We have scanned the Honours List but couldn’t spot any Lib Dems this time.
Of course, members may be honoured for their professional as well as their political achievements, so do please tell us of anyone we should be congratulating. Drop an email to [email protected] and we’ll add them to this post.
A week ago, Lib Dem leader Ed Davey joined members of the House of Commons in paying tribute to the Queen.
Davey said: “The whole country will agree that our Queen has more than fulfilled her promises made to our nation. With her sense of selflessness and her steadfast commitment to the nation, these values and her service have defined Her Majesty’s seven-decade reign and will continue to define her. The unwavering nature of her service and duty is made all the more remarkable by the length of Her Majesty’s reign.”
Reminiscing about the silver jubilee, he said: “My strongest memory of 1977 is the Queen’s smile and personal delight as Virginia Wade won Wimbledon. My fingers are crossed that Emma Raducanu might serve up something similar later this year.”
Davey said the highlight of the diamond jubilee in 2012 was watching the Queen parachute down to the opening ceremony of the summer Olympics. Asking Queen Margrethe of Denmark when she was taking up parachuting. She replied: “When I’m over 80.”
Ed Davey, Sarah Olney and the by-election campaign team are calling for help in Tiverton and Honiton this weekend to ensure that Richard Foord is elected three weeks today. Postal votes land on doormats in just a few days. There are volunteer activities in the constituency and regular Maraphone sessions.
The scenes at the airports this week have been rather worrying.
OK, so in the grand scheme of things arriving a day late at a holiday destination may not appear to be a serious matter, but for the families involved it can be very challenging. Some are trying to have their first family holiday since the pandemic, and in many cases this has involved some belt-tightening as the cost of living spirals upwards.
Anyone who has travelled with young children will know how frustrating it can be when plans are upset. Amongst those caught up in the chaos are people with disabilities, children on the autistic spectrum and elderly people, all of whom will not find the delay and long queues easy.
Sarah Olney is our Transport spokesperson and she issued this statement yesterday:
The scenes at our airports are nothing short of a disgrace. Families are being left marooned for hours on end with no guidance from airlines or Ministers.
We need action now to break the deadlock and to save families from yet more travel carnage.
Yet travellers haven’t even heard a peep from Grant Shapps this week. The Transport Secretary has gone missing in action when the public will be looking to him for help. This is nothing short of a failure of leadership on his part.
It’s about time he fronts up for that failure with an apology to those who have had their travel plans derailed, and finally begins giving daily press conferences on the situation. Hiding away isn’t good enough – Shapps must face the music and scrutiny about his lack of preparedness for the Jubilee Bank Holiday logjam.
Since then Shapps has popped up and made some comments, mainly blaming the travel companies for overselling holidays. He has asked for a meeting with the leaders in the travel industry. He said:
Despite government warnings, operators seriously oversold flights and holidays relative to their capacity to deliver. This must not happen again and all efforts should be directed at there being no repeat of this over the summer – the first post-Covid summer season.
Sarah has made this suggestion:
With thousands of families facing cancelled holidays owing to the chaos at our airports, the Government should call on the Armed Forces to run the logistics to end this logjam.
Drafting in our best and brightest to solve this crisis is simply a no-brainer.
— Sarah Olney (@sarahjolney1) June 1, 2022
The Spring 2022 issue of the Journal of Liberal History has just been published. One of our themed special issues, this edition covers the important topic of Liberal attitudes and responses to the American Civil War. The war was a pivotal event in American history but one which also sent shockwaves around the world, provoking argument and debate on questions of Republicanism, democracy, nation-building and, of course, slavery.
The entire period of the Civil War (1861–65) took place during the Liberal administration of Lord Palmerston, and the contents of the special issue look at some of the significant Liberal and Radical reactions to the turbulent events of the times. The articles include:
Introduction: Co-editor of the special issue, Eugenio Biagini (Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge University), contextualises the contributions.
The Palmerston Ministry and the American Civil War. Duncan Andrew Campbell examines the tensions and disagreements in Anglo-American relations leading up to the war and follows the efforts of the Palmerston administration to remain neutral during the conflict, which angered both North and South in the process. The article also considers the impact of the war on British political thought, with some surprising conclusions.
