Paul Haydon

Opinion: Britain and the EU-Liberal Democrats need to help reduce the democratic deficit

By Paul Haydon | Tue 17th July 2012 - 4:14 pm

Following the launch of the Balance of Competences review of EU powers last week, the next major debate within the coalition looks set to be over Britain’s relationship with Europe. Nick Clegg has emphasised that the review should not be used as a way to exploit the eurozone crisis and carve out a special EU deal forBritain. However, many Tory eurosceptics will no doubt view it as a platform to push for a significant repatriation of powers, in the run-up to an eventual referendum on EU …

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Mary Reid

LibLink: Stephen Williams says MPs should move their money from big banks

By Mary Reid | Tue 17th July 2012 - 3:20 pm

In an article in The Spectator, Stephen Williams argues:

The Libor scandal has shown the UK’s banking sector in its worst light. The public has lost trust in the big banks and are concerned that their politicians are more interested in political point scoring than the urgent task of fixing our broken banking system.

That is why, last year, I joined the Move Your Money campaign, which urges the public to use their consumer power to change the behaviour of the big banks by moving their money, or at least some of it, to ethical, local or mutual financial institutions.

He has …

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Posted in LibLink | Tagged and | 1 Comment
Paul Walter

LibLink: Proof that politics is for young people

By Paul Walter | Tue 17th July 2012 - 2:23 pm

Well done to Councillor Victor Chamberlain who has had an article published in the Manchester Evening News entitled “I’m proof that politics IS for young people” with the byline “Manchester’s youngest councillor aged 22”. Here is a taster:

Many friends think I was mad to get involved in politics at a young age, but in fact it was inevitable after the Iraq War. I felt strongly that the action being taken in my name was completely immoral, and I wanted to find a way to voice my opposition. In Manchester, effective opposition came only from the Liberal Democrats. When I joined

…

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Alex Smethurst

Opinion: The myth of the referendum convention

By Alex Smethurst | Tue 17th July 2012 - 12:41 pm

All three major parties committed to Lords Reform in their 2010 General Election manifestos, however Labour promised an elected Second Chamber via a referendum. This explains why Labour MPs dragged their heels during the Second Reading of the Lords Reform Bill, though a cynic may suggest that Labour did so not as its job as Opposition but because of a more insidious agenda to break up the Coalition. Nevertheless, Labour profess that their opposition stems from a belief that ‘constitutional convention’ requires that the Bill must include a …

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The Liberator Collective

New edition of Liberator

By The Liberator Collective | Tue 17th July 2012 - 11:05 am

 

The latest issue of Liberator magazine (issue no.354 – July 2012) was mailed to subscribers last week. If by chance you have not yet got round to taking out a subscription, here’s a summary of the contents:

  • The editorial column Commentary calls for tougher bank regulation in the wake of the Barclays scandal. It also calls on the party’s Federal Finance and Administration Committee to produce the evidence for its decision to defy both the conference and the Federal Conference Committee and persist with police accreditation for conference representatives.
  • The insider

…

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Merlene Emerson

The new Naoroji Award

By Merlene Emerson | Tue 17th July 2012 - 9:36 am

Dadabhai Naoroji

I have written here before about the case for community outreach by our Party and cited amongst other statistics results from the Ethnic Minority British Election Survey (EMBES) which showed in the 2010 elections: 68% of ethnic minorities had voted Labour, 16% Conservatives and only 14% Liberal Democrats.

To encourage local parties to do more to promote support from diverse communities, we have of course implemented various initiatives. These range from the appointment of a National Diversity Advisor for the Party in Issan Ghazni (2007-2010) and permanent staff …

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Stephen Tall

What the IMF says about the UK and global economy

By Stephen Tall | Tue 17th July 2012 - 8:25 am

The economic headlines have been dominated by the IMF’s latest forecast, with seemingly grim news: UK economic growth forecasts slashed by worried IMF.

