From the BBC:
A Liberal Democrat MP has denied that his Russian-born parliamentary aide is a spy.
However Mike Hancock, who is a member of the Commons Defence Select Committee, has confirmed his assistant has been arrested and is now fighting deportation.
According to the Sunday Times, Katia Zatuliveter, 25, was detained on the orders of MI5 over espionage claims.
As Tom Brake’s website says:
Tom Brake MP for Carshalton and Wallington is taking is commitment to the Movember Campaign a step further. Unsatisfied with the run of the mill style of his current moustache, Tom is asking his constituents for input on how he should style his moustache as Movember nears its end.
Tom said, “I’m partial to one of the styles, but I promise to sport whatever tache my constituents vote for. If I find that it compliments my face well, I may even continue the look into December or the new year.”
Go visit his site to see the …
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is interviewed today in the Independent on Sunday, with the report inevitably featuring tuition fees:
He says he is still determined to tackle social disadvantage and educational underperformance, and says that a £150m national scholarship scheme will give a year’s free tuition to 18,000 students on free school meals. Universities wanting to breach the £6,000 cap on fees, to charge up to £9,000, will have to give another free year to the poorest students.
In the coming weeks, months and years he will need to “grit my teeth, display a bit of resilience, and explain calmly and
…
Sometimes political life is just one controversy after another. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, a special issue takes centre stage and becomes totemic – a key decision which sets the course for a whole period of government. So it was for Blair’s Iraq. So it is now for Clegg’s tuition fees.
William Cullerne Bown has described our dilemma well. The options are to trash the Coalition or to trash the Liberal Democrat brand. There is no third way. It is far too late to rethink whether we should have signed the NUS pledge, …
A quick update on the case of electoral fraud in Walsall, where father and son were charged. The father, Conservative councillor Mohammed Munir was cleared in September. His son, also a Conservative Party member but not a councillor, has now however been convicted.
Ali Hayder Munir has received a three month jail sentence after admitting to two charges of faking proxy vote applications in the run up to the 2008 elections for Walsall Council. The fake applications involved identifying real but unregistered people and then making electoral registration and proxy vote applications on their behalf. The government’s plans …
So wrote former Labour Party General Secretary Peter Watt in a piece over on Labour Uncut this week:
There is an arrogance at the heart of our politics that is going to make it difficult to really understand why we lost. It is an arrogance that says that we alone own morality and that we alone want the best for people. It says that our instincts and our motives alone are pure. It’s an arrogance that belittles others’ fears and concerns as “isms” whilst raising ours as righteous. We then mistakenly define ourselves as being distinctive from our opponents
…
Our political discourse has become increasingly dominated by insubstantial ‘buzzwords’ like ‘fairness’ and ‘progressive’ to the point where discussions about politics have begun to focus less on policy differences and more on how these words are to be used. Truly, British politics has entered an era in which the works of Wittgenstein are more relevant to the debate than any properly political philosopher or theorist.
This is perhaps exemplified by the debate within our party over the meaning of the word ‘fairness’. Prompted by Nick Clegg’s Hugo Young lecture, the Social Liberal Forum (SLF) recently wrote in an article here on LDV concerning this subject, and claimed that it means:
“…that society is fairer when absolute poverty is eliminated, the gap between rich and poor is reduced and where people can rise (and fall) through the income hierarchy regardless of their starting point.”
On this definition, fairness is a question of outcomes, rather than principle. It is a term subsidiary to the moral principles that dictate which outcomes are to count as good, and which assign values to the decisions made by individuals inasmuch as they move towards those outcomes.
I am going to argue that this definition is incorrect, that it speaks to an undeveloped concept of liberalism, and that adherence to it will result in our subsumption into a Labour Party moving inexorably rightwards. I will then sketch out a new definition of fairness that aims to avoid these consequences.
Compass director Neal Lawson and the Guardian’s John Harris have written a very thoughtful and forward-looking article for the New Statesman. It proposes a new direction for the centre left, which they call “New Socialism”.
