Julian Huppert

Julian Huppert MP writes…Let’s bring the “polluter pays” principle to government decision making

By Julian Huppert | Tue 6th May 2014 - 5:49 pm

imageAll too often Government departments get decisions wrong. Most notorious are the Home Office and the Department of Work and Pensions. Many people will be well aware of the anguish faced by those awaiting Employment and Support Allowance appeals, and the same is true for those waiting to see if they can stay in the country, or bring in a spouse.

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Mary Reid

Social Liberal Forum conference 2014

By Mary Reid | Tue 6th May 2014 - 4:28 pm

slflogoSocial liberalism is right at the heart of Liberal Democrat values, and all Lib Dems, right across the political spectrum, believe in fighting for the rights and needs of the disenfranchised and disadvantaged.

The Social Liberal Forum is a membership group within the party who are committed to making sure that these values drive policy and strategy. Its key aims are to promote social justice and to narrow gaps in power.

This summer will see its fourth annual conference, with the theme ‘Governing as Liberal Democrats’, taking place in London on Saturday 19th July. All

…

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Mohsin Khan

Opinion: Rethink which conditions get free prescriptions in England

By Mohsin Khan | Tue 6th May 2014 - 2:12 pm

PillsPrescriptions have risen to £8.05. Now, you get free prescriptions if you’re on benefits, a child, student or over-60. But there’s a list of illnesses that also give you free prescriptions for everything. Besides adding in cancer, this list was last updated in 1968.

The list ignores the fact that today, prevention is central to healthcare. Many drugs are now used to stop people developing heart conditions or strokes. It disregards treatable conditions like asthma or high blood pressure, where these drugs help keep patients out of costly hospitals. It …

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The Voice

Nick Clegg unveils Council waste and incompetence

By The Voice | Tue 6th May 2014 - 12:10 pm

wasteToday Nick Clegg launches the Liberal Democrats’ local election campaign with a fascinating round-up of Tory and Labour ‘achievements’.  As he writes:

If you want to understand a political party’s values, look at one thing: when they are in power, how do they spend your money?

Here is a sample of the worst or daftest excesses:

Labour Councils

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Stuart Bonar

Opinion: 485 million, 26 million or 4,000? UKIP’s immigration confusion

By Stuart Bonar | Tue 6th May 2014 - 10:26 am

Nigel Farage, Leader, UK Independence Party (UKIP)So, Mr Farage, which is it? In the debates with Nick Clegg, you claimed 485 million of our fellow Europeans could come to Britain. On your wretched billboards, you claimed 26 million are eyeing up our jobs. Now, on leaflets that are dropping through letterboxes, you claim 4,000 EU migrants are landing on our shores each week. These are very different numbers.

I guess the 485 million figure is simply the total number of people who could legally come to the UK. But how is this different from pointing out that the 64 million people who live in the UK are all perfectly free to move to, say, Totnes? Should Totnes Town Council leave the UK so it can impose border controls? Should National Rail blow up the railway line at Dawlish to slow their arrival? Should the Government impose restrictions on internal movement within the UK just in case? Of course not, because 64m people aren’t about to move to Totnes, even though they’re free to do so, just as 485 million Europeans are not going to come here to Britain.

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Mike Biden

Opinion: Astra-Zeneca and a Fairer Society

By Mike Biden | Tue 6th May 2014 - 8:46 am

PfizerThe approach by Pfizer to acquire Astra-Zeneca raises yet again the question of what criteria should be used to evaluate the merits of large international corporate acquisitions.  I would argue that too often the real issues are lost in xenophobic arguments about the loss of national champions – though that is a legitimate concern in this instance.

No compelling rationale for this merger has been put forward.  The Directors of Astra-Zeneca do not see one. Straight forward commercial agreements between the companies to buy and sell individual assets, drugs patents or to …

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The Voice

Scottish Liberal Democrats launch their European Election campaign – IN Britain, IN Europe, IN Work

By The Voice | Mon 5th May 2014 - 2:47 pm

Given the illustrious collection of single malts that there is in Scottish Party HQ, it’s hardly surprising that the party decided to launch its campaign of for the European elections in a distillery near Edinburgh. Alistair Carmichael, Willie Rennie and George Lyon checked out the products as they outlined the campaign themes.

Rennie, Carmichael and Lyon

There are no local elections in Scotland this year, but there is an added dimension with the approaching independence referendum. The Party of IN arguments apply just as much to Scotland staying in the UK as they do to the UK staying in Europe.

