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Nigel Jones

The speeches that got away: Investing in further education and learning throughout life 

By Nigel Jones | Published Fri 27th September 2019 - 11:55 am

The Education motion at conference stated  “The UK faces a serious skills deficit”. 

That is an understatement. Take for example what happens when young people fail GCSE Maths and English and move on to sixth form or college. 

When I taught at a general FE College, I remember a group of 17year old girls, who aspired to be nurses. I had to spend time, for example, teaching them quadratic equations when they really needed much more time improving their understanding and application of decimals, percentages, and ratio relevant to their career. 

Force-feeding young people to resit GCSE Maths and English which they have just failed and hated is bad education. Statistically, results show it does not work. On average 25% pass; in Maths this year only 20% passed and can we claim that even these have sufficiently improved, with a pass mark around 20 out of 100, so was it relevant to their career? 

This approach can even be dangerous; on more than one occasion in my lifetime a baby has died because the decimal point in a drug prescription was in the wrong place. 

Our party motion makes clear that young people need to develop their Maths and English in a free course that is suited to their needs.  Functional skills qualifications have this year been improved, so there is no excuse. Colleges at the moment are constrained by strict funding rules. We will give colleges the freedom and resources to judge the best way to improve basic skills for everyone at age 16+. 

In this country skills and ‘vocational’ learning have  not been given the attention they need for decades. Note these points. 

First, the department for Education Skills Index, shows since 2012 the contribution of skills to the nation’s productivity declined by 27%. Second, we have now the lowest on record of adults pursuing any form of education. Third, the new T-level courses due to start in September 2020 look like being under-resourced.  Fourth, the new apprenticeships while welcome are failing at the lower levels; companies who pay the levy have reduced their other training provision. 

So, with all these recent failures to deal with the skills deficit, what does Boris Johnson do ?  He removes the post of Skills Minister. 

This follows a period when Michael Gove distorted the whole Education curriculum by his obsession with academic learning and theoretical testing. Under the veneer of improved exam results, many feel the harmful consequences of that and those at the lower end are not catching up.

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Jo Hayes

Jo Hayes: more on why I am a candidate to be Federal President

By Jo Hayes | Published Thu 26th September 2019 - 5:00 pm

I’m a Remainer and proud of it. I have fought tooth, nail and tweet against Brexit and will do to the end. I completely agree with Conference’s decision to revoke Article 50 if we win an election, just as I completely disagreed with Parliament invoking Article 50 without a plan, three years ago.

It’s interesting that those who say it’s undemocratic of us to tell the people what we’d do if we won a General Election are the same ones who doggedly defend our failing electoral system. I want an end to Brexit, I want electoral reform and I want …

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Prue Bray

Prue Bray writes, “We need to talk…”

By Prue Bray | Published Mon 23rd September 2019 - 5:00 pm

If I am elected as party president I want to weld the party together to form an unstoppable force to fight for liberalism. I believe the way to achieve that is by applying our principles: championing the rights and well-being of individuals, and helping them to grow and contribute to the party.

It’s all very well for me to lay out what I want to achieve. Now I need to answer the obvious question: how would I actually do it?

I think our Federal Conference showed that under Jo’s fantastic leadership we have a shared sense of purpose, …

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Mark Platt

Help make the Lib Dems the renters’ champion

By Mark Platt | Published Mon 23rd September 2019 - 8:55 am

On Tuesday morning, the last day of conference, I moved a motion calling on conference to support renters. To support them by instructing our party to scrap section 21 of the housing act (1988). Section 21 is the part of the act that allows no-fault evictions. You can see the debate that followed here. Please do watch it, but to save you time, I’m very happy to be able to tell you that they did. So, it is now party policy to scrap section 21, either directly as a government, or indirectly, in response to a vote in the Commons, or in response to a consultation (and of course, one is already running and offering that very approach).

But as I said in my speech, as I have in other LDV articles, I’m interested in more than just scrapping a pernicious piece of legislation. Section 21 is the legislative bullet of no-fault evictions, but it’s not really the cause. There are in fact many causes. In my speech I identified the biggest. We have too few homes, whether for rent or for purchase. And what are available are either too expensive for the vast majority of our fellow citizens, or are in seriously unfit for habitation, in dangerous states of repair or maintenance.

I, like many people, am not in a place to be able to afford to buy a home anytime soon, so I will be reliant on the private rental market (a term I hate as much as I hate the term ‘luxury’, which seems to appear in front of every new home advert my news feed seems to see fit dangle in my face) for the foreseeable future. And in itself that’s not a problem. I’m not a ‘stuff’ person, so ownership has never been the epitome of existence for me; I’m much more of a Gig person, using my local cycle hire scheme to get around and buying ‘pre-loved’ tech whenever mine finally gives up.

