We’re having our annual look down the New Years Honours list and we didn’t get very far before we saw a name we recognised:
For political and public service.
He joins fellow former Liberal Democrat Sir Menzies Campbell who became a Companion of Honour last year.
May saw the start of a campaign that was to eventually change the law on what has become known as Revenge Porn. The friend I quoted in the article wasn’t going public at that time, but it was Hannah Thompson who so eloquently and with real grace and dignity told her story and persuaded the likes of Maria Miller, Julian Huppert and Sal Brinton to fight for change.
Remember that interview where LBC’s James O’Brien took apart Nigel Farage on such issues as UKIP’s dodgy immigration claims and its MEPs’ expenses? We shouldn’t forget that infamous moment when he said …
Throughout the 12 days of Christmas, we’re bringing you the 12 most-read posts on this site of 2014. Here’s today’s offering…
Opinion: Why I was persuaded to back LibDems4Change – George Potter | Sat 24th May 2014
… I’m now backing LibDems4Change and have signed their open letter calling for a leadership contest. I’m not naïve. I don’t think electing a new leader would mean a clean break. I don’t think it will magically win us back loads of lost votes. But a new leader won’t start with the same trust deficit that Nick Clegg has. A new leader will be
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Daniel Coleman will be one of the youngest candidates in the country when he fights Dundee West for the Liberal Democrats in May. Last year, while still at school, he was recognised by Dundee City Council as being truly community spirited when he was awarded the McManus Citizenship Award.
Daniel is a qualified football referee and has chaired Dundee Youth Council. He also represented the city in the Scottish Youth Parliament.
He’s also been the sole Scottish representative on the British Youth Select Committee at Westminster .
From the Dundee Liberal Democrats’ website:
I was furious last night when I saw some social media posts from people who should know better complaining that the nurse now being treated in London for Ebola was let back into the country. Some of them calmed down a bit when you explained that it would have been impossible for anyone to catch Ebola when she was showing no symptoms on the flight. In fact, it would have been pretty darned hard, involving more intimacy than is usual with complete strangers on a flight, even if she had started to develop a fever during the journey.
People were asking why those travelling back from West Africa shouldn’t be quarantined to make sure that they were disease free, despite all the evidence that this would be a costly waste of resource.
The members of the LDV team are in a relaxed state at the moment, replete with the joys, food and drink of the season.
Some of us have been showing off our best Christmas fashion and I thought you’d like to have a look over your morning coffee.
We’ll start with the tasteful. Mary Reid’s wonderful green coat. I bumped into her at LDHQ the other week and I can promise that it feels amazingly soft. I don’t really care that much about clothes, but I like this coat.
I guess Joe Otten’s new funky Christmas shirt could be described as tasteful, too. It’s kind of like the duvet I had as a teenager.
By April the European election campaign was in full swing. The second Nick v Nigel debate took place on the BBC. Nick’s performance wasn’t as strong as it had been in the LBC debate the week before. His big error, which he later acknowledged, was to say that the EU would be roughly the same in 10 years tome. That made us look far too wedded tot he status quo rather than the reformers we are.
Nick was never going to come out of these debates ahead, but that isn’t help. At least he had the nerve to take Farage on, though. Stephen Tall told us not to panic:
Recent polls show the British public pretty split on whether the UK should remain within the EU, but tilting towards staying in. The Lib Dems’ internal polling suggests that, among the one-quarter of the public who’ll consider voting for the party, pro-Europeanism plays pretty well. My main frustration of tonight’s debate was that Nick Clegg failed to advance the pro-reform case for staying within the EU as well as he’s done in the past – but there will be many more times and places for him to make that point in the next seven weeks. Overall, clear defining the party as being pro-European is more likely to win the Lib Dems the votes the party needs to win, both in 2014 as well as 2015.
So Eastleigh MP Mike Thornton used an agency to send out some Christmas cards on his behalf and some of them were sent out without stamps. He apologises for the error and rightly offers to reimburse what they recipients have had to shell out.
It’s not exactly high drama, is it? It’s hardly worth the space on the Daily Mail website with a headline screaming “Lib Dem Scrooge: Families have to pay £1.53 for letter that arrives with no stamp, only to find it’s their MP’s Christmas card.”
