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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Torrin Wilkins

Reintroducing Liberal Leave

By Torrin Wilkins | Mon 24th July 2017 - 11:38 am

 

Liberal Leave was formed as a part of Vote Leave during the EU referendum. It had the slogan “Liberal. Democratic. Internationalist.” and it mainly operated through social media. The most high-profile figure in the Group was an ex-MP called Paul Keetch who wrote an article in the Independent called “Think that if you are liberal you should vote to stay in the EU? Think again”. I was part of that group during the EU referendum and I now chair it.

I have tried to change the group so it is about a compromise between Remain and Leave, one that can be found in the ‘Icelandic option’ which differs from the ‘Norway option’ due to its use of safeguard measures. Compromise is what I feel Brexit should now be about, because otherwise hard-line groups on either side will shape it for us in the years to come.

We are against a second referendum. The argument used by Tim Farron during the recent election campaign was that we didn’t vote for a destination, just to leave the EU and that’s right. Therefore, we should have a referendum on just that, the destination. Do we want to remain members of the single market and do we want to remain members of the customs union? We should ask that rather than replaying the EU referendum.

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Sam Al-Hamdani

Liberals: a fresh message

By Sam Al-Hamdani | Mon 24th July 2017 - 9:02 am

 

Politics in the UK is changing faster now than ever before. This change gives us the opportunity to take our place at the heart of the UK by presenting a strong, passionate and persuasive liberal view of the world. It also means we may get lost among the crowd. We must make sure it is the former, and not the latter.

Clear, simple messages are crucial to how the country views us. Every opportunity to speak to people is a chance to present liberalism in its best light – distinct, valuable, and making our communities stronger.

The centre ground is stable, but it is also defined by what it isn’t. Strong messages must change that. The preamble to the Constitution of the party is a wonderful piece of writing; honest, inspirational, and clear, but it is not going to be read by 99 per cent of the population. What we need to do is distil its values: liberty, equality and community, and let that shine through our communications.

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Stephen Tall

How to enter the LibDemVoice Fantasy Football League 2017/18

By Stephen Tall | Sun 23rd July 2017 - 8:30 pm

LDV FANTASY FOOTBALLThe English Premier League kicks off a fortnight on Friday, 11th August, and LibDemVoice has revived its Fantasy Football League to mark the occasion.

So if you fancy pitting your soccer selection skills against fellow party members then here’s your chance. There’s over 60 of you already joined!

To enter all you have to do is click on this link. Simply register your details, pick your team, and away you go. If you need the joining code at any point, it’s 926270-223363.

Last season’s winner, Alain Desmier, finished in the top …

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Caron Lindsay

It’s going to be a bit quiet around here for a couple of weeks…

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 22nd July 2017 - 11:51 am

As you read this, I’ll be on my way to the beautiful Highlands for two weeks. I need my spiritual home to work its restorative magic on me.

I have decided that I’m going to have a proper break. In previous years, I’ve still done meetings and continued to write for LDV albeit at a reduced rate.

This year has been a bit of a rollercoaster. From the personal drama of my husband’s serious illness last Autumn to the Council elections to the General Election and starting a new job, I’ve …

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Caron Lindsay

Happy 40th Birthday, Alex Cole-Hamilton

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 22nd July 2017 - 8:55 am

Today, Liberal Democrat MSP for Edinburgh Western, Alex Cole-Hamilton turns 40.

I have to confess to being slightly traumatised by this – much more so than by my own imminent Golden Jubilee.

You see, I don’t feel 50. I feel about 28. And I’m in much better shape physically and mentally than I was at 28, so it’s all good here. And the waiter at the Indian last night referred to me as a “young lady.” Even better.

Alex’s big day, though, provides inescapable evidence of the passage of time. I can’t help but remember that I first met him when he was a young lad fresh out of university. Now he’s a 40 year old father of three.

He hides it well, though. He’s probably even more irrepressible now than he was back then.

I’ve asked some of his friends to help me come up with 40 Legendary Alex Moments. Sit down with a cup of tea and enjoy a meander through the life of someone who is guaranteed to bring a smile to whatever is going on. Happy Birthday, Alex:

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Mathew Hulbert

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

By Mathew Hulbert | Fri 21st July 2017 - 7:03 pm

Our new leader

I wish Vince all the luck in the world, in what is one of the most demanding jobs in politics today…ensuring we get enough coverage to break through and continue the Lib Dem Fightback which Tim Farron made a such a good start on during his time in the top job.

There’s no doubt that Vince has pretty good name recognition among the general public (for a politician, anyway) and is clearly a trusted voice on the economy, something which hasn’t always been the case for our leaders.

As the star of a past Christmas edition of Strictly Come Dancing, we can but hope that Strong and Cable Vince will glide across the political scene and ensure that liberalism and social democracy not only survive but thrive in the form of the Liberal Democrats in the years ahead.

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NewsHound

LibLink: Christine Jardine: The country cannot afford a Summer of Brexit discontent

By NewsHound | Fri 21st July 2017 - 1:30 pm

Edinburgh West MP Christine Jardine has set out some thoughts on our strategy as we respond to the total mess that the Tories are making of the Brexit negotiations.

