29 1/6): Saturday part deux

Our Vince Cable the Able was the main event of a lot of people’s Saturday conference. It will therefore surprise precisely no-one to see that the Red Box is desperately attaching electrodes to the equine corpse of the “Should Vince have stood?” non-issue. The giveaway in such tedious toilet paper coverage is that it actually devalues Cable – the man supposedly being praised – as much as Clegg, as if the shadow chancellor’s function is limited to providing a compare-and-contrast exercise for the media.

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Leader’s Speech: Open Thread

A chance for all those at home listening to Nick Clegg’s speech on the radio or BBC News 24 to have their say, before all those who were actually there get home and start weighing in.

In previous years, conference representatives have arrived home to hear very different spins being applied to the words they heard, so it’s always interesting to compare how speeches come across in person and mediated across the ether.

UPDATES: You can read his speech here (part one) and here (part two). Coverage so far includes:

Sky News – Clegg: ‘Donations Cap To Save Britain’
Politics.co.uk …

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Illegal abductions

One of the debates yesterday was about illegal abductions, otherwise known as the US kidnapping people around the world. You can read the text of the motion here, which called for a full independent inquiry into the UK’s involvement in the abductions.

And for other conference news, here is Lynne Featherstone’s Sunday morning diary:

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Diary of a Conference Virgin (aged 29 1/6): Saturday

Continuing in the little-known twenty four hours later school of live-blogging, we come to the moment on Saturday morning when I unglue my eyelids just in time to hear Brian Paddick deliver his London setpiece.

He is as impressive as ever, and plays on his background in just the right way – “I’m not a politician. I don’t know much about talk, but  I do know a lot about delivery”. His main hitpoints are crime, housing and transport, and increasingly his speeches use his life experience as a personal sidelight on all of them, not just crime. I am

…

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Campaign for Gender Balance Blog Awards

The full results of the blog awards… James has them.

And hopefully I’ll be able to bring you a podcast of the full event tomorrow, including comprehensive advice from ReadMyDay’s Mary Reid, after I’ve had a chance to tinker with the sound a little.

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The sclerotic defence

Amongst the weighty matters of political debate on Liberal Democrat blogs at the moment is the question of whether “sclerotic” is too recondite a word for Nick Clegg to have used. Stephen Tall posts a case for the defence, a view echoed by Brian Appleyard:

I would have thought that, since arteriosclerosis is so common, almost everybody would have come in contact with the word … Ignore the knockers, Nick, swallow a thesaurus that we may engorge on your recondite multiloquence.

P.S. A quiz question for Iain Dale: can you guess what word is not only used on the Conservative Party …

Posted in News | Tagged and | 5 Comments

Sam Coates covers conference

A few good pieces from Sam Coates over at the TimesOnline blog. He was clearly at the same Vince speech as our own Alex Foster, although the idea of filling the conference hall with new Cablite Daily Mail reading Lib Dems might put the wind up some of our existing conference reps. The speech didn’t go down quite as well with Wetherspoons, by the way. I just hope Tim Martin isn’t reading the LDV comments thread.

Coates’s piece on unapologetic Clegg seems to hit the mark too.

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The Red Book

 Our LDV office, under the arena seating, is shared with the Innovations Dept and PICS, so some cross-fertilization on content is possible. George Crozier updating the party website with what goes on can call across to see if we’re doing something and vice-versa.

Interviewing George Crozier

I’d just been brainstorming with Innovations about some ideas for a podcast when George came in and announced that he had the Red Book. What is this Red Book, you may ask? And so, the interview:

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Alan Beith’s longevity

Hooray! Someone has phoned the Podcast Hotline 020 7617 7221.

Alright, so it’s a blatant plug for an event later in the year, but I have no objection to testing the technology this way.

EDIT: the event is now on FlockTogether.

Posted in Conference and Podcasts | 2 Comments

Programme alert: ‘A Marriage Made in Portsmouth’ – 9pm tonight

Can’t get to conference, but in the mood for some Saturday night Lib Demmery? At the conference, and desperate to avoid the bar?

Then why not switch on the telly, and tune to the BBC Parliament channel at 9 pm tonight, Saturday 8th March, when you can watch A Marriage Made in Portsmouth, a documentary to mark 20 years since the Liberal/SDP merger. The programme combines archive footage of the merger process, as well as contemporary interviews with some of the key players, such as Lord Steel, Baroness Williams and Lord Maclennan.

