On BBC iPlayer, history broadcaster Dan Snow takes a look at Liberal Prime Minister from 1916-1922, David Lloyd George, who was his great-great-grandfather.
It’s an excellent documentary, drawing on photos and footage from the era of Lloyd George’s life, as well as commentary from a team of excellent historians and biographers.
My poor husband doesn’t get a lot in the way of post. It tends to be bills, or adverts for stair lifts or begging letters from the Liberal Democrats.
The latter do not please him so I tend to intercept them so he doesn’t see them. He is of the not entirely unjustified opinion that his household has more than enough disruption because of his wife’s involvement in the party that they don’t need his money as well. The begging letters, 3 issues of Ad Lib a year and an absent wife sum up his membership experience. That and every five …
The party is advising candidates tonight that, while national campaigning remains suspended, local campaigning can resume tomorrow.
The advice came in an email from Federal Campaigns and Elections Chair James Gurling who said:
Further to our advice this morning following the terrorist attack in Manchester, national campaigning will remain suspended tomorrow.
Like other parties we have agreed that local campaigning may resume with due sensitivity and at the discretion of local campaign managers.
We will continue to review the advice given on national and local campaigning.
So, take the lead from your local campaign manager and act accordingly.
The Scottish Parliament is still sitting and all Scotland’s political leaders made statements of solidarity with Manchester and the victims of the murders at the Ariana Grande concert last night.
Here is Willie Rennie’s:
I want to express my absolute condolences to the people affected, their families and the support services helping them as best they can.
This morning was a moment that, when you woke up to the news on the radio, you tried to turn it off. As if, by not hearing it, you could make it not true. We are all horrified that such an attack can take place on
…
An email from the Chair of the Federal Campaigns and Elections Committee James Gurling has been sent explaining what the suspension of campaigning in respect for the victims of the Manchester attack means:
By now you will all have seen and heard about the terrible events of yesterday. Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the tragic attack in Manchester.
We, along with the other political parties have agreed to suspend our campaigns until further notice.
That means until further notice, please do not carry out any public campaigning activity – that includes canvassing, campaigning online, leaflet delivery and any street stalls.
This site …
Last night people would have dropped their kids off at Manchester Arena for the Ariana Grande concert. The kids would have been so excited. In the normal course of events, they’d have come out afterwards completely buzzing about the whole thing and would have spent hours reliving it and singing the songs.
They will certainly never forget the awful events of last night.
It is utterly impossible to comprehend what goes through the mind of someone who targets children and young people in this way.
One of my friends wrote on Facebook that we should think about what the terrorists want us to do – and then do the exact opposite.
They want us to turn on each other and change our lives to pander to them or fear of them. We can’t let them diminish us like that.
And in fact, we can see from the acts of kindness and solidarity from the people of Manchester that the generous, open-hearted spirit of that wonderful city will prevail.
Our hearts go out to all those who have lost loved ones, or who are going through the raw anxiety of not being able to track someone down, or who are waiting for news of an injured friend or relative.
All of us need to think about what we can do to make the world kinder, more open and gentle – and then go and do it.
Senior Liberal Democrats have been reacting to last night’s attack. Tim Farron said:
There has been a very unfortunate trend in recent years of those in power condemning anyone who stands in their way. We all remember the failure of the Conservative Justice Secretary Liz Truss to stand up for the Supreme Court judges who upheld the law after the “enemies of the people” headline. However, that wasn’t the first time the judiciary had come under such attack. Back in 2011, Alex Salmond insulted Lord Hope, a judge who had found the Scottish Government to be wanting on human rights. As I wrote at the time:
Peter Cadder, whose case sparked the SNP’s casual quadrupling of pre-charge detention time in an afternoon last year, won his human rights case because, then a teenager, he had not had access to a lawyer before a police interrogation that led to his conviction for assault. Now, to me, it seems eminently reasonable that people should have access to lawyers. A system that does not allow that is flawed. Rather than slag off judges and court judgements, surely the Scottish Justice Department would be better off comparing Scots law with European human rights law and sorting out where there could be problems. You could argue this should have been done years ago.
Alex Salmond is pandering to a Daily Fail type agenda with is comments and he needs to catch himself on.
The Tories and the right wing press are playing from the same playbook with their “saboteurs” and “enemies of the people” narrative as if they alone are the true diviners of the will of the people as if that is as immovable as Mount Everest. There’s a certain irony about those who claim to be all about enacting the will of the people zealously ensuring that the people don’t get a chance to mark their homework.
