Tag Archives: nick clegg

In other news… Mensch sticks up for Clegg, Rennie takes on Salmond, Bristol mayoral election latest & other stories

By Stephen Tall | Sun 27th May 2012 - 5:25 pm

Here’s a round-up of stories we haven’t had time to cover on the site this past few days…

On day UKUncut protestors targeted Clegg family home, Tory MP Louise Mensch urges people to donate £5 to Lib Dem funds (ConHome)

Louise Mensch, the Tory MP for Corby is recommending that her followers donate £5 to the Liberal Democrats for today only. She thinks it will show solidarity with the Cleggs who have been targeted by UNuncut protestors today. Hundreds gathered outside the Putney home of the Lib Dem leader, some chained themselves to railings and they held a noisy but apparently

…

Posted in News | Also tagged alex salmond, bristol council, graham walker, iain roberts, leamington council, louise mensch, st austell & newquay, stephen gilbert, stephen williams, ukuncut, willie rennie and yvonne moore | 11 Comments

LDVideo: Nick Clegg – Syrian human rights abusers to be banned from London Olympics

By Stephen Tall | Sun 27th May 2012 - 3:10 pm

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg appeared on the Andrew Marr Show this morning to say that those guilty of abusing human rights in Syria will be banned from entering the UK for the Olympics:

Posted in YouTube | Also tagged olympics and syria | Leave a comment

Desperately thin stuff – Observer fails to reveal Lib Dem ties with Murdoch

By Stephen Tall | Sun 27th May 2012 - 1:20 pm

Liberal Democrats’ ties with Murdoch aides revealed to Leveson inquiry shouts The Observer headline today followed by a breathlessly hyped claim:

Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats were sucked deeper into the controversy over News Corp’s planned takeover of BSkyB on Saturday as evidence submitted to the Leveson inquiry revealed close party ties with Murdoch executives.

I then read the story to try and find what amazing revelations backed-up the paper’s confidence. Then I read it again. And again. I’m still none the wiser how “Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats” have been “sucked deeper into the controversy”.

The Observer’s attempt to implicate the Lib …

Posted in News | Also tagged fred michel, giles wilkes, news corporation, the observer and vince cable | 27 Comments

Clegg calls for Coalition to “shift up a gear” on the economy

By Stephen Tall | Fri 25th May 2012 - 7:45 am

Nick Clegg has said the Coalition Government’s economic policy needs to “shift up a gear”, following news yesterday that the UK economy shrank by 0.3% in the first three months of the year, down on the initial estimate from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing a contraction of 0.2%. Here’s Nick speaking on BBC2’s Newsnight last night:

Posted in News and YouTube | Also tagged economy, gavin kelly and george osborne | 14 Comments

Nick Clegg: Europe’s future is our future

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 24th May 2012 - 7:28 pm

Nick Clegg has been in Berlin today, along with Vince Cable. to meet with German ministers and launch the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, a £1 million reward for an invention that’s changed the world and benefitted humanity.

He took the opportunity to talk about the economic crisis engulfing Europe, making the point that Europe has to work together to sort it. There were no diplomatic niceties in his language as he criticised the failure to find a solution so far:

…our response to this brewing crisis has been woefully fragmented. We have failed on a number of fronts. We have

…

Posted in Europe / International and News | Also tagged economy, europe, Eurozone and greece | 5 Comments

Opinion: How a stranger carrying a rucksack came within 10 feet of Nick Clegg

By Hywel Morgan | Thu 24th May 2012 - 12:57 pm

It was November 5th 2011, the date for that hotbed of radical fervour that is Yorkshire and Humber regional conference.

Those who know me will not be surprised that I was running late so things were already underway when I arrive. Those people will be further un-surprised that I hadn’t registered in advance either, confident that people would be willing to take my money on the day!

The session was already underway so I quietly slipped in through the door and sat at the back.

