A press release from BIS brings the news:
Responding to recommendations made by Graeme Nuttall in his independent review of the sector, the Government has approved plans for a range of activity that will help to grow the number of businesses that become or convert to the employee ownership model.
Scottish Liberal Democrats met for a busy annual Autumn conference in Dunfermline last Saturday. The day started with the most delicious sliced sausage ever. Subjects debated by members (all of whom have a vote), include reverse vending machines, honest lets, cuts to student funding, affordable childcare and the Home Rule Commission chaired by Sir Menzies Campbell. Charles Kennedy also took part in that debate.
There were keynote speeches from Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Moore, new Business and Equalities Minister Jo Swinson and leader Willie Rennie. Danny Alexander did a question and answer session on the Mid Term Review and …
Every week, Liberal Democrat Secretary of State for Scotland writes a column for newspapers in his Borders constituency. Here is this week’s edition.
I have been working with Eyemouth Harbour Trust and other local stakeholders over recent years to ensure our local economy benefits from the planned offshore wind development in the Firth
Thursday, November 15th, isn’t just the date of the Police Commissioner elections. There’s by-elections in Cardiff, Manchester and Corby and an election for the mayor of Bristol. There’s also by-elections pending in Croydon North and Middlesbrough.
That means a lot of campaigns at the same time. But, look on the bright side, they’re neatly spread right across the county. So, for most of us, there’s one within easy reach.
With so many by-election campaigns running at the same time, the campaign teams could really do with your help. That means help, not in three weeks time, but help at any time, starting now!
On Monday Ed Miliband made a speech to the Royal College of Psychiatrists concerning the taboo surrounding mental illness. He spoke about the devastating human and economic consequences of failing to address the under- provision in mental health treatment and promised that, amongst other things, a Labour Government would re-write the constitution of the NHS in order to address this under provision.
In my previous post on this website I wrote about the motion concerning mental health which was passed at the Lib Dems autumn conference in Brighton.
Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie is “coolly impressive” …..says journalist Euan McColm, who is not known for dishing out praise without good reason.
He was speaking after Willie’s contribution in the Scottish Parliament debate on the events of last week, when it emerged that the SNP Government had not even sought legal advice from its law officers on the terms of an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU, despite them making every effort to create the impression that they had. To add insult to injury, …
On Friday last week, eleven former members of staff at Winterbourne View private hospital were sentenced for the shocking neglect and abuse of their former patients. Six have been jailed, and five others given suspended sentences. I hope that these sentences will send a clear message that such criminal behaviour will not be tolerated and that there will be real consequences for the perpetrators. It was abuse of power of the worst sort.
The case should reinforce to everyone, from frontline workers, to regulators, service commissioners, managers and board members, that they have a shared responsibility in preventing abuse of people …
There has been a rise in factionalism across the Liberal Democrats during their time in the Coalition Government – with the Liberal Left, Social Liberal Forum, Liberal Reform and other groups, all promoting their different perspectives. At Party Conference a left/right divide over economics and fiscal policy was very noticeable.
My thesis is that this divide is a serious one which is widening, not narrowing, and without measures to halt the fragmentation,
The Scottish Liberal Democrats are part of the Better Together campaign which will be putting the positive case for Scotland to stay in the UK in the forthcoming referendum campaign.
Better Together have produced a video which shows young people from across Scotland saying why they don’t want to see their country broken up. Their arguments range from greater global influence on human rights and LGBT equality to international aid to greater security and jobs at home.
One good thing, as I wrote recently, is that Liberal Democrat Secretary of State Michael Moore has given the SNP government the power to implement the long-standing Liberal Democrat policy of giving the vote in the referendum to 16 and 17 year olds.
Enjoy!
The natural mechanism for raising a mansion tax on high value UK property is not Council tax. Councils lack a home by home market valuation database and the means to build one. HMRC can raise a tax far more effectively and then might distribute it to councils.
Current Conservative policy will block a mansion tax based upon the rich contributing more but might accept a new tax targeted solely at non-owner occupied homes. Not only do these homes
Labour peer Lord Hart has just tabled an amendment to the Electoral Registration Bill which would have another major impact on the timetable of the Coalition’s plans to cut seat numbers.
