Spirit of 1976 has found a secret video exposing the Gay Agenda to Take Over the World.

Steph Ashley can’t understand why everyone quotes Iain Dale as if his views actually matter. I share her mystification on this.

Alix Mortimer compares Lib Dem and Tory campaign slogans and (surprisingly!) finds the Tory one somewhat wanting.

Dreaming of Simplicity wants to pee on Aaron’s bonfire in linking to this article on Digital Spy about the BBC’s commercial impacts.

Aberavon and Neath Lib Dems examine the Tax Credit train wreck.

And finally, Lady Mark Valladares has been up in my neck of the woods. He (and Ros) will be in Bradford today and I shall, if I can drag myself out of bed, be going to have a cream tea with them. The perils of Lib Demmery…

SnapsThoughts has a photo essay on the fraughtness of union links with Labour. Each image is accompanied by some thought-provoking words. Highly recommended.

Douglas has news of a sexist Tory. In other news, bears are Catholic and the pope poos in the woods.

Spirit of 1976 discovers his inner Clarkson and feels DIRTY.

Sexual Intelligence Blog reports on John McCain’s reluctance to discuss sexual matters. Not in front of the children, dear.

Jonathan Calder is rather cross about curfews, and people who hail them as a success before they even start.

Lee Griffin has some praise for the home secretary’s plans on knife crime.

Feminist SF covers the finale of the most recent series of Doctor Who.

That’s all folks. Tips to the usual address, and I’ll see you Sunday.

David Davis has won the by-election, according to Sky News, with a total of 17,113 votes. The Green Party’s Shan Oakes came second with 1,758 votes, which is also great news.

A BBC News article says turnout was at 35%, much higher than expected and very high for a single-issue election.

Worth noting:
The turnout was comparable to most by-elections.
This was a single issue by-election;
It faced a lot of hostility from the media
It was a very safe seat and Davis had no opponents who could unseat him.

That makes a 35% turnout much higher than expected.
Continue reading…

“It’s a total waste of bloody money!”; “I have not made my mind up yet”; “I’ve voted for him already” (one of 10,000 postal ballots requested, 59 per cent sent them in); “I just don’t know about politics, I don’t vote.

A lady somewhere will be turning in her grave” (clearly meaning her mother); “I never thought I’d vote Tory, but this time I will” (an enthusiastic Lib-Dem); “Look at all these leaflets!”; Definitely I’m voting for Mr Davis … I don’t need a car thank you, my son will walk me there”.

I canvassed for David Davis on the eve of the by-election. The uncertain did not want to discuss. We had a single conversation with a man who did raise 42 days - he was for locking them up, but not, on consideration, if they were innocent. Davis’s core team is very competent. But it is hard for them. Many voters are puzzled about why David Davis has done it, especially Conservative voters. I’ll come back to this, his core problem at the moment. But also party activists who worked especially hard to ensure he won the constituency in 2005 to frustrate the Lib-Dem’s “decapitation strategy”. They backed a leader. They wanted him to be Home Secretary.

Continue reading…

I don’t suppose I need to repeat the refrain about this government’s authoritarianism. In its eleven years in power, Labour’s base instinct has been to legislate its way out of every problem, every bad headline and every moral panic.

We’ve seen a criminal justice policy dictated more by Paul Dacre than common sense and we’ve seen public health campaigns that achieve Cromwellian standards of piety. Such is the level of disgust with the overbearing Big Brother State, we’re frequently seeing liberals, libertarians and some left-wingers converge onto a common ground they rarely share.

And then this week the government went and threw a fork in the road.
Continue reading…

Good. Bad. Right. Wrong. In a speech in Glasgow on Tuesday, Tory leader David Cameron inveighed against ‘moral neutrality’, and evinced a desire to reinstate categories as basic as these in British political discourse.

Nor will this performance a one off; spindoctors confirm that this theme will be central to Conservative agitation and propaganda over the summer months.
Continue reading…

Gordon Brown is on shakier ground than he thinks on 42 days pre-charge detention for people suspected of terrorist offences.

