Michael Moore

Michael Moore MP’s Westminster Notes

By Michael Moore | Fri 10th August 2012 - 9:23 am

Liberal Democrat Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Moore MP writes a regular column for newspapers in his Borders constituency. Here’s the latest edition.

Olympics

I think everyone would agree that the Olympics have been absolutely fantastic so far with medals won by Team GB in rowing, gymnastics, swimming and cycling and many other events. The team has done exceptionally well and it has been brilliant to see Scots such as Andy Murray, Heather Stanning, Chris Hoy, Katherine Grainger and Michael Jamieson winning medals. The support of Britons up and down the country has been brilliant and I know it has given …

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Stephen Tall

LDV poll: 54% of Lib Dem members back ‘new approach’ to boost economic growth

By Stephen Tall | Fri 10th August 2012 - 7:55 am

Lib Dem Voice polled our members-only forum recently to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. Some 500 party members have responded, and we’re publishing the full results.

54% of Lib Dems back ‘new approach’; 23% say ‘stick with Plan A’

LDV asked: Thinking about the Coalition Government’s economic policies, which of the following best reflects your view? (Compared to June 2012 results in brackets)

23% (-4%) – Borrowing more at a time when we already owe so much will simply make matters worse, as the country will have to pay …

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Posted in LDV Members poll | 18 Comments
The Voice

How to get the most out of your Lib Dem Voice comments

By The Voice | Thu 9th August 2012 - 5:10 pm

How to get a photo to appear next to your comments

You may have noticed that next to some people’s comments is a small picture of themselves, such as:


If you want a picture to appear next to your comments you need to do two things.

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Posted in Site news | 2 Comments
Toby Fenwick

Opinion: Can Corby smelt a new Coalition?

By Toby Fenwick | Thu 9th August 2012 - 2:25 pm

Louise Mensch’s resignation on 6 August has triggered a by-election in Corby on 15 November. Initially treated as a silly-season oddity, the likely Labour victory exposes the Coalition’s fragility post Cameron’s dropping of Lords Reform.

A tight Tory-Labour marginal, Corby has been a reliable bell-weather constituency since its creation in 1983. Retaken for the Conservatives by A-lister Louise Mensch in 2010, it has a Conservative majority of 1,951 on a swing of 3.6% – less than the 5.6% swing from Labour to Conservative across England as a whole. Given current national opinion polls, and the fact that the seat will be …

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Posted in Op-eds and Parliamentary by-elections | Tagged and | 64 Comments
Mark Pack

How Parliament walked eyes wide open into the Bob Ashford mess

By Mark Pack | Thu 9th August 2012 - 1:08 pm

Would-be Labour Police and Crime Commissioner candidate Bob Ashford is rightly getting a positive press and sympathy from across the political spectrum today for discovering he’s disqualified from standing thanks to a £5 fine he paid 46 years ago.

It is absurd that he can’t stand. It is an absurdity that Parliament deliberately decided to enact, for the ban does not arise from unintended side effects of another measure or from poor drafting. Instead, it was a deliberate decision to introduce an unprecedented restriction on who can stand in the Police …

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Tom Brake

Tom Brake MP writes… Politics is a profession of unrelenting pace

By Tom Brake | Thu 9th August 2012 - 11:58 am

In politics, no sooner have you seen off one challenge, than another appears on the horizon. At least the triathlon I completed had a clearly defined finish line. Yet, in politics, no sooner has one election ended, than you have to refocus on the next.

As a result, it’s hard to find time to sit down and take stock. But during this recess, I’ve set myself the challenge of putting some time aside to refocus on the last election and look at the detail behind the detail.

I’ve spent election after election trying to learn the lessons of what went wrong. I’ve …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 4 Comments
Stephen Tall

What factors Lib Dem members think are MOST to blame for UK economy remaining in recession

By Stephen Tall | Thu 9th August 2012 - 7:55 am

Lib Dem Voice polled our members-only forum recently to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. Some 500 party members have responded, and we’re publishing the full results.

A mix of factors, but global / Eurozone crisis blamed most for UK recession

LDV asked: Which of the following do you think is MOST to blame for Britain’s economy remaining in recession?

