.@timfarron making his curry in Newport. We need to stop the govts rigid immigration rules. pic.twitter.com/29YkBeI2Gm— Lib Dem Press Office (@LibDemPress) June 18, 2016
Showing posts with label Liberal Democrats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberal Democrats. Show all posts
Some Indian restaurants are so short of chefs they are employing Liberal Democrat MPs
Scribbling on the constitution: A referendum on Europe was always a bad idea
Margaret Thatcher, quoting Clement Attlee, once described referendums "a device of dictators and demagogues".
She was right.
A referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union was always a bad idea and it has had an unlovely effect on our politics - or at least revealed a side of it that is usually well buried.
For a discussion of that effect I recommend articles by Alex Massie and the great Neil Ascherson.
Reader's voice: Come off it! You are only saying this because you are afraid your side is going to lose.
Not so.
I have been saying the same thing for many years. Most substantially, as far as I can recall, in this article for the much-missed Liberal Democrat News in 2011:
For years the main parties have engaged in something close to a conspiracy. The issue of Europe has been taken out of general elections, with the promise that it will be decided through a referendum. Those referendums never take place. The result has been an infantilisation of debate on Europe, as politicians are allowed to take up self-indulgent, extreme positions they know they will never have to defend to the electorate.
This process has been bad for us Liberal Democrats, encouraging the idea that all we need do to prosper is not offend anybody and deliver lots and lots of leaflets. And it has been bad for democracy as a whole. Why should voters feel enthusiastic about Westminster when their representatives avoid talking about one of the most important issues facing the country?But don't take my word for it: read a guest post by Paul Evans on Slugger O'Toole, the best blog on Northern Ireland politics.
In 2010 he gave 14 reasons why the move to introduce referendums to British politics should be resisted, The European referendum campaign has proved he was right in every case.
Here are a couple of examples:
- They drive out the deliberative element in policymaking. The referendum question is an appeal to reflexes rather than an attempt to get a thoughtful response from the public.
I am a believer in representative government - what George Watson called The English Ideology. It is the cornerstone of our constitution.
- They hand enormous powers to newspaper proprietors and people with the finances to take one side of the argument. It also hands the reins of government over to unelected and well-heeled pressure groups.
The Conservative Party used to be united by its belief in upholding that constitution. Today, most of its members, and many of its MPs, would rather scribble on it.
Scrutiny process "ripped up" on Leicestershire's fire authority
Mike Charlesworth, the leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Leicestershire's fire authority, has written a letter of complaint about the way the authority is being run to its monitoring officer.
The complaint, reports the Leicester Mercury, follows the departure of the county's chief fire officer after just over a year in the job with an £84,000 pay off.
This move was not discussed with the Lib Dem group, which holds the balance of power with the authority. It would probably have remained secret if the Mercury had not revealed it.
There is a widespread perception that the fire authority has been carved up between Sir Peter Soulsby, the Labour mayor of Leicester, and Nick Rushton, the Conservative leader of the county council.
As Mike Charlesworth told the Mercury:
Rushton and Soulsby are running what ought to be a democratic body as a two man show.
"We appreciate there will be employment issues involved with Richard Chandler leaving, but as a courtesy at the very least we should have been told about this so we could raise any concerns.
"There are so many questions about this that need answering.
"We don't know what settlement package has been agreed with the chief fire officer, whether it is justified.
"They've just ripped up the scrutiny process.
"They are making major decisions effecting public services as if it was some private club."The paper also quotes Rushton's reply, which does not seem overconcerned with democratic oversight of the authority's decisions..
Meanwhile the people of Leicestershire wait avidly for news of the police investigation into the hacking of Nick Rushton's Twitter account.
Lord Bonkers' Diary: Reviewing David Laws’ memoirs
A breeze stirs the May blossom, inspiring me to prop open the French windows in the Library. I settle down to review David Laws’ memoir of his time in government for the High Leicestershire Radical and am embarrassed by my inability to find the volume. Only after I have led my staff in a systematic search do I find it propping open those windows.