Remember the Brexit “Battle Bus” with this slogan, “We send the EU £350 million a week lets fund our NHS instead Vote Leave”? It was powerful and “misleading” according to the UK Statistics Authority. Mr Farage referred to it as a “mistake”.
No! “The number plastered on the side of the Brexit bus was a big fat lie.”
It was not a mistake because it affected the “Brexit” result the way Mr Farage wanted.
In short, we were misled and those who subverted our democracy with this deception have gone unpunished. Therefore it will happen again to further diminish democracy.
Last month the CPS announced that there would be no criminal charges brought against 14 MPs over their expenses in the 2015 election. In March 2017, The Electoral Commission fined the Conservative Party a record £70,000 for “numerous failures” in reporting expenses for the 2015 General Election. For that election the Conservatives raised some £38, 000,000.
Apparently that bus now looks like this:
Which might explain why Boris Johnson got a bit confused yesterday on Peston on Sunday.
Would you like to see him claiming that the Conservative manifesto promises £350m a week for the NHS? Of course you would.
In a letter, more than 50 business leaders, including Nicola Horlick and the founders of EBookers and Innocent Drinks, have said that they will be voting Liberal Democrat because of our stance on Brexit.
From the Times (£)
The 53 signatories who say they intend to vote Lib Dem include senior players in the investment and IT sectors, two industries that could be hit by a poor Brexit deal. They represent small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) rather than FTSE 100 companies.
“The Conservatives’ failure to even mention a transitional deal threatens Britain’s status as one of the best countries in the world with which to do business,” the letter reads. “While we may not have voted Liberal Democrat in the past and we may not agree with the party on all issues, they are now the only party speaking for business and the majority of Britons on the key issue at this election.”
Richard Reed, the co-founder of Innocent Drinks and board member of Britain Stronger in Europe, Dinesh Dhamija, the founder of the Ebookers travel site and the businesswoman Nicola Horlick are among the signatories.
In response, Vince Cable said:
The Liberal Democrats now have support from a large number of serious figures in the business community, showing that we are rapidly emerging as the party of business, both big and small.
Theresa May’s determination to take us out of the single market would devastate the financial sector, while taking us out of the customs union would cause incalculable disruption to manufacturing .
Theresa May herself warned of the Brexit dangers to our exports in a speech at Goldman Sachs. Since then she has taken on the agenda of Nigel Farage, who has understandably declared himself delighted with her.
That is scary. It is vital that the next parliament contains enough Liberal Democrat voices to argue for Britain’s future in the world’s most lucrative single market. The more Liberal Democrat MPs, the better the deal we can secure on Europe.
Lib Dem leader Tim Farron was given a new title by the Mail on Sunday. Under the striking large-caps headline, THE WRATH OF FIERY FARRON, Tim was reported as fired up to denounce the Tory manifesto declaration that the value of people’s homes will be taken into account in future to help pay for extensive home care. People will only be able to safeguard £100,000 of their total assets, including their home. ‘If you have dementia’, Tim is said to have told the Mail journalist Simon Walters, ‘Theresa May is coming for you. Your house is up for grabs.’ He said it showed the hardness of May and her party. ‘She’s making the Tories nastier than ever.’
This is the Prime Minister who pledged herself when taking office last July to ‘a vision of a country that works not for the privileged few but that works for every one of us.’ Here is a May policy which seems likely to dismay every modest home-owner in England and Wales who contemplates retirement without much other wealth, in fear now that the lottery of life may make them or their partner housebound with long-term illness.
Mayism in practice already seems far from the Prime Minister’s vision. Inflation has reached its highest level in almost four years, with consumer prices at 2.7% now rising faster than earnings at 2.3%. As always, it will be the poorest families who suffer most, with the greater part of their income going on necessities including food and energy. And there is no relief proposed in the Tory manifesto for families on frozen or reduced benefits, already suffering from the government’s austerity programme. Instead, pensioners will lose the present guarantee of a 2.5% annual rise in their pensions, and primary-school children are to be denied their nutritious free school lunches, reversing policies initiated by the Liberal Democrat ministers in the Coalition government.
Our huge number of new members are making me think differently about the familiar problem of balancing resources between target and non-target seats, and the possibility of attracting support in a way that parallels En Marche in France.
