Liberal democrats

Labour under a more left-wing leader, the Tories bearing right. These are circumstances in which you would expect the Liberal Democrats to flourish. But they are in government and haven’t benefitted from this moment. Instead, they are struggling in the polls, coming fourth too often for comfort. Part of the problem is that the public simply aren’t listening to Nick Clegg at the moment. As one Conservative Cabinet Minister sympathetic to the Liberal Democrats’ political strategy observes, ‘Clegg can say anything, he’s just not being heard.’ Those close to Clegg believe that this will turn round in time. Their hope is that his apology over tuition fees has drawn some

The Liberal Democrats are keen to use today to show that Coalition works, but Lord Oakeshott is in a less charitable mood. I’ve just had a chat with him about George Osborne’s explicit rejection of the mansion tax in his statement today as ‘intrusive’. The former Lib Dem Treasury spokesman in the House of Lords says: ‘I’m not withdrawing anything I have said about the Tories and the mansion tax. Intrusive is exactly what taxes on high-end tax dodgers have to be. George Osborne has performed a screeching handbrake turn on Tory donors’ orders.’ Nick Clegg’s aides have been trying to labour the proalition point in their briefings , though. A

Senior Lib Dem MPs are deeply concerned about the government’s plans for secret courts, and will urge the government to accept changes made to the legislation in the House of Lords, I understand. The Justice and Security Bill will have its second reading in the House of Commons in the next few weeks, fresh from a series of embarrassing defeats on the secret courts measures in the House of Lords. Ken Clarke has said that some of the amendments brought in the upper chamber will need modifying at the very least. But the Liberal Democrat grassroots have been lobbying their parliamentarians to drop the Bill entirely ever since their conference

Theresa May has upset quite a few people from across the political spectrum with her comments in the Sun today about the Communications Data Bill. The Home Secretary told the newspaper: ‘The people who say they’re against this bill need to look victims of serious crime, terrorism and child sex offences in the eye and tell them why they’re not prepared to give police the powers they need to protect the public. Anybody who is against this bill is putting politics before people’s lives.’ This irritated David Davis sufficiently for the Tory backbencher to raise May’s comments as a point of order in the House of Commons this afternoon. Davis,

Being in government has forced the Liberal Democrats to decide whether they are liberal in the British sense of the word, or in the American, statist sense. Nick Clegg leans towards the latter, which is why he wants the state to regulate of the press. But Jeremy Browne, the Home Office minister, is emerging as a genuine Manchester-style liberal. In the Mail on Sunday today, he has come out against the illiberal strategy for the minimum pricing of alcohol. He can’t speak himself, but ‘friends of Mr Browne’ have this to say: ‘Jeremy’s view is that the thug who has downed nine cans of lager is hardly going to think,

Say what you will about Nick Clegg’s decision to take a different stance from the Prime Minister on Leveson, but the Deputy Prime Minister has this week effected another big change to the way Westminster government works. He has sent party members an email today explaining why he felt it was necessary to make a separate statement to David Cameron in the Commons on Thursday. The Lib Dem leader writes: As you may have picked up, the Prime Minister and I disagreed; there is not yet an agreed ‘government line’. That’s in part why we had to make separate statements – a major departure from Parliamentary protocol, apparently. I’m often

‘UKIP is not a party but a state of mind’ wrote the usually excellent Matthew d’Ancona in a remarkably sniffy column a couple of days back. Now, given that UKIP became the second party in the Middlesborough and Rotherham by-elections, perhaps some people will have to consider that the UKIP state of mind is rather closer to that of many British people than that of certain mainstream political parties? After all, yesterday the Liberal Democrats managed to record what is now being anointed the worst ever by-election result by a major political party. The Liberal Democrats managed to poll behind the Respect party, the British National Party and the English