I find the book has three heroes: Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and, above all, Laws himself. (Poor Huhne and High-Voltage Cable, who must be admitted to know how many beans make five, do not get a look in.)
Still, one has to admire the mordant wit of Jonny Oates, as quoted by Laws: “Your constituents will be mad if they do not re-elect you, Danny. And if they don’t, we should ask for all that money back that has been sprayed around your area – the extra ski lifts and the gold-lined roads.” Except that, if you have been to Badenoch lately, you will know that Oates was speaking no more than the truth.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary
Jasper Gerard is the Liberal Democrats' new head of press
The new Liberator reports that Jasper Gerard is the Liberal Democrats' new head of press. The magazine sources the news to an email to party staff by its communications director James Holt.
Gerard will be remembered as the party's candidate in Maidstone and the Weald at the last election. This is a historically safe Conservative seat, but Peter Carroll had got a good result there in 2010.
Because of that we convinced ourselves that Gerard stood a good chance of winning and funded his campaign accordingly. In the event he finished more than 10,000 votes adrift.
Jasper Gerard will also be remember as the author of a book with a spectacularly inaccurate title: The Clegg Coup: Britain's First Coalition Government Since Lloyd George.
Simon Titley reviewed it when it came out and was not impressed:
Gerard’s basic thesis is that the coalition government was the product of a carefully orchestrated ‘coup’ by Nick Clegg and his allies. But coalition was inevitable sooner or later. The two-party system reached its peak at the 1951 general election, when 97% of the electorate voted either Labour or Conservative. Since then, the two-party vote has slowly shrunk, reaching a post-war low of 65% in 2010. ...
Gerard’s claim that the coalition was possible only because Clegg “had transformed his party and dragged it to the centre ground” simply doesn’t stand up. Indeed, the incompetence of the party’s general election campaign, the net loss of seats, and a popular vote share no better than 2005 (and lower than that won by the Alliance in 1983) suggest that coalition happened despite rather than because of Nick Clegg’s leadership.
And the loss of Short money shows that the party was not as well prepared for coalition as Gerard claims.Still, Gerard is an experienced journalist and I wish him well in his new job.
This item can be found in the Radical Bulletin section of Liberator. There you will also read of the internal tensions in the Young Liberals, how Nick Clegg turned down a favourable deal on party funding and of a hefty bill the party must pay before vacating Great George Street.
The moral is clear. You should subscribe to Liberator.
Lord Bonkers' Diary: Freddie and Fiona at Remain
Wednesday
To London and the office of the Remain campaign. (I judge it a little on the poky side and ask if they have thought of moving.) There I find my old friends Freddie and Fiona, late of the deputy prime minister’s office, ensconced.
I ask how their economic liberal think tank is getting on. “It’s going really well.” “Did you go to our fringe meeting at the Lib Dem spring conference?” “It was all about Uber.” “Do you know it? It’s this wonderful app on your phone.” “You can call at taxi any time.” “And if you don’t like the driver you can give him a low score and he loses his livelihood.” “We call it ‘the sharing economy’.”
I ask how the campaign is going. “Will Straw is brilliant!” “He says that, a month before polling day, his father phones his agent and tells him to make sure everyone votes Labour.” “So I expect that he will do the same thing with the Remain agent.”
And what of Ryan Coetzee? “Oh, he’s brilliant too!” “Just like he did with the Lib Dems, he is making sure our campaign keeps using the same slogan.” “And then we think he will change it twice in the final week.”
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Tim Farron backs Kirsty Williams's cabinet post plan
And he's right.
In the elections earlier this month Kirsty Williams was the only Liberal Democrat to win a seat in the Welsh Assembly.
She increased her majority over the Conservatives in Brecon and Radnor to more than 8000. It's strange to recall that the 1985 by-election, when the seat first turned Liberal, was a neck-and-neck contest with Labour. (I was there.)
Beyond Kirsty's victory, our results in Wales were universally dismal. We are firmly established as the country's fifth party - that rumbling sound you can hear is Lloyd George turning in his grave.
