Liberal democrats

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

One of the key challenges for David Cameron this autumn is to address his policy on Europe. A big speech is expected before European leaders meet in December, with some in the Conservative party hoping it will come as soon as next week in order to boost Tory chances in the Corby by-election. But because the Prime Minister is offering definition for his own party on the EU, the other party leaders must do the same. Nick Clegg’s speech today set out where he stands, and he didn’t mince his words. As well as the lines I reported earlier about opting out of law-and-order powers, the Deputy Prime Minister also

When Nick Harvey was sacked in September’s reshuffle, leaving the Ministry of Defence without a Liberal Democrat minister, anti-nuclear campaigners and the SNP claimed the move put the future of the review into alternatives to the current Trident nuclear deterrent in doubt. To underline the review’s security, the party announced at the start of its autumn conference two weeks later that Danny Alexander would lead it instead. But though the review may be continuing, it appears rather insecure in one crucial respect, which is whether anyone will actually pay it the blindest bit of attention. Today Philip Hammond announced a further £350 million of funding for the design of a

Danny Alexander told Andrew Neil on The Sunday Politics that even if he had known the economy would only grow by 0.6% rather than the five and a half percent plus that the Office of Budget Responsibility predicted in 2010, he would still have backed the austerity programme. ‘The judgment we made was the right one’, he declared. He cited how the deficit reduction programme had reassured the markets from which Britain still has to borrow and that the OBR’s view is that fiscal tightening has not been a major reason why its forecasts were so out. Alexander refused to concede that a mansion tax was dead, despite the Chancellor

Nick Clegg is giving a speech this evening in which he will try to re-sell the Liberal Democrats as friends of business. Admitting that he hasn’t ‘said enough’ about the party’s pro-business policies, he will tell the guests at Mansion House: ‘Many in the corporate world do not – automatically – see the Liberal Democrats as natural allies. Perhaps that’s because, most recently, we’ve rightly earned ourselves a reputation as loud critics of corporate irresponsibility… Not least in financial service following the crash in 2008. Yet, historically, the Liberal Democrats are a party of industrialists and small business… And, since coming into government, we’ve been taking decisions, day in, day

The government suffered an awkward defeat in the House of Lords this afternoon on its changes to council tax benefit. Rebels on an amendment to the Local Government Finance Bill calling for an independent review of the changes to be carried out within three years of their introduction included 16 Liberal Democrats. Labour has dubbed the changes, which will mean councils will have to design their own local schemes to help low-income households with council tax bills, the ‘poll tax mark two’ because two million families will have to contribute towards their council tax for the first time. Liberal Democrat Lord Shipley told the Chamber: ‘The problems for individuals could

This is a story that’s going to run and run until MPs walk through the lobbies next year in the vote approving the boundary reforms: senior Tories are plotting to buy the Lib Dems off from blocking changes to constituencies by offering them state funding of political parties. The latest plot has surfaced in today’s Financial Times, with one Conservative minister telling the paper that the Lib Dems are ‘basically out of money’. As expected, the Lib Dems are rejecting the story, arguing there is no way that the party would do a deal on party funding when their plan to vote down the boundary reforms is revenge for the

Grant Shapps, the perky new Tory chairman, has just been grilled on The Sunday Politics by Andrew Neil about the Tories’ majority strategy. In a sign of how tight the next election will be, Shapps stressed that you don’t actually need 326 seats to have a majority in the Commons because Sinn Fein don’t take their seats. He said he was able to “reveal” the Tories’ 40/40 election strategy:  “We’re going to defend our [40] most marginal seats, and we’re going to go and attack the 40 seats that we will need to win. We’re going to focus and target on those seats in a way that we’ve never done

The only mention that the Liberal Democrats received in David Cameron’s speech was a reference to the fact that they, unlike the Tories, had not been committed to real-terms increases in the NHS budget. Combine this with the fact that the speech saw Cameron pit the Tory view of the world against Labour’s and one could see an attempt to write the Liberal Democrats out of the script. The absence of the Liberal Democrats from the speech was, I’m informed, quite deliberate. Cameron’s implicit message was that the really big things the coalition is doing — education and welfare reform and the structural changes to the economy — are Conservative

If the Lib Dem conference was all about proalition, the Conservatives seem determined to at least start their conference in a less coalicious frame of mind. This morning Chancellor George Osborne made very clear on Murnaghan on Sky News that he would not introduce either a wealth tax or a mansion tax: measures Nick Clegg has called for as the price of the Lib Dems supporting further welfare cuts. Osborne said: ‘I don’t think either of those ideas are the right ones. I don’t think a mansion tax is the right idea because, I tell you, before the election it will be sold to you as a mansion tax and