Tag Archives: reform

Our responsibility – Reform can and must be defeated

While a cautious Labour government is worrying about former Labour voters who moved to Reform UK at the General Election and Conservatives are split between those who see the Faragists as friends and those who see them as enemies., Liberal Democrats have a clear moral  responsibility to fight them hard and defeat them.
Much has been written about the exploitation of grievances fuelling far right advances on both sides of the Atlantic and within the EU. While we have to take seriously the hurts many are experiencing and the sense of lostness in the face of collapsing public services which threatens civil society, we have to overcome the divisive hate-mongers. Labour say this is their mission but they have strange ways of showing it. So it’s up to us.
In the pre-Christmas weeks the Yorkshire and the Humber Region explicitly encouraged members and supporters to get stuck into a run of local by-elections saying “Reform is spreading divisive rhetoric and we’re working hard to offer a better vision for our communities”.
There was an interesting sequence of results.
  • On 28th November we had a shock gain in Woodhouse, Sheffield with a 10 vote margin over Reform and Labour pushed into third place.
  • Also on 28th a strong Lib Dem defence in York gave us three times the vote of the Tory in second place. Reform came third with Labour fourth.
  • On 12th December Reform took a seat from Labour in Merseyside (with no Lib Dem candidate). Meanwhile in West and South Yorkshire Reform failed to take seats in Featherstone, Wakefield and Dodworth, Barnsley. Labour held Featherstone but a large increase in the Lib Dem vote pushed Reform into third place. In Dodworth a strong Lib Dem hold secured twice as many votes as Reform with Labour in third place.
In some respects we have been here before. In 2006 the BNP came within a hundred votes of taking the Eccleshill, Bradford seat, which a few years later I was to represent on the City Council. We were determined to push them back. In 2007 it was not difficult to persuade voters that the Lib Dems were best placed to defeat the far right and we had a good track record to show that we could offer something much, much better. With people who usually voted for other parties coalescing around the Lib Dem candidate we had our biggest ever margin of victory. We secured nearly twice as many votes as the BNP in second place with Labour third.
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Ed Davey should lead a ‘Cordon Sanitaire’ towards Nigel Farage and Reform

The recent rioting in England and Belfast, has seen Nigel Farage and Reform trying to use the riots for political purposes to fuel people’s prejudices regarding immigration and racial tension within local communities where tensions are already high. Farage is not responsible for the primary causes of the riot as has been suggested, but he should be condemned for using the riots for political purposes and trying to polarize and stigmatize different parts of our community. It could be that Nigel Farage, is trying to emulate Enoch Powell, as has been suggested in Jason Cowley’s Reaching for Utopia. I will leave that for others to judge whether that this is the case or not.

How should Ed Davey respond to Nigel Farage trying to use the riots for political purposes? Firstly, I want to commend Layla Moran’s performance on various media outlets, by being constructive and offering support to the Government and the Police through the difficult days of the riots, which we hope to have now passed us. Sadly, it will not bring the three young girls killed in Southport back, or the untold damage done to communities throughout England and Belfast.

However, Ed Davey should lead calls for a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around Nigel Farage and Reform. A ‘cordon sanitaire’ is the refusal of one or more political parties to cooperate with other political parties considered radical or extreme. It can be argued that Reform falls into the ‘radical right’ and other parties should not join in a Coalition with them or have an electoral pact with Reform. With our politics becoming more European, despite Labour winning a landslide, these things must be thought through.

Therefore, Ed should call on other parties to join the Liberal Democrats in a ‘cordon sanitaire’ against working with Nigel Farage and Reform. I can see Labour and the Green Party willingly prepared to join a ‘cordon sanitaire’ against Reform. The Conservatives will have a dilemma on whether to be part of a ‘cordon sanitaire’ against Reform, which I will touch on at the end, although all six leadership candidates have refused to allow Nigel Farage into the Conservative Party. I think also morally it will be correct for Ed to lead calls for a ‘cordon sanitaire’ because as Liberals, we believe in an open, cosmopolitan society.

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Do not walk away from accountability, reform OFSTED, do not abolish it.

OFSTED, the schools inspectorate has received flack for its inspection methods in the aftermath of the tragic death of Ruth Perry earlier this year. Following a period of silence, OFSTED Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman appeared on BBC Laura Kuenssberg this morning to face questions over the OFSTED’s approach to inspections.

The Liberal Democrat policy on OFSTED is to abolish it and replace it with a new body for school accountability. This is flawed for a number of reasons, not least because the hiatus period between abolition and refounding could lead to serious failures in uncovering failing establishments, hurting the life chances of the thousands of pupils in the communities that those schools serve. However, reform is a more appropriate method to secure the faith of the profession in their regulator.

