This weekend, I introduced two new, keen politics students to the art of door-to-door canvassing in Guildford.
I wanted to make it clear that most people are pleased to see us on the doorstep, and are polite even if when they’re not supportive. In nine years, I’ve only had two people swear at me. The worst you’ll get is generally polite ‘not interested’.
Liberal Democrat candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon Layla Moran was on Channel 4’s political slot tonight talking about apprenticeships. She interviewed apprentices, including Paige McConville, the 2 millionth apprentice. She also interviewed business owners who told her of the high value training apprentices receive and how having apprentices benefits us all as they provide the skills the economy needs to grow.
You can watch it here:
Liberal Democrat peer Lord George Mackie died today at the age of 95. As the Herald reports:
A famous Liberal Democrat peer Lord Mackie of Benshie has died aged 95, a decorated airman with Bomber Command in the second world war as well as a renowned farmer.
He was a chairman of the Caithness Glass company and a hotelier at John O, Groats.After the war he took over a farm at Benshie in Angus and subsequently set up a cattle ranch at Braeroy near Spean Bridge.
George Mackie, from a renowned farming family in Aberdeenshire, was elected as MP for the old Scottish Liberal Party in Caithness and Sutherland in1964. But he served only until 1966 when Harold Wilson’s Labour Government went back to the country to seek a larger majority. Mackie lost narrowly.
In 1974 he was offered a life peerage. His brother John, who had been on the Labour benches while he was in the House of Commons, also arrived in the House of Lords as a Labour peer.
I’m looking forward to the election with a fair amount of optimism. My response to disappointing election results in May 2014 was to join Team 2015, which in August had just begun to mobilise Lib Dem volunteers in preparation for the General Election. At this point the Team membership’s infectious enthusiasm far outweighed its numbers. It has since grown to include volunteers from across the country, and this has shaped my belief that we have a chance to do better in the election than critics and pollsters are anticipating.
On Sunday night, Stephen Tall and I were on the Westminster Hour discussing the party’s prospects for the coming election and beyond. You can listen to the whole thing here. They also have a shorter clip of Stephen talking about the dilemma facing the party about portraying itself as a “split the difference” party. He rightly said that concern about it is something that unites activists on both sides of the party but on the other hand we aren’t going to win the election outright so we have to claim the centre ground between the other two.
In my contribution on this issue, I said that there was a place in our campaigning for showing what we’d stopped or would stop. We had done so very effectively in coalition with Labour in Scotland. However, we had to show our heart as a bold, radical liberal party.
Lancashire county councillor David Whipp has won the World Meat Pie championship, which travelled this year all the way to Barnoldswick, Lancashire. Winning a world meat pie contest with a vegetarian pie is simply out of this world.
The news last week from the BIS that the Regional Growth Fund (RGF) will receive a further £300 million in funding can only be celebrated by Liberal Democrat activists. Launched by Nick Clegg back in 2010, the fund was designed to help regional businesses grow and strengthen local economies. In the run up to the upcoming elections, local businesses need to be reminded of the funding available to them, now in its sixth round, which the Liberal Democrats have secured in government.
So far almost £3 billion has been invested in regional companies through the RGF, helping them to …
The issue of politicians and their tax returns has been in the media once again recently, sparked in part by increased scrutiny of tax avoidance measures. The prime minister has said (via the chancellor) that there are no plans to publish his returns, while the man who would like to be in his shoes, Boris Johnson, said on a trip to the US last week that other UK politicians should follow his lead (and those of their US counterparts) in publishing their returns.
Here. the Voice’s Nick Thornsby and Paul Walter debate the issue. Please do share your thoughts in the comments below.
Nick Thornsby: Like the prime minister, I am “relaxed” at the prospect of him and him alone releasing his tax returns for public consumption. Any individual is welcome to do so. But we know, of course, that this is unlikely to be isolated to the PM himself: the floodgates will be open, and all senior and aspiring politicians will, in time, be forced to release theirs. Hooray, some might think: a victory for transparency. I disagree.
One of the strange things about recent elections is the lack of debate about defence and international affairs. So far, the current election campaign is no exception, despite the reality that the choices the next Government makes will limit our strategic options over the next 30 years.
The key decision is whether or not to replace the existing Vanguard-class Trident submarines at a capital cost of up to £33bn, £3.3bn of which has been spent thus far. A decision to pursue replacement would commit between a quarter and a third of the total Ministry of Defence (MoD) equipment budget to Trident – every year – from 2018 to 2032. It would deny the conventional forces of the investment that they need to remain capable of world-wide operations in support of the UN and regional peacekeeping and, where necessary, intervention and peace-enforcement.
