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 Vince Cable makes the case for building more council houses: "The most compelling argument for councils becoming developers is that the private developer model, however valid for most housebuilding most of the time, depends on a set of circumstances – the ability to earn a profit margin above rising land and property prices – which may not exist. Public sector developers can build through economic cycles and where market conditions are unattractive for private developers."

"Changes in public spaces (including increased provision of green parks, lakes and water fountains) enable easy public access to cooling. Everyday heat adaptation is not only about technological fixes, but about building or redesigning everyday infrastructures that enable a fair and equitable living environment for everybody, whatever the weather." Subina Shrestha and Claire Hoolohan on what Britain must do to prepare for future heatwaves.

Mark Braund looks at Andy Burnham's past support of a land value tax.

"Three Lions has started to to more harm than good. I think that 'thirty years of hurt' line has helped seed a sense of entitlement, a baked-in belief that anything other than outright victory legitimises a sense of hurt. It raises the stakes and ratchets up the pressure – a pressure that ultimately bears down on the very players you're counting on to try and deliver a result." Pete Paphides says it's time to say thank you and goodbye to the song Three Lions.

"The final prisoners left Crumlin Road Gaol in 1996 and, in 2012, it reopened as a visitor attraction and conference centre, sharing the grounds with McConnell’s whisky distillery. Although the prison experience is now dominated by atmospheric lighting, holographic presentations and short information videos, it is possible to see the history behind the modern technology." Angela Buckley experiences the Crumlin Road Gaol Experience.

Jeremy Rees celebrates the magnificent Queenie Watts.

Why the Lib Dem fuel duty cut would not reduce petrol prices

I don'r recall any debate about it within the party, but it's now Liberal Democrat policy to cut fuel duty by 10p. This, we claim, would bring down prices at the pump by 12p per litre.

But I don't believe it would.

Petrol prices at the pump have gone up because the US attack on Iran has led to less crude oil coming on to the world market. This has increased wholesale prices.

The Liberal Democrat fuel duty cut would do nothing about situation in the Gulf, so no more oil wuold be available for refining.

What it would do is give motorists a bit more cash to spend. And in the absence of any increase in the supply of petrol, that cash would bid up prices at the pump more or less by the amount of the duty cut.

You should add ceteris paribus after any statement about the economy, if only to make yourself sound learned, but I can't see any flaws in this argument.

I feel a certain nostalgia for the years the days when the Lib Dem front bench included Vince Cable, David Laws, Chris Huhne and Steve Webb. We need to have something more substantial to say about the economy than this.

For Lion & Unicorn: 10 years in the life of the Lib Dems

I've written another post for Lion & Unicorn. To celebrate its 10th year, the blog asked me to write about what the last decade has been like for the Liberal Democrats:

Swinson saw her party’s vote increase from 7.4 per cent of 2017 to 11.5 per cent, but its number of seats dropped from twelve to eleven, with none of the recent star recruits from Labour and the Conservatives (such as Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and Sam Gyimah) managing to get re-elected in Lib Dem colours. 

And Swinson’s own East Dunbartonshire seat was one of the ones that were lost. In a striking illustration of the maxim that all politics is local, her defeat was attributed locally to her getting on the wrong side of an indoor bowls club in Milngavie.

Ed Davey takes aim at Keir Starmer and the BBC

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Keir Starmer risks turning into "continuity Rishi Sunak" and the BBC has Nigel Farage on so often that it risks becoming his mouthpiece - "and this is a guy who wants to destroy them".

You can read these views from Ed Davey in an exclusive interview he granted Peter Walker of the Guardian.

After listing the deficiencies of government policy on health, welfare and defence, he turns to Starmer's performance as a leader:

"There needs to be something that people can get behind. He needs people to understand where we’re going. And I don’t think anyone, even his own party, have a real feel for where he’s going."

A Starmer supporter may ask how a Liberal Democrat chancellor would finance the extra spending implicit in Ed's criticisms, but it's clear that this government is going to have to increase taxation before the next election. 

Ed could call for tax increases or simply say they are inevitable. Vince Cable had a neat trick of sounding as though he was above politics while being very political, and Ed comes close to adopting such an approach in this interview.

And on the BBC is undoubtedly right:

On the rise of Reform, Davey argued that one factor was the disproportionate coverage given by the BBC to Nigel Farage and his party, something he said was "just completely disproportionate". 