For a long time targetting has been a difficult decision. The electoral system means that, if we lean too far one way, we spread ourselves too thinly and are even more badly under-represented in parliament. If we lean too far the other way, we create Liberal Democrat holes where there is more-or-less little for people to join, which makes it really hard for that situation to change.
But one of the many unusual things about this General Election campaign is that it is taking place in a period of rapid growth while our membership is growing rapidly. At the moment I am parliamentary candidate in a constituency where membership is up 400% since the General Election and 250% since the EU referendum.
Yes, Willie was brilliant and we’ll come to that in a moment. But let’s hear it for this nurse who had Nicola Sturgeon on the ropes. Two weeks ago the First Minister led her MSPs to vote against an end to the pay freeze for Scottish nurses. The nurse in the audience spoke very movingly about having to use a food bank. She also talked about how demoralising working in the NHS was. Watch her here.
"You have no idea how demoralising it is to work within the NHS", says audience nurse at #leadersdebate https://t.co/u5WlVZxgul pic.twitter.com/zkDnDkxbfE
— BBC Scotland News (@BBCScotlandNews) May 21, 2017
A few years ago, a friend of mine who’s a nurse really struggled to manage on her salary as a single parent so I know that what tonight’s nurse says rings true.
I also spent 51 days last Autumn watching exactly how hard and stressful work is for nurses. No matter how short-staffed they were and how rushed off their feet they were, they still managed to give my husband fantastic care. I was worried then about the effect that it was having on their health. Giving at 120% all the time is simply not sustainable.
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 481st weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere, a little earlier than usual because of the Scottish Leaders’ Debate … Featuring the five most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (14-10 May, 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:
When Willie Goodhart died in January, in our tribute post, we put in a link to a wonderful piece written by his son Benjie during the 2010 election.
In it, he talked about what it was like growing up in a very political household.
It is one of those pieces that enrich your life.
Benjie has done it again with a beautiful article, written with so much love, about the progress of his father’s Dementia. It first became clear that something was wrong during a Today programme interview.
For us – my sisters, my mother and me – the door closing on Dad’s career marked the beginning of a new era: one that was by turns agonising, baffling, heartbreaking and, I must confess, comedic. Alzheimer’s affects everyone differently, including those around them – but the ability to laugh at its quirks and peculiarities sustained us all in the darkest times.
For almost 50 years of married life, Dad got up in the morning and brought Mum a cup of tea in bed. This came to a rather abrupt halt the morning her cup of tea consisted of orange juice, milk, and some potted shrimps all stirred together. My mother demurred, though Dad consumed his with alacrity and chided her for being fussy. At times like that, it is easier to laugh than to cry.
On another occasion, two years ago, Dad took me and my wife to the opera. An opera devotee, it was his last visit: as the lights went down for act three of a rather lengthy German comic opera, he called out in despair, “Oh God.” A few minutes later, he heckled (I suspect a first for the rarefied audience): “Get on with it!” My wife and I, being of reasonably sound mind, were inclined to agree. That was also the evening Dad looked at his diary, which he did every five minutes, for reassurance, and read “To opera with Benjie.” Then he looked up at me. “Are you Benjie?”
Radio 4’s PM programme covered Edinburgh West the other night and the profile was surprising in some ways. The Labour candidate, Mandy Telford, was pretty candid about tactical voting to stop the SNP:
Labour is out there fighting for every vote but ultimately we are dead set against the SNP and their desire to have an unwanted second divisive independence referendum. That’s the message we are getting back on the doorsteps very strongly. People will use their votes in whatever way they want to defeat the SNP.
It’s a cleverly crafted comment. She’s obviously not endorsing any other candidate but she’s summed up the reality of the situation on the ground pretty well.
People want a decent MP who will champion what is important to them and fight their corner. In Edinburgh West they know that Lib Dems deliver on that score. They are also highly motivated to get the SNP and to do whatever it takes to do so. Here and elsewhere I have been staggered by the intensity of people’s desire to see the back of the nationalists for all sorts of reasons. It’s primarily independence, but they are also sick fed up of falling school standards and an NHS lurching from one crisis to another.
Our Christine Jardine had this to say.
People are looking for the party who are more likely to beat the SNP and in this election stopping that independence bandwagon is the most important thing.
Conservative and Labour voters recognise it’s the Liberal Democrats who can beat the SNP.
