You might find yourself wondering why, when the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Health are all self-isolating, and new cases have reached the peak levels seen last over the New Year, today is a good day to declare as “Freedom Day”. And yet, for all of the bombast that the Prime Minister offered in the days leading up to today, even he is now quoted as saying;
So please, please, please be cautious. Go forward tomorrow into the next step with all the right prudence and respect for other people and the risks that the disease continues to present.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the new “new normal”, when we’re all encouraged to throw off the shackles of Covid restrictions and return to our old lives. That is, unless you’re immuno-compromised, or minded to take into consideration that those around you might be cautious, or unvaccinated, or… well, you know the rest…
So, what have we got today?
Katie Hopkins (you remember her, yes?) is awaiting her deportation flight from Australia, having been flown in by a local television station to take part in their version of Celebrity Big Brother (and yes, the definition of “celebrity” is clearly being stretched gossamer thin here). Flouting Australia’s incredibly tight quarantine rules was one thing – telling the world via Instagram that you were doing it and deliberately so quite another. What is it about faux-libertarians and consequences?
Suzanne Fletcher is one of the hardest working, humanitarian, compassionate people I have ever known. She has devoted her life improve living conditions for the poorest people with the least power.
Her local paper, the Darlington and Stockton Times, has done a wonderful profile of her as part of their series of features inspired by Middlesborugh Soroptimists’ list of outstanding local women.
Suzanne talked of her own experience of poor housing when she was small:
“We lived in an awful place, near the slag heaps,” says Suzanne. “It was difficult and dangerous as there was so much pollution in the air. Coal gas came up through the cellar, our plants died, as did my pet mouse, and the curtains rotted. My mother and father were both hardworking and did their best to keep everything clean, but when we complained the authorities didn’t listen. They considered our living conditions to be fine.
“The noise and swearing from the police cells at night kept us awake. My mother would prepare meals for the prisoners. They were sometimes sent back uneaten, but she was determined they would be treated with dignity.”
Willie Rennie has done two major interviews this weekend talking about his decision to stand aside as Scottish Liberal Democrat leader and his hopes for the future.
It is to be hoped that Mr Rennie remains active in public life. He has been a cheerful voice for a more decent politics and his brand of low-key, relaxed liberalism is more necessary than ever. After a summer running in the hills he should return to the fray, ready to play his part in building a bigger and better centre.
Willie spoke to Magnus Linklater for the paper (£) and talked about his hope that Labour and the Lib Dems would work more closely together to present a progressive, pro-UK alternative to the nationalism and populism of the SNP and Conservatives:
“I think working together with Labour on issues of common interest would be a good thing,” he said in an interview with The Times. “I wouldn’t run before we can walk. But build confidence between the parties and also amongst the electorate to show we’re getting our act together.”
This is about trying to show that for middle Scotland there is something better and stronger than the Conservatives or the SNP, that it’s got energy, it’s got momentum, it’s got ideas, and that’s the most important thing, so people know that if they vote for it, it will be worth it,” he added. “The actual mechanism is less important — it’s the energy behind it that matters.”
He talked about how much Scotland had changed in the past decade or so – and not for the better:
You couldn’t make it up. It’s like reading the cover of Private Eye. Health secretary Sajid Javid gets a positive Covid-19 result. If the Prime Minister and Chancellor, who met with him on Friday, were ordinary mortals, they would have been banished into the self-isolation wilderness for 10 days.
But those at the heart of government live more privileged lives. Driving to Barnard’s Castle to test eyesight. Sneaking a clinch with a mistress, though forgetting to smile for the CCTV. And now Johnson and Sunak, who must not to be confused with the comedy act Laurel and Hardy no matter how tempting that is, are on a trial. They are piloting a stop at work with Covid scheme and testing daily.
If you are hoping to be a Lib Dem Councillor next May, you really need to be a member of ALDC, the Association of Lib Dem Councillors and Campaigners. They have all the tools you need to win and you will be able to access all of them and attend their brilliant online training if you join.