On the eve of the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, a new ICM poll conducted for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust shows most people (60%) think terrorist suspects should be held without charge for no more than the current limit - 4 weeks, or 28 days.

The poll questions on which he relies for his populist gesture politics with our civil liberties ask people whether terrorist suspects should be held for up to 42 days, questions that by their very nature do not fully reflect the possible innocence of those held nor the length of time that they may be held in custody.
Continue reading…

A short one today, I’m afraid, since I was up until stupid o’clock last night and am knackered

Purple Cthulhu and prominent Brussels-ite Nick Whyte both report on the sneaky Tories being sneaky and urge you to write to your Euro MP before they introduce a Euro Law which could take your internets away. Andrew Ducker has already written, as have many others.

UK Polling Report has realised that young people can’t remember living under the Tories and thus are less likely to be prejudiced against them. In other news, the sky is blue and the Pope shits in the woods.

Jonathan Calder praises the Sunday Times for praising Lib Dem Economic Expertise.

Septicisle approves of an article in the Daily Fail shock!

Smashboredom examines the G8 in group blog Powerswitch.

And The Prydonian Academy has an end of series poll for Doctor Who.

The BNP have a lot to answer for in regard to pulling down the gene ral tenor of virtually any electoral debate, but it is not to them that I refer herein.

No, it is to ‘independent candidate’ Jill Saward who is running against David Davis in Haltemprice and Howden on the basis that all our society seems to be interested in are the rights of the accused, not the rights of the victims.

This one could give the hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade a run for their money when she declares that…

Continue reading…

Firstly, on the cleaner’s strike across London. I got this today:

The second round of strikes are about to come to an end. They have been well-supported across the London Underground network.

Continue reading…

I am going to make a prediction - the Liberal Democrats are going to lose the next election.

Now, this may not strike you as one of the great feats of prognostication. The Liberal Democrats have never won an election and the Liberals last won an election before the first world war. Even though in the council elections and the Henley by-election we came in second place, I don’t think there’s a single person in the country who actually believes we’re going to win a General Election in the near future.

But I don’t mean we’re not going to gain the majority of seats; I mean we’re actively working against our own interests. The decisions being made are going to actively damage the party - and, more importantly, damage the chances of getting some of our principles put into practice.
Continue reading…

Sorry the netcast is a bit late today, folks. I got caught up in emailing Woman’s Hour and lost track of time. As always, tips to the usual address (although we give no guarantees you’ll be included) and hope you find something of interest in this.

Paul Walter has a handy précis of ConHome’s “How to become a Tory MP” guide. Essentially it involves throwing lots of money at it. *I* thought that was supposed to be the *Labour* way…

Lynne Featherstone calls people who don’t support Harriet Harman’s proposal to allow positive discrimination “Tory Boys”. Thank, Lynne! I assume the penis and blue rosette must have been lost in the post…

Lee Griffin is a Tory Boy like me, then. I particularly like this rabid right-wing point: “If schools want more male teachers then incentives are necessary to increase numbers, not putting a worse teacher in charge of educating our children for the sake of some equality figures.”

Anthony Hook thinks that the age discrimination proposals might be ill-thought-out too. Continue reading…

Sorry to butt in here, team, but thought I would take a moment to appraise you of an exchange we’ve had with our nobody Labour MP Joan Ruddock on the 42 days’ detention vote. Thought I might as well share this correspondence, so that you also could kill a few moments on a Friday savouring the kind of limp response former Labour voters get when they approach their local Brownite buttkissing MP on issues of real significance…

Continue reading…

The Green party has put forward a candidate in the by-election against David Davis. Left of David Davis? Check. A left / progressive candidate? Check. Wants to push for even more civil liberties? Check. So the Labour and lefty bloggers must be rising up in support? Erm… well, there’s Neil Harding… and a lot of tumbleweed rolling by.