The Campaign for Gender Balance (CGB) and the Candidates & Diversity Team are pleased to announce that applications are now open for the 2018 edition of the Future Women MPs Weekend, to be held in Milton Keynes on 24-25 February 2018.
The weekend is an intensive residential training weekend for aspiring female MPs; designed to equip you with the knowledge you need as a candidate.
As well as expert advice on your political career the weekend will also give you:
Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs Group Inc, is turning out to be a bell-weather of the London banking community regarding Brexit. He doesn’t tweet very often, but when he does, his tweets cause quite a kerfuffle.
Recently he made interesting comments about Frankfurt:
Just left Frankfurt. Great meetings, great weather, really enjoyed it. Good, because I'll be spending a lot more time there. #Brexit
— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) October 19, 2017
The Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, Barnaby Joyce, together with four senators, has had his election declared null and void by the country’s High Court. There will be a by-election to fill the Deputy PM’s seat, which has been vacated by this ruling. There will also be recounts in the four senate seats.
All this was due to infringements of rules pertaining to dual citizenship. Australia’s constitution bans anyone holding dual citizenship from sitting in parliament. Mr Joyce discovered that he had joint New Zealand citizenship by descent from his father. He has since renounced this status and will fight the forthcoming by-election.
And so, a relatively quiet day has come to an end at LDV Towers. Thank you to our contributors, readers and those of you that have added to the debates here.
Time for some final thoughts…
We now know that the identity of the thirty-six Conservative MPs alleged to have behaved inappropriately is now known by at least two media outlets, following the Channel 4 report earlier this evening. It does trouble me that there is a risk that, in having the information, but not making appropriate use of it (and that doesn’t necessarily mean publication as much as passing it on …
Regardless of whether you support or oppose Brexit, there is no doubt that you’d prefer your negotiators to be both united and organised. In a piece for yesterday’s Independent, Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesperson in the Lords, William Wallace, highlights some of the emerging tensions amongst Conservative ranks.
The Leave campaign united around reasserting British sovereignty; but they gave little thought to what that meant, or what continuing relations we would have with our neighbours if we left what has been the institutional framework for a broad partnership for 44 years.
Boris Johnson
…
Whilst British politics is dominated by Brexit, elsewhere in Europe, life goes on. And yes, the question of “what Europe?” is playing a key role in the changing scene, but it is not the only issue.
Earlier in the month, the Austrian Parliamentary elections saw the triumph of the shiny new leader of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), Alexander Kurz, aged just thirty-one. Talk of a coalition with the far right Freedom Party (FPÖ), led by Heinz-Christian Strache, was somewhat curtailed when, once all the votes were counted, the Social Democrats (SPÖ) limped into second place by less than 1%. Putting …
As we approach the forthcoming Budget, we have the opportunity to present ourselves as the party of business which also cares about the dreadful level of inequality in the UK today.
Brexit is obviously the key issue affecting the economy and there is nothing more pro business than our stance of wanting to remain in the Single Market and the customs union. Rising inflation is hitting the low paid particularly hard. Public sector workers need and deserve a proper pay rise. It is a disgrace when one reads that nurses are having to rely on food banks.
Outside of Brexit, …
Welcome, once again, to Liberal Democrat Voice’s preview of the week in Parliament or, to be more precise, the (usually) more dignified end of the Palace of Westminster.
It feels a bit like a phony war at the moment, with the Lords to some extent killing time until the EU Withdrawal Bill finishes its passage through the Commons, but there is still plenty to interest the connoisseur.
Diving straight in, Monday sees the first day of the Committee Stage of the Data Protection Bill. Leading for us will be Tim Clement-Jones, accompanied by Brian …
Vince Cable has backed Theresa May’s calls for new grievance procedures in Parliament following allegations of sexual harassment of staff by MPs.
The Prime Minister set out proposed reforms in a letter to Commons Speaker John Bercow, copying in the other party leaders.
Liberal Democrat Leader Vince Cable said:
The Prime Minister is right to be calling for these changes.
Parliament clearly needs improved procedures to respond to allegations of harassment.
The Liberal Democrats have introduced similar changes since a review in 2013, which has proved a positive step.