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Greg Foster

News from the Membership Department – 60k people joined us this year – and how to get a replacement membership card

By Greg Foster | Published Fri 6th September 2019 - 6:38 pm

There are now (as of the time I’m typing) 120,995 members and 17,083 registered supporter of the Liberal Democrats.

That’s a record high – and means that just shy of 60,000 people have joined the Liberal Democrats as either a member or supporter this year. Most of them have joined, since fantastic local elections in May.

This latest membership surge comes after six months of extensive work to try and make membership better for everyone.

This all started with the implementation of the Supporter’s Scheme – which enabled us to do some really extensive work on the party’s membership database and fix a lot of long standing issues with how memberships were managed.

There’s still a lot more work to do (more on that further down) but we have made huge improvements to how the system works and it’s far more reliable and accurate than ever before.

Of course, the supporter scheme itself has proved both successful and popular – even without some of the more generous rights originally proposed.

The team have pulled together a report on the first three months of the scheme, which you can read here: www.libdems.org.uk/registered-supporter-report 

One of the big things those database changes enabled was to allow us to introduce a lot more automation.

Some of you will have already had it – the vast majority of our renewal communications happen automatically and members new get a confirmation when they’ve renewed their membership.

We’ve got big plans for where we want to take this next year – especially when it comes to supporting Local Party Officers and making sure they get support and advice on their new roles.

The next set of improvements will be a bit more visible than everything that’s been done so far.

We’re planning to replace the existing Salesforce interface local parties use with a user-friendly web interface we’re developing in conjunction with Prater Raines.

Prater Raines (as many of you know) are long-time suppliers to the party and almost all of their staff have been local party officers – so they’re the ideal people to help us build this.

The new interface won’t replace Salesforce – that will still be there in the background and be used by HQ, but local parties will enjoy a tailor made way to handle their donation reporting, manage memberships and their local parties.

We’ll also be able to implement a number of long asked for improvements which have not been possible in the current system – like knowing who your moved out members area.

The development timetable is tight but is intended to deliver access to the new portal from the start of January 2020. 

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Kirsten Johnson

Being a PPC with a Snap GE looming….

By Kirsten Johnson | Published Wed 4th September 2019 - 9:30 am

Needless to say, I have been busy lately! As have been PPCs and candidate selection teams up and down the country with the threat of looming General Election. Exciting times!

This uncertainty plays havoc with our mental health. We all have mental health, as we all have physical health. Not knowing whether one’s life is going to be put on hold in a few hours time for the next six weeks can be extraordinarily stressful.

At our local exec last night our team well-being was raised by a wise and concerned seasoned campaigner. He wanted us to first of all recognise the dangers of a 24/7 campaign and the huge pressure it puts everyone under; and secondly have a way of supporting our activists.

I have been at a lot of training sessions over the years since approved as a PPC in 2014. I can not remember any ALDC or party training in protecting and preserving the health and well-being of our campaigners and activists. There are usually lots of jokes about the junk food we all consume and the weight we gain due to poor hours, lack of sleep and not looking after ourselves – a feeling that our bodies might take a bashing during the campaign but its all worth it in the sacrifice for the Greater Good, i.e. winning.

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Paul Walter

Surely there is a way that Johnson can give us a treat on Halloween, rather than a trick?

By Paul Walter | Published Mon 26th August 2019 - 3:07 pm

Embed from Getty Images

WARNING: This article contains high amounts of hysterical optimism (or at least non-pessimism)

Here are, to my mind, three significant things about Boris Johnson in the context of the current Brexit dilemma:

1. It is conceivable that he harbours ideas of having statues of himself built in future. When grappling with the choice of being a politician or a journalist, he allegedly once said:

They don’t put up statues to journalists

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Miranda Roberts

Taking a lead from the family friendly Sheffield campaign HQ

By Miranda Roberts | Published Sun 25th August 2019 - 10:40 am

Politics and families don’t always go well together. Being active in politics, whether as a volunteer, team member or candidate often means spending time in the campaign headquarters. When you have a child with you, that often becomes a barrier that prevents you from taking part.

Here in Sheffield Hallam we have Laura Gordon as our PPC and she has a one year old little girl. That has prompted us to take a much more proactive approach to becoming a family friendly campaign HQ.

In the clerical room we have a playpen in the corner, with a playmat for newborns to lie on. In the canvass area, we have a little toddler sized table and chairs with a load of toys, books and colouring they can do. In the refreshment room we have a table for older kids to play Jenga or do colouring in too. We’ve put a changing mat in the ground floor bathroom and a high chair for feeding in the area between canvassing and clerical.

