The Dissenter's Voice

The future's bright, the future's Orange

2008-01-15T20:54:00.000Z

The reaction to Nick Clegg's speech on public services has been fascinating. His speech has been widely welcomed in the media and much more importantly the party as an authentically liberal answer to the question of choice in public services.

Only a few years ago a speech by a LibDem leader advocating a massive increase in the role of the private & voluntary sectors in the provision of public services it would have caused outrage across much of the party. Over the last 20 years the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors have allowed themselves to be characterised as the last protectors of the old Butskellite consensus, reactionary defenders of the status quo in public services. But oh how times change, when Liberalfuture was launched as a pro-market ginger group in the party in 2001, it was attacked as a Tory trojan horse, while the publication of the Orange Book in 2004 created an avalanche of opposition. Now those much maligned views are fast becoming the mainstream of party thinking.

Clegg's speech was firmly in the vein of both Liberalfuture & the Orange Book. It's not that he has adopted wholesale the policies they advocated, it is that he has explicitly accepted their analysis, that the Liberal Democrats must rediscover their anti-statist roots, and reclaim the small government, individualist liberal tradition which is now the undercurrent of political debate.

This is the speech that I wish Nick Clegg had made during the leadership election, but better late than never. Clegg has clearly learnt his lesson, in the brief month since becoming leader he has invited the head of the country's leading management college to review the party's structures & operations, he has cheekily pinch Maggie Thatcher's old campaign adviser to oversee a shakeup of communications and now he is challenging the party to drop is soggy thinking on policy and return to our liberal roots.

This is the Nick Clegg I voted for: bold, radical & liberal - now at long last we can start to draft a manifesto which is as well.

Fasten your seat belts its going to be a bumpy ride...

2008-01-07T22:55:00.000Z

With only a few hours to the New Hampshire primary vote it's looking a little grim for Hillary, however, it would be foolish indeed to write her off.

There seems little doubt that Barack Obama's Iowa momentum will give him the win on Tuesday, and indeed we can expect him to win South Carolina as well. However, you shouldn't be too surprised if the gap in New Hampshire might in the end turnout to be somewhat closer than some people are expecting. A closer than expected second place, followed by a potential win in Nevada next week and then another in Florida at the end of the month would set Hillary up well for MegaTuesday on February 5th, when over 20 states hold their primaries.

The latest CNN poll shows Obama leading Clinton by 9% in New Hampshire, while Fox News has her only 6% behind. The wall to wall Obamania in the news in the last 2 days has set Barack a very high hurdle - anything short of a landslide could (if spun right by Clinton's team) look like a stumble. Clinton could end up doing what her hubby Bill did back in 1992 and be seen as 'winning' the primary by outperforming artifically low expectations.

Don't be surprised if reports of her death turn out to have been greatly exaggerated.

A similar process looks to be happening on the Republican side. Mitt Romney is trailing in the polls, battling a resurgent John McCain - however there are signs that the GOP race is now tightening, with Romney's shameless negative campaigning paying off. Romney is trying to portray McCain as a Washington insider, despite his record as a maverick, appealing to Republicans on an anti-immigration ticket while reassuring independents that he himself as a former business man, rescuer of the Salt Lake Olympics and former Mass Governor, is the real agent of change.

I'm going to stick my head out & predict that Romney will spring a real surprise and win the New Hampshire primary tomorrow, which will throw the Republican race into total disarray. In Michigan next week any of McCain, Romney or Huckabee could win, while Guiliani is still waiting in the wings leading in Florida. There's a real chance that all 4 leading contenders could come out of MegaTuesday with enough momentum to carry to stay in the race.

We could end up seeing the first brokered or hung nominating convention since the war. If that's the case then anything could happen.

Now Clegg has to lead

2007-12-18T18:23:00.001Z

First things first, congratulations are due to Chris Huhne. It’s not usual to congratulate the loser of a contest, particularly when you voted for the winner but Chris ran an effective, focused and dynamic campaign. The narrowness of the loss was a testament to the verve with which he fought and he will have a well deserved seat at the top table.

But what about the winner? Certainly Nick Clegg should be congratulated on his victory, however he cannot honestly be congratulated on his campaign. He fought a awkward, cautious campaign which at times appeared so frightened of being labelled rightwing that he failed to articulate a clear, compelling message about himself or the party.

None the less, as any by-election candidate knows a narrow win is still a win and Nick is now leader. That means though that Nick now has to lead. I don’t believe that the Nick Clegg we saw during the leadership election is the Nick Clegg we have just chosen as Leader. Nick is bright, charismatic, and astute – he understands the challenges the party faces, the size of the job in both organisational & policy terms. He must now though learn the lessons of his campaign – when he was timid and unclear he lost ground, when he was bold and challenging he set the agenda. If Nick is to fulfil his and our potential then he has to be true to his instincts, he must now leave the caution behind. He cannot lead forever looking over his shoulder, his victory gives him a mandate and he must use it to push through an outward looking agenda of change.

Chris would have been a good leader, if he allows himself to be himself then Nick has the opportunity to be a great one.

The wizard of Oz

2007-11-24T12:35:00.000Z

Australia: Only place in the world I like seeing Labour beating Liberals.

The Choice

2007-11-18T17:32:00.000Z

I wrote a couple of days ago that the way someone fights a leadership campaign will tell you lot about what sort of leader they would be.

Today´s Politics Show has told us a great deal. The ballots go out in a few days. Party members now have a clear choice, they can vote for a negative, inward looking left leaning campaign or they can vote for a positive one that seeks to win new converts to our cause by updating our enduring liberal values for the 21st century.

For me the choice is clearer now than ever before. It´s Nick Clegg

Time to be bold

2007-11-17T17:45:00.000Z

So now we know.

We have two leadership candidates who are articulate, passionate and credible. Both, in their differing styles are able to make the LibDem case effectively and persuasively. For me that has never been it doubt, though I must admit I find Nick´s ´human friendly´ style more engaging, however, this election isn´t just about presentation it´s about direction - inwards or outwards.

Chris has certainly had a good campaign so far, despite running on a remarkably conservative programme he has managed to paint himself as radical champion. Chris has been very effective so far in playing to the internal LibDem gallery, a natural temptation in a leadership election. However, although being popular amongst the activist base might work to win a leadership election is not enough for the party to fulfil its potential. If we are to break out of our rut in the polls then we need persuade new groups of people who don´t think of themselves as LibDems to support us. Deluding ourselves that they don´t support us because they simply haven´t heard enough of what we´ve said before is the road to no where. We need to make ourselves more relevant to their lives.

I believe that Nick Clegg understands this in a way that Chris´s campaign indicates he does not. However, Nick needs to start articulating the need to change more clearly or the momentum of this race will shift away from him. Nick has fought the frontrunner´s traditionally cautious campaign so far. He has set a positive optimistic tone and laid out the principles by which he wants to lead the party, that´s all well and good. However, what he hasn´t yet done is to define clearly the scale and urgency of the task ahead of the party, or the danger of closing in on ourselves and ignoring it.

We can´t afford to forget the political reality in which we find ourselves. David Cameron has firmly parked his tanks on our lawn, while Gordon Brown is busily trying to win back those Labour supporters lost during the Blair years. We are being savagely squeezed in the poll, averaging between 12%-16%. This is simply disastrous, even if we were to gain a couple of points from this level, we would still lose 20 or more of our MPs, a third of the Parliamentary Party wiped out. We desperately need to pull the liberal diaspora scattered across British politics to back to us. The idea that the way to do that is more of the same, simply restating our programme a little more sharply, a little more clearly is absurd. We need a leader who understands that, and is not content for the party to standstill, while it is overtaken.

Just over half way through the campaign Nick now needs to strike a bolder, more aggressive note. Having spelt out a positive message about himself, he now has to explain how his approach differs from Chris´s. He needs to define the choice the party now faces. Chris´s left-leaning campaign has largely set out the battle lines for him. He should now engage. Simply put, do we carry on talking to ourselves, rehashing our last 3 manifestoes, with a new coating of competency or do we reinterpret our values so that they are relevant to the world as it is today rather than the 1980s?

Nick´s campaign has seemed a little hesitant to engage on this ground for fear of being accused of being rightwing, however he now needs to throw away the caution. The choice is more than a simple one of left and right, it is between looking back, staying with our comfort zone and moving forward to reclaim into the liberal mainstream of British politics. If Nick now moves decisively to define that choice I believe he will maintain the momentum in this election and win.

The left turn is a dead end

2007-11-15T10:22:00.000Z

The leadership election is getting interesting.

The contest started with the two contestants sitting on Andrew Marr’s TV sofa appearing to be agree with each other on virtually every issue. However as the contest has evolved the differences have started to emerge. Differences not just over policy but also over campaigning style and strategy. How someone campaigns in a leadership election might not seem terribly important at first but actually it tells you a great deal about how that person would lead the party if they were elected, how they would try to define the party and themselves if they won.

We are lucky, both our leadership candidates are real talents and can hold their own against the best Labour & the Tories have. The difference between them though is that Chris Huhne has decided to run to the left, outlining a platform which appears designed to appeal to the small selectorate of LibDem activists, while Nick Clegg looks to be trying to challenge the party and reach out beyond it to the wider electorate.

Why do I say this? Well, Chris has draped his campaign in the mantle of radicalism. However he has chosen to appeal to the comfortable verities of the party’s traditional policies. His latest campaign email for instance has a familiar feel - it calls for greater funding for health and education and the devolution of more power to local councils.n Chris´s programme is in the words of one of his vocal blog supporters ´meaty´ - it is not however particularly radical. Promising to spend more money on services, which will be more local but still run by middle class bureaucrats rather than the people who use them is not a revolution.

