What does it mean to be Black in Britian in 2020?
This year’s Black History Month has arrived at a time where the topics of identity, race, culture and equality rarely seem to be out of the national conversation. … Read the full post »
Equalities
Read my blog posts about equalities issues.
The neglected problem with Sasha Swire’s diaries
The diaries of Sasha Swire, wife of former Conservative MP Hugo Swire, have attracted a lot of attention and several lengthy book reviews. But… … Read the full post »
Warning over discriminatory risk in Conservative voter ID plans
There is vanishingly small evidence that showing your ID when voting in Britain would reduce electoral fraud. … Read the full post »
Ed Davey vs Layla Moran: the LBC debate with Iain Dale
Earlier today, Iain Dale hosted a head-to-head debate for LBC radio between Ed Davey and Layla Moran, safely socially distanced but in the same studio. … Read the full post »
Lib Dems move to scrap Section 60 stop and search
The Liberal Democrats are calling on the government to back a new Bill to scrap suspicion-less stop and search in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, which have exposed ingrained institutional racism and discrimination in the UK. … Read the full post »
5 lessons from my 1993 election leaflet: LDN #138
Back in the early days of the lockdown, I caught up on filing old election leaflets and found one of my own. Liberal Democrat Newswire #138, which came out last week, explains the lessons for politics in 2020 from it. … Read the full post »
All history is rewritten; the choice is over how to do it
I am a historian by training, so you might expect me to instinctively favour of arguments about how ‘we mustn’t airbrush history’ and ‘we mustn’t edit history to meet current values’. … Read the full post »
Who’s going to be campaigning for the restoration of Lenin’s statue in London?
As I pointed out on Twitter, citing a Parliamentary debate from 1947, police guards for controversial statues which are vandalised and even then removed are nothing new. … Read the full post »
How should we react to the removal of the Edward Colston statue?
It’s no surprise that reactions to protesters’ removal of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol have included liberals worrying about the rule of law. … Read the full post »
Toppling statues, the rule of law and the failure of democracy
I think I understand where many people are coming from when they look at the news of the removal of Edward Colston’s statue and say, ‘perhaps it should have been removed, but not by a crowd; it should have been done by democratic means’. … Read the full post »