Duncan Stott

Opinion: Monetary policy is political, so where’s the democracy?

By Duncan Stott | Mon 3rd September 2012 - 8:56 am

We are in extraordinary economic times, which have led to extraordinary measures from the Bank of England in its attempt to help steer us out of the storm. The Bank appears to be terrified at the prospect of deflation and the depressive effect it could have. Not only have base interest rates been pinned to a historical low of 0.5% for well over three years, the Bank has also used Quantitative Easing to pump £325 billion of newly created money into the economy.

We now know more about the effect that QE is having and it should send shivers down the …

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The Voice

How you can help Liberal Democrat Voice

By The Voice | Sun 2nd September 2012 - 7:50 pm

The Voice is only a success because of the interest and support from our readers. For many people just lurking and reading the site is all they want to do – and that’s fine, we’re grateful for people taking the time to read the site.

You can though help us continue to produce interesting content for a growing audience. Here are four simple ways:

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William Jones

Opinion: keeping up the Mo-mentum

By William Jones | Sun 2nd September 2012 - 4:25 pm

Many of us watched with pride as Mo Farah won his two Gold medals at the London 2012 Olympics, encapsulating the spirit that swept most of the country over two golden weeks, re-invigorating our nation, and this week saw the beautiful Paralympics opening ceremony. Mo and the Paralympians show what a civilised and diverse country we are. London 2012 has shown that this nation is great because it is open, modern, quirky, successful and brilliant, a country ready to embrace the challenges of a changed world head on.

Recently, Conservative minister Damian Green said he wants Tories to pass the ‘Danny …

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Stephen Tall

Nick Clegg’s leadership: 3 thoughts from me

By Stephen Tall | Sun 2nd September 2012 - 2:15 pm

Today’s papers are full of speculation about Nick Clegg’s leadership prompted by a handful of party members — inevitably labelled ‘senior’ — calling on Nick to go, such as Lib Dem peer Lord Smith of Clifton, with Torbay MP Adrian Sanders urging Nick to get better advice to avoid “bumbling along”. Here are the three thoughts on the issue which strike me (before I head off to the Olympic stadium for tonight’s Paralympic athletics action)…

1) I’m more surprised by how few people are calling for Nick Clegg to go

It’s not especially surprising there’s some discontent among members. The party is …

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Mark Valladares

If you’re going to suggest that Nick Clegg isn’t the answer, you need a plan B ready…

By Mark Valladares | Sun 2nd September 2012 - 10:52 am

Lord Matthew OakeshottFollowing the interventions of Matthew Oakeshott and Trevor Smith, there will be those both inside and outside the Liberal Democrats, who will be looking forward to next month’s Federal Conference with an eye to a future. Not necessarily the future, but a future nonetheless.

But before anyone gets terribly carried away, there are two key questions that need to be asked and, ideally, answered.

What are you changing the Leader for?

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Caron Lindsay

So, evil government to deny women pain relief during labour, right?

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 1st September 2012 - 2:20 pm

“Doctors told to try and talk women out of epidurals to save NHS money” screamed yesterday’s Daily Mail headline.  I could understand women reading that and being outraged and terrified.

Fortunately, this being the Mail, the truth is not as bad as the headline implies. Rather than being a miserly, deficit-busting ministerial directive, this is expert, evidence based guidance drawn up by the Royal Colleges of Midwives and Obstetricians with the help of the National Childbirth Trust. It aims to reduce the amount of medical intervention during childbirth because that’s best for both mother and baby. Nowhere in the guidance is …

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Mark Pack

Just the sort of thing local campaigners should be trying out

By Mark Pack | Sat 1st September 2012 - 11:25 am

The changing nature of high street shop windows picks up many threads of wider change in society. Not only the increasing homogenisation of them as national chains with standard shop front designs have spread out across the country. But also varying attitudes towards, and technologies for, tackling crime. Large glass panes frequently sprouted metal shutters – immediately effective, relatively cheap and yet ugly ways of stopping the classic smash and grab crimes.

Then a move away from shutters following an increasing awareness that ugly, off-putting high streets bring about their own problems with crime and fear of crime, with empty, dehumanised hearts of …

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Mark Pack

Police and Crime Commissioner elections: where the Lib Dems are standing

By Mark Pack | Sat 1st September 2012 - 9:25 am

Although the party has been warming to fighting the Police and Crime Commissioner elections, estimates as to how many Liberal Democrat candidates there will be in the November contests vary hugely.

