The long-awaited Energy Bill will be published at the beginning of November and will give Ed Davey a unique opportunity to prove that Lib Dems are the greenest of the main political parties. But in the innermost circles of the Coalition Government a battle royal is currently being played out over crucial details of the text.
This bill will establish the Electricity Market Reform (EMR) that will shape UK energy policy for decades to come. It therefore offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to set the parameters for tackling climate change, the greatest challenge of the twenty-first
On the off-chance that Voice readers missed The Sun’s interview with Lib Dem energy and climate change secretary Ed Davey on Friday, here’s an excerpt:
In a grim admission to millions of hard-pressed Brits, Energy Secretary Ed Davey said ministers cannot reverse rising global fuel prices. But he insisted that they can help to ease the blow for millions of households hit by the global trend. In a bid to placate furious consumers, he today
Earlier in the day, Clegg was repeating his calls for a mansion tax in some form:
Our focus does remain on very high value property for the simple reason that I think most people in this country just don’t understand why people who have very high value properties just don’t pay their fair share, in the way that everybody does.
Danny Alexander has been calling for speedier action to implement social care reforms:
Danny Alexander will warn his Conservative colleagues on Monday not to delay plans to reform social care for the elderly and state pensions, amid Treasury fears that the changes would cost too much.
The Treasury chief secretary plans to use a question-and-answer session at the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton to insist that the government goes ahead with both the Dilnot reforms and a single-tier state pension, according to officials.
Meanwhile, Vince Cable is winning out in the arguments with the Treasury over creating a new business bank:
Vince Cable reveals £1bn backing for business bank to help small firms…
In what Liberal Democrats are hailing as one of the major announcements of their conference, the business secretary will say that the new bank could leverage up to £10bn to help businesses struggling to find funds from high-street banks…
The Lib Dems say they have had to fight hard to persuade the chancellor to sign up to the bank, which will be funded from “underspends” by Whitehall departments. These are the funds that remain unspent by departments, which are then clawed back by the Treasury.
And here is Ed Davey and colleagues explaining the Green Deal:
Saturday is education day, with David Laws giving a keynote speech. For many party members he is more respected than trusted; recognised for his skills yet leaving people uneasy over quite what a David Laws manifesto would look like or whether it was right to bring him back into government this year. Saturday is his big chance to win over members.
Back for its fourth year (see 2009, 2010 and 2011) is my conference fringe meeting league table, showing how many fringes each MP will be speaking at. As ever, this is based on the information from the official fringe listings in the printed conference directory. With the reshuffle, I expect a fair number of fringe organisers are reshuffling their panels too; the table is still however a good indicator of the combination of demand for certain MPs and their enthusiasm for working the fringe.
Trends to note include that Cable topped the table the first two times, then slipped to third …
I love reshuffle days, they’re just like transfer deadline day. You sit there at your office computer pretending to work while secretly updating the Guardian live blog to see who your side has brought in and let go.
So, have we strengthened the side for the second half of the season or left gaping holes in our defence?
Well, we have managed to hold on to all our big players – Cable, Alexander, Davey and Moore – and, despite losing his place to Alexander after his suspension early in the season, we now have a fighting fit Laws back and ready …
Ed Davey’s announced this week that he’d secured an important concession from the Chancellor over wind farm subsidies – but at what cost?
Although there was understandable relief over the certainty this move gave to investors in clean British energy it seems the victory may have come with a hefty price tag: an agreement to burden our electricity system with dirty and increasingly expensive gas for decades to come – despite the enormous damage this could cause to both the economy and planet.
Ed Davey’s success in securing a 10 per cent cut in wind farm subsidies – to reflect the …
Liberal Democrats are determined to make the Coalition Government the greenest ever and prove that going green can be good for business and jobs.
Today’s announcement of subsidy levels for renewable energies gives investors the long term stability they need and should see £20-25bn invested by 2017.
It will help create new green jobs and keep us on track to meet our ambitious climate change targets.