In an article for the Times Red Box (£), she sets the scene:

The internal squabbling of our chancellor, foreign secretary, and Brexit secretary — to name just a few of the clowns at play — is making the chances of a poor deal for the UK, or a catastrophic failure to get a deal at all, all the more likely.

Instead of knuckling down and approaching negotiations with a seriousness befitting the task, Davis has so far shown up to a photo-op without even pretending to have the necessary papers and briefings, then taking the first Eurostar home. No doubt heading straight back to the journalists to criticise his leader. It rather undermines the negotiation of critical issues like EU citizens’ rights, a solution for Northern Ireland and the UK’s debt to the EU when your so-called chief negotiator would rather be at home leaking cabinet papers.

But this is all part of a hard hearted strategy. She thinks that they are trying to create such a bad atmosphere that in a year’s time, they walk way blaming the EU for the failure.

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Michael Taylor

The sixties

By Michael Taylor | Fri 21st July 2017 - 11:55 am

I just visited an amazing exhibition in Montreal at La Musee de Beaux Arts, entitled ‘Revolution’, all about the sixties, when I was a teenager. The revolution in question was the change in art, ideas, politics, power, dress, music etc etc that occurred in the late 1960s, which culminated in the 1968 student riots, Expo ’67 in Montreal and Woodstock.

Many people today, especially young people it seems, criticise the sixties as a time of fantasy, forgetting what life had been like before the so-called swinging sixties. Before the sixties, (male) homosexuality was illegal, women were second class citizens, treated as appendages of their husbands especially in regard to finance, people were hanged for murder, computers and the internet were non-existent, books, plays and films were rigorously censored and non-white people were subject to overt harassment and discrimination. Who can forget the prosecution of the publishers of Lady Chatterly’s Lover – the book the prosecutor said you would not want your wives or servants to read! Or the shocking Tory campaign in Smethick in 1964, when the Labour MP Patrick Gordon-Walker lost his seat to a campaign of ‘If you want a ******* for a neighbour, vote Labour’.

During the sixties, homosexual acts between consenting adults in private were made legal, the Race Relations Act outlawed much discrimination based on colour or race, hanging was abolished, abortion was legalised up to 28 weeks and the voting age was reduced to 18.

The sixties saw an unprecedented revolution in fashion in which the UK through designers like Mary Quant and the Carnaby Street shops changed clothing forever from the somewhat staid post war styles to the modern ever changing fashions of today. The Women’s Liberation Movement started demanding equal rights for women and the end of patriarchy, which, in Britain, eventually led to the Sexual Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act in 1975.

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Edward Goater

How do we measure the evolving will of the people?

By Edward Goater | Fri 21st July 2017 - 10:25 am

The 2017 Liberal Democrat manifesto boldly sets out in section 1.1 the intention to hold a second referendum on EU membership (or indeed, a first vote on the Brexit deal). As a LibDem supporter and remainer in an area which voted 70% to leave, I was simultaneously pleased and worried at the announcement.

When asked by Nick Robinson on the BBC Question Time Leaders Special about the second referendum, Tim Farron made it clear that the result of the referendum is respected, though the people ‘didn’t vote for destination’. Whether true or not, I believe that the type of Brexit that the majority of people voted for needs ratifying in some way, which one could argue a second referendum could allow.

But much more importantly, the question of overturning Brexit, in my opinion is entirely reliant on a second referendum. Polly Toynbee wrote an insightful and interesting piece for the Guardian a few days ago. She argues that a second referendum is naturally divisive, and that an ‘indefinite limbo’ could be ‘the least worst option’.  Whilst I entirely agree that referenda are by their very nature divisive, particularly close ones, I disagree with the idea of a second referendum being wrong. I believe that Brexit can only be overturned by the will of the people to avoid the potential backlash over the perception that the ‘political elite’ have ignored people who feel long-forgotten by the system. The only means to avoid the backlash is to allow the will of the people to overturn the will of the people.

However, whether there is a taste for it is unclear, and what it would take for the minority Conservative government to call one is undetermined. Opinion Polls are famously unreliable at the present. One can pick and choose an opinion poll based on their opinion on a second referendum. For example, YouGov suggest that the support for a second referendum sits at 31%, whilst against sits at 58%. Conversely, Opinium suggests that the support for a second referendum is growing, now sitting at 41% compared to against at 48%. 

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Tom Arms

Observations of an ex pat: Crooked or incompetent?

By Tom Arms | Fri 21st July 2017 - 8:54 am

Is the Trump team totally incompetent or crooked? Is it perhaps a combination of the two or an unappealing variation on the political spectrum?

For despite the never-ending stream of White House protestations and presidential tweets, not all of President Trump’s problems are the result of a witch hunt of historic proportions orchestrated by  the Democrats, the liberals, “ the dishonest media,” immigrants, refugees, Muslims, “so-called judges”,  turncoat Republicans, Chinese currency manipulators, Angela Merkel, Mexicans and Canadians.