"I come to this debate as essentially someone who supports the BBC," he said. "But I fear that they’re allowing themselves to be seen, by some at least, as an organ of Reform. They seem to bend over backwards to please Nigel Farage. They’re almost like a mouthpiece for Nigel Farage, he’s on so much, and this is a guy who wants to destroy them."

BOOK REVIEW When We Speak of Freedom: Radical Liberalism in an Age of Crisis

This review appears in the new issue of Liberator.

When We Speak of Freedom: Radical Liberalism in an Age of Crisis Paperback

edited by Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood

Beecroft Publications, 2025, £15

When We Speak of Freedom, as a football commentator would put it, is very much a book of two halves. The first is historical, philosophical and a little quirky in its approach: the second has chapters by policy experts with concrete proposals for government action in their fields.

The editors, Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood, write that the project began over wine and sandwiches at the home of Elizabeth Bee and Michael Meadowcroft, where a small group talked of “contemporary politics, memories of liberal triumphs past, and our hopes for the future”. Their hope that the book is “suffused with the warmth, intellectual curiosity, and hospitality of that first meeting,” is met in many of the 20 chapters of this engaging collection

I had thought of writing an elegant essay that drew together the diverse themes of the book, but so diverse are they that I decided to go against every canon of reviewing and tell you what’s in the book.

One complaint: there’s no index. I’m sure the John Stuart Mill Institute, who publish When We Speak of Freedom, didn’t have the budget for a professional indexer, but Mill himself does pop up in many chapters, and it would be good to be able to compare what different authors have to say about the old boy. You can ask contributors to a collection like this to highlight the names they quote or discuss, and produce an index of sorts from that.

And so to the 20 chapters…

Michael Meadowcroft has expanded his introduction into a pamphlet – see the note at the end. Here he writes of a “crisis of democracy” and does not see its resolution coming from economic growth or any other of the policy prescriptions that dominate political debate. Rather, he looks to another Victorian sage, John Ruskin: “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration.”

Benjamin Wood looks to two Liberal heroes: Jo Grimond and Hannah Arendt. He sees them as students of Classical Greece who, inspired by a vision of the Greek city-state purged of slavery, sought a politics that is more human in its scale and less obsessed with getting and spending. Wood concludes in language they would approve: “Citizenship must mean more than a flag and a passport” and be “an invitation into a shared project of civic betterment.”

Helena Rosenblatt writes on Mill and On Liberty, reminding us that there’s more to it than the harm principle. She emphasises Mill’s championing of individuality and the flowering of character – both a long way from the atomistic individualism of which Liberals are often accused. Rosenblatt also writes of Mill’s awareness of social tyranny: he said, “the yoke of opinion could often be heavier than the law” – Liberal Democrat habitués of social media please note.

Christopher England and Andrew Phemister contribute a fascinating chapter on liberalism, land and democracy – Henry George, the Diggers and radical crofters are all there. My only regret is that they had to end so soon in the story, as issues like the quality of food, and access to the countryside for health, wellbeing and recreation, will only grow in importance. Let’s take this history as an inspiration.

Emmy van Deurzen looks at the tensions today between individuality and people’s need for community. These can give rise to individual mental health problems and to social problems, such as a widespread withdrawal from engagement in politics. She seeks a cure for both kinds of problems through political change and bringing more philosophy and psychology into our politics. Interestingly, both Mill and Hannah Arendt turn up here too.

Helen McCabe usefully reminds us that there is far more to Mill than On Liberty. She looks at his support for women’s suffrage, and for their liberation more widely, as well as his opposition to domestic violence. Then there is Mill’s advocacy of workplace democracy and producer cooperatives – causes that were still dear to the Liberal Party when I joined it, but are now little discussed.

Timothy Stacey offers a diagnosis of modern liberalism’s ills. He sees it as lacking “that je ne sais quoi that makes us fall in love with political visions”, and as inclined to fuel the divisive public debate that it hopes to dispel. His answer is that we should seek to foster liberal virtues. This I’m happy to agree with, even though I’m not convinced by the list of them he gives, as our view of ethics today is so dominated by rights, with the concomitant duty falling upon the state, that we offers little sense of what the good life looks like to a liberal.

Matthew McManus takes us back to Mill’s wider political views, finding in them an answer to our discontents under neoliberalism. He points to Mill’s support for worker cooperatives, a welfare state, representative democracy with universal suffrage, and his strong commitment to liberal rights. This he terms Mill’s “liberal socialism”, arguing rightly that its more useful to use the plural ‘socialisms’ than to see socialism as the monolith it once was.

