The Joy of Six 1539

Roz Savage says our electoral system is not just unfair but dangerous: "Manifestos are written for floating voters in constituencies that might change hands – not for the country as a whole. And when governments make spending decisions, the incentive structure pulls them in exactly the same direction. The Towns Fund, which directed 40 of 45 allocations to Conservative-held seats, was not an aberration. It was the system working as designed."

"Some schools have glass atriums, which were a common feature of those constructed during the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme in the early 2000s, but which now give the effect of walking into a Kew hothouse." Harry Paticas explains why hot spells now turn British schools into heat traps.

Jack Meredith says it's time for Liberals and trade unions to talk again: "The last Lib Dem leader to engage seriously with the movement was the late Charles Kennedy, who in September 2002 became the first to address the TUC Congress. Nearly 24 years of near-silence since then is beyond disappointing/"

Simon Skinner reviews a history of the World Cup: "Argentine reverence for Maradona endured because and not in spite of his anti-Corinthian ethos, up to and beyond the point in 1991 that he failed a drugs test when unable to deploy his habitual expedient of squirting someone else’s urine through a prosthetic penis. The penis was later displayed in a Buenos Aires museum as a quasi-religious relic (before being stolen)."

"Plans to moor a large vessel beside London Bridge have run into an unexpected complication – a disused tube tunnel buried beneath the Thames," reports Ian Mansfield.

Maria J. Pérez Cuervo looks at legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and what may lie behnd it: "The Pied Piper, like the Trickster, is a shape-shifter who wears a number of different masks – the psychopath, the hero, the rebel… even Death himself. Like Shakespeare’s Puck or Barrie’s Peter Pan, he spreads a net of enchantment, leading our children to the Otherworld. Whether this Otherworld was a new land to colonise, an altered state of consciousness or the realm of the dead remains a mystery."

BOOK REVIEW Liberalism by Jonathan Parry

This review appears in the latest Liberator (issue 431), which can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's website.

Liberalism

Jonathan Parry

Agenda Publishing (2025), £19.99

In this short book, written as part of a series that promises “incisive and provocative introductions to topics, ideas and events for students wanting to know more about how we got where we are today”, Jonathan Parry provides a history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats and makes you think again about the relation between political philosophy and political practice.

The first three chapters deal with the years 1830 to 1914 – the Liberal Party’s era as a party of government – and do so thematically rather than chronologically. In the first of these, Parry discusses the widening of the franchise, the taming of the House of Lords and the intermittent Liberal enthusiasm for proportional representation.

Asquith’s battles with the Lords will be familiar to all, but the Liberal attitude to the widening of the franchise was more ambivalent than you might imagine. The Liberal Party, Parry argues, was forged in the struggle for parliamentary reform, but that was not the same thing as democratic reform. 

So the Reform Act of 1832 swept away many of the abuses of the old system – notably 143 rotten boroughs, which effectively allowed seats in the Commons to be bought – but it was not born out of zeal for any abstract principle of democracy. Rather, it was intended to make sure the Commons did its job of representing the country’s various interests and allowing the peaceful expression of grievances.

Many 19th-century Liberals had their doubts about democracy. John Stuart Mill, for instance, hedged his support for the democratic principle in his Representative Government with all sorts of conditions that would ensure educated opinion was well represented in any elected chamber. Among these conditions was the introduction of proportional representation to ensure that minority points of view were heard.

But other tendencies within the Liberal Party did not share these patrician fears, so no legislation to change the voting system appeared. Nor did it under Asquith, when the rise of the Labour Party and the consequent inevitably of three-cornered contests led Liberals to explore the virtues of the Alternative Vote.

Parry’s second chapter on Liberal history before 1914 deals with the development of the Liberal attitude towards the state. Gladstonian retrenchment had great appeal earlier in the 19th century when the party was busy attacking the corrupt old city corporations. When these were replaced by elected local councils, school boards and health boards, then the good that government, national and local, might do became of increasing interest to the party. The growth of the Empire also brought with it irresistible pressure for more spending.

The third of these chapters looks at Liberal moves towards a pluralist society, notably in religion, where the party became the champions of Nonconformists in their disputes with the power of the Established church and a supporter of Catholic emancipation, both in Britain and Ireland. Parry notes that support for Home Rule changed the social basis of the Liberal Party, with most of its members from the landowning classes becoming Liberal Unionists.

Parry’s final two chapters cover the Liberal Party’s long years in the wilderness as it tried to survive as a centre party in a two-party system – and that in an era when politics was principally about economics and the struggle between capital and Labour. There were interesting Liberal economic ideas – the party was putting forward Keynesian policies on the need for public works while Asquith was still leader, and Elliott Dodds’s advocacy of an idiosyncratic blend of Distributism and private enterprise was influential after World War II – but no single one that voters identified with the party.

The Alliance years are passed over quickly, which is surely fair, as social democracy never did cohere as a force or a philosophy outside the Labour Party. The two most prominent former SDP members of the new Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy and Robert Maclennan, were already pretty much Liberals by the time the parties merged.