But then a headline saying: “Agency working for MP makes mistake. All those affected reimbursed” wouldn’t have quite the same impact.
Nick Clegg has published his New Year message for 2015. Here it is in full:
The text appears below.
The Liberal Democrats’ mistake in 2010 was not to insist on STV for electing MPs – but merely to accept a referendum on a miserable little compromise – as a condition of entering into a coalition. This is not recriminatory. I appreciate the problems and pressures of negotiating a coalition and that senior Lib Dems wanted to create stability and help repair the damage to the economy.
I say it was a mistake not just with hindsight. I have believed it for about 50 years.
Throughout the 12 days of Christmas, we’re bringing you the 12 most-read posts on this site of 2014. Here’s today’s offering…
Opinion: Why changing leader now WILL save the party in 2015 and beyond – Jonathan Pile | Tue 24th June 2014
Could ditching Clegg this summer really help the party? Absolutely Yes. It would signal that we have listened to the voters – a fundamental requirement for a party that calls itself democratic. A new leader – be it Vince Cable, Tim Farron or anyone else known by the public to have agonised with the choices forced on
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I was one of the ‘victims’ of the Network Rail engineering fiasco of 27 December.
I won’t over-encumber you with details but the experience has certainly shaken my faith in railways as a means of long distance travel. No doubt there will be equivalent experiences with roads and airlines to bring me back into line as well as the usual desire not to wreck the planet with my travel arrangements.
In fact my family of five (including 80 year old mother) escaped the train at Peterborough (unscheduled stop to offload some passengers who had boarded ‘by accident’) and used a taxi to get to the East Midlands line. Not cheap but much better than the active maltreatment waiting for us at Finsbury Park. But we had Twitter, which was more than East Coast railways seemed to have.
We continue our saunter through the year in the eyes of Liberal Democrat Voice authors and contributors. In March we had our Spring Conference in York and the build-up to Nick vs Nigel intensified.
But first, we had to deal with someone behind the scenes briefing against both Tim Farron and party activists. By and large, this party has been pretty together given he challenges that presented themselves over the last few years with little public sniping. Caron Lindsay just wanted everyone to play nice.
I don’t want to over-egg the pudding, because, by and large, members of the party have been pretty civilised, wherever they stand on the Coalition. Compared to Labour’s toxic factionalism and the hatred of Cameron in some areas of the Conservative party, we are a bunch of cuddly teddy bears in comparison. But when the instinct to show our claws takes hold, we really need to quash it. Nobody should be talking about anyone to the media in these terms. Our energy needs to go into winning elections, not fighting petty, internal battles on the pages of the media.
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 404th 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 (21 -27 December, 2014), 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:
Occasional Liberal Democrat Voice contributor Gareth Wilson has been selected to fight George Osborne in his home constituency of Tatton in May. He is seen here with Paddy Ashdown at Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow.
Gareth lives in Mobberley in the constituency and recently successfully led a campaign which defeated an attempt to build an unsustainable large housing development.
On his selection, Gareth said:
Throughout the 12 days of Christmas, we’re bringing you the 12 most-read posts on this site of 2014. Here’s today’s offering…
Rochester & Strood by-election: Ukip win, Lib Dems lose 11th deposit – Stephen Tall | Fri 21st November 2014
For the Lib Dems… well, we’ve been here before, haven’t we? Ten times before, to be precise: that’s the number of lost deposits we’ve racked up so far. At £500 a pop it’s one other way the Lib Dems are slowly helping to slow down the spiralling national debt.
We were never serious players in this by-election. Everyone knew it,
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Many thanks to the 13,600 visitors who dropped by Lib Dem Voice this week. Here’s our 7 most-read posts…
Jo Swinson attacks gender stereotyping of toys and is attacked by Jeremy Browne (90 comments) by Caron Lindsay
What does Alex Salmond think he’s playing at? (31 comments) by Caron Lindsay
The polls in 2014: what they show with 133 days left til 7 May 2015 (27 comments) by Stephen Tall
Study shows that voters in Liberal Democrat seats trust their MPs more (41 comments) by The Voice
Feeling slightly restless between Christmas and New Year? Are you one of those people who just can’t keep away from their computer or device? Fed up of the constant emails about sales?!