Next week we may start to learn the answer to the questions posed. It is a major week for the Trump Administration.  Three big names from the Trump campaign—Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort – are all appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating the Russian hacking scandal.

A bit of background for anyone who has been living at the bottom of a mile-deep Tibetan cave for the past month.  Donald Junior—after initially denying he had met with any Russians—published a string of emails which revealed that in the depths of the presidential campaign he was keen to meet with a Russian lawyer who could dish the dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The White House made much of the fact that Trump Junior released the  correspondence rather than having  it  revealed by someone else. Little was made of the fact that he made public  the emails after the New York Times said they were going to publish them.

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Caron Lindsay

Vince’s manifesto shows just how far Tim took us

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 20th July 2017 - 8:55 pm

When Tim Farron stood for the leadership two years ago, his winning manifesto was quite internally focused. It had to be. We’d just had what could have been a mortal blow from the electorate. We were all in shock, devastated at the psychological impact of the loss of so many of our heartlands.

We knew we had to pick ourselves up, but in those early weeks, every time we tried to get ourselves off the floor, we couldn’t quite manage it. Then along came Tim with a jolt of electricity, a motivational message that energised us and got us going again. A lot of his manifesto was internally focused – about picking a ward and winning it, about tackling diversity, about how he’d make decisions in the party (with a diverse group of people in the room), and about having a festival of ideas. It was a time of innovation when newbies developed initiatives like Lib Dem Pint and Your Liberal Britain. But it was mainly internal.

Tim has left us in better shape and grew the size of the parliamentary party in an incredibly difficult election for us.

Vince’s manifesto is much more outward looking. He doesn’t really talk about internal stuff at all. It’s all about our positioning to the world.

He uses language about being ambitious for party and country that reminds me of Willie Rennie’s optimistic campaign in Scotland where we won two seats from the SNP. Where we could get that message out in sufficient volume, people liked it. It was full of heart and authenticity and optimism. People want something to look forward to.

Vince concentrates on five policy areas:

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Caron Lindsay

Vince takes the stage with a strong “Exit from Brexit” line

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 20th July 2017 - 6:07 pm

Vince is not our almost leader any more. Just after 4pm, Sal Brinton announced that there had only been one nomination received and therefore he was our actual leader.

Having one of the country’s most credible and authoritative experts on the economy at a time when the economy is at risk is no bad thing.

We will certainly see a change in style from Vince. He won’t be as Tiggerish as Tim, but he’ll fight the recklessness of the Tories and Labour and promote our Liberal Democrat values with energy and optimism.

Vince has huge intelligence, a way of telling it like it is that makes sense to people and a wicked sense of humour. I feel much more optimistic than I did on 9th June that we can actually get somewhere.

Watch this afternoon’s proceedings here. You can see speeches from Sal, Tim, Jo and Vince.  Some key points from Vince’s speech are below.

There is a huge gap in the centre of British politics and I intend to fill it. As the only party committed to staying in the single market and customs union, the Liberal Democrats are alone in fighting to protect our economy. It will soon become clear that the government can’t deliver the painless Brexit it promised. So, we need to prepare for an exit from Brexit.

Theresa May wants to take Britain back to the 1950s while Jeremy Corbyn wants to take Britain back to the 1970s. I will offer an optimistic, alternative agenda to power the country into the 2020s and beyond.

We have a government that can’t govern and an opposition that can’t oppose. Labour and the Conservatives have formed a grand coalition of chaos, driving through a hard Brexit which would deliver a massive blow to living standards.

Both parties have abandoned mainstream economics. I want to put economics back centre stage.

Under my leadership the Liberal Democrats will be at the centre of political life: a credible, effective party of national government.

We have doubled our membership and our new members have given the party enormous energy. I want to give leadership to that energy, hitting the headlines and putting our party at the centre of the national debate.

 

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 32 Comments
Max Wilkinson

My message to liberal Tories: join us

By Max Wilkinson | Thu 20th July 2017 - 4:54 pm

During the General Election campaign I found myself in an interesting position. Standing as the candidate for the most liberal, pro-EU party, I found myself against an incumbent MP who spent a lot of time talking about his enthusiasm for Europe. He also spoke often of the need for ‘liberal pluralism’ and his enthusiasm for a change to the voting system.

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Posted in News | 36 Comments
The Voice

LibLink: Lord Teverson – Big challenges ahead as the PM pushes nuclear button on Euratom membership

By The Voice | Thu 20th July 2017 - 2:12 pm

Lord (Robin) Teverson has been writing for PoliticsHome on the UK’s membership of Euroatom:

Last year’s referendum was not about Euratom. Leave and Remain were silent about this low profile, essential institution – a body that uses the EU institutions but is not part of it.

Put simply Euratom acts on behalf of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) as the ‘safeguarding’ agency for all its 28 member states, the same 28 members of the EU.  It ensures that under international non-proliferation treaties all fissile materials are controlled and accounted for. Its inspections make sure the strict protocols and safeguards are in place on behalf of all its members, including the UK.

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Posted in LibLink | 2 Comments
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