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PMQs: Moustaches, strawberries and anoraks

By Paul Walter | Thu 25th November 2010 - 10:49 pm

There were signs this week that Prime Minister’s Questions was getting serious and considered at long last.

Ed Miliband asked a very anorakky question about the government taking away “all the funding from the highly successful school sport partnerships”

There followed an almost scholarly exchange of statistics which left me none the wiser. Miliband’s stats said Labour improved school sports. Cameron’s said they ruined it. Was Miliband right? Was Cameron right? It was beyond me. Except I did notice that Cameron seemed to be almost exclusively quoting figures on “competitive sports”. Ah. The old Tory Daily Mail rant. “Schools don’t do races …

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Posted in PMQs | Tagged david cameron, ed miliband, julian huppert, mike crockart and tom brake | 23 Comments

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The IFS answers… Is increasing VAT progressive?

By Mark Pack | Thu 25th November 2010 - 12:28 pm

For the final part in our question and answer series with the IFS on a range of questions about their views on government policy it is the turn of VAT. The impact of increasing VAT is an issue on which I’ve changed my mind. I used to think that increasing VAT was a bad idea because it would be a regressive tax change. But when the issue shot up the political agenda earlier this year, it was the IFS’s reasoning that made me doubt that. Here is the current version of that reasoning (which of course is subject to the same …

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Posted in News | Tagged institute for fiscal studies and vat | 71 Comments

Opinion: Beware of Tesco towns

By Merlene Emerson | Thu 25th November 2010 - 11:24 am

The Government’s chief design adviser has warned against the danger of supermarket led developments in town centres. Mixed-use developments involving the building of housing, schools and parks linked to supermarkets are often badly conceived and may not thrive in the long term, said the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) in its report published this week.

While developers are keen to sign up a key anchor tenant such as Tesco, Sainsbury or Homebase to lease their retail and commercial spaces, this may not be what residents or local communities want or need. A formula that works for an out-of-town …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged hammersmith and fulham and planning | 13 Comments

A lesson from history in tackling terrorism

By Mark Pack | Thu 25th November 2010 - 8:54 am

Antonia Fraser’s lively and authoritative history The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 not only provides an entertaining account of the events that have turned November 5th into an annual fireworks celebration but also throws a light on how to tackle terrorism. For the early seventeenth century world which spawned Guy Fawkes, Robert Catesby and an attempt to blow up Parliament was one in which there were widespread fears of plots and violence, motivated by differing religious views that led some (but not all) to see the future as inevitably bringing a violent confrontation for religious supremacy. Fears of terrorist conspiracy by an extremist minority in a religion that nominally owned obedience to an overseas religious figure all sounds rather contemporary.

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Posted in Books and News | Tagged antonia fraser | 6 Comments

January by-election in Oldham East & Saddleworth (but we can win before Christmas)

By Mark Pack | Wed 24th November 2010 - 6:39 pm

Item: The by-election team in Oldham East & Saddleworth have confirmed that Phil Woolas’s judicial review judgement won’t be given this week.

Item: According to Oldham Council, the last date in 2010 they can run a by-election is December 16th.

Item: Students of election law will already have calculated that the writ for a by-election on December 16th would have to be moved this week.

The result? We’re looking at the election being held very early in January.

I’ve written before about how by-elections campaigns have become shorter in recent years. Oldham East & Saddleworth will be a longer campaign – similar to …

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Posted in Parliamentary by-elections | Tagged elwyn watkins and oldham east and saddleworth | 28 Comments

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Chris White writes…‘We can’t keep meeting like this…’

By Chris White | Wed 24th November 2010 - 5:55 pm

There are some issues that the public finds it difficult to care about and councillors find fascinating. One of these is the governance model for local government – about to change once more.

The Coalition, bafflingly, is about to reintroduce the committee system (or rather to allow its reintroduction) while also forcing 12 large cities to have executive mayors. There is next to no intellectual rationale for facing both ways at once. Nevertheless it is probably a good idea to think more carefully about the basic principles here.

What is the committee system? Why do we instinctively prefer committees and oppose ‘Cabinets’ …

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Posted in Local government and Op-eds | 11 Comments

Delivering a fair start for every child‏ – Sarah Teather on new Schools White Paper

By Helen Duffett | Wed 24th November 2010 - 3:26 pm

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Posted in News | Tagged education, pupil premium and sarah teather | 3 Comments

Opinion: “The Importance of Teaching” White Paper – putting Lib Dem policy into action?

