Julian Glover, writing for The Guardian’s Comment Is Free, puts forward a trenchantly pro-Coalition, pro-Clegg line — one that’s guaranteed to attract the ire both of Guardianistas, and of some Voice readers, too. This excerpt offers the substnance of his argument:
Loathe this government if you will, but at least acknowledge that neither side in it got all it wanted at the election and that neither has sold out all of its principles. The strangeness of co-operation exposes its component parts to the easiest of attacks: of promising one thing before an election and doing another after it. But as
Over at the Financial Times today, former Lib Dem cabinet minister David Laws and CentreForum’s director Julian Astle write about the potential of the ‘pupil premium’ to transform the life chances of pupils from the most disadvantaged backgrounds — but argue that schools must be held accountable for using the money directly for this purpose. Here’s an excerpt:
The pupil premium, which for the first time will see a universal service underpinned by an explicitly pro-poor funding system, sits front-and-centre in this agenda.
At present there is additional school funding for young people from deprived backgrounds, but it is allocated in
Party members have been receiving emails today from Tim Farron and Susan Kramer setting out their pitches for party president. Of course, the emails can only go to party members for whom the party has an accurate email address. So I’ve reproduced the emails below – and if you’ve missed out but would like to get future party emails, get in touch with Membership Services on [email protected]
If reading these messages moves you to want to ask the candidates a question, don’t forget the online hustings coming up.
Susan Kramer
Dear Mark,
We in the Liberal Democrats are facing a time of …
I was also supportive of many of the actions taken in the early days of the government including the decision to focus more heavily on reducing the deficit. I broadly accepted the arguments that the government as a whole have used to justify this.
I have not blogged myself since the start of August but have found myself in mid-October …
This Wednesday the two candidates for Liberal Democrat President will take part in the official Federal online hustings at party headquarters in Cowley Street, London.
Susan Kramer and Tim Farron will answer questions which have been submitted online, and a video of the event will be posted afterwards on YouTube for all party members to refer to.
I’ll be chairing the hustings, so please submit your questions via email to [email protected] or in the comments thread below by 5pm Wednesday.
If you’d like to attend in person, a limited number of places are available. It’s on Wednesday 20 October at 7pm. …
Although the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, which completed the UK’s political union with the EU, is a change which significantly disenfranchised the electorate our surrender to the global free market and all that it entails occurred far less obviously and has had a much greater obvious impact.
The promise of this free market is that the whole of the world’s population can share in the affluence which has been, until now, the prerogative of the West. I pointed out in my article concerning the minimum wage that the seeking out of the cheapest labour by the global corporations …
Nick Carthew posed the provocative question on Twitter earlier today:
If cyberwarfare is the biggest threat in the 21st century why do we need to renew our nuclear deterrent? http://bit.ly/bNkBXn
There are of course a range of nuances to that question which can’t be squeezed into one tweet, but at its heart is a spot-on observation.
On the one hand, we’re now often told how internet hacking poses one of the biggest threats to our country’s future security and how illegal activities such as the hijacking of computers via bots are widespread and an extremely profitable form of crime.
If we want to change Coalition policy, we have to understand why Tories are so keen on high variable fees. It isn’t about the deficit. As usual, that is a smokescreen. It’s about the Tory philosophy of creating a marketplace in education. It is very important to the Tories that they should saddle the student with debt, hung around his or her individual neck. A graduate tax, which feels less threatening, is not good enough for just that reason. If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working.
The market achieves two key Tory goals. It forces weak universities to improve …
Published last week, Lord Young’s report for the government into health and safety regulations has gone largely unreported, even though “it’s health and safety gone mad” is such a common refrain in the media. The reason? Mostly, I suspect, because the report leads on health and safety for employees at work whilst the stories the media most love talking about are usually about health and safety more widely, such as for visitors to museums.
Reading through the report, it comes across as one from a Conservative rather than a Liberal Democrat: hence the frequent references to the problems of over-zealous health and safety rules for business but much less about the problems of over-zealous health and safety rules in restricting people’s lives or depriving them of opportunities. This is primarily a report about business, not about missed playing opportunities in childhood, though the report does say:
My proposals aim to ease the administrative burden on teachers that the current health and safety regime has brought about to ensure that children do not miss out on important experiences.