From here on, the chapters are less philosophical and more devoted to particular policy areas and what Liberalism can contribute to them.

Edward Robinson on Liberalism and the environmental crisis is the first of these, and he commends three writers to us. First, Mark Stoll, an economic historian who has studied the British economist William Stanley Jevons – Jevons grasped in the mid 19th century that extractive industries would not last for ever and wrote about the moral implications. Second, Brett Christophers, who argues that energy cannot be produced and traded like a conventional commodity. Third, Dieter Helm, who argues that the marketisation of public goods has been a mistake.

Denis Robertson Sullivan argues there has been market failure and policy failure in the provision of housing, meaning government intervention is needed. Home ownership is in retreat, so there need to be policies for providing the sort of rented accommodation that people want. Banks and pension funds must be encouraged or forced to invest more in social housing, and there needs to be new urgency in the fight against homelessness, with government setting targets and publicising the progress made.

Stuart White looks for practical means to bring about the economy of cooperatives that Mill advocated. He discusses the role of trade unions and a sovereign wealth fund, and suggests, I think fairly, that modern Liberals are slow to recognise the existence of structural inequalities in society or the need to organise to challenge them.

Paul Hindley writes on spreading ownership through society, throwing in a good quotation from G.K. Chesterton: “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” He sees this spread as a way of countering the effects of insecure employment and an increasingly punitive welfare state, and repeats the traditional Liberal call for more taxation of wealth and less of income.

Gordon Lishman examines some dilemmas Liberals face around community, diversity and nonconformity. He doesn’t offer neat problems or neat solutions – in a way his point is that there aren’t any – but he is surely right to conclude that the decline of voluntary associations and the rise of the internet have made it hard to conduct community politics in the way that Liberals learnt to do in the 1970s.

Bob Marshall-Andrews looks at current and not so current challenges to civil liberties – there’s a lot about his opposition to his own party’s more draconian proposals in his years as a Labour MP between 1997 and 2010). He is very good on the way that governments generate fear in order to win support for repressive measures.

Andrea Coomber and Noor Khan write well about prison policy: “The cliff edge on which the prison system finds itself was not approached at speed, but one that we slowly but surely trudged towards.” They argue, unfashionably, that excessive punishment damages not only the individuals concerned, but also the fabric of society, and call for a reduction in the number of people in prison.

Vince Cable, like several other authors of these later chapters, looks to have been given more space. This may be out of deference to his standing or out of a belief in the importance of his subject of immigration. Vince writes very much with his economist’s fedora on, concluding that Enoch Powell was completely wrong about the social and political consequences of immigration, but that a rising population means we must face both our chronic inability to expand the housing stock sufficiently and our decaying infrastructure.

Ross Finnie takes us through Britain’s experience of federalism and looks at its possible future. He is billed as writing from a Scottish perspective, but much of what he has to say is relevant to England. How do we deal with this whale in the bathtub of British government? Ross is an enthusiast for devolving power to England’s regions, as Jo Grimond was before him, but it’s never been clear that the English share this enthusiasm. Still, as Ross points out, the idea has its English enthusiasts today.

David Howarth frames his proposals for constitutional reform as a way of easing Britain’s return to the European Union, or at least of making it possible. Since he wrote this chapter, events in the US have made us wonder how secure our present constitutional arrangements are. Would we have much defence against an executive that usurped powers that did not belong to it? You fear not, given Britain’s dependence upon the ‘good chap’ theory of government. We saw during Boris Johnson’s time at Number 10 what havoc someone who is not a good chap can wreak. As ever with David, his chapter is well worth reading.

Lawrence Freedman writes on Liberals and war, and those same events in the US make you wonder if his chapter should not have been placed first. Yet his conclusion holds: “After Iraq and Afghanistan, and because of Ukraine, there is less interest now in taking the military initiative in the name of liberal values and much more of a focus on the need to defend those values against aggressive states.”

And then Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood return to sum up the book’s arguments, quoting Wordsworth and William Morris as well as Mill.

Some will question the relevance of parts of When We Speak of Freedom – and I’m aware that those are probably the parts that appealed to me most. But I urge you to read this book. The Conservatives are showing us every day the gruesome fate that awaits a party that forgets its own history and its philosophy.