The Guardian contrasts the IMF’s downgraded prospects for UK growth with the more stable picture for other countries:

The IMF said in its latest World Economic Outlook that GDP across the UK – which is currently in recession – will increase by 1.4% in 2013 – a 0.6 percentage point cut from its previous 2% forecast. Only Spain has a bigger downgrade next year after the IMF said it will lose 0.7 percentage points and maintain its

…

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Stephen Tall

What Lib Dem members think of the impact of the Coalition

By Stephen Tall | Tue 17th July 2012 - 7:45 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 560 party members responded, and we’ve been publishing the full results.

Party members give Lib Dems 7 out of 10 for influence within the Coalition

How would you rate the extent of the Liberal Democrat influence within the Coalition Government, where 10 is highly influential, and 1 indicates no influence.

    1: 1%
    2: 4%
    3: 9%
    4: 8%
    5: 9%
    Lacking influence = 31% (n/c)
    6: 16%
    7: 27%
    8: 19%
    9: 4%
    10: 2%
    Achieving influence = 68% (+1)

This is the second time we’ve …

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Posted in LDV Members poll | 4 Comments
Paul Walter

Opinion: Hollow Crown – Is this what the BBC is for?

By Paul Walter | Mon 16th July 2012 - 5:23 pm

I’ll immediately rubbish my own title. Of course, the BBC does thousands of things. Its beauty is that hundreds of thousands of people can point to be one thing and say “That is what the BBC is for” – be it “Strictly”, Greg James or BBC Radio Ulster.

For me, if I was to identify one programme series which summarises all that is great about the BBC, it would be “Hollow Crown“, a quartet of Shakespeare kingly history plays currently showing on BBC2.

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Greg Judge

Opinion: Presidents, mops and turkeys – The future of House of Lords Reform?

By Greg Judge | Mon 16th July 2012 - 3:53 pm

Whilst recalling the successes of the 1997 General Election, in which the Liberal Democrats earned a net gain of 28 seats, Paddy Ashdown brought his speech at a commemoratory reception hurtling into the present with talk of the now embattled Lords Reform Bill.

In a manner delivered only by a character such as Paddy, he proclaimed that the current proposals were of Lincolnian proportions in that they existed to

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Mark Pack

The Politics of Coalition: How the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government Works

By Mark Pack | Mon 16th July 2012 - 2:25 pm

Robert Hazell and Ben Yong’s work, The Politics of Coalition: How the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government Works, is a very readable volume, written mostly in the style of an introductory politics textbook and based on extensive interviews with the participants, including at very senior levels.

The book is well done, readable, comprehensive and has a few gems lurking in the revelations from all the interviews, such as the limited involvement of Andrew Lansley and Paul Burstow in drafting the health section of the Coalition Agreement.

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NewsHound

Major railway modernisation announced

By NewsHound | Mon 16th July 2012 - 2:15 pm

From the BBC:

A £9.4bn package of investment in the railways in England and Wales, including £4.2bn of new schemes, has been unveiled by the government.

The plans include electrification of the Midland Main Line between Bedford and Sheffield.

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 17 Comments
NewsHound

LibLink: The Lib Dem political plan for the next year

By NewsHound | Mon 16th July 2012 - 11:50 am

Writing over on the Huffington Post, Lib Dem Voice’s Mark Pack has been taking a look at the party’s plan for the next year:

The plan of senior Liberal Democrats is to focus heavily on delivering and communicating the four priorities from the front page of the party’s 2010 manifesto:

  • “fair taxes – that put money back in your pocket
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Posted in LibLink | Tagged , and | 6 Comments
Alex Smethurst

Opinion: Lords reform – the lies & lessons from the AV referendum

By Alex Smethurst | Mon 16th July 2012 - 10:23 am

I invite you to join me in a thought experiment. Let’s imagine Lords Reform has been passed as an Act. But let’s also imagine the Act includes a commitment to a referendum…

A Lords Reform referendum will be perceived as a Liberal Democrat ‘fix’, much like the AV referendum. This perceived fix, in the eyes of the electorate, is personified, regrettably, in Nick Clegg. According to UK Polling Report, Clegg’s

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

Opinion: Make the bankers pay

By Charles Beaumont | Mon 16th July 2012 - 9:23 am

Back in May I posted on a distinctive message for the next election. This post looks at the defining global political issue since 2008: no, not the House of Lords; the financial sector.

