Please, please, could you just make this the last time you use the wrong logo for the Liberal Democrats?
In case you are in any doubt – the logo you keep on using is WRONG. As in, it is NOT THE RIGHT ONE. I mean, even manages to get it right whilst the Guardian gets it WRONG. Again and again – even though you’ve managed to switch to using the new Labour and Tory logos.
PS Could you use the right one next time? Please?
I’m off this morning to Lib Dem Conference in Brighton. It seems to me that this has the opportunity to be one of our most interesting and engaging conferences for a while.
There are some really quite interesting discussions which it’s quite difficult to call which way they will go. It has been a criticism that I and others have made in the past of conference that sometimes too much of it could be predicted in advance and isn’t saying anything too much new. But that certainly can’t be said of this year, which contains plenty of new and strong thinking.
So some of my predicted highlights for the week are below. If you’re not coming to conference you might want to watch out for some of them.
But if you won’t be there, I wouldn’t trust too much to what the mainstream media will tell you about the conference, because I can tell you now what they will be saying.
They will be saying firstly that the Leader’s authority is on the line, pending a possible defeat on the conference floor on something, and secondly that everyone is talking about how the Lib Dems will position themselves in the event of a hung Parliament after the next General Election.
I know this because this is what the media have said people are talking about conference at each of the 13 previous conferences I have been to. This will not be true. These discussions are not on the agenda and will not be seriously discussed. But it is a standard feature of Lib Dem conferences (and for all I know the other parties’ ones too) that those who have spent the week at them come to home to find media coverage describing an entirely different event than the one they have been at.
The media also have their own news priorities which rarely coincide with a full and balanced approach to reporting this event. A journalist unwittingly put it very well to me last year when he said in answer to a question about what story his paper would be running the following day, “Well if Ming loses the vote tomorrow we’ll be writing about that; if he wins it then we’ll be running on what’s happening in Lebanon”.
So if you have find yourself hearing a reporter say that “all the talk in the conference bars tonight is of…” then trust me, it isn’t. I can honestly say that over the years I have devoted my fair share of effort into researching what people are talking about in the bars at conference, and I can tell you quite clearly that whatever it is on any particular night, it jolly well isn’t what the media are reporting it is.
So, what are my particular tips for interesting debates next week:
The Lib Dems have just issued a press release in which Ming Campbell has demanded in unequivocal terms a referendum on the UK’s position within the European Union. Here’s the full text:
Ahead of his Party Conference, which begins tomorrow, Liberal Democrat Leader Menzies Campbell, has called for the public to be given a real choice on the European Union.
Menzies Campbell said:
“It’s time for the political parties to end the shadow boxing on Europe and enter into an honest debate about the European Union.
“We will not know the final shape of the European
…
You can’t accuse Norman Lamb, Lib Dem shadow secretary of state for health, of slipping out gently his policy proposal that patients needing emergency NHS treatment after becoming drunk or incapacitated by drugs should be charged:
“If you get rat-arsed on a Friday night and get taken to A&E where you are foul and abusive to staff, is it right for the taxpayers to fund your life-saving treatment?”
Though this is perhaps the most eye-catching proposal from Norman – gathering headlines in The Guardian, The Times and BBC.co.uk – it is by no means the only one.
His paper – not Lib Dem policy, but his contribution to the party’s health policy working group – proposes:
A rather bizarre headline distracts from a shrewd, but by no means comfortable, analysis of the Lib Dems’ prospects by Lewis Baston, co-editor of Politico’s Guide to the General Election 2005 and research officer at the Electoral Reform Society, on The Guardian’s CommentIsFree blog.
It’s worth reading in full here – but here’s the conclusion:
There are two strategies available , to slog on and hope the climate improves, or to shake it up. More or less the only way the party has to shake things up is to dispose of another leader. Rumblings against Charles Kennedy were audible at the
…
William Ewart Gladstone, David Lloyd George, John Maynard Keynes, John Stuart Mill – who is the greatest Liberal of all time? All Lib Dems coming to the autumn party conference will be able to cast a vote.
