Liberal democrats

Copper-bottoming the Coalition

Number 10 officials have been working on the mid-term review since the autumn, with what the Prime Minister’s spokesman described today as a ‘long-term intention’ to publish the awkward annex. But even though the review itself was delayed from the real mid-term point of the Coalition to this Monday, it doesn’t seem to have given those working on it sufficient time to get the annex ready for publication at the same time. The PM’s spokesman said: ‘It has been a long standing intention to publish the annex. What we needed to do was to copper-bottom it.’ The implication was that there was a great deal of copper to put on

Mid-term review: A return to the rose garden?

‘David Cameron and Nick Clegg get coalition better than anyone else in the government’ one Downing Street aide remarked to me recently, and watching the two men at today’s press conference you could see what they meant. Us hacks who came looking for disagreement or awkward body language went away disappointed. As they both talked about how the coalition had come together to deal with long-term challenges and, to quote Cameron, the ‘positive benefit’ of two parties working together on these issues, I wondered if they thought that a second term of coalition might be needed to deal with Britain’s long-term problem. Intriguingly, when asked Cameron refused to say that

Isabel Hardman

Sarah Teather dents the Coalition’s unity message by announcing her benefits rebellion

Coupled with Lord Strathclyde’s resignation over the way the Coalition worked in the House of Lords, Sarah Teather’s announcement that she will rebel against the government tomorrow is extremely poor timing. Today was supposed to be about unity, the Coalition working well together in the national interest. Now there are suggestions that this unity isn’t visible in the Upper Chamber, and that senior Lib Dems aren’t quite as ecstatic about key policies as Nick Clegg might try to argue. Ever since she went AWOL on the day of a vote on the benefit cap, Teather was a rebellion waiting to happen. She had already expressed public opposition to that cap

The Tory message in 2015: Vote Cameron for PM

One thing is already apparent about the Tories’ 2015 campaign, it will be even more dependent on David Cameron than the 2010 one was. Why, because as Anthony Wells points out again today, Cameron polls ahead of his party. There’ll be those who criticise this decision. They’ll point out that the big billboard posters of him in 2010 backfired badly. Others will wonder what more juice can be squeezed out of Cameron, given that by the next election he’ll have been leading the party for nigh-on ten years. But to the Tory leadership, the Cameron lead on the best Prime Minister question is one of their trump cards. It is

Ken Clarke’s concession on secret courts fails to calm Lib Dem fears

Ken Clarke’s announcement that the government will accept a major House of Lords amendment to the Justice and Security Bill might ease the legislation’s passage through the Commons. The Lib Dems and several senior Conservative figures, including Andrew Tyrie, have been pressing the government to accept the amendment, which gives judges more discretion on whether a court should sit in secret. So those parliamentarians will be happy. But there is still a fight on the cards, albeit not in either chamber of Parliament. The Liberal Democrat grassroots remain horrified by the Bill’s proposals for secret courts in general, even though they aren’t currently getting much traction with their MPs when

The Liberal Democrat paradox

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

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg wants gory government: so should the Tories

There’s nothing wrong with Nick Clegg putting some distance between his party and the Conservatives. Today the Liberal Democrat leader is going to open up about the gory details of government, explaining where his party has held the Tories back, and heralding a new era where he and colleagues are honest about what they actually think of policies. On Friday, I argued that this sort of honesty about the workings of coalition government was a good thing. But there is one caveat to this. Conservative MPs are pretty unhappy at present, and it’s not just that they are overtired before the Christmas break. Their unhappiness stems partly from the splits

Autumn Statement: Lord Oakeshott claims George Osborne dances to donors’ tune

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

Exclusive: Senior Lib Dems push for changes to secret courts bill

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 upsets the Lib Dems and David Davis in one fell swoop

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,

What shall we do with the drunken British?

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,

Nick Clegg is changing the way the government works

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

Is voting Lib Dem just a state of mind?

‘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

Labour’s safe seats stay safe

In the end, the threat from smaller parties came to nothing, and Labour easily retained all of the three safe seats it was defending yesterday. In fact, they extended their vote share in all three as well. Respect could only manage a distant fourth in Rotherham and sixth in Croydon North, where former Ken Livingstone adviser Lee Jasper lost his deposit. Instead it was Ukip who came second in Rotherham and Middlesbrough, and third in Croydon North. Both coalition parties saw their vote collapse in all three seats. The Conservatives ended up fourth in Middlesbrough and fifth in Rotherham (their worst results of this parliament), though they did manage to

Lib Dems seek alternative Leveson statement slot

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

The Lib Dems’ future may not be so bleak

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, balancing the budget on the backs of the rich

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

Why I regret voting for the Bill that introduced PCCs

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 crime of the Justice and Security Bill

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

Five points from ‘Super Thursday’

1). Independents and the changing face of politics. The election of 12 independent police commissioners (at the latest count) in Dorset, Gwent, North Wales*, Hampshire, Warwickshire, West Mercia, Kent, Avon & Somerset, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Surrey and Gloucestershire is cause for celebration. The aim of elected Police and Crime Commissioners is to localise power in communities, making it more accountable and therefore, one hopes, improve the quality of the service. Independent commissioners are, theoretically, the purest form of this. The same applies to George Ferguson, the newly elected independent mayor of Bristol. Their success also expresses the fact that this was a profoundly anti-politics election. The very low turnout was a