The authors start from the premise that the Labour party suffered a stunning defeat in May. Currently, they say, the party is “sleepwalking from the car crash”. Old Labour ran out of steam. New Labour ran itself into the sand. Now, however, “the party seems to have switched off”, while “social democracy” dies throughout the world. Labour has “almost forgotten how to think, or even …
A new film from Tim Farron MP on what he wants to do when he takes over as President of the Liberal Democrats on 1 January (and watch out for an exciting close-up of the back of my neck):
As you may have heard on the news, High Court judges have dismissed the appeal by former Labour MP, Phil Woolas, against his conviction for illegal practices in the General Election.
There will now be a by-election in Oldham East and Saddleworth with a likely polling day of January 13th.
Last May, Elwyn Watkins lost by just 103 votes because of the lies told by Phil Woolas that have been condemned by the Court. A couple of days ago I canvassed one couple who told me: “We we’re going to vote Liberal Democrat, but when we read what Labour were saying about your …
Here’s your starter for ten in our Saturday slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…
With the news that Ed Miliband wants to give the public a share of the votes in future Labour leadership elections, and with the Conservative Party already having run several open primaries in which the public could vote for Parliamentary candidates, the Liberal Democrats are currently the only one of the three main parties looking to keep such party elections in the hands of party members only.
Should the Liberal Democrats stick to that position or should the rules for leader and/or …
It’s Friday. It’s five o’clock. Here’s a fistful of lists that sum up the LDV week:
1. Nick Clegg writes to Aaron Porter on ‘Right to Recall’ and tuition fees (55 comments) by Helen Duffett
2. Tuition fees: will Lib Dem MPs split three ways? (84 comments) by Mark Pack
3. Dear John Reid… (71 comments) by Mark Pack
4. Opinion: On Broken Promises (43 comments) by David Parkes
5. Opinion: Cleggmania in reverse, or the right side of the revolt (47 comments) by David Boyle
Net Neutrality
Lack of global focus
The Happiest People in the World
PPCs for the next General Election
SET IN STONE ?
(3rd December, 2006-09)
1. What does £10,000 mean to you? To Zac Goldsmith it’s a “very marginal tax benefit” (6 comments) by Stephen Tall, from 2009
2. Photographers: ’tis the season to be wary? (13 comments) by Helen Duffett, from 2009
3. Why British universities need student fees (47 comments) by Tim Leunig, from from 2008
4. How do policy working groups work? (14 comments) by Greg Simpson, from 2008
5. New poll: where on the political spectrum would you like the Lib Dems to be? (17 comments) by Stephen Tall, from 2007
(excluding Liberal Democrat Voice or its variants)
LDV has had sight of this letter, written by a group on facebook, and sent to Lib Dem MPs.
Dear Liberal Democrat MPs,
We, the undersigned students, recognise the benefits of tuition fee reform and urge you to vote for it.
We see that our annual loan repayments will fall due to the substantial rise in the loan repayment threshold, and that the grants system will become more generous. We see that part-time students will no longer be forced to pay up-front fees and that poorer graduates will benefit from a rise in the repayment threshold.
We feel that the NUS, by spreading …
A press release from the Editors’ Code of Practice Committee (the body that draws up the code with the Press Complaints Commission implements) brings the news:
From next year, corrections involving the Press Complaints Commission – which oversees press self regulation in the UK – will be agreed with the PCC in advance, under new rules agreed by the Editors’ Code Committee, which reviews the Code…
Code Committee secretary Ian Beales said: “This amendment is designed to help kill the myth that newspapers and magazines routinely bury corrections. Research conducted by the PCC has shown this to be untrue – nearly 85%
…
The BBC reports:
Phil Woolas has lost his bid to overturn an election court’s ruling that stripped him of his Commons seat and barred him from politics.
He narrowly won his Oldham East and Saddleworth seat in May but the result was declared void by an election court over his conduct in the campaign.
He argued that the election court’s interpretation of the law was flawed.
But three High Court judges upheld the election court’s decision. If he does not appeal there will be a by-election.