The amendment, which seeks to amend a clause in Section 10 of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011, declares that the Boundary Commissions reviews will not take place until….2018. Yes, you read that right, 2018.
Liberal Democrat Energy and Climate Change Secretary Edward Davey has been talking to ITN’s Laura Kuenssberg after £700 million private companies following the announcement that Hitachi were investing £700 million in new nuclear plants. He said:
It’s a real vote of confidence from a major international company…. This is good news for the public because it’s part of our energy security strategy to keep the lights on
One of the moments I will never forget from the heartbreaking night of the 2011 Holyrood election was our Edinburgh Central candidate Alex Cole-Hamilton’s tweet:
Ending Labour’s horrendous policy, whereby children were locked up for indeterminate periods in horrible institutions like Yarl’s Wood and Dungavel, is one of the great things to come out of this coalition. Nobody’s saying the UK Border Agency is now perfect. Far from it. But on this, there can be no doubt that the Liberal Democrats ended an unacceptable, inhumane scandal.
Nick Clegg …
The stunned response that has crystalised around the proposed inquiries into alleged abuse at public institutions following the broadcast of ITV’s Exposure investigation is perfectly understandable/
Yet after decades of scandal, alarm and outrage, controversy after controversy, following numerous inquiries and reports, and despite the best efforts of huge numbers of dedicated staff, one conclusion is inescapable: Britain has created, in the words of Nick Davies, “an elaborate and sophisticated failure, a child protection system which does not protect children.”
There’s a terrific interview with Lib Dem chief whip Alistair Carmichael in this month’s Total Politics magazine, in which he gives a typically candid view on what life is like as within the Coalition — and how the Lib Dem whipping operation differs from Labour’s and the Tories’. Here’s a few excerpts:
“I would say the difference between us and the other two parties in this place is that we can get to a position of unity. In fact, it’s much more important to be able to persuade a liberal,
…
The latest flurry of excitement about the Trident nuclear deterrent — as the Daily Mail puts it with typical tabloid restraint: Tories and LibDems at war over contract to build Trident sub: £350m deal is jumping the gun, warns Clegg — is one of those stories which pops up twice a year. The last time was six months ago, in May, when the Ministry of Defence announced £350m-worth of design contracts for the Trident successor submarines had been signed. As then Lib Dem defence minister Nick Harvey pointed out on LDV at the time:
is being portrayed as the Coalition Government moving a step closer to a
I’ve blogged just once or twice or thrice about the many failings of the Interception of Communications Commissioner and his dreadful record, failing to ask the right questions, unwilling to investigate evidence of widespread abuses and ignoring questions over cost.
And now he’s spoken out over the highly controversial Draft Communications Data Bill – not against its extensive online snooping provisions or even to call for stronger safeguards (such as to remedy his own failures to look into strong evidence that …
As a former Editor, I’m sad to see that Liberal Democrat News is now compiling its final issue.
The idea of a weekly newspaper began in 1947.There were numerous attempts to axe it. I fought off at least two, and it was only thanks to the likes of David Steel, John Pardoe, and the ALC, that the treasurer was persuaded otherwise in the 1970s. Then, the party was financially bust, despite Trevor Jones delivering a string of remarkable by-election successes that
George Osborne has many faults, but we have to thank him for one thing – uniting the Liberal Democrats. There are groups within the Lib Dems holding different, even opposite views. However, many Lib Dems are united in their opposition to Osborne’s idea of exchanging workers’ rights for shares in their company. If you agree, please help us by taking part in the consultation on these proposals which ends on 8th November.
Whilst the Lib Dems are fully behind the idea of Employee Share
Two doping scandals hit the headlines last week. One was very serious, apparently very long-running, and seemingly ignored by the sport’s governing bodies for a great many years. The other culminated in Lance Armstrong finally being stripped of his 7 Tour de France titles.
In case you’re puzzled, I should inform you of the apparently entrenched practice of dosing up on an addictive stimulant drug before top level football matches. Glen Johnson, Rio Ferdinand and Phil Neville have all admitted recently that they take this drug before matches and have been doing so for some time. They don’t seem to think
I did a bit of a double-take on reading Fraser Nelson’s latest column in the Telegraph complaining that David Cameron has been ‘strikingly relaxed’ about appointments to government-funded bodies.