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Rupinder Singh

Policy responses to the Amazon fires – a longer read for the weekend

By Rupinder Singh | Published Sat 24th August 2019 - 2:00 pm

President Macron, the UN Secretary General, London mayor Sadiq Khan and even Cristiano Renaldo have all chipped in over the last 24 hours with concern about the situation where 1/5th of the Earth’s oxygen source is located and Sao Paulo is covered in a blanket of smoke and across half of Brazil. How big is the problem, what are the implications and how do we incentivise and assist Brazil?

The figure above, from the BBC website, shows the increasing trend which feeds into the wider global concern about global warming and the resultant thawing of the Arctic, melting of glaciers such as that in the Hindu Khush that feeds 1 in 3 of the global population and the extreme weather events from heavy rains that cause flooding (from England to the current woes affecting the Indian sub-continent) and intense summer heat and often more intense winters. And witness the spate of Artic fires this year from Alaska to the Russian far north.

The immediate impact of climate change is evident across much of the world – even if not accepted by naysayers – and most pressingly by the developing world, countries without either the budgetary resources or the institutional structures in place to put together cohesive long-term stabilisation strategies in place to deal with the immediate emergency and humanitarian crises following fires and floods.

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Paul Reynolds

Ten freeports by Spring; Boris’s post-Brexit economic miracle

By Paul Reynolds | Published Mon 5th August 2019 - 8:36 am

What should the Liberal Democrats do about Boris’s freeports idea? It is alleged that 85,000 jobs will be created.

What is a freeport?

It is a simple idea as old as customs duties themselves. Countries designate an area of land accessible in some way from outside their territory, as outwith their national boundaries for the purposes of customs, taxes and regulations. This means the freeport is a quasi-foreign territory free of all taxes and inspections, even though physically it is inside the host country.

The point is that goods or materials can come into the territory without paying any duties …

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Rupinder Singh

Sunny Uplands and Baloney Economics: whence the falling Pound?

By Rupinder Singh | Published Fri 2nd August 2019 - 2:45 pm

The pound has hit a 2-year low and is the worst performing currency this year and there are still strong headwinds ahead for sterling, particularly if a No Deal Brexit ensues.

The circumstances facing the UK economy and the exchange rate remind me more about country risk scenarios that I faced for dodgy Emerging or Transition Economies, not a developed and mature economy such as the UK. 

All bar our more mature colleagues will have no memory of the dark days of the IMF led bailout of the UK in the 1960s. It’s worth therefore sketching out what the economic-cum-financial risks lie ahead if the “Sunny Uplands” scenario of Prime Minister Johnson starts to take shape, based on his statements and promises since his speech at the doors of 10 Downing Street.

The pound’s value in terms of other currencies is based several factors. Right now, the increasing risk of a “no deal” is scaring away demand for sterling and for sterling assets, thus pushing down the price or exchange rate in terms of other currencies – but the markets sense that there’ll still be a resolution or a further extension.

However, in the event of a “no deal” we will face a genuine currency crisis as investors pile out of sterling assets. These events tend to lead to an initial “overshooting” of the depreciation and we could easily see a further drop of 10, 15 or 20% – nobody really knows. With liberalised exchange rates there’s nothing to really hold back the initial loss of the pound’s value.

Ignoring the immediate hit for UK holiday makers facing a steep rise in the cost of holiday spending, what are the likely consequences for a no Deal as far as the pound is concerned?

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Caron Lindsay

What a brilliant time to be a Liberal Democrat!

By Caron Lindsay | Published Fri 2nd August 2019 - 11:48 am

So said a very smiley Jo Swinson as she gave an interview to Sky News this morning from the gorgeous town of Builth Wells. I had already decided to write a piece with that title this morning.

There are two things I will never get tired of seeing on news channel banners – Jo Swinson, Leader of the Liberal Democrats and Jane Dodds, MP for Brecon and Radnorshire.

Jane was also interviewed and she said she was going to hunt down Boris Johnson, wherever he may be hiding, and tell him that he has to take no deal off the table. She explained that the Lib Dems were a Remain party and we want to see a People’s Vote with the option to Remain.

I seem to have given myself an authentic by-election experience. I eventually got to bed at about 4:30 and woke up about 8:45 and decided that I wanted to get up to see the celebrations from Brecon. It had to be really early because Jo has to get from Brecon to be on stage with Iain Dale at the Fringe in Edinburgh at 6:00. I will be there too and I’m really looking forward to it. I may need a nap first, though.