His policy on Trident is a calculated attempt to rub up the party´s errogenous zones - however it is not much more than a restatement of the policy of a smaller, cheaper, more independent nuclear deterrent that has been party policy in one form or another since the 1980´s. Chris´s genuinely radical big idea - the green tax switch - has been party policy for the last year, beyond that the new ideas are actually pretty thin on the ground.

What´s being proposed isn´t a liberal revolution it´s social democratic managerialism, but it is comfortable, it appeals to the party´s self image without forcing it to ask any hard questions of itself or its direction. It´s message is an insular one, that the party simply needs to restate its exiting policies more clearly and competently and we will all soon reach the `liberal´ nirvana. Bumping along as we are in the mid teens in the polls, that is a dangerous misconception.

What worries me more even than this though is the accompanying `dog whistling´ the subtle and not so subtle attempts to portray his opponent as some kind of lightweight, crypto-Tory, all spin and no substance. Chris´s own remarks about ´opposing the education vouchers & US style health insurance supported by some of our MPs´, and ´not wanting to be the third Tory party´ are clearly covert and unjustified digs at Nick, while his more outspoken supporters have directly attacked Nick in a way that will delight our opponents, but I suspect appall many of our members. Chris needs to calm it and them down before it gets out of hand.

Perhaps Chris is pursuing a sort of Lib Dem equivalent of Nixon´s famous Southern Strategy, swinging to the left during the leadership election only to swerve back to the centre if elected. Perhaps, though that would hardly be the most open and frank way to win an election. If though the appeal to the left is to be believed then Chris´s campaign is in danger of taking the party of in search of electoral fool´s gold. Positioning ourselves of the party of the statist left would be to abandon our natural liberal territory to parties that speak the language but not understand it. It would all but guarantee that the gains so pàinstakingly won over the last 20 years are wittled away. And it would deny the party the opportunity to reach out and connect with people who share liberal values but have never yet thought of themselves as Lib Dems.

Blair Must Go

2007-11-01T19:37:00.000Z

Sir Ian Blair’s position as Metropolitan Police Commissioner is untenable. He must resign.

Jean Charles de Menezes was killed as a result of Police ‘shoot to kill policy’ which was implemented as a result of a catastrophic series of failures and incompetence. In their desperate flailing to defend themselves the Police leadership has smeared Menezes’s name by the Police and Sir Ian’s attitude throughout has at best been high handed, insensitive and arrogant.

Despite his being identified as a potential terrorist subject and having had several opportunities to do so the Police totally failed to attempt to detained Menezes from the time he left his house until after he walked to the bus stop, got on the bus, got of, entered the tube, went through the ticket barrier and then entered a packed tub train. He was then shot in the head 7 times despite being pinned down in his seat by a police officers.

The Special branch time who were ordered to kill Menezes say that they never gave a fully positive identification of him as a terrorist, while the Police Commander who gave the order, Cressida Dick says that they did. Someone in the police is lying.

The Police’s main defence was that Menezes was somehow responsible for his own death by his reactions on the day, and that these were caused by his having taken cocaine. This bizarre and appalling tactic is the direct result of Blair’s decision to contest this case against the advice of at least three of his senior colleagues.

Beyond the awful personal tragedy of Menezes’s death there is the disastrous impact on racial and community relations in the local area. At the time of the shooting I was a Councillor in Lambeth, my ward was a mile or so away from the scene of the shooting. I had only recently stood down as the Lead member for Community Safety, having worked for 2 years with the excellent local Police building community relations in a Borough, whose heart Brixton, has long been a byword for tension between the Police and the local community. That work was nearly destroyed by the shooting and the Met leadership’s subsequent actions.

In the immediate aftermath Blair’s reaction was to give wholly inaccurate information to the public and press about the details of the incident and to phone the then Home Secretary and trying to persuade him not to all the independent Police Complaints Authority to investigate the case. Ever since he has been obstructive and unhelpful, he has personally chosen to confront rather than console.

Not only has he has presided over the death of an innocent unarmed man killed in the most brutal & shocking manner. He has shown no sign of comprehending the nature of the public outrage. He personally decided to contest a case which further darkened the met’s reputation and now lead to £500,000 of Police funds being lost. He has totally failed to accept any responsibility as the head of the organisation that has now been found guilty in a court of law. His refusal to resign is not just an embarrassment it is an insult to De Menezes and to Londoners as a whole.

He must go.

It´s choice, stupid!

2007-10-23T12:37:00.000+01:00

We LibDems have long prided ourselves on our willingness to address uncomfortable truths, think new thoughts and challenge outdated consensus. Indeed, in most areas this is true, from Iraq, to the Environment, to civil liberties - it´s the Lib Dems who have set the pace with others running to catch up. However, there is one policy area where we have been woefully lacking in new thinking - choice in public services.

For many years, ever since the Alliance days in fact, we have allowed our thinking on public services to be dominated by the views of the professionals who run them, doctors, teacher etc, rather than the people who use them on a day to day basis. Don´t get me wrong this isn´t a criticism of their work - their ability to battle through the the long hours, bureaucracy and interference they face speaks for itself. No, my point isn´t about service providers at all, its about their consumers.

If you are poor in this country, you are likely to live in a council flat, receive your income from the government, have your children educated in the state school, use the NHS and rely on public transport to get around. You are in fact likely to be entirely dependent on the state. What do we as LibDems say to someone who lives in that situation? Well by and large we say vote LibDem and we will run the state better on your behalf. Use your vote every 4 years and leave it to us to sort it all out. That is not exactly a satisfactory stance for liberals to take, posing as managers of one size fits all public services.

It wouldn´t be fair to say that we haven´t done any thinking on this issue the Huhne Commission of a few years back attempted to look at what modern public services would look like in a Liberal Britain. It wouldn´t be unfair to sum up its conclusion as ´more local and more democratic´ - that is in effectthat more powers would be given to local councils, with responsibility for services such as the NHS and policing made directly accountable through them. I doubt there is a single LibDem who would disagree with that in as far as it goes. However, the idea that the sum total of our thinking on how to empower the powerless, or even the aspirational, through public services is to give Lambeth or Doncaster or Glasgow Councils more power and control over peoples lives is to say the least somewhat disappointing. review.

You might be forgiven for having forgotten that when last year we came up with our dramatic new tax policy we also had a major review of our other policies. The result was an extraordinarily limp document, which rather than challenging party orthodoxy and fundamentally rethinking our ideas simply tried to distill and clarify what had gone before, unsurprisingly it has been left on the shelf since the day it was passed. It barely addressed the issue of public services and how to give people more control over them, indeed it deliberately avoided discussing the issue of choice. At the time I was serving on the party´s Federal Policy Comittee, when the final draft came before us I asked why the section in particular on public services was so weak? The answer came from the Co-chair of the policy review group that this was indeed the weakest section of the review, because ´they had not had time´ to look at the issues properly in the 8 months of the review process. In short when we were looking at how best to make our future policies relevant to the electorate, reformng public services was the last priority, almost an afterthought for which there wasn´t enough time to examine the issue seriously. That is a pretty savage indictment not just of our policy making process but also of our priorities.

The leadership election provides us wth an opportunity to correct this mistake. Both canidates must address the issue of choice n public services. Why should someone be stuck with shoddy, second rate services which they can only influence every 4 years. Arguing that we will make these services more local will no longer do. One of the many reasons I´m voting for Nick Clegg is his willingness to address this issue and try and find a liberal way of squaring the circle and enable everyone, whoever they are the opportunity to choose the services they deserve. If his stance means that as a party we finally have a real debate about the role of the state and public services in the 21st Century then so much the better.

It has to be Clegg

2007-10-19T16:16:00.001+01:00

Nick Clegg surprised no one by announcing today that he is the running to succeed Ming Campbell as Leader of the LibDems. Even before he was elected to Parliament two years ago he was being tipped as a future party leader.

Clegg, is young, bright, articulate and as the new Facebook group says ´more of a hottie than David Cameron´. However more important that youth and goodlooks, he combines the ability to challenge the party´s cosy assumptions (his announcement called for the LibDems to leave their comfort zone and be wary of excessive state interference) while unifying the party around a forward looking 21st Century liberalism.

It was a pleasant surprise yesterday morning that when the leading ´leftwing´ contender Steve Webb announced that he was not running himself, he did not chose the candidate who appeared to be closer to that wing of the party but instead backed Nick Clegg, the unabashed Orange Booker. Indeed he is not alone, Phil Willis, Mark Hunter and Paul Rowen, MPs who all along with Webb backed Simon Hughes last time out have already declared their support for Clegg.

What is it then about Clegg that can pull together such a wide coalition of support with Ed David, Juila Goldsworthy, Greg Mulholland and Sarah Teather also adding their backing? Well, Clegg speaks to a basic truth about British politics - it is liberalism that is the underlying theme of modern political discourse. Words like freedom, choice, diversity, and opportunity trip of the tongue of every Labour & Tory politician. However, although they have hijacked the language of liberalism they don´t truly understand it. It is the Liberal Democrats alone in British politics who are the true champions of this tradition, we just have to be brave enough to go back to our roots and rediscover that voice. That won´t happen by chance, we need to refresh and rethink our approach, we don´t need to change our values but we do need to find a new way of challenging ourselves and the country.

We need to can articulate a vision that speaks to the millions of voters who share our party´s values but have never previously thought of themselves as Liberal Democrats. We need to begin to call the Liberal Diaspora that spread across the political spectrum from the wreckage of the old Liberal Party back home. We need a party leader who can inspire and build a new liberal coalition that looks like the country we want to represent. We need someone with energy, intellect, charisma and determination.