Today sees the 200th anniversary of the declaration of independent Venezuela by Simón Bolívar. Frankly, there isn’t much to celebrate there at the moment, the pile of notes pictured being what $100 looked like in bolivars two years ago (and it’s much worse now), and perhaps the Danes might not be celebrating the 153rd anniversary of the end of the Second Schleswig War either, given that they lost.
However, it might not all be doom and gloom, as Liberal Democrat Voice has a new Day Editor. To be strictly accurate, and because …
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 494th weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the five most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (22-28 October, 2017), together with a hand-picked seven you might otherwise have missed.
Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox — just click here — ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.
As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:
Miriam Gonzalez Durantez was on Peston this morning as one of the panel of 3 guests who are there throughout the programme.
The subject of Jared O’Mara’s appallingly racist, misogynist and homophobic comments came up and Miriam said something very interesting instead. She said that Labour must have known about his past because she and Nick did.
That, of course, begs the question that if we knew why on earth didn’t we use it during the campaign. She answered that one as well, saying that Nick refused to run a negative campaign.
She pointed out the hypocrisy of Labour allowing someone with such deeply regressive views to present themselves as a progressive candidate.
It is very typical of Nick to take the high road and not the low one. He is, sometimes to his detriment, an idealist at heart who has always behaved with integrity.
Would it have made a difference if he had used what he knew about O’Mara? Well, let’s look at the change in vote share since 2015. The Labour vote only went up by 2.6%. It was an advance by the Tories of 10.2%, Tories who had hitherto voted tactically for Nick. They unsqueezed themselves presumably to give Theresa May the strong hand she craved in the Brexit negotiations.
Liberal Britain must be neither a country of entrenched privilege riding over the less fortunate, nor a nanny state shepherding and corralling its people.
Liberal Democrats stand for liberty, the freedom of every individual to make their own decisions about how best to live their lives. We trust people to pursue their dreams, to make the most of their talents and to live their lives as they wish, free from a controlling, intrusive state and a stifling conformity; a free and open society that glories in diversity.
That statement of our principles contained in the Agenda 2020 party consultation paper makes me doubt the ideas of Universal Basic Services and Universal Basic Income, discussed here lately.
“We stand for equality”, continues the declaration of Agenda 2020. Yet UBS and UBI could be argued as likely to reinforce structural inequality in Britain. The benefits might be intended to keep the mass of the population reasonably content in having enough to live on and being looked after, while the rich and privileged might willingly pay for the right to continue to accrue wealth and power in unchallenged peace.
The policy would then be the equivalent of the bread and circuses of Roman Emperors, so Liberal Democrats should shun it. It is too easy for us in our middle-class, educated way to avoid facing the glaring inequalities of our country by offering palliative measures, as we did in lifting poorer people out of income tax but ignoring the poorest who didn’t pay tax at all.
Layla Moran has given an interview to the Oxford Student about her life and political priorities.
She talked about her early life and the influence it had on her:
Layla, having been born to a British father and a Palestinian mother, spoke of some of complications connected to coming from a multicultural background. “We had to move around a lot when I was younger so when all my peers would say ‘I grew up in this village’, I could never really say that I had”. But it is exactly this, combined with Layla’s career as a maths and physics teacher, that has
…
This week there were 7 seats up for grabs in 6 seats in England, with a mixed, although largely positive, set of results. Most pleasing is that we’ve continued our trend since the General Election of standing candidates in the vast majority of seats, standing candidates in 3 seats where we didn’t last time, leading to an overall increase of our share of the vote of 5.7% in last night’s seats and 6.0% over all of October.
Derbyshire Dales DC, Ashbourne South – Conservative hold
Con 495
LD Rebecca Goodall 334
Lab 242
Grn 0
Massive thank you to Rebecca Goodall for being the first Lib Dem to stand in this seat since it was created in 2003, and a massive congratulations to everyone in Derbyshire for taking home 31.2% of the vote. Not bad for your first result in a seat!
The situation in Catalonia is incredibly worrying. I can’t help but think about what this would be like if it were happening in Scotland and am grateful for the wiser heads (i.e. ours) in the Coalition that facilitated a legal referendum that settled the issue at least for then.
Both the Madrid and Barcelona governments escalate this situation in a text book “what not to do” approach. Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, writing in the FT, looks at this polarisation at the extremes and sees a need for reconciliation and moderation. Both are wrong. Someone has to do something right, and soon.