Though I can't find the figures, I believe we finished behind the campaign to abolish the assembly in a couple of regions.
So the opportunity for the only Lib Dem AM to take up a high-profile position like education secretary is a godsend.
The Welsh Lib Dems are holding a special conference tomorrow to vote on whether Kirsty should take up this appointment.
If they do anything other than welcome it with open arms, they are madder than Mad Ianto Ap Mad, the winner of this year's Mr Madman competition.
Before we finish, let us pause a moment to mark the defeat of Leighton Andrews, Liberal Gillingham Town fan turned Labour Cardiff City fan, in Rhondda.
Church Stretton points the way forward for funding local services
From the Shropshire Star today:
Church Stretton Town Council has agreed to set up a “working group” to look at the services in the area put at risk by Shropshire Council cuts.
It will launch consultation with people living in the town over whether to raise the council tax precept to help fund such services in the future.
The move has come in response to Shropshire Council’s proposed budget for 2017, which suggests stopping all funding of services such as libraries and leisure centres.This report reveals the scale of the cuts the government is inflicting on local government.
For decades the Liberal Democrats campaigned for local services, but then we adopted George Osborne's economic opinions during the Coalition years. When we start campaigning for local services again, as we must, we risk at best puzzling the voters.
But there may be something interesting at work here too.
When I was a councillor my impression was that people did not worry about the level of taxes so much as whether they got value for their money.
And maybe such judgements mean more when money is raised and spent locally.
So could Church Stretton, which you can see in the photo above, be pointing the way forward for local government?
It would go against the current thrust of policy in local government, which is all about the abolition and amalgamation of authorities and the appointment of regional mayors, but I would like to think so.
Mind you, such increases in hyperlocal taxation can be controversial, as the case of Desborough shows.
Torbay Lib Dems raise questions over Alison Hernandez
From the Herald Express:
Torbay Lib Dems have lodged a question at Wednesday's full council meeting over the conduct of the new Devon and Cornwall Police Commissioner - former Torbay councillor - Alison Hernandez ...
Lib Dem leader Steve Darling wants to ask Conservative councillor Robert Excell:
"As Torbay Councils representative on the Devon and Cornwall Police and Crime Panel, do you think it is right that Alison Hernandez remains in post whilst being investigated by the police for criminal offences, while a serving officer in the police would be suspended during such an investigation?"However, the paper said the Lib Dems have been told that the question arrived too late to be considered for today's meeting.
You can watch Alison Hernandez's encounter with Michael Crick above.
Absurd claim from the Labour deputy leader of Croydon Council
More evidence that the Labour Party is in a strange place at the moment comes from Croydon (hitherto best known as the land of inflammable trousers).
There, says the Croydon Advertiser:
A Labour politician claims the Liberal Democrats sabotaged his party's election chances - by selecting a candidate with the same surname.
Stuart Collins, deputy leader of Croydon Council, claims the Lib Dems helped the Conservatives beat Labour hopeful Marina Ahmad in Croydon and Sutton by selecting Amna Ahmad to stand in the constituency.
Ms Ahmad is less than impressed with the conspiracy theory and has called on Cllr Collins to apologise.Given how low the Lib Dem base vote is at the moment, any confusion between our candidate and the one from the Conservatives is likely to harm the Tories not help them. It is an absurd claim
Remember how the Literal Democrat candidate robbed the Liberal Democrat Adrian Sanders of victory in the 1994 Euro elections.
Police investigating alleged 'electoral malpractice' in Leicestershire PCC poll
After the Liberal Democrat and Ukip candidates had been eliminated, he beat his Conservative opponent by 78,188 votes to 58,305.
This represented quite a turnaround on the result in 2012. Then the Conservative Clive Loader (who stood down at this election) won at the second stage by 64,661 votes to Labour's 51,835.
Over the weekend there was gossip about irregularities in the postal votes cast. Today's Leicester Mercury quotes a spokeswoman for Leicestershire police:
"We have received an allegation of electoral malpractice which is believed to have taken place during the Police and Crime Commissioner elections.