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Vince Cable gives it both barrels: "Our secular and liberal values; our diverse society; our democratically elected government. All are antithetical to the Trump clan. We need to understand that the sentimental nonsense about the special relationship is over. We are under attack."

 "Trump’s potential kompromat combines with his cultural-political alignment with kleptocracy and dictatorship that makes him a Russian agent of influence. This was played out in ghastly detail in the 28 February meeting in the White House. In considering our response to America’s abandonment of the West, we need to be realistic about its leadership." Arthur Snell says it's time to take a serious look at the evidence of Trump's relationship with Russia.

Mark Pack reviews Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund.

Kate Bradbury sets out what we can do to help bumblebees: "If you don’t have a greenhouse, do you have space for a pot of winter heather? Can you use your conservatory, porch or other covered space to grow crocuses? Can you dedicate a space in which bumblebees might make a nest?"

"When asked by the Bench chairman if they had anything to say, the taller woman said they did not approve of this court, as there was no woman there to try them. They were remanded for a week while efforts were made to identify them." Jill Evans on a 'Suffragette outrage; at Cheltenham in 1913.

"I was astonished: here was drama, humour, satire and wit in abundance, here too I learnt social history and observed sharp psychological insights." Chris Lovegrove won't have Jane Austen's novels called mimsy, tedious and woke.

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.

Vince Cable nails Labour's "big mistake" in opposition

The University of York student newspaper York Vision has an interview with the city's famous son Vince Cable.

Asked for his reaction to Rachel Reeves's budget, Vince says:

"It was necessary to have a substantial increase in taxation because public services are in a very poor state. I think people have to get used to the idea that if they want good public services, they have to pay for them. That means taxation. So, yes, I agree with that.

"I think the big negative thing, which is not about the budget itself, but the preparations. I think the Labour Party made a bad mistake in opposition, not being honest about the need to raise taxation substantially. And they should have said to people that you’re going to have to pay more VAT, more income tax.

"But as a result of not doing that, what they’ve got into looks a bit sneaky, and they’ve got into bad taxes. This national insurance for employers looks like a victimless tax but it’s actually going to hit consumers, it’s going to hit workers indirectly. It’s not the best way to raise taxation."

Asked what the Liberal Democrats should do to become the official Opposition in Parliament, Vince stressed the importance of Europe, local government and climate change:

"I think they need to be a bit more explicit about Europe and the commitment to Europe. I would be much more outspoken in saying Britain needs to have higher taxes for better public services, and I think particularly areas like education.

"I think the Lib Dems should be ... pushing very hard to get more funding into local government rather than central government, because ... councils are closer to the public. At the moment, they’re disempowered, and many of them are bankrupt, so I think reforming local government  would be a high priority."

And on electoral reform, he had no time for the argument that the rise of Reform should make Lib Dems reconsider their support for it:

"We do need electoral reform. The fact that you get more people from Reform is neither here nor there. They exist as a force. We’ve seen with Trump, we’ve seen in Germany that populist parties are very, by definition, very popular. Just sweeping them under a carpet and pretending that they don’t exist is the worst kind of response."

When I was a student at York in an earlier life, there was only one newspaper on campus, Nous. Judging by its website, it is still going strong.

Ed Davey, Jo Swinson and Vince Cable to appear before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, will appear before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry on Thursday.

Two former leaders of the party are also about to give evidence to the inquiry. Jo Swinson will give evidence on Friday and Vince Cable on Thursday of next week (25 July).

My impression as a follower of these hearing's is that Jo's name has cropped up in proceedings more often than the other two, but I suspect those who think responsibility for the scandal will be pinned on past government ministers are in for a disappointment.

Writing in the Guardian, Jane Croft suggests:

The toughest questioning is likely to be reserved for politicians who held office under Conservative governments from 2015, when the scandal was regularly hitting the headlines. ... 

Greg Clark, business secretary between 2016 and 2019, will testify in late July, as will ... former ministers Margot James and Kelly Tolhurst.

Should the Lib Dems be more relaxed about members backing other parties' candidates?

Zoe Crowther has been to North Norfolk for Politics Home and found that some of the people out canvassing for the Liberal Democrat candidate Steffan Aquarone are Labour supporters:

"I would describe myself as left-wing Labour,” local resident Christine told PoliticsHome. Christine, like most of the people gathered here, has been canvassing for the Lib Dems over the last few weeks.

She said people in North Norfolk needed to vote tactically to defeat the Conservatives, as “Labour won’t win here, they’re really in the background”. In 2019, the Conservatives’ Duncan Baker won with 29,792 votes – followed in second by the Lib Dems with 15,397, and then Labour in third with only 3,895.