The paradox
…
Paul Scriven has been writing for Politics Home about the behaviour and comments of Sheffield Hallam MP Jared O’Mara. He says that they are the most disgusting he has seen in politics. I have to say that’s quite a high bar, remembering what I do about the negativity of the Labour Party in Sheffield when I lived in that area.
He makes the point that O’Mara was going for elected office not long after the comments were made and there are recent episodes which suggest that the journey he says he has been on is pretty short.
hese outbursts are not of some teenager sat in their bedroom. In 2004 O’Mara was a Labour party candidate for Sheffield City Council. He stood in multiple council elections for the Labour Party, never making much progress. Pretending he was new to the party, someone unknown who they had just come across, is a weak excuse the doesn’t hold up. They should be called out at every opportunity for clinging to it.
More recently, only seven months ago, he has been accused of sexist and aggressive language to a woman in a nightclub in Sheffield. The Labour Party have themselves now admitted that they didn’t do any background checks when they selected him.
He suggests that the people of Sheffield Hallam are getting a raw deal.
Today is an important day. We, as Liberals, need to remember that 50 years ago, on this day, the Abortion Act came into being.
Why is this important? I know many people, especially disabled people, feel a real conflict about this legislation. There are issues to consider here, not least with regard to the concept of gender selective abortion and I would urge people to look at MP voting records on this important topic.
Back in the 1960s, the oral contraceptive was still in its infancy. Abortion was illegal and many women faced the real social stigma of being pregnant and unmarried. Fortunately, attitudes have changed. However a real and profound reason for the idea of the Act was not, as many people think, convenience. In actual fact, women were dying every year, in the U.K. from illegal and unsafe abortions. I am talking about women who had few options, where access to clinics was for the rich. A young Liberal MP, David Steel, took up the challenge and the Act was drafted.
Amongst the team of civil servant legal officers was a woman in her early twenties, who would have been deeply affected by issues around women’s reproductive health. I cannot tell you what she, coming to adulthood in this era, must have experienced with her friends, but I do know that she had fellow female students who were married with children at an early age. Did she know anyone who had had to engage the services of a woman like Vera Drake, someone who did their best to help women in trouble? Did she know someone who had died or became unable to have children as the result of infection from an unsafe abortion? I don’t know. I do know that the experience and what she learnt from drafting the legislation had a profound effect on her and she went on in life to strongly support women’s reproductive rights and health. Her views on people who wanted changes to U.K. legislation “because it felt right” were quite strong. I know she was happy to discuss it with her daughters. I know this because she was my mother.
It is difficult to understand how somebody who expresses such hatred and contempt for his fellow human beings as we have seen from Jared O’Mara, could wish to undertake or be a suitable choice for the noble calling of public service in politics.
I do accept that is possible for an angry young man to reform over the years and become an upstanding public figure. The problem is that there is no sign that this has happened.
O’Mara first sought election – to the city council – in 2004, the same year he was writing the hate speech against women, fat people …
It’s 2017, and there’s another motion on Uber to be debated at London region conference. Two years ago the conference voiced its opposition to Transport for London’s (TfL’s) rather overbearing plans for private hire regulation, which ranged from banning the visualisation of nearby cars on a mobile app to mandatory 5 minute minimum waiting times (even if a ride was around the corner). The plans were so out there the head of the Competition and Markets Authority took the unusual step of writing an opinion piece in the Financial Times publicly attacking them for proposing ideas that ‘would artificially restrict competition, and curb developments that benefit the paying passenger’.
This time we’re debating TfL’s decision to ban Uber. It’s a little less clearcut. The facts are that TfL has found Uber’s approach to obtaining driver medical certificates, DBS checks, and reporting serious criminal offences (apparently telling TfL rather than the police in the first instance) wanting. There’s also been an inadequate explanation of whether Uber has ever knowingly blocked TfL officers from accessing the Uber app to perform checks. All potentially quite serious issues.
Part 2 (of 2): The people in the Dutch coalition: strong D66 women
For me the proudest D66 boast about the new Dutch coalition is that, where all four coalition parties said having more women in government is important, D66 with its social liberal feminist tradition dating from Aletta Jacobs and her British suffragist friends (see my earlier posting about her and Millicent Fawcett) actually delivered on this: with three female and one male Cabinet ministers, and with one male and one female minister, we have the highest proportion of women, and deliver the bulk of the female Cabinet ministers.