They are having an online conference for members which includes their AGM on Saturday 4th September. There are sessions on things like how to win, how to make a difference in your community and local government in Europe.
ALDC Chief Executive Tim Pickstone said in an email to members:
Cuba may be reaching the end of its search for Utopian Socialism – shop shelves are empty and people are hungry. Ten years from now 2021 will be known as the year that the world was dragged kicking and screaming to the reality of climate change. The Taliban continues its march to victory with the capture of a key border crossing in the southeast corner on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Boris Johnson’s win on foreign aid this week was the world’s loss.
In an interview with the I, Ed Davey has announced that the Lib Dems are picking candidates in “blue wall” seats like Chesham and Amersham with the aim of taking seats off the Tories at the next General Election.
Speaking in Guildford, a former Lib Dem seat held by the Tories since 2005, Sir Ed said: “We’re selecting our candidate, do it early and get them on the doorstep.”
He added: “If we get through these selections, which are now going well apace, we’ll have campaigns, we’ll have people who are going out there and knocking on doors, week in week out, listening to people, and the Tory MPs are going to find them getting worried. They’ll start feeling that at the local level but it will feed through to the national level.”
He talked about his experience of knocking on doors in Chesham and Amersham:
When we were looking at this week of by-elections coming up, we thought it’d be a bit of a lull. In fact, it’s been one of the most exciting by-election weeks we’ve had in a while! A Tuesday by-election, flying the flag for the first time in 15 years in Sandwell, and an outstanding Parish Council win by just one vote. It’s been a great week for us by-election nerds!
We had quite the pleasant surprise here at ALDC towers when someone reported a by-election happening on Tuesday night, even more so when it ended up being another Lib Dem win. Whilst there’s long standing statutory requirements for local elections to be held on the first Thursday of May, and the same for general elections since the Fixed-Terms Parliament Act, no such regulations exist for by-elections, and is merely convention. Why this one bucked convention no one quite knows…
America has developed its own version of Original Sin. It is called the Critical Race Theory and is proving to be yet another toxic debate topic dividing Black and White and the growing chasm separating America’s right and left.
Original Sin was propagated by St Augustine in the 4th century. It maintained that every human was born sinful and spent a lifetime fighting against it. The Augustinian philosophy was a major tenet of the medieval church and proved especially with the breakaway Protestant sects. Gradually, however, first the Catholics, and then most of the Protestants revised their thinking. Sin was washed away with sacrament of baptism and replaced with personal responsibility.
Critical Race Theory maintains that all Americans—or at least all White Americans—are born racist.
The Liberal Democrats are celebrating a close win in the Lawley and Overdale Parish Council by-election.
Lib Dem Catherine Salter took 140 votes, to the Conservative’s 139, with Labour trailing a distant third on 69 votes. The independent candidate came fourth with 38 votes.
The focus of Cllr Salter’s campaign was engaging with and listening to local residents’ concerns about speeding, lack of public transport and poor finishing of new estates by developers.
Before my election to the Senedd I was a child protection social worker. I worked with some of the most vulnerable children and young people in society and those staff dedicated to giving them every chance to thrive.
That is why I jumped at the chance to table a debate on legislative proposal in the Senedd on Wednesday, just weeks into the first term. I used the opportunity to shine a light on the work that we must do here in Wales to create a genuine care system based on the needs, hopes, and aspirations of children and young people.
I used my voice in our national parliament, to speak up for the children, young people, and staff who are waiting for the Welsh Labour Government to act.
In a Commons debate on Thursday, Bath MP Wera Hobhouse warned it would be unacceptable for the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, senior diplomats and officials to attend the Winter Olympics in Beijing next year. To do so would give credibility to a regime that is accused of genocide in Xinjiang. Western countries had to take a stance against China’s human rights abuses.
Hobhouse told MPs is totally unacceptable that peaceful demonstrations during protests on the field of play or in medal ceremonies are barred by the IOC under the threat of sanctions. Given the ongoing human rights abuses, is it at all justifiable for the games to go ahead?