Lord Justice Thomas, Mr Justice Tugendhat and Mrs Justice Nicola Davies said that, although Mr Woolas was entitled
…
With the Yes to AV campaign getting into full swing (and attempts by the No camp to do the same), it is perhaps unsurprising that the majority of the recent commentary on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill has revolved around Part I of that Bill, which deals with the AV referendum (and the earlier post on LDV by Keith Sharp about the message of the pro-AV campaign is essential reading). But in the excitement, we seem to have allowed a very significant deadline to pass by – the deadline for the compilation of Electoral Rolls on …
Yesterday the Electoral Commission published information about the campaign spending by UK political parties during the 2010 general election. Buried near the end of the release was this news:
Two third parties – ‘UNISON – The Public Service Union’ and ‘Searchlight Information Services Ltd’ – failed to submit their spending return on time. The Commission has issued Searchlight Information Services with a fine. The Commission will issue UNISON – The Public Service Union with a fine when they submit their return.
The overall figures showed spending down from its heights of 2005, with 43 parties spending just under £32m for 2010 …
Figures released by the Electoral Commission this week reveal that while the Conservative Party outspent all the other parties put together in General Election 2010, it was the Liberal Democrats who got the best value for money.
The Liberal Democrats spent 70p for each vote gained; the Labour Party, 93p and the Conservatives, £1.54.
From the Independent:
The biggest change from the previous election was the dramatic depletion of the Labour campaign’s war chest. It spent just over £8m on the three month campaign, less than half the £16.7m spent by the Tories. The figure for the Liberal Democrats was £4.8m,
…
That’s The Guardian’s headline on this story:
Nick Clegg is seeking cabinet approval for his plans to secure an end to the practice of detaining children in immigration removal centres, with government sources suggesting he wants to see no children in detention by the spring…
Clegg will promise a timetable before Christmas for ending the practice, but he will say he is unable to announce a final deadline as the policy is wending its way through the cabinet home affairs committee.
He is also said to be limited by the pace of working out humane alternatives to locking up families with children who
…
Two pieces in the New Statesman have crossed my desk recently, and I thought I’d pass them on.
First, a quick Q&A with Lib Dem peer Julia Neuberger, including this rather positive outlook:
Are we all doomed?
Absolutely not! Not only are we not doomed, we’ve got a bloody great responsibility to turn things around when we feel as if we are.
Me, I always feel as if the Eco-Apocalypse is just around the corner.
And secondly, David Laws pens a piece in reply to Andrew Adonis’s review of his book.
I am one of those many politicians across all parties who admire Andrew Adonis.
…
In news this morning Home Office minister and Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone said that the government would be looking to get voluntary agreement from industry for gender pay audits, which would reveal cases of unreasonably disparity in pay between men and women. An attempt to introduce voluntary agreement previously fell apart under the Labour government.
There is also unimplemented legislation on the statue book to allow for mandatory pay audits. The legislation was introduced by Labour, but not brought into force (nor were they any immediate plans from Labour to do so).
Whilst the government is not moving straight away to …
Yesterday saw the publication of the interim report from Will Hutton’s Review of Fair Pay in the Public Sector, commissioned by the government.
The bald headline from the report is one of modest reform: moving toward recommending the introduction of a 20:1 maximum ratio between the top and bottom salary in any public body. This ratio is more generous than existing pay arrangements, but it is more radical than that superficially makes it appear.
First, the ratio has been increasingly and is likely to continue to do so, particularly with public sector structural reforms the government is planning. So introducing a cap that looks modest now may yet have a radical impact in the future.
Second, as I wrote in June:
It provides a fair pay benchmark which campaigners, pressure groups and the public can use more widely. Whatever is decided to be the formal extent of its applicability, there is nothing to stop people pushing for its wider adoption and there is good evidence that pay at the very top of the private sector has got out of control, increasing far faster than profits, turnover or other performance would justify. Partly because of the number of firms who set their top pay saying that it must compare well with the rest of the sector, there has been a self-reinforcing upward spiral in pay as everyone pushes up everyone else’s top pay.
A 20:1 ratio would still allow for generous top pay, but stop that cycle – if it ends up applying more widely. Whether or not that happens is not just a matter for central government. For example, even if the government holding the majority of shares in a bank does not mean the 20:1 ratio applies to that bank, that doesn’t stop a campaign to introduce such a ratio. The use of the 20:1 ratio across large parts of the economy will provide a clear benchmark that will make those sort of wider campaigns more effective.