By James Kempton | Wed 24th November 2010 - 3:08 pm

After a year’s work in the run up to the General Election co-writing the Liberal Democrats’ Equity and Excellence education policy paper with other members of the 5-19 Education Policy Working Group, I opened the Coalition Government’s first education White Paper with understandable trepidation.

Nothing can be more important than giving every child a fair start in life, but the education system inherited from Labour offered some young people pretty much the best education system anywhere in the world, while leaving others ill-equipped, under-funded, and lacking the skills needed to get on in life.

The White Paper launched by the government today, called The Importance of Teaching takes as its starting point the unflattering international comparisons of the performance and skills of our pupils. Its critique of where and why the school system is underperforming is one that will be very familiar to most Liberal Democrats. It is a vision for a system based on excellence, underpinned by freedom and fairness: an education system which challenges low aspiration and achievement and where school-level innovation and diversity are seen as strengths to be welcomed.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged education, local government association, ofsted, pupil premium and sats | 29 Comments

Huge public support for removing sex discrimination in royal inheritance

By Mark Pack | Wed 24th November 2010 - 1:58 pm

With the Royal Family very much in the news at the moment, a recent YouGov poll asked if people thought the rules favouring men over women when it comes to succeeding to the throne should be changed:

Currently male children of the monarch takeprecedence over female children in terms of thesuccession. Do you think men and women shouldbe treated equally in the line of succession to the throne?

Should 70%
Should not 17%

Both Lynne Featherstone and Evan Harris took up this issue in the last Parliament, with Lynne getting widespread media coverage for her mini-campaign and commenting:

For me the basic

…

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Posted in News | Tagged evan harris, lynne featherstone and royal family | 14 Comments

The IFS answers… What about wider policy impacts?

By Mark Pack | Wed 24th November 2010 - 12:23 pm

Yesterday I made the point that the way in which the IFS presents its estimates as to how progressive or not government measures are risks giving an over-precise impression bearing in mind the data and methodological issues the IFS has acknowledged. That is an issue which comes up again in the answers from the IFS in this post, where the IFS’s position can be summarised as ‘yes, our calculations are not perfect but they are the best that can be reasonably done’. That does mean there is plenty of scope for people to place undue weight on their …

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Posted in News | Tagged institute for fiscal studies | 5 Comments

Lords signals its intent to change controversial section of Public Bodies Bill

By Mark Pack | Wed 24th November 2010 - 8:55 am

Last week I wrote about the Public Bodies Bill and the power grab it makes to let the government change the law in future without proper Parliamentary control, similar though on a smaller scale to what Labour proposed previously with the so-called Abolition of Parliament Bill. David Howarth echoed these concerns at the weekend:

The Public Bodies Bill might not presage the end of parliamentary democracy in the way the 2006 Bill did, but it is a sloppy, lazily drafted bill that assumes, just as the 2006 Bill did, that those in power are all good chaps who would

…

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Posted in News | Tagged david howarth, house of lords delegated powers and regulatory reform committee, lord norton and public bodies bill | 4 Comments

Clegg signals control orders to go

By Mark Pack | Tue 23rd November 2010 - 8:47 pm

In the Hugo Young lecture tonight, Nick Clegg all but said that control orders were to go when – in pre-prepared comments in the middle of the speech – he said:

Old progressives pose a trade-off between individual liberty and national security. But, for liberals, liberty is the guarantor of our security. It is a false trade-off. For old progressives, national priorities will automatically trump individual freedoms. By contrast, the Coalition Government has already halted ID cards, and set out plans to regulate CCTV and end the indefinite storage of innocent people’s DNA. We will also shortly be published the results

…

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Posted in News | Tagged anti-terrorist legislation, control orders and nick clegg | 8 Comments

In Government for all the right reasons: the David Laws interview

By Helen Duffett | Tue 23rd November 2010 - 4:41 pm

Yesterday I interviewed David Laws, on the day his book 22 Days in May was published. I asked him about the book, his views on the Coalition Government, as well as about the focus of his current work, plus his thoughts on the Ireland bailout.

In the introduction to the book, David Laws writes that its purpose is to “inform those who are interested in this important period of British politics, and to make sure that an accurate account is left of what really happened in May 2010, before memories fade, myths grow and evidence is lost.”