Quite simply we need Nick Clegg - he gets my vote.

Sad for Ming, sad for the Lib Dems and sad for politics

2007-10-16T09:05:00.000+01:00

I had intended to give up my blog, having taken up a new job that requires a degree of political impartiality, however yesterday's events are just too much for me to allow to pass without comment...

Ming has always been a real liberal, a decent man of integrity, everything he has said and done as Leader has shown that.

He was in many ways the right man at the wrong time. I was one of a number of people who repeatedly tried to convince Ming to stand in 1999 when Paddy resigned. He wavered and in the end decided to sit pout that contest, sometghing which he clearly regretted very much. When the chance for him to run again come along last year he finally went for it, however I didn’t vote for him. Not because my view of his abilities had changed but because the times had changed around him.

It’s a sad fact that British politics has been reduced to little more than stardust and sound bites but that doesn’t make it less true. The modern party political leader needs to be fit not just for the media age but the internet age, and sadly Ming just didn’t have the right image for the iPod generation. It wasn't just a question of age but of style, fluency and approach. All his undoubted ability just weren't enough to get the message across to the electorate.

Today is a sad day, sad for Ming, sad for the party and sad for politics. It’s time to pay tribute to a great liberal and good man and move on.

We can't afford pointless recriminations about whose fault it was, personally I think the genuine shock etched on the faces of the Parliamentary Party show that that this really was Ming's personal decision. That is very much to his credit, he has braved personal humiliation to put his party first. In the words of the old cliche says ‘nothing so became him as the manner of his parting…’

Brown's mischief and Lib Dem misjudgement

2007-06-21T10:47:00.000+01:00

The last 24 hours have been bad news for the Lib Dems, we have looked at various rtimes shambolic, indecisive, divided, secretive and greedy and there is little point blaming either Gordon Brown or the Guardian. The truth is we have brought this on ourselves.

The problem started with the ill advised passages in Ming last conference speech, when he set out his 5 Tests for Gordon Brown. As was warned at the time these were predictably, even inevitably seen as a coalition negotiating gambit and they effectively opened the door to endless press specultation on whether or not the party would support a future Brown Govt. Given this we can hardly blame Brown for stirring up the water a little with his offer.

I can't believe that the party leadership for a moment seriously entertained the idea of having Paddy join a Labour Cabinet, however I cannot help but suspect that there has been a certain amount of testing the water on future co-operation. There are some people hovering around the current leadership who hanker for the days in the 1990's when there was a talk of a long term project 're-uniting' the progressive centre-left in an anti-Tory coalition.

However, times have changed and 10 years of Labour Govt have shown that they are frankly neither progressive nor particularly centre-left. Despite that these nostalgic grandees still see to believe that there is still room for working with a Brown Govt. There can be no more private chats about co-operation, no more secret liaisons, Ming has to make clear that he is not interested in working with Brown, now or in the event of a hung Parliament. If not then we will increasingly be seen as an irrelevant appendage to a tired and largely discredited Govt.

When we doubled our seats in 1997, we did so having abandoned equidistance between Labour & the Tories so that we could ride a wave against a govt that has palpably lost its way and energy. Today, we see to be endanger of doing exactly the opposite, abandoning equidistance so that we can support a Govt that looks set to be drowned by the incoming tide.

Smiles for cameron, headaches for Brown and frowns for Campbell

2007-05-04T07:57:00.000+01:00

A good result for the Tories - we are finally seeing them reach the kind of levels where they can feel confident of winning the next election but not yet of gaining an overall majority. 41% is good, winning Lincoln & Plymouth was good news but they should have won places like Bury & Crewe as well, and be pushing their overall vote up higher into the mid 40’s. None the less being 14% ahead of Labour is a genuine reason for Cameron to be smiling this morning. While in Scotland, the Tories have held their own well, gaining Roxbergh & holding Dumfries is an unexpected bonus for them.

As for Labour, the idea that winning just 27% of the national vote, their second worst ever vote, is some kind of triumph reveals just what bad shape they are in. This result is bloody awful for Labour, there have been virtually wiped out in the South, which means that Labour MPs such as Howard Stoate in Dartford who came in during the 97 landslide, should be polishing up their CVs. However, they have done well in some of the urban centres against the Lib Dems, for instance taking seats in Bristol and only losing 3 seats in Birmingham. Wales has been pretty hideous, a coalition beckons & they will probably have to find a new Leader before too long. While in Scotland whether they hang on as the largst party their stranglehold on the Scottish central belt appears to have been finally broken.

This is a poor result for the LibDems, my party must recognise the warning signs. As expected the party has been pushed back by Tory gains in the South, less expected was the failure to make any real headway against Labour in the cities, though there were some bright exceptions such as winning control of Rochdalle and Hull. Overall though 26%, a 1% fall from last year is no disaster, it genuinely was a mixed bag for the party, but we should have done better.

Overall there is little % change in the vote of the big 3 parties - 41% (+1%) for the Tories, 27% (+1%) for Labour, 26% for the Lib Dems (-1%). I’ve thought for some time that the Tories were heading for largest party status at the next general election, making agins from both Labour & the Lib Dems. That looks increasingly likely to me.

These results make me think that the Lib Dems will have to fight harder than we currently think to make gains from Labour in order to make up for the losses to the Tories.

What on earth are the Tories up to?

2007-04-18T22:35:00.000+01:00

We all know that David Cameron has been trying to copy pages from the Blair text book, trying to pull his party to the centre in order to build a coalition of support wide enough to win power. A key part of that is getting endorsements from unlikely people who would previously have been expected to run a mile from the Tory embrace. That I assume can be the only logic behind the Conservatives approach to the LibDems to support Greg Dyke as an independent candidate for Mayor of London. The affair rasies serious questions about Cameron's judgement and indeed undermines his ability to deliver his wider project.

The idea of a joint LibDem-Tory candidate was nothing more than an ill thought through school boy wheeze. It exposes the shallowness of Cameron's internal party changes and clumsiness of some of his actics. It seemed to be based on the model of Martin Bell's successful campaign against Neil Hamilton in 1997, when both Labour & the LibDems withdrew to allow him a clear run against the Tories. However those were very special circumstances and they took place after several years of evolving co-operation between the party leaderships. This latest proposal came out of the blue, with no preparation or it seems assesment of the likely reaction. Reaction from the Lib Dems and inside the Tory party.

What I found perhaps most surprising is that this idea was raised by Cameron himself directly to Ming Campbell. Surely, something as a sensitive and potentially damaging should have been discretely raised by the back room boys, allowing plausible deniability if things went awry. The amateurishness of this episode, followintg on from George Osbourne's crass attempt to bribe David Laws into defection with the offer of a Shadow Cabinet place shows that unlike Blair, who was surrounded by some of the sharpest political brains for a generation such as Peter Mandelson & Alistair Campbell, Cameron's inner circle lack a sure political touch.

So far Cameron has had a pretty easy ride as Tory leader, the media have been largely sympathetic, however this may prove to be something of a turning point, when they start to take a second look and begin to ask harder questions about him. The long run-up to the next election may reveal that the boy wonder isn't quite so wonderful after all.

Welcome to Gordon Brown's Britain

2007-03-23T21:54:00.000Z

This week's budget was an unashamedly redistributive one, no surprise you'd think from a Labour Chancellor running for the party's leadership. Except of course for the fact that it redistributed from the poor and the struggling to the better off and the rich.

This is the moment when all those people who have secretly hoped that Gordon brown will somehow be different from Tony Blair when he moves into no 10 should finally realise that he offers just more of the same.

In choosing to cut the standard rate of income tax but abolish the lower 10p rate and to reduce the main corporation tax while raising taxes on small businesses Brown has revealed his ture colours.

Brown's apologists claim that the the abolition of the 10p rate on the first £3,000 of taxable income doesn't matter because, the poorest are all eligible for working tax credit. This ignores the appalling take up rate of the fiendishly complex tax credit system, but more than this it deliberately ignores the fact that many people who are on below average incomes cannot claim credits because the cut off level is £12,000.

As Channel 4 news pointed out that includes junior nurses for instance on £12,600, under the new regime their tax bill will rise a whoping 9% from £1355 to £1475. while there are others who earn less than £12,000 who arent eligble either, such as under 25s, many part time workers and older women, so that someone earning just £7,500 could actually see their tax bill double from £227 to £454.

This was a taste of things to come under Gordon Brown and it is simply indefensible, those Labour backbenchers with their order papers in the air were not just cheering Gordon Brown they were waving good bye to any claim that their party might once have had to being a socially progressive one.

Labour has become an empty electoral machine, increasingly devoid of purpose and meaning. On the basis of the evidence this week Gordon Brown will not provide it.

The 5 Tests

2007-03-10T21:51:00.000Z

Here is an article that I´ve written for Lib Dem Voice....

I didn’t vote for Ming Campbell to be party leader, but I’ve never been one of those who have criticised his leadership, I have had no time for those who listened to the media fluff about dissent in the party over his style & age. In fact his first year has been better than I expected or even hoped for. He has imposed a degree of organisational rigour on the party that was sadly lacking previously, he has set a clear policy lead challenging much of the party´s soggy corporatist hobby horses and he has generally repaired and steadied a ship that was badly holed below the water line by Charles Kennedy’s messy departure.

So far, so good or at least until last weekend it was.

Ming’s speech to the party’s Spring Conference has left me deeply worried about the strategic direction of the party and the advice that he is getting. In his speech he laid out Five Tests for a Gordon Brown government. This was at best a very peculiar thing to do. Don’t get me wrong the tests themselves were perfectly sound in as far as they went, though they were a little vague and with one or two glaring omissions. However, publicly declaring them was I believe a serious tactical error .