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Liberalism and Constitutional Democracy

The UK is sliding into a major constitutional crisis. The future of the Union itself presents the most immediate issue, with rising discontent in both Scotland and Northern Ireland. And Johnson’s casual dismissal of the conventions of constitutional behaviour, his insistence that as ‘the people’s government’ (on 43.5% of the national vote in December 2019) he and his ministers can push back parliamentary scrutiny and sweep aside reasoned criticism, is taking us down the road from liberal democracy to authoritarian rule.

Right-wing think tanks call this ‘post-liberalism’ – a kinder concept than authoritarian populism. Constitutional, deliberative democracy is at the heart of liberalism. Liberal philosophy in Britain grew out of the civil war and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, arguing for limited government, parliamentary and judicial checks on executive power, and toleration of dissenting opinions. The 19th century Liberal Party fought for home rule (devolution), elected local government and successive widening of voting rights, and education, for citizens. Minority rights, civil liberties, power spread as widely as possible rather than concentrated in Westminster and Whitehall, have been central to liberal campaigns over generations.

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Towards a Referendum Programme for Remain

The original remain campaign was negative and defensive. Nigel Farage, in his debate with Nick Clegg, has been described as “pushing on an open door”. Is all we can offer negatives – there is no European Army – there is no federal state – Turkey is not going to become a member – when all of these things are partly untrue?

Our opponents will say that “remain in the EU as we were before” would be to ignore the previous result; to betray the people’s vote, to disillusion the country and cast doubt on democracy itself.

The Remain …

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Reform the Reformers – Part 2, Challenges in Updating Liberal Democracy

There are two types of people in this world. Those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t.

The rise of left and right wing populism points reformers towards updating liberal democracy.

The remedies that left and right populists peddle are remarkably similar; one-party regimes, state control of the economy, dismantling the ‘separation of powers’, nationalism, and a rapid increase in state spending.

Less attention, however, is paid to the parallel rise of liberal, pro-democracy parties in government; Canada, Netherlands, South Korea, Malaysia, Ireland and elsewhere.

There are many lessons to be learned from liberal-democratic parties in these countries, …

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The Independent View: Incentives matter in our education system

Incentives matter in our education system. The right ones encourage our schools and teachers to deliver the very best education the system has to offer.

Yet in the run up to the general election, politicians would have us think otherwise. Rather than creating the incentives for excellence to spread, they seek to drive performance from the centre. Cross-party support for a new college of teaching illustrates this shift in rhetoric, with politicians trying to magic more high quality teachers without thinking about the underlying incentives. The so-called “Cinderella” teaching profession really has found its fairy godmother.

The academy school programme is all about incentives. By freeing schools from local authority control and management, the aim is to allow innovation to drive better education for pupils.

Yet better incentives are needed if academies are to drive large scale transformation across the country. According to a survey of academy schools Reform published last year, many academies are inhibited from using their freedom to innovate. Two thirds of the 654 academies surveyed had yet to make changes to the curriculum, staff terms and conditions or the school day, despite having the freedom to do so.

Posted in Op-eds and The Independent View | Also tagged and | 32 Comments

The Independent View: Keep academy freedoms – and extend them to all schools

schoolsignThe question whether to curtail or extend academy freedoms to state-funded schools was resurrected last October in a speech by Nick Clegg. The answer he put forward was to extend academy freedoms to all schools, albeit in a limited form. Clegg would like to claw-back the freedoms academies have over unqualified teachers and the curriculum, but to extend the remaining freedoms to all state-funded schools.

 Clegg’s new-found middle way is based on a belief that guaranteeing high standards in education is best achieved by curtailing autonomy. In October 2013, he said: “There is nothing…inconsistent in believing that greater school autonomy can be married to certain core standards for all.”

 Yet high levels of autonomy and accountability are conducive to high pupil attainment. The Deputy Director for Education and Skills at the OECD, Andreas Schleicher, has said that England’s multiple measures of accountability, along with a “high level of autonomy and discretion at the front line”, are key to success in education.

Posted in The Independent View | Also tagged and | 20 Comments

Independent View: why we should all campaign for full recall

For over six years now I have worked on Parliamentary campaigns such as the Sustainable Communities Act and the Climate Change Act. I have done this as an independent freelance, unaffiliated to any political party and always seeking cross party support.

This experience has given me a deep insight into our system of governance from the Ministers and senior civil servants at the top, whom I meet in Westminster and Whitehall, to communities at the bottom, whom I meet at campaign public meetings that I speak at across the country.

Our democratic system desperately needs reform. People increasingly feel disconnected …

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Opinion: Don’t reform the House of Lords; scrap it

After the humiliating defeat of the AV referendum, a system to which no party aspired to before the General Election, and the disastrous rout of elected Lib Dems in Scotland and England, serious questions must be asked about the future direction of the party and its place in the coalition government.

In order to reclaim the trust of the British electorate, we need to be bold and radical, and we must speak up for the aspirations of the British people, particularly the disillusioned young; the Facebook generation, who are the future of our democracy. Despite Nick Clegg’s promise of a ‘New …

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