The ‘voice of reason’: John Bright and his relationship with the Union. Radical MP John Bright was one of the most outspoken proponents of the North throughout the Civil War. Along with Richard Cobden he was even nicknamed ‘the Member for the Union’. In this article Shannon Westwood uses Bright’s speeches and letters to trace his influence on Liberal and wider British attitudes to the war.
John Stuart Mill, moral outrage and the American War. According to one recent biographer of Mill, the Civil War galvanised and politicised him in the same way as the French Revolution had. In this article, Timothy Larsen focuses on Mill’s contribution to developing Liberal support for the North, particularly when some senior Liberal voices seemed to be moving towards acquiescing in the secession of the Southern states.
‘An undoubted error, the most singular and palpable’. One of the voices which would have worried J S Mill was that of William Gladstone. Despite Gladstone’s expressed detestation of the institution of slavery, events in 1861–62 gave Gladstone pause for thought about the ability of the Union to reunite the country. In a speech at Newcastle in October 1862, Gladstone declared that the leaders of the South ‘had made a nation’. In this article, Tony Little examines Gladstone’s views on the speech which he later came to consider one of the worst mistakes of his political life.
Commerce, conscience and constitutions. By no means all Liberals and Radicals automatically sided with the North. In this article Graham Lippiatt unpicks the motivations of two contrasting Liberal MPs who chose to support the Confederacy: William Schaw Lindsay, a man of business and a strong free trader, who saw the economic damage the Civil War was doing and understood Southern resentment at US government policy on tariffs; and Lord Acton, the great historical thinker on rights and liberties whose legacy includes the famous aphorism that ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.
In her Scotsman column this week, Christine Jardine looks back at the Queen’s reign and her contribution to our national life.
She looks at the laws the Queen has given assent to over the past 70 years:
In 70 years, the Queen has given Royal Assent to around 4,000 pieces of legislation.
Among them are some of the most significant in British social history on abortion, race relations, equal rights, same-sex marriage and devolution.
And the fact that the Queen is female helped the cause of women’s equality:
Even in the ‘Swinging 60s’, a decade marked by social and sexual revolution in the UK, the perceived wisdom imparted to those of us at school was that the boys would be the doctors, engineers and lawyers. The girls would be nurses, teachers and secretaries until we stopped to have our babies.
Seems madness now, but that is the world our mothers had to deal with, and that we overcame or are at least overcoming.
How important has it been to that change that our head state, the image presented to the world and to us, has been a woman?
She remembers just how young the Queen was when she took on the demanding role of Head of State:
A recent Financial Times op-ed argued that the UK should now recognise that the Ukraine conflict has imposed aspects of a war economy on the UK – shortages, rising prices, disruptions in supply – which require serious changes in economic policy. The business pages of the serious press urge higher public investment, spending on education and apprenticeships to raise our woefully-low labour productivity, and government intervention to promote innovation, resilience against supply-chain shocks and sustainability.
Defenders of the NHS point to its much lower spending and staffing per head than comparable European countries half that of Germany and the Netherlands, far fewer doctors and nurses per head and less than half the number of hospital beds – which as the Financial Times says ‘reflect political choices, not what is affordable.’ State schools have been similarly underfunded for many years. Teachers’ salaries, like nurses’, have been held down to a point where recruitment and retention is difficult. Conservative MPs and others call for higher defence spending in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Anyone serious about the ‘levelling-up’ agenda knows that it cannot succeed without a very substantial and long-term financial commitment: an additional 1-2% of GDP over a decade or more.
Yet Conservative MPs, backed by almost all political commentators outside the Guardian, still call repeatedly for cuts in taxation. Their reactions to Rishi Sunak’s latest emergency package have expressed dismay at the rise in taxes it involves. Sunak is still promising them that he will find a way to cut taxes before the next election, although neither he nor anyone else says anything about what cuts in spending that would imply. And the Labour Party is silent on the subject, fearing that the Mail and the rest of the Tory press would love to label them again as ‘the high tax party’. I saw a Labour leaflet in Wandsworth in the local election campaign that promised that if Labour won control of the Council it would keep Council tax at the same low level – a similar promise to what Tony Blair pledged for national taxation in 1996-7.
As you might be aware, there is a ridiculously important by-election going on in Tiverton and Honiton, in our former heartlands of the West Country.
