Antony Hook

The Parliamentary Boundary Review is continuing.

By Antony Hook | Thu 3rd August 2017 - 8:41 am

 

If you want to win a parliamentary seat at the next General Election start thinking about the new parliamentary boundaries.

Seasoned political campaigners understand the importance of the boundaries.  Any area that is divided up into electoral districts has to have lines drawn somewhere.  Moving a village between this or that constituency can make all the difference to who wins and who loses. Sometimes changes are so significant that new constituencies are radically different to their predecessors.

In 2011, Parliament amended the Parliamentary Constituency Act 1986. There were two main changes: 650 MPs …

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Mary Reid

Autumn Conference agenda and directory now available

By Mary Reid | Wed 2nd August 2017 - 6:13 pm

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The agenda for Autumn conference in Bournemouth has now been published online. This contains the full text of all the motions that will be debated, as well as speeches and other events in the main hall. The conference runs from Saturday 16th September to Tuesday 19th September.

Now is the time to arrange a meeting with your local party to discuss amendments you might like to submit. The deadline for submitting amendments to motions, and also for emergency motions, topical issues and questions to reports, is 1pm on 4th September. As always, you would be wise to ask for drafting advice for amendments in advance, and this is available up until 21st August.

You can also download the Conference directory, which lists the fringe meetings, training sessions and exhibitors.

If you haven’t attended conference before then it is not too late to register. The registration fee for first-timers remains the same throughout the booking period, whereas the fees for returnees rises in steps. First-timers also get invited to a number of events designed to introduce them to conference, to the venue and to each other.

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Jon Andrew

The Right are more politically correct than the Left

By Jon Andrew | Wed 2nd August 2017 - 4:19 pm

“It’s political correctness gorn mad!” is probably a phrase you would associate more with a gruff, Daily Mail reading, UKIP supporter, than you would with a Guardian reading, quinoa eating, Lib Dem. Political correctness is the stick that progressives get beaten with time and time again by people like Nigel Farage, who like to claim that the left care more about censoring discussion than about common sense politics.

I also get annoyed by people who obsess over what you can and can’t say at the expense of what is actually true, but my argument is that, increasingly in British politics, the right are worse in this regard than the left.

Theresa May’s central argument in the 2017 General Election was that a vote for her was a vote for Britain and that those who opposed her were “talking Britain down.” Supporting the Conservatives and their hard Brexit agenda was almost pitched as a patriotic duty, rather than a matter of political persuasion and opinion.

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Martin Thomas

A bit of Lib Dem history

By Martin Thomas | Wed 2nd August 2017 - 12:34 pm

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The sad passing of Jim Davidson recently brings back memories, as I write this here in Aboyne in  the heart of his former constituency.

“We can’t have another Welshman as leader of the Liberal Party” said Jo Grimond. When Jo resigned as leader in 1967, there were two contestants to replace him: Emlyn Hooson and Jeremy Thorpe. The electorate was the Parliamentary Party of twelve Liberal MPs. Initially, Hooson had the support of  six of them which, if he voted for himself, would make him the clear winner.

Jo took aside Jim Davidson, the pleasant and talented recently elected Member for Aberdeenshire West, who was a Hooson supporter. Jo’s wife Laura had not forgiven the Welsh wizard, David Lloyd George, for supplanting her grandfather, Herbert Asquith, as Prime Minister in 1916 and splitting the Party.  Another Welshman as Leader was unthinkable. Jim succumbed to Jo’s pressure and with misgivings, as a memoir of Jo and Laura revealed in 2000, promised his vote for Thorpe.

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ALDC

Reminder: ALDC’s Give It A Go – pizza and phoning TOMORROW

By ALDC | Wed 2nd August 2017 - 10:02 am

We’ll provide the pizza, if you come and make some calls… followed of course by a trip to the pub!

The phone bank makes a real difference, giving you the chance to encourage uncertain voters to make their voices heard, and provide real time feedback for the teams campaigning on the ground. It’s also really important after the General Election that we continue to be successful in our local government by-election campaigns.

Our next Give It A Go – Phoning evening is Thursday 3 August, between 6-8pm when we are focusing on gaining two seats from the Conservatives. We’ll provide a briefing on the areas we phone through to, so you’ll have all the answers to whatever the voters ask of you.