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Caron Lindsay

Could Labour and Tories unite to pass tougher knife crime sentencing? How should Liberal Democrats react?

By Caron Lindsay | Mon 5th May 2014 - 11:30 am

FSI working at crime sceneLast Friday, Joe Otten wrote about the leak of letters  revealing that the Liberal Democrats were opposing Tory plans to introduce a six month mandatory sentence for those convicted a second time for carrying a knife.

Today’s Daily Mail makes two claims. The first is that Labour is getting ready to “humiliate” the Liberal Democrats by siding with the Tories and they could pass this together. Secondly, they say that Nick Clegg was “bouncing off the walls” when he discovered the leak.

We know from the feature on …

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Alisdair Calder McGregor

Opinion: We are still living with the consequences of nationalised railways today. Turning back the clock will make matters worse.

By Alisdair Calder McGregor | Mon 5th May 2014 - 9:31 am

Northern trainIn a letter to the Observer a group of Labour PPCs, including my opponent Joshua Fenton-Glynn, have proposed that the Labour should nationalise rail services.

This idea displays an ignorance of the true cause of the problems with UK railways that beggars belief. Almost every issue with rail transport can be traced not to privatisation per se, but to nationalisation, or the insufficiently liberal privatisation foisted upon us by the Major government.

In the 1980s investment in rail was at an all time low, due entirely to the nationalised nature of …

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Caron Lindsay

35 years since Thatcher: A trip down Memory Lane

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 4th May 2014 - 3:22 pm

THE IRON LADY, MARGARET THATCHEROn 4 May 1979, Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street for the first time. The sun that shone down on her on the steps cast a decade long shadow. The culture of selfishness, instilling a belief that there was something wrong with paying taxes for good public services, pervades today. In recent years, only the Liberal Democrats of the major parties have gone into an election advocating a rise in Income Tax, albeit a tiny one, to invest in education.

We seem to be embroiled in this cycle of underfunding our services, complaining about them and then underfunding them some more.

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The Voice

LDV’s Sunday Best: our 7 most-read articles this week

By The Voice | Sun 4th May 2014 - 2:40 pm

7 ver 4 fullMany thanks to the  visitors who dropped by Lib Dem Voice this week. Here’s our 7 most-read posts…

UKIP examined, who they are, what they stand for and what does it mean for British politics? (79 comments) by Stephen Tall

Latest Euro-election polls: UKIP take the lead but what about the Lib Dems (43 comments) by Stephen Tall

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Caron Lindsay

Malcolm Bruce: Britain needs Lib Dem MEPs

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 4th May 2014 - 12:52 pm

malcolm-bruce-2Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader Malcolm Bruce went on the Sunday Politics today to highlight the work that Liberal Democrat MEPs did in terms of working with others for reform across Europe. He said that Liberal Democrat MEPs were the hardest working of all British MEPs, a fact backed up by actual evidence, as revealed on Lib Dem Voice by Giles Goodall last month.

The European Parliament takes decisions that affect us and the people who are working hardest to ensure that British national interests

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Caron Lindsay

Which member of the LDV team gets a mention in today’s national press?

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 4th May 2014 - 11:52 am

Step forward…..

Screen Shot 2014-05-04 at 11.24.30

If you follow our Nick on Twitter, you’ll know he loves interesting use of language, whether it be puns, silly signs or malapropisms.

Some time ago, he suggested to John Rentoul that it would be a good idea to do a feature on the Top Ten Malapropisms. And so, here in today’s Independent on Sunday, it came to pass. “This one is Nick Thornsby’s idea.” says the first sentence.

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NewsHound

LibLink: Paddy Ashdown: Alex Salmond should apologise for his poor call over Vladimir Putin

By NewsHound | Sun 4th May 2014 - 10:55 am

paddy ashdown - paul walter“Lib Dem Statesman Paddy Ashdown”. That’s how the headline in Paddy’s Sunday Mail article describes him.

Paddy is writing in response to Alex Salmond’s comments on Vladimir Putin . As a reminder, this is what Salmond said:

Obviously, I don’t approve of a range of Russian actions, but I think Putin’s more effective than the press he gets, I would have thought, and you can see why he carries support in Russia.

“He’s restored a substantial part of Russian pride and that must be a good thing. There are aspects of Russian constitutionality and the intermesh with business and politics that are obviously difficult to admire. Russians are fantastic people, incidentally; they are lovely people.