Missing too are the sorts of criticisms that can fairly be made of central government for its own over zealous procedures, most notably at the Ministry of Justice where staff are urged to have four different official forms in their car at all times if they ever drive for work matters.
So what does the report say?
While the ubiquitous media reports may cause little more than a raised eyebrow to the reader they hide a serious point; the perception of a compensation culture results in real and costly burdens for businesses up and down the country. Today there is a growing fear among business owners of being sued for even minor accidents.
And it’s not just a media phenomenon; the rise of claims management companies over the last decade has had a dramatic impact on the way we perceive the nature of compensation. When laws were amended to allow ‘no win, no fee’ agreements with lawyers, it led to aggressive and, I believe, wholly inappropriate advertising…
It’s a climate of fear compounded by the actions of some health and safety consultants, many without any professional qualifications, who have a perverse incentive to take an overzealous approach to applying the health and safety regulations. As a consequence they employ a goal of eliminating all risk from the workplace instead of setting out the rational, proportionate approach that the Health and Safety at Work etc Act demands. It is a problem exacerbated by insurance companies, some of whom insist on costly and unnecessary health and safety risk assessments from external consultants before they will even consider offering accident insurance policies to small and medium sized businesses.
There is a welcome recognition of the continuing importance for the original motivation behind the Health and Safety at Work etc Act:
Today we have the lowest number of non-fatal accidents and the second lowest number of fatal accidents at work in Europe. In my review of the workings of this Act, none of my recommendations applies to hazardous occupations where the present system, although probably overly bureaucratic, is nevertheless effective in reducing accidents at work
Little is said about how to improve the existing systems to further reduce the number of accidents though.
The report includes several recommendations for local government, both telling councils what to do whilst also making data more available to the public:
• Combine food safety and health and safety inspectors in local authorities.
• Make mandatory local authority participation in the Food Standards Agency’s Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, where businesses serving or selling food to the public will be given a rating of 0 to 5 which will be published in an online database in an open and standardised way.
• Promote usage of the scheme by consumers by harnessing the power and influence of local and national media.
• Encourage the voluntary display of ratings, but review this after 12 months and, if necessary, make display compulsory – particularly for those businesses that fail to achieve a ‘generally satisfactory’ rating.
• The results of inspections should be published by local authorities in an online database in an open and standardised way.
• Open the delivery of inspections to accredited certification bodies, reducing the burden on local authorities and allowing them to target resources at high risk businesses.
A welcome new announcement in the report is that efforts are being made to ensure that this report does not simply get commissioned, get published and then get ignored:
I am also committed to ensuring that the recommendations in my report are put into place. All too frequently reports of this nature are left to gather dust on the shelves of Whitehall, so I have agreed with the Prime Minister that I will continue in my role to deliver all the reforms identified as being necessary.
On its own, the report does not deliver what a Liberal Democrat majority government should do. It does however propose many simplifications, particularly of the relevant parts of the legal system, which are welcome. The challenge for Liberal Democrats in government is not so much to argue over the report as to ensure that the report is only one part of what the government does.
For those who missed LibDemVoice.org’s coverage over the weekend, here’s a catch-up:
EXCLUSIVE: What Lib Dem members think about Browne and tuition fees… looking at ‘How would you prefer higher education is funded?’ and ‘Are there any changes to the plans announced to date which would make you more likely to support recommendations based on The Browne Report?’
The issue of tuition fees has raised a more general challenge the party needs to get its head round. This one’s been bubbling away quietly since the Lib Dems entered the Coalition and we seem no closer to an answer now than we were then.
Are our Government ministers bound by party policy?
When one of our ministers is formulating what the UK Government should do on a specific issue, or setting out the Lib Dem bargaining position to get the best final deal, how far should that minister be reaching for a party policy document rather than using their own …
Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem party members think of the party’s reponse to The Browne Report into higher education funding and student finance in England. Some 567 party members have responded, and we’re publishing the full results of our survey this weekend.
First, we looked at how party members thought higher education should be funded, and whether there were any measures that might make the Browne Report acceptable. Then we looked at what members felt our MPs should do given the pledges they made not to increase tuition fees. Now …
The UK is now in a great rush to reduce GDP in order to reduce the financial deficit. But before we frame economic policy, we need to revisit economic theory, in particular the theory of money and macroeconomic demand theory.