Describing herself as “more anti-Tory than pro-Lib Dem”, Christine explained that she had begun canvassing for the first time during this election, initially for tactical reasons – although as the campaign has gone on, she has found herself less convinced by Labour anyway. 

And she has nice things to say about both Steffan and Ed Davey.

It seems to me that such blurring of party boundaries is inevitable in an election where the country rouses itself to shake off a discredited government and is rather to be welcomed.

But not everyone agrees.

Over the border in Suffolk, Cllr David Beavan, deputy leader of East Suffolk Council, has been expelled from the Liberal Democrats for supporting Adrian Ramsay, the Green candidate who appears to have a good chance of winning the Waveney Valley constituency.

David, who has been a member of the Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats for 55 years, told Suffolk News:

It was with much surprise and sadness that I learnt second hand from a local member of this bizarre decision by head office, whilst I was busy canvassing for the party in North Norfolk last week – they have shot themselves in the foot.

“If I wanted to be dictated to by party officials, I would have joined the Communist Party – I will at least now still be free to say and think what I believe is right for Southwold and East Suffolk.” 

This seems to me an unfortunate decision by Lib Dem HQ, particularly when many party members are talking themselves into casting a tactical vote for Labour next week, and some of us find ourselves being asked to travel a hundred miles to reach the nearest target seat.

And the Lib Dems have been making moves towards relaxing the rigid boundaries of political parties.

Under Vince Cable we brought in the idea of being a registered 'Liberal Democrat Supporter' while Jo Swinson won the party leadership talking about creating a "Liberal Movement", which she presumably saw as being different from a traditional political party.

It's quite possible that East Anglia will find itself represented by MPs from five different parties. Should we Liberal Democrats be prepared to move with the times a little?

"Morals more akin to the Mafia": Chris Huhne on the methods of the Murdoch empire

Chris Huhne says the public documents in the cases brought by three former Liberal Democrat ministers - Vince Cable, Norman Lamb and Huhne himself - show that phone-hacking was directed by News Group executives who had no journalistic role.

This hacking, claims Huhne in an article for Byline Times, had two objectives:

The first was to target political figures who were perceived to be unsympathetic to News and Murdoch in order to smooth the way for achieving the boss's is objectives. 

The second was to gather intelligence from the heart of government in order to further News's objectives, in particular, the purchase of the 61 per cent of Sky - BSkyB - that the Murdoch's family did not own. Murdoch wanted to stop ministers referring the bid for a time-consuming review - and possible veto - by the competition authorities.

The reason this is so important is because is because it is about using illegal information gathering for corporate purposes is such as spying and getting rid of opponents and obstacles.

Read the full article on Byline Times. It will 

Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand on end

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

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Matthew Pennell uncovers the roots of the Post Office Horizon scandal: "The political origins for Horizon date back to 1994, with the idea of computerising payments and moving away from Girocheques being proposed by Social Security Minister Peter Lilley. It needs to be understood, however, that a brand new IT system for the Post Office and DSS fitted in perfectly with the New Labour ethos of using tech to transform anything and everything."

"The thing is ... this is not a new story. It’s a fairly old one, and in 2019, [Epstein victim Sarah] Ransome told New Yorker writer Connie Bruck that not only did she not have the tapes, but that she invented their existence." Robyn Pennacchia refuses to be excited by the dump of Epstein files.

"It is unclear whether pints were ever available on the shelves of British shops, as opposed to direct supply, and, however supplied, it seems as if they had disappeared well before Britain joined the EU." Those near-mythical pint bottles of champagne are a good symbol of the wholly nonsensical and imaginary idea of sovereignty, itself predicated on a nineteenth century view of Britain and the world, that is shared by Brexit supporters, argues Chris Grey.

Vince Cable warns us not to underestimate the threat posed by Nigel Farage.

A report from Foundation for Common Land describes the results of heritage work carried out with volunteers on the Stiperstones during Autumn 2023. It focussed on Bronze Age cairns in the south of the site and the remains of post-Medieval smallholdings in the north.

Sarah Bertram presents a video obituary of the great JPR Williams.