That was certainly backed up by two Tory voters who were interviewed saying that they were voting Lib Dem.
There’s a super interview with Sutton and Cheam Lib Dem candidate Amna Ahmad in The Pool.
So, who are the Lib Dems now, I ask Ahmad when we meet for coffee. She answers by telling me her issues: she is, of course, against a hard Brexit; she campaigns for NHS funding and sits on Norman Lamb’s committee on the subject. She’s against grammar-school funding, but not grammar schools per se: “I want the comprehensives to have a fighting chance.” When I ask how she became a member, she recalls turning 18 the day before the Stop The War demo and identifying with then-party leader Charles Kennedy’s refusal to support war in Iraq.
But perhaps a more interesting question is: who is Amna Ahmad? When first campaigning in Brixton in 2013, she was accused of being an Oxford-educated careerist with a posh voice. And it was this depiction of her that made her decide to talk about her own life. Yes, she went to Oxford and, yes, her voice could be clarified as “posh”, but the real story goes something like this: Ahmad grew up in a violent house in one of London’s poorest boroughs, Lewisham. At 15, she called the police to report her father, who was arrested and taken into custody. She and her younger brother and sister were split up and put into care. Ahmad was in care for just a week, because she was turning 16. “‘You were on time every day for school’ was the only thing my teacher said to me about that week,” she laughs. Her brother and sister were only five and seven at the time, however. “It was heartbreaking. My brother went on hunger strike. There were issues around cultural sensitives. They made him eat bacon.”
Batley and Spen is a gathering of typically independent, no-nonsense and proud Yorkshire towns and villages. Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir. While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.
Those were the words of Jo Cox in her maiden speech to the House of Commons
Looking at that just now, I’ve just realised that her maiden speech took place just after the House had paid tribute to one of its former members, our Charles Kennedy, who had died two days before. What extraordinary talents those two people were.
Election campaigns are about the debate of different ideas. At their best they should be inspiring and uplifting and full of vision. But political activists of all parties have a lot in common – the dedication, the determination and the exhaustion for a start.
Tomorrow, though, there will be a pause in campaigning in Jo’s memory, a chance to reflect on the things that unite us rather than divide us. From the Guardian:
Party leaders will halt political activity and instead visit community projects. The parties have asked all their candidates to do the same.
Vince Cable launched a new Lib Dem campaign poster today.
Vote her, get him. Don't settle for Nigel Farage's vision of Britain by voting for Theresa May. #ChangeBritainsFuture pic.twitter.com/wiDXAwBnkA
— Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) May 20, 2017
This is how he explained it:
This week has been about manifestos
To understand what is going on you have to listen to the voices of the people who are Mrs May’s cheerleaders and admirers.
Nigel Farage. He purrs like an elder statesman, his job done.
He said of the Prime Minister “she is using exactly the words and phrases I have been using for 20 years. I’m thrilled”
He should be. She has adopted wholesale the UKIP model of Brexit. No half measures. Out of the Single Market. Out of the customs union. Out of all the sensible cooperation around science and environment. The agenda of the hard right.
And not just on Europe. Do you remember the man who smiled with President-elect Donald Trump in a gold-encrusted lift? Who used his good offices to secure a meeting for our Prime Minister. Her hand-holding. Backing for the Trump administration. The close bonding. The treat of a state visit to come. Not that it achieved anything. The tough American trade negotiators have made it clear that economic size, not sentiment, determines priorities: the EU before the UK.
In an article for the Times Red Box, Tim Farron points out the huge differences between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat visions for the future:
The contrast between the Liberal Democrat manifesto and the Conservative one couldn’t be starker. We would extend free school lunches to all primary school children and invest an extra £7 billion in schools and colleges, to make sure funding rises in line with both inflation and pupil numbers. Instead, Theresa May wants to take free school lunches away from 1.9 million children to fund her obsession with grammar schools.
Our manifesto commits to capping the cost of
…
Vince Cable wrote an interesting article in City Am last week about the imminent appearance (on polling day, of all days) of Fred Goodwin, the former head of RBS in a court case brought by 9000 retail investors.
Goodwin, alongside RBS itself and several other former executives at the bank, are defendants in a case brought against them by 9,000 retail investors, including many current RBS employees. The trial starts in less than two weeks (22 May) and Goodwin will be called to the stand after the opening remarks. The claimants allege they were wilfully misled over the true financial woes of RBS during the £12bn rights issue of 2008, which was supposed to stabilise the bank. Within months, RBS had to be rescued by the government, which spent £45.5bn of taxpayer money to stop it from collapsing.