On the theory of money
Money is an artefact, not a real physical commodity. It does not obey the laws of thermodynamics – it can be created and destroyed. The idea that macroeconomic budgets have to be balanced is a category error. It takes a microeconomic simplicity, that individuals or firms have to balance their budgets, and falsely transfers this to macroeconomics. …
I’ve heard a few Liberal Democrats express concern about the mid-term election results. The fear, as it has been expressed to me, is that Cleggmania had a lot of superficial similarities to Obamamania – it was a campaign based on hope, by a progressive liberal who offered something new, and it led to the formation of a government. Seeing Obamamania apparently swept away in a surge of vehemently conservative tea-partyers, several Lib Dems fear that the same fate could befall them at the next election.
I think this is simplistic.
Michael Collins, a lecturer in twentieth century British history at UCL, has predicted at Open Democracy–Tuition fees just the beginning of Lib Dem troubles that the “SDP contingent” in the Liberal Democrats faces an existential battle with “coalition Liberals” over the future of the party.
Collins’ fantasy Lib Dem politics isn’t very convincing but there are a growing number of matching accounts, which mirror his portrayal of Liberal Democrat division, include accusations of unprincipled behaviour and go on to predict the party’s demise. It seems reasonable to respond to Collins’ account of ‘Lib Dem troubles’ with a little history and …
This video, filmed at the Lib Dem 2010 Autumn conference in Liverpool, contains interviews with Chris Huhne and Vince Cable about how conference is different now the party is in government, plus interviews with members, a look at why organisations hold fringe events and a tour around the exhibition area with interviews with one internal and one external organisation about why they have a stand in the exhibition area. Presented by Greg Stone and Jonathan Wallace.
Back in 2004, when New Labour reformed higher education funding, most Liberal Democrats opposed the changes. I favoured them. ‘Top-up fees’ were, and still are, a liberal solution to higher education funding. Lord Browne’s recommendations don’t change that. Liberal Democrats should think twice before opposing whatever package of reforms is presented to us in the coming weeks.
The central principle – retrospective fee-payment – is, to my mind, a small work of genius. Liberals are always poised between the principles of freedom (self-ownership and personal rights), and fairness (universal equality of opportunity as a very minimum). Higher education is thus a …
Liberal Democrats in Southwark claim the council is £26 million pounds worse off because of decisions the Labour-run body has taken over a regeneration scheme for Elephant & Castle.
This figure has been the subject of political debate, it’s been mentioned in the council, it’s been mentioned in the press and it’s been mentioned online.
So what happened when Liberal Democrat councillors tried to put the figure in a motion to be debated at the council? The council said no – the figure is secret and can’t be mentioned.
Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem party members think of the party’s reponse to The Browne Report into higher education funding and student finance in England. Some 567 party members have responded, and we’re publishing the full results of our survey this weekend.
In the first part of our survey, we reported how Lib Dem members think higher education should be funded, and what changes, if any, would make the Browne Report acceptable to them. Now let’s look at what party members think our MPs should do about that pledge…
Paul Walter has picked up on some less than flattering comments, including from an anonymous Liberal Democrat “grandee”, about Danny Alexander:
Danny has gone completely native…He should be the Lib Dem man in the Treasury. But he has turned into the Treasury man in the Lib Dems. Perhaps Danny could look slightly less pleased with himself and wipe that smile off his face.
Paul’s full post is here but some better news is over in The Mirror, echoing a point also made in the report Paul quotes:
Cold weather payments to the elderly and the poor were saved yesterday in a
While canvassing in South Manchester I have met a number of people who do not accept that cuts are necessary on the scale suggested by the government. The common mantra is that the banks who caused the collapse should be made to pay, not the taxpayer, or, by implication, the poor who rely on the taxpayer.
Telling people on the doorstep about the Banking Levy meets with the response that this has not stopped bankers receiving enormous bonuses. Reminding them that 50% of these bonuses end up in the treasury is just as ineffective. The public seem to want more. They …
Sorry Nick. Sorry Vince, I can’t find the figures that back you up
Both Nick and Vince have claimed that there was no option but to reverse their pledges on tuition fees. The public sector finances were in a far worse state than they expected and they had no option.