More than that, we can win it and deliver the death knells to Boris Johnson’s premiership and get our country back from the quasi-mob outfit currently running the show.
However, to get a decent government of the United Kingdom back that doesn’t deport refugees to Rwanda, we badly need to get down and volunteer in Tiverton and Honiton.
Here are four ways you can help:
…
It is back! The Social Liberal Forum Conference will be held in London after a two year gap. It will be held at Resource for London, 356 Holloway Rd, London N7 6PA and online on 25th June 2022.
We are delighted to be able to give you a first glimpse of the programme. An impressive list of speakers will lead off our discussions on Britain’s role in Europe. We are concentrating on three key areas
Although Brexit has allegedly happened and Boris Johnson pretends the UK’s focus is on the “Indo-Pacific”, wherever that may be, and the government sees trading with Australia and the USA as the future, we remain part of the continent of Europe and must not throw away the history of peace, prosperity and environmental protection built by the European Union. This conference asks the question, how are we to continue to co-operate with our close friends and allies in Europe and who are those friends?
Speakers include former Liberal Democrat MEPs Phil Bennion, Jane Brophy and Rebecca Taylor, leaders of our Social Liberal Dutch colleagues D66, Sophie in ‘t Veld MEP and Gijs de Vries – who formerly was State Secretary of the Interior in the government of The Netherlands and the EU’s first Counter Terrorism Co-ordinator.
The economy session speakers are Professor Chris Grey (author of the ‘must read’ Brexit & Beyond blog) and Will Hutton of the Observer and the author of “The State We’re in” – the biggest selling politico-economic work since the Second World War.
In addition we will be joined by our own Duncan Brack, Wendy Taylor, Denali Boisot, Gordon Lishman, Louise Harris and Baroness Julie Smith.
Only a week or so ago, I sat down at our Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council Annual Meeting. I sat thinking whether I did the right thing. I sat wondering whether, after a 6 year gap, it was the right decision to stand again. One of the Labour Councillors, a really decent guy, said to me: “Michal, you’ve done it before. You really wanted to do it again? You are crazy”. There were a few moments before the meeting, when I was reflecting on sacrifices that many of the Cllrs have to make. Most of us have to work, full or part-time. There are plenty of evening meetings and our presence at home, or lack of it, will be felt. In my case, with 3 school-aged daughters, my conscience was searching for an answer for this question. The beginning of the meeting was really powerful. The Full Council meeting is the only meeting of the Annual Calendar which begins with the prayer. A short prayer, read out at the beginning of the meeting, had such a huge impact on me. I felt once again a “calling” to public life and that I am not alone in fulfilling my duties as a Councillor. Moreover, our prayer reminded me about my most important part of my role as a Councillor; being at the service of others.
Not much tends to happen here on a Bank Holiday, which makes the job of a Day Editor a mite easier. And then the Queen has a platinum jubilee and the usual schedule gets disrupted…
And I ought to wish Her Majesty the very best on her big day – it really is remarkable that she has reigned for seventy years, demonstrating her sense of duty and adherence to a code of behaviour and decorum alien to her Prime Minister. She’ll be a difficult act to follow and I do wonder what role a new monarch will have in a post-Elizabethan age.
Mind you, you have to wonder what will be left of ethical governance by the time Johnson has left office. The Gray Report hardly demonstrated any sense of adherence to a moral or ethical code and the reports that, far from being a true reflection of events, it was doctored in order to prevent exposure of the failings and misdeeds of key players at the heart of this administration, suggests that there is no level to which they will not stoop.
The 27 EU heads of government are meeting in Brussels next week to supposedly confirm plans to stop imports of Russian oil and gas. It may not happen. Decisions have to be unanimous. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has signalled that he will block the move.
Hungary is dependent on Russian fossil fuels for 100 percent of its energy needs. These can only be delivered by pipelines because Hungary is landlocked. All the pipelines run from Russia. The other EU countries have offered to give Hungary a two-year grace period to find alternative sources. But Orban maintains that he has no alternatives and that stopping imports of Russian gas would destroy the Hungarian economy.