Long before the LIBOR scandal, the financial industry dragged millions into poverty, awarding the perpetrators staggering salaries. But you already knew that. What we need is an intelligent, credible policy response. It is tempting to

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 21 Comments
Stephen Tall

What Lib Dem members think about internet surveillance and free speech

By Stephen Tall | Mon 16th July 2012 - 7:45 am

Lib 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. Some 560 party members responded, and we’re publishing the full results. (Apologies for the delay in reporting this one, by the way: slipped through the net.)

68% Lib Dem members oppose Draft

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Posted in LDV Members poll | Tagged , , and | 5 Comments
The Voice

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #282

By The Voice | Sun 15th July 2012 - 7:00 pm

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 282nd 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 (8-14 July, 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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Stephen Tall

In other news… Thurso on banking, Ward on immigration, Swales on G4S & other stories

By Stephen Tall | Sun 15th July 2012 - 5:25 pm

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

John Thurso MP to lead banking inquiry (John O’Groat Journal)

CAITHNESS, Sutherland and Easter Ross MP John Thurso has been elected to lead an inquiry into how the banking system is run. The Lib Dem politician has been chosen as one of five representatives who will

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Stephen Tall

How Jeremy Thorpe (and then Nick Clegg) broke the electoral system

By Stephen Tall | Sun 15th July 2012 - 2:45 pm

Democratic Audit this week published its latest analysis, its depressing conclusions summed up by The Guardian’s headline British democracy in terminal decline.

A fascinating aspect of the Audit, even for those of us still scarred by the rejection of electoral reform in the 2011 referendum, is its detailed dissection of how the First-Past-The-Post system is failing democracy. And in particular the pinpointing of the year when FPTP started to go bad: 1974, and the Liberal insurgence under Jeremy Thorpe, when the party increased its support from 7.5% in 1970 to 19.3%.

This, say the Audit’s authors, marked a turning point in the UK’s electoral history, a moment when ended the dominance of the ‘Golden Age’ of FPTP (1950-70) and introduced instead its ‘Dysfunctional Age’ (1979-2005):

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Stephen Tall

Why the Lib Dems cannot end the Coalition. And what we should do to try and rescue it.

By Stephen Tall | Sun 15th July 2012 - 8:55 am

How do we revitalise the Coalition? I realise that for many Lib Dems that’s the very last question on your minds. After a week in which Tory rebel MPs forced the Government to delay a key plank of the Coalition Agreement — House of Lords reform — rather more Lib Dems, and not just the ‘usual suspects’, are turning to the question: how quickly can we be shot of the Tories?

After all, didn’t enough of our MPs walk the plank on the Coalition’s behalf on tuition fees, a policy directly counter to the Lib Dem manifesto? Meanwhile David Cameron cannot even persuade his party to back a reform that’s featured in the last three Tory manifestos. So what’s the purpose of the Coalition any more?

I get the emotional pull of the argument… but it doesn’t persuade me.

Coalition matters more to the Lib Dems than the Tories

The simple truth is that it’s more important for the Lib Dems to try and make this coalition work than it is for the Tories.

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Posted in News and Op-eds | Tagged , , , , and | 65 Comments
Mark Pack

Nick Clegg gives the William Beveridge lecture

By Mark Pack | Sat 14th July 2012 - 6:28 pm

Nick Clegg gives the William Beveridge lecture

Speaking at the at Social Liberal Forum Conference 2012 on Saturday morning, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg gave the William Beveridge memorial lecture. Here are my tweets of the event, interspersed with some links to older blog posts that expanded on some of the issues which came up.