Two days ago, it was 36 years since I joined the SDP on my 16th birthday. I can honestly say that the last few months have been amongst the best I’ve had in the party. We are in a place where the long held principles and values of the party are entirely in alignment with the national interest. Not only that, but we’re embracing it with a very clear message. Even John Curtice was saying positive things about us on BBC News, saying that nobody would have expected us to win Brecon and Radnorshire a few months ago.

We have three leaders across the country who are spirited, likeable and brilliant at delivering that message with confidence. Two are relatively new and all are now in Parliament. It’s been a real struggle for the Welsh Party to get the coverage while their leader didn’t hold elected office, but Jane is now in a much stronger position – and when she does get media, she’s really, really good at it.

Jo has only been UK leader for 11 days, but already she has been all over the media. And she showed her different style of leadership by getting out there and knocking up with Jane yesterday. Party leaders don’t often do that, but it’s very much her style to be in the thick of the action at these vital moments.

Willie Rennie has led us through some very dark times in Scotland. It’s largely down to the force of his personality, propensity for the most exuberant photo opps (as well as his affinity with farm animals) that we have managed to pull ourselves back up. We went into the 2016 election worried that we might end up with no MSPs at all and ended up winning constituency seats from the SNP.

This all compares very well to every other party. The Tories are a mess, although, like the Republicans with Trump, they seem to have been temporarily cowed by Boris. How long that truce will last as he drives the country to a no deal disaster is anybody’s guess. Not long would be my take. Whether Labour is capable of learning the very obvious lesson that its fence-sitting on Brexit is not doing it any good remains to be seen. But it’s not easy when you have a Brexiteer as leader of a party that wants to Remain.

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Hugh Andrew

Be careful what you wish for

By Hugh Andrew | Published Wed 31st July 2019 - 3:20 pm

Lib Dem Voice is currently full of excited speculation about the timing and possibilities of an election. It is worth standing back a little.

Who else really secretly wants an election? Certainly not Labour – it is difficult to think of an opposition in a less credible state. But Boris Johnson does. By tacking to the hard right he can destroy the Brexit party while the collapse of Labour means he has nothing to fear from that direction. His only care is a working parliamentary majority. He could not care less whether the Liberal Democrats get 50 seats or 150 provided …

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Joshua Hindle

The Great Hack: What we should take away

By Joshua Hindle | Published Sat 27th July 2019 - 9:42 am

If you have  a Netflix account it’s likely you’ve already seen The Great Hack.  This near two hour documentary  details the Cambridge Analytica scandal and examines the wider issue of our rights to our data. For many Liberal Democrat campaigners and Pro-EU activists who have kept up with this whole scandal, what the documentary revels is not new  but it leaves us with a cause that should be a natural rally for the Liberal Democrats.  It creates a foundation for meaningful policy regarding the giants of Silicon Valley and how our democracy and use of social media can work in harmony with each other. 

The Great Hack hints towards a potential path for the party which links our belief in economic liberalism and property rights along with our belief in privacy and personal freedom. Currently the data which we willingly leak onto social media is just skin deep for the user but behind the curtain this data is valuable information for advertisers and campaigners to ensure that the ‘right’ advertisement on visible on your Facebook or Twitter news feed. Globally this can range from the harmless like a good deal for a tent on Amazon to horrific and extreme cases where military personal in Myanmar manipulated users  using Facebook to facilitate genocide towards the Rohingya people.

Every day in the UK we see thousands  drawn into arguments online  and very little room is left for compromise or compassion. To paraphrase Carol Cadwalladr, in an effort to connect people, these social media moguls have instead facilitated on driving us apart. This has allowed for a sense of invincibility of consequence to our words and a thin layer of anonymity where we dehumanise to an extent those we disagree with and pander to those we do. It is vital that the Liberal Democrats start to lead the charge on how we should be thinking of social media differently as this is now here to stay and will be (already is in some cases) a central part of our lives.

 To start we need to explore the idea of breaking down Facebook’s monopoly of social media as Sir Vince Cable has mentioned in the past. Even though since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke Facebook’s users took a very minor hit, those same users appeared to just simply switch to Instagram which is also owned by Facebook. Secondly we must be fighting now for a major review of our electoral law and its relation to social media especially after the Culture Committee expressed the current laws are not ‘fit for purpose’.

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Stephen Harte

Reprise: Managing staff – a chance to show liberalism in action

By Stephen Harte | Published Fri 12th July 2019 - 8:55 am

Editor’s Note: Two reports published this week highlight bullying and harassment of staff in both Houses of Parliament. There are some horrific stories. Gemma White QC described the situation in the Commons. Naomi Ellenbogen QC did the same for the Lords. . There are some serious issues with the culture in Parliament.

This seems like a good moment to rerun an article written by Edinburgh Lib Dem member Stephen Harte who makes some suggestions about how we as a party can make sure we live our values in the way that we treat our staff. 