Well if your answer yes to any of these questions – and the fact that you are even reading this article suggest you might – then I have a suggestion for something to do.
Why not quickly complete a Home Office consultation on the issues of firearm licence fees?
Yes you read that correctly.
The consultation ends at the very end of Monday 29th December (I didn’t set the deadline!) so it really is now or never.
The issue, as I raised back in an article in August, is that the cost of a five-year licence for a firearm, has now been frozen for more than 13 years.
Over the next few days, we are looking month by month at the year that’s coming to an end. What were we all thinking about in February?
6th February saw #timetotalk, an initiative by Time to Change to get everyone talking about mental health. Liberal Democrat Voice took part with a series of moving and powerful posts as people shared their own experience. Eleanor Draycott wrote about what it’s like to live with Bi-Polar Disorder and the pain inaccurate assumptions about her illness causes her:
One of the most common misconceptions about people with Bi-polar, as with any other mental health problem, is that they are a danger to other people. Nothing makes me more angry than when I’m watching a film or television programme and they announce that the serial killer, murderer etc is Bi-polar and just leave it at that – like that explains everything. It doesn’t. Of course it can happen, and it does, but assuming that a person with a mental health issue such as mine is automatically going to go on a killing spree is like assuming anyone with a gun is going to go out and shoot someone in the head, or that anyone who drinks alcohol is going to become and alcoholic. The world just doesn’t work that way. Even at my worst times I have always been more of a danger to myself than to anyone else, which isn’t ideal, but I’d rather hurt myself than harm another being, be that man, woman, child, animal or “other”.
Craig Murray has always been a free spirit. As an ambassador, he favoured human rights over the war on terror. He was always happy to criticise the Liberal Democrats when he was a member, as are many of us. He left us in 2011 and joined the SNP to campaign for Scottish independence and was a shoo-in for the seat of Falkirk which the SNP hope to win. Unfortunately, he came up against the SNP’s approval process and lost.
Here’s what he had to say on his own blog:
Upset and depressed after being barred from the SNP candidates’ register by the hierarchy for “lack of commitment to group discipline”.
I was asked at assessment whether, as part of a Westminster deal with another party, I would agree to vote for the bedroom tax if instructed by the Party. I replied “No.” End of SNP political career. Problem is, I really believed we were building a different kind of politics in Scotland. I also knew that a simple lie would get me in, but I couldn’t bring myself to utter it.
I had very, very strong support from ordinary members to be the candidate in Falkirk or in Airdrie, and had 17 requests to stand from other constituencies, several from branch meetings. I wonder what the SNP new membership will think of this?
Throughout the 12 days of Christmas, we’re bringing you the 12 most-read posts on this site of 2014. Here’s today’s offering…
Clegg opposes ban on halal and kosher slaughter; now we need to hear his reasons – Nick Thornsby | Thu 6th March 2014
This issue is a classic liberal dilemma, requiring us to consider competing rights: on the one hand the right of animals not to be caused unnecessary pain and of society to impose regulations to ensure this; on the other the right of religious observants to cause pain to animals that, on their interpretation, religious texts require.
Given
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Norman Baker has revealed that the report into effective ways of tackling drugs policy commissioned by Liberal Democrats in Governemnt had some of its conclusions removed by Theresa May, presumably for fear of upsetting the Daily Mail.
From the Guardian:
He said that drugs policy should be based “on evidence, not dogma” and that, although the Conservatives were opposed to liberalisation, they were losing the argument on the issue.
Under pressure from the Lib Dems, the Home Office commissioned a report looking at the international evidence on the impact of legislation on drug use. Theresa May, the home secretary, made no secret of the fact that she had no enthusiasm for the project, and when it was published in October, with Baker taking the lead in publicising it, Conservative ministers signalled that they would ignore it.
Over the next few days, we’ll remind you of five posts from each month, to give you a flavour of what was in the minds of LDV readers and contributors in what proved to be a gruelling and often bruising political year.