"Inquiries are ongoing into the report and we are liaising with the Electoral Commission and the local authority."The Mercury says this allegation has been made by the Ukip agent, but adds:
An East Midlands Conservative Party spokesman declined to comment but a number of activists left Friday's election count talking about 'anomalies'.
Did the rise of the SNP really spook Lib Dem voters in England?
Last July I began a post like this:
A myth is growing up about the Liberal Democrat debacle at the last general election. It holds that we lost almost all of our seats because the Conservatives ruthlessly targeted them and won over former Liberal Democrat voters.
So they did, but there is little sign that our lost voters went to the Conservatives instead.My assurance was based on my reading of an article by Seth Thévoz and Lewis Baston on the Social Liberal Forum site.
Here are a couple of the paragraphs I quoted back in July:
The Conservative-facing seats showed a remarkably consistent pattern; the main factor at play was Lib Dem collapse rather than Conservative recovery. In each of the 27 seats lost to the Conservatives, the collapse in Lib Dem votes was sizably larger than any increase in Tory votes, by a factor of anything up to 29.And:
This means that although the Lib Dem position in many Tory-facing seats is dire following a collapse of the party’s vote, the Conservative position is not necessarily ‘safe’ or stable; the Conservatives have won many of these seats on relatively small popular votes, and there still exists in these constituencies a reasonably large non-Conservative vote which could potentially be mobilised around a clear anti-Conservative candidate with a more appealing pitch than that of the 2015 Lib Dem campaign.
Nor is the Conservative vote appreciably growing much in such areas. In seats like Lewes, Portsmouth South, St Ives, Sutton and Cheam, and Torbay, the increase in Conservative votes was negligible, and Lib Dem defeat can be laid down entirely to so much of the Lib Dem vote having vanished.I thought of this article when I read the review of David Laws' new book Coalition that Nick Thornsby has written for Liberal Democrat Voice.
Or, to be more accurate, when I read the comments on that review.
In one of them Nick himself says:
The conclusion he [Laws] comes to is that the coalition was probably worst for the party in terms of 2015 results, but that whatever route we took was always going to result in a fairly significant loss of seats, either in a later election in 2010, or in 2014/5.
The particularly big factor in that is Scotland, and the SNP’s rise there would almost certainly been as drastic whatever we did, which had the double-edged effect of denying us seats in Scotland and scaring our voters in the south-west into voting Tory.In reply Glenn says:
The Lib Dem vote was not scared by the SNP or Miliband or The Greens or frankly even UKIP. Many more former Lib Dem voters voted for these parties than for the Conservatives. The vote simply split enough in enough seats to give Cameron an edge. This is a government formed on a small majority, not a landslide victory or masses of popular support.And, Adrian Sanders - the defeated Liberal Democrat MP in Torbay - agrees:
“our voters in the south-west into voting Tory.” No, no, no, this is not what happened. Firstly there was no great swing to the Tories – 500 votes in my seat while I lost over 7,000. Our voters mostly stayed loyal. It was tactical voters who deserted us for Ukip, Labour and the Greens, not the Tories.This debate matters, because our analysis of what went wrong at the last election must be central to our attempts at recovery.
Are we trying to soothe people who voted Conservative last time and praying for something to change in Scotland? Or are we trying to reassemble the coalition of anti-Conservatives that returned us in these seats between 1997 and 2015?
My feeling, backed by the original article by Thévoz and Baston, is that we should adopt the latter approach,
Six of the Best 592
Internet voting is a terrible idea. In a video, Andrew Appel explains why.
"Having first placed Eliot in his historical and literary context, then having pointed to what is unique in him, Obama ends by showing how he speaks to any individual reader who pauses to listen. This is what the finest literary criticism has always done." Edward Mendelson discovers Barack Obama the literary critic.
Railway Maniac uncovers Ilkeston's forgotten history as a spa town.