Nor did The Orange Book have much discernible long-term effect on the party. Its reputation was always a triumph of marketing over content, as it wasn’t the bracing call for an end to “nanny state” interventionism its adherents sometimes pretended. The chapter on social policy was thoroughly Blairite, born from middle-class impatience with the lower orders and the way they brought up their children. If only they were better raised, the authors reasoned, there would be less need for public spending on them in later life and taxes could be cut.

And maybe we have always worried too much about economic policy. Today’s Liberal Democrats have little to say on the subject, but that didn’t stop us electing 72 MPs last year.

Finally. Parry looks at the agenda that the Liberal Democrats have made their own: devolution, civil rights and Europe. Much of it has been party policy since the Grimond years – our early support for British membership of the European Economic Community, in particular, was seen as proof of our farsightedness and proof that, despite all the humiliations of life as a third party, history was on our side. This, I think, explains the reluctance, noted by Parry, of Liberal Democrats to criticise the EU in the years before the referendum.

I enjoyed this breezy and unusually accurate history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats, but what I will remember most from Liberalism is Parry’s discussion of the relationship between a party’s philosophy and its practice.

There is a temptation – I have been guilty of this myself – to turn to works by John Stuart Mill or L.T. Hobhouse or Jo Grimond in search of an expression of Liberal philosophy that will tell us what the party should be saying today. But this is to put the philosophical cart before the horse of practice.

Parry has no truck with this view:

This book claims that Liberal leaders such as Lord John Russell, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, Jo Grimond and Paddy Ashdown are better guides to political Liberalism than theoretical writers such as J.S. Mill or T.H. Green. It argues that politics has its own rationale, and that politicians take up bodies of ideas for specific purposes, rather than allowing works of theory to set their policy agendas for them.

This is surely right, as is his reminder that:

Hundreds of Victorian Liberal pundits made interesting and rich contributions to national political debate. We know much more about these than was once the case, so there is no longer any excuse for elevating Mill or Green into a small elite of Liberal “thinkers” who have had a transcendental impact on the party’s definition.

And when we do read the works of this elite, we are likely to misunderstand what they were about:

Liberal intellectuals such as Green, or later L.T. Hobhouse, described the aim of Liberalism as the socialisation of individuals into civil society without the intervention of a heavy-handed state that would suppress the energy and self-control that was the essence of their individuality. These writings sound more utopian and radical than they were. They were elegant ways of describing social arrangements that were increasingly visible in many towns by the end of the century.

And if that is not enough iconoclasm for you, here is Parry on Mill:

On Liberty was not intended as a political party bible but as a contribution to general educated discourse. It was also intended to be provocative. Mill knew that most Victorians would not agree with his underlying assumptions. Most educated Victorians did not see orthodox religion as a restrictive cultural force. On the contrary many of them viewed the issue of liberty through a religious lens. Individual responsibility was responsibility and accountability before God.

Again this is surely right. Gladstone, for one, certainly took this view of liberty.

I shall add Parry’s Liberalism to my shelf of very good short books alongside Bryan Magee’s ones on Karl Popper and Richard Wagner and James Hawes’s “shortest histories” of England and Germany.

Jonathan Calder

The LRB podcast takes us deeper into Paul Marshall

Peter Geoghegan talks about the mysterious Paul Marshall, who began working for Charles Kennedy in his SDP backbencher days and is now a right-wing media mogul, on the latest London Review of Books podcast.

This follows the LRB article on Marshall that I blogged about the other day.

Here Geoghegan discusses why it is that Marshall is prepared to lose so much money funding media organisations from the cerebral Unherd to the nakedly populist GB News.

He is also impressively well informed about old debates within the Liberal Democrats. Could it be that he's been exploring the archive of back numbers on the Liberator website.

Paul Marshall: From SDP researcher to right-wing media mogul

The new London Review of Books has a substantial article by Peter Geoghegan on SDP researcher turned right-wing media mogul Paul Marshall.

It takes us through his career, from researcher to Charles Kennedy in Kennedy's days as an SDP Alliance MP, via his own candidacy in the 1987 general election to his take over of the party's ailing think-tank Centre for Reform. He relaunched this as CentreForum, with a far more right-wing agenda.

Then it's on to The Orange Book, which Geoghegan, unlike many of its critics and adherents, appears to have read:

Many Lib Dems still remember Marshall primarily for The Orange Book, the controversial collection he edited in 2004 with David Laws, then a rising star on the Lib Dem right. The Orange Book is less incendiary than its reputation might suggest. 

Although the book was billed as a response to ‘nanny-state liberalism’, most of the essays are standard social democratic fare: Vince Cable making the case for financial reforms, bromides from Nick Clegg about the need for transparency in the European Union. 

Other chapters, however, suggest an effort to move the party to the right. [David] Laws proposed replacing the NHS with a French-style social insurance system. Another MP, Mark Oaten, contributed an essay about cutting crime titled ‘Tough Liberalism’. (He later admitted that it had been written by a researcher.) 

It was David Laws' chapter, which he reportedly included without informing the other authors, that led to a row at the Liberal Democrat conference and to the whole publication being seen as an attack on Charles Kennedy's leadership.

As to an attack on nanny-state liberalism, The Orange Book contained the purest expression of that creed I've ever read. It was largely a cuttings job (and cuttings from the Daily Mail, if I recall rightly) by the normally sound Steve Webb and a researcher.