At the same time, the newly re-elected Hungarian leader has used the war in Ukraine to declare a state of emergency which allows him to effectively rule by decree. Orban claims that the Ukraine war “represents a constant threat to Hungary.” He has already used his new powers to impose fresh taxes to finance an increase in defence spending. Many fear that Orban will abuse the state of emergency to bypass parliament and suppress critics. He is already under attack from Brussels for damaging Hungary’s democratic institutions and the EU is threatening to withhold development funds because of that and allegations of corruption. Former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt tweeted: “Hungary was already no longer free, now it is no longer a democracy”.
With all this talk about Taiwan and ambiguous or clear US policies on the issue of whether or not to defend the island, one thing has been slightly overlooked – chips. To be precise advanced semi-conductor computer chips. Taiwan produces 92 percent of the world’s advanced semi-conductor computer chips. The remaining eight percent come from South Korea. These tiny electrical conductors are to technology what oil and gas are to industry and transport. Without them our computer-dependent world would come to a sudden halt.
Former Labour culture secretary Ben Bradshaw has called for Labour voters to vote Lib Dem in the Tiverton and Honiton by-election on 23 June. Well, he almost did. In a carefully worded message on Westminster Hour and reported in the Independent, Bradshaw says:
“I think there are very good prospects of a Lib Dem victory.”
He says the only way to give the government “a kicking” is to vote Lib Dem:
“What some Labour members and activists don’t always appreciate is that a lot of Conservative voters, if they want to give the government a kicking will vote Liberal Democrat but they wouldn’t vote Labour.
“So if we have a joint purpose of wanting to send the prime minister a message and ultimately defeat this government in a general election then I think there are very good prospects of a Lib Dem victory there.”
I wonder how Liz Pole, chair of the local Labour Party and the Labour candidate for the seat feels about that.
In a podcast interview for Politics Home, Ed Davey said there is no formal pact with Labour but it was simply rational behaviour for both parties to put their resources where they have the best chance of winning.
He said the Lib Dems intend to take on Labour in areas where we can think we can beat them.
The interview also covered Partygate, the economy and the cost of living crisis, Tiverton and Honiton, and Lib Dem values.
Popular Lib Dem Councillor Robert Aldridge became Edinburgh’s Lord Provost on Thursday. He was the only nomination and was proposed by the leader of the SNP Group Adam McVey and seconded by his ward colleague, new Lib Dem Councillor Ed Thornley. Watch here:
The 258th Rt Hon Lord Provost of The City of Edinburgh is Cllr Robert Aldridge who is the longest serving councillor but also a very popular choice. pic.twitter.com/hBbDRuAdEm
— Edinburgh Reporter (@EdinReporter) May 26, 2022
Dobbie, as he is known to his friends, was first elected to the Council in 1984. I first got to know him when we first moved back to Scotland in 2000 when he was Marilyne Maclaren’s agent in Edinburgh South for two general elections. He spent most of his career working for an organisation supporting people through homelessness. He is a wonderful, compassionate Liberal Democrat. He made a superb, generous and inclusive speech on taking office which you can listen to here. It certainly had me in bits.
He will need every ounce of his patience and ability to make people work well together over the next five years.
You would think, wouldn’t you, that when the culture of your Government has been slammed in a report which outlined disgraceful behaviour, you would be absolutely mortified and would make sure that your actions showed that you were truly sorry. Especially when you had been saying so at length and you knew that nobody believed a word of your apology.
Well, you could think that of virtually any other PM than Boris Johnson. But the current incumbent’s capacity for brazen disregard for rules or accountability is second to none. We saw this when he tried to change the rules to save his mate Owen Paterson last Autumn.
Yesterday, Boris Johnson watered down both the Ministerial Code and the role of the so-called “Independent Adviser.” The Guardian reports:
The prime minister faced a barrage of criticism after he amended the rules on Friday to make clear that ministers will not always be expected to resign for breaching the code of conduct. Under new sanctions, they could apologise or temporarily lose their pay instead.
Johnson also blocked his independent ethics chief, Christopher Geidt, from gaining the power to launch his own investigations, and rewrote the foreword to the ministerial code, removing all references to honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability.
Our Chief Whip Wendy Chamberlain is reported as saying that this was an:
appalling attempt by Boris Johnson to rig the rules to get himself off the hook.
It seems the Conservatives have learned nothing from the Owen Paterson scandal.