"The last time I had seen Panesar at Wantage Road the club shop was fully stocked with Monty merchandise – “I Love Monty” and “Sikh of Tweak” t-shirts, the ill-advised “Monty’s Cricket Madness” DVDs (a compilation of cock-ups, whose cover made him look as though he had just been pulled up for driving a minicab uninsured), those masks." Backwatersman sees Monty Panesar return to play for Northamptonshire.
Curious British Telly on a forgotten (by me at least) comedy starring Rik Mayall - Believe Nothing.
Could Willie Rennie win North East Fife?
Early this week the Telegraph looked at the prospects for the Holyrood election in North East Fife, which is the seat Ming Campbell used to represent at Westminster.
The Liberal Democrat candidate is Willie Rennie:
Rennie is not prepared to predict victory in the constituency (he is more likely to get in as a regional list MSP), but says the fact the Lib Dems came second in the general election last year by around 4,000 votes is “not insurmountable”.
He adds: “It’s the right combination of a good team, the right message and the right circumstances locally plus the best candidate you could possibly ever get.” This last comment is accompanied by a trademark chuckle.
“Because I am from that part of the world I understand the area, I have got a good network of councillors, a good activist base. I would like to do it, but it’s up to the voters and I never take anything for granted.”
Six of the Best 591
Monroe Palmer outlines the improvement to the government's Housing Bill that Liberal Democrat peers have battled to make.
"The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree. Moscow has found such people throughout Europe; until the rise of Trump the idea of an American who would volunteer to be a Kremlin client would have seemed unlikely." Timothy Snyder dissects Donald Trump's admiration for Vladimir Putin.
It is good to see Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End getting a mention alongside the usual suspects in this Steve Rose survey of films about Britain from the 1960s.
Jessica Fielding brings us the Yorkshire Television schedule for Monday 19 April 1971 - Richard Beckinsale, Austin Mitchell and Ena Sharples in unexpected colour.
The defunct Glasgow Central Railway line left behind a trail of stations, tunnels, shafts, cuttings and bridges throughout the west of the city. Alex Cochrane explores its remains.
Undeclared Conservative spending in Liberal Democrat seats
This Michael Crick report, giving the latest revelations in the growing scandal over Conservative spending at the last election, was broadcast by Channel 4 News earlier this evening.Read more on the Channel 4 website.
Six of the Best 590
The House of Lords by-election to replace Eric Avebury is ludicrous and should be boycotted, say John Lubbock and Seth Thévoz.
"There will be no incumbents, and few of the ex-MEPs are expected to run ... So, there is every possibility that new names may emerge and end up as Liberal Democrat MEPs." Mark Valladares says the forthcoming selections for Liberal Democrat Euro candidates will be the most open yet.
Kyra Hanson on guerrilla gardening and the battle against concrete paving and private development in London.
"Verification and fact-checking are regularly falling prey to the pressure to bring in the numbers, and if the only result of being caught out is another chance to bring in the clicks, that looks unlikely to change." Kevin Rawlinson on the new plague of fake news stories.
Flickering Lamps visits Brompton Cemetery and returns with tales of soldiers and adventurers - and rumours of a time machine.
Six of the Best 588
Eight Labour candidates are standing for the Northern Ireland Assembly. Stephen Glenn asks if it is time for the Liberal Democrats to fight those elections too.
Anthony Painter explains his conversion to support for Universal Basic Income.
"At the time of its Berliner re-launch, the Guardian had a daily sale of nearly 400,000. Ten-and-a-half years later this has slipped to 165,000." Stephen Glover speculates on the future of what is, for all its faults, my favourite newspaper.
Chris Heather uncovers a sad tale of murder and suicide in the National Archives.
"Alighting from Swindon station in 1910, she hired a driver to take her to Coate but before arriving was dropped off so that she could amble to the farm and reservoir and immerse herself in the sights and sounds of so-called 'Jefferies Land'." Barry Leighton introduces us to Kate Tryon, an American artist and admirer of Richard Jefferies.