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Joe Otten

Liblink: David Laws – the ‘poor’ quality of education policy

By Joe Otten | Tue 1st August 2017 - 1:29 pm

In the Guardian today, Peter Wilby speaks to ex Liberal Democrat schools minister David Laws about his life and careers so far and his work at the new Education Policy Institute.

Like the IFS, Laws’s institute will, he tells me, be “data-driven, influencing debate by the quality of its analysis and its quantitative skills”. The quality of education policymaking is poor, Laws argues, and the institute wants to make it better.

Was policymaking poor when he was schools minister? “Yes. A lot of decision-making is not based on evidence but on hunch. I had little coming to me from civil

…

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Paul Walter

A belated personal tribute to Tim Farron

By Paul Walter | Tue 1st August 2017 - 11:25 am


Tim Farron took over our party after we had fallen off a cliff and landed amongst particularly dangerous rocks underneath with a team of crocodiles having a good chew at our ankles.

He was exactly what we needed at that time. A passionate liberal and Liberal. A fighter. Someone with bags of energy and a great, charismatic speaker. He is also a man of great honesty and integrity.

You have to remember the appalling state we were in on 8th May 2015 and then compare it to 8th June 2017. We went from being absolutely gutted to having our highest membership ever, a revitalised campaigning structure and 50% more MPs.

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Paul Walter

Vince shines in exchange of barbs with Boris Johnson

By Paul Walter | Tue 1st August 2017 - 9:53 am

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For me, the little exchange of barbs between Vince and Boris Johnson, over the weekend, is an early sign of what a great leader Vince will be for our party.

It was a bit like tennis.

Vince served brilliantly with:

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Oliver Craven

A new economic vision for the Lib Dems

By Oliver Craven | Mon 31st July 2017 - 5:05 pm

The Liberal Democrats need new thought on how we view the economy and the role of the state and this idea could influence what we choose to support. We often struggle to find an economic system we can get behind.

Unrestricted capitalism leads to unacceptable inequality. The Conservatives stand for a small rich elite, while everyone else struggle to make ends meet. The Corbynite vision of socialism would leave us all worse off. The Liberal Democrats must form a new vision of how our economy should work and what role the state should play in it.

I would propose the Enabling State as our vision.

The state has a duty of promoting liberty in all its forms, and to ensure everyone has the chance to make the best of themselves. This would include freeing people from poverty, through a basic income, to ensure everyone has the money for basic needs.

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Mary Reid

Sarah Olney on returning to normal life

By Mary Reid | Mon 31st July 2017 - 12:15 pm

The New Statesman is running an article titled “I’m very much out on my ear”: what it’s like becoming an ex-MP. It interviews a number of people who lost their seats, but the focus is heavily on Sarah Olney.

Apparently, Theresa May apologised to Tory MPs who lost in the debacle that was the June General Election.

While May was referring to her Conservative peers, losing a seat is an experience also familiar to Liberal Democrat Sarah Olney. The former MP for Richmond Park made headlines by overturning Zac Goldsmith’s 23,015 majority in the December 2016 by-election – only to lose the seat by 45 votes six months later.

“I don’t get any money at all,” she says. “I got paid up to 8 June and then nothing. I don’t qualify for loss of office allowance or statutory redundancy because I wasn’t there for long enough. You have to have been there for at least two years.”

Olney, who intends to look for a new job after the summer holidays, describes herself as a “little bit cheated” by the snap election. “I was expecting – especially when we had a Fixed-term Parliaments Act – that parliament was going to last until 2020. So to suddenly find that it’s changed means that you don’t qualify for anything.”

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Joe Bourke

Funding Social Care costs

By Joe Bourke | Mon 31st July 2017 - 10:33 am

Andrew Dilnot, the economist who reviewed social care for the coalition government has described the social care system as a classic example of market failure  where the private sector cannot do what’s needed.

On the Tory plans, he said:

The changes just fail to tackle the central problem that scares most people. You are not tackling the big issue that people can’t pool their risks. There is nothing that anybody can do to pool their risk with the rest of the population, you just have to hope that you are not unlucky.

It is not providing insurance. You could easily have care costs of £300,000 each if you are a couple; you are not able to cover that extreme risk which is what we all want to do faced with anything else which we can insure. That’s the market failure and these changes do nothing to address that.