One of Charles Kennedy’s significant achievements as Party Leader was to reach a point where the Lib Dems were being judged, for better or for worse, on our own agenda and our own terms. He did this by resolutely refusing to discuss the idea of pacts, deals or coalitions, until journalists finally became bored of receiving the same non-answer, something he even managed to maintain under the intense pressure of two General Elections.

That achievement is now being undermined. Although the 5 Tests were presented to the party as criteria for judging a pre-election Brown Government it is clear from the media reaction that virtually no-one has taken them at face value. They are widely seen as the opening gambit for coalition talks should Labour be the largest party in a hung Parliament after the next general election. Even if they genuinely are not, that is how they are perceived, perceived by the public, the media and by the Labour party.

It makes perfect sense to have a set of criteria for judging the Government´s performance at the next election. However publicly setting those criteria out it is a diversion that gives no advantage to the party in the short term and instead opens a Pandora’s Box of media speculation in the run up to the General Election. We know to our cost that most journalists can only cope with one Lib Dem story at a time, last year it was our pending implosion and mass defections to the Tories, as a result of the 5 Tests the next story is likely to be whether or not we will support Labour not what are our own policies.

What is even more troubling though is the one sided nature of the tests. If they are good enough to judge Gordon Brown & the Labour leadership, why can’t they be applied to David Cameron’s Conservatives?

Like most Lib Dems the new Rainbow Tories fill me with a mixture of incredulity & distaste, despite their pantomime attempts to masquerade as liberals we know who they really are, it is Patrick Mercer he speaks from the Tory heart not David Cameron. However, if the 5 Tests are to be seen as a genuine framework for judging performance – why can’t they be used to assess the Tories? If Cameron has been judged and found wanting without the need for pre-set criteria, why do we need them for Brown? Indeed looking at the test Cameron seem to perform as well, or as badly as Brown. It is this point which leaves me wondering whether there are some people at the top of the party who still hanker after ill-fated ‘project’ of co-operation with Labour.

If the 5 Tests are the first step towards reviving the idea of a progressive anti-Tory alliance then they are a mistake, both as an idea and a tactic. In the 1990’s I supported co-operation with Labour because I thought there was the chance to secure a truly radical centre-left Government that would transform this country. However the last 10 years has amply demonstrated that nationally Labour is very far from being a progressive party, and is in fact a totally untrustworthy partner – remember that promised referndum on PR? Even if you share the view that we should be working with Labour after the next election the Tests do not work as a tactical negotiating gambit.

It is a pretty strange tactic to start negotiations in public and to do so by effectively dropping a central policy condition. Let alone capping it all by giving up any leverage you might have had by making clear that even if you don’t get what you want, you have no Plan B, because you won´t work with the Opposition!

10 years ago, when the country had had enough of the unsavoury shambles of the Major Government the Liberal Democrats, along with Labour, rode an anti-Tory tidal wave, more than doubling our seats. We did that in large part because many people who did not necessarily identify themselves as natural Lib Dem, looked at the local political situation and decided that we were the best vehicle for removing the Conservatives from power.

Today the political tide is turning again, as more and more people are repulsed by Labour’s arrogance and authoritarianism, Cameron is finally beginning to surf that tide not because people love the Tories but because they are tired of Labour. Surely we as a party won’t choose this moment to stand against that tide?

Publicly announcing the 5 Tests was a mistake, at best a diversion that will lead to the revival of the tired ‘will they, won’t they’ press speculation loved by pundits. However, far more worrying is that they may indicate a train of thought and action at the higher echelons of the party that could lead to us propping up a defeated and discredited Labour government after the next General Election. I for one am wholly opposed to that idea and I suspect so are the overwhelming majority of party members.

Have they no shame?

2007-02-08T17:38:00.000Z

The Government's complicity in the illegal Iraqi war now extends to covering up the incompetence of the American military at the expense of British justice and the family of British servce men kileed in 'friendly fire'. Mealy-mouthed apologies from Blairs & his minions should cut no ice.

Time and time agin this Government and particularly this Prime Minister shows it simply has no shame. The sooner he goes the better. Will things be any different though under Gordon Brown? I doubt it, he is even more rabidly pro-American than Blair.

Labour's strategy has been to gain influence over the US neo-cons by publicly supporting them while privately urging restraint. Pretty obviously this hasn't worked, they have become grotesque mouth pieces for a bankrupt policy, a discredited war and a lameduck President.

Why Polly Toynbee hasn't got the answer

2006-11-22T22:16:00.000Z

Interesting noises are eminating from the Rainbow Tories. Apparently the Cameroonies want to abandon Churchill policy & embrace Polly Toynbee instead.

The idea maybe of anyone wanting to embrace Toynbee, seems a little odd for me but for Tories it is even more bizarre. What Greg Clark, the moderate MP for Tunbridge Wells actually said was that the Tories should drop Churchull's attitude to social issues in favour of Toynbee's, in particular they should join the C20th and recognise the existence of relative as well as absolute poverty. This is welcome of course but has the rest of us have been living in the C21st for some years it is a little belated.

You see Toynbee's few is outdated as well, she is one of the most articulate advocates of the New Labour creed that work is the passport oout of poverty. This might seem like common sense to most people but then most people don't earn the minimum wage. For the vast majority of 'the poor' the range of jobs open to them do not include those that would allow them to escape poverty whether it is absolute or relative. Working as an unskilled labourer, in a fast food outlet or as a cleaner is not going to solve your financial problems. Indeed it may even worsen them as your benefits are withdrawn or you get tangled in the web of working tax credits.

No the answer to poverty is not more people working long hours in low paid, low skilled jobs.

Poverty is engrained & generational, by and large it is determined not by personal ability but accident of birth. The children of the poor end up poor the children of the middle class, middle class. Breaking that cycle requires a fundamental re-appraisal of our welfare system.

The current welfare system isn't designed to end poverty, just to make it more tolerable. It was designed for an age of full male employment, when the bulk of the work force had jobs for life & the unlucky few who were unemployed could expect to find a job in weeks or months. It was designed to bridge short term gaps to pull people out of economic deprivation - thats why benefits are itched at such ridiculously low levels.

Now working patterns are different, for most people will change jobs many times in their life, and more and more people are left out in the cold by the inadequcies of an antiquated system As Tory & Labour governments have tried to cut welfare bills by holding down benefit levels & trying to force people into the rough end of the labour market so the figures for long term illness have shot up with people trying to find an alternative to burger flipping.

That alternative must come through the transfer of wealth, capital ownership into the hands of the poorest people in society. It's only when you have enough money to put down a deposit on a house, start a business, go to university, or take out a pension that you start to become truly free. Neither minimum wage jobs or subsistence welfare is going to provide that.

It's time to turn our welfare system up side down. Instead of paying people a weekly pittance to stay poor the state should give every newborn a substantial grant that can be invested long term to make the capital purchases that will really make the difference to long-term economic opportunity.

What if every children born in the UK, were given a real baby bond of say £10,000 available from the age of 18 to be spent on major capital outlays? Just think how it would transform their lives. How many people for the first time would have real choices about their future in the world?

Yes, I know what you're thinking - a nice idea this is fantasy politics, think of the cost! Well, there are roughly 500,000 babies born in the UK every year, a £10k baby bond would also cost £5 billion ayear, a collosal amount yes, but much less than the £8 billion a year we already spend on child benefit.

If we really had the will to end poverty we could do it, there are ways & means of doing so, and lord knows I for one would rather given every new born child a fat bank account than pay for the bureacracy of tax credits & New Deal and the whole panoply of the modern welfare state.

Why I'm glad Nick Griffin was acquitted

2006-11-16T22:22:00.000Z

here's a piece that I wrote for lib Dem Voice last week. Thought it was worth reprinting given the authoritarian humbug that we've had from Gordon Brown on the subject.

"Nick Griffin, the Leader of the BNP, was acquitted yesterday of charges of inciting racial hatred. In 2004 Griffin made a speech to BNP activists in which he described Islam as a “wicked, vicious faith” and said that Muslims were turning Britain into a “multi-racial hell hole”.

Griffin is a racist, he espouses an ugly creed based on fear and ignorance, almost every word he says is offensive. But being offensive shouldn’t be enough to land you in jail.

Yesterday, Mizanur Rahman, a young radical Islamist was jailed for his part in the protest earlier this year over the Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Rahman waved banners and chanted into a megaphone shouting “Annihilate those who insult Islam” and “Behead those who insult Islam.”

Although he apologises now, Rahman’s remarks were full of hate, they were grotesque, offensive and shocking. But being shocking shouldn’t be enough to get you convicted.

I’m a black gay man and much of the anti-hatred legislation that Griffin and Rahman were prosecuted under was designed to protect people like me. But freedom is a delicate thing, and I believe that our current raft of hate crime laws in danger of undermining the very freedom they aim to protect.

These laws are meant to stop people inciting others to acts of hatred, but how can you do that? Where do you draw the line? Hatred, however repugnant is a legitimate view. You might deplore it but you cannot abolish it by Act of Parliament.

Certainly the law can and should criminalise the planning and instruction of acts of violence, but is describing Islam as ‘wicked and vicious’ or saying that those who insult it should be ‘annihilated’ really the same thing?

I believe that there is a right to be offensive, to say things that scandalize and outrage opinion. Far more important though is the right to be offended. I would rather hear things that hurt me than be stopped from hearing them for my own good.

Being hateful is wrong but I don’t want to live in a society where it is illegal."