The Prime Minister gave his big speech on “Levelling Up” and as we discovered it is still a slogan in search of policies. The only positive was a half-formed idea around further devolution. If the pandemic has taught us anything from the separate policies of devolved First Ministers, Track and Trace to the spotlight on Metro Mayors, it is that effective policy can only be delivered at a local level.
Our current constitutional settlement is obviously lopsided between Nations and the English Regions. What’s worse, government fiat often dictates spending. It is time to recast our country and develop a model that works for the whole country. Every company knows that the closer a service is to the people it serves the more responsive it is. And yet the dominance of the Treasury and Whitehall means the government pays lip service to this idea. Local government is given responsibility but starved of funding. There is another way.
We held the last of our summer meetings this week and now that the deadlines for motions for autumn conference have passed, we were able to focus squarely on thinking about our future plans. So there were fewer decisions, and mindful of FPC Meetings Reports Fatigue, I’ll try and be briefer than usual!
We’ve carried out Equalities Impact Assessments on all our recent policy papers. We now want to develop and strengthen this approach further and agreed a plan for doing this. Many thanks to Helen Cross, Lizzie Jewkes, Mohsin Khan and Tara Copeland for driving this forward.
We have started our programme of work developing policies on strengthening the UK’s relationship with the EU, with the long term goal of membership. Our first motion on this territory is coming to this conference and this week we discussed our longer term plans for this work. We plan to develop proposals on joining the EU’s free trade area, the Single Market, to bring to spring conference, with more to follow. Thanks to Duncan Brack who is working closely with staff in bringing this forward.
Finally we discussed our plans for future policy working groups. We kicked around various ideas on this, prior to taking some firm decisions in the autumn. Early priority areas here are likely to include prominently work on creating a fairer and more caring society (linking up to the party’s commitment to UBI, which we will be consulting party members about further at this autumn conference). This is likely to be a mixture of drawing together existing policy to present it in the right way, and developing new policy, with a firm focus on appealing to target voters. Supporting child development in the early years and housing and planning policy are also areas we are currently thinking a lot about. There will be further discussions on this, and work on others, in the autumn, which we’ll report about then.
At Lib Dem Voice we don’t usually cover the results of political polls, because they do fluctuate. Also, paying too much attention to poll results can have unintended consequences for our party’s campaigning. Liberal Democrats were riding high in the polls during the last elections to the European Parliament in 2019, and some people imagined that we could win a swathe of seats in the General Election later that year simply based on the polling data. Seasoned campaigners, however, know that we only win seats if we do a lot of work on the ground – the support shown in polls is never enough.
But we have to admit that it is exciting when our poll position makes a substantial leap from 6% to 13%. The Evening Standard reports an Ipsos-Mori poll which shows that support for both Labour and the Conservatives has fallen by 4 points since their last poll. The Conservatives are still 9 points ahead, but net satisfaction of Boris Johnson and the Government have fallen to and -16 and -20 respectively. But the Liberal Democrats have jumped to 13%, and this is the first time we have been at that level since the 2019 General Election.
So what do we make of it? Undoubtedly our win in Chesham and Amersham produced this bounce. The party cleverly exploited the publicity immediately afterwards. The image of Ed Davey knocking down the blue wall with a small yellow mallet visually encapsulated our key message to the whole country very neatly – those who criticised it as a stunt clearly don’t understand how the media works.
Federal Conference Committee met via Zoom call on Saturday, 10 July for the agenda selection for our Autumn Conference 2021. The meeting was a lengthy one, which was in part due to the large selection of motions received.
A few announcements before the report; as you may be aware Geoff Payne, departed the FCC in early May, and I am delighted to have been elected the new Chair of FCC. All of us wish Geoff the very best for the future. A recount was held for the vacant place on the Committee, and I am delighted that Keith Melton has joined as our new member of the Federal Conference Committee. Chris Adams has also been elected in the vacant Vice-Chair position and will take responsibility for the General Purposes Sub Committee.