Those cuttings were full of horror stories about the effects of bad parenting. I suppose the idea was that if the lower orders could be persuaded to raise their children properly, then there would be less need for public spending and it would be possible to cut taxes for the middle classes.

It was all a long time ago, but you can read my Liberator review of The Orange Book on this blog.

Then it's on to Brexit. Geoghegan says of Marshall:

In the aftermath of the referendum he attacked the Bank of England for being anti-Brexit, donated £500,000 to the Tories under Boris Johnson and funded the Alternative Arrangements Commission on the Irish border question. The AAC looked like an official government body but was in fact run by a private think tank. It was dominated by right-wing Tory MPs such as Steve Baker and Suella Braverman who opposed the 'backstop' that would have kept Northern Ireland in the single market.

Money well spent? It doesn't sound like it

After he was done with Brexit, Marshall founded the Unherd website. It's tone is the sort of world-weary Toryism you once found in the Spectator and for which I have a weakness myself. And it's a clever name, though many of its contributors have long been heard elsewhere and few of their opinions lack a herd that already follows them.

None of this tone was to be found in his next media venture GB News.

Geoghegan dwells on Marshall's financial career, his membership of the influential and fashionable congregation of Holy Trinity Brompton and, in education, his funding of his own multi-academy trust.

But I am left wondering, for all his money, how much political nous Marshall has if he thought the SDP and then the Liberal Democrats could be wrenched away from their instinctive support for pan-European institutions.

Ed Davey will publish his book 'Why I Care: And Why Care Matters' in May

After leading a strikingly successful first general election campaign, the next thing on a Liberal Democrat leader's to do list is the book. And Ed Davey is about to tick that one off too.

The Bookseller reports:

HarperCollins has bought Why I Care: And Why Care Matters, the debut from Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Editorial director for HarperNorth Jonathan de Peyer acquired world all-language rights directly from the author. The book will be published in hardback, e-book and audio in May 2025.  

“Care is the thread that runs through Ed’s life,” the synopsis reads. “Aged only four, Ed lost his father. When his mother also became ill with cancer, Ed and his brothers nursed her at home until she died when Ed was just 15. That formative experience was one of the main inspirations in seeking election and with it the opportunity to take action. 

Now, he and his wife care for their son John, who has severe physical and learning disabilities, as well as raising their younger daughter. So, Ed has real knowledge of the emotional, physical and financial challenges faced by legions of carers in Britain today.”  

HarperCollins said of the politician’s debut: “Why I Care is both a deeply personal story, drawing on Ed’s own experiences, and a book that reflects the stories of people everywhere to offer a vision of change. Shedding light on the often-invisible world of carers, he calls for society, our government and our institutions to recognise, support and lift up the silent carers who form the backbone of our communities. This isn’t just Ed’s story. It’s the story of millions.” 

And Ed Davey says:

“Carers don’t just look after their loved ones: they’re propping up our NHS and are so often the bedrock of our communities. It’s a tough job, caring. But the thing about being a carer is you develop these amazing relationships. As I’ve gotten older, having had all these family caring responsibilities and now seeing life through the eyes of my son, I could not be more passionate or determined to sort out care in this country. And that’s why I’ve written this book.” 

I can see Why I Care making more of an impact than the books Charles Kennedy and even Paddy Ashdown wrote as Lib Dem leader. And I shall end here by reflecting on how quickly "gotten" is replacing "got" in English English.

Bit of a cock-up on the counting front in Dingwall: Lib Dems wait for their 72nd win to be declared

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BREAKING... Drew Hendry has conceded that the Lib Dems will win the seat after the recount, so 72 it is.

One general election result remains to be announced: it's the one from the Scottish Highland constituency of Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire. A second recount will be held there tomorrow morning.

The delay does not appear to be caused by an exceptionally close result, but we are still having to wait for what sounds as though it will be a 72nd seat for the Liberal Democrats.

The Press & Journal describes what  went on at the Highland Football Academy in Dingwall in the small hours of this morning:

Jamie Stone held on to his seat for the Lib Dems around 5am and a result in the neighbouring constituency was expected to follow shortly after.

However, election count officials were seen looking exasperated shaking their head as the delay wore on.

The candidates for the election were also left in the dark, unable to say what exactly was the problem.

Counters were left twiddling their thumbs and to grow increasingly frustrated as speculation about the next step filled the air. ...

At 6.30am a recount was announced.

That was due to take around 90 minutes but shortly before 10am, returning officer Derek Brown announced that another recount was needed.

The reason given was a “discrepancy between the number of verified votes totalled and provisional counted votes”.

A fresh recount will now take place at 10.30am on Saturday.

The Press & Journal says the Lib Dems, whose candidate is Angus MacDonald, are confident of victory - is closest challenger is Drew Hendry from the SNP.

And the Inverness Courier report suggests why:

Count agents have widely credited Liberal Democrat Angus MacDonald with having pulled off a major upset and secured the Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire seat ahead of the SNP’s Drew Hendry. ...

The calculus is quite simple as by the end of the night Mr MacDonald had between three and four more boxes than Mr Hendry – in each box there are 500 ballots so the margin of victory was likely between 1500 and 2000 votes.

Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire covers much of the area that was represented by Charles Kennedy. It would be good to reclaim it, just as we took back Paddy Ashdown's Yeovil yesterday.

“I almost got killed by elephants a number of times”: Rob Blackie interviewed by On London

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Rob Blackie, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor of London, has been interviewed by Dave Hill for the On London website.

Though the most interesting part is Blackie's work in Namibia:

Blackie’s endeavours included elephant conservation and the development of an apparently now widespread model under which control of wildlife was placed in the hands of rural communities. “It meant they treated it better and were more anti-poacher,” he says. “It was a huge conservation success story,” though it meant “I almost got killed by elephants a number of times”.

he also has important things to say about national politics, informed by his time working for the party under Charles Kennedy:

Blackie says he learned ... that it is “always much better to be bold and stand up for what you believe in, rather than cowering in fear from people who might attack you.” He cites Kennedy’s opposition to the war in Iraq as the clearest example of this, but also the Lib Dem challenge to the Labour government of that time.

“I think we forget that a lot of the arc of Labour when they were in power was not unlike what Keir Starmer’s might end up being,” he relfects, “which is very, very cautious in order to get into power and then finding out that things don’t magically change just because you’re a nicer bunch of people”.

And he sets out his plans for London:

For Blackie, Britain’s most fundamental need is for decentralisation, a principle he thinks should also be applied to the running of London. In his, view, this is particularly true of policing. 

“Crime is going to be the biggest thing I’ll be talking about in this campajgn,” he says, pinning blame for a lot of the Met’s problems on the creation between 2017 and 2019 of 12 Basic Command Units (BCUs) to replace the previous 32 borough-based organisational structures.

The Joy of Six 1192

Computer Weekly has investigated the Post Office Horizon scandal since 2008. Now Karl Flinders has written a guide that tells you everything you need to know about it.

Chris Bowers finds that Mark Pack's recent Never Mind the Bar Charts with Duncan Brack shows striking parallels between the Liberal Democrats under Charles Kennedy’s leadership and the party today.

Peter Simons on a call by more than 30 prominent figures in critical psychiatry for the government to acknowledge the evidence that antidepressants are no better than placebos for most patients and to increase funding of social and psychological interventions while decreasing drug prescriptions.

"A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism are exactly what we would expect to see in children who have little opportunity to play socially. Children can't learn these social skills and values in school, because school is an authoritarian, not a democratic setting. School fosters competition, not co-operation; and children there are not free to quit when others fail to respect their needs and wishes." Children today are cossetted and pressured in equal measure, argues Peter Gray. Without the freedom to play they will never grow up.

"Elsewhere, the universality of the situation depicted in Brief Encounter, the pull between desire and duty, family and infidelity, was lauded. Whether Laura Jesson was privileged in her home life or not faded to the immaterial as people across the country felt they could identify with her dilemma." Rose Staveley-Wadham looks at the critical reaction to Brief Encounter when it was released in 1945.

A Very Public Sociologist takes a pessimistic view of Steven Moffat's call for a British version of The West Wing.

Lib Dems set their sights on retaking Charles Kennedy's seat

Writing in the Herald, Kathleen Nutt says the Liberal Democrats is seeking to take back Charles Kennedy's old seat of Ross, Skye and Lochaber.

Kennedy lost the seat to the SNP's Ian Blackford in 2015 after a bitter local campaign. Blackford has recently announced he will be standing down as an MP at the next election.

Lib Dem ambitions are boosted by the strength of the candidate they have in place, the prominent entrepreneur and local councillor Angus MacDonald:

The businessman opened Fort William’s first cinema in 15 as a gift to his home town and also runs a bookstore while his son, Archie MacDonald jointly runs The Highland Soap Company, which opened a multi-million base in 2020.

Cllr MacDonald was named Scottish and UK Entrepreneur of the year in 2017 and founded The Caledonian Challenge endurance walk, which has raised £13million for local charities. He is also a published author.

And there is plenty for the Lib Dems to campaign on. The SNP's centralising tendencies - Scotland now has a single national police force, for instance - look less benign when viewed from the Highlands than when viewed in Edinburgh:

Scottish Lib Dem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton will be campaigning in Fort William today with Highland councillor Angus MacDonald.

Ahead of the visit to the town Mr Cole-Hamilton accused the SNP of overseeing "a complete dearth of infrastructure spend" and making do with an ageing ferry fleet.

"For years, the SNP have removed autonomy from Highland communities, cut council budgets and singularly failed to stand up for rural issues," Mr Cole-Hamilton said.

"Ian Blackford and the SNP have overseen a complete dearth of infrastructure spend and the north and west Highlands have had to make do with an ageing, creaking ferry fleet while new vessels fall ever further behind schedule and budget. ...

""Angus will protect jobs, create opportunities and secure a better deal for people right across the region.

"He is already campaigning tirelessly on the issues that matter, such as replacing the Belford Hospital, rejuvenating local high streets and improving the A82.

"The residents of Ross, Skye and Lochaber deserve so much better than a centralising SNP and years of nationalist neglect."

After all, it was the Tories who promised to 'Stop the Boats' and not the SNP.

Lib Dems choose candidate for Charles Kennedy's old seat

Angus MacDonald has been chosen as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Ross, Skye and Lochaber.