And they are not only there because of their gender; they’re quality persons, and we present the first lesbian vice prime minister in Dutch history (married, because D66 introduced gay marriage to the world). Let me give brief descriptions on their expertise and working past:
*) Kajsa Ollongren worked at the top in the Dutch prime minister’s department before becoming alderman and deputy mayor of Amsterdam. She put herself forward for parliament in 2006 when D66 went through an electoral nadir (after an unhappy time in a right-wing coalition), and in Amsterdam she got transnational platforms like Uber and AirBnB to respect the wishes of the local population and put limits on their operation. She is Home Secretary and vice prime minister. In her departmental days she and prime minister Rutte got along famously.
*) Sigrid Kaag who evolved from a British-educated (universities of Exeter and Oxford, and Cairo) Dutch top diplomat to a high-flying UN manager, negotiator and mediator, leading the UN chemical disarmament operation around the Syrian Assad dictatorship. She is Cabinet minister for Development Aid and International Trade, combining the humanitarian D66 instincts with hard-nosed practical experience.
What happened to the 11.9 million who didn’t vote in the referendum last year? According to the pro-Brexit lobby’s version of ‘democracy’ they no longer exist.
Non-voters may have been unregistered, uninterested, or too busy to pop in the polling station, and others reckoned their single vote would never matter much and didn’t bother, but there is a core who were confused by the lies and misinformation and didn’t know which way to turn, after a campaign that was shoddy on both sides.
In the last few months the effects of the Brexit vote have started to become clearer. The pound immediately lost value, banks and other financial institutions are starting to move to other European countries, there are big doubts about the future of aero-space and our foreign-owned car industry, EU citizens are already leaving and creating labour shortages in key industries and services, anti-foreigner rhetoric is making the UK an unfriendly xenophobic place, and forecasts predict a long-lasting downturn in the economy, causing tax revenue reductions which would far outweigh the mythical £350m a week gain. Brexit champions thrived on stirring up anti-EU feelings but had no plan for the future, apart from a low-tax, low-tariff Poundshop Britain which would horrify most of us, including leave voters. They had boasted we could easily do advantageous deals with economic super-powers like the USA and China, but the reality is stark; trade agreements take years to negotiate, and we would come off worst in deals with ‘America first’ USA and the equally self-centred China.
Despite all this, the Brexiters claim another referendum would be “anti-democratic”, because “the people have spoken.” We all seem to be forgetting that 11.9 million didn’t speak.
My father died last month. Not the way I’d want to start a piece for Lib Dem Voice, but that’s the fact of the matter. And after mulling it over for a while (and being very occupied with everything such a bereavement entails), I thought it would be relevant to write about him here.
Like his father before him, and his son after him (me), David Blackburn stood as a Liberal (Democrat) Parliamentary Candidate. He fought Brentford and Isleworth in West London in 1974; I remember campaigning for him as a 16 year old and I still have the press cuttings. He was a very successful car importer and as a result was a significant party donor too. Wealthy enough to send me to boarding school where I was the only Liberal in a Tory hotbed.
I wasn’t just a Liberal because my dad was. I was keenly interested in politics and soaked up all the literature. I passionately believed in what I read. There were parallels in the seventies with conditions now – economic challenges, a growing threat from the far right. My father was deeply pro-Europe and stood for the European Parliament as well – the slogan on his election address states ‘Make Britain Great in Europe’. Quite possibly a stronger message than any we used in the referendum! His literature appeals directly to young people, and “oppose(s) all forms of discrimination and demand(s) equal opportunities for women”. These values ran and run through my blood.
I’m proud to say it goes back even further than that. I admit to being something of a hoarder (to the frustration of my wife) and I have my grandfather’s election literature too. He stood in Islington East before WWII and in Chippenham and Calne just after the war; his manifesto speaks of a ‘National Housing Policy’ to build affordable homes, protecting leasehold tenants and among other issues proportional representation! Plus ca change. After he’d had a stroke and while I was studying at the LSE, I used to visit his flat and we’d talk politics and read his books together; it was he who taught me about Beveridge and the five evils.