The poll for the greatest British Liberal in history is being run by the Liberal Democrat History Group. In the first stage, in July, readers of the Journal of Liberal History voted between 15 potential candidates (plus an eclectic collection of write-ins).
We chose not to define what we meant by ‘great’ – leaving that up to our voters – but our criteria for candidates were that they must have been active in the Liberal Democrats, or its predecessors, or influential on Liberal thinking; they must have been British, or active in Britain; and they must be dead.
The final four to emerge were:
Two new Liberal Democrat members of the House of Lords have been appointed today by the Government.
Sue Garden is the widow of Lord Tim Garden, who died last month. An active Liberal Democrat in her own right, she is a member of the party’s Federal Conference Committee and was the parliamentary candidate for Golders Green in 2005. A former secondary school teacher, she worked from 1988 for City & Guilds, developing and promoting vocational education and qualifications, including NVQs, and since 2000 she has been a consultant for the highest award of Fellowship, FCGI.
Jim Wallace, the former Deputy First Minister …
The new book Reinventing the State
Unlike socialists, liberals never allowed the desirability of greater equality to undermine their …
The jury trying a Labour member of Waltham Forest Borough Council has been told by prosecutors that she spread lies about her Lib Dem opponent in order to win election by just 28 votes in 2006.
It is alleged that she told voters that her opponent – a gay Lib Dem councillor in a long-term relationship with a 39-year-old Malaysian – ‘was living with a 16-year-old Thai boy’ and that he ‘slept around with boys under the age of 15’. Local residents have taken to the stand to testify to such doorstep slurs of paedophilia. The Lib Dem councillor, who …
I think it’s fair to say there’s not been universal acclaim of Ming’s verdict, posted here on Lib Dem Voice yesterday, that a referendum on the EU reform treaty is “not necessary”. Here’s the scores on the doors…
Agreeing with Ming
David Nikel
Paul Walter
Frank Little
Disagreeing with Ming
Gavin Whenman
Chris Black
Arwen Folkes
Nich Starling
Antony Hook
Jonathan Calder
Toby Philpott
Stephen Tall
James Graham
Finally, it seems there may well be a fourth Lib Dem MP backing moves for a referendum, according to the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts: “Paul Keetch …
According to the Glasgow Daily Record, anyway:
Ex-Lib Dem leader Lord Paddy Ashdown has been outed as a spy by successor Sir Menzies Campbell. Ashdown, a former Royal Marine who served with the elite Special Boat Service, was long suspected to have been a real life James Bond. Now Sir Menzies has confirmed he worked for MI6.
The North East Fife MP revealed: “Put it this way, when he was in the Foreign Office, I think he was in the more shadowy side of Foreign Office activity.”
And, indeed, the resemblance between Paddy and Daniel Craig is uncanny.
It may be easy to forget when it’s on your doorstep every day, but the UK is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. You only have to think about the stunning views from the Brecon Beacons, the tranquillity of the Norfolk Broads or the thriving cultural scene in Liverpool to understand why that’s the case.
The coming years boast some fantastic opportunities for tourism in the UK. At conference, Liberal Democrats will debate our tourism policy outlining how to make the most of them.
Tourism is one of the UK’s largest industries, employing over two million people. The benefits of tourism are clear. A thriving visitor economy can provide employment, investment, tax revenue and regeneration in a range of communities. For every £1 we spend promoting tourism, we gain £5 in re-investment. But tourism’s benefits are not purely financial. It can also help to preserve our national heritage and encourage cross-cultural understanding.
Tourism once boomed in this country. But despite the UK’s potential, Britain’s share of the global tourism market has fallen by 16% over the last 20 years. Only London is currently immune from falling visitor numbers. The amount of money UK citizens spend abroad far exceeds the amount overseas visitors spend here – known as the tourism deficit. Under Labour, this deficit has quadrupled, currently standing at £18 billion.