    19% – The deficit left by the Labour government
    29% – Global factors and the debt crisis in the Eurozone
    7% – The Coalition’s economic policies and austerity programme
    6%

…

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Posted in LDV Members poll | 18 Comments
Stephen Tall

More voters think the Tories have broken their Coalition Agreement promises than think the Lib Dems have

By Stephen Tall | Wed 8th August 2012 - 8:05 pm

Nick Clegg’s announcement on Monday – that the Lib Dems would end the party’s support for the boundary changes pledged in the Coalition Agreement in response to David Cameron’s failure to persuade his party to back the Lords reform pledged in the Coalition Agreement – has triggered a collective how-very-dare-he whine from the right-wing commentariat. Unreliable, betrayal, treachery… and those are some of the kinder words being uttered.

So what does the public think of the Lib Dems’ and Conservatives’ role in the Coalition: how far do they think the parties have stuck to their respective sides of the deal? Well, …

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 23 Comments
Tony Little

Book review: William Gladstone – New Studies & Perspectives

By Tony Little | Wed 8th August 2012 - 2:50 pm

Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and William Ewart Gladstone, giants of the nineteenth century, were all born in 1809 yet as Frank M Turner argues in this collection of essays Darwin and Lincoln are much better remembered today. I am sure this is true even for Liberal Democrats. In the final essay, Eugenio Biagini reflects on a 1992 Economist front cover describing Gladstone as ‘A prophet of the Left’. Gladstone’s legacy has been appropriated by Thatcherites who over simplify the Victorian Liberal view of the roles of government and private enterprise. …

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Posted in Books | Tagged and | 2 Comments
Nick Tyrone

Opinion: Why scrapping Lords Reform is ultimately a disaster for Cameron

By Nick Tyrone | Wed 8th August 2012 - 12:04 pm

Many of the more right-of-centre newspapers are declaring that the government calling time on Lords Reform is a victory for Cameron personally. Iain Martin’s piece summarises this thesis.

I would argue the precise opposite. I think the whole episode has been a disaster for Cameron and damaging to the Conservative party overall, albeit in a minor way, at least when you take the fact that their only even vaguely electable possible leader has been politically debased out of the equation.

A question that has hung around the neck of Cameron since the near miss of the 2010 election is this: would …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 15 Comments
The Voice

How you can help Liberal Democrat Voice

By The Voice | Wed 8th August 2012 - 10:25 am

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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Posted in Site news | 1 Comment
Antony Hook

Opinion: Unelected Lords are against the spirit of the European Convention on Human Rights

By Antony Hook | Wed 8th August 2012 - 9:22 am

For as long as philosophers and political campaigners have asserted that certain rights are basic, universal or inalienable, the right to elect one’s legislators has generally figured in those rights.

England’s 1689 Bill of Rights protected the right to elect Members of Parliament without interference from the Crown.  In France the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man guaranteed the right to vote. In America, five separate Articles of the US Bill of Rights protect voting rights and both Houses are elected under the Constitution.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides:

Article 21

(1) Everyone has the right to take part

…

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , and | 33 Comments
Paul Tyler

Paul Tyler writes… Conservative crisis, Labour leaderless

By Paul Tyler | Tue 7th August 2012 - 5:00 pm

It’s a good job I’m not a betting man, having said here in July “my bets are strongly against the Government giving up at this point”.  But now we know:  David Cameron’s authority within the Conservative Party is so weak that he cannot even persuade his MPs to support an agreed manifesto commitment, and a Bill unanimously supported by his Cabinet.  Cameron and Osborne voted for the 80% elected component as long ago as 2003, yet this summer their right-wing backbenchers simply would not accept elections at all.

Unsurprisingly, concern for future of their own constituencies – as boundary changes …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 42 Comments
Chris Davies

Chris Davies writes: A view from the North (1/3)

By Chris Davies | Tue 7th August 2012 - 4:15 pm

From time to time I try to find out what my party members in the North West think about the issues that most concern me.  We do our best to make sure that the questions are serious and that we do not try to ‘lead’ members into giving particular responses.