1 January 2014 was the day we were going to be overwhelmed every single Romanian and Bulgarian coming here. We would all turn up to work the next day to find out we’d been replaced. They’d be hiding everywhere, even in our bread bins. Or so Farage would have had us believe, anyway. Remember all those very amusing posts on social media, with people saying things like “Just popping out to the pub, but can’t get past the crowds of Romanians and Bulgarians”. It might have been funny for those few hours, but the reality is that parties which peddle the migrant-bashing line seem to be in the majority at the moment. If that isn’t a call for liberals to remember who the enemy is (clue: not each other), then I don’t know what is.
On New Year’s Day itself, Charles Kennedy summed up the challenges of the year ahead. 2014, he said, was not for the politically timid.
Throughout the 12 days of Christmas, we’re bringing you the 12 most-read posts on this site of 2014. Here’s today’s offering…
Time for Nick Clegg to ditch the “Great Britain not Little England” line – Stephen Tall | Sun 30th March 2014
I realise that what Nick Clegg refers to as ‘Little England’ is a catch-all term for the right’s “inward-looking and defensive agenda”. But, to many voters listening, it will more likely appear that their identity is simply being belittled by one of those Westminster elite politicians they feel so detached from. It’s the kind of language that fuels
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About this time last year, we asked you to name your Liberal Democrat Stars of 2013. Little did we know that what we thought might be an interesting comments thread for a day or two would turn into a six part Liberal Democrat Roll of Honour with some really lovely tributes to some fabulous people.
This year has been pretty a gruelling time to be a Liberal Democrat, I’m not going to lie about that. What’s kept me going, though, is the camaraderie, inspiration and sheer dedication of so many people in this party. This coming year is not going to get any easier. Our colleagues will sustain us in so many ways. It’s good to celebrate them.
This isn’t just about honouring the Great and the Good, although they are as eligible as anyone else. It’s about appreciating anyone from grassroots activist to Cabinet Minister who has made your Liberal Democrat journey easier, more stimulating and satisfying or who has provided comfort and inspiration for the future.
I think it must have been about 12:05 yesterday when I realised that there actually was no hope for me. I mean, it was Christmas Day and there I was not only listening to the Call Clegg Christmas Special, but tweeting about it as well. In my defence, the people who were re-tweeting what I was saying were probably worse.
My intention was to listen to the show while peeling the turnips and tatties (the latter being auto-corrected to tattoos on Twitter, to much hilarity) for dinner. I did get them done, eventually, but I guess my tweets were making notes for this post.
The show was recorded a couple of weeks ago in a Sheffield hospital’s Children’s Ward. Nick Ferrari actually went Up North. He didn’t wear a Christmas jumper, though. Our Nick did, and mighty garish it was too. He’d early tweeted a picture of himself wearing it.
Hoping to win the office’s most garish Christmas jumper competition. What do you think? #ChristmasJumperDaypic.twitter.com/mI3958AdEM
— Nick Clegg (@nick_clegg) December 12, 2014
Nick took questions from the children in the ward on some pretty serious and hard-hitting subjects. One girl asked him what could be done to make education provision better for children with Cancer. She now had the all-clear, thankfully, but when she was having her treatment, she’s found it very difficult to get the school and health professionals to work together. Nick was pretty horrified by what she told him, saying that it was “basic common sense and decency” that people should work together to make sure sick children and young people have their education disrupted as little as possible.
Throughout the 12 days of Christmas, we’re bringing you the 12 most-read posts on this site of 2014. Here’s today’s offering…
Newark by-election: Tories win well, Ukip falls short, Labour dips, Lib Dems collapse – Stephen Tall | Fri 6th June 2014
And then there’s the Lib Dems… It was another dire night, to cap a dire fortnight. We didn’t just lose our deposit, we came sixth. Our vote collapsed. Four years ago, 10,246 Newark voters marked a ‘X’ beside the Lib Dem box. Yesterday, just 1,004 did so. In contrast to the Tories, not a single Lib Dem MP
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The final polls of the year have been published — getting on for 500 have been commissioned in 2014 — and their story is told in the graph below.
It shows Labour’s declining (down from c.38% to c.33%), the Tories static (at c.32%), Ukip on the rise (up from c.12% to c.16%), and the Lib Dems dipping (down from c.10% to c.8%). I’ve added trendlines to cut through the noise and give us a signal:
The last month has done little to alter this overall picture.
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