Climate change has risen to the top of the UK’s political agenda in recent months. The Prime Minister talks about it, the leader of the Conservatives talks about it. But the role of our Party on this issue has always been to lead the way and we will continue to do so. Not only that, we’ll continue to press for Britain to take global leadership on fighting climate change.
At our Conference we will be debating our new policy paper ‘Zero Carbon Britain – Taking a Global Lead’. This paper encapsulates the vision, determination and political will of the …
In a pre-conference interview in today’s Financial Times, Lib Dem leader Ming Campbell has dismissed calls for the party to back a referendum on the EU reform treaty – but has kept open the possibility of a re-run of 1975’s ‘in or out’ poll:
… Sir Menzies, a “pro-European”, told the Financial Times the new EU reform treaty was “sufficiently different” from the original constitution to avoid the need for a plebiscite. He said the only case for a public vote would be on a much broader “in or out” question about Britain’s membership of the EU, to prompt a
…
I’ve been asked to preview the conclusions and argument for my book Location Matters: Recycling Britain’s Wealth here. If you subscribe to Liberator or Challenge (the Green Lib Dems’ journal) you will get reviews by others of the book before Conference. In the current Challenge you will also see a piece by me about how the Liberal Democrats’ Tax Commission got in such a depressingly non-radical place with Land Value Taxation (LVT) – which is what my book is about.
What I want to do here is explain the conception of the book, its purpose and what I hope happens next. But first, as requested, in a single sentence: conclusions and arguments. If the Liberal Democrats do not go into the next General Election campaign with a pledge to retain some form of nation-wide property tax at the same time as scrapping Council Tax, they will have betrayed their forebears and – more importantly – future generations of British people and will not deserve the support of voters.
A new report by the Green Alliance has placed the Lib Dems lightyears ahead of the Tories and Labour for environmental policies. The Green Standard Report gave the Lib Dems three ‘green traffic lights’ compared to Labour’s one and the Tories’ none.
“The Liberal Democrats have an ambitious and realistic objective for a zero-carbon Britain, tackling carbon emissions from every part of the economy: transport, housing, offices and factories. Our green tax proposals will switch the burden of taxes towards pollution, not people. We need greener and fairer taxes, not more taxes,” said Chris Huhne, our Environment Spokesman.
The news comes ahead …
Issan Ghazni has been appointed to the newly created position of National Diversity Adviser based at the party’s Cowley Street Headquarters. Issan has a consulting and professional background in Equalities and Diversity at the highest level and has extensive experience of the public, private and voluntary/community sectors.
Issan is also a Liberal Democrat activist who fought Nottingham East in 2005, doubling the Lib Dem vote and achieving a swing against Labour of almost 12%. Commenting on his appointment Issan said:
“This is an exciting time to be joining the team at headquarters. I am really looking forward to tackling the diversity
…
There is meant to be a political consensus in this country. Global warming is taking place, and humans contribute to that. There is also a scientific consensus that this is the case as well, so since we are all agreed, it is surely the case that the BBC can go ahead to what is now the important next step; try to encourage the population of this country to do something about it?
In the same way the BBC encourages us not to commit crime, it is important for our future safety and wellbeing, indeed our survival, that we do not destroy the environment in which we live.
It appears we are not there yet. There is still a powerful anti-green movement in this country. When the BBC announced it was dropping an awareness-raising programme on climate change, only Chris Huhne had the courage to speak out against the decision:
“The consensus about global warming in the science community is now overwhelming, so accusing the BBC of campaigning on such an undisputed threat is like suggesting it should be even-handed between criminals and their victims.”
Why was that? What do Brown and Cameron think? If they both publicly agreed with Huhne, then surely the BBC would have to change its mind?