Reading the runes

2006-10-28T12:05:00.000+01:00

The art of political fortune telling has come a long way since the local Chieftain's pollster would open a pig's bladder to discern his chances in the upcoming battle but after this week's polls we may have to reconsider that option. It's been an interesting week though with YouGov, ICM, Mori and Communicate Research all reporting widely different results.

The Tories' rating has been very similar in all 3 from 39-35% but there is disagreement among the pollsters on the split between Labour (ranging from 37-29%) and the LibDems on between 22-14%.

It's pretty clear that the Tories' support is in the high 30's, good but not good enough to guarantee victory in an election. Having said that though it is possible for the Tories to scrape home with that level of support. How? Well, its the gap between the two main parties that will decide the outcome of the next election. If the Tories can't increase their support over 40% they will need the LibDems to take Labour votes for them. That's why the uncertaintly over the split between Labour & the LibDems makes all the difference.

I suspect the reality is that Labour are in the low 30's & the LibDems in the high teens. Either way though, the real balance of support won't be settled until Tony Blair leaves Downing St. Only when Brown takes over will we see if Labour can recover some ground with the voters who have left them in the past few years. I don't place any great store in the hypothetical polls between Brown & Cameron. When he takes over perception of Brown will change. There will be a 'Brown Bounce' in the polls, though how high it will go and how long it will last no-one knows.

Until we see the nature of the linkely bounce and whether it signals a permanent consolidation of Labour support or a temporary hike we won't really know the landscape on which the next election will be fought. Until then interesting though they are the polls are fairly meaningless.

Tax & the Tories

2006-10-20T07:07:00.000+01:00

The Tory Tax Commission has released its report and surprise, surprise it has recommended sweeping tax cuts. Well, the real surprise of course is how similar many of the proposals are to those laid out by the LibDem Tax working party this Summer.

Although there are differences over Inheritance Tax & Stamp Duty (the Tories want extra breaks for the rich, while the :ibDem package is redistributive) the big items - cutting the basic rate by 2% to 20 & scrapping the 10% rate raising the threshold to £7,835 are both the same.

This package would cost £21billion, its already clear that Cameron will look to counter the revenue loss through a 'Green Tax' switch, both he and Osbourne indicated as much at Tory party conference and are again briefing the press now.
The approach is clever politics, setting up a fake confrontation with the 'rightwing' report and balancing its nod to the party's grassroots ideologues with a high profile green initiative.

Of course the green switch is also at the heart of the LibDem strategy. If the Tories do adopt the same approach it will be an act of political larceny on a par with Disraeli backing Parliamentary reform. none-the-less the LDs shouldnt be overly concerned. The LDs new tax policy left it exposed, with the potential for the Tories to attack them in the 20-25 seats where the party is vulnerable to Cameron's revival as a high tax party. A Conservative green switch policy will signal that the Tories have changed their strategy against the party, to trying to kill the LibDems with kindness, stealing their ground and wooing back liberal Tories who supported the LDs since 97, rather than trying to scare with horror stories.

I suspect that such a policy will have a patchy success rate. It will blunt the anti-LD message & allow Campbell to hold on to some seats he might otherwise have lost - but it will open up a bigger prize, but winning over LD voters in marginal Labour seats who don't yet trust the Tories and win them more seats overall.

Yet again Cameron seems to be positioning the Tories in a way that would make it relatively easy for the LibDems to tolerate a minority Tory Govt if thats what the next election throws up.

Just a little bit more conformity & we'll all be alright, won't we?

2006-10-15T12:35:00.000+01:00

Two weeks ago Jack Straw reignited the simmering debate about multiculturism in the UK with his clumsy comments about Muslim women wearing the veil.

This is a tricky issue, complex with few easy answers, especially for a liberal - but the response has been predictably simplistic. We are now in the midst of a wave of Isamophobic media-led hysteria. Since Mr Straw spoke out we have had fears of Muslim teaching assistants being unintelligible, Muslim policemen cherry picking their duties, Muslim cabbies refusing to allow guide-dogs in their taxis and now fears over the building of a 'supermosque' in East London.

The problem with Straw's remarks is not that he doesn't have the right to express his discomfort at overt declarations of religious doctrine, as an atheist I have quite a lot of sympathy for that. Rather it is that he has calculatedly stirred up a hornets nest to promote his own forlorn ambition to become Labour's Deputy leader and dressed it all up as an attempt to bolster community relations.

The essence of Mr Straw's point is that the wearing of the full veil is so alien a concept in the UK that it is hurting community relations. He argues that those relations would be far better if Muslim women took the full veil off. In other words there would be less discrimination, fear & distrust of Muslims if they were just a little bit more like everyone else.

It's a cheap populist political gimmick, typical of today's Labour party, but unsurprisingly the new Rainbow Tories are jumping on the bandwagon with David Davies accusing Birtish Muslims of 'voluntary aparthied'. What is this nonsense? Should Sikhs take off their turbans or should Jews lose the skull caps to avoid upsetting other communities? - of course not, just to suggest it expose's the absurdity of the idea. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book, blaming the victim for provoking the crime. The problem isn't too much diversity, its too much intolerance.

It would undoubtedly be true that if we were all alike we would have less cause to disagree with each other, but I'm afraid that kind of conformity comes at a price. One of the reasons I am a liberal is the preamble to the Liberal Democrat's constitution which boldy declares that the party 'exists to safeguard a......society in which no one is enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity'.

When I was a teenager Enoch Powell came to my school, quite something for an inner city comprehensive with a 40% black intake. None the less it gave me, as the son of Jamaican immigrants who came here in the 1950's the chance to ask him whether or not he thought I was British? He replied in his ornate way - "If the passport you carry, says you are British then, by will of the Crown in Parliament, you are indeed British - but you are not English and should not want to be." For years his comment puzzled me, but in the end I saw in it an essential truth about what it is to be British.

The historian Lynda Colley describes the nation as an 'imagined community'. Britishness is the perfect example of that - it is an invented concept - Britain didn't organically evolve, the UK was willed into existence by the Act of Union 1707. That doesn't make Bristihsness any less valid or real, but it does allow us to better understand what it means. Just as the British state has changed in those 300 years so has what it means to be British. 250 years ago it was illegal to wear that symbol of Jacobinism Clan Tartan, now it is an integral part of our culture. That is the essence of Britishness, that it grows and changes with each generation. This is a nation of immigrants, our national drink is the once exotic oriental infusion of tea, our most popular dish the chicken tikka masala. For over 1,000 years wave after wave of immigration has shaped our identity. That process has never been easy or comfortable, but it is what has made us who we are - the average sentence in English contains words whose roots come from at least four different languages.

I am a multiculturalist and an integrationist. I don't believe in multiculturalism in its classic academic sense - believing that abuses of civil liberties such as female circumsicion, should be excused on the grounds of differing 'cultural outlook'. No, a multicultural society is not one that allows any & everything - it has rules, universal standards that must apply to all people & all communities, however a multicultural society is one that doesn't assume that in order to obey those rules we all have to be the same.

The fear of otherness is found in all societies, its cure is not conformity but tolerance. That tolerance and integration cannot be achieved by brow beating and bullying. It may take generations for things that are exotic or threatening to become a standard part of British culture, but like tea & tartan British they will be. Integration takes time and undertsanding not political posturing. What has made Britain such as extraordinary influence on the world was not just its ancient traditions, but its amazing vitality & flexbility. What made Britian great was its ability to accept difference and to adapt to it.

It is not just possible to retain your cultural identity as a Jew, a Hindu, a Muslim or a Afro Carribean while being British - that is the very essence of being British. It is Britishness that will change with each new wave of immigration, we will absorb these differences not through forcing conforminty but by growing and expanding our 'imagined community' and our society will be the better for it.

Watch the straw men fall

2006-10-04T07:56:00.000+01:00

David Cameron, may have finally found his Clause 4 moment.

Having manufactured a row with the rightwing phantom, in the shape of John Redwood & Edward Leigh, over tax, he is now able to show himself bravely holding on to the centre ground.

Like Blair before him he has chosen the ground for his party's internal fight carefully. He knows he will win that fight, not because the party agrees with him but because the party is so desperate for power after 3 election losses that it6 will put up with virtually anything in order to win the nest election. He knows the Tories refusing to promise tax cuts is counter-intuitive enough for to stick in th public's subconscious.

Is this change of heart genuine, are the blue-green-yellow-red Rainbow Tories for real? Well, in a sense yes - just as pre-1997 Blair, Brown & Mandelson genuinely meant to drag Labour to the centre ground so Cameron, Osbourne & Letwin do with the Tories. However, the parrallel with Labour goes further, in that the rest of the Tory gang remain much the same gnarly bunch of rancuous reactionaries as they always were whatever liberal clothes their leaders don.

If there is a Tory majority after the election (unlikely but possible with effective targeting) then between 80-100 Tory MPs will be out & out headbangers, rightwing nutters bent on leaving the EU, ending all immingartion & asylum,privatising everything that isnt nailed down & slashing both taxes & public spending. They will be organised and out to get cameron. The Major Govts troubles & indeed Tony Blair's problems with his left, will look like a little kid's picnic compared to the antics that Redwood & co will get up to if they have the chance.

Cameron knows that he can only win the election by posing as a LibDem, but a Tory govt would be dependent on the votes of a phallanx of hard right MPs. I suspect that Cameron would genuinely like to govern from the centre and indeed, like Blair would confront his party in power. However, whatever liberal sentiments he may possess these are not strong enough to sustain a government. Like Labour, once in power the baser instincts of the party will come through. Cameron talks a good liberal game - but then he talked a good Tory game when he drafted the most rightwing election manifesto ever prioduced last year.

