Tag Archives: john pienaar

The Voice

Vince: Brexit has no good options

By The Voice | Sun 17th December 2017 - 11:12 am

Vince Cable has been on Pienaar’s Politics on Radio 5 Live this morning. He told Pienaar and journalists Paul Waugh and Kate McCann there there were no good outcomes to Brexit.

There are no good options now. We are either going to get a very poor deal or none at all.

He added that the Single market was originally a British project and walking away imposes very major economic costs.

Those costs aren’t being felt yet as business is “sitting on its hands” waiting to see what emerges from the negotiations:

We haven’t got to decision point yet. All the Government has done is got through the first stage of agreeing to have negotiations and what happens then will determine whether there will be large scale disinvestment from the UK.

He confirmed that, when the Bill goes to the Lords, Lib Dem peers will be working with dissident Tory and Labour peers to “improve” the legislation, particularly by adding in a commitment to remain in the single market and customs union.

By the time the Bill comes back to the Commons, those MPs who favour the single market may well be prepared to vote for it.

More and more people were becoming disillusioned with Brexit, he added. He reminded everyone, as you would expect, that we would be pushing for an exit from Brexit referendum, emphasising that it isn’t a second referendum, but the chance for the public to have the final say on the deal. 

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Caron Lindsay

Vince: I won’t be winning the Bad Sex Award

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 9th July 2017 - 9:28 pm

Vince went from Marr to Pienaar’s Politics this morning..

It started seriously enough and he delivered The Message that there is a great opportunity for us as the other parties are divided. The Brexit train is not unstoppable, he said, and there are significant risks to a disorderly Brexit.

He says there is a sense that people do want to work together to stop things like leaving Euratom. The key is what happens in the Labour Party. The contradiction between him being the hero of young people while working with the Tories to bring about hard Brexit will be exposed.

He says that we may be faced with a completely unacceptable Brexit outcome and people will want the opportunity to vote. With extra young people on the register, the balance of public opinion may be shifting.

He said that all of this could mean an upheaval of the political system and we might just be at the centre of major political transformation like Macron did in France.

He dealt with the age question then. Thankfully, there was no sign of the “culture of youth” stuff he was coning out with last week. He returned to talking about Gladstone who was 82 when he last became PM. Vince said he feels young and has a good team around him. He’s just been through an arduous election and he feels great.

Talk turned to realignment of politics. We aren’t expecting defections but the tensions between the moderates and the revolutionary socialists were, he said, profound.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 3 Comments
Caron Lindsay

Farron’s first Sunday media marathon

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 19th July 2015 - 10:19 am

Tim is doing the media rounds this morning with interviews on Marr, Murnaghan (at 10:20) and John Pienaar (at 10:35).

Here are some tweets from his Marr appearance:

adding that he wanted them to join the Liberal Democrats to fight the Tories on the appalling things that they are planning on doing.

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Posted in News | Also tagged , , and | 12 Comments
The Voice

New Deputy Leader Sir Malcolm Bruce hits the airwaves.

By The Voice | Tue 4th February 2014 - 3:16 pm

On Sunday, our new Deputy Leader, Sir Malcolm Bruce was despatched on media rounds. His first appearance was on John Pienaar’s show on Radio 5 Live. Pienaar said that this was Malcolm’s first interview since his election. I beg to differ.

This interview was strongly focused on the future of the coalition, the economy and the forthcoming European and general elections.

On the coalition, Pienaar painted a Godfatheresque picture of a coalition at war, behind the mattresses, all the Liberal Democrats round Malcolm’s house with meatballs on the stove and machine guns under the beds.

The essence of coalition politics is working

…

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