Month: May 2015

Parliament and the fight for change

Earlier this week Caroline Lucas visited Bristol to speak at the Festival of Ideas on the key themes of her recent book Honourable Friends? Parliament and the fight for change. As well as being a hugely impressive Parliamentarian, Lucas is an extremely engaging speaker. The response from the […]

Social liberalism and the Liberal Democrats

Last week a tweet by the estimable Stephen Tall crossed my timeline. The tweet pointed to his blogpost The Economist is right. Liberalism is winning. Which could be bad news for the Lib Dems in 2020. That immediately piqued my interest. After all, it is axiomatic, as all […]

Labour listless

I was following the live tweets coming from Saturday’s debate among the Labour leadership contenders. I could sympathize. Many moons ago I was quizzed at a couple of public events by Simon Fanshawe, the chair of Saturday’s event. He’s not backward in coming forward with the difficult question that gets […]

British bill of all kinds of wrong

We are getting a very strong indication of the Conservatives’ preoccupations for the opening weeks of this Parliament. The tabloids are keen to tell us the Government is acting decisively by going to ‘war’ against a range of its established bugbears – extremists, the EU, the trade unions, […]

Liberalism redux

It’s conceivable that I am just about the last Liberal Democrat blogger to post something in the aftermath of the General Election horror show. Plenty has been said. There is no doubt plenty more to say. I thought I’d add something to the mix. A little of the […]

In defence of liberal democracy

Yesterday’s Independent newspaper appropriated this title for its unprecedented editorial backing something that is clearly impossible. The Independent abandoned its traditional, and commendable, stance of remaining independent. It threw its support behind a second Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. The editorial added the caveat that it would like a second […]

The smoke and mirrors of small politics

This is supposed to be the most exciting election for decades, with the outcome still unclear only four days before polling day. But I can’t say I’m feeling it. With the exception of yesterday’s quite extraordinarily bizarre #Edstone stunt, it has all felt pretty humdrum, slightly surreal, and […]