It has been clear for some time that the Government doesn’t care that accountability and justice are seen to be done where its own behaviour is concerned. With these moves they are effectively giving themselves the right to mark their own homework. The legitimacy of any Government depends on having some sort of check on its power.
With just 26 days to go before polling day, Lib Dems are heading to Devon this weekend to support Richard Foord’s campaign to overturn a 24,000 Conservative majority. Activists have come from as far away as Fife, 600 miles away, to help.
The Young Liberals are turning up in force to help, just as they did in Chesham and Amersham and North Shropshire. They also produced an excellent guide to campaigning in by-elections which you can find here in the Members’ area of the ALDC website.
It’s looking busy and positive on the campaign trail and voters are well aware that we are the challengers to the Tories:
These views chime with doorstep conversations in #TivertonandHoniton – lifelong Tory voters are disgusted by what is happening in Westminster.
🍷 “No 10 is utterly delusional if they think this has gone away. It just hasn’t” #Partygate #NolanPrinciples https://t.co/MzUsHY3faf
— Eleanor Rylance 🌳🔶🇪🇺🇬🇧 🇫🇷 🐝 #Rejoin 🌎 (@EleanorRylance) May 28, 2022
Great day out chatting to residents in Tiverton with @Sandbach and the team.
Really positive conversations and clear many people are fed up of being taken for granted by Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.#TivertonandHoniton 🔶 pic.twitter.com/VNgEix65sp
— Richard Foord MP (@RichardFoordLD) May 24, 2022
Out canvassing with Michael who has come down from Fife to help the @LibDems win in #TivertonAndHoniton by-election. Massive anger on the doorstep against the serial liar in 10 Downing Street. #GTTO #ProgressiveAlliance pic.twitter.com/JDBpZVGCQJ
— Prof John Timperley (@aJohnTimperley) May 26, 2022
While Richard Foord has been impressing in the media, the Independent reports that the Conservatives are keeping their candidate well out of sight of journalists so she doesn’t have to face questions about Partygate:
Chiselled on the wall of the entrance lobby of the National Rifle Association are the words: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
This, claims the gun lobby is the Second Amendment of the US constitution. It is not. The oft-quoted right to bear arms clause is preceded by the words “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right….”
Should the amendment be read in its entirety with the second half contingent on the first? Or has the need for a citizens’ militia become redundant in the modern age and therefore only the second half remains relevant?
The NRA is in no doubt. It only every quotes the second half. All references to militias are conspicuous by their absence.
But why do Americans need guns? Conservatives say it is to protect themselves and their families from bad people with guns. Liberals reply: then take the guns away from the baddies as well as the goodies so no one can shoot. It is a policy that has worked in Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other developed countries.
American conservatives retort with what may be the real reason for hanging onto their firearms: Individual gun ownership is the ultimate defence against tyranny – the tyranny of anarchy and the tyranny of overbearing government.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz – one of the most prominent supporters of the NRA and a major beneficiary of the gun lobby’s largesse – was crystal clear on the tyranny issue when he ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He wrote in his campaign literature:
“The Second Amendment isn’t just for protecting hunting rights, and it’s not only to safeguard your right to target practice. It’s a constitutional right to protect your children, your family, your home, our lives, and to serve as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny – for the protection of liberty.”
But from whence does this need for weapons as protection against tyranny come? The answer is Britain.
In my Lib Dem Voice article of 4th March 2022, I argued that Putin should be stopped in Ukraine for good.
Now that Putin has narrowed his war aims to take over the rest of Donbas, Luhansk, including the industrial and food producing heartland of Ukraine, having had created a land corridor to Crimea and brought Ukraine’s economy to its knees, he may well accede to calls for a ceasefire to consolidate his gains, erect strong defences in his recently-captured territories and rebuild his army into a new more effective force to recommence war whenever it suits him.
A ceasefire would be the easy way out for the West. Some western countries have already suggested it. However, we must resist this happening if the Ukrainian Government is against it.
After tens of thousands of Ukrainian deaths, disappearances of whole Ukrainian populations deported from captured war zones into Russia, the wholesale demolition of Ukrainian cities and towns (all at a cost of 25,000 dead Russian soldiers so far and many more wounded), the chaos that Putin has caused cannot be allowed to be paused to be continued later, whether against Ukraine or other neighbouring countries.