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Caron Lindsay

Caron’s Sunday Selection: must-read articles from today’s papers

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 4th May 2014 - 9:42 am

Selection of British newspapersHere are a few stories from today’s press to challenge, infuriate and inform:

John Rentoul’s General Election Preview in the Independent describes Paddy Ashdown’s role as providing “romping gravitas”:

The South African Ryan Coetzee, a former MP in South Africa for the opposition Democratic Alliance, is Nick Clegg’s head of strategy. There was a bit of a synthetic fuss recently when journalists noticed that his £110,000 salary as a special adviser is paid by the taxpayer. It was his idea to raise Clegg’s profile by challenging Nigel Farage to public

…

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The Voice

What’s being debated in our members’ forum this week?

By The Voice | Sat 3rd May 2014 - 2:03 pm

forum1LibDemVoice has two parallel sites. The first is our public blog, the thing you’re reading now. The second is our private members’ forum, which only current Lib Dem members can access.

If you’re a member and want to chat with fellow party members about any issue that’s on your mind, then why not sign up? In addition, you’ll be included in our regular surveys’ of party members’ views.

Here’s some of the most active discussions this past week:

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The Voice

Lynne Featherstone on the need for clean cookstoves to transform the lives of women and girls

By The Voice | Sat 3rd May 2014 - 12:23 pm

Dr. Kalpana Balakrishnan tells Secretary Clinton more about the clean cookstoves effort in South India.Earlier this week we told you of Paddy Ashdown’s visit to Bangladesh to raise awareness of the need for clean stoves. This is also an area where Liberal Democrat International Development Minister Lynne Featherstone has been working and on Thursday, she spoke at a Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves conference in London. This issue is important because the World Health Organisation estimates that 4.3 million people lost their lives through being exposed to household air …

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The Voice

Norman Lamb: Ensuring good quality care is essential to Lib Dem mission for fairer society

By The Voice | Sat 3rd May 2014 - 10:57 am

Stay Well At Home Service, Evesham, BritainThe BBC reports that those seeking to work in care homes will have to have a certificate before being allowed to look after people without supervision.

New care workers will have to earn a training certificate within 12 weeks of starting a job in a hospital or care home, the BBC has learned.

The initiative comes in from March next year in England for staff including hospital healthcare assistants.

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Paul Reynolds

Opinion: An open letter to UKIP voters

By Paul Reynolds | Sat 3rd May 2014 - 9:28 am

Letters Play Important Roles in our LivesDear UKIP voter

Although you are probably not an avid reader of the Lib Dem Voice website, this letter may get to you through the usual ‘viral’ internet ‘system.

The opinion surveys suggest that there are three main reasons for people like yourself voting UKIP.

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Joe Otten

…or you could vote for not having an opinion

By Joe Otten | Fri 2nd May 2014 - 6:41 pm

imageOn Wednesday I went to my first hustings as a European Parliament candidate (number 3 on the Yorkshire and the Humber list). When the Green candidate announced that he supported staying in the EU, I had a quiet conversation with the Labour candidate sitting next to me.

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Ben Nicholls

Opinion: Get your hands off my pint, Nigel

By Ben Nicholls | Fri 2nd May 2014 - 4:53 pm

BeerDespite some of the quite appalling statements they’ve provided us with in recent weeks, I’m getting fed up of hearing UKIP supporters described as nutters. I’m no psychiatrist: it’s hardly my place, or that of anybody else, to decry someone as a nutter. But more importantly than that, I’m fed up of it because it’s insulting to everyone who supports UKIP, and it gives them a cast-iron reason not to place their cross elsewhere.

As a recently-selected Lib Dem PPC, I obviously don’t agree with UKIP. I’m pro-Europe, primarily because I’m …

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Joe Otten

Lib Link: Paul Tyler on establishment of the church

By Joe Otten | Fri 2nd May 2014 - 3:29 pm

York Minster by Paul WalterOur own Stephen Tall broke the story last Slownewsday that disestablishment of the Church of England is a longer-term project than the Times and Telegraph might have realised.

Now Paul Tyler in Lords of the Blog, addresses the reasons for the historical presence of Bishops in the House of Lords as ‘Money, not Morals’.

I am a practising Anglican (trying to improve) but I have been firmly committed to disestablishment for over 50 years, for the sake of both church and state. The muddled

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Joe Bourke

Opinion: the biggest threat to global security

By Joe Bourke | Fri 2nd May 2014 - 1:55 pm

Free Syrian Army rebels fighting against Assad militias on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Maraat al-Numan, Idlib - SyriaThe Arab spring has receded into the nightmare that is Syria today; continuing instability in Libya and Yemen and death penalties by the hundreds in Egypt. We have been shocked by the atrocities of Boko Haram in Nigeria; Al Shabab in Somalia; conflict in the Central African Republic, Mali and Chad.