There has been much in the news about MPs and, in Scotland, MSPs behaving inappropriately towards staff – whether this be bullying or inappropriate sexualised behaviour. Many of the current examples relate to other parties but most of us will be aware that we too have had our problems and can be no more complacent than any other party. For example, I can think of one former Parliamentarian (who, to this day, I greatly admire) who, when stressed, could shout at staff in ways that fell far short of good HR practice. There are many other stories within our party of much worse behaviour from other Lib Dems towards staff and volunteers. This is simply not good enough.

This all makes me wonder if every Lib Dem who employs or engages with staff (whether at a party level, directly as their own staff or as staff of the body on which they serve) or manages volunteers should undertake a training course on how to manage staff in accordance with the law, good HR practice and, importantly, our liberal values.

The late, great Maya Angelou told us “When people show you who they are, believe them.” What we do is a showcase for what we believe liberalism looks like in practice. While no one is perfect and we all have times when we fail to live up to our ideals, how we behave shows people what we truly believe.

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Kirsten Johnson

Making a difference – the first Mental Health First Aid Impact Report

By Kirsten Johnson | Published Wed 10th July 2019 - 4:55 pm

I blogged several years ago about my experience of training as a Mental Health First Aider. Since then, I’ve lobbied and worked to bring equal parity of esteem to mental and physical first aid.

So I was keen to read the first Impact Report from Mental Health First Aid England: does MHFA really work?

The statistics which open the report remain shocking. An average of fifteen people per day took their own life in 2017. The approximate cost per year of mental ill-health in England is £105 billion. And that does not include the personal cost of lives changed and relationships altered forever.

Over 140,000 people were trained in Mental Health First Aid in 2018/19. That is from the beginnings of training 9,000 in 2009. To date, over 400,000 people have had mental health first aid training. This includes the full course as well as the bespoke Armed Forces course; the course for those working in Higher Education; and the course for those working with young people.

Many employers now use Mental Health First Aid in training line-managers and promoting well-being in the workplace. The evidence shows that 72 million working days are lost each year due to mental ill-health. Several testimonials in the Impact Report give strength to the argument that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Alan Millbrow of Three UK says,

Mental Health First Aid is an essential part of our well-being strategy…..It has had an immediate positive impact on our people….We are keen to continue to break down barriers.

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George Kendall

What I’d change about the coalition

By George Kendall | Published Tue 9th July 2019 - 11:55 am

Since 2010, I’ve been very loyal to the Liberal Democrats.

There were many things I disliked during the Coalition, but I kept silent for fear of feeding the ridiculous exaggerated attacks on our party. Deficit reduction was hard, but in the lifetime of the Coalition, the amount cut was similar to Labour’s 2010 plans.

After the Coalition, my party was in a dire state, so for the same reason, I kept quiet about my concerns.

Only now the party is surging in the opinion polls do I feel free to say what I wish we’d done in Coalition. This article is to encourage those who are thinking about joining the party but are worried about what happened between 2010 and 2015, that they will have friends in the party. I also want to reassure new members that it’s okay to disagree with party policy, as long as you agree with the broad principles laid out in the preamble of the party’s constitution.

Below are three of my concerns about the Coalition.

(1) The decision to raise the income tax threshold. It was expensive; for the low paid, much of the benefit was clawed back with reduced benefits; and without it, we could have cut a little less severely. The suggestion of the IFS, to increase the amount the low paid could earn without losing their means-tested benefits, would have been far better targeted at helping low-income families.

(2) The bedroom tax. On paper, it sounded sensible. The idea of reallocating large family houses from those who didn’t need them to those who did wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. But local councils weren’t required to provide suitable alternative accommodation. I’m glad that, in 2014, we changed our position.

(3) Local government cuts. These were far too deep. It’s a natural instinct for a central government that wants to cut expenditure to foist a disproportionate burden onto local government. I wish we had vetoed this.

However, I don’t want to give the impression that I have any sympathy for Jeremy Corbyn when he rails against the Coalition. We held the Tories back on some truly savage cuts. Cuts which were quickly introduced when the Tories won a majority in 2015.

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Mark Argent

Remembering the liberty message among the Brexit madness

By Mark Argent | Published Fri 21st June 2019 - 8:55 am

The Liberal Democrat result in the European Elections has shown that the #BollocksToBrexit message has finally got through.  But my twitter feed in the last couple of days makes me think that our position on civil liberties is also very relevant to the chaos around Brexit and all that this stirs up for people.

Recently there was an article in the Telegraph  about secret talks between some Tory donors and Nigel Farage with a view to a pact to avoid Tory Brexiteer and Brexit Party candidates standing against each other. 