It is broadcast Saturday night at 9pm on BBC …

Posted in Lib Dem TV | 5 Comments

Diary of a Conference Virgin (aged 29 1/6*): Friday

On Friday, I undergo the unwieldy registration process and persuade MatGB to take a new picture for my pass, because my last picture was taken in Brighton when I was both windswept and hungover, whereas today I am merely windswept. In fact this is not technically my first conference, but my only contributions to proceedings in Brighton last September were to hang around outside the conference centre leafletting and go to the Bloggers’ Drinks. I was going to call this column Diary of a Conference Virgin-sort-of-with-some-fumbling but decided that discretion should be the better part of valour.

We are joined by my friend familiar to LDV posters as Grammar Police, and we start Lib Dem-spotting in earnest. The bulky tourist families and bevies of French schoolchildren shuffling round the Albert Dock are now joined by small parties of worthy looking people clutching sheaves of paper. Sharp-suited aides (as sharp-suited as Liberal Democrats get) bark into phones and Tom Brake is reported to be sitting alone in Coffee Republic looking a little bit bored. You can’t move around the Conference Centre area without taking on at least one leaflet per minute, a thing I am happy to do partly because I feel sorry for the leafletters (we all do; it’s a leafletters’ self-made paradise) and partly because I am not organised enough to have brought a notebook.

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Saturday conference diary: Lynne Featherstone

UPDATE: Federal website now updated with the latest speech – Simon Hughes’s Party President words from just before lunch.

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Legal Aid debate

You cannot have democracy, civil rights and a rule of law without access to justice, and you can’t have access to justice without Legal Aid. So said speaker after speaker in interesting waistcoats. And they are right of course. There is no access to justice for millions in this country, and the move to fixed fees will decrease it further by driving more legal aid practises out of business.

As much as this is all true, I found I had more sympathy for the lone dissenting voice of Elizabeth Dukes. Why is it that Legal Aid costs £34 per person in …

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Nick Clegg on a moped

Thanks to, er, everyone for bringing our attention to the Times piece about Nick Clegg on a moped.

Mixed views on the idea in the Lib Dem Voice room under the seating in the Liverpool arena, we have to report.

Posted in Humour | 1 Comment

Warm reception for Vince

Conference has just listened with rapt attention to shadow chancellor Dr Vince Cable MP. As Sal Brinton pointed out in her introduction, Vince has had an amazing time of it in the last few months following events largely unforseeable as recently as the last conference.

So delegates were very keen to show Vince their gratitude, and burst into applause simply at the mention of his name, and continued for a number of minutes after he got to the podium. Vince – apparently a Stalin expert – joked this was because he was deploying the old Stalinist technique of peppering …

Posted in Conference | 7 Comments

Send in your Golden Dozen nominations

Regular readers of our weekly Golden Dozen feature will know that we have opened up five slots to reader nominations.

All you have to do is drop me a line at [email protected], highlighting the best Lib Dem blog postings from the past week, and providing the web-link and author, and any tagline comment you care to have published. Self-nomination is just fine. I can’t guarantee inclusion, of course, but will do my best to work my way round different Lib Dem blogs over the weeks.

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News from the daily sheets

George Crozier, from the Political Intelligence and Communication Section wrote last night in a comment that a little difficulty was being had updating the party website from Liverpool, and gave the following information about the weekend:

The two emergency motions which will be debated between 16.25 and 16.55 on Saturday (tomorrow) are on Extraordinary Rendition and Sustainable Banking.The emergency motion that will be debated at 9am on Sunday morning is on Gaza. It is proposed by Hackney Lib Dems and it condemns both terrorist acts aimed at Israeli civilian targets and disproportionate use of force by the Israeli Defence Forces.

Ed …

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Martin Kettle: why the Lib Dems matter

There is a pretty fair analysis of the last week for the Lib Dems by The Guardian’s Martin Kettle today – you can read it here. On the issue de jour – Europe and the Lisbon Treaty referendum vote:

To witness our one truly pro-European party abstaining and divided at the climax of the most important European vote in British politics for years this week was to witness a parliamentary shambles. No party can ever be satisfied with a shambles. Yet while acknowledging the damage, it is important also not to exaggerate it. The Lib Dems will recover. Nick Clegg’s fledgling leadership is not at risk.

Indeed Wednesday night’s abstention and pro-referendum rebellion was probably the least worst option for the party. The free vote that some of Clegg’s critics advocate on the Lisbon treaty referendum would have seen half of the party in the pro-referendum lobby and the other half, including Clegg himself, in the anti. The derision that would have greeted that damaging spectacle would easily have eclipsed the derision provoked by the abstention. And anyway, Europe isn’t a free-vote issue.