Vince Cable, Chris Huhne and Norman Lamb sue Sun and News of the World publisher over phone hacking

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Claiming an exclusive, the Guardian reports that three senior Liberal Democrat politicians, Vince Cable, Chris Huhne and Norman Lamb, are

suing the publisher of the Sun and the defunct News of the World, claiming that their phones were hacked for stories or to “exert political influence”, including when Rupert Murdoch was seeking approval for a takeover of BSkyB.

Journalists working at Murdoch’s newspapers are said to have unlawfully targeted the former business secretary Vince Cable as well as Chris Huhne, a former energy and climate change secretary, and Norman Lamb, a whip and sometime adviser to the then deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.

The purpose of the attempts to access the men’s voicemail messages during their time in coalition with the Conservatives and to carry out other “unlawful information gathering” had been to source stories about them in order to “sell newspapers”, but to also influence political events, according to the claims lodged at the high court, which have been denied.

The report goes on to say that Vince Cable claims that between 27 July 2004 and 31 December 2011, a total of 383 calls were made by journalists at the Wapping headquarters of the Sun and News of the World, "the overwhelming majority of which he will infer were made for the purposes of unlawfully intercepting his voicemail messages".

Vince Cable on 'deniable' conversations with Labour about coalition

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Writing for Comment Central, Vince Cable looks at the Liberal Democrat performance in last week's local elections:

The Lib Dem results were more impressive than the numbers suggest. They built on exceptionally good results in 2019 when the seats were last contested and a record 700 seats were gained. 

The aggregate vote share of 20 per cent was even higher than the 19 per cent in 2019. There were also strong results in some areas where Labour was the opposition, notably in Hull where the incumbent Lib Dem council held off a strong Labour challenge and even made gains.

As to what this means to our approach at the next general election:

Lib Dems are currently targeting a dozen or so new seats but may be tempted to raise their sights.

They will rely on Labour (and Green) tactical voting in these target seats which will be maximised if a pact is agreed with the Greens, as in 2019, to stand aside candidates and if there is tacit cooperation with Labour as in 1997. 

The pollster Michael Thresher concludes from the local results that the Lib Dems could win 39 seats but even 25-30 would be considered a good outcome by the party (with perhaps another one or two Greens).

He suggests that Lib Dem gains on this scale would be crucial to the formation of a stable Labour-led government, but suggests we are unlikely to see a coalition government on the scale of 2010-15:

Ed Davey is right not to rule out a coalition with Labour but it is highly unlikely that the Lib Dems would go into such an arrangement this side of electoral reform being delivered.

A looser 'confidence and supply' arrangement is much more plausible, depending on how the numbers look after an election and subject to agreement on reform of the voting system.

You can be sure that serious, but deniable, conversations will be taking place over the next year.

So we won't be hiring Westminster Abbey to hold them.

GUEST POST Why we need an emergency Lib Dem special conference this year

Ed Davey, party members and Britain as a whole need a Liberal Democrat emergency special conference, argues David Evans.

In less than 26 minutes last Friday Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng took an axe to what remains of the British economy and to the hopes and prospects of so many people, and totally destroyed the last vestiges that the Conservatives are the party of Economic competence.

By the end of the day the pound had crashed over 4 per cent in value (and is still falling) and the FTSE a further 2 per cent, undermining the savings, pensions, and prospects of workers, the retired and the unemployed, be they teachers, doctors, farmers, workers in industry or workers in entertainment.  It affects them all.

Earlier this month, the Liberal Democrats' federal board and federal conference committee had decided to completely cancel the party's annual conference and put everything on hold until Spring conference is held In York next March.  

While the decision that it would be seen to be inappropriate to hold conference during the period leading up to the Queen’s funeral was justified, it was misguided to think that the Lib Dems, as a party, should have no opportunity to say anything about the new prime minister and her deeply damaging new ideas for six months.

Every Lib Dem who met Liz Truss when she was, temporarily, a member of our party seems to have quickly formed the view that she had an eye for self-publicity and an extremely radical view on things. But it wasn’t a Liberal Democrat view, as she quickly found out when they began to question the reasoning behind her vision.

Everyone who works in business knows that real growth and progress comes slowly, and need careful planning and sustained amounts of effort over years and sometimes decades. The desire for a quick fix, a dash for growth based on throwing vast amounts of borrowed money at its supporters, underpinned by a total lack of understanding of simple economic realities is no substitute for hard work and effort.

Sacking a permanent secretary on Day One and calling the most outrageous gamble with our nation’s economy "a fiscal event" in order to avoid Office of Budget Responsibility scrutiny shows linguistic cunning that Vladimir Putin would be proud of. 