So here’s a first attempt from me to track the answer comprehensively, based primarily on the adverts which have so far appeared inviting people to apply for the selection in particular contests. As a result, the list will (so far) miss out some areas where the party has 100% decided to contest the election but an advert has …

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Mark Pack

The party with the British instincts

By Mark Pack | Fri 31st August 2012 - 7:18 pm

Rather nice graphic from Liberal Martin:

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The Voice

The LDV Friday Five: 31 August 2012

By The Voice | Fri 31st August 2012 - 5:00 pm

It’s Friday. It’s five o’clock. Here’s a fistful of lists that sum up the LDV week:

5 most-read stories on LDV this week

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Posted in Friday Five | 1 Comment
Adrian Sanders

Why is the UK government encouraging companies to use tax havens?

By Adrian Sanders | Fri 31st August 2012 - 2:46 pm

Plans by the government to change Controlled Foreign Companies (CFC) rules are threatening to deny the developing world billions of pounds in tax revenues. The current CFC rules discourage UK companies from using tax havens, by requiring them to pay UK levels of corporation tax whether they are based in the UK or abroad. This system discourages the practice of profit shifting and protects the tax incomes of both the UK and developing countries.

The changes were proposed in the Budget earlier this …

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The Voice

From today’s Lib Dem News

By The Voice | Fri 31st August 2012 - 1:00 pm

By Howard of Lib Dem News

Posted in Humour | Tagged | 7 Comments
Mark Valladares

Tim Farron responds to justified criticism?

By Mark Valladares | Fri 31st August 2012 - 11:18 am

Tim FarronThere’s no doubt that one of the most controversial phrases in British politics is “hard working families”. Not because anyone has anything against hard working families, but because it excludes whole swathes of people who deserve the support of the state too.

So, when Party President Tim Farron used it recently, he really shouldn’t have been surprised to attract some criticism. As Jennie Rigg so forcefully put it;

The phrase Hard Working Families purposefully excludes and marginalises anyone who doesn’t have a job, and anyone who doesn’t have a

…

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Mark Valladares

LibLink: Paddy Ashdown “Liberal Democrats must back Nick Clegg and let him finish the job”

By Mark Valladares | Fri 31st August 2012 - 8:52 am

Paddy AshdownIn today’s Guardian, Paddy Ashdown responds to Matthew Oakeshott’s call upon party members to consider replacing Nick Clegg as Leader in typically direct style;

All party dissidents, minor or not, suddenly find themselves welcome on every front page and in every news studio. Opinion pollsters, out of business during the dead days of summer, suddenly find themselves able to use a late August poll to predict the outcome of an election still three years away. I remember one in 1995, two years from the election in which

…

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Posted in News | 38 Comments
Mark Pack

Pendle investigates claims of postal vote fraud

By Mark Pack | Thu 30th August 2012 - 6:37 pm

News via the BBC:

The council’s chief executive Stephen Barnes had written a letter to the Electoral Commission last year, saying allegations and perceptions of malpractice around postal voting “are seriously undermining public confidence in the whole electoral process”.

In the letter, the council cited examples of probable malpractice and the difficulties in taking action…

The leader of the borough council’s Labour Group, Councillor Mohammad Iqbal, said his party had won seats from the Conservatives fairly, adding: “There isn’t a problem in Pendle”…

The panel, consisting of cross-party councillors and representatives, will gather evidence at five public hearings across the borough.

Posted in Election law and News | Tagged , and | 3 Comments
William Mosseri-Marlio

Opinion: Grade inflation must stop, but not artificially

By William Mosseri-Marlio | Thu 30th August 2012 - 3:42 pm

For the first time in its twenty-six year history, the proportion of A*—C GCSE grades fell on Thursday. Michael Gove, who has been talking about grade inflation since the dawn of time, must have felt vindicated. A ‘cosy cartel’ of exam boards, head teachers and ministers has resulted in a seemingly inexorable upward trajectory of student performance. This year’s results, Gove’s supporters will suggest, reflect his work in dismantling this arrangement of mutual back scratching.