Three years ago, it was the infamous Orange Book which became the talk of the Lib Dem conference. This year it looks set to be Reinventing the State, published yesterday. (And which includes a number of the contributors to the original Orange Book, including Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne and Steve Webb.)
On Thursday, Lib Dem Voice will publish an article by David Howarth, Lib Dem MP for Cambridge and one of the book’s three editors, in which he sets out why he feels it is necessary to update social liberalism for the present day. Today you’ll simply have to make do with the press release, below, to mark the launch. And, if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the link to The Guardian’s report of Reinventing the State’s publication.
It is only fitting for Lib Dem Voice to mark the 17th anniversary of the publication of Lord Bonkers’ diary with this special cut-out-from-your-computer-screen-and-keep souvenir special. Through the good offices of his literary secretary Jonathan Calder, who writes the blog Liberal England, Lord Bonkers writes exclusively for us.
I have been asked by the editors of this moving electric blog to share some of my long experience of Liberal politics with you. Many of you will already know me from my Diary in Liberator magazine, where it has appeared since 1990: those who do not should take out a subscription immediately.
First, let me introduce myself. I think my entry in Who’s Who in the Liberal Democrats puts it Terribly Well when it describes me as “Statesman, Soldier, Diplomat, Philosopher, Traveller, Industrialist, Author, Philanthropist and All Round Good Egg.”
Islington South & Finsbury Labour MP Emily Thornberry – who was just 484 votes ahead of the Lib Dems’ Bridget Fox at the last General Election – is used to being in the papers talking about the need for action on affordable housing.
Islington is one of many London boroughs where the rise in property prices combined with decades of ‘right to buy’ and ‘buy to rent’ has priced swathes of people out of being able to buy or even rent a home. Islington has an estimated 13,000 households on the housing waiting list and Ms Thornberry has not been slow to exploit their situation for votes.
Now she’s been exposed taking a rather different kind of action to that expected by her constituents.
The Liberal Democrat conference tax policy motion is based on the report of the Tax Policy Working Group, which I chaired. The Group was established by the Lib Dem Federal Policy Committee after last year’s conference had approved a pretty comprehensive policy covering the principles which we wanted to underpin our tax policy and specific policies to bring these principles to life. We summarised that approach under the heading “fairer, simpler and greener”.
Last year’s policy paper did however leave some issues unresolved. And we also had to respond to the Budget.
The first issue we discussed was property tax. Here we have fleshed out proposals to move from the uniform business rate to site value rating for business property. On domestic property, we reiterated our support for Local Income Tax (LIT) and also propose that, in the longer term, a system of land value taxation should also be introduced.
We looked at simplifying the system and we make three proposals: –
1. We would replace the extremely complicated rules against tax avoidance by introducing a General Anti-avoidance Rule which would make it illegal to structure transactions for the principal purpose of avoiding tax. This would allow us to tear up about 500 pages of tax legislation
2. We would replace the highly complicated system of capital allowances with one based on tax deductible depreciation. This would simplify the system and raise enough revenue to allow us to reduce corporation tax by a further 1%.
3. And we would reduce the size of the tax return for the majority of those whose tax affairs are straightforward – over six million taxpayers – by cutting out all the irrelevant questions. All they would need to complete is a form the size of a postcard.
Imagine, for a moment, that the terrifying secrets of nuclear fission did not wait until the wartime dash for knowledge under Robert Oppenheimer. Let’s imagine, instead, that the basis for nuclear energy was developed closer to Einstein’s breakthrough, maybe just before the Great Depression.
Ask yourself, what would the Chamberlain government have done with nuclear energy in the weeks after the outbreak of war, expecting at any time the drone of Nazi bombers? It doesn’t take much imagination. They would have abandoned such tempting and potentially devastating targets, just as they abandoned BBC television because its transmissions could guide bombers.