It’s easy to see how over time the 20:1 ratio could become a standard applied to suppliers to the public sector, by ethical investment funds, by good corporate practice lobbyists and more.
The full report (or at least the executive summary) is well worth a read, particularly for information such as this graph:
You only had to open last week’s Observer to realise what a lot the party leader has on his plate at the moment. As well as dealing with the ‘Petition of 104’, the constant repetition in the paper of the ‘liar’ tag was pretty unpleasant.
Nick Clegg has managed to survive the battering with great dignity so far. But it is hardly surprising that the commentariat are currently writing off his party.
I think they are wrong. But the health of the Lib Dems depends on staying on the correct side of the revolt.
Just set aside …
Conservative MP Rob Wilson’s book on the formation of a coalition government in May 2010, 5 Days to Power: The Journey to Coalition Britain, plays up the drama of the events, talking of how “Gordon Brown and David Cameron were both determined to do whatever was necessary to secure the position of Prime Minister” as if the story is one of a cliff-hanging drama which could have gone either way.
Whilst the outcome is certainly significant for British political history, what the book is far less convincing on is that there was really any serious chance of a Labour – …
… We’d say a big thank you to the 59,273 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in November.
That’s a notch down on our October figure of c.63,000, but double the equivalent figure for November ’09 of c.29,000.
https://www.libdemvoice.org/wp-admin/post-new.php
This brings our absolute unique visitor readership for the last year to date (1 Dec 2009 – 30 Nov 2010) to 733,459, getting on for double the equivalent figure for 2008-09 of 333,175.
The 5 top-read stories during the month were:
…
We’re now getting an obligatory minimum of four mentions of the “blank sheet of paper” by David Cameron at each Prime Minister’s Questions session. I may be firing off prematurely, but Ed “Blank sheet” Miliband struggled today. Given the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast was generally sanguine, he had weak material to play with. But one wonders: who is he trying to kid?
Ed Miliband pointed out that the OBR say that unemployment will rise next year. This is because they’ve reduced their forecast for unemployment this year and left next year as it was. They’ve reduced the forecast of …
During last winter’s snow I blogged a few times about the legal scare stories about how people shouldn’t sweep away snow from outside their home (you can be sued! the world will end!), how clearing snow is traditional in Britain (sort of) and how some companies that tell us at great length about how much they care about local communities miss taking the obvious steps to show such care during a snow fall – clearing the snow from outside their premises.
Not to mention the way some journalists who spend their time loving to mock real or imagined nanny state actions suddenly think the state should do everything when it comes to snow clearing.
But this year? Well, it’s all looking rather different.
First up for credit is the government with its wise advice:
I’m sure many of you, like myself, watched Vince Cable’s interview on the Politics Show last week where he denied breaking any promises to oppose a rise in tuition fees, with a certain feeling of discomfort. But now I think the time has come to discuss a change in narrative.
Lib Dem MPs and Ministers (including up until now Vince Cable,) have a reputation for giving straight-forward honest answers to journalists questions without coming across as evasive or revisionist. However, with the tuition fee pledge to deny a promise was ever made and as such never broken is not a …
Yesterday the Government published its Scotland Bill. When this becomes law, a second and exciting phase in Scottish devolution will begin. We are strengthening Scotland’s future based on three principles: empowerment, accountability and stability.
This Bill starts its parliamentary process with the support of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Each of our parties – plus business and civil society – contributed to the Calman Commission, which drew up the blueprint for it. It is right that change of this sort should be built on a broad consensus. But now it is this government that …
On Saturday 50 phonebanks are opening in cities across the country as the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign launches the most ambitious voter contact programme in British political history.
The total capacity of the 50 phonebanks is set to exceed that of even the Conservative and Labour Party national phonebanks at their peaks, with volunteers phoning voters to persuade them to back a fairer voting system in next May’s referendum.
In addition to the phonebanks, a virtual phonebank will be launched in the new year letting …
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