We all know that our party has a proud record of economic competence thanks to Vince and his spell as secretary of state for business, innovation and skills - a time when he actually got industry leaders talking to each other and dealing with the fundamental issues they faced.  He even started to develop a proper industrial strategy, something the UK hasn’t had since the 1970s.  

However, we can’t expect Ed and his few close advisers to develop and make a case for a radically different Lib Dem solution to Conservative incompetence on their own in a five-minute slot on the BBC between coverage of the Labour Party Conference and the sports news.

He needs the support of the whole party and help from party members to develop a radical Liberal Democrat alternative to this Tory-created crisis, and a forum that will cut through into the national media, so we can present these to the country.  

We can only do this by being more wide ranging, radical and comprehensively better in our proposals, and to do this he, and we, need a conference.

But we don’t need yet another set of deadly dull Lib Dem policy motions that simply say

1. Conference notes - Things are bad.
2. Conference believes - Things should be better.
3. Conference further notes – The Government are responsible for this mess.
4. Conference reaffirms – Everything we ever said about this in the past, that the government still hasn’t done.
5. Conference calls on – The Government to magically change its mind and do what we want.

When what need to get cut through is

• This is the solution and Lib Dems Commit to do everything it can in government to sort it all out

Currently there are good Lib Dems working on a solution to these problems, but to make it successful we need a federal conference to give it the publicity it needs.

So in summary

1. I note - Things are bad.
2. I believe - Things can be made much better.
3. I further note – That we have better solutions but we need to promote, debate and agree them, quickly.
4. I reaffirm – That we need to hold this government responsible for the mess
5. I call on - the federal conference committee and federal board to convene an emergency special conference later this year to allow these to be discussed
6. To make sure this happens - Every Lib Dem who cares about our country’s future and our party’s continuing relevance should formally request that the party call an emergency special conference later this year, in accordance with Section 6.3 of the party’s constitution, to discuss our solution to the economic crisis that the Conservative Party has unleased on the British people.

David Evans is a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat.

Norman Lamb on his time as a minister... and Danny Alexander

Norman Lamb has been interviewed by the Institute for Government for its Ministers Reflect series.

You can see a short clip from it above and read the full transcript on the IfG website. (The interview took place in March 2020.)

As the Liberal Democrats could find themselves part of a coalition government after the next election, it's important that we learn from our unhappy experience between 2010 and 2015. So this interview makes useful reading.

But it may not make happy reading for Danny Alexander, who does not come out of it well.

Here, for instance, is Norman Lamb talking about his role as Nick Clegg's parliamentary private secretary, which he took on after the offer of a ministerial role was clumsily withdrawn:

I found it to be a fairly hollow role. I was involved in central discussions and I became part of the core team around Nick, but I was also conscious that the power lay with Nick and Danny - Nick primarily went to Danny and not anyone else - which caused, I think, some frustration amongst many people. A lot of people felt that Danny wasn't necessarily the best influence on Nick, and I still feel that strongly.

And when asked by the interviewer to expand on this point, Lamb says:

I think that Danny was hopeless on the health reforms, he passed it all and didn’t really understand the issues, in my view. In my view, the great sadness was David Laws falling early as the chief secretary .... The caricature of David was as right wing, as a sort of Tory in disguise, but actually, internally, he wasn’t. He was the one who was fighting against ending the indexing of benefits, he was fighting for a real terms increase in education spend and a real value to the pupil premium. 

His fall from the Treasury meant that we lost an intellectually coherent Liberal in the Treasury. We ended up with someone who was trying to convince Tories that he could be trusted doing this vital role of chief secretary to the Treasury. It was a case of overcompensating, which you quite often see.

That overcompensation was pretty much official Liberal Democrat strategy after 2010 - you can learn that from an article written by Nick Clegg's then political adviser, Richard Reeves, in 2012.

Reeves thought the Liberal Democrats had first to prove they were mature enough to be in government, but it is hard to imagine any other party burdening itself with this demand when it had just won a share of power through the ballot box.

A better model, Norman Lamb suggests, was that offered by Norman Baker as a transport minister. Lamb recalls that Philip Hammond (then the transport secretary) complaining to him that Baker was difficult to work with and did not comply with the protocols:

Norman, who I’ve got a lot of time for, was a press junkie who was just going off and actually doing what he ought to be doing, I think getting the message out there about what a Lib Dem minister was achieving. 