Vince notes that Goodwin’s defence is being publicly funded and he still enjoys a lucrative RBS pension:
Goodwin has spent the past seven years hiding from a public still furious that his dreadful calls – notably the 2007 purchase of Dutch bank ABN Amro – helped bring Britain’s economy to its knees. He left RBS in 2009 and was later stripped of his knighthood. But he has never been properly taken to task for his failures.
It appears that the brutal Tory approach to social care is not going down so well with its own candidates.
From PoliticsHome:
One candidate said the author of the proposal “should be shot”, The Times reports.
Another candidate standing for re-election said it is “very hard to justify” the plan. “This plan was coming up on the doorstep this morning and there has not even yet been much coverage it. It is very hard to justify, because people with a house of £300,000 could have a liability now of £200,000. I thought the campaign was just right until yesterday,” they said.
Bob Blackman, the Tory candidate in Harrow East, told the Evening Standard: “I broadly support the policy but clearly there needs to be a limit on how much any individual or family should be required to pay.”
A third candidate said the plan was “not great. Theresa should have stuck with Dilnot and an insurance scheme.”
Norman Lamb said:
The Tory high command is now in meltdown. It realises it has misjudged the British people, who don’t like this cold, mean-spirited Conservative approach to our most vulnerable citizens.
First Theresa May was revealed as the lunch-snatcher. Now she is pushing a Dementia tax. This will go down as her poll tax – not only a colossal political miscalculation, but also cruel, showing that she just doesn’t care.
No wonder the Tories are panicking. The Liberal Democrats will continue to campaign to give social care the extra funding it needs, properly funded with a penny on income tax to pay for it, and to give Britain a brighter future.
The Tory plan was also condemned by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, who said:
A life-time cap on care costs, as proposed by the Dilnot Commission, is a solution to the insurance problem. It is effectively a form of social insurance, funded from general taxation. It may also make it easier for a private market to emerge that would offer insurance against care costs up to the cap.
By contrast, the Conservative plan makes no attempt to deal with the fundamental challenge of social care funding. That is the big problem – not how many people might win or lose.
In response to that, Norman said:
Scottish Liberal Democrat general election campaign chair Alex Cole-Hamilton and young activists will be outside the U.K. Green Investment Bank headquarters in Edinburgh where Alex will call on young voters to register before Monday’s deadline so that they can have a say in their future
He will declare that only the Liberal Democrats are making the steps necessary to leave behind a green legacy for future generations.
Leaving a sustainable legacy for our children is the most important task of this current generation and both UK and Scottish Government have failed in that task.
The Conservatives don’t care for the environment and the selling off of the Green Investment Bank is just one example of the UK Government rolling back progress made by the Liberal Democrats and neglecting the needs of future generations. Meanwhile the reckless cut to Air Passenger Duty by the SNP will only further pollute our air.
While the Conservatives continue to put forward a cold and mean-spirited vision of Britain, Liberal Democrats are committed to seeing a better future where we leave behind a world that is sustainable and green for our children and I urge those that want to see a greener future to vote Liberal Democrats.
The Lib Dem Manifesto of 2017 gives canvassers plenty to promise on the doorstep, but past achievements can be more convincing. Yet who among canvassers can instantly name three achievements attributable to the Liberal Democrats, against Conservative inclinations, in the Coalition Government of 2010-2015?
Here is a short list, which will no doubt benefit from correction or expansion. A full list can be found in an Appendix to David Law’s book Coalition.
Nick Clegg writes with great passion in the Guardian about the Tory plans to scrap universal free infant school lunches:
So much for compassionate Conservatism. So much for helping the “just about managing”. During my time as deputy prime minister, I repeatedly blocked the Conservatives from proceeding with tax, welfare, education and pensions policies that did not cater for the neediest in society. I became wearily familiar with the Conservative party’s habit of placing greater priority on the needs of “their” voters than those of society at large.
This bizarre election campaign is based on building a personality cult around a virtual reality leader who can parrot well–rehearsed lines in controlled surroundings, but doesn’t have the guts to risk exposing her façade in a proper leadership debate. It demonstrates both the arrogance of the Tory PR machine and a press propaganda juggernaut that Putin must envy.