That would be a justification that would be just about sellable to people. A promise made in good faith which became unsustainable due to information not known about at the time could be legitimately broken.
The problem is, I can’t really find much that backs that claim up.
London Region Liberal Democrats have postponed the Mayoral candidate selection, possibly for up to a year – although it’s hoped that nominations will be reopened much sooner.
A selection had been due this autumn after which the party hoped it could get its candidate well enough known to take on incumbent Boris Johnson (Con) and Labour’s Ken Livingstone in May 2012. But regional chair Jonathan Fryer said the process had been halted because an insufficient number of approved applicants were available to put before party members.
“There will be a reopening of nominations in about
Perhaps one of the biggest issues in Britain today is education and having heard various members of my family rant on about it, it’s one of the most emotive subjects I’ve come by. This week we have had all the talk of university tuition fees and I’ve been listening very carefully as it does affect me, but whatever level whether it be primary, secondary or further education, the Lib Dems are the people who usually stand up for our pupils and students.
In Dunfermline at the Scottish Liberal Democrat’s conference I (a very nervous young first timer) got up on the …
Vince Cable is, if you’ll pardon the pun, deep in the Browne stuff. Lord Browne’s proposed reforms to higher education funding – and overall rise in tuition fees they represent – have quite understandably upset a significant portion of the party. Cable’s whole-hearted endorsement of them has led to the accusation that we’ve gone back on one of our core principles in the name of political expediency. This accusation is not without merit, but let’s map out the situation as best we can.
Significant cuts are in the pipeline for higher education. Already this year restrictions have been placed on the …
A detail from the government’s current consultation on introducing elected police commissioners:
Commissioners will have a set four yearterm of office and term limits of two terms. The Government intends to apply the existing framework for the conduct of local government andParliamentary elections including the recognised eligibility criteria for standing for public office, in preparing for the first set of elections in May 2012. We are considering the appropriate voting system, and believe that a preferential voting system is the right option. (Source: section 2.12 in Policing in the 21st Century: Reconnecting police and the people)
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) have looked at the Browne Report. Their conclusion raises some interesting points.
our analysis suggests that graduates with higher earnings would repay unambiguously more than their lower-earning counterparts.
Under Lord Browne’s proposals, this would for many become a 30-year graduate tax of 9% above £21,000 (with this threshold indexed in line with earnings). Indeed, for the lowest-earning 30% of graduates the actual level of fees makes no difference to how much they repay
Paradoxically, therefore, the more fees go up, the more the system approximates a graduate tax – indeed, a pure graduate tax
Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem party members think of the party’s reponse to The Browne Report into higher education funding and student finance in England. Some 567 party members have responded, and we’ll be publishing the full results of our survey this weekend.
How you want higher education to be funded
First, we asked: How would you prefer higher education is funded?
Here’s what you told us:
54% – Through general taxation (as was the case before 1998)
26% – Tuition fees paid by students after they have graduated according to their earnings
The publication of the Browne report earlier this week has received a lot of backlash from the public but what angered me and many other members the most was the positive response it got from Nick Clegg and Vince Cable.
Although the report does contain some positive points, there are a few dangerous suggestions which threaten the futures of thousands of prospective students. One such suggestion was to get rid of the cap on fees. This will inevitably lead to many courses costing around £7,000 per year with some so-called ‘elite courses’ possibly costing up to £36,000 for …
expats Chris Bowers...Where is that ‘Yesss’ moment going to come from?
It looks like 'from Andy Burnham'.....
Peter Davies Housing is unlikely to be an election winner. Parties for decades have put forward targets for masses of new houses and schemes for bringing existing houses int...
Nick Baird @Jana - so your argument is that the UK shouldn't take *any* refugees, and the burden should fall entirely on countries that happen to neighbour those suffering...
Peter Wrigley Surely our defining issue must be the the preservation, improvement and extension of Liberal Democracy in this country and beyond. By all means support it with...
Chris Cory Community politics should not be a technique for winning elections. It should be about the redistribution of power to local people. It is not about all the thi...
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Burnham's PR pledge: Should Lib Dems be optimistic?
A Liberal View on Burnham's Speech
Russia opens criminal case against Lib Dem councillor
Is Labour's success in curbing immigration harming the economy?
expats
Peter Davies
Nick Baird
Peter Wrigley
Chris Cory