Tag Archives: expression of ideas

Martin Dickson

Democracy and Public Debate

By Martin Dickson | Mon 13th September 2021 - 4:17 pm

Fake news and hate speech online – much of it spread via the giant tech platforms. Government ministers brazenly lying. Threats to the integrity of our elections through the dissemination of misinformation on social media. National newspapers that are increasingly partisan, and a local press too financially enfeebled to hold politicians to account.

In recent years, the quality of public debate in Britain has deteriorated sharply, thanks to all these factors and the increasing rejection of traditionally accepted norms of behaviour. And this threatens the very fabric of our democracy. We have lost a set of shared truths and facts around which we can base political debate. What can be done to reverse the decline?

A policy paper prepared by an FPC working group, to be debated at Autumn Conference, proposes a bold and distinctly liberal set of initiatives that carefully balance our rights and freedoms, especially the right to free speech, with the need to combat online harms and allow misinformation to be challenged.

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Posted in Conference, Op-eds and Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged | 3 Comments
Rebecca Hanson

Opinion: How the world has changed since the Orange Book was published

By Rebecca Hanson | Wed 25th June 2014 - 2:45 pm

Earth Day 2007 - Atlantic ReflectionIt’s so commonplace for politicians to publish their thoughts on policy for public debate now that it’s hard to understand the furore which prevented the Orange Book having a public launch when it was first published in 2004.

Yesterday’s Orange Book – 10 years on  conference finally celebrated the way in which contributors to the Orange Book raised the standard of debate about liberalism by exposing their views to rigorous scrutiny and by doing so challenging others to do the same. Amongst a very tempting variety of …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 59 Comments
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  • Daniel Walker
    @theakes "first past the post was a winner for us in 2024. Suggest we keep our heads down and live with it." If your opinion on an electoral system—...
  • Paul Holmes
    Rob, you also say that we can't be the party of the NHS or the Environment because Labour and the Greens have those. Surely it is a mistake to abandon whole are...
  • Paul Holmes
    Rob, you offer two possible groups of key target supporters for the Liberal Democrats. However, both are, as you note, just subsets of the affluent middle class...
  • Peter Wrigley
    @Jana: I regrade myself as an extremest for liberalism: the maximum amount of individual freedom that doesn't infringe the freedom others. I’m also pretty ke...
  • Roland
    >”He’d voted in every general election since 1974, he said, and this was the first time he had ever voted for a winning candidate.” Well I could say t...