A Lib Dem reshuffle is coming after this conference

Photo by Amanda Jones on Unsplash 

Senior party figures have told PoliticsHome that the Liberal Democrats will reshuffle their frontbench after their party conference in Bournemouth this weekend.

Among the names tipped for promotion in Harriet Symonds' article are Alex Brewer, Jess Brown-Fuller, Josh Reynolds, Anna Sabine, Mike Martin and Bobby Dean.

Given the calibre of the new Lib Dem MPs elected last year, this sounds like a positive move.

But don't get too excited:

Continuity will prevail in some key areas: deputy leader Daisy Cooper is expected to remain in the Treasury brief, as are Callum Miller in Foreign Affairs – seen as a "safe pair of hands" –and chief whip Wendy Chamberlain.

GUEST POST Let next week's online summer school rekindle your Radical Liberal fire

William Lane invites you to an exciting online event being organised by the John Stuart Mill Institute and the Social Liberal Forum.

As Liberals, it is easy to feel despondent in the current political moment. The last few decades have told a tale of retreat from Liberal values globally, with rising authoritarianism across the world and a growing cynicism gnawing at the heart of established liberal democracies.

Our horizons are shrinking as the world grows ever smaller and more insular, riven with fear and mistrust, and it feels like many of our cherished values are facingpushback across the globe. The far right rises on the back of political hopelessness, states and businesses monitor us ever more closely, and people feel more and more disconnected from each other and their communities.

Yeats’s famous lines will resonate with many of us:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

But we must not give in to despair. Our political tendency, the tendency that has ushered in an age of unparalleled prosperity across the globe, is capable of astonishing regrowth and renewal.

Liberalism did not become the dominant global ideology overnight, it had to fight hard and fast against entrenched political and social interests, while also contending with the ideological threats of absolute monarchy, fascism and state communism. 

In our age of rising political tension, economic stagnation and growing authoritarian threat, we need to rediscover the social and political dynamism that made Liberal thought and politics so incisive in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The John Stuart Mill Institute and Social Liberal Forum are leading that charge, by launching an online Radical Liberal Summer School that is taking place from the 11-13 August. Through lectures, Q&As and panel discussions we hope to rekindle some of that old Liberal fire, and contribute to an as yet small but growing spirit of Liberal revivalism.

Join us next week for fascinating discussions on individual freedom, economic empowerment, foreign policy and workplace democracy. We will be hosting prominent politicians, philosophers and academics including Bobby Dean MP, Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle, Cllr Carl Cashman and Frances Foley.

For full details and to book your place, go the the event's webpage. We look forward to seeing you next week.

William Lane is senior researcher at the John Stuart Mill Institute.

The Joy of Six 1270

Bobby Dean, the new Liberal Democrat MP for Carshalton and Wallington, argues that a return to austerity will not solve Britain's problems: "Starmer says he wants to end the politics of easy answers – and I agree. But on the exam question of 'how to fix Britain', he sidesteps complex answers in favour of a simple one that we have all heard before: we must tighten our belts."

To keep his government on track, Keir Starmer needs to restore the clout of the cabinet secretary and stamp out Downing Street factionalism, says Alex Thomas.

Adam Kucharski offers a guide to the bad-faith arguments people use on social media and how to defeat them.

"I go down there to get away from everything. And it’s a place you can time travel. You get this sense of the past that’s been locked away in the mud, sometimes for thousands of years." Harriet Sherwood on the growth in popularity of mudlarking on the Thames foreshore.

Rose Staveley-Wadham tells the story of all 34 British medallists from the 1924 Paris Olympics using local press cuttings: "Remaining in the sphere of athletics, there was another gold medal winner for Britain at the 1924 Paris Olympics in the shape of Douglas Lowe. His win, on the same day as Harold Abrahams’s, garnered less attention. For example, a small paragraph in the Halifax Evening Courier on 11 July 1924 noted how ‘the winner of the Olympic Games 800 metres race, Douglas Gordon Arthur Lowe, is an old Manchester Grammar School boy, who left the school when his family removed to London in 1917."

The scariest sound in film? Adam Scovell looks back on Jerzy Skolimowski's "visionary British horror oddity" The Shout.

I can see James MacCleary now the Rain has Gone: Lord Bonkers' foreword to the new Liberator Songbook

Journalists have been clutching their pearls for several days, but only now are Liberal Democrats gathering for the Conference Glee Club.

The event is nothing without a Liberator Songbook, and - or so the old brute tells me - a Liberator Songbook is nothing without a foreword by Lord Bonkers.

So here's the one he's written for this year's edition.

Bonkers Hall

Rutland

Tel. Rutland 7

Planning the Bonkers Hall International Arts Festival takes up much of my time over the summer, falling as it does just before the Liberal Democrat autumn conference. (For myself, I tend to fall at or immediately after the conference.)

This year’s programme featured the Elves of Rockingham Forest, who offered ‘An Evening of Aeolian Harmonies (no money returned)’, while the Well-Behaved Orphans put on their traditional gymnastic display. (Only three got over the wall this time.)

Earl Russell’s Big Band made a welcome return after many years, and the Sisters from the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Box offered their tribute to the Sex Pistols.

No, you don’t mess with those nuns. I shan’t forget the Mother Superior warning Violent Bonham Carter, the gender-fluid London crime boss of the Sixties, that the convent was “her manor” and that she would “give a slap to anyone who got lairy”. You have to admit she’s got more go than the Revd Hughes.

And I found many talents within the greatly enlarged Lib Dem parliamentary party. Bobby Dean, for instance, enjoyed a successful career singing ballads (rather bland ballads, if I am honest) for white American teenagers until the Beatles changed everything. When I first met Roz Savage, by contrast, she was a member of an all-girl punk group.

Some songs, of course, were written about our MPs. ‘Olney the Lonely’ was occasioned by the writer’s sympathy for Sarah when she found herself joining such a small Commons group after winning her by-election. Johnny Nash, I believe, penned ‘I can see James MacCleary now the Rain has Gone’ after a showery canvassing session in Newhaven.

But enough from me. Enjoy the Glee Club and may you stay forever Claire Young.

Bonkers