Shadow Health Secretary Norman Lamb has said:

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Paul Walter

Pivotal US healthcare votes swung by ailing Senators

By Paul Walter | Sun 30th July 2017 - 8:59 pm

It’s been a disastrous week for Donald Trump’s Presidency. I won’t the list the cataclysms because there are endless articles cataloguing them. This article does a very good job in summing up the situation.

What struck me was that a situation which led to the Affordable Care Act (ACA – “Obamacare”) becoming law was repeated as the Republican “Skinny Repeal” of the ACA failed in the US Senate early on Friday morning.

In the December 2009, the late Senator Robert Byrd, then 92 years-old with fragile health, was instrumental in passing the Affordable Care Act through several late night voting appearances in his wheelchair.

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Paul Carroll

The need to rediscover Social Justice

By Paul Carroll | Sun 30th July 2017 - 11:32 am

So, we are to be a party of the centre; open, tolerant and united. Four adjectives for the LibDems of the future.   Given that we are currently polling around 7%-8%, I feel we need to take a long hard look at ourselves.   So for what it is worth, here is my take on the first of these adjectives: party of ‘The Centre’.

The problems of being a party of the centre are well known.  Suffice to say that barring a massive misjudgement on the part of the Labour or Conservative parties we will never hold the centre captive, un-contested and fertile. It is absolutely essential therefore, for the LibDems to find a political territory that is distinct and independent of the Tory Labour axis and effectively communicate that territory to the electorate.

I was recently advised in a dialogue on this site to revisit the preamble to our constitution and it seemed to me that written through it, like a stick of rock, was the notion of Social Justice.  The more I reflected on this issue the more it seemed to offer explanations and possibilities, not only as a guiding principle but as a strong and powerful narrative for the public imagination. But for it to work, ‘Social Justice’ cannot just be a brand or a slogan, it has to be defining, intrinsic and all pervading; a raison d’être.

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The Voice

LibLink: Vince Cable on the battle for LGBT+ rights

By The Voice | Sat 29th July 2017 - 5:08 pm

 

This week Vince Cable marked the 50th Anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality with an article in Pink News. He remembers the social context in which the changes happened.

The period that saw the introduction of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 left a powerful impression on me. It was around this time that I returned to the UK from Kenya with my now late wife, Olympia. She was Indian, and we arrived in a Britain snarling with the racism of Enoch Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech. Intolerance was not merely tolerated by the state, but enforced by it, with immigrants, women and of course members of the LGBT+ community discriminated against in a way that is hard now to fully understand.

But it was also a time of social change, even ferment. My colleague David Steel piloted an act that legalised abortion that same year. And gay people could finally have sex without fear of prosecution (provided they were both 21 or over, and it was in private).

Looking back, the sheer level of bigotry is shocking. Even many supporters of the reform referred to homosexuality as a “disability”. By 1974, the number of arrests for gay “offences” had actually increased. It was not until 2001, after a defeat in the European Court of Human Rights, that the Labour government was forced to repeal the criminalisation of “homosexual acts”.

 He then looks at the Liberal Democrat record.
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Mary Reid

Want to see Norman Lamb in lycra?

By Mary Reid | Sat 29th July 2017 - 2:43 pm

It is dangerous for politicians to make pledges during an election campaign. I’m sure you all know what I am talking about – Stephen Tall’s pledge to run naked down Whitehall.

And then there was Vince Cable’s hat.

But Norman Lamb rashly said he would join a zumba class if he won his seat in North Norfolk, which, of course, he did.

But he did it!

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Jon Andrew

What we need from Vince

By Jon Andrew | Sat 29th July 2017 - 11:31 am

 

In terms of our national campaign, the 2017 election was a failure. Yes, we increased our number of MPs, but this was not because of a coherent and appealing overall message, it was because of 12 very hard fought local campaigns, and good strategic pooling of resources into target seats.

The leadership of the Party assumed that the main dividing line among the electorate would be Remainers vs Leavers, and so led with our vehement opposition to Brexit, but this did not resonate. Corbyn’s luke-warm-at-best Remain credentials did not put people off, and this is probably because the public themselves are a lot more luke warm on the issue than we are.

If I had to describe the mood of the country on Brexit right now I would describe it as “meh – let’s wait and see” rather than “let’s overturn the whole damn thing”. Indeed, a YouGov polling report published a few weeks before the election campaign started found that only 21% of the public favoured going against the result of the referendum. Perhaps this will change as the impact of Brexit on our daily lives becomes clearer, but for now, we have been making the wrong pitch.