This is the seat represented between 1983 and 2010 by Charles Kennedy, and currently held by Ian Blackfordm who recently stood down as the SNP's leader at Westminster.

Angus MacDonald told the Ross-shire Journal that his decision to stand stems from a deep sense of frustration at the lack of infrastructure in the Highlands and the centralised system of government:

"We get absolutely nothing up here, compared to the central belt where they have had trams, roads and countless infrastructure projects.

"Whereas up here all we have seen is the CalMac Ferries, which have not gone according to plan."

The paper describes Angus, who is a member of Highland Council, as a serial entrepreneur and philanthropist.

GUEST POST A lifetime among the Liberals

Paddy Briggs looks back over a lifetime's political involvement and forwards to the next election.

I was 13 and for the first time I started to take an interest in politics. It was JFK wot did it. That summer of 1960 a man born in the same century as me was campaigning to be President of the United States. He was beautiful as was his wife. He wasn't Harold Macmillan or Ike or de Gaulle. He had charisma (though I don't think I knew that word at the time). He won!

 

In 1962 I got a bit excited again. Now Eric Lubbock wasn’t JFK but he made me momentarily famous at my boarding school. You see I lived in Orpington which hitherto had only been famous for its chickens. I decided to be a Liberal when he won. Of course I did.

 

As a student in the late 1960s there were plenty of good causes for liberals to care about. The old men defended the deadly nonsense of Vietnam. I didn't. They defended even the racial obscenity of Apartheid. I didn't. 

 

Surely the Liberal day had dawned ? But what did that mean ? Well it wasn’t Socialist (Good). Or Conservative (even better). So I knew what it wasn't – but what actually was it? That was more difficult.

 

The real dawn of the liberalism I believed in wasn't to come until the 1980s. Like Charles Kennedy and a few other good men and true I joined the SDP. Social Democracy and Liberalism. Perfect match. The SDP did well actually but the electoral system killed us. Charlie survived and a few others. I was mortified.

 

The Liberal Democrats were a decent post-SDP refuge and they did pretty well. Mainly as a home for those of the Centre/Left who lived in constituencies where Labour was nowhere and the Tories weren't that popular. Including mine – Twickenham. Vince was an old colleague of mine in Shell and a kindred spirit. Easy call. 

 

I liked the Coalition and thought the love-in in the Rose Garden was fine. My wife told me it was a public schoolboy alliance. She was certainly right but it suited me. But Nick didn't use his power as wisely as he could have. 2015 was a disaster. Even Vince lost. 2016 was the beginning of the end. The hideous referendum. Trump. Liberalism and pro Europeanism (my watchwords) became dirty words. 

 

So what now? Well first and foremost there’s Keir Starmer. He must be a man that the Libs can do business with. Surely to goodness. The policy is staring us in the face. Labour and the Lib Dems have much in common. An electoral alliance please. Labour to stand down in Lib Dem constituencies and in Tory constituencies where the LD’s are running second. The Lib Dems to do the same. Don't stand in Tory Conservative/Labour marginals.

You can follow Paddy Briggs on Twitter.

17 May in Liberal England history

I enjoyed doing this for 18 April - whether my readers enjoyed it as much is another question - so here is a survey of what has concerned this blog down the years on 17 May.

2019

Hard times in the Shropshire hills. Stiperstones primary school was to close and Bishop's Castle residents were planning to block the road in a protest against bus cuts.


2018

I previewed A Very British Scandal as the first episode was about to be shown.



2017

"Boris Johnson moos 'like a cow' and devours cakes on bakery visit" ran my Headline of the Day.

You can't say we weren't warned.


2016

Talking of Boris Johnson, I blogged about his failure when mayor to publish a report on air pollution near London' schools.


2015

Included in a Six of the Best, Down at Third Man was worrying about the future of English cricket:

"The players coming in during the next few years come from a generation deprived of free to air cricket. This generation will have come in on the echoes. Soon it will be a privileged generation: in the main sons/daughters of club cricketers and sons of parents able to afford a very expensive education, or sons able to win scholarships to such institutions."

2014

I went to Woodhouse Eaves, which had once been a sort of health resort in Leicestershire's Charnwood Forest:

Today, the first hot day of the year, the countryside was alive with hikers and Scouts, giving it something of the atmosphere of its 1930s heyday.

2013

UKIP supporters, I suggested, were not that keen on the UK. They were English Nationalists.


2012

I quoted Christopher Hitchens and his praise for Karl Popper's insistence on the importance of argument:

It is very seldom, as he noticed, that in debate any one of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or "converting" the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end upholding exactly the same position as that with which he began.

2011

Lord Bonkers reacted to the headline "Fox blasts British overseas aid plan":

It was clearly set out in the Coalition agreement. Now clear off down the garden and leave our dustbins alone.

2010

I quoted something I had written for the Guardian website back in 2006 (when it paid much better than it does today):

When [Charles] Kennedy stood for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats in 1999, the West Highland Free Press - a radical newspaper published in his own constituency - remarked that people in London were beginning to ask what it had been asking for 15 years: what exactly does Charles Kennedy stand for? 

Though he won that contest and went on to lead the party for nearly seven years, we never really found out.