My twitter feed had a string of comments from people alarmed at this. The sharpest I saw was from @bulshdetector  on 16 June: 

 

This is a different time and the parallels between now and then shouldn’t be drawn too closely, but the anxiety is real and should be engaged with.

Christina Wieland’s majesterial book The fascist state of mind and the manufacturing of masculinity gives a perceptive account of how people’s real anxieties left them prey to strong-sounding leaders in Germany and Italy in the 1930s. Earlier this year, the Hansard Society’s 2019 Audit of Political Engagement showed 54% of Britons in favour of a “strong leader who would break the rules”. It’s tempting to read the show of machismo in the Tory leadership contest as a competition to take up that role — in eliminating Rory Stewart they removed the voice calling this out.

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The Voice

Jo’s Day – 10 June 2019

By The Voice | Published Mon 10th June 2019 - 9:00 pm

Jo started the day by agreeing with Jeremy Hunt. No, really:

In the Commons, Jo questioned Said Javid on a key civil liberties issue:

In his remarks about facial recognition technology earlier, the Minister for Policing rightly spoke about the need to take the public with us. Does the Secretary of State recognise that the imposition of Big Brother-style surveillance and fining people for covering their face with their coat is no way to secure the public’s trust? Will the Government halt the use of live facial recognition technology in policing until there has been a proper public debate, Parliament has considered a framework and there are civil liberties safeguards?

Unfortunately Javid’s desire to legislate in a really awful way came shining through.

New technology and AI is one of Jo’s key interests. She wrote for the New Statesman about why transparency and ethics should be at the forefront of development:

She highlighted that same facial recognition pilot:

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Caron Lindsay

Labour panic as Lib Dems advance into second nationally and first in London

By Caron Lindsay | Published Sun 19th May 2019 - 10:06 am

The Lib Dems have overtaken Labour in another poll, this time another massive one, in the Observer:

Lib Dems were on 17% ahead of Labour on 16% and the same poll put us in first place in London and ahead of Labour as the choice for Remain voters.

The data seems to be matching up with the many anecdotes from across the country, this one from Alistair Campbell on Channel 4 News last night:

Labour voters will be reading the Observer’s leader this morning which has harsh words for the party and uncomfortable truths for Labour remainers.

There are those in the Labour party who maintain it is a Remain party. As much as they may wish this to be true, they are deluding themselves. Labour is a Brexit party, under a Eurosceptic leader who has unequivocally committed the party to trying to deliver Brexit.

The party clearly realises that winning over Labour remainers is keen:

You can tell Labour have the wind up them because they are going for us on the Sunday morning programmes.

But when asked if they are a Brexit party or a Remain party they disappear in a cloud of waffle.

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Lord William Wallace

We have to defend open debate and democratic government against fears of dark forces and betrayal

By Lord William Wallace | Published Thu 25th April 2019 - 5:10 pm

Embed from Getty Images

Most of us never see most of the social media that feeds conspiracy theories about the European Union. As we have all learned, the algorithms operate to feed back to consumers stories that confirm their existing views, not challenge them. When the wilder beliefs filter through into letters to newspapers, the deepest prejudices have often been removed.

A letter in the Yorkshire Post last week, for example, warned of the threat of German domination, and referred to the re-emergence of ‘militarism in Germany’. Anyone who follows German military expenditure will know that German forces are under-equipped and poorly trained, suffer from a budget allocation much smaller than the UK spends on defence, and are rarely deployed. But the anti-Brexit blogosphere, taking its cue from the Bruges Group and other sources, has latched onto German calls for a ‘European army’ – an ill-defined concept that enables them to avoid hard questions about national defence and strategic priorities – and mispresented it as a wicked German plot to conquer us all.

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The Voice

18 April 2019 – the overnight press releases

By The Voice | Published Thu 18th April 2019 - 6:45 am

Tories’ high-stakes testing culture pushing children out of school

Responding to the EPI report revealing that over 50,000 pupils who took their GCSEs in 2017 were removed from the school roll for unexplained reasons during their time at secondary school, Liberal Democrat Education spokesperson Layla Moran said:

This is yet more worrying evidence that the Conservatives’ high-stakes testing culture is letting down our most vulnerable children.

The desperate drive to secure a better Ofsted grade or climb up the league tables has given schools a perverse incentive to push children they regard as difficult on to other schools, alternative providers, or let

…

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The Voice

Moran: Time to end ‘teaching to the test’ culture

By The Voice | Published Mon 15th April 2019 - 10:30 pm

Liberal Democrat Education Spokesperson Layla Moran today used a speech at the National Education Union to demand an end to the ‘teaching to the test’ culture by scrapping league tables, Ofsted and high-stakes testing in primary schools.