Why Twitter doesn't work, Labour won't win and the Lib Dems are irrationally cheerful
It's hard to have sensible conversations with people from other parties on Twitter. Too often, name-calling or petty point-scoring takes over from rational discussion early in the proceedings.
Labour activists find it particular hard to talk to Conservatives because they have convinced themselves that the Labour Party is the fount of virtue. Therefore, they reason, anyone who votes Tory must be an evil person.
Let's call it the Hesmondhalgh Doctrine.
It's predominance in Corbyn's Labour Party mean that it cannot talk to the many voters who have no great love for the Conservative Party but suspect that it is more to be trusted from an economic point of view than Labour.
Meanwhile many Liberal Democrats, when they have been traumatised by the result of the last general election, shrugged, declared a #libdemfightback and carried on as if not much had happened.
An article in the New York Times by David Brooks puts a finger on the social changes that are behind these phenomena.
He writes:
In healthy societies, people live their lives within a galaxy of warm places. They are members of a family, neighborhood, school, civic organization, hobby group, company, faith, regional culture, nation, continent and world. Each layer of life is nestled in the others to form a varied but coherent whole.
But starting just after World War II, America’s community/membership mind-set gave way to an individualistic/autonomy mind-set. The idea was that individuals should be liberated to live as they chose, so long as they didn’t interfere with the rights of others. ...
The individualist turn had great effects but also accumulating downsides. By 2005, 47 percent of Americans reported that they knew none or just a few of their neighbors by name. There’s been a sharp rise in the number of people who report that they have no close friends to confide in.Brooks cites Marc J. Dunkelman, author of The Vanishing Neighbor, as arguing that
people are good at tending their inner-ring relationships - their family and friends. They’re pretty good at tending to outer-ring relationships - their hundreds of Facebook acquaintances, their fellow progressives, or their TED and Harley fans.
But Americans spend less time with middle-ring township relationships - the PTA, the neighborhood watch.These middle-ring relationships sound like Edmund Burke's little platoon and Dunkelman sounds very like Robert Putnam, whose Bowling Alone we all read at the turn of the century.
What has this to do with the state of party politics?
Brooks continues:
With fewer sources of ethnic and local identity, people ask politics to fill the void. Being a Democrat or a Republican becomes their ethnicity. People put politics at the center of their psychological, emotional and even spiritual life. This is asking too much of politics.
Once politics becomes your ethnic and moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor. If you put politics at the center of identity, you end up asking the state to eclipse every social authority but itself. Presidential campaigns become these gargantuan two-year national rituals that swallow everything else in national life.
If we’re going to salvage our politics, we probably have to shrink politics, and nurture the thick local membership web that politics rests within.He goes on to say we should "scale back the culture of autonomy," which makes my liberal hackles rise and suggests Brooks too is in danger of wanting the state to eclipse every other social authority.
As a liberal I believe in individuality, and we express our individuality through the groups we choose to join. There must be a liberal route to the revival of social bonds.
But the idea that we are asking too much of politics is one I have long been toying with.
Political activists do tend to make their political affiliation central to their identity. More than that, they find their social life, their friends, even their partners, through their activism.
That party membership is such a minority taste now suggests that the 19th-century model of political parties we still embrace is hopelessly outdated.
Yet no politician has the vision or overweening ambition to wrench it apart and allowing something more attuned to our needs today to take its place.
Shropshire gags councillors over Church Stretton Library case
 |
| St Laurence's, Church Stretton |
The mighty Andy Boddington, a Liberal Democrat member of the authority, tells us what happened next:
We had a high court case over libraries last week. The council withdrew and lost the case.
Since then it has launched a vitriolic campaign against the local campaigners in three press releases.
Late on Friday, the chief monitoring officer and chief executive slammed a gagging clause on all councillors. The gagging memo is phrased as a “request” but I know that if any councillor ignores this request is ignored, flack will fly in their direction.
We are told we cannot comment in any way on the case. That probably means that I can’t comment on the council reaction. Or why it has decided to attack a local community at the same time it is planning to work more closely with local people.