2009

Those were the days. I wrote seven posts on 17 May 2009 and most of them were about politics.

In one of them I argued that:

the causes of the anger over MPs' expenses go beyond indignation at what has been done with our money. That anger is so great because this affair has laid bare what an unequal society we now live in.

2008

Michael Gove wanted to tell teachers what they should wear:

No doubt this is meant to appeal to Tory voters who like tradition, but in reality there is little tradition of teachers dressing smartly. The traditional dress for teachers was the academic gown, which was designed precisely to distance education from the world where a good business suit matters. 

Less grand teachers wore a tweed jacket with leather patches and a worried expression.

2007

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I asked why people could not forgive Ming Campbell for being old:

If a comedian or journalist had made similar reference to the fact that a politician was a woman or was gay or was Black, it would have finished that comedian or journalist's career. Yet in our society it is perfectly acceptable to make fun of people for being old.

2006

The idea that the state should decide the speed at which people walk their dogs is ridiculous.

I still hold that view today.

2005

I discussed Siôn Simon Syndrome:

there is a law that people accuse others of the faults they most fear in themselves, much as those who make most fuss about homosexuality are supposed to be repressed homosexuals themselves.

2004

Iraq Body Count estimated the number of civilian deaths in the country since the start of the invasion at somewhere between 9,148 and 11,005

Scottish Lib Dems target their lost heartlands

The Quiraing, Skye

The Scottish Lib Dems' election co-ordinator Alex Cole-Hamilton is notably bullish in an interview for Scotland on Sunday.

He says: "We’re very excited about the prospect of a general election whenever it comes."

Among the former Lib Dems Westminster seats he lists as good prospects are Charles Kennedy's old seat of Ross, Skye and Lochaber; Aberdeen South; Argyll and Bute; and North East Fife.

There's more:

The traditional stronghold in the Borders seat of Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk – which the party held for decades – is also in play. The Lib Dems are even confident of muscling their way into the Edinburgh North and Leith, the seat held by the SNP’s Deidre Brock.

What is most encouraging is Alex's claim that "It’s true to say that the Highlands are rediscovering their liberal traditions."

Viewed from a distance, the Scottish Lib Dems have so far based their welcome recovery on emphasising their unionist credentials. It is good to see them going beyond that.

So farewell then Andrew Neil and This Week

It was announced today that Andrew Neil is giving up presenting This Week and the BBC is taking the opportunity to scrap the programme.

There was a time when I never missed This Week. The problem, as a confirmed hater of Question Time, was how to fill the 20 minutes between Newsnight ended and it began.

Then I got older and realised that I could go to bed and watch it on iPlayer the next day.

Then I gave up watching it at all.

There were always too many "funny" items that weren't funny - step forward Kevin Maguire and Quentin Letts.

But Andrew Neil is a better broadcaster than the Dimblebys added to John Humphrys and multiplied several times over.

OK so he has run with the hare and hunted with the hounds too much recently, but at his best he is peerless. The BBC should have made better use of him.

I remember, in the days when he was seen as a meritocrat from a humble background, Neil's forensic politeness forcing from Michael Gove the admission that his adoptive parents had paid for him to attend one of Scotland's most expensive private schools.

And This Week could be brilliant. I remember a riveting discussion of alcoholism with Shirley Williams and Rosie Boycott on the evening of the day that Charles Kennedy resigned as Liberal Democrat leader.

I used to grumble about its late-night slot, but maybe the BBC should have made a virtue of it and made it open ended - something along the lines of Channel 4's old After Dark.

If you keep politicians up late enough and lubricate them with Blue Nun, they start to tell the truth.

Alastair Campbell's Charles Kennedy Memorial Lecture

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Alastair Campbell gave this year's Charles Kennedy Memorial Lecture in Fort William in August.

He has now posted the text of that lecture on his website:

It was funny to watch the vox pops in Fort William after his death. Virtually everyone said "oh yes, I always voted for Charles." Amazing he lost really! But he would have seen the funny side of that too. 

There was pain in his defeat, but no bitterness. I never once heard him express bitterness about his ousting as Lib Dem leader either. He knew his colleagues had a point. They knew – and he knew they knew – that unless he cracked his drink problem, a bigger problem was coming their way. 

That being said, as the Lib Dems surveyed the wreckage of their party after the last two elections, they might recall his warning that if they got into bed with the Tories they would use them, abuse them and then destroy them.

Alastair Campbell to give the Charles Kennedy Memorial Lecture

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How times change! This year's annual Charles Kennedy Memorial Lecture will be given by the former Labour director of communications Alastair Campbell.

The lecture will take place, reports the BBC, the fifth Lochaber Ideas Week.

With the advent of Jeremy Corbyn and the fading of memories of the controversy over the Iraq War, Campbell does not seem such an odd choice today.

Liberal Democrats may also feel a degree of identification with another of the week's guest lecturers, Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards.

The mysterious Darren Grimes

Who is this paying tribute to Charles Kennedy in a BBC Newsbeat interview from June 2015?

"He would have been great in the upcoming EU referendum - he won't be known just for [his problems]. He was so much more than that." 

Why would he have been so good in the EU referendum? 

"He was always pushing for the party to be an internationalist voice. 