Left alone Tories will always be Tories, as their flip-flopping on ID cards & Iraq has shown they simply cannot be trusted with a Parliamentary majority. Desperate as I am to get rid of this wretched Govt, I am deeply concerned at the prospect of a return to power by the Tories. I think that's how the country feels as well.

If, as is likely, the next election results in a hung Parliament, then the LibDems will have a real opportunity to ensure that whoever occupies No 10, is forced to adhere to Liberal values & policies, not just empty liberal slogans.

Just how low can they go?

2006-09-29T23:27:00.000+01:00

This govt just gets more & more absurd, fines for muggers? It's becoming parody of itself.

Just think about it - someone is mugged & the attacker makes off with £100 - they are nabbed by the police and fined on the spot for all the money they have - £100! Mmmmm, surely some mistake?

Though reid has distancd himself from the idea so intense is Labour's mania for populist stunts that it has infected the policy thinkers at the Home Office, so that they are coming up with this rubbish unprompted by Ministers. You just can't make it up.

It used to be that Labour would blame its populist whizzes on the Tories, that they had to be 'tough' because otherwise the Tories would outflank them and whip up hysteria - this week though John Reid abandoned that pretence. As David Cameron (whether sincerely or not), strike an appeal for more tolerance on immigration Labour now since to outflank the Tories on the right by denouncig them as soft on crime & immigration. And this man won a standing ovation at Labour's conference!

I shudder to think of the consequences if Reid succeed in his barely concealed ambition to replace Blair.W hat is the Labour party for? They have become a soulless empty electoral shell. Reid represents them at their worst but as a whole they have surely reached the end of the road. Blairs going makes no difference - we need all of them to go, and go now.

Looking to the future? - Part 1

2006-09-18T07:51:00.000+01:00

Party conference season is here again and the LibDems are meeting in Brighton this week for their annual seaside jamboree. On the agenda are 2 key policy papers that will set the tone of the party's campaigning for the rest of this Parliament & the next general election.

One the tax paper is a bold an imaginative attempt to recast the party's tired tax & spend thinking. The other what was billed as a overarching policy review has turned into a damp squib that missees the chance to think new thoughts and instead settles for a tweaking of old policy positions.

There's been much coverage of the details of the tax paper, with its 'green switch' - cutting income tax while raising environmental taxation. The paper is far from perfect but it represents the party's first serious attempt to fund its liberal policies without stinging the middle class and therefore guaranteeing it will never have a chance to implement them.

Argument has mostly concentrated on the proposal to scrap the party's longstanding commitment to introducing a new 50% wealth tax on incomes over £100,000pa. This has been met with howls of dismay from some of those on the party's so called 'left'. Indeed the party's Science Spokesman, Dr Evan Harris, reprising his regular role as a poor man's Tony Benn, is proposing an amendment - keeping the tax and raising the threshold to £150,000.

This amendment represents a low point in the already threadbare intellectual arsenal deployed by the defenders of high taxation. The main argument used is that the party has to show that it remains committed to the cause of social justice. Well, of course no self respecting liberal could argue with that. However the amendment is completely redundant in achieving that end. It doesn't add anything to policy,it wouldn't raise significant amounts of extra funds (certainly not more than could be achieved by a reform & extension of Capital Gains Tax for instance), it's passage would drown out all coverage of the 'geen switch', it is simply being proposed so that we use our tax policy as a signal about what sort of party we are.

Well, it certainly would do that at least, but what sort of signal would it send? Not one about redistribution because tax paper's proposals are already more redistributive than the wealth tax policy, not one about the environment as it is obviously less environmentally friendly than the current proposals and clearly not one about finding new ideas for new challenges as this is a throw back to the failed formuals of the 1970s.

No the passage of this amendment would signal that the Lib Dems are simply not serious about ever attaining the power we need in order to implement our principles. This amendment is gesture politics of the worst sort, because it would be emntirely counter productive, by passing it it would make it less likely that we can win the seats we need in order to ever actually to anything in the first place.

Passing it would send a signal that we are more concerned with parading our consciences even though it means that we would be far less likely to ever have a chance to act on them.

Wealth is not just income but assets as well, and that a progessive 21st Century liberal party should be concerned about how those assts are used. The tax system should reflect that - the tax paper begins that progress the amendment tries to reverse it. I'll be in the conference hall on Tuesday voting for the LibDems to look to the future not the past and I hope the majority of other delegates will be too.

The return of eugenics

2006-09-01T17:10:00.000+01:00

Mr Blair has finally lost the plot, in a last desperate effort to find a populist drum to beat before he is finally run out of town he has hit on the ultimate scapegoats - unborn children.

In his latest madcap rant on anti-social behaviour we are told that you can spot 'menace' kids before they are even born. By identifying problem families you can work out who are 'unsuitable' parents and provide them with 'help & assistance' in bringing up their children.

Who wouldn't be against help for people struggling to raise their children, put like that it sounds almost reasonable. Almost, but then you need to ask a few questions – who will do the identifying? Perhaps the local authority social services departments dominated by our old friends those Guardian reading, Labour voting, middle class lefties with bad 2:2 in Sociology who have been ruining lives for poor people for the last quarter of a century? What about the help, what shape will that take? Already we have dark threats that the state will take away the children of families that don’t control them properly, because we all know how well Council run children homes have served those children who managed to survive their tender care. And who will be the sort of people who get targeted? Well they won't be white, middle class barristers from Islington will they....

This is the same sort of wrong-headed nanny state mumbo-jumbo that we have come to expect from Blair & his tabloid army of collectivists, authoritarians & populists. We’ve gone from on the spot fines, to teen curfews and now we’ve reached ASBOs for the unborn - has anyone told SPUC? Even King Herod waited till the sprogs were actually born!

I’m afraid I have no confidence in the idea that the state will be a better parent than people. Instead of blaming the poor and means-testing them into penury why doesn’t this ‘Government’ give them the power to run their own lives, with control over the services they rely on, the financial means to make real choices and the responsibility for making their own choices about their lives and their family.

Blair has finally gone beyond parody – the Labour Party is a hollow rightwing election machine. It is devoid of principle, bereft of ideas, and needs to be put out of its, and our, misery. It is time to kiss nanny goodnight, say good bye Tony, Gordon & John and the rest of this increasingly appalling, wretched and clapped out shambles masquerading as a government.

Not quite so liberated afterall

2006-08-17T23:02:00.000+01:00

It's now almost 4 months since I left Lambeth Council by popular demand and I discover belatedly that I'm the subject of a short piece in the 'Radical Bulletin' section of Liberator (head nod to Donnacaidh McCarthy) the self proclaimed guardians of British liberal conscience.

The June edition of that august journal contains a comment on the South London Press's sexpose of my personal ad on Gaydar, a popular gay dating site. For those who don't know it the SLP is a local tabloid newspaper with a reputation for - how can I put it - 'sensationalist' reporting.

The SLP published the article just before this years local elections in Lambeth where I was standing for re-election to the Council. The article accused me of posing naked for explicit photos 'too shocking to publish in a family newspaper'. Using carefully chosen words it implied that the pictures were of me performing some kind of sexual act. While I have never denied posting the ad I've been silent about its central allegation of a sexually explicit photo.

Given that the Liberator has chosen to perpetuate this accusation I think it’s now time to set the record straight.

Like 250,000 other gay men in the UK I have a profile on Gaydar. However, there are no sexually explicit photos on my ad and there never have been. What there was though, in common with very many other ads on the site, was a full body shot with my private parts obscured by my hand.

Was this a reckless thing for an elected councillor running for re-election to post on the net? Certainly. Was it naive to think that it shouldn't be an election issue? Probably. Was it wrong? Definitely not!

Liberator seem to take a different view however. Their article was disappointing, its not just that they took at face value the comments of a tabloid newspaper owned by a Labour peer, its not just that they failed to ask me whether or not the accusations were true, its not even the fairly obvious pleasure they take in seeing the downfall of a fellow liberal who has taken an opposing political line to them in internal party debate. What is so disappointing is the whole tone of the piece - which is just so.....illiberal.

You see Liberator seem to argue that there should be a different set of behaviour for those who seek office from those who a elect them - in their words "when one voluntarily enters public life there are some constraints". Apparently if you are in public life it is only acceptable to live a modern gay lifestyle if you are secretive and embarrassed about it - a sort of 'don't ask, don't tell' policy for politicians. Well I'm afraid I am comfortable and happy with who I am. I refuse to accept that what is perfectly acceptable in everyday life should be treated as something shameful & shady in public life. I don't believe that it is wrong in 2006 for a man, gay or straight, to look for dates over the internet. Indeed, to be fair, no-one has really suggested that it is wrong - just that I was wrong to be so open & public about it. Well, I came out when I was 16 and I'm not about to start sliding back into the closet now. If the price of being open about who I am is to lose office then that is I'm afraid a price well worth paying.

I doubt I'll ever run for office again - having been a political activist all my adult life now that I've tasted freedom I must confess that I rather like it. However, this isn't just about what happened to me - it's about what kind of politicians we want as a society. How often have we heard the complaint that politicians are aloof and separate, that one of the causes of political disaffection is that they lead lives completely divorced from the experiences of the electorate. Now we are told that it is only those people who conform to an imagined ideal of behaviour who are fit to hold office. Surely we can't have it both ways.

Yes 'when you voluntarily enter public life there are some constraints' the public have a right to expect certain standards from their elected representatives. They have the right to expect that they will not break the law, the right to expect that they will not do or say one thing in public and another in private, they have the right to expect that they will not do anything that stops them fulfilling the job to which they were elected. But what they do not have the right to is determine how a politician lives their private life. By private, I don't mean hidden and unseen - I mean that part of their life that is not accountable, whether it be that they go to church on Sunday, have a secret taste for barn dancing or they get dates on the internet.