Of course I always hope that my own views will be generally reflected amongst the membership, and I also note that the answers we get do not always reflect preconceived views.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 3 Comments
George Kendall

Eight ways to help Team LD win gold in 2015

By George Kendall | Tue 7th August 2012 - 3:03 pm

The Olympics can be like politics.  The public remember a single moment of triumph or disaster.  But much of the fight to reach the winner’s podium is the years of relentless training.

Parliamentary elections are similar.  Any Liberal Democrat who hopes to become an MP with a half-hearted six month campaign is living in denial.  It takes years, working to build up the local organisation, meeting the electorate, month in, month out.

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Tim Leunig

Opinion: What the Tory backbench rebellion means for parliament

By Tim Leunig | Tue 7th August 2012 - 1:35 pm

Failing to get reform of the House of Lords through the Commons shows a parliamentary asymmetry. There are enough Tory backbenchers to defeat the government, but not enough Liberal Democrat backbenchers to do so. One party’s backbenchers have de facto veto power, but the other’s do not.

There are three responses to this constitutional oddity.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , and | 18 Comments

Opinion: With all constituencies declared, Labour has an overall majority

By Charles Beaumont | Tue 7th August 2012 - 12:01 pm

No, I didn’t just get in a muddle about what year we’re in.  But the collapse of Lords Reform has brought us, inevitably, to this point. Labour will win the next election with an overall majority.

Three years may be long enough for anything to happen. But consider this: it is hard to see the Conservative vote in 2015 being an increase on their 2010 showing. Since 2010 we’ve had the Euro crisis, George Osborne’s U-turn fest, a healthy reminder of the symbiotic relationship between the Murdoch empire and the Tory party and the longest recession in more than 50 …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 46 Comments
John Cross

The Independent View: FairCopUK – a new campaign for police honesty

By John Cross | Tue 7th August 2012 - 10:39 am

FairCopUK is a new campaign for the UK police to be required to be honest when explaining what your rights are and what powers they have. I was inspired to set up the campaign by Richard Taylor’s suggestion that the police should not be allowed to lie or mislead without justification.

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Mark Pack

Twitter, trolling and the law

By Mark Pack | Tue 7th August 2012 - 8:50 am

Last week I took part in a discussion on Voice of Russia radio about the problem of abuse and threats on Twitter. We talked about questions such as what the law should allow and what Twitter’s terms and conditions should permit.

You can listen to the full discussion, in which I joined Vanessa Barnett, a partner at Charles Russell LLP, Carl Gardner, a former government lawyer who writes about law at Head of Legal blog, and Ian Cram, a Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at Leeds University:

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Posted in News | Tagged , and | 4 Comments
Stephen Tall

62% of Lib Dem members agree with Clegg decision to vote down boundary changes over Tories’ Lords reform retreat

By Stephen Tall | Tue 7th August 2012 - 8:15 am

Lib Dem Voice polled our members-only forum recently to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. 446 party members responded, and we’re publishing the full results.

What party members say about Tory breach of Coalition Agreement

LDV asked: Within the package of constitutional reforms proposed in the Coalition Agreement was a pledge to reduce the number of parliamentary constituencies and re-draw them to ensure each individual’s vote counts roughly equally no matter where they live. It is believed by electoral experts this will benefit the Conservatives and have an adverse …

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Posted in LDV Members poll | Tagged , and | 24 Comments
Mark Pack

Lords reform: what the failure means for the Coalition, David Cameron and Nick Clegg

By Mark Pack | Tue 7th August 2012 - 8:06 am

First up, here’s Nick Robinson’s take on yesterday’s events followed by myself, via the BBC News Channel:

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Posted in News and YouTube | Tagged , , , , , , and | 10 Comments
Mark Pack

The House of Lords just got even more dangerous for Cameron

By Mark Pack | Mon 6th August 2012 - 8:52 pm

Imagine the situation.

You are a Liberal Democrat peer.

You have voted for several measures you did not like because they were in the Coalition Agreement.

You have now seen the Conservative Party walk away from a major part of the agreement.

You now know your place in Parliament is secure for a good few more years without the party’s whips being able to hold over you anything about your fate when reforms kick in, even if they should wish.

How do you think you are going to vote on future issue after issue that is in the Coalition Agreement but not the LibDem manifesto?