Jim Pickard in the FT carries details of a leaked letter from Gerge Osborne to Ed Davey laying down the law on crucial green energy issues. The letter includes the demand that Davey sends a “strong signal” that the government is in favour of “unabated gas”:
…I have been handed a letter from the chancellor to Ed Davey, energy secretary, which suggests that the wind subsidies are only
COALITION splits over Britain’s nuclear deterrent are set to be reopened after an internal Ministry of Defence review suggested a slimmed-down version of the £25 billion Trident replacement could be an option. … The report, led by Lib Dem armed forces minister Nick Harvey, looks set to reopen coalition divisions with many Tory back-benchers concerned that Britain’s replacement for Trident could end up being sacrificed for political reasons. However, with final decisions not
Writing over on the Huffington Post, Lib Dem Voice’s Mark Pack has been taking a look at the party’s plan for the next year:
The plan of senior Liberal Democrats is to focus heavily on delivering and communicating the four priorities from the front page of the party’s 2010 manifesto:
The Government has published its flagship Green Deal plans, promising to deliver £1.3bn in energy saving measures and support up to 60,000 jobs across the sector.
The deal, which is designed to operate until 2030, allows households and businesses to complete energy efficiency improvements at no upfront cost and then make repayments through a small levy on their energy bill.
Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. Some 560 party members responded, and we’re publishing the full results.
28% choose Vince, 21% tip Tim: how you voted
Yesterday we reported the finding that 34% of Lib Dem members surveyed thought Nick Clegg should step down as party leader before the 2015 general election compared to 59% who thought he should stay to fight it. Today we report the hypothetical question we then posed: who should take up the reins if for …
Over the next decade, around a fifth of existing power plants are due to close, against a background of projected increased energy demand and increasing energy prices. We need new investment simply to keep the lights on and avoid blackouts becoming a feature of daily life. But we also need investment in electricity generation for our climate change goals. We must decarbonise Britain’s electricity generation, to meet our Carbon Budgets as we transition to a low carbon economy.
We need an estimated £110 billion investment in electricity generation and transmission this decade alone. So we need electricity market reforms to incentivise …
Our electricity system is broken – soaring fuel bills, an over-reliance on overseas fossil fuels and an urgent need to tackle climate change highlight the severe energy crisis the nation faces.
So the inclusion of an Energy Bill in this week’s Queen’s speech to overhaul the UK’s failing electricity market was long overdue.
The Bill is a once in a generation opportunity to secure our long-term opportunity to make our power system cleaner, more affordable and less reliant on increasingly imported fossil fuels.
Such a move would be popular, too. A recent YouGov poll Friends of the Earth published to mark the …
A poll out yesterday showed that action to address high energy bills is now the top priority for voters, so Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey has a political interest in new research on the True Cost of Energy published by IPPR. The report argues that competition in the energy market is not working and that some consumers are paying higher prices as a result.
IPPR has analysed how much it costs energy companies to supply electricity and gas to UK consumers, finding strong evidence that competition in the market is not in good health.
Liberal Democrats were at pains in the negotiations for the coalition to insist that if nuclear power stations were to be built in the UK that there should be no public subsidy. This position was reiterated by Chris Huhne in a statement to the House of Commons on October 18th 2010 as reported in his article on Lib Dem Voice. So I would like to allay Fiona Hall concerns expressed on Lib Dem Voice yesterday by clarifying that there has been absolutely no change in this position.
As Chris Huhne outlined in October 2010 this means that “there will …
Tonight’s Labour local election broadcast, starring telly’s very own Lord (Robert) Winston, climaxes with the rallying cry:
On Thursday May 3rd, vote NHS, vote Labour
Exactly how voting Labour then will help the NHS isn’t explored — not surprisingly, because it won’t. There’s a reason these elections are called local elections, after all.
Before highlighting Labour’s misleading tactics I thought I should first check out the Lib Dem record on fighting local elections. I have to say I was expecting to find comparable examples, times when the party leadership had called …
Nick Clegg, Ed Davey and Naomi Colvin of Occupy will be among the speakers at the Social Liberal Forum (SLF) conference on Saturday 14th July.
You can now register through the Social Liberal Forum website. Last year’s conference sold out so do book your place soon.
The theme for our conference is “Intergenerational Justice”. Since the economic crisis that began in 2007, we now have a young generation that will be poorer than its parents; this is unprecedented in British history since the last world war. At the same time the older generation will have to retire at a later …
The Institution of Gas Engineers & Managers (IGEM) exhibited at the Liberal Democrats Spring 2012 Conference, which took place at The Sage centre in Gateshead from 9th – 11th March 2012.