So how are we to understand the Brown government’s determination to press ahead with a vastly expensive investment in nuclear energy, with all the concomitant transport of plutonium and nuclear waste, at a time when we are supposed to be facing an unprecedented external threat? Are we really facing such a terrorist threat after all? Or is modern government hopelessly in thrall to departmental divisions, to the extent that one department deals with risks and another deals with something else entirely?
Labour’s Rochdale candidate – Simon Danczuk – has just done a leaflet opposing the idea of fortnightly weekly rubbish collections. He thinks it is a “crazy idea”.
Only one slight problem. Can you guess the connection between the man who is his election agent and the man who was leader of the council when the decision to introduce fortnightly collections was made?
Yup, there are one and the same. So he’s campaigning against something his very own agent introduced. Oops.
The Liberal Democrats have just announced their shortlist for London Mayor. The final choice will be made by party members in London in a postal ballot.
The people are:
More details, including hustings, over at the party’s website.
Some of you may know that I have recently finished authoring a book on coalition governments. I wanted to speak directly to Lib Dem members to explain my conclusions, having spent the best part of the past nine months researching and writing the book, and how and why I have come to them. It’s not easy to explain in a brief article but I hope it goes some way to illuminating why I have come to the view that for our party and the country, we need to be both prepared for and wary of sharing power.
For most of my 18-year career in politics, I have seen such a deal as an exciting prospect. For a third party in a majoritarian electoral system, coalition government is our quickest route to power, and perhaps the only way we will achieve proportional representation. But my study of the history of coalition governments has given me a new insight into coalitions and the myriad pitfalls that accompany them.
Let’s not accuse Norman Lamb, the Lib Dem Shadow Secretary of State for Health, of gently slipping out his latest policy proposal – that patients needing emergency NHS treatment after becoming drunk or incapacitated by drugs would be charged:
“If you get rat-arsed on a Friday night and get taken to A&E where you are foul and abusive to staff, is it right for the taxpayers to fund your life-saving treatment?”
The Guardian reports that, “The proposals are understood to have strong support from Sir Menzies Campbell, the Lib Dem leader.”
Perhaps the more significant aspects of the proposals, though, are contained …
Rochdale Councillor Elwyn Watkins has been selected to fight Oldham East and Saddleworth for the Lib Dems. Elwyn, 43 beat off 4 other candidates and has now promised to hit Labour hard.
Elwyn, a financial analyst for a Sheikh in the Middle East said, “I am obviously delighted that local members have shown their faith in me. I will repay that faith by working hard with Councillors and Members to regain this seat. Phil Woolas MP has a poor record and I am going to expose that. People in Oldham East …
You’d have thought that by now that someone in the Conservative Party might have learnt to check their policy review documents carefully before printing them. I mean, how embarrassing is it to publish a document that points four different contradictory ways on the same policy, be caught out using ten years old data or propose a new law that is, er…, already about to come into force anyway?
Well, they’ve done it again. And again. Not one but two more blunders.
Blunder one – following from their triumphant success of proposing a change in the legal age of smoking which is …
Welcome to the 29th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (2nd – 9th September), together with a hand-picked quintet you might otherwise have missed.
Without further ado:
1. Am I too ‘right wing’ for the Lib Dems? on Tristan Mills’ Liberty Alone
A sequel to last week’s post by Barrie Wood. Here, Tristan explains why he’s a libertarian Lib Dem, and initiates a cracking comments section debate to boot.
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A plea from a member – more ambition and less equine pacification please… (Nick Baird)
Will the real Green party that cared about people and planet please stand up? (Kobe Bibbon)
We need better conversations on AI and the environment (Josh Matthews)
How to spot a Racist (Ben Rich)
Councils must help music – so music can help their communities flourish (Charlie Clinton & Josh Matthews)
Chloe 
Anthony Acton 
Nigel Jones 
Katharine Pindar 
Tim L 
Can Davey survive as leader?
A Week in Politics #9
The Joy of Six 1589