That’s right – at an openly advertised meeting, where Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged conference accreditation, FCC, fe and ffac | 21 Comments

DPMQs: De facto but not de jure Fruit Ninja

By Paul Walter | Wed 23rd May 2012 - 11:53 am

MPs are always queuing up in droves to ask a question of the Deputy Prime Minister. He is what the Speaker describes as “box office”.

The subjects at this monthly session can, however, be a bit repetitive. House of Lords reform, electoral registration and lobbying all tend to pop up every time.

Helen Grant (Con) was anxious to get the Royal Sucession changes on the statute books pdq. But Nick Clegg reassured her that, should the Duchess of Cambridge undergo successful confinement resulting in a female happy event, …

Posted in PMQs | Also tagged constitutional reform, house of lords and lords reform | Leave a comment

We must be doing something right – Mail rails at ‘Commie Clegg’, Telegraph blasts ‘Socialist Vince’

By Stephen Tall | Wed 23rd May 2012 - 8:25 am

There’s a measure in marketing known as Advertising Value Equivalents (AVE) — it’s used to assess the impact of coverage in the media. Glancing at today’s right-wing press, the Lib Dems have won headlines money can’t buy…

Nick Clegg’s push for increased social mobility, to equalise opportunities for the poorest in society, has earned him the tag ‘Commie Clegg’ in today’s Mail. This is of course the same paper that only two years ago splashed on the bizarre headline ‘Clegg’s Nazi slur on Britain’.

Meanwhile …

Posted in News | Also tagged daily mail, daily telegraph, featured and vince cable | 27 Comments

Willie Rennie’s first year as Scottish Liberal Democrat Leader

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 16th May 2012 - 8:47 pm

Tomorrow it’s a year since Willie Rennie became Scottish Liberal Democrat Leader. What have been the highlights of that first year?

Well, on his first day, I interviewed him for Liberal Democrat Voice and you can still listen to that here. He said that his priorities for his first hundred days were to work out what our message was, to sort out our organisation and to get out there and meet people, members and ordinary people on their doorsteps. So how has he done with these things and more?

Willie leader launch crouching in front of bridge …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged alex salmond, equal marriage, rupert murdoch, snp, soctland and willie rennie | 7 Comments

John Leech MP writes… It is not just the Leader’s job to sell the Pupil Premium

By John Leech | Tue 15th May 2012 - 4:21 pm

The Pupil Premium is one of our biggest achievement in government, and helps the poorest children in our country bridge the gap when it comes to the quality of education they receive. Manchester has had an extra £19 million this year, and the overall spend is some £1.25 billion this year, increasing to £2.5 billion by 2014/15.

The Pupil Premium ticks all the boxes for the Party. It is designed to help the most disadvantaged, it allows schools to spend the extra money flexibly, and it is new money on top of the school budget.

So why are we not shouting about …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged pupil premium, sarah teather and twitter | 22 Comments

Which of the five Lib Dem reshuffle options will Nick Clegg pick?

By Mark Pack | Mon 14th May 2012 - 2:23 pm

Five scenarios for your delectation:

The Lib Dem night of the long beards

The drastic, dramatic and painful option. Clegg says the Liberal Democrats need David Laws’s expertise and media savvy at the heart of economic decision making, restoring him to Chief Secretary to the Treasury and expressing tearful regret that Danny Alexander is off out of the Cabinet, with a resting place as a new Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Cabinet Office where he will not have to handle quite so many tricky TV interviews.

Education, education, education

Too problematic to bring back Laws in a tax and cut role? Bring him …

Posted in Humour and Op-eds | Also tagged andrew stunell, Danny Alexander, david heath, david laws, Jo Swinson, lembit opik, lorely burt, lynne featherstone, Michael Moore, nick harvey, norman baker and sarah teather | 45 Comments

Liberal Democrats deliver fair pensions for women

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 12th May 2012 - 3:28 pm

So, here it is in the Guardian, the paper that’s been so critical of the Coalition in general and the Lib Dems in particular, these past two years. The announcement that many of us have wanted to see for as long as we’ve been politically active. That women who take time out of the labour market to care for children or sick relatives will not be penalised in their old age.