I recently watched a television programme in which Ross Kemp looks at the situation in Calais, where thousands of refugees are seeking to gain access to the UK in the most dangerous manner.
I have no special knowledge of the situation there, nor from what they are fleeing – who can? But I do know that seeing the programme has made me deeply ashamed of being European. Not being a citizen of the European Union, but being a member of a large community that has not yet addressed the issue of how we can help people in such dire straits.
The latest 32-page issue of Liberator, the independent radical liberal magazine, is on its way to subscribers.
This issue will also be on sale at spring conference in Liverpool.
Live sample contents from Liberator 370 online are:
Commentary, on how the Lib Dems’ appear to be positioning themselves as the only party with no distinctive profile in the general election.
The lead story from Radical Bulletin is on whether, in the event of another coalition, the ‘triple lock’ is now quite what it appears to be.
The sample feature Survivors’ Guide, sees Roger Hayes suggest how Lib Dem candidates can avoid the worst of the bucket of ordure voters are about to tip over them.
This revival of David Hare’s play loosely based on the 1992 General Election sees Sheffield Labour MP and party leader George Jones as channelling Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband in similar measure. As in 1992 the country is emerging from recession, and the voters perhaps do not feel rich enough to afford a Labour government yet.
These are the four results of unregulated capitalism according to Mike King in Quakernomics. In his book, which I highly commend, he details the history of Quakers in industry and how they modelled an ethical capitalism which served the community. “Quakernomics is the enthusiastic pursuit of economic activity as a social good.” We can always learn from history. In this blog I will explore what lessons gleaned from the Quakers can be applied to economic and social problems today.
The Quakers valued the entrepreneur, but gave equal value to the workers who brought new ideas to fruition. Equality and the worth of every individual were key. Owners and workers were interdependent.
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 411th weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the seven most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (8-14 February, 2015), together with a hand-picked quintet, 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:
Many thanks to the 16,600 visitors who dropped by Lib Dem Voice this week. Here’s our 7 most-read posts…
Lib Dem spin doctor feels “disenfranchised” (44 comments) by The Voice
Liberal Democrats publish their General Election manifesto front page (59 comments) by The Voice
Nick Harvey: ‘If you think we are going to spend another five years being shafted (this time) by Labour, you’ve got another think coming’ (113 comments) by Paul Wlalter
Earlier this week, a Guardian editorial called for a pre-election pact between the parties on the size and proportions of the House of Lords.
The piece complained about the cost of the peers and the size of their House.
The Commons itself is very large. But the size of the Lords is the real problem. There is no other bicameral legislature anywhere in the world in which the upper house is larger than the lower house. The case for change is overwhelming – morally, democratically and on every other ground.
Liberal Democrat peer Paul Tyler wasted no time in reminding the Guardian of a thing or two – namely that if Labour hadn’t behaved like toddlers, we would be on the way to our first Lords elections in just a few weeks’ time:
Lib Dems being out campaigning is such a normal thing – we have always been proud of our all year round work ethic. So what have our councillors and candidates been up to this weekend?
It seems to have been lovely weather everywhere:
Martin Horwood and his team were out in his Cheltenham constituency:
Sunny morning & warm response on the doorstep this morning in #Leckhampton @cheltlibdems pic.twitter.com/nPtFerFqNU
— Martin Horwood (@MartinChelt) February 14, 2015
But, look, how sweet is this? He still found time to remember someone special:
Shona oddly reluctant for me to put anything soppy about her on Twitter.. #valentine #M❤️Sxxx pic.twitter.com/R4eRh9OY3l — Martin Horwood (@MartinChelt) February 14, 2015
Ease yourself gently into Sunday with this video of Nick Clegg helping Oxfordshire schoolchildren with their woodland craft class. He was there on Thursday with Oxford West and Abingdon candidate Layla Moran ahead of the manifesto front page launch.
Ok, so there’s no hard policy, but it’s pleasant and the kids seem to know quite a lot about him.
The Telegraph has unearthed an STV documentary on the early days of Labour in the Treasury in 1997. It makes fascinating watching for all sorts of reasons. It feels not unlike an episode of The Thick of It, with Ed Balls a bit like Ollie Reeder to Whelan’s Malcolm Tucker. Everyone looks so young, Gordon Brown particularly. Ed Miliband has become significantly less geeky over time, too.
The Telegraph article is full of derision for Labour’s removal of regulatory powers from the Bank of England. That principle seems fine to me, and fairly logical. If you give the bank the power to set interest rates independently, then you need to get someone else to do the regulation. Labour’s failure to build an effectively regulatory framework for the banks can’t be pinned on that.
There is an arrogance about the way they went about it. The Permanent Secretary of the time was clearly worried about all this change. If you are going to reform, you need to just get on and do it, but they did seem to be enjoying smashing the established order a little bit too much.