We have two and a half years before the possible return of Trump or another far-right Republican to the White House. Given Trump’s previous disparaging remarks about NATO, we cannot exclude the possibility that the US would pull out or render US membership of NATO ineffective. Coupled with Trump’s own admiration for Putin, the very survival of liberal democracy is at stake in such circumstances if Putin continues to remain in power with, of course, China taking advantage of the situation to further its own aims against the West.
Writing in The House yesterday, Tim Farron said:
British farming communities are a crucial cog in the cost of living fighting machine. But farming families themselves are facing an even more acute cost of living emergency.
He said input costs are spiralling making crops and livestock more expensive to produce. In 12 months, the price of animal feed has shot up by 60 per cent. In some cases, fertiliser prices have quadrupled because production uses gas. Twelve months ago, a tonne of ammonium nitrate fertiliser cost £280 – it now costs £1,000.
I have been asked how we consistently manage to elect a diverse group of Lib Dem councillors in Kingston, reflecting the local community in terms of gender and ethnicity.
I want to focus specifically on gender in this post, and that got me thinking about quotas and targets.
Amongst the many strategies to get a better gender balance in education, employment and political representation, quotas have had their day. There is one simple problem with quotas – they are perceived as unfair all round.
Quotas in general carry the implication that those in the under-represented group are not able to achieve parity on their own worth; access can only be addressed by imposing restraints on selection. Quotas also create resentment amongst well-qualified people who do not fit the quota but who feel they have been overlooked in favour of someone who may be less qualified.
I do understand that quotas can be seen as a rebalancing exercise, but they are not sustainable unless they address the underlying causes of the imbalance. For that reason I was never a fan of all-women shortlists. They were seen as a quick fix to a specific problem in Westminster, although in the end the voters fixed it for us in a much more brutal way.
Targets can be helpful as a way of focussing attention on something that needs to improve. But they can also have unintended consequences, especially if resources are limited. For example, setting a target for treatment waiting times by the NHS for certain illnesses may result in resources being diverted from treatment for other illnesses.
When thinking about setting targets for recruiting Council candidates we must ask three questions:
The recent local election results continue to demonstrate that rural support for the Conservatives is dwindling.
Their loss was, by all appearances, the Liberal Democrats’ gain. Where the Conservatives faltered, the Lib Dems thrived: in newly created council Westmorland and Furness, they took 36 seats compared to just 11 for the Tories, and in the Conservative stronghold of Somerset, they won 65 seats compared to a meagre 36.
Our recent opinion poll could well have predicted this Conservative downfall in the countryside. Published just weeks before locals took to the ballots, it indicated a 7.5% drop in support for the Conservatives.
Should the governing party continue on this downward trajectory, the results could be an indication of more big wins to come for the Lib Dems.
This is by no means a foregone conclusion, however. To ensure local election wins are converted into seats at the next General Election, there is no room for complacency.
Ed Davey was unimpressed with the package announced by Rishi Sunak aimed at helping people with the soaring cost of living.
He described it as the “Sunak Scam.”
The Chancellor is hammering families with a £800 tax hike this year, more than wiping out what he announced today.
It is the Sunak scam, promising you help but picking your pockets while you’re not looking.
Soaring inflation and devastating tax rises have left proud families who never dreamed they would find themselves in trouble struggling to pay the bills.
The British people need help right now, but instead have been left abandoned again for months on end.
The people of Moray deserve better from our elected Member of Parliament. Douglas Ross should resign now as an MP. Let someone do the job who actually wants to make a positive difference in the lives of those who live and work in Moray.
Our MP has not only backed down on calling for a Prime Minister that has committed a criminal offence to resign, but he has also got a track record for missing key votes that would benefit his Moray constituents due to his commitments as MSP and as a Scottish party leader.
Only last week, our MP was absent for a vote for an emergency VAT tax cut from 20% to 17.5% that would have saved Moray residents an average of £600 per household. This at a time where there is a cost-of-living crisis in our country.
The Scottish Conservatives have already proven to be led by someone with the backbone of a jellyfish. Our former Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie called Douglas Ross out for his lack of backbone after he withdrew his letter of no confidence in the party-animal Prime Minister.
Powys County Council is to be led by the Welsh Liberal Democrats for the first time since its creation, in a partnership with Welsh Labour. Previous administrations have been led by independents.