Storified by Mark Pack · Sat, Jul 14 2012 10:25:17

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Stephen Tall

LibLink: Long reach of the Laws

By Stephen Tall | Sat 14th July 2012 - 6:15 pm

David Laws may have resigned from the Coalition’s cabinet two years ago, but (after an initial period of wondering whether to quit politics altogether) his influence hasn’t actually waned much. His interests range across economic and social policy: though he was the party’s education spokesman in opposition, he was a natural fit as chief secretary to the treasury in government, however briefly. He is widely expected to make a return to government at the next reshuffle, …

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Posted in LibLink | Tagged , and | 8 Comments
The Voice

LDVideo: Introducing the Land Value Tax

By The Voice | Sat 14th July 2012 - 3:05 pm

The Liberal Democrat campaign for Action on Land Tax and Economic reform has recently released a new video to explain the virtues of a Land Value Tax — described by ALTER as ‘making taxation more progressive and addressing the injustice of economic rent, it would encourage development and boost the economy. It’s the kind of measure that our country is in desperate need of right now.’

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Mark Pack

A longer watch for the weekend: explanations of electoral bias

By Mark Pack | Sat 14th July 2012 - 9:25 am

Something a little longer for the weekend – a talk explaining how the British electoral system works, and in particular why some parties need more votes to get a winning number of seats than other parties:

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Posted in Election law and YouTube | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Two people wrongly detained after communications interception errors

By Mark Pack | Sat 14th July 2012 - 8:55 am

For the last decade and more, the publication of the Interception of Communication Commissioner’s Annual Reports has gone largely unremarked, even when they have contained news of copious errors or news (by omission) of a Commissioner not investigating evidence of widespread breaking of the rules he is meant to oversee (see my previous posts).

This year, however, with the Draft Communications Bill hanging over us and given a helping hand by a deft MP, it is rather different, as this sampling of coverage shows:

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The Voice

The LDV Friday Five: 13 July 2012

By The Voice | Fri 13th July 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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Rebecca Taylor

Opinion: How my life changed forever – 100 days in!

By Rebecca Taylor | Fri 13th July 2012 - 3:16 pm

At the start of this year I was a Lib Dem from Yorkshire working and studying in London who according to some journalists was an “unknown” – although I was quite well known in certain Lib Dem circles, especially for my quiches! The resignation of Diana Wallis, as Lib Dem MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber changed all that.

In 2009 I was third on the Lib Dem list for Yorkshire and the Humber. When you are third on a regional list and the …

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Posted in Europe / International and Op-eds | Tagged , , , , , and | 13 Comments
Sara Bedford

Lib Link: How does David Cameron charm the Liberal Democrats?

By Sara Bedford | Fri 13th July 2012 - 2:17 pm

Over at his day job at MHP Communications, Mark Pack turns his thoughts to how David Cameron should react to , stating that the Prime Minister has ‘two tricky problems to mull over’.

The first, and most talked about, is how to get his party to back some measure of Lords reform else risk seeing Liberal Democrats outside ministerial ranks (and even some inside) see it as open season on future legislation as it goes through Parliament. The sort of effective and tight whipping operations that saw Liberal Democrats in both Houses votes for a range of measures they did

…

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The Voice

From today’s Lib Dem News

By The Voice | Fri 13th July 2012 - 1:08 pm

By Howard of Lib Dem News

Posted in Humour | Tagged | 1 Comment
Bill le Breton

Opinion: Why a referendum on second chamber reform would be good for the party

By Bill le Breton | Fri 13th July 2012 - 11:56 am

The Liberal Democrats built their electoral success on the three ‘Cs’: Concentrate, Communicate and Campaign. The campaigning zeal of the Party took us from a handful of councillors and a few MPs dotted around the Celtic fringe in the mid ‘Seventies to a truly national party, with over 3,500 councillors, 60MPs, power and influence in the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament, power and influence in over 150 councils, from Newcastle to Newquay, Liverpool to Islington.

Campaigning is the life blood of the movement we endeavour to create around the drive to seize and redistribute power. We do this by the simple means of helping people to take and use their power in their communities. Campaigning succeeds by involving people beyond the party in our campaigns. It energies and strengthens communities and nurtures the tolerance that comes from understanding others and identifying the common causes that link us. These common causes centre upon the injustice stemming from subjection to illegitimate power – be that banks that gamble with our money and provide shocking service, supermarkets that drive farmers to ruin and fix prices or bureaucrats who entangle citizens in red tape and restrict people’s opportunities.

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