Lamb goes on to add:

The interesting thing was that the two of them ended up getting on quite well in transport and having a degree of mutual respect, I think because they were both assiduous - I think the dynamic ended up working quite well.

So next time we Liberal Democrats find ourselves in coalition, we need to have more confidence in ourselves and in the approach to the country's problems that we have just fought an election on.

And we need to make sure  we have someone at the treasury with the intellectual equipment and confidence to stand up for themselves.

In 2010 our front bench had as much expertise on economics, if not more, as those of the two larger parties. Think Vince Cable, Chris Huhne, David Laws and Steve Webb. We should have drawn on that pool of talent and used Danny Alexander's talents differently.

You can explore all the Ministers Reflect interviews on the Institute for Government website.

Evan Harris speaks after settling his phone-hacking claim against Murdoch newspapers

Evan Harris didn't just make a statement to court as his claim against The Sun and the News of the World was settled, he made one outside court too.

And here it is.

In settling Evan Harris's claim, the owner of the papers, News Group Newspapers, made no admission of liability.

Evan Harris settles hacking claim against Murdoch newspapers

Yahoo! News reports that the former Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris has settled his claim for unlawful information gathering against News Group Newspapers, publishers of The Sun and the now-closed News of the World.

Dr Harris told the High Court that he believes some of his close friends and associates, including Vince Cable and former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, received calls from NGN journalists which cannot be "explained by anything other than voicemail interception".

Representing Dr Harris, barrister David Sherborne read a statement to the court, as the claim was formally settled:

Mr Sherborne said Dr Harris "believes that disclosed documents show that private investigator activity – which he considers to be unlawful – was directed against Hugh Grant … a few days prior to Mr Grant giving evidence at the Leveson inquiry in November 2011".

He also said NGN had disclosed other documents which Dr Harris believes reveal that fellow former Liberal Democrat MP Sir Simon Hughes was "outed" by The Sun as bisexual based on an itemised phone bill said to have shown Sir Simon calling a gay chat line.

In settling the claim, NGN made no admission of liability in relation to The Sun or The News of the World

Six of the Best 981

"It didn’t matter if many of the voices expressing these opinions online were paid for by multiple accounts, boosted by dark digital analytics, or indeed often outright replicants run by troll farms hosted and funded by hostile foreign countries. If the Supreme Court had ruled that corporations were people, why not networks of bots and troll armies?" Peter Jukes explains the rise and fall of the dark money and online culture war strategies that put Donald Trump in the White House and pushed Britain out of the EU.

Vince Cable looks at what may happen to British farming after Brexit.

"The UK is the only country in Europe that still has formal public exams at 16. Of course, it made sense when the majority of young people left school at 16, as the results helped them find a pathway into work or into the next stage of education. However, today, between the ages of 16 and 18, all young people have to be in education or work-based training." Mary Reid calls for GCSEs to be scrapped.

Sarah Coomer looks back to Christmas Day 1973 and the BBC's adaptation of M.R. James's ghost story Lost Hearts: "Stephen, played by Simon Gipps Kent, an actor who was fated himself never to see his thirties, has a refreshingly realistic lack of agency as opposed to the oft-seen ass-kicking young hero - he is entirely at the mercy of the adult world he is forced to encounter so prematurely."

A London Inheritance visits the Post Office underground railway that used to hurry the mail between London sorting offices and railway termini.

A Netflix documentary tells the story of a miraculous cat sanctuary on the Greek island of Syros, reports Patricia Claus.

Vince Cable: Covid-19 incompetence could cost the Tories their Red Wall seats

Writing for the Independent, Vince Cable notes that the public health measures necessary to curb Covid-19 are falling most heavily on the Red Wall seats that gave Boris Johnson his majority last year:

Residents in these afflicted areas would have no particular reason to blame the government for their misfortune were it not for one piece of serious incompetence. In most countries where there are areas with rising infections there is an effective test and trace system to isolate clusters and super-spreading individuals. Germany, Korea, Sweden, China and Japan are, in different ways, controlling the disease in this fashion. Highly targeted action can then follow whether supported by rules or voluntary compliance.

But in the UK, the test and trace system is proving a disaster because of a combination of poor design, over-centralisation, defective software, inefficient and predatory private providers and poor management under the politically appointed leadership of Lady Dido Harding (some say that pop singers Dido and Lady Gaga would combine to do a better job).

It's a long and serious piece, but I like the joke and topical reference that ends this quotation.