It is the first time IGEM has exhibited at a political party’s conference and it gave the organisation a chance to raise its profile with senior Liberal Democrats holding key posts in the Coalition Government. IGEM met Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg, Vince Cable (Business Secretary), Danny Alexander (Chief Secretary to the Treasury) and Ed Davey (Energy Secretary).
Ed Davey MP, the new Energy and Climate Change Secretary features today in a cracking interview by the Independent’s Matt chorley. Far from being caught in the headlights, Ed is revealed as a man of bravery and resilience, with green and Liberal principles from his youth.
Here’s an excerpt:
Covered in blood and carrying a stranger in his arms, Ed Davey turned to see the lights of a high-speed train hurtling towards him. A split-second decision to help a woman in trouble late one December night was about to cost him his life. “I decided that I had to go across
This weekend, Scottish Liberal Democrats gather in Inverness for their annual conference. This is the second most important event to take place in the city this year, next to my sister’s wedding in the Highland Capital on 8 April.
Every Council seat in Scotland is up for election in May so the Conference will be a good launch pad for the campaign. It’s also new leader Willie Rennie’s first Spring Conference speech, a chance for him to map out where he wants to take the party over the next year and remind us of how the small but strong Liberal Democrat …
The Liberal Democrats have long been seen as the greenest of the biggest three political parties. Now in government, the party is facing tough decisions with huge implications both for our country’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions and for wider protection of the natural world.
During his time in office Lib Dem Climate Secretary Chris Huhne won a couple of significant battles with Cabinet colleagues. Most notably, despite opposition from the Chancellor, he won the backing of David Cameron to put into law tough new carbon targets for the 2020s that were recommended by their independent advisers the Committee on …
Now that we know that a referendum will definitely be held on Scottish independence, I am committed to working with the Scottish Government to ensure we have one that is fair, legal and decisive. A few weeks ago I launched a consultation to seek views on how we could achieve this and I want to encourage Borderers to take part to make their voices heard on this incredibly important issue.
Following the launch of the consultation I have also met with the CBI, Scottish Engineering and others and I plan to meet with many other Scottish businesses, representatives of …
Ed Davey’s choice of words when presenting a political case is always worth close attention as he is a man very interested in the details and nuances of political messaging. (He was for a while under Ming Campbell’s leadership in charge of refashioning the party’s messaging.)
So what to make of his initial description of his role in charge at the Department of Environment and Climate Change? He said,
When the great British public look at their leaders, what do they think? In the unlikely event it’s anything other than ‘what have we done?’, it’s probably indifference or, occasionally, murder. The current crop of Lib Dem Cabinet Ministers do nothing to dispel these opinions. Chris Huhne’s sadly justified resignation provided an opportunity to change our public image for the better. This opportunity was not taken.
As has been pointed out, Ed Davey’s appointment as Huhne’s replacement has removed a ‘big beast’ from Cabinet: someone who can stand up for a broader range of party opinion. However, his appointment …
Here’s Nick Clegg welcoming new energy and climate change secretary Ed Davey to the cabinet — what do you think might be being said or thought by or about them?
By Stephen Tall
| Sat 4th February 2012 - 10:45 am
LibDemVoice is currently conducting one of our regular surveys of party members to find out views on a range of issues. One of the questions we always ask is how satisfied Lib Dems are with key figures in the party. Though the survey is still open, a couple are now out-of-date — specifically, what members’ opinions were of Chris Huhne and Ed Davey in the jobs they occupied until Friday. So here are their results…
Tristan Ward @ David Allen
"PFI won’t help stop the planet burning"
Who said anything about PFI - I didn't.
The private money that is building (not enough) house...
Joey Vimsante I think the EU and UK needs to support not for profit, social media platforms that put the interest of the public, vulnerable people, young people, and nation a...
Nick Baird With regard to client-side image scanning, the danger of mission creep are real, but I have other concerns. One is whether this is truly a practical and effecti...
Tara Foster Hi Simon
"Has the author not heard of girls sharing pictures with boys who then share with their friends ? of boys and girls tricked in to sharing pictures w...
Sarah Agreed. We are far too smart as a party to abandon our liberal values to pretend that social media and photo bans will be effective. The method by which we woul...
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Brechtian television: Leo McKern in Galileo (1964)
Good news on political donations?
Conference booked
Are Labour going to cross another red line?
Tristan Ward 
Joey Vimsante 
Nick Baird 
Tara Foster 
Sarah 