"He believed that in an increasingly globalised world, having Britain in Europe was the only way forward. 

"And I think that's the message the party needs pushing. And he was one of the first people to get out there and voice that."

An unremarkable, loyal Liberal Democrat view you might think.

In fact it belongs to Darren Grimes, who was to leave the party a year later and join the Conservatives because he was a "classical liberal".

He went on to head an organisation called BeLeave during the EU referendum. It was supposedly wholly independent of Vote Leave, but its funding and campaigning are now under scrutiny.

It was a remarkable transition, but we may have an intermediate form of Darren Grimes in a Lib Dem Voice article written a month after his Newsbeat interview.

There he appointed himself to speak for an entire generation and backed Norman Lamb for leader.

Which reminds us that Mark Gettleson and Christopher Wylie from Vote Leave both worked alongside Grimes on Norman's 2015 leadership campaign.

It's all very mysterious.

Book review: Winning Here by Chris Rennard

This is my review of Chris Rennard's memoirs from the current issue of Liberator. Since you ask, you can subscribe to the magazine via its website.

Winning Here - My Campaigning Life: Memoirs Volume 1
Chris Rennard
Biteback Publishing, 2018, £25

When Phil Reilly left his job as the Liberal Democrats’ director of communications last November, he announced the decision in a post on Lib Dem Voice. Writing of the first leaders’ debate in the 2010 general election, he said:

That night changed the course of our party’s fortunes, but it also changed my life. I had joined the press office of a party that hadn’t been in national government for decades, with no expectation that would be changing any time soon. A few short years later I would be working in 10 Downing Street.

After it was published I saw tweets from national political journalists congratulating Phil on the article, which suggests that his may become the official version of Lib Dem history.

The truth, however, is rather different. Cleggmania lasted only a few days and the party lost five seats at the election. We did end up in government, not because of the peculiar brilliance of Clegg or Reilly, but because the election produced a hung parliament, an outcome that will always be a fluke result.

A more accurate account of Liberal Democrat history was given in an earlier Lib Dem Voice post by Nigel Lindsay:

Liberal Democrats were arguably more effective as a party of government before Nick Clegg became leader. [In] the decade from 2000 to 2010, Liberal Democrats were coalition partners in the governments of both Scotland and Wales.  The achievements of Liberal Democrat Ministers in those governments were far-reaching and radical …. Liberal Democrats also controlled major local authorities in most parts of Britain during those years.

Chris Rennard’s ‘Winning Here’, which is billed as volume 1 of his memoirs, tells the story of how he helped the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats reached this position of comparative strength, ending with the defenestration of Charles Kennedy and then Willie Rennie’s victory in the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election in February 2006.

This has the effect of ending the story before the emergence of the allegations of sexual harassment against him that have sometimes threatened to split the party along a generational divide. Chris does mention them in his introduction, but a full discussion will presumably have to wait until the appearance of the slightly improbable volume 2.

Chris’s father, a veteran of the First World War who lost a leg on the Western Front, was 71 when Chris was born. He was to die three years later, leaving Chris’s mother with three children and a complicated financial situation. The help she received in gaining a widow’s pension had historic consequences for the Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats.

One day Cyril Carr, the leading figure in Liverpool Liberals, called at the Rennards’ house, listened to their problems and made the call that secured the pension from their own phone. So Chris joined the Liberals.

Carr was one of the pioneers of community politics in the party and Chis became his protégé. This was an era when the party twice ran the city council (1974-6 and 1978-0) and contained nationally important figures like David Alton and Trevor Jones, but Chris was to become the leading Liberal agent in the city. Alton was to win the Edge Hill constituency, which was wonderfully compact for campaigners but already identified as for the chop by the Boundary Commissioners, at a by-election in 1979.

After the 1984 Liverpool council elections, which Chris suggests were swung by personation for the Militant-led Labour Party, he left the city to become the Liberal Party’s regional agent for the East Midland, and this is what he found:

The East Midlands Regional Party was considered to be one of the most viable in England because it owned a (near-derelict) house in Loughborough. The house did not even had a functioning loo and visitors had to rely on the facilities at the nearby railway station. This was the regional office and home for the administrative secretary, a man called Maurice Bennett, who also hailed from Liverpool. 

Maurice made sure that the Regional Executive … Regional Finance and General Purposes Subcommittee and Regional Council all met regularly and he tried to raise funds to cover his modest salary and the costs of the house by selling a weird assortment of pens, key fobs and party memorabilia, as well as organising draws and sponsored walks. 

The operation required the limited number of constituency associations to pay into the regional party £200 per year, unless they could plead great poverty. For this fee, they appeared only to have the benefit of being able to buy the key fobs and to send representatives to regional party meetings.

It was at this house, which was in Burder Street, Loughborough, that I first met Chris. We talked upstairs among stacked boxes of leaflets that must have challenged the joists while Maurice Bennett watched the racing on television downstairs.

Chris had an enormous influence on the party in the region. He brought community campaigning techniques from Liverpool that enabled Rob Renold to win Crown Hills, an inner Leicester ward on the county council with a largely Muslim population in 1985. He also put together a team of activists, based at a Liberal safe house in Kimberley Road, Leicester, who helped across the region. They ran the committee room at an important Harborough by-election, leaving us local activists free to knock up all day.