James Gibson-Watt, the Welsh Liberal Democrat Group Leader on Powys Council, was elected as Leader of the Council at the Council’s AGM this morning, becoming the first Welsh Liberal Democrat Council leader since 2012.
The agreement between the Welsh Liberal Democrats and Welsh Labour will focus on delivering a fresh and distinctive path to meet the serious challenges the county faces. A Green Party councillor is expected to join the partnership.
If you live in the West Midlands and are going to fall ill, you better get on with it. Certainly, don’t leave it until 17 August because if you want an ambulance, you may not get one. That’s the apocalyptic prediction from a director of the West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS).
Ambulance provision in the West Midlands, as in many other areas of the country, has been struggling for a couple of years. There are endless stories of delays in ambulances reaching patients. Handover delays from ambulance paramedics at the county’s two hospitals, both maintained by the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Hospital Trust (SaTH), are among the longest in England. There are far too many reports of patients dying during these delays when they might have survived. Too many patients with worse health outcomes because they could not get to specialist treatment quickly enough.
Mark Docherty, Executive Director of Nursing and Clinical Commissioning at WMAS, this week told the media and the board members of the ambulance service that the whole West Midlands ambulance service could fail by mid-August.
Ed Davey spoke in the Commons following the Prime Minister’s statement on the Sue Gray report.
Boris Johnson is only sorry he got caught. He's not fit to be Prime Minister. He should resign, if he won't Conservative MPs should sack him. pic.twitter.com/PWK8CyO6Kx
— Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) May 25, 2022
As you might expect, other Lib Dem MPs also expressed their anger.
The evidence was overwhelming before today that Johnson had been to parties when they were barred by his own government’s rules. That’s bad.
With Sue Gray’s report now before parliament and the public, it is clear if it wasn’t before, that Johnson has repeatedly lied about parties and whether he attended any. That’s seriously bad.
Gray’s report has now been published. Thirty-seven pages. Nine photos. Vomiting, red wine on the walls, fighting, sitting on laps, karaoke, pizzas, prosecco, birthday drinks, sleeping in the office, overflowing bins, leaving drunk by the back door to avoid the press pack outside the front door, along with poor treatment of security and cleaning staff. Classic signs of parties but we have been repeatedly told that there were no parties, just meetings, and Johnson did not attend any parties.
Johnson is likely to survive this because Conservatives haven’t got the guts to remove him. Although perhaps the truth is that they have no one to replace him.
We woke to the grim news this morning of another mass shooting in a school in the USA. Nineteen young children and two adults died in a shooting at Robb Elementary School in south Texas. The gunman, eighteen years old, had purchased two assault rifles and used them for a mass slaughter before being shot dead by police.
President Joe Biden just back from Asia made an emotion speech.
As a nation we must ask: When in God’s name will we stand up to the gun lobby?
When in God’s name will we do what needs to be done?
I’m sick and tired of it. We have to act.
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 25, 2022
“As a nation we have to ask when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby. I am sick and tired of it – we have to act.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, reported to be close to tears, said:
“Every time a tragedy like this happens, our hearts break. And our broken hearts are nothing compared to the broken hearts of those families – and yet it keeps happening. So, I think we all know and have said many times with each other: Enough is enough. Enough is enough.”
We are expecting Sue Gray’s report today, so I thought you might like to be reminded of the advice we were being given by the Prime Minister during the pandemic.
For example, this was from the very early days of lockdown.
Don’t break the rules. If you do, it won’t just impact you. #StayHomeSaveLives pic.twitter.com/P0BBoJAk0y
— UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) April 15, 2020
Ans this one was a few days before the party in the garden at Number 10.
Anyone can get #coronavirus and anyone can spread it.
The social distancing rules apply to everyone.#StayHomeSaveLives pic.twitter.com/QcWexTOKEC
— UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) May 3, 2020
And this one, just two days before a gathering at Number 10 to say farewell to two members of staff, which the Police have said did breach the rules.
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Observations of an Expat: Post Election Worries (Tom Arms)
How Liberal Democrats can ride Britain’s youth wave on the pro-EU shift (Rupinder Singh)
Just growth by lowering deadweight losses through tax (Tony Vickers)
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