This Autumn conference will be held online, via our third-party provider, Hopin. You will be able to find more information about the virtual conference. If you are planning to attend conference, we highly recommend taking part in the interactive exhibitions and the fringes.
The FCC wants to pay its thanks to the continued amazing efforts of the Conference Office team and members who have worked so incredibly hard. You will see from the timings of Conference that it is slightly different to the usual format, and we hope that this will give more people an opportunity to attend virtually, but also it has meant that we have been able to increase the number of motions selected, we have allowed short breaks between sessions but have also worked hard to include as many of the motions submitted as possible. The agenda for Conference will be published very shortly.
Last night, Liberal Democrat MPs voted against the Government’s Statutory Instrument which made vaccinations compulsory for care home staff.
Munira Wilson, our health spokesperson, had a right go at the Government for its approach, pointing out that the care sector had long been undervalued and the Government’s approach had let down so many staff and residents during the pandemic.
She said that, while Liberal Democrats were absolutely in favour of vaccination, we would not support making it mandatory. She said:
In her Scotsman column this week, Christine Jardine described something worrying that took place while she took part in a protest for Hong Kong democracy in Edinburgh:
A drone. Hovering a couple of feet above the heads of the group was a small grey machine, the single eye of its mounted camera recording the event and everyone there.
This was, it is important to stress, a Covid-compliant, socially distanced, perfectly legal outdoor gathering of a small number of people in Edinburgh’s High Street. Unremarkable even in these times, save for one thing. It was about the threat to democracy in Hong Kong
She asks if we take our civil liberties for granted:
A force spokesman said: “Police were called just before 1:30am on Tuesday, July 13 to reports of a vehicle on fire in the Glodwick area in Oldham.
“Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service attended along with police, and it was established that the vehicle was deliberately ignited, also causing slight damage to a neighbouring property.
“The fire was extinguished, no-one was injured, and officers are investigating the circumstances.”
Lib Dem Group Leader Cllr Howard Sykes condemned the attack and called on people to stand together in the face of such appalling acts:
Wendy Chamberlain, MP for North East Fife attacked the government’s commitment to reducing the overseas aid budget below 0.7% in the House of Commons today.
It is a straight choice: do we return to 0.7%, as we were all elected to this place to do, or do we fail to be the global leader on this issue that the UK has been to this point?… the poorest will be hardest hit by these cuts. The reality of the covid pandemic is that no one is safe until everyone is safe… The fiscal tests for development spending presented today are the height of cynicism. They are designed never to be met.
The government, which has a majority of 80, won the vote by 35.
Ever since Boris won the 2019 General Election, there has been growing talk of the need for a “progressive alliance” to stop the Tories winning the next election.
Quite what this might involve is unclear. Some would like a national pact between Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens so only one party would stand in each seat, and others want simply to promote greater tactical voting and other parties to scale back their campaigning where another party is the main challenger.
Helpfully, the by-elections in both Batley and Spen and Chesham & Amersham give us some insight into how this could work and how voters might react.
Chesham & Amersham: a victory for tactical voting
Let’s take Chesham & Amersham first, where the Liberal Democrats started in firm second place. We fought a vigorous campaign and proved early Green party claims that they were going to be the main challenger wrong. People who were traditionally Labour voters, realising that their vote could make a difference, decided to tactically lend their vote to the Lib Dems – including some Party members and activists.
When you think of Lib Dem conference, you think of debates, packed fringe meetings with varying quality of buffets and events like the Glee Club.
These things are difficult to replicate on a virtual platform, but the Federal Conference Committee has flagged up Pilates classes, a comedy night and a classical music concert with an orchestra as just a few of the attractions at this year’s digital Autumn Conference, to be held from 17-21 September.
Registration is now open, as FCC Chair Nick De Costa announced in an email to members:
After more than a decade in the role, Willie Rennie announced this evening that he is standing aside as leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats.
Watch his statement here:
He leaves while he is still incredibly popular within the party – and the tributes he has received from outside it show how valued he is across politics.