If we want to have politicians who are vaguely recognisable as members of the human race then we are going to have to stop attacking them for being...well....frankly...human. That is particularly true of those who so presumptuously claim to be in the vanguard of liberal thinking. For me the role of Liberals is not to criticise people for exercising their freedoms it is to defend them.

'A smile like the brass plate on a coffin'

2006-08-16T19:21:00.000+01:00

I've been having a horrible recurring dream for the past week, a menacing bald man, with a sinister smile is standing waving to the crowd before entering No. 10 as Prime Minister. No it's not IDS raised from the political grave, it's someone infinitely more rightwing and authoritarian....John Reid.

Reid has had a good week in political terms, with many believing that he handled the latest "Terror Crisis" well while Big Tony was at the seaside. He's now being touted as the only credible candidate to beat Gordon brown when Tony Blair finally calls it a day. It's a terrifying thought.

While the chorus of praise is being sung its worth taking a little closer look at our brave Home Secretary. he started his political life at Strathclyde University as the Student Communists (yes this was when the British Communists thought that Uncle Joe Stalin was just misunderstood) political enforcer - the political & physical heavy who 'persuaded' recalcitrant party members to toe the line.

Perhaps it was this aspect of his personality that led to him striking up a friendship with Serbian war criminal Radozan Karadic. He stayed for 3 nights as a guest of the charming Karadic in a luxury hotel while he was a Defence Minister.

Reid comes across as a brute, an intelligent one, but a brute none the less. He is charmless, cold and unsympathetic. He has a total lack of empathy, whether it's his past as a communist bully boy, his friendship with war criminals, his complete disregard for civil liberties, his crude political populism & opportunism or his swaggering self-importance. Reid’s Labour party defenders are welcome to him.

If it wasn’t for the awful things he could do with even more power I’d welcome him as Labour leader as I think he’d be a disaster in an election and at least we could be sure of getting rid of the rest of this tabloid government as well!

Why I'm not yet convinced....

2006-08-15T19:36:00.000+01:00

It's a liberal's job to be sceptical, so I guess you can't blame me for being increasingly concerned about just how justified the latest Terror Alert has actually been. I'm not a crazed conspriacy theorist, almost always it is a combination of incompetence & opportunism that is the answer when things don't seem to add up, rather than conspriacy. That I suspect is what's going on here as well.

We've been told that the 24 arrests averted an horiffic 9/11 style attack, that following the arrest of fugitive terrorist mastermind in Pakistan information was 'discovered' that made it imperative to arrest the suspected bombers straight-away before they could put there plan into action.

However, it's now emerging that none of the 24 arrested had actually bought an airline ticket, indeed a number now appear not to even have valid passports. They literally could not have got on board a flight, let alone blow one up. Virtually all of them have been under long-term surveillance by the Security Services. Surely this means that they did not have the capacity to launch an 'emergency' attack, and that any attempt to do so would have been easily spotted & stopped?

I don't doubt that most of those arrested have extreme views, and that many of them will probably have been taped making wild threats, or indeed to be actively involved with extremist jihadist organisations but given the Police's recent record I'm not so convinced that there was much hard evidence of an actual terrorist conspiracy. Lets remember that as Craig Murray has pointed out only 12% of the 1000+ British Muslims arrested under new terrorism legislation have ever actually been charged and that of those 80% have been acquited once they got to trial.

Remember the 'Dodgy Dossier'? What that showed us was that inteligence isn't black & white, there are a lot of judgement calls, and balanced evidence that needs to be assesed calmly. What I suspect has happened is that some weak evidence against a group of home grown extremists has been used to justify action which is very politically convenient for both Tony Blair & George Bush.

The evidence remember comes from the government of Pakistani Dictator General Musharraff, which is anxious to stay in the West's good books despite its continued links with elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In particular the details of the alleged plot came from the confession of Rashid Rauf, a Birmingham born man on the run for the murder of his uncle in the UK. Tayib was arrested by the Pakistani Secret Service, the ISI (yes that's the same ISI that continues to train the Taliban), who routinely use torture to get information from suspects. As we know, torture is a very reliable way of getting information - it's not however a very reliable way of getting the truth as those tortured will say anything to make it stop.

The whole thing looks a mess, I don't think anyone sat down to plan out a conspiracy, but I do suspect that political expediency has led to pressure for 'action' whether the evidence justified it or not.

I could well be wrong, and this might have been an amazingly piece of intelligence work from the guys who rbrought us iraqi WMDs & the Forest Gate bomb factory but it will be very interesting to see how many of the current crop of suspects are actually charged, how many go to trial and how many are actually found guilty in the end.

Time to get typing

2006-08-15T07:54:00.000+01:00

This was alweays meant to be an occassional endeavour, however what with holidays & work it's been even more occassional than I'd envisaged. I'm going to make a little bit more of an effort to post more regularly, not least because so much keeps happening whenever I stray away from my PC.

An act of terrorism

2006-07-26T21:45:00.000+01:00

Can a nation lose its soul? If so, then Israel is in danger of doing just that.

The murder, for that is what is was, of four unarmed UN observers, is without justification or even excuse. It crosses the line between an act of war and an act of terrorism.

It is arguable, though vehemently I disagree, that the death of so many Lebanese civilians is unavoidable 'collateral damage' caused by Hizbollah's insistence on placing its weapons in residential areas. It is even arguable that the bombing of 2 Red Cross ambulances, evacuating civilians who had already been victims of the bombings, was, despite their clear markings, a tragic case of mistaken identity. What it is not possible to argue though is that the Isreali defence force did not know that it was attacking a UN outpost.

The first sheeling took place before Noon, in all there were 14 artillery attacks up to the point it was detsroyed at 7pm by a precision misile. Throughout that time the UN feverish tried to reach Isreali command, apparently tyelling them 10 days that day that they were in danger of destroying the outpost & killing its unarmed occupants.

The post was over 20 years old, it has the distinctive blue UN colours, it features on every Isreali army map. when the order was given to kill its occupants the IDF knew what is was and who they were targeting. There is no defence for this act, the deliberate targeting of unarmed non-combatants - and there is no moral difference between it and a suicide bomber blowing up a city bus.

What are you prepared to do in order to defend your country? What line are you not prepared to cross? When does your conscience say enough is enough? Can a nation lose its soul?

Israel must stop

2006-07-20T19:31:00.000+01:00

I am a friend of Israel, I am a passionate believer not only in the right of the Jewish people to state of their own but also in their right to defend it.

Israel was founded amid the ashes of the concentration camps, its surrounded by hostile nations, it has fought 5 years in its 58 year history. It's a nation that is forever looking over its shoulder in fear. One cannot fail to understand its determination, indeed desperation to get its soldiers back.

None the less I believe Israel must stop its bombing of Lebannon. This crisis was sparked by the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. But the Israeli military campaign is not just about securing the return of its men, its about destroying the kidnappers Hizbollah as a military force capable of attacking Israel.

But why is Hizbollah such a threat? Hizbollah is the dominant political & military force in southern Lebanon, far stronger than the Lebanese government. During the 18 year Isreali occupation it was Hizbollah that led the popular resistance. Financially supported by both Syria & Iran, Hizbollah didn't just spend the money on rockets they also spent the money on local people, providing services for people who were struggling to survive. Hizbollah is a threat today because Isreal's occupation of Lebannon made them gave them a popular mandate as a resistance movement, now Israel's bombing of Lebananon is making them even more popular.

The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Ohlmert has made a terrible strategic mistake, he is still trying to prove his strength to the Israeli public but appears to be seriously mishandling the situation. He says he wants the Lebaneese army to disarm Hizbollah, but he knows that that the govt in Beirut doesn't have the strength to do it. Ohlmert is using the capture of the soldiers as a pretext to tame Hizbollah himself.
This though cannot work, the bombing campaign is inevitably hitting civilians hardest, as we are now learning the Israeli army is not hitting the targets it wants and Hizbollah's capacity to strike southwards remains strong.

Unlike the PLO in 1982 when Isreal invaded Lebannon for the first time, Hizbollah are not a foreign force that can be expelled, they are Lebanese. If they are removed as a military force in the South their terrorist operation will fan out from Beirut around the world. Yes this campaign, if kept up long enough will humble Hizbollah, but unless Isreal is prepared to stay in southern Lebannon for another generation, then Hizbollah will regroup. Regroup that is in a different form, with yet another wave of supporters recruited by Israel's actions.

Isreal must stop, there must be a ceasefire. If not then Israel will find itself back in Lebannon, trapped in the same quagmire it so recently escaped from. It won't just be a tragedy for the people of the souvereign nation of Lebannon, which has struggled to rebuild itself from 20 years of devasting cival war, it will be a tragedy for Israeli too.

Bromley, Blaenau and a bloody nose

2006-06-30T19:23:00.000+01:00

Here's something I posted on Politicalbetting.com earlier today...

"I went to bed last night with Tories promising to ‘eat their hats’ if there was a recount and accusing ‘Limp Dems’ of spin for suggesting B&C was going to be close.

Whither DC & Rik now? Anyway, gloat over (teehee).

This is a great result for the LibDems, very poor for the Tories and BG was just plain abysmal for Labour. However, this result does not really change the fundamentals of the current political situation.

The Tories are doing well under Cameron but not well enough to be confident of winning the next election. Bromley has exposed the fragility of his message.

