So a snap General Election it is then. The stars are surely aligned for substantial Conservative gains. They appear to be polling double the vote share of the Labour party at the moment. That would deliver a thumping majority. The Commentariat has already expended plenty of effort over […]
An awful lot seems to have happened on the housing policy front this week. Or at least the volume of housing talk has increased considerably. We started the week with Brandon Lewis announcing that the Government wants to see a million new homes by 2020. But the Government […]
Last night I attended a fringe meeting entitled Ten years since the Orange Book – What should authentic liberalism look like? organised by the Institute for Economic Affairs and chaired by Isabel Hardman of the Spectator. I can’t quite remember the last time I went to an IEA […]
We’re most of the way through the Party Conference season, with only the Liberal Democrats left to play. So far it’s been a bit underwhelming on the housing policy front. Labour offered a number of proposals. Some of them had been announced previously. Many of them were rather […]
It was an uncomfortable experience reading today’s Work and Pensions Committee report on what we are now calling the “social sector size criteria” – aka the bedroom tax – and other components of housing support affected by welfare reform. It was uncomfortable because the cross-party Committee highlights the […]
What to do about the housing crisis? It’s a question that, should you have been so inclined, you could have focused on throughout much of yesterday’s proceedings at Liberal Democrat Spring Conference. A motion on the reform of planning policy was passed, unamended, during the morning’s official business. […]
And so it came to pass. Almost as you would have anticipated. Labour’s bid to win today’s vote against the so-called “bedroom tax” was defeated. There was speculation during the day about how many Liberal Democrats would vote with Labour. The answer, when it came, was two. The […]
Tim Farron is by far the most accomplished orator among the current generation of leading Liberal Democrat politicians. Rarely does one of his speeches as Party President pass without someone making use of the word “barnstorming”. His speech on the opening day of this year’s autumn conference was […]
Rafael Behr uses the ongoing Rennard imbroglio as a jumping off point for some broader points about the positioning of the Liberal Democrats in a post today at the New Statesman. He argues that: Clegg’s office has a clear enough sense of where they think he and the […]
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