Liberal democrats

The approach that the Liberal Democrats take to social care over the next few weeks and months will be the best guide we have to how they now view the future of the coalition. If, in the coming all party talks, they effectively ally with Labour and try to score points off the Tories by suggesting that their coalition partners are ‘too mean’ to fund a solution to the problem then it will be apparent that they have moved fully into distancing mode and are preparing to position themselves as the party who restrained the Tories. This would imply a Lib Dem exit from the coalition sometime well before the

Roy Greenslade’s report in the Evening Standard that The Sunday Times will hand over to Essex Police the tape of Chris Huhne talking to his estranged wife Vicky Pryce that got the speeding points story motoring in the first place has revived speculation in Westminster about the future of the Energy and Climate Change Secretary. The Sunday Times’ report says that the tape contains Pryce telling Huhne that, ‘It’s one of the things that worried me when I took them; when you made me take the points in the first instance.’ Huhne, of course, has always denied that anyone ever took points on his behalf. It should be stressed that

Simon Hughes’ desire (£) to stop Oxbridge academics interviewing potential students is muddle headed as well as an attack on the right of these universities to run their own affairs. If the coalition wants universities to pick on academic potential rather than academic performance to date, then the interview is a crucial part of this process. Sitting down with an applicant gives academics a chance to assess how this student’s mind works, to ask questions that they haven’t been drilled for. It allows them to use their professional discretion in choosing to make, say, a lower offer to a pupil from an underperforming school who in the interview demonstrates that

The government’s u-turn on sentencing reveals something quite important about the Lib Dems’ approach to coalition. Despite having backed Ken Clarke in private, they have stayed as far away as possible from the issue in public.   The Liberal Democrats were determined not to put themselves on the wrong side of the public on this issue, to end up copping the blame for ‘soft sentencing’. As one senior Liberal Democrat said to me recently, “we’re determined not to walk into any bear pits. If there is a big flashing neon sign above something saying ‘Tory trap’, we’ve got to be disciplined enough not to fall into it.”   Clegg’s circle

With events in Greece moving at pace, next week’s European Council meeting (which was scheduled to be a low-key affair) could be the place where attempts to resolve the crisis in the eurozone take place. I’m told that Number 10 has now woken up to this possibility and is doing some preparatory work on the matter.   But, frustratingly, there’s still no strategy for how David Cameron could use this crisis to advance the British national interest. As I wrote last week, if the eurozone countries decide that a solution will require a treaty change, then Britain has a veto over that — and could use the negotiations to secure

Or so they will try to claim. For today is the day when Steve Field, the GP doing the listening part of the NHS listening exercise, will release his report into the government’s reforms. Judging from the convulsions of the grapvine, his recommendations will go something like this: more involvement for nurses and local officials, less private sector involvement and competitiveness, and a more relaxed timescale for introducing the changes. Although there are questions of degree hidden in that checklist, it is enough to have the Lib Dems heralding their “victory” for now. Paddy Ashdown was tapdancing across the airwaves yesterday, saying that Nick Clegg had “played a blinder”. “Am

David Cameron is at his best when his back is to the wall. His speech on the NHS was largely as expected – a charm offensive designed to appease his warring coalition and reassure a fevered public. I’ll wager that he has succeeded; but reservations and pitfalls remain. Cameron recognises that competition is the stiking point for most Liberal Democrats, while the Tories insist on it. Competition will stay. He said, “New providers, more choice and competition raises standards and delivers value for money.” However, competition will not be unbridled. Cameron reassured doubters, “But let me clear, no: we will not be selling off the NHS, we will not be

This is an age of ideas, not of ideology. That is the thesis of Amol Rajan’s enthralling overview of the intellectual trends in contemporary British politics, published in today’s Independent. As part of the piece, Rajan has interviewed Maurice Glasman, who gives a far clearer account of ‘Blue Labour’ than he did during his recent comments to the Italian press. Communities must be organised to resist the caprices of capital and the dead-hand of the state. Resist is probably the wrong word because the aim appears to be, in Philip Blond’s celebrated phrase, the ‘recapitalisation of the poor’, which implies some form of empowerment. Rajan notes that Glasman holds a