‘His allies say that he has been too much of a gentleman to play Labour’s game and start stuffing quangos with Tory placemen,’ says Fraser, whose tone suggests he’d like nothing better than for the Prime Minister to start stuffing quangos with Tory placemen.
His plea for greater patronage was taken up with alacrity by Tim Montgomerie at ConservativeHome who …
Like my LDV colleague, Paul Walter, it was good to hear Nick Clegg’s announcement that he intends to give more economic powers to up to 20 cities and major towns. After all, if there’s one thing that unites Lib Dems it’s the belief in devolving power to the most local level possible.
And yet there is a grumble about the scheme that nags me: why is it that local government is having to bid to central government for “the right to decide how skills and transport funding is spent
Nick Clegg is giving more economic powers to a new batch of cities and major towns.
– Devolving powers out of Whitehall in order to stimulate growth.
It is very difficult not to see this as A Very Good Thing.
The Independent takes up the story:
Up to 20 major towns and cities will today be offered extra
Nick Clegg has made it clear that the Coalition Agreement on the Trident nuclear programme will not be changed, despite Philip Hammond’s announcement today on a multimillion-pound contract for a new generation of nuclear missile submarines.
Speaking at a press conference this morning, Nick Clegg said:
Some people are jumping the gun on this Trident decision. The Coalition Agreement is crystal clear. It stands. It will not be changed. It will not be undermined. It will not be
Since 2010 the word ‘fairness’ has been deployed on an industrial scale across the political spectrum.
To want ‘fairness’ is to want a distribution of the spoils which reflects the value of the contribution of each to the economic and social resources of society. A fair tax system should seek to tax according to capacity to pay. It must also act to discourage those, such as polluters, whose economic choices negatively impact on society.
Middlesbrough Liberal Democrats have selected a local jobs expert as their candidate for the upcoming Parliamentary by-election in the constituency.
George Selmer, who grew up and went to school in Middlesbrough, has outlined his plan for the town – focusing on jobs, housing and safeguarding local facilities under threat from Labour cuts.
Commenting on his selection, George said:
A new set of automatically updated campaign buttons is now available for Liberal Democrat websites.
As I wrote in September, during my time working at party HQ doing online campaigning one of our most successful projects (cooked up with the help of Rob Fenwick and Martin Tod) was the ‘campaign buttons’ – a simple piece of code which let bloggers and those with other websites easily display campaign adverts and news stories from the party.
It was a great way for the party to be able to push out quickly and widely adverts for new campaigns, policy launches and the like, whilst for …
In November 1926, Mussolini established the Tribunale Speciale, which was a secret court designed to convict those of dissident and anti-state activities. The Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo was the secret police force, wtih the authority to arrest opponents of the regime.
4,000 citizens were detained in secret, tried in secret and exiled in secret. 10 individuals were even executed in secret. Secret courts were not isolated to Fascist Italy; Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and countless authoritarian states used or use secret trials to silence dissidents and guard state secrets. The auspice of national security is invoked to justify
Those of us familiar with the EU are used to its complicated processes, obscure acronyms and often unfathomable procedures. We sometimes forget that it is still a hybrid project that no-one has ever tried before: a multinational, multilingual experiment in international cooperation where countries decide by common accord to pool decision-making in certain areas and under certain conditions for their own mutual benefit.
Today’s leaflet in my series on old election leaflets is a centrally produced Labour party 4-pager from 1929. As with the Conservative leaflet from 1931 which I previously featured, the design may be very different from good modern leaflets, but the content has some very familiar overtones.
The May 1929 contest was the first general election in which women under 30 could vote and also one of only three elections in the modern era where the party with the most votes did not also win the most seats. Despite being slightly out-polled by the Conservatives, Labour won more seats in …
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Conference or What? (Roderick Lynch)
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I watched Ed Davey’s speech. Here’s why it matters (Kamran Hussain)
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Lib Dems come from third to win by-election in Katie Lam's constituency
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PM 
Peter Davies 
Mick Taylor 
Peter Wrigley 
Mary Reid 