But what is the right pitch? The most straightforward way for a third party to gain popular support is by painting the main two as the establishment options; too similar, too set in their ways of thinking, and then appealing to people’s frustrations by pitching themselves as the change from the norm. The difficulty here though is that the main two parties are not the same, and Corbyn is hoovering up all the anti-establishment sentiment in a way that we can’t compete with.

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The Voice

LibLink: Vince Cable on Corbyn

By The Voice | Fri 28th July 2017 - 7:30 pm

 

“Corbyn wants a hard-right Brexit. Progressives must fight back, not follow” – that is the uncompromising headline to an article by Vince Cable in today’s Guardian.

Vince claims:

It is a paradox not lost on many Labour MPs that while their leader is to the left even of Michael Foot, he has collaborated with the right more than any Labour leader since Ramsay MacDonald. Jeremy Corbyn’s insistence that Brexit means leaving the single market and customs union – unpicking Keir Starmer’s carefully woven tapestry of ambiguity – now puts him in the same place as Theresa May and Liam Fox. That place is to the hard right of British politics.

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Mathew Hulbert

Mathew’s Musings -commentary on this week’s news

By Mathew Hulbert | Fri 28th July 2017 - 5:51 pm

Fifty years on

As many (if not all) of you will know, this week marks fifty years since the partial decriminalization of homosexuality.

As an out and proud gay man, it is humbling to remember the efforts of so many people…most of whom didn’t live to feel the joy of (near) equality but who nonetheless kept up the fight and the campaigning in the hope that future generations of gay and bi men and women would.

I shed a few tears this week thinking of all the people who were demonized, criminalized, abused, and died, just because of who they they were and who they loved.

There’s still much more to do, of course, from doing more to tackle homophobic bullying in schools, to further acceptance in institutions such as the Church, recognition and rights for non-binary individuals, and further rights and equality for Transgender people.

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The Voice

Peter Taylor to fight Watford mayoral race for the Lib Dems

By The Voice | Thu 27th July 2017 - 11:41 am

News reaches The Voice that Peter Taylor, currently Watford’s Deputy Mayor, has been selected as the Liberal Democrat candidate to contest next year’s Mayoral election in Watford. Peter, who currently serves as Dorothy Thornhill’s Deputy Mayor, lives in Watford with his wife Rachael and their three children and has served as a councillor for Oxhey since 2012.

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Mary Reid

James Davidson – a Liberal MP in Scotland who should not be forgotten

By Mary Reid | Thu 27th July 2017 - 9:06 am

The Times has carried an obituary for a former Liberal MP for Aberdeenshire West. You can be forgiven for not having heard of him because he served as MP from 1966-70 and he died at the age of 90.

But having read his story I really wish I had known him. Here are some extracts:

A British naval attaché was on a 1,100-mile train journey from Murmansk to Moscow in the early 1950s when he got talking to a young captain of artillery in his carriage. “We had lunch together and he asked if I would like to bring a girl from the embassy to come to have dinner with him and his fiancée,” recalled James Davidson. “Then, 48 hours before I was due to go, the phone rang and it was him. He just said, ‘This is Sergei. I am afraid we cannot meet you. I am sure you understand.’ And he hung up and that was the end of that.”

On another occasion Davidson and a colleague went for a walk in the forest and were stopped by soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs who tried to make them sign a confession that they had deliberately gone into a forbidden area. “But that was not true, there were no signs,” he protested.

More than a decade later, and back in Britain, Davidson discovered that the Russians had not forgotten their suspicions. Now serving as a Liberal MP, he was proposed as a member of a parliamentary Anglo-Russian friendship society, but the Soviets refused to accept him.

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John Knox

New thinking on job creation

By John Knox | Wed 26th July 2017 - 6:23 pm

 

One of the big challenges of our time is to provide work for all those who need it, work which is useful, fulfilling and which pays enough to live on. And although the British economy is creating around half a million jobs (net) a year, many of them do not satisfy those simple criterion.

The need for good quality jobs will increase as the population increases and working careers get longer, yet hardly anyone is thinking about where these jobs are to come from.  Government departments, unions and think-tanks tend to concentrate on where jobs have been created in the past or predicting where they may come in the future, or on skills training or how to improve conditions for those already in work. The private sector seems to regard jobs as a by-product, a necessary evil in the process of making a profit, and in the public sector the government wants to cut as many jobs as possible to save tax-payers’ money.  No one is actively looking at areas where new and worthwhile jobs can be created and how to do it.