This is an example of the Coalition delivering a major benefit to mainly women. And although it’s Iain Duncan Smith who’s quoted in the article, make no mistake, it’s Liberal …

Posted in News | Also tagged iain duncan smith, pensions and steve webb | 18 Comments

Leveson: it’s a good thing Nick Clegg was there

By Mark Pack | Fri 11th May 2012 - 8:25 pm

Today’s latest revelations from the Leveson Inquiry are a reminder of how wise it was to create a judge-led inquiry with wide terms of reference and powers. And who was it who did that when the Coalition Government was drawing up the plans, rejecting the talk of a lesser inquiry? Step forward, Nick Clegg.

PS I should have added that it was of course Lib Dem MP Adrian Sanders who was the first in the party to be calling for a judicial inquiry, following his experience on the DCMS Select Committee.

Posted in News | Also tagged adrian sanders, journalism, leveson inquiry and Phone hacking | 12 Comments

Nick Clegg e-mails party members: Queen’s Speech has a firm Liberal Democrat stamp on it

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 9th May 2012 - 5:59 pm

Nick Clegg MP sent out this e-mail to party members about the Queen’s Speech this afternoon. He is holding an exclusive web chat for party members only at 1:30 pm tomorrow. Places are limited but there is still space available. If you are a party member and want to take part, please e-mail party Internal Communications Manager and Lib Dem Voice Co-Editor Helen Duffett on [email protected] giving your name, address and party membership number. Here is Nick’s e-mail in full.

Today’s Queen’s Speech has again shown that the Liberal Democrats are punching way above their weight – and we can be proud of

…

Posted in News | Also tagged helen duffett, internal communications and queen's speech | 5 Comments

Opinion: Austerity and defying the Laws of gravity

By Bill le Breton | Wed 9th May 2012 - 10:58 am

“It’s ideology, stupid.” – a subtext to the Queen’s Speech

On Five Live a bond trader says that austerity isn’t working and the government should be more expansionary. In Wake Up to Money a fund manger says that austerity has been overdone and it’s time for countries like Germany and Britain to borrow more.

Yet on Tuesday’s Today programme, David Laws continued to advocate austerity.

It is more and more apparent that ‘economics’ is being used to serve the ideology of a smaller State, damning the idea that the State should have different responsibilities at different times, especially when the private sector is …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged austerity, david cameron, david laws and economy | 31 Comments

Is this the day the Coalition admitted reality and buried its claim to be a radical government?

By Stephen Tall | Tue 8th May 2012 - 9:50 pm

One of the iconic images of the early days of the Coalition — in the midst of the summer haze of the leggeron rose garden bromance — was The Economist’s front cover depicting the Prime Minister as a punk, representing the Coalition’s self-appointed claim to be one of the most radical governments in history.

Economically (a cuts agenda intended to rebalance the economy between the private/public sectors), socially (from free schools to gay marriage) and politically (police commissioners to Lords reform) — this ‘liberal conservative government’ was supposed …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged coalition agreement, david cameron and featured | 27 Comments

LibLink: Nick Clegg – This coalition is stable and the centre will hold

By NewsHound | Mon 7th May 2012 - 2:10 pm

In today’s Guardian, Nick Clegg declares the Coalition isn’t about to lurch to the left or the right in the wake of the governing parties’ bruising election results: “We spent two years on rescue. Now it’s time for reform.” Here are the three lessons Nick says he’s drawing from last week…

1) The coalition must work harder to show that we are governing for the whole country

Both coalition parties got thumped in Scotland, Wales and the north of England. People are afraid for their jobs and their children’s prospects. In my own patch in Sheffield, I know that memories of the

…

Posted in LibLink | Also tagged local elections 2012 | 49 Comments

MORE SHOCK NEWS: Bill that was going to be in Queen’s Speech will be in Queen’s Speech

By Mark Pack | Mon 7th May 2012 - 9:23 am

Pick and mix your allocation of blame between some Tory right-wing MPs and some political journalists, between deliberate deceit and genuine confusion as you wish, but as the dust settles on yesterday’s political stories about the Queen’s Speech the news is remarkably dull:

A Bill that was not going to be in the Queen’s Speech will not be in the Queen’s Speech, and
A Bill that was going to be in the Queen’s Speech will be in the Queen’s Speech.