One of the biggest hits the party took during the coalition years was not so much being associated with the Conservatives (though that was toxic enough) but losing so much of our identity. And if we want to have a future as a party, we have to get that identity back.
Our coalition years slogan ‘Stronger economy, fairer society’ was fine up to a point, but it didn’t provide us with much distinctiveness. Associated messaging that framed us as having more head than Labour and more heart than the Conservatives effectively defined us in relation to Labour and the Conservatives. It did not emphasis what we stood for and make clear what a vote for the Lib Dems meant. By the time of the 2015 seven-leaders TV debate, most people could have formulated in a few words what six of the seven parties stood for, but they might well have struggled with us.
In trying to re-establish our identity, there are two things that are essential. Firstly, we need to set out what radical liberalism means in today’s political context. When we’ve done that, we need to frame our policies in a way that both generates a sense of what the Liberal Democrats stand for that the general public can assimilate, and allows scope within that framing for the
formation of shared agendas with parties of similar outlooks.
As a first step towards getting the ball rolling, Paul Pettinger and I have written a paper The Place for Radical Liberalism in the 21st Century. It’s a short paper – just nine pages – because what’s important is to set out the bare bones of what we need to achieve; the flesh can come later.
They call it “managed Democracy”. Another term is an “illiberal state.”
It is a political/philosophical term that has emerged from central and Eastern Europe to describe political systems whose leaders claim democratic credentials while suppressing dissent.
Degrees of managed democracy have become the order of the day in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Slovakia. It is also finding adherents elsewhere in the democratic world where politicians and their supporters are frustrated by the slow-turning wheels of traditional representative government.
At the heart of this new system are free and fair elections—and they are scrupulously so. Election observers are invited to scrutinise every poll. Ballot papers are carefully printed, distributed and counted. The result is announced and –the winner takes all.
From the moment that a new government is elected the “managed “ element takes over with a vengeance. Government appointed judges pack the courts along with the top positions in the military and police. Senior positions in the universities change hands. Opposition media is either barred from press conferences, terrorized, de-licensed, denied advertising revenue or its senior figures are thrown into prison on trumped up charges.
The political opposition is marginalised and when elections come around again the government is a guaranteed pole position because of its stranglehold on the levers of power. Over a few elections the word democracy is dropped from the political vocabulary and voters are left with a state which is “managed” for a shrinking group of corrupt special interests.
Part 1 (of 2): The coalition agreement: many D66 issues, initiatives
Due to the fragmented party-political parliament which resulted from the Dutch general elections this spring, forming a coalition was always going to be a difficult process. Setting aside populist protest parties like Geert Wilders’ PVV, people expected the political center (from center-left to center-right) to play an active role in building a workable coalition. The only exception was about the PvdA (Dutch Labour party): because they lost disastrously after having been the junior party in a two-party government (led by Mark Rutte, leader of the VVD, and “Green-Right” ally of …
Did you know misogyny is not a hate crime? Hate crimes include racial and religious slurs, but not gendered.
The Crown Prosecution service defines hate incident as:
Any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.
With #metoo and the more open discussion about omnipresent harassment, such that most of us are guilty of ignoring ‘minor’ incidences rather than acting on them, there is now growing pressure to make misogyny a hate crime.
This is not a new idea. Last year, there was …
Britain is a nation with a dubious imperial past and a rather selective memory; one that has forced open the doors of countries the world over while continuing to close its own, bringing us to the latest measure to be implemented with a view to creating the ‘hostile environment,’ that Mrs May envisages will ‘incentivise voluntary departure,’ of ‘disqualified persons,’ Schedule 7 of the 2016 Immigration Act seeks to supplement section 40 of its 2014 predecessor in precluding banks and building societies from opening current accounts for ‘disqualified persons.’
What’s new about the latest Act, however, is its retrospective effect; in …
This is a remarkable video clip of a 1980 NBC interview with Donald Trump. Tom Brokaw is the host for a conversation about New York real estate with a 33 year-old Trump.
It is worth noting Donald Trump’s mode of speech in this interview. He talks quite quickly. He uses lots of words. He doesn’t stumble over those words. His sentences are perfectly formed and crisply delivered, with lots of substantive clauses and the like. And what he is talking about has quite a lot of technical detail.
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