Why have you published …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged coalition, david laws and featured | 40 Comments

The IFS answers… Is the data accurate enough for its calculations?

By Mark Pack | Tue 23rd November 2010 - 12:28 pm

Yesterday I blogged the first of a set of answers from the IFS about its calculations and the data behind them. Those answers nicely lead on to the next question:

In looking at the impact of the Budget or the Spending Review, the IFS typically quotes the impact on different groups of people to one decimal place. What’s your reason for thinking that your calculations are based on sufficiently accurate data and assumptions to justify reporting them to the nearest tenth of one percent (rather than, for example, the nearest percent)?

Our policy is to publish the exact figures produced by …

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Posted in News | Tagged institute for fiscal studies | 21 Comments

Opinion: How do my election leaflets look now?

By Stuart Bonar | Tue 23rd November 2010 - 10:26 am

Rummaging through some papers at the weekend I came across my Election Address from May’s General Election. I was the Liberal Democrat candidate in Plymouth Moor View.

Conditioned after months of the media drip feed about how Lib Dems had stabbed every conceivable group in the back, I steeled myself to read the list of broken promises I had made to the good people of my home city.

Well, first of all, on the front of my Election Address, I promised fairer taxes that put money back in your pocket. I went into specifics, stating that “you will pay no tax …

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Posted in Op-eds | 49 Comments

Camp Victory, Afghanistan

By Mark Pack | Tue 23rd November 2010 - 8:57 am

Over the weekend I went to see a screening of Camp Victory, Afghanistan. In short, if you get a chance – go see it.

What makes the film different from many others about Afghanistan post-2001 was illustrated by a comment from the director in a post-screening Q+A session. Carol Dysinger explained that, unlike many others making films of the conflicts in Afghanistan, she had first approach the Afghan government for permission to film rather than the US (or other) military forces.

It is the Afghan army that is at the centre of the film. The footage comes from five visits, each …

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Posted in News | Tagged afghanistan | Leave a comment

Help early in Oldham East and Saddleworth, regardless of when it’s called

By Helen Duffett | Mon 22nd November 2010 - 10:24 pm

There’s been a lot of speculation about the possible date of the Oldham East and Saddleworth election rerun. Three High Court judges are considering Phil Woolas’ request for a judicial review of the ruling that voided the election result in the constituency.

Today there have been reports that there may not be a court judgement this week, which would delay an election until after Christmas.

Lib Dem Voice understands that the situation isn’t quite so clear cut and there is still the …

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Posted in Parliamentary by-elections | Tagged elwyn watkins, oldham east and saddleworth and phil woolas | 14 Comments

Welcome news as party changes tack on coalition

By Mark Pack | Mon 22nd November 2010 - 7:54 pm

A common theme of my posts about the party’s strategy over the last few months has been my scepticism about the strategic decision taken to love everything the coalition does. As I wrote in July, the risk with trying to ‘own’ the entire government record is that we get blamed for the things we’ve opposed or got changed yet don’t get credit for what we’ve achieved:

The danger is that, rather like a good speech writer, the party may end up making many significant changes to government, improving what is being done, but whose good work is not noticed

…

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Posted in News | 80 Comments

On the receiving end of a tuition fees protest

By Iain Roberts | Mon 22nd November 2010 - 2:21 pm

I recently spent the day at the office of a Lib Dem MP, who’s been targetted for a protest about the proposed increase in tuition fees. As a veteran of quite a few protests myself, especially back in my student days, it’s interesting and quite fun to be on the receiving end.

My personal view on the Lib Dem tuition fees position is one I’ve previously written about. With hindsight, the pledge was clearly a mistake and our MPs shouldn’t have made it. However, we are where we are and MPs have to consider not just the pledge but actually …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged higher education, tuition fees and universities | 26 Comments

The IFS answers… Who counts as poor?

By Mark Pack | Mon 22nd November 2010 - 12:27 pm

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has been much quoted and criticised by all sides over the last few months as the government has set out its willingness to be judged on how progressive or not its policies are and the IFS has become the default think tank of choice to turn to for information and supporting arguments by politicians, bloggers and pundits.

No-one is infallible, so it’s perfectly reasonable for people to sometimes agree with the IFS and sometimes disagree. However, some people from all parts of the political spectrum have not always covered themselves in glory by switching from …

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Posted in News | Tagged institute for fiscal studies | 17 Comments

Immigration: a different kind of challenge?