As teams in secure rooms in Downing Street pore over the half dozen copies of the Leveson report, which arrived this morning, the Liberal Democrats are already starting to work out what they’ll need to do if David Cameron and Nick Clegg find they cannot agree on the government’s response. The Lib Dems have approached the Speaker to find out whether there is a possibility that Nick Clegg could give his own separate statement following Cameron’s own response in the Commons tomorrow afternoon. Sources say they hope that this is an unlikely scenario, but add that ‘he would like to be able to make his position clear in Parliament’ if

At last week’s Corby by-election, the Liberal Democrat candidate requested two recounts. Once a formidable by-election machine, the Lib Dems were reduced to searching in vain for the 14 extra votes they required to get 5% of the vote, and so get their £500 deposit refunded. In 1935, a famous book described The Strange Death of Liberal England, a theme that has regularly been returned to in the intervening 77 years. In 1951 the Lib Dems’ predecessor, the Liberal Party, won six seats on 2.5 per cent of the national vote; in 1989, a year after the merger between the Liberal and Social Democratic parties, the Lib Dems polled 6

George Osborne has a dilemma to answer in his autumn statement (which must be finalised by 28 November, when it will be submitted to the Office of Budget Responsibility). He has promised to offset politically welfare cuts worth £10bn with tax increases on the wealthy. There is an added complication in that Osborne cannot afford (literally) to choke recovery by imposing levies on sources of wealth creation. This leads him, logically, to pensions and property. The FT reports that the chancellor is considering reducing the maximum level of tax relief on annual pension contributions from £50,000 to either £40,000 or £30,000. It is estimated that these changes would net the

So much has been written about the lead up to, and the fall-out from, last week’s elections for Police and Crime Commissioners that it seems almost futile to try to add anything. As the paltry turn-out became obvious – formally and reportedly as it was obvious to anyone in touch with a polling station on the day – and the election of a myriad of quixotic independent candidates apparent, I tweeted that I thought we may regret introducing PCCs and that I regretted voting for the Bill which made them a reality. That was borne out of frustration that we really didn’t need to end up where we did last Friday.

The Coalition Agreement states: ‘We will be strong in defence of freedom. The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties.’ The Justice and Security Bill, which returns to the Lords on Monday, contains measures that contradict the noble objectives laid out above. This should shame the coalition and the Liberal Democrats in particular, for whom civil liberties are a defining issue. The government has made a last minute amendment (£) to the bill in order to scale back some of the ‘order-making’ powers of the Secretary of State, which

Of the three main parties, Labour will be happiest with today’s results. They’ve won Corby, the contest that was always going to get the most media attention. But, I think, there are things to worry all three parties in the results. Last week, Labour sources were talking about how the big two tests for them of the night were Corby and the Bristol mayoralty. In Bristol, they’ve been beaten by an independent candidate. Ben Bradshaw is already complaining on Twitter that this defeat can be put down, in part, to the party’s resource allocations for these elections; the fact that Corby was prioritised above everywhere else. The Police and Crime

Are Britain and Germany heading for an almightily clash over the future of the EU? In this week’s Spectator, Christopher Caldwell argues that Angela Merkel has had enough of Britain’s position and is out to give David Cameron a kicking over Britain’s lack of solidarity with her nation. On the latest View from 22 podcast, Fraser Nelson explains the significance of about is about to happen: ‘The [problem is the] extent to which Europeans don’t understand us, they can not get that for Britain, it is an issue of sovereignty. They keep thinking well the Brits don’t want to agree the next budget, let’s give them a few sweeteners —

The Tories have a 40:40 strategy for the next election. The aim is to defend their 40 most vulnerable seats and try and win 40 others to give the party a majority. So which 40 are in their sights? Normally, it’s an easy one to answer: you just look at the last election and count which seats have the most narrow Tory defeat. If you’d done this, there would only be 9 Liberal Democrat MPs on the Tory hit list. But the Liberal Democrat vote has changed radically since the last election. So Stephen Gilbert, the PM’s political secretary,  has drawn up a new list, added in demographic factors, current polling