Speaking at the conference, Ms Moran warned that the Government cannot create an education system that gives every child the “opportunity to flourish” when teachers are “over-worked, under-paid and pressured to the point of sickness.”

Ms Moran also encouraged delegates to contribute to her newly launched independent Education Commission’s call for evidence. The Commission intends to develop a vision for the school system of …

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Caron Lindsay

How is Alistair Carmichael switching off from Brexit?

By Caron Lindsay | Published Fri 5th April 2019 - 7:22 pm

The Times Red Box asked MPs from all parties how they are going to try to switch off from Brexit.

As if they actually could.

I mean, that cliff edge is a week and four hours away at the time of writing.

The article has a serious point though. There is so much strain on MPs at the moment. If four in ten of the general population, according to the Mental Health Foundation, are suffering from some sort of Brexit-related anxiety, how much worse is it going to be for MPs in such a febrile environment.

It is not a good atmosphere to be making decisions which will affect this country for generations. I think that they should grab as long as extension as the EU will grant and go back to first principles. Or just decide to revoke Article 50. That would free them up to talk about something else – like making sure everyone has a house that they can afford and the means to feed themselves and their families.

Anyway, two Liberal Democrats took part in Red Box’s survey.

Alistair Carmichael’s answer was predictable:

I don’t think I will get my mind off Brexit but I have a bottle of Highland Park that should help to numb the pain. Obviously other single malts are available (which is just as well as I fear that one bottle may not be enough).

Tim Farron’s was entirely unsurprising too:

I will go for a run with my famous spaniel… and fret about Blackburn Rovers’ terrible form… and watch Shetland with the kids… and go to church (praying seems especially worthwhile right now…) and knock on tonnes of doors of course!

Joking apart, I have been feeling increasingly anxious for months. I’m sure each knife edge vote in the Commons takes about a week off my life. I’m not dealing with it terribly well – more chips and wine than quinoa salad, put it this way.  There is so much at stake.

Politics has been anxiety inducing for the best part of a decade now. The coalition years were difficult, but it was the Scottish referendum, another existential threat to our peaceful way of life, that first made me feel absolutely ill. Part of that was simply because people were horrible to each other. Some families are still not speaking to each other over stances that they took at that time.

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Caron Lindsay

Vince kicks off local election campaign in Yeovil

By Caron Lindsay | Published Fri 5th April 2019 - 3:32 pm

Yesterday, Vince went to Yeovil to launch the party’s final push for the local elections  to be held on May 2nd. He visited accommodation for homeless people opened by the Lib Dem council in South Somerset.

He then spoke at a rally:

He  spoke to the local paper.

From the County Gazette:

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Richard Joy

A momentary lapse

By Richard Joy | Published Thu 28th March 2019 - 9:00 am

Now, I am not the sort of person that hurls toast and marmalade at the radio every time a politician trots onto the Today programme and proceeds to make a claim of dubious validity, however, yesterday morning (Wednesday 27 March), there was a momentary lapse in my usually calm demeanour.

I had just heard Jacob Rees-Mogg say that his signature has been added to the petition to revoke Article 50. How does he know this? Does somebody with access to the data, feed confidential information to members of parliament?

Another way to “know” that somebody had submitted a signature in the name of Jacob Rees-Mogg would be to arrange a false submission to discredit the petition deliberately. Who would do such a thing and who would then tell Jacob Rees-Mogg that it had been done?

Another way to discredit the 6 million signatures would be to say that the signatures have been manipulated by the Russians – again, a claim that I heard on Radio 4. How would a politician know that the Russians are manipulating the signatures on the petition? Where is the evidence? Does the politician have the evidence and, if they do, will they present this to the relevant authorities – or are they unconcerned about Russian intervention in a democratic process?

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The Voice

Vince Cable’s Leader address to Lib Dem Spring Conference

By The Voice | Published Mon 18th March 2019 - 1:30 pm

It is a sobering thought that just under 2,000 years ago there were people gathered on this spot no doubt complaining about a treaty from Rome.

…with tiresome regulations about daily baths and straight roads; muttering under their breath that these legionnaires should go back to Gaul or Carthage.

And you would have heard lots of people saying Interum sumo inferium. For those amongst you who don’t converse in classical languages, that means: take back control!

It then took them over 300 years to get their ’Rexit, when the Romans went home.

That’s the kind of timescale Theresa May seems to …

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The Voice

In full: Christine Jardine’s keynote speech

By The Voice | Published Sat 16th March 2019 - 12:22 pm

The first keynote speech of Comference came from Christine Jardine.

