Archive for News
Ashdown, Glover and Williams on the party’s history
The latest edition of the Journal of Liberal History caries this account from me of the conference meeting which launched the new history of the party, Peace, Reform and Liberation. You can watch the meeting in full here. It would be a brave person who walked up to Paddy Ashdown or Shirley Williams and told them to [...]
Andrew Marr bids for record-breaking number of different topics in one interview
I wonder if somewhere deep in the BBC there is a target for how many different topics must be asked about in political interviews each month and someone woke up this morning to realise that January’s quota is about to be missed. Or perhaps there was a typo in Andrew Marr’s contract and his BBC [...]
Nick Clegg unites with Lords in battle to alter benefit cuts
So reports tomorrow’s Observer: David Cameron has been lobbied by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, on the need to rewrite the government’s flagship benefit reform to help children suffering as a result. Clegg proposed a series of changes to the £500-a-week cap, including exempting current claimants, in an attempt to ameliorate some of the [...]
LabourList readers: scrap personal privacy over your income
LabourList has been running a series of posts based on a good idea – asking people to propose policy ideas that don’t cost money, under the banner ‘What’s Labour about when there’s no money left?’. I was, ahem, a bit underwhelmed then to read one of the ideas – to strip away personal privacy from [...]
Ed Balls: My starting point is we are going to have keep all the cuts
Saturday’s Guardian has an interview with Ed Balls: Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, has moved to challenge accusations that Labour is not credible on the economy by telling the public sector unions that he endorses George Osborne’s public sector pay freeze until the end of the parliament, and that he accepts every spending cut… “My [...]
How the left/right balance of Liberal Democrat voters has changed
It is common to use two political spectrums to sort out where people or parties sit ideologically: the left-right spectrum and the authoritarian-libertarian spectrum. The latter is important in explaining the politics of the coalition’s formation, as it was a defence of civil liberties against New Labour’s post-9/11 authoritarian streak that both saw senior figures [...]
Michael Brown arrested in Dominican Republic
The Guardian reports: The Liberal Democrats’ biggest donor, who has been on the run for three years after being convicted of a multimillion pound theft, has been arrested by police in the Dominican Republic, the Guardian can disclose… A City of London police spokesman confirmed Brown’s arrest. “We are pleased to hear that Michael Brown has been [...]
Local council by-elections: the recovery continues
Week by week local by-election results can fluctuate greatly as the luck of the draw over which seats are up adds to the variations in local circumstances to produce a large spread of results. However, aggregated over longer periods the pattern of local by-elections does say something about the state of the parties, which is [...]
Who said this…?
The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all. The answer is after the jump. Answer: John Maynard Keynes. [...]
