Category Archives: First appeared on LDV

Read Lib Dem Voice on your Amazon Kindle

Did you know you can subscribe to Lib Dem Voice using Amazon’s Kindle service? You can do so either on their Kindle device or using their apps for iPhone, Android, Mac or PC.

The link to Lib Dem Voice on Amazon is here. It will set you back a modest £1.99 a month.

Of course, if you think the content we produce here is worth £2 a month, and you don’t have a Kindle, you are more than welcome to cut out the middle-person and donate it to us directly by standing order.

You can also donate money to us indirectly by using any of the book or technology links on our blog to buy stuff from Amazon. As Amazon Associates, we take a small cut of your spend.

Liberal Drinks / #tweetup at #ldconf

LibDemVoice have for the last few years nominated a time and a place for an informal drink and meet-up for internetty Lib Dems to let their hair down and have a chat.

This time around, we weren’t quite fleet enough of foot to get any such event in the conference directory, so we will have to rely on word of mouth helping to spread the details.

After a quick chat on the topic in Lib Dem Voice’s private members’ forum, we settled on meeting at the Wellington pub, a short distance from the conference centre itself, on the Monday night of the conference week. Kickoff will be around 7.30pm.

If you’d like to come along, why not click here to let your twitter friends know.

In addition, Lib Dem Voice have our usual strong presence at the conference, with the following events planned:

Lib Dem Blog of the Year Awards 2011
Join LDV and online friends for a walk down the yellow carpet to award the 2011 BOTYs. Categories,
nominations and public voting all happen in August at http://www.LibDemVoice.org
Saturday, 17th September, 10pm onwards
Hyatt Regency, Andante

Do we need a Coalition ‘exit strategy’? Preparing for 2015
How should the Liberal Democrats campaign as a distinct party in the next General Election? Our panel of experts explore the party’s options for 2015.
Tuesday, 20th September, 8pm
Jurys Inn, 102

Lib Dems and the Media: friend or foe, and does it matter?
“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” Media coverage of the Liberal Democrats has increased hugely since the 2010 General Election campaign – but have we got the coverage we craved?
Wednesday 21st September, 1pm
Hyatt Regency, Fortissimo

Read Lib Dem Voice on your Amazon Kindle

Did you know you can subscribe to Lib Dem Voice using Amazon’s Kindle service? You can do so either on their Kindle device or using their apps for iPhone, Android, Mac or PC.

The link to Lib Dem Voice on Amazon is here. It will set you back a modest £1.99 a month.

Of course, if you think the content we produce here is worth £2 a month, and you don’t have a Kindle, you are more than welcome to cut out the middle-person and donate it to us directly by standing order.

You can also donate money to us indirectly by using any of the book or technology links on our blog to buy stuff from Amazon. As Amazon Associates, we take a small cut of your spend.

Cross-party smackdown for Home Secretary

A tweet crosses my desk from Cllr Kemp, itself a retweet from LGCPlus journalist Ruth Keeling. It contains a link to the Association of Police Authorities – not a body I am overly familiar with, but it has a fairly self-explanatory title.

The link is directly to a fairly draw-dropping cross-party letter from chairs of Police Authorities around the country who have a fairly serious beef with the Home Secretary’s accuracy in a recent speech.

Theresa May appears to have tried to shore up support for the Conservative policy of elected police commissioners by insinuating that in London, taxpayers got a better service from the elected police chief (and Mayor) Boris Johnson, than in other parts of the country where there are indirectly elected Chairs of Police Authorities instead.

A large number of Chairs of Police Authorities are not happy at the suggestion:

This un-evidenced, London-centric assertion was either regretfully ill-informed or wilfully inaccurate. In either case we believe it to be unbecoming of a Secretary of State. It has caused not only bemusement but anger amongst police authorities and our partners across the country.

Quite simply, your allegations are completely untrue and a cursory conversation with the relevant Chief Constables, Council Leaders or representatives of local media could have confounded it.

The facts are that not only Chairs, but the full range of diverse police authority members were out listening to communities and reflecting their concerns to the police at the highest levels in GOLD meetings across the country. Authorities provided both support and appropriate challenge to forces. We worked closely with Chief Constables to ensure that they had all that they needed to police confidently, with full operational independence in defence of the public. Both in public and in private, we simply got on with the job. Police Authority Chairs were out on the front foot; convening meetings with the leaders of other emergency services, local councils, local media and community leaders, as well as visiting affected areas.

It is a matter of record that a number of Police Authority Chairs actually cancelled their leave to ensure that the police could respond to public concerns. Before any politicians could tour the streets of London with TV cameras in tow, Police Authority Chairs from across the country had agreed the mutual aid which played an indispensable role in restoring order to London and ensuring that those streets were again safe to stroll. This was done without fanfare, but quietly, in the national interest.

Read the rest of the strongly-worded letter here.