By Mark Pack | Mon 22nd November 2010 - 8:56 am

Understandably recent debates about immigration, both under Labour and now with the lively debates within the Coalition over an immigration cap (or colander, as the case may be) has focused in on the short-term perspective of what policy is appropriate for the next few years for the UK. The wider context however is very striking:

Close to half of the world’s population now lives in countries with fertility rates below the replacement level, which, as a rough rule of thumb, is 2.1 births per woman. In these states – absent steady compensatory immigration – current childbearing patterns will lead to an

…

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Posted in News | Tagged immigration | 10 Comments

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #196

By Helen Duffett | Sun 21st November 2010 - 7:00 pm

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 196th 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 (14th -20th November, 2010), 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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Posted in Best of the blogs | 1 Comment

Opinion: Ireland has many economic problems…..but it isn’t an argument against the Euro

By David Thorpe | Sun 21st November 2010 - 1:50 pm

As my native Ireland teeters on the edge of bankruptcy and bailout, sections of the British press have taken the opportunity to view Ireland’s difficulty as the Europsceptic’s opportunity.

Some of the comment has centred around the idea that British taxpayers will be asked to ‘bail out’ their feckless neighbours, as, apparently they were with Greece last year.

This article aims not to explore that argument further, as it is a debate too reliant on uncertain future events, and is framed within a Britsih nationalist context which it is not appropriate for me to explore.

Instead I want to focus on another aspect …

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Posted in Europe / International and Op-eds | Tagged euro, european union, eurosceptic and republic of ireland | 55 Comments

Opinion: Control Orders – 14 words to mull over

By Jo Shaw | Sun 21st November 2010 - 12:26 pm

“The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society”. These are the first fourteen words of the Preamble to the Constitution of the Liberal Democrats. It was this statement that finally made me decide to join the Lib Dems nearly ten years ago, and has kept me campaigning, working and fighting for and on behalf of our party ever since.

The control order debate has been raging lately, within the party and in the press. I wanted to explain why I feel so strongly about the issue of control orders and why I set up the …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged anti-terrorist legislation and control orders | 13 Comments

What do the academics say? Influencing people to vote

By Mark Pack | Sun 21st November 2010 - 10:54 am

During the 2005-10 Parliament I blogged several times pointing out how the trends in turnout in British elections were more positive than many of the media reports suggested. One reason for this was simply an interest in the gap between the widely accepted clichés in political and media circles about turnout and the reality. The other was that the gap is not simply of academic interest, as misplaced stories of turnout can in turn alter turnout.

Whether it is because of a herd effect (you know that other people are voting, so you copy them) or social pressure (you know that other people …

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Posted in What do the academics say? | Tagged jane green and turnout | Leave a comment

Opinion: Lib Dems must change strategy if they are to regain electoral credibility

By Sean McHale | Sun 21st November 2010 - 9:56 am

Nobody likes an apologist. So why are the Liberal Democrats apologising for every decision the Coalition takes? Continue on this road and the party is heading toward electoral annihilation.

This apologist outlook has stemmed from the strategy the Lib Dems have operated with since 1997, namely, attacking the government from the left. The strategy must be broadly viewed as a success. Only a month prior to the election the party were ahead in the polls, and although they suffered a net loss in regard to seats, the party gained a notoriety amongst the public not witnessed for over 80 years.

But the …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged simon hughes | 32 Comments

Vince: there has been no betrayal

By NewsHound | Sun 21st November 2010 - 8:45 am

The BBC is reporting that Vince Cable has argued that there’s been no betrayal of students by the Lib Dems, and that he’s working to get the best deal for students.

We didn’t break a promise. We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn’t win the election. We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it’s the coalition agreement that is binding upon us and which I’m trying to honour

Vince speaks in an interview to be broadcast on the Politics Show later today.

Posted in LibLink | Tagged higher education, tuition fees, universities and vince cable | 45 Comments

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Op-eds

Britain should be proud, but never afraid of the stranger (Anton Georgiou)
Where is that ‘Yesss’ moment going to come from? (Chris Bowers)
Mathew on Monday (Mathew Hulbert)
You can’t elect a Community Champion without a community (Elin Kingston)
Words matter, use them carefully! (Leon Duveen)

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