This slightly misses the point. Europe might not be a free vote issue, but a referendum on a treaty has been regarded as a free vote issue by the party in the past – most notably under Paddy Ashdown’s leadership during the Maastricht debates in 1993. This phase of the party’s policy on Europe is omitted by Mr Kettle. Nonetheless, it’s welcome to see a commentator retain a sense of perspective, something that’s been a tad lacking in other media analyses or in the blogosphere.

Posted in Europe / International and News | Tagged | 2 Comments

Liverpool Arena: first impressions

Part of observing Conference Ctte meant I got to tag along on their tour of the building, and here are my thoughts:

  • It’s huge
  • And Shiny
  • And painted lots of very bright colours
  • There are amazing views back over Liverpool when you walk out of the building
  • (Almost) Everyone’s happy to see you
  • Registration went really quickly (I needed to upgrade to a voting rep badge because I didn’t send local party officer details to Cowley Street in time)
  • The building is a total rabbit warren – and not just the backstage bits where the LDV office is located
  • But this might be because we are not using

…

Posted in Conference | 2 Comments

User Generated Content

Like a crazed talk-show host, I’m appealing for Lib Dem Voice readers at home and at conference to contribute to our coverage of conference.

You can e-mail [email protected] if you have a whole opinion piece – or a very long comment – to submit for consideration. Our general guidelines are here.

You can phone our podcast hotline with your views: 020 7617 7221 (perhaps you were planning to give a speech and didn’t called to the platform? Well, phone your speech in to us…)

And you can of course always leave comments at the items we do cover. We’ll …

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Opinion: Better health = a more equal society

I’ve submitted an amendment to the motion accompanying the health policy paper we’ll be debating this weekend at the Lib Dems’ spring conference in Liverpool, and our esteemed editors have asked to me to explain its reasoning.

The amendment aims to add to the list of things we want to do: ‘Concerted action across government to tackle the root causes of ill health and inequalities in health, including high levels of income and wealth inequality, poverty, poor housing and environmental pollution’.

The thinking behind it was triggered by listening to Nick Clegg’s comments when the paper was launched. He used the statistic – familiar from his leadership campaign, and a good illustration of the problem – that someone born in the poorest ward of Sheffield would have a life expectancy of fourteen years less than someone born in the richest ward. ‘And’, he added, ‘the NHS has to do something about this’.

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Diary of a Conference Virgin (aged 29 1/4): Thursday

The People’s Republic of Mortimer is very much your modern, convenient lock-up-and-leave totalitarian state, so when this diary was suggested as a way of keeping homebodies in touch with the all-singing all-dancing excitement that is a political party conference, I had only to change the guard, cancel the milk and weaken the currency so that no-one would be popular enough to mount a coup while I was gone.

Our grand progress northwards was agreeably punctuated by a very kind man offering to buy us a sandwich (seeing that we were embarrassed for funds; it is an expensive business running a republic) and the most patriotically scouse train manager one could wish for: “This train will be calling at Watford Junction, Nuneaton, Stafford, Crewe, Runcorn and Liverpool – city of culture 2008 – Lime Street. Expected time of arrival in Liverpool – eight times European cup winners – is 12.47. On behalf of the driver, the crew, the trolley staff, the people in the shop and the fluffy mascot on the dashboard may I warmly welcome you aboard this Virgin Trains service to the greatest city on earth and assure you that we will be bearing you away from the dirty south as fast as humanly possible.”

Emerging from Lime Street station is a fine if disconcerting experience. Why, someone has picked up the Roman forum, rebuilt it at its zenith and plonked it down in the middle of a whirlwind of merciless relief roads! You can still sense, around Lime Street and along the docks in particular, the puffy pride of those Victorian grandees pretending they were Pericles, bolting on superbly extravagant civic buildings to what had formerly been a very ordinary if sprawling port city. The experience of sailing up the Mersey to dock at Liverpool must have been, to your average Irish famine victim for example, something akin to how arriving by ship at New York feels now.

Posted in Conference | Tagged | 13 Comments

News from Nick

The latest party video is a brief chat from our leader Nick Clegg telling us about Liverpool and some of the issues facing us at conference.

Shortly after that, he headed into the rally, which as I write, is where I’m headed.

Posted in Conference and Lib Dem TV | 3 Comments

Nick Harvey introduces… Forces Focus

Our 2005 Manifesto stated that one of our priorities was to look after our Armed Forces so they can look after us. At a time when our forces are committed to fighting on two fronts, as well as operations around the world, this holds just as true now as it did three years ago.

With continued operations around the world, defence remains at the top of the agenda and it is essential that the Government’s ‘duty of care’ to service personnel is fulfilled.

However, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved to be more challenging and more hostile …

Posted in Online politics | Tagged | 2 Comments
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