Lib Dem candidate resigns over secret courts

Lib Dem members have just voted overwhelmingly in favour of an emergency motion on secret courts which repeated calls for the party’s parliamentarians to delete the second half of the Justice and Security Bill. During the debate, the leading campaigner against secret courts, Jo Shaw, who has spoken to Coffee House a number of times about activists’ opposition to the legislation, resigned as a Liberal Democrat on stage. Shaw stood in the 2010 general election, and is a barrister by trade. She had tried repeatedly to meet Nick Clegg to express members’ concerns about the Bill, but it was only recently that she was granted that meeting. Yesterday she was deeply unimpressed with Clegg’s description of some of the anti-secret courts arguments as ‘hyperbolic’.

In today’s debate, Shaw said:

‘The party which stood up against 42-day detention, ID cards and the excesses of the War on Terror is now led by those who on this crucial issue employ the same shoddy logic and who have fallen into the same anti-democratic realpolitik as the Blair government.