Transport for London boss Sir Peter Hendy is under fire after he accepted an invitation to attend not one, or two, but three dinners from which women are excluded. The Independent has the story:
The CommonSpace website said that Sir Peter, 61, who receives a £348,000 salary, attended the December dinner in the Radisson Blu Hotel in Portman Square, London, as a guest of the Scottish-based bus company Alexander Dennis Ltd. Photos of the event posted on the society’s website showed a “handsome body of men enjoying their dinner” alongside another picture of female performers in thigh-cut dresses who were said to be bringing “a new spectacle to the dinner”.
The golfing society’s rules state membership is open only to “gentlemen associated with the transport industry”, and that the dinner is “for gentlemen only”. Its website described the gathering as “one of the best sporting dinners of the year. With a glamorous string quartet playing exciting music in even more exciting tight dresses, a troupe of can-can dancers and a truly fun atmosphere”. It added: “Over the years we have been privileged to welcome top men from the worlds of sport, industry, show business and politics. They always enthusiastically wave their napkins to the patriotic sounds of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and leap enthusiastically to the feet when their table’s turn comes to sing ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. Some even do the actions!”
Julian Huppert has tabled an amendment to the Serious Crime Bill enabling journalists to better protect their sources. He wrote about why this was necessary in the Guardian – apparently over 600 applications have been made to access journalists’ phone records in the last three years. That’s about four a week. As Julian puts it:
How will anyone be brave enough to contact a journalist in the public interest, if they know that they can easily be tracked down?
What’s more, these actions have clearly discouraged whistleblowers from coming forward, having a chilling effect on free speech.
Current procedures do not give adequate protection to journalists:
At the moment the police quite rightly need the approval of a judge before they can take documents from a journalist. But they authorise themselves to access the journalist’s mobile phone records and other communications data. This cannot be right.
As a matter of principle, police and security services should not be able to authorise themselves to snoop on journalists to get to their sources. It may be convenient for the police but it’s not right for freedom of the press and it’s not right for the whistleblowers who badly need protection.
Sarah Teather’s announcement that she was standing down as a Liberal Democrat MP on the eve of our conference in 2013 did create some waves at the time. She was very critical of some of the things that the party had done in government, most notably welfare reform. Since then, she has done what she’s always done – been a strong voice speaking up for poorly treated asylum seekers and was a strong voice in the campaign against cuts to criminal legal aid.
She’s now done an interview with the Telegraph in which she talks about her time in Parliament. She’s thoughtful, reflective and does not show one trace of bitterness. In fact, she shows sympathy for Nick Clegg, despite the fact that he sacked her in the 2012 reshuffle.
Her appointment as Minister for Children meant that she could address special needs education, something which meant a huge amount to her personally:
Back in 2010, however, she found the new job a positive challenge, and felt a particular, personal, satisfaction in bringing forward legislation to transform the teaching of children with special educational needs.
“I have rather an odd educational background, I was very ill as a teenager, I missed four years of school so I suppose I have a particular affinity for children who, for one reason or another, had not found education an easy process.
“I spent a lot of that time wheelchair bound. For me it was a bit of a passion, that reform on special educational needs and disability.
She talked about her struggles over welfare reform, how she fought and won concessions and how she thought she was going to have to resign over the issue. I can understand her dilemma. I remember writing to one minister who might have gone over tuition fees to ask them to stay because of the good things they would be able to achieve for other people in their government role. For Sarah, she didn’t want to leave without making a difference for kids facing the same problems as she had.
An editorial in yesterday’s Independent will give both heart and motivation to Liberal Democrat troops heading out on to the doorsteps this weekend.
Its acceptance that our fate is sealed for this election will irritate those teams of canvassers in our key seats who are finding a good response on the doorsteps. Those of us who have been around for a while will know that our demise has been predicted at virtually every election.
They demolish Jeremy Browne’s theory that we need to position ourselves on the centre right, highlighting the unprecedented successes of Charles Kennedy’s time as leader.
Danny Alexander takes to the pages of the Independent to challenge the points made by Jeremy Browne in his critical interview in that paper yesterday.
He looks back at the recessions of the 80s with their mass unemployment and misery and highlights the differences in approach brought into government by the Liberal Democrats. This, he says, has brought about a quicker, fairer end to the economic downturn:
Liberalism is about individual freedom, fairness and opportunity. And freedom, fairness and opportunity cannot flourish without a strong economy.
Today, Britain has the strongest growth and fastest job creation of any advanced economy. Inflation is benign, business investment is rising and we have record numbers in work. By any measure, Britain is making strong progress and opportunity is increasing.