In opposition under Thatcher in the late 70’s the Tories were winning seats of Labour like Workington & Birmingham Stechford with massive swings. They held their own seats like Saffron Walden with increased majorities, indeed the Liberals fell below the National Front in that by-election despite starting in second place! In comparison to that the Tory performance last night was woeful.

This result exposes a vulnerability to their right in certain places - if UKIP can get its act together it could play an important spoiler role in some areas running on a nationalist, anti-immigration ticket, denying the Tories seats they need to win at the next GE.

It also shows that Big Dave is not invincible. Yes it was a local campaign & an unsuitable candidate - but if Cameron were really creating a wave of popular dissent in the suburbs then that shouldn’t have mattered - like the Tories in the 70’s he should have swept all before him on the strength of a national swing. The comparison to make is not with the Tories under Thatcher in the 70’s but Labour under Kinnock in the 80’s.

Once again Cameron’s luck has come through. He should actually be thankful that Labour’s treadful own goal and the local Bromley association’s stupidity will allow him to avoid answering some tough questions about his electoral prowess.

Blaenau Gwent is just horrendous for Labour. Yes they made a tiny recovery but it shows two things.

First, where the habit of revolting against Labour takes root it very hard to shift. That doesn’t bode well for seats where there was a big swing to the LibDems at the last general election. There a many Labour people in the Labour party who believe that when Blair goes, memories of Iraq will fade and things will return to normal. This result chimes with the opinion polls that show that isn’t necessarily the case at all - Labour is likely struggle to recover lost ground.

Secondly, Blair has to go and go soon. While some iin the party may round on Charles Clarke, the turth is that the spectacle of this Govt eating itself alive has to stop. As I’ve just said Labour will struggle to reconnect with its lost support anyway, however if it carries on like this much longer - it will have no chance of doing so - and will evetually reach a Major Govt-like condition. The only way for them to lance the boil now is for Blair to go before it is too late to rewrite a winning narrative for the govt.

For the LibDems this simply shows yet again, for those who continually write them off, that to paraphrase Mark Twain ‘reports of their death are greatly exagerated’.

The party still packs a punch - and this is not just about by-elections. Yes, the locals in may were disappointing, but they still came second in the popular vote with 27% and consolidate their seat tally. This result, as with Dunfirmline and Cheadle should demonstrate to both Labour & Tories that they will be far harder to shift at the next election than many currently expect.

The Bromley result re-inforces my view that the LibDems support is not about the popularity of its Leader. The party is I believe reaching the critical mass of solid support that implies yet again that we are in an area of 2 1/2 party politics for some time to come."

What are these bloody liberals for anyway?

2006-06-26T13:04:00.000+01:00

I'm often quite surprised by the reaction my views provoke, some people just can't believe that I am a LibDem, 'you should be a Tory' they say. It's funny how many people think in such as two dimensional way - you must either be Conservative or Labour - as if there's no room for anything else. It's equally strange how many people, even the politically informed misunderstand who the LibDems really are. All parties are coalitions, the LibDems no less than anyone else, and it worth taking time to think about who it is that actually makes up the LibDem coalition.

The LibDems are not a leftwing party, what we have been guilty of though is being overly reactive, reacting against the excessives of Tory and Labour governments rather than articulating a coherent world view of their own.

Probably about 20-25% of the party are like me, traditional economic liberals who believe in choice in public services, lower taxes and smaller government; while there is about another 25-30% are welfarists arguing for traditional direct state provision, the remaining bulk of the party are somewhere in the middle, a largely non-ideological bunch who want to do what's best for their local community - a sort of residents' association with a social conscience. The whole coalition is held together by its commitment to civil liberties & environmentalism and a strong internationalist stance.

How did the party of John Stuart Mill, Gladstone and Lloyd George lose its ideological edge? Well I believe this can be traced back to way the Liberal Party imploded in the interwar years and slowly rebuilt itself over the following decades. When the Liberals shattered in the 1920's, a result of personal rivalry, changing demographics and its own policy inertia, its great electoral coalition split off in different ways, creating a liberal diaspora right across the political spectrum.

Those more concerned with the protection of personal freedom & private enterprise mainly fled to the Tories, while those more worried about poverty and unemployment tended to end up with Labour. All that was left behind was a small rump, reduced by the 1950's to 6 seats in Parliament and winning only 2.1% of the vote in the 1955 General Election.

It must have been tough being a Liberal back then. How tempting it must have been for Clement Davies, the then Liberal Leader, to succumb to Churchill's coalition offer in 1951. But he didn't and the Liberal's survived as a party in a new role - party think tank, part pressure group. For the next 20 or so years that was pretty much the party's function despite the leadership attempts to turn it into something rather harder edged.

However, as the party recovered from its near death experience it learnt to campaign developing innovative techniques that propelled Liberals to some unlikely local victories. It clawed its way up to 19% of the vote in the February 1974 election and peaked as part of the Alliance at 26% in 1983. This new campaigning prowess came at a cost though, as the party focused on local populist campaigns it began to lose its ideological clarity, often its campaigning was reactive and parochial, defending the status quo against change whatever it was. This was good for winning elections, but not for philosphical coherence.

This reactive tendency was strengthened during the yers of the Libreal/SDP Allaince - the extremism of both the Tories and Labour parties meant that it simply had to demonstrate its moderation in order to gain new support. Not being either of the other two parties gave the Alliance electoral momentum without it having to find a sharp ideological or policy profile of its own, becoming instead the last defender of the Butskellite consensus.

For many years it seemed as if the Alliance and its successor, the Liberal Democrats, were in danger of losing any authentically liberal voice. Reacting first against the Thatcher and then against the Blair government, the party appeared to be increasingly leftwing, even knee jerk in its opposition. As Tory & Labour tried to outbid each other in rightwing populism the LibDems appeared in comparison to be the party of tax & spend and producer interests, with 'penny on income tax' policy reinforcing this perception with the public.

However, just as this perception started to get fixed in the public's mind the small government liberals in the party started to become restless. After the 1997 general election groups like LiberalFuture & new MPs like Mark Oaten, David Laws and Vince Cable started to call for the party to go back to its roots.

I vividly remember hearing the phrase 'I am an economic liberal' for the first time at the 2000 party conference. As the limits of Gordon Brown's spending increases were exposed more and more people in the party started to question the drift towards tax & spend. Pretty soon economic liberals were coming out of the closet all over the place and a new agenda was being formed to reach outside the party's traditinal voting block and call the liberal diaspora home. By 2004 the publication of the Orange Book gave a name to this growing school of thought.

Today, the Orange Bookers, although they remain a minority in the party are the LibDems' intellectual driving force - for instance the new tax proposals are pure Orange Book thinking. It seemed as if I'd been waiting 15 years to hear the things that Ming said at their launch.

When I first joined the party back in 1990, I often felt a little like a lone voice arguing for a traditional liberal approach. When I was first approved as a Parliamentary Candidate - the assessor wrote that my views were 'beyond the normal range of party opinion', today I think I may well be slightly to the left of the party's Treasury team!

The party is reaching a tipping point in policy thought, the intellectual argument in favour of a traditional liberal approach is being won, even if there is still an emotional reluctance to admit it. To put it another way, the future's bright the future's Orange!

This is a Liberal Blog

2006-06-23T08:12:00.000+01:00

This is a Liberal Blog.

I've finally joined cyberspace so that I can add my voice to the growing number of liberals who not only surf the net but also have their own little island out there in the ether.

The internet is amazing, the natural home for a liberal: free-thinking, open, linking like minded people, challenging assumptions and preconceptions. It's just the place I want to be.

I'm a political anorak of course, a sometime amateur politico, LibDem aparatchik and general hack - this place is made for me. The internet feeds my insatiable appetite for information, analysis and gossip. But the internet is much more than that. Look at how it is changing the face of politics in the US.

Bloggers are changing the way parties campaign - the quixotic Howard Dean US Presidential run in 2004, changed things permanaently - the web went from being considered as a sort of citizens' band radio for anoraks into a powerful tool for raising money and mobilising support. Now the viral marketing techniques of the web bloggers are spreading word of new policy ideas and new sorts of political candidates.

That's what we need here in Britain. People are tired of what we've got, I know I am, we really deserve something better. I'm tired of this authoritarian, tabloid, lying, brutish Labour government. I'm equally bored of the smiling, opportunistic, shallow 'Rainbow' Tories.

And even though I'm a LibDem I'm pretty tired of a tepid centrist fudge masquerading as liberalism.

I'm a Liberal and I want a different kind of politics.

A politics that doesn't confuse simply taking power from the private sector and handing it to the state, even the local state with liberalism. There isn't anything particularly liberal about promising to spend other peoples' money on big one size fits all government schemes. Liberalism is about devolving power, wealth and choice to individuals and their communities.

Surely there is room in British politics for a party that believes in social justice and the freedom of the individual. I want a politics that recognises that if you are poor in the UK and have no day-to-day control over a state that provides your healthcare, education, income and transport then you are not truly free. The point of having money, is that you can afford to walk away and do your own thing. When you're poor you don't have the choice.

I can't be the only liberal who totally rejects the so-called 'leftwing' idea that 'the poor' are too stupid to make informed choices themselves and need enlighted middle-class lefties with bad 2:2s in Sociology to make those decisions for them. I want a politics that gives ordinary people as much or more choice and control when using public services as they do in the private sector.

Britain's politics mustn't be allowed to degenerate into a tedious managerialist squabble. The internet provides an alternative, it gives us a glimpse of something different, better, not controlled and regimented from above. I'm convinced that it's here that the ideas that will change politics will be born and spread. The internet is free, open and devolved.

That's just like the sort of politics I want, and that's why I'm here - where else would a liberal want to be?