The …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 17 Comments
Kevin McNamara

Opinion: We are Liberal cherries in a very Conservative cake

By Kevin McNamara | Mon 6th August 2012 - 3:53 pm

Lords Reform might have only gone missing, but we should prepare for the idea that we might find a body.

We should first realise that we haven’t yet made a single, big achievement in this government. That is not to say that I do not think that the Pupil Premium is a bad thing – I am a passionate advocate. The same with the £10K tax threshold; I even believe we could move forward on that. These are good achievements, but not legacies.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 29 Comments
Chris Rennard

Chris Rennard writes… Restoring balance to the Coalition

By Chris Rennard | Mon 6th August 2012 - 2:42 pm

Nick Clegg’s statement dropping Lords Reform in this Parliament should come as no surprise following David Cameron’s failure to persuade barely half of his backbench MPs to support the Government’s Bill on this.

Two years ago, Conservative MPs were supporting a Queen’s Speech that made explicit the Coalition agreement to elect members of the House of Lords through Proportional Representation.

The Coalition Agreement is the contract that underwrites this government. In its name many Liberal Democrats have voted for compromises in legislation that we would not on our own have put forward.

So, the question is what to do when one side fails to honour its side of the contract?

You act swiftly and decisively, even ruthlessly, as Nick Clegg has done, to redress the balance. Hence, the boundary changes are no more.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , , , , and | 82 Comments
David Thorpe

Opinion: Liberal Democrats should abandon support for the single currency

By David Thorpe | Mon 6th August 2012 - 2:23 pm

Despite the media perception of the Liberal Democrats as a party of Euro fanatics, there is arguably a wider divergence of opinion

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 31 Comments
Mark Pack

Quick, let’s bury the good news about teenagers

By Mark Pack | Mon 6th August 2012 - 12:25 pm

OK, let’s just keep this between you and me.

Don’t want to let anyone else know in case it upsets them. We both know how unsettling it can be for people who love to moan about how the country is going to the dogs* and how feckless the young are to be confronted with any evidence to the contrary.

I think I just about got away with sharing that poll finding with you last year about how the number of people thinking our society is broken has fallen.

So fingers crossed, let’s …

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Posted in News | 3 Comments

Opinion: Why we need to tackle homophobic bullying now

By Sarah Rose | Mon 6th August 2012 - 10:23 am

In recent years, Liberal Democrats have been political frontrunners in identifying ways to tackle the insidious issue of homophobic bullying in our schools. In a 2010 interview with Attitude, Nick Clegg called for all schools – including faith schools – to implement anti-homophobia bullying policies and teach that homosexuality is “normal and harmless”. Our 2010 manifesto said that we would “confront bullying, including homophobic bullying, and include bullying prevention in teacher training”,

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 11 Comments
Stephen Tall

Danny Alexander: UK’s triple-A credit rating “not be-all and end-all”

By Stephen Tall | Mon 6th August 2012 - 9:05 am

Lib Dem chief secretary to the treasury Danny Alexander has signalled an interesting shift in the government’s economic approach, downplaying the significance to the economy of the UK’s continuing triple-A credit rating. Here’s what he told the BBC (courtesy of PoliticsHome):

“The credit rating is not the be-all and end-all. What matters is have we got the right policy mix for the country to get people back into work, to support economic growth, to deal with the huge problems in our public finances and the credit agencies reflect on those things and the ratings they give are a reflection of

…

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Stephen Tall

The Lib Dem membership slump: how it compares and how we can respond

By Stephen Tall | Mon 6th August 2012 - 8:25 am

The Lib Dems published its statement of accounts this week, including the most recent membership figure for the calendar year 2011. If you don’t want to know the score, look away now…

As at 31 December, 2011, there were 48,934 Lib Dem members. That’s 25% down on the previous year, 2010, when there were c.65,000 members. True, that figure was inflated by the ‘Cleggmania’ of the 2010 election and the initial excitement of the Coalition, but it is still down 17% compared to the pre-election year, 2009.

Though this is by some way the sharpest recorded decline in the modern party’s membership, …

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Posted in News | Tagged , , , and | 34 Comments
The Voice

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #285

By The Voice | Sun 5th August 2012 - 7:00 pm

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 285th 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 (29 July – 4 August, 2012), together with a hand-picked quintet, normally courtesy of LibDig, 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:

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