She covered the pink tax, called for an end to the benefits freeze and condemned the government for marginalised asylum seekers and not letting them work.

Here is her speech in full.

Its fantastic to be back here in York. And a bit eerie for me.

You see making a speech on this stage to all of you was the very last thing I did before my selection process in Edinburgh West.

A lot of things have changed since then… and there is a lot more we want to change.

Some of them are about the party. Some are about the country.

And then there’s Brexit. But lets not bring the mood down.

Certainly that is one of the things we are working to change.

But on a personal level I’ve been focussing on three things.

Asylum seekers. DWP. And the thing I’ve had most fun with:

The Pink Tax.

Taking multi-national corporations to task for thinking its ok to charge women and girls more for everything from deodorant and disposable razors to clothes and services.

Over the next few weeks Ill be lining up meetings with some of the big manufacturers and retailers to persuade them that they really

Want to act now. Fix the Pink Tax themselves.

They’ve seen what we did to the Gender Pay Gap and well if they don’t fic the Pink Tax.

Ill set Jo Swinson on them.

That’ll teach them.

I didn’t think Id be fighting the big corporations the last time I was in York.

So it’s all very different from the last time I was in York.

But it is wonderful to be back here in York.

I was going to make a joke about Vikings. Or maybe Rowntree’s Fruit pastilles. I do love them

But isn’t it strange for us

Liberal Democrats.

To be holding our conference so close to Theresa May’s spiritual home and the area from which her Government must be drawing its guiding principles.

The Shambles…

Well actually I’m being too kind to them.

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Erin Yarrow

Young Liberals need reform – and we need your help!

By Erin Yarrow | Published Wed 13th March 2019 - 11:30 am

Young people play a vital role in the party. Beyond our ability to deliver vast sums of leaflets, or to liven up that local party picture, we shape the Liberal Democrats. We stand for public office; we lobby for youth issues and representation, we ensure that as society changes the party changes with it. However, lately the boundaries of who is young have changed, and the Young Liberals need to change too. That is why we are looking at possible structural reforms, including raising the automatic membership age cut off from 26 to 30.

No longer can even the luckiest of us expect a job straight out of education; more and older graduates have to turn to internships for work. As house prices skyrocket, moving out of the parental home is taking longer. Moreover, with the tendency to remain in education, even the culture and lifestyle associated with youth has come to be applied to a broader age range. With these changes in society, the political landscape has changed too. The needs of those preparing to leave school and the needs of those in their late twenties are more closely aligned than ever before. Ending long-term unpaid work, tackling the housing crisis, improving representation in education, and increasing funding for mental health care are just some examples of policies that would have a disproportionate impact on all of us under 30.

However, the Young Liberals as an organisation has been struggling to represent these needs. It is no secret that we have suffered deepening institutional memory problems as a result of these societal changes. Students now make up such a large part of our constituent members that it’s hard for us to develop a network capable of serving our school leavers and young professions. Our lives have also become more defined by instability – such as moves abroad or in and out of education. These sudden radical changes in circumstances can render members unable to contribute in the way they have done before, and so the consistency in the quality of our work has taken a hit. By virtue of our membership and structure it is getting pretty tough to run ourselves well, and if Young Liberals as an organisation cannot run well then all our members whether in their twenties or still in their teens lose out.

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A No Deal Brexit will not just impact finance and manufacturing – it will be a disaster for cereal producers too

By Ian Thomas | Published Sun 10th March 2019 - 8:55 am

With so much emphasis being placed on how a No Deal Brexit will affect banking and car production, little thought has been given to the potentially devastating impact crashing out of the EU would have on Britain’s agricultural sector.

The National Farmers Union (NFU) has produced a series of briefings to try and raise awareness amongst MPs in a hope of avoiding disaster – most recently on cereals. The UK produces nearly 25 million tonnes (Mt) of arable crops, collectively worth over £3 Billion at the farm gate – driving significant economic activity in rural economies.

As part of the EU, the UK arable sector has been able to export circa 85% of its grain surplus to other member states and, whilst the UK does export grains to the wider global market, these markets are fiercely price competitive with emerging producers such as Russia able to dominate due to a lower cost base relative to developed economies.

In a No Deal scenario, the UK would have to pay tariffs on grain entering the EU market place, meaning would have to compete with other third countries in hope of securing generic quota which enables access at a tariff level of €12 (c£10) per tonne for wheat and €16 (c£14) per tonne for barley. There is far from any guarantee that the UK would be able to secure quota and without it tariffs would shoot up to €95 and €93 per tonne respectively for wheat and barley. The reality is that trade would not occur at these higher tariff levels, forcing UK grain to compete on the world market in direct competition with low cost, lower regulation producers.

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