Whilst you’re on the site, you might be interested, as I was to see their map of police authorities, the e-factsheet “What is a Police Authority?” and learn that there are also two non-geographical police authorities too. There’s something I didn’t know: there’s a British Transport Police Authority and a Civil Nuclear Police Authority.

80 dead in Norway shootings

I’ve been keeping late hours baking but as I was getting ready to turn in, the news began breaking about the extent of the awfulness in Norway. As I write, 80 are confirmed dead at a summer camp for youth members of Norway’s ruling Labour party.

It’s terrible, terrible news, all the more vivid for me for the thought that this meeting must have been a similar sort of thing to the dozens run by our own party over the years. None of us would ever have considered Activate, or a Liberal Youth meeting a target for such an atrocity. A swathe cut through an entire generation of young political activists.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who have lost children today.

Read Lib Dem Voice on your Amazon Kindle

Did you know you can subscribe to Lib Dem Voice using Amazon’s Kindle service? You can do so either on their Kindle device or using their apps for iPhone, Android, Mac or PC.

The link to Lib Dem Voice on Amazon is here. It will set you back a modest £1.99 a month.

Of course, if you think the content we produce here is worth £2 a month, and you don’t have a Kindle, you are more than welcome to cut out the middle-person and donate it to us directly by standing order.

You can also donate money to us indirectly by using any of the book or technology links on our blog to buy stuff from Amazon. As Amazon Associates, we take a small cut of your spend.

Is John Healey as dumb as a bag of spanners?

In the grand scheme of things, not a lot of people know the rules MPs are subject to when it comes to using parliamentary stationery.

If you were an MP with a boatload of postage-paid envelopes, you could probably abuse them with impunity, and send them out unsolicited to 95% of your constituents without getting any redress.

But there is one group of people who are much more likely to know the rules: people who work in politics. A subset of those are councillors. And if you are really keen on getting shopped to the House authorities, who best to try it on with but councillors of an opposing party?

So, in the run up to Lib Dem Spring conference, Labour Shadow Minister John Healey wrote a letter to 295 Lib Dem council group leaders with party political content, and was duly shopped to the authorities. It was the on the issue of the Health bill – and from the same John Healey who went to the conference hoping for a massive dust-up and appeared a little surprised at the mature discussion he witnessed. He has repaid the cost of headed paper and pre-paid envelopes, and when he was slapped on the back a second time, also managed to cough up the cost of lasering the letters.

After a fair bit of ill-tempered arguing, which appears to boil down to Healey saying the rules shouldn’t apply to him because he is a front-bencher, the shadow minister was ultimately ordered to apologise to the House.

And the moral of the story? a) don’t break the rules and b) don’t break them in front of a group of people with a ready made motive to dob you in!

Opinion: Gay blood donation ban to be lifted – well, barely

The news broke over the weekend that an announcement is imminent on the policy surrounding the lifetime ban on donating blood for any man who has ever had sex with another man.

The writing on the wall appears to be that gay men who have not had sex for a decade might in future be allowed to give blood.

This decision was the likely outcome of the scientific review into blood donation, when I researched the issue for an op-ed slot on Pod Delusion live. It was one of the things I mocked in front of a live pub audience.

The Advisory Committee for the Safety of Blood, Tissue and Organs (SaBTO) have been looking at the issue for over two years. If you check their website on the NHS pages you can read the minutes of the committee and a number of academic papers they are considering as part of making up their minds.

One of the “compromises” they appear to be coming to is suggesting that gay men who haven’t had gay sex for five years become eligible to donate blood.

This would have the bizarre outcome of putting the NHS in the same situation as the Anglican Church. “We’re absolutely fine with teh gays – just so long as we can be sure that you’re not actually f***ing.”

Will Howells joked at the time that it meant you could redefine “a dry spell” as “taking one for the team” – which made me chuckle then.

But joking aside, this is a disappointing decision.

Whilst it is welcome that a very small number of people might now be able to donate blood who previously were not able, I think this falls short of the sort of action we have seen in other countries, and is a disappointing outcome.

It still means that the vast majority of gay men, the vast majority of whom do not have HIV, will still be unable to donate blood. 19/20 gay men polled would be happy to do so if they were able, and would be happy to contribute to the Blood Service’s perpetual problem of finding enough eligible donors to keep the nation’s crash victims, surgery candidates and post-partum mothers alive.

PODCAST: How do the government’s political reforms measure up to the Great Reform Act?

Soon after becoming Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg promised “the most significant programmes of reform by a British government since the 19th century…. the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832.” But how do the Coalition government’s constitutional changes actually compare to the changes brought in by the Great Reform Bill of 1832?

That question was addressed by a meeting organised by the Liberal Democrat History Group earlier this year, with speakers our own Dr Mark Pack (who studied nineteenth century elections and electoral reform for his PhD) and the History of Parliament Trust’s Dr Philip Salmon. Here now for those who couldn’t make the meeting is a podcast.

You can also read a review of Philip Salmon’s book Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties 1832-1841 here.