Let me be bold and suggest six sectors where this might be done, in what I call the “infinite industries” ie where there is no limit to the amount of production that can be done: education, health, energy, environment, sport and the arts.

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Katharine Pindar

What should Liberal Democrats expect of our leaders?

By Katharine Pindar | Wed 26th July 2017 - 4:20 pm

 

Members are sovereign in the Liberal Democrat party. Members will be consulted on the overall party strategy at the next Federal Conference, prior to a motion being passed. Yet the party leader is expected, both by the membership and by the country, somehow to embody the image of the party. He or she is identified with its perceived success or failure by the media, regardless of how much control they may actually have had.

So what do we members think the first duty of the Liberal Democrat leader should be?

Surely he must show in outlining his political priorities that he is true to the party’s principles and values. This Tim Farron did, when elected in 2015. He said, for example,

We see people as individuals. The Liberal mission is to help us to be the best we can be. Standing up for the individual is not what we do – it’s what we are.

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Joe Bourke

Crackdown on unfair Leasehold Practices

By Joe Bourke | Wed 26th July 2017 - 12:37 pm

 

The Communities secretary, Sajid Javid, has issued a consultation to look at a range of measures to tackle unfair and unreasonable abuses of leasehold.

The Leasehold Knowledge Partnership and Carlex seek to represent the interests of residential leaseholders and end unfairness in this form of property tenure.  Carlex, the Campaign Against Retirement Leasehold Exploitation, represents the interests of retirement leaseholders. They provide the secretariat to the new All Party Parliamentary Group on leasehold and common hold, formed on September 7 2016.

Ed Davey MP, has been closely involved in the investigation of Cartel-like practices and Leasehold abuses in retirement homes.

England and Wales are unique in the world in perpetuating flat “ownership” in the form of a tenancy – leasehold – with all the vulnerability that that involves. Many who live in flats are young, old and single. Often knowledge of leasehold is very limited, and in disputes they are disadvantaged.

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Luke Reading

Two months with the Lib Dems

By Luke Reading | Wed 26th July 2017 - 11:10 am

 

Two months ago today I joined the Liberal Democrats amongst the peak of political campaigning for the general election (the first in which I was able to vote). Before this year I had seen myself as someone more on the right when it came to business and the economy but also felt strongly in favour of civil liberties.

As someone who has grown up in a Conservative stronghold in the South, and only really came to better understand politics under the Coalition government, I had always seen the Tories as the better choice out of the two major parties. Until the referendum last year, I was probably well on the route to putting a cross in the box next to Conservatives, not out of total agreement with Tory policies but seeing it as the lesser of two evils. When I found out the result of the referendum early the next morning, followed quickly by the news of David Cameron’s resignation, after the initial anger, confusion and disbelief, it left me reflecting on my own political stand point.

It emerged Theresa May would take over as Conservative leader several weeks later and earlier this year a general election was called for June. In the time from the Brexit result to the election being called, I found myself unable to be supportive of the Conservatives who had done nothing but shift rightwards on the political spectrum and witnessed a Labour party move much closer to its socialist roots. I was left unsatisfied with what the two major parties were offering, and so I looked elsewhere for inspiration.

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Paul Walter

Willie Rennie – the “secret guilty pleasure” of singer and columnist Michelle McManus

By Paul Walter | Wed 26th July 2017 - 9:50 am


MichelleMcManus2010
Michelle McManus

Winner of Pop Idol 2003, singer, broadcaster, actress and columnist, Michelle McManus must have brought blushes to the cheeks of Willie Rennie with this passage in her Glasgow Evening Times column:

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Azi Ahmed

I’m proud to be a be a Lib Dem newbie

By Azi Ahmed | Tue 25th July 2017 - 12:59 pm

During last month’s election campaign, I made the most important political decision of my life. I resigned from the Conservative Party, for whom I had stood as a parliamentary candidate in 2015, to join the Liberal Democrats.
As I explained in an article for The Guardian, I could no longer support a party trying to drive through an extreme Brexit with disastrous consequences for our country. Unlike Theresa May, I was not prepared to campaign for a cause in which I did not believe.

I was honoured to be asked to introduce Vince Cable at a packed election …

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Bill Fowler

Vince Cable, the next PM?