For some readers, the book will be too much of a catalogue of long-forgotten by-elections, but for me, at least in these years, it is riveting because I remember them all. I drove down with Chris to the Brecon and Radnor by-election in 1985 and was on the front line there in Ystradgynlais.

‘Winning Here’ sweeps on through the Alliance years, giving an inside view of the seat negotiations between the Liberal Party and the SDP and showing how poorly the two Davids worked together. It was not just a lack of personal chemistry, but a lack of organisation: when they arrived for a joint appearance they had never discussed who would say that.

Then we come to the period after the two parties merged. This is chiefly remembered as an era in which we argued over the party’s name – at one time we were going to be “the Democrats” – but Chris reveals how precarious the financial position was, with the party reliant for its continued existence at one point upon a major donor who insisted upon keeping his identity a secret.

The drama that dominates the latter part of the book is the fall of Charles Kennedy. It had been rumoured for years that Charles had a serious drink problem, but whenever you asked an insider you were told that, yes, Charles used to have a problem, but he has sorted himself out. Sadly he never did.

Chris reveals more instances of cancelled meetings and campaign trips than I remember reading about before and pays tribute to the people like Tim Razzall who kept Charles going for as long as he did. He also gives Donnachadh McCarthy his due as the man who pushed the Lib Dems into opposing the war in Iraq.

I suppose it was the lifestyle of politics that did for poor Charles, and Chris himself did not find it healthy either. Living in what was in effect a permanent by-election campaign for 30 years left him with diabetes and depression when he stood down as the Lib Dems’ chief executive in 2009.

In recent years, in part perhaps because of the allegations against Chris, it has been fashionable to decry ‘Rennardism’. Yet this style of politics did not come just from him and Liverpool: it was originated independently across the country by forgotten figures like Wallace Lawler in Birmingham and Stanley Rundle in Kew. It was solidified into a technique for winning seats by the Association for Liberal Councillors in the late 1970s, and Chris was the strongest influence on its development in the years after that.

And, though it is true that the ruthless targeting and playing up of local grievances can grate, it has never been clear what people propose putting in place of Rennardism. Nick Clegg’s charisma, which was based on a single attractive television performance, did not last a week as the centrepiece of our campaign.

When the history of the Liberal Democrats comes to be written, Chris will have a central place in it and this book, which already feels like a monument to a forgotten era, will be a valuable source. It’s just that you fear the historians may decide they have more important things to do.

Goodbye to Phil Reilly - and a note on Liberal Democrat history

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Phil Reilly has announced his decision to step down as the Liberal Democrats' director of communications in a post on Lib Dem Voice.

I wish him well for the future. If nothing else, the remarkably spirited reaction of the party press office to the straitened circumstances of the past couple of years has helped keep members cheerful.

However, in the post Phil repeats a version of party history that has long been popular in Nick Clegg's inner circle.

Writing of the first leaders' debate in the 2010 general election, he says:

That night changed the course of our party’s fortunes, but it also changed my life. I had joined the press office of a party that hadn’t been in national government for decades, with no expectation that would be changing any time soon. A few short years later I would be working in 10 Downing Street.

It is true that the Lib Dem vote did rise a little at the 2010 election - no doubt Nick's performance in the debates had a lot to do with that.

But we emerged from that election with a place in government because of the way the Labour and Tory votes divided and what that meant in terms of seats.

That outcome was a fluke, as evidenced by the fact that we went into that election with 62 MPs and emerged with 57.

But I am more worried that this account give the wrong impression of the Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats in the years before Nick Clegg became leader.

I was sure I had answered it before, and indeed I had.

That post led me to a post on Liberator's blog by Simon Titley. And Simon led me to one on Lib Dem Voice from 2013 by Nigel Lindsay.

Nigel points out, rightly, that David Steel, Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy all faced the electorate with serious and detailed plans for government.

And he goes on to say:

Liberal Democrats were arguably more effective as a party of government before Nick Clegg became leader. [In] the decade from 2000 to 2010, Liberal Democrats were coalition partners in the governments of both Scotland and Wales. The achievements of Liberal Democrat Ministers in those governments were far-reaching and radical. Significantly, they punched above their electoral weight and delivered effectively on their manifesto pledges. Fair voting in local elections, free personal care for the elderly, and no university tuition fees are just some of the party’s achievements in government in Scotland. 

Liberal Democrats also controlled major local authorities in most parts of Britain during those years. 

Finally, though Phil does not use this argument, I am always a little surprised by those who insist that Nick Clegg brought a new professionalism to the Liberal Democrats.

To me, a large part of Nick's appeal was that he had a quality of ingenuousness that is rare in leading politicians.

Fort William community building named after Charles Kennedy

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BBC News reports that a former school in Fort William has been reopened as a community centre and named after the former Liberal Democrat leader.

It quotes the SNP Highland councillor Blair Allan, who proposed it be called the Charles Kennedy Building:

"Charles Kennedy was educated in Fort William and throughout his career was hard working and dedicated to the communities he represented. 

"I think it is very fitting that the new offices which will serve the local community well for many years to come be named in his honour and I would like to thank his family for giving their support."