The UK has an issue with grade inflation. Although Britain’s position in the OECD/Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey substantially fell between 2000 and …

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Nick T

A response to Peter Kellner: yes the Lib Dems need a narrative, but they should reject the tired left/right division

By Nick T | Thu 30th August 2012 - 12:24 pm

Peter Kellner, the President of polling company YouGov, has written a typically thought-provoking piece analysing – using recent polling figures – what he believes to be the reasons behind the Lib Dems’ current difficulties, and suggesting some solutions to overcome them.

The piece is a good one, and worth reading in full, though I have some reservations, not primarily about his conclusions but about how he reaches them. One of the key polls he cites asks voters to place themselves, the main parties and the party leaders on a spectrum of right to left. And while voters overall place both …

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Nick T

Clegg starts Public Negotiation: Phase 2

By Nick T | Thu 30th August 2012 - 9:21 am

Public Negotiation: Phase 1 kicked off on Thursday 26 January 2012. It ended on 21 March 2012. The deputy prime minister’s first demand was to allow the lowest paid to keep more of the money they earn next year by implementing more quickly the Lib Dem policy of raising the income tax personal allowance to £10,000. However badly the budget was presented, Clegg’s stance can only be judged a success: the policy was implemented significantly more quickly, with the threshold being raised by £1100 next April.

Yesterday, Clegg signalled the start of Phase 2, and it’s tax …

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Jeremy Browne MP

Jeremy Browne MP writes: Paralympics legacy must advance rights of people with disabilities

By Jeremy Browne MP | Wed 29th August 2012 - 6:55 pm

The fourteenth Paralympics Games open today, the pre-cursor of which dates back to the last time London hosted the Olympics. The brainchild of Dr. Ludwig Guttmann of Stoke Mandeville Hospital for disabled veterans of World War II, the event was staged to coincide with the 1948 London Olympics. It has grown dramatically since then. This year’s Games, the biggest yet, will see 4,200 athletes, from 160 countries, compete in 20 different sports medal events.

London 2012 saw the first ever double amputee compete in the Olympic Games. South African, Oscar Pistorius competed in the men’s 400 metre race and was a …

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Helen Duffett

Lib Dem Blog of the Year Awards 2012 – nominations now open

By Helen Duffett | Wed 29th August 2012 - 4:53 pm

BOTY 2
The Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year Awards, run by Lib Dem Voice, are back for their seventh year. As usual, they’ll be awarded in a budget lavish ceremony at the party’s autumn conference in Brighton.

Click on the following links to see last year’s Shortlist and the Winners.

This year’s awards are as follows:

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Mark Wright

Opinion: Prohibition 3 or how I learned to stop worrying and love failure

By Mark Wright | Wed 29th August 2012 - 3:54 pm

I am a non-smoker, apart from the odd birthday cigar. After initial misgivings about the details of the public building smoking ban in the UK, I have come to see it as the most significant and beneficial health change in human behaviour in many decades. It has transformed our public places for the better and helped thousands to give up.

Despite that, I have always been suspicious of the increasingly fanatical political drive against smoking. It has always had an undercurrent reminiscent of the 19th century Temperance movement that gave rise to the disaster of “Prohibition” of alcohol.

There can’t be a …

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Caron Lindsay

Nick Clegg in Scotland: another opportunity for Scots to get to know him wasted

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 29th August 2012 - 2:25 pm

I am proper livid today. Nick Clegg came to Scotland yesterday. Not that you’d know from the amount of media coverage the visit attracted. There’s not much in today’s papers, although STV covered his visit to a factory in Jedburgh.

What would Scots have learned about our Deputy Prime Minister over the last year? People remember that he had paint thrown at him when he came up last August but his visits since then have largely gone unnoticed. That, I believe, is because we are being far too timid in what we do with him: every time he comes …

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Charles Kennedy

Charles Kennedy MP writes: UK’s Air Passenger Duty is damaging our economy

By Charles Kennedy | Wed 29th August 2012 - 12:59 pm

The eyes of the world are now on the UK for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. We have heard a lot about the legacy of the Games, in terms of the rejuvenation of East London and getting more children into sport, but we also have a fantastic opportunity to create an economic legacy right across the UK. From my perspective, as a Highlands and Islands MP, we want all those visiting or watching the Games to see the beauty of our rugged coastline and mountains and be inspired to visit the outstanding beauty of the whole of the UK, …