By Bill Fowler | Tue 25th July 2017 - 10:15 am

 

As a fan of Mrs Thatcher it might seem odd that I have just joined the Liberal Democrats. However times change, hard right policies are more likely to drive the large number of people depending on in-work benefits or working in the government into the hands of Mr Corbyn.  Labour, who shout loudly about democratic mandates, are likely to have another go at bankrupting the country as well as bring democracy into disrepute by promising endless giveaways.

The worst possible case for the UK is to have a Labour government and be outside the EU. Labour want out of EU because they can then rape and pillage the slightly rich – anyone who cannot bite back. Given the pasting that the EU gets from our press it is actually surprising that, as far as citizens’ rights go, it actually does work – and seems to be improving in many areas. It would be ironical if Brexit forces them to reform further in the interests of its citizens rather than its bureaucrats.

I would probably have not joined up had not Vince Cable become leader; he at least talks some reasonable sense – most of the time. Now he has the amusing task of saving the country from itself. The current fickleness of the British voting public means just about anything is possible but it will mean swallowing some liberal pride to get there. Looking from the outside, there is one little trick that might placate half the Brexiteers and that is a very strict residence test before there is any access to benefits, social housing, in-work benefits and possibly the personal tax allowance. By strict I mean at least five years…

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John King

Brexit: an idea whose time has passed?

By John King | Mon 24th July 2017 - 6:47 pm

One view of our divided country is that it was always a land of potential Leavers and Remainers, the rift being merely exposed by the referendum. On this theory, Remainers were born rather than made and Leavers, like leopards, will never change their spots.

Yet the truth is that Leavers comprise all sorts of people, as do Remainers. They are not a different species. I am coming round to the view that our current turmoil is not the fault of the people themselves, so much as the power of a virulent ideology that has swept the country like a tsunami, sweeping away common sense, but which is now slowly evaporating.

It has happened before: ideas have taken hold with a force disproportionate to their merit, and caused mayhem. There are reasons why these belief systems gain traction. Let us look at a couple of examples.

Lysenkoism

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Mary Reid

LibLink: William Wallace gives the William Beveridge Memorial Lecture

By Mary Reid | Mon 24th July 2017 - 5:05 pm

William Wallace – one of our eminent peers – delivered the William Beveridge Memorial Lecture at the Social Liberal Forum Conference a week ago.

Professionally William was a professor in International Relations at the London School of Economics, and he has worked as a visiting professor in Universities around the world. So you would be right in expecting his lecture to be intellectually rigorous and thoroughly relevant to social liberals.

He took as his theme the question: Is a liberal and democratic society compatible with globalisation? You can read the full text of his lecture here, but here is a taster.

He sets the question firmly in an international context:

Dani Rodrik, one of my favourite economists – a Turk teaching at Harvard – wrote some five years ago that we may be discovering that democracy is not compatible with unconditional globalization; and that if we have to choose, we must prefer democracy and open society to globalization.  I take that as my text, and will explore its implications for Liberals, who believe in open societies and international cooperation but also in individual freedom within settled communities.   I have a second text, which is President Macron’s declaration that France must support a market economy, but not a market society’ – which is a good phrase for us to adopt in Britain, when Corbynistas are close to rejecting the market as such and the Conservative right sees the market as governing social provision.

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Phil Bennion

Defending the Human Rights of Parliamentarians at the Inter-Parliamentary Union

By Phil Bennion | Mon 24th July 2017 - 2:43 pm

The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) is the global club of national parliaments, so one might ask why Liberal International (LI) has signed up to the organisation as an Observer Member. The clearest reason is to further the work of LI’s highly active Human Rights Committee, which already has recognition and speaking rights at the United Nations Human Rights Council. The IPU has its own human rights committee specifically defending the rights of parliamentarians across the world. Many of its cases involve liberal politicians in places where opposition politics is fraught with danger. A second reason is to develop stronger collective identity and action between liberal politicians from our member parties.

Dhaka was a controversial choice of venue, as Bangladesh has itself seen considerable political strife in recent years and the last election was boycotted by the opposition. Whilst I was there their student leader in Chittagong was picked up by police then found dead hours later. A high profile court case involving the suspension from office of the opposition mayor of Sylhet was dismissed by the High Court, only for new proceedings to be instigated before he had gained access to his office. I met the opposition leader off site to discuss democratic progress.

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