Tony Blair, in a recent speech reminded us Why the Middle East matters

What is presently happening there, still

…

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Joe Otten

Knife crime leaks reveal coalition battle over mandatory sentencing

By Joe Otten | Fri 2nd May 2014 - 12:09 pm

The Court House - Warwick - Coat of ArmsLetters between government ministers debating whether a second offence of carrying a knife should attract a mandatory prison sentence have been leaked to the Daily Mail. The timing of these leaks must suggest an attempt by some Conservatives to exploit the appalling murder of Anne Maguire for political ends.

It may be a little less precise, but I am reporting this as ‘second offence of possession’, because more serious knife-related offences attract mandatory prison sentences already, including the offence, new in 2012, of …

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Iain Donaldson

Opinion: Licensing the private sector housing market would be more effective than 3 year tenancies and a rent fix

By Iain Donaldson | Fri 2nd May 2014 - 10:05 am

Matilda HouseMuch has been said about Ed Miliband’s latest proposal to grant 3 year tenancies and cap rent rises over the three years but it’s not that bad an idea as a part of a package of measures to tackle the housing crisis. The key problem is that Mr Miliband’s solution would have to be regulated and yet Labour has consistently blocked the introduction of regulation for the private sector housing market.

We need to ensure that all rented accommodation (private, social, co-operative, lodging or council) meets standards of service …

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Stephen Tall

What Lib Dem members think about top-rate tax: 53% back 50p (or higher) BUT only if it raises more revenue

By Stephen Tall | Fri 2nd May 2014 - 8:00 am

Project 365 114 - MoneyLib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum  to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. More than 830 party members responded – thank you – and we’re publishing the full results.

53% support 50p (or higher) top-rate of tax; 31% say stick at 45p; 13% back 40p (or lower)

Currently the top rate of income tax is 45p in the pound for earnings over £150,000. Which rate do you support this top rate being set …

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Paul Walter

Nick Clegg’s Twitter Townhall as it happened

By Paul Walter | Thu 1st May 2014 - 7:26 pm

nick clegg live tweet town hall 1st may 2014Today, Nick Clegg took part in a remarkably simple and accessible Twitter Q&A on Europe, dubbed a “Twitter Townhall”. Via Storify and the LibDem party website, here below is the official version of how it happened, (almost) tweet by tweet.

Over on Caron’s Musings, LDV Co-editor Caron Lindsay gives her take on the event and presents the complete, unofficial version of the tweetery.

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Jonathan Pile

Opinion: Time for Lib Dems to ditch HS2 for alternative HS1 extension

By Jonathan Pile | Thu 1st May 2014 - 4:56 pm

P1090440With a recent COMRES poll showing 52% of the public are against the current HS2 plans and with 70 seats and 600,000 Lib Dem voters affected, I sat down one day and decided to find a better scheme. One which did unite the north of Britain to London and the South, one which didn’t cost the earth, one with a minimal human impact and one which actually linked up with HS1, Eurostar and the Channel Tunnel – none of the things HS2 can boast off, but all of which an …

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Mark Valladares

ALDE Party Council – seeing double in the city of intrigue and sachertorte

By Mark Valladares | Thu 1st May 2014 - 3:41 pm

SachertorteIt is perhaps appropriate that, given the much-anticipated (at least by our enemies) fate of Liberal Democrats on 22 May, the ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe) Party Council meets in Vienna, the city where Orson Welles set ‘The Third Man’, in which Harry Lime gave the impression of being dead, only to be killed in the end anyway.

However, this month’s European Parliamentary elections represent the raison d’être of any pan-European political party, and so liberals from across the European Union are working to ensure the strongest possible representation …

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The Voice

LibLink: Catherine Bearder MEP – UKIP’s utter contempt for the electorate

By The Voice | Thu 1st May 2014 - 2:32 pm

Nigel Farage, Leader, UK Independence Party (UKIP)Following Nigel Farage’s eventual decision not to run in the Newark by-election, Lib Dem MEP for the South-East of England Catherine Bearder shared her thoughts on UKIP’s approach to holding public office, over at the Huffington Post:

Following hours of umming and ahing, Nigel Farage finally declared that he won’t stand for election in the upcoming by-election in Newark, desperately insisting that he is still “a fighter”. It is remarkable that the very man who claims he is not your typical politician, that he

…

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