This recovery has not come about by accident. It has been hard earned by millions of people and businesses. But we needed the right economic climate for the recovery. That climate is the direct result of liberal values in the recovery plan – fairness and opportunity. Delivered in the Coalition by Liberal Democrat policies – a balanced approach to dealing with the deficit; raising the income tax personal allowance to make work more attractive; creating apprenticeships to give people the skills they need; and the priority we have given to boosting investment in regional and local businesses, innovation and infrastructure. This is not “splitting the difference” between the other parties. It’s doing things in a distinctly different way, the liberal way.
No change in the top 10 this week, with George Murray’s Marauding Fullbacks continuing to lead the LibDemVoice Fantasy Football League after Week 25.
But let’s also hear it for three players outside the top 10: Will Barter (Mid-Table Meanderers) had last gamesweek’s best performance, with 70 points. Honourable mentions go to Max Wilkinson (Regency Spa Town) and Richard Farrance (Wirral_Rovers), with 68 and 67 points respectively.
Three principal council by-election were held yesterday. In Cambridgeshire (CC), the Conservatives comfortably held their seat in Bar Hill ward, polling 46% of the vote to finish 536 votes ahead of the UKIP candidate. Fiona Whelan finished a close third with 13.9%, an improvement on the party’s vote share in the ward’s previous election in 2013 of 5.4%.
The contest in Oswestry East ward in Shropshire (UA) once again saw the Conservatives secure an easy hold, with their candidate finish 411 votes ahead of second place Labour with 47.5% of the vote. Lib Dem candidate Amanda Woof registered 16.5% to finish fourth, with the party not fielding a candidate in the ward’s 2013 election.
Imagine that health professionals had the time to make everyone feel valued and cared for personally. Imagine there was an infinite resource to provide the kind of informal care that keeps people healthy. Imagine there was enough time.
Well, the peculiar thing – if you set the questions out like that – is that there is enough time, if you have the infrastructure and institutions that can use NHS patients, their time and experience, and that of their family and neighbours, as a resource.
That is becoming a familiar idea and the NHS is embracing the co-production agenda, even if they don’t yet very fully understand what it means. But the practical application of the idea is to set up time banks in hospitals and health centres, and I was involved in launching the UK’s first – at the Rushey Green Group Practice in Catford in 1999.
I have made a promise of spending every Friday out on the doorstep, I thought I would update you all on some of my recent experiences out campaigning.
The other week I had another inspiring day on the campaign trail, this time with Jasper Gerrard and his team. The age of the team ranged from 22 to 78! Who says we can’t generate commitment! Jasper is clearly neck and neck here with the unpopular Tory incumbent. The perfect antidote to those who are paying too much attention to the national polls.
Jeremy Browne has used an interview with the Independent to continue his love-in with Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. The headline says he called Nick Clegg “insipid” but he didn’t use that word directly about the leader. However, he did say something that will probably find some sympathy across the whole party. I’ve often said that we need to be passionate about who we are and not define ourselves by who we are not so that we’re just pushing ourselves as moderating influence on the other parties. I don’t like it when a speech is memorable for its mention of which body parts we share out. I do like it when we say what we are about.
Browne makes a similar point:
We are defining liberalism as the precise mid‑point between conservatism and socialism. Whatever liberalism is, it is not defined by where the other parties choose to pitch themselves or by measuring the distance between them and splitting it in half.
All we offer is a desire to water down their strong views. We offer an insipid moderation. Whichever party is the biggest one, we will stop them implementing a large number of their ideas. It is entirely negative. It is a deeply conservative position. We have become the most small-‘c’ conservative party.
Where I part company with Browne is his assertion is that this makes us more conservative than the two parties who have resolutely junked political reform whether it be electoral, party funding or to the House of Lords, throughout this Parliament. On devolution, it’s our party which has driven more powers for Scotland and Wales. You don’t find a conservative party creating opportunities for disadvantaged kids in school or transforming the way we deal with mental health.
One of the first things Liberal Democrats in government did was to scrap the UK wide National Identity Scheme. It would have been all to easy then for NO2ID to pack up, say job done and go home. Thankfully that didn’t happen and the remnants of the campaign instead carried on keeping watchful eye on developments of what has been coined the database state. The database state is the term we now use to describe the tendency of governments to try and use computers to manage and control society. Another attribute of this database state is function creep. This is the phenomenon whereby a system setup for one discreet purpose starts to grow out of control expanding to be used for ever more administrative functions.
A perfect illustration of function creep can be seen with the Scottish National Entitlement Card (NEC). This card started off as a replacement to pensioners bus passes in cities like Edinburgh but quickly developed into a system for accessing Council services such as libraries. Now it has about 30 uses including proof of age, paying for school lunches cashlessly and accessing leisure services. In all but name it is a National Identity Card.
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