When he took over in 2011, he inherited a party that had been given the hoofing of its life in the Scottish Parliament elections, reduced from 16 MSPs to just 5.
The small group he led had a big voice, though. Over the years, the Scottish Lib Dems have been the go-to people on issues like education and mental health. Willie’s dogged persistence, challenging Scottish Ministers week in and week out on issues like police centralisation, college places, mental health waiting times, childcare and free school meals shifted government policy on many occasions.
He stared wipeout in the eye in the Scottish Parliamentary elections of 2016. If you had told me we would emerge with 5 MSPs from that election after the disaster of 2015, I would not have dared to believe it. But he showed what he could do with a bright and optimistic campaign which include him launching the manifesto while running down a soft-play volcano and being interviewed on a slide. When his photocall at a city farm was overshadowed by two amorous pigs, journalists were given a packet of Percy Pigs each at the next big event.
His commitment to improving the party’s diversity saw him ensure that we had all women shortlists for both 2017 and 2021 elections, a gender balanced team of spokespeople and serious money invested in diversity projects in each year’s Scottish budget. He put his own neck on the line to get these measures approved by Conference. He needed a two thirds majority and he got it by basically ringing everyone who had registered and talking them round.
And he has travelled the length and breadth of the country so many times supporting candidates at every possible level of election. He’s encouraged people to stand who have now been elected. He has led campaigning with boundless energy, enthusiasm and a huge smile.
I am incredibly sad to see him go, but I can understand that after 10 years of unrelenting graft, he relishes the chance to do something a bit different. He’ll stay on as MSP for North East Fife, of course – but don’t expect him to stop speaking out on th issues he has championed.
And as a campaigner who has been responsible for many of the party’s successes over the past three decades, his skills in that direction will be in demand.
So what now?
The Scottish Executive will set a timetable for a leadership election in which any of the party’s other three MSPs will be eligible to stand.
But for now, let’s look at some of the lovely things people are saying about Willie:
Following the Government’s update on plans to ease restrictions on 19th July, the Liberal Democrats have called on businesses to be given the legal right to require customers to wear face masks on their premises.
Sarah Olney MP, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Business, has heard from businesses who want to protect young staff who have not received their second jab, and those who are clinically vulnerable, by ensuring face masks are worn by customers.
This is the call of the Health Foundation charity in its final report this month from a long-running enquiry into the impact of COVID-19. Calling on the Government to address the root causes of poor health, the report makes clear that the investment required into people and communities will involve jobs, housing, and education, plus action to ‘level up’ health.
In the report, they say;
The pandemic has revealed stark differences in the health of the working age population – those younger than 65 in the poorest 10% of areas in England were almost four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those in the wealthiest. Recovery needs to prioritise creating opportunities for good health – a vital asset needed to ‘level up’ and rebuild the UK recovery.
Speaking in a House of Commons debate on fuel poverty on Thursday, Wera Hobhouse, Lib Dem MP for Bath, said no one should have to make the choice between feeding their family or heating their home. The pandemic has made things even worse. People working from home faced an extra £16 a month on energy costs, adding up to £195 a year for those on poor value tariffs. She said the clearest example of the Government’s failure was the scrapping of the green homes grant only five months after it was introduced with only 6% of the budget spent.
Andy Daer I expect a more believable theory would suggest that modern Israeli Jews are trying to expunge the memory of apparently docile European Jews being annihilated b...
Mick Taylor I think there is a real problem with NEETs. When I was young, and indeed when my children were, we were prepared to take any job that paid money whilst continui...
David Le Grice I missed out that I'm referring to her statement in parliament about the postponement of the 2025 county elections....
David Le Grice I'm not sure that the reappointment of Angela Rayner is necessarily cause for hope. It became clear during her statement and answers to MPs questions that she h...
Ruth Bright I really would like a quiet August and I know, of course, that I will get the ducking stool for this, but surely we can do better than 20% female representation...
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Andy Daer
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