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Fiona Hall MEP

Fiona Hall MEP writes: Behind the scenes – negotiating the EU Energy Efficiency Directive

By Fiona Hall MEP | Wed 29th August 2012 - 11:58 am

While the UK Draft Energy Bill is creating headlines in the UK as it makes its way through Parliament, the EU agreed on what is regarded as the biggest ever piece of legislation in the field of energy efficiency earlier in the summer. The adoption of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) was preceded by a whole year of tough political scrutiny and weeks of negotiations between the European Parliament and Member State ministers in the Council, led by the Danish Presidency. Both Chris Huhne and later Ed Davey were heavily involved in these negotiations for the UK, which was one …

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Julian Huppert

Julian Huppert MP writes… Liberal Democrats need a clear policy on the future of aviation

By Julian Huppert | Wed 29th August 2012 - 10:25 am

Over the last few months, speculation over the Government’s aviation policy has filled countless column inches. The majority of it has been based on very little evidence.

Perhaps the lack of evidence isn’t surprising, given the way aviation policy has been formed during recent years. When Labour decided to build a third runway at Heathrow, they did so by completely ignoring the fact that, already, a quarter of all those in Europe who are affected by aviation noise live under the Heathrow flight path.

Not only that, but Labour decided to figure out if we could meet our carbon reduction targets after …

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Posted in Op-eds | 24 Comments
Marisha Ray

Opinion: Who’s phoning who? (with apologies to Aretha Franklin)

By Marisha Ray | Wed 29th August 2012 - 9:15 am

A year ago I heard that six degrees of separation are now down to four courtesy of the internet and social media. Some, if not most, in politics are “connectors”, people who know many and who like introducing them to each other, who make friends fast, keep them for life and remember all about them; that’s not just true of politics, but of successful people in most walks of life.

Will there be any point in let’s say 12 years time, in keeping information on who has been in touch with whom during the previous year? I choose 12 to match …

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Caron Lindsay

Nick Clegg calls for emergency taxes on wealthy

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 29th August 2012 - 8:06 am

Nick Clegg has told the Guardian that he wants to see a time limited extra tax for the wealthiest so that it can be seen that they are shouldering their share of the burden of the country’s economic challenges. He warned that, with the “economic war” we’re facing likely to be longer term than we thought, it wouldn’t be either “socially or politically sustainable  or acceptable” if the richest weren’t asked to pay more.

He said:

If we are going to ask people for more sacrifices over a longer period of time, a longer period of belt tightening as a country,

…

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Stephen Tall

In other news… Teather on pupil premium, State of play for Welsh Lib Dems & other stories

By Stephen Tall | Tue 28th August 2012 - 6:15 pm

Here’s a round-up of stories we haven’t had time to cover on the site this past few days…

Teather: Pupil premium ‘changing the way schools think’ (BBC)

The Liberal Democrat MP and minister at the Department of Education Sarah Teather, said the policy is about “changing the whole way schools think”. Speaking to The World At One, she said there is a “scandalous gap” between those from poor backgrounds and those from wealthier backgrounds. ” about focusing money on the individual child regardless of where that child is,” she told Martha Kearney. Under the policy, by this September schools in England

…

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George Kendall

How a deliverer can recruit two deliverers

By George Kendall | Tue 28th August 2012 - 3:49 pm

There are martyrs who will do anything for the Liberal Democrats … except ask for help.

They drive themselves to an early grave delivering thousands of leaflets, canvassing, and organising everything else in their local party.

Nothing scares them … except asking for help.

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Posted in Campaign Corner | Tagged and | 1 Comment
Joe Bourke

Opinion: Rock Salmon and Chips anyone?

By Joe Bourke | Tue 28th August 2012 - 1:30 pm

Fish and Chips

Before the rise in popularity of Indian curries, kebabs and Chinese take aways, battered fish and chips were considered the British national dish. Rock salmon was a staple – among the cheapest offerings in fish and chip shops around the country. However, demand for “rock salmon” devastated the shark’s population off the coasts of Britain and France, where the spiny dogfish is widely considered to be critically endangered.

The Common Fisheries Policy was introduced by the European Union in the 1970s to ensure a profitable and sustainable fishing industry – an objective in which it has completely failed.

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