Behind deceptively simple messages there appears to lie a skilful use of psychology, particularly an understanding of cognitive dissonance; the propensity to ignore, distort or misinterpret incoming information which does not align with existing beliefs or is otherwise unsettling. The dissonance ramparts are not however impregnable; they can be breached, and an action tendency can be changed. Information that comes from trusted sources, or is otherwise credible, will sometimes get through. During the referendum “project fear” and the denigration of experts was a clever device to offer wavering leavers licence further to indulge their dissonance and ignore powerful evidence to the contrary that might otherwise have triggered many voters’ decision tipping points.
Another tool being exploited is dissonance’s mirror image i.e. consonance. One way to achieve the desired acceptance of a new message is to tag it to an existing belief or to some information likely to be accepted as fact. The widely expected difficulty of Brexit negotiations ought to work in our favour. it does not logically follow that the annihilation of alternative political voices or an awkward woman are the answer, but voters are looking for reassurance, for mitigation of perceived risk, and are taking these messages on board.
Issue 384 of Liberator is on its way to subscribers.
This necessarily rather truncated pre-election issue’s free sample online content is from Claire Tyler on why the poor pay more by being excluded from financial services, and Andrew Duff on why the UK should seek an association agreement with the EU
Elsewhere in the issue there is:
How the Lib Dems Lost Their Think Tank – Seth Thevoz analyses Centre Forum’s slide out of liberal politics and eventual demise
Out With the Old – English county results show some old guards should step aside, says Chris White
The new French President is the latest international political darling, man of the hour and flavour of—well at least a month.
He is young, multilingual, charismatic, exceptionally well-educated and bright. When he speaks common sense pours forth as from an intellectually gifted Parisian fountain.
His election has saved—at least for now—the European experiment which was reeling from the body blow of Brexit. And when it comes to the politically important field of economics, Emmanuel Macron is one of the world’s top whizz kids.
BUT, just as every cloud has a silver lining, every blue sky has a thunder cloud over the horizon. In the case of France there are potential thunderstorms—foreign and domestic— which could wash away the new French optimism.
There is no doubt of President Macron’s Europhile credentials. At his first speech as president-elect, he ran onto the stage to the strains not of the French, but the EU’s national anthem Ode to Joy. He is, in fact, more of a Europhiliac than his more experienced German counterpart Angela Merkel. And that is the reason for the first cloud.
As a group, the Germans are pro-Europe. But they have started to baulk at the cost of propping up the poorly run Southern European Eurozone economies. This is despite the fact that the same cost has contributed mightily to Germany’s enviable trade surplus with the rest of the world.
Today, Tim Farron is in Hazel Grove. With Lisa Smart, our candidate there, he will attend a digital inclusion class.
In Scotland, Willie Rennie will be visiting a candlestick maker in North East Fife. He has already visited a butcher and a baker during this campaign.
He will use the visit to condemn the Conservatives for embracing UKIP policies over Brexit and immigration.
He will say:
The Conservative immigration policy is badly thought through and will hit Scottish universities, businesses and our NHS hard.
Nigel Farage himself has said that the Conservatives are adopting his old policies.
The Scottish Conservatives have done nothing to stop this cold
…
Good morning, and welcome to Liberal Democrat Voice’s coverage of the 70th Anniversary Congress of Liberal International from sunny Andorra.
Liberals from around the world have gathered in the Co-Principality to talk about human rights, debate the big global issues of the day, elect a new Bureau and, most importantly, formally adopt a newly-updated “Liberal Manifesto” which aims to express how liberal values and ideas are relevant in a rapidly changing world. For, whilst policies are forever evolving in the face of events, values offer insight into the types of solutions on offer.
The …
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Ed Davey on the Budget: British people need real change and fast (The Voice)
Vince Cable writes: A budget of small things (Vince Cable)
A Liberal Vision for Britain’s Overseas Territories (Cody Butler)
What can republican political thought teach the Liberal Democrats? (Daniel Duggan)
Mathew on Monday: Prime Minister, it’s time to restore our freedom to move across Europe (Mathew Hulbert)
Big Tall Tim 
Simon Robinson 
Richard Treadwell 
David Raw 
Mick Taylor 
On romanticising nationalised railways...
Farewell to another legend... John Shipley retires...
How George Santos bet on himself and lost
Reform's overseas donors exposed