Or in other words, ignore the nonsense about how the absence of an equal marriage Bill from the Queen’s Speech means the government …

Posted in News | Also tagged constitutional reform, equal marriage, equalities, house of lords, lords reform and lynne featherstone | Leave a comment

Nick Clegg says big question marks hang over Rupert Murdoch

By The Voice | Thu 3rd May 2012 - 1:25 pm

Via The Guardian:

Nick Clegg has said there are “big question marks” about Rupert Murdoch’s fitness to run News Corporation in the wake of a damning House of Commons report on the phone-hacking scandal.

The deputy prime minister said the report, published on Tuesday, raised “serious questions of basic corporate governance in the Murdoch empire”, which allowed its journalists to engage in illegal invasions of privacy on an “industrial scale”…

During a visit to Fife before local council elections, Clegg threw his weight behind the culture committee’s central findings: “What’s striking about it is how much full, cross-party consensus there was behind a number of excoriating

…

Posted in News | Also tagged rupert murdoch | 14 Comments

Two weeks, two major achievements for the Liberal Democrats in government

By Mark Pack | Thu 3rd May 2012 - 9:50 am

Last week the Green Investment Bank made its first loans, as Nick Clegg mentioned yesterday, and this week the Protection of Freedoms Bill received Royal Assent and became an Act, as Tom Brake wrote about on this site.

The Protection of Freedoms Act includes the banning of rogue private wheel clampers, who are so unpopular that when Lynne Featherstone announced the plans last year it resulted in wall-to-wall positive coverage from the broadcast media, the tabloid press, the broadsheet press and even the pollsters. When the media and 87% of the public love a policy of ours …

Posted in News | Also tagged green investment bank, lynne featherstone and protection of freedoms bill | 6 Comments

Nick Clegg trashes Liam Fox’s economic policy demands

By Mark Pack | Wed 2nd May 2012 - 9:55 am

During yesterday’s Radio 4 interview with Nick Clegg there was a feisty exchange over why so much time in the interview was being taken up with the details of when and to who Jeremy Hunt should next answer questions to about his conduct, rather than issues such as the state of the economy.

Certainly the media loves investigatory process stories. Not only the Clegg interview but the subsequent coverage of it neglected the economy, even though Clegg had some choice words to say about former minister Liam Fox:

Martha Kearney: Liam Fox recently accused the Liberal Democrats of being a brake on

…

Posted in News | Also tagged economy, featured, Ha-Joon Chang and liam fox | 6 Comments

Tom Brake MP writes… A landmark achievement in fight for our civil liberties

By Tom Brake | Tue 1st May 2012 - 4:13 pm

Today the Protection of Freedoms Bill became an Act: a landmark for the campaign to roll back Labour’s surveillance state. Liberal Democrats have long campaigned for this piece of legislation, proposing a “Freedom Bill” more than five years ago when Nick Clegg was the party’s Home Affairs Spokesman.

The Act will protect millions of people from unwarranted state intrusion in their private lives, building on some of the things we’ve already achieved like the ending of ID cards and the destruction of the National Identity Register.

I just want to highlight a couple of things that will now happen. …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged brian paddick, criminal records bureau, freedom of information act, id cards, national dna database, national identity register, Protection of Freedoms Bill 2010-11, ripa, surveillance camera commissioner and vetting and barring scheme | 12 Comments

‘Brand Clegg’ continues to out-poll ‘Brand Miliband’: what it means for the Lib Dems

By Stephen Tall | Tue 1st May 2012 - 9:15 am

It’s a harsh reality that ‘Nick Clegg’ has become an easy punchline for many comedians. Nick can perhaps draw some comfort from the truth universally acknowledged that it’s better to be joked about than never to be joked about at all.

But he can draw greater comfort from some of the polling evidence showing him doing better than Ed Miliband, even though the Lib Dems’ ratings significantly trail Labour’s. The Independent’s Matt Chorley noticed this little-noticed phenomenon last week:

Most, though not all, months the Independent on Sunday/Sunday Mirror/ComRes poll has asked voters whether they agreed or disagreed with these statements

…

Posted in Op-eds and Polls | Also tagged david cameron, ed miliband and featured | 42 Comments

In other news… Lib Dems close no libraries, Paddick pledges 360,000 homes, & Newby is new Lords whip

By Stephen Tall | Sun 29th April 2012 - 5:15 pm

Here’s a round-up of stories we haven’t had time to cover on the site this past few days…

Tim Farron: No library closed under Lib Dem leadership (LibDems.org.uk)

Last year, more than 40 libraries were closed by Conservative and Labour councils. In stark contrast, for the second year in a row, no Liberal Democrat-controlled council in England and Wales closed any library. Liberal Democrat-controlled Cardiff is opening five new libraries and Portsmouth and Bristol are also opening new libraries.

Tim Farron said: “Cutting services like Labour and Tory councils are doing will do long-term damage. Liberal Democrats are doing the right

…

Posted in News | Also tagged brian paddick, dick newby, house of lords, housing, lembit opik, libraries and tim farron | 1 Comment

LDVideo: Clegg – we don’t need Hunt inquiry. Hughes – we need Hunt inquiry

By Stephen Tall | Sat 28th April 2012 - 2:55 pm

Here’s Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg saying that the Leveson Inquiry is the best place for culture secretary Jeremy Hunt to give evidence about his role in the BSkyB takeover bid…

Posted in YouTube | Also tagged jeremy hunt, leveson inquiry, media, rupert murdoch and simon hughes | 13 Comments

LDVideo: Nick Clegg urges banks to lend to businesses

By The Voice | Wed 25th April 2012 - 5:55 pm

We covered earlier Nick Clegg’s reaction to today’s shock news that the UK is back in recession — here’s an excerpt from his speech today to the Institute of Directors where he urges the banks t play their part, and start lending to businesses:

Posted in YouTube | Also tagged banking | 11 Comments

Nick Clegg on the double-dip recession: “our answers are the right ones to repair the damage done”

By Stephen Tall | Wed 25th April 2012 - 1:45 pm

Nick Clegg spoke this morning to the Institute of Directors, shortly after the announcement that the Office of National Statistics estimates that the economy contracted by 0.2% in the first three months of 2012 — a second quarter of shrinkage that officially means the UK is once again in recession. Here’s what he had to say:

As you may have heard, the first set of GDP figures for this year have just been released. And so, if I may, I would like to start by addressing what is disappointing news. The ONS’s preliminary estimate for Q1 GDP has

…

Posted in News | Also tagged centre forum, economy, recession and tim leunig | 63 Comments

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Tag Archives: nick clegg

In other news… Mensch sticks up for Clegg, Rennie takes on Salmond, Bristol mayoral election latest & other stories

LDVideo: Nick Clegg – Syrian human rights abusers to be banned from London Olympics

Desperately thin stuff – Observer fails to reveal Lib Dem ties with Murdoch

Clegg calls for Coalition to “shift up a gear” on the economy

Nick Clegg: Europe’s future is our future

Opinion: How a stranger carrying a rucksack came within 10 feet of Nick Clegg

DPMQs: De facto but not de jure Fruit Ninja

We must be doing something right – Mail rails at ‘Commie Clegg’, Telegraph blasts ‘Socialist Vince’

Willie Rennie’s first year as Scottish Liberal Democrat Leader

John Leech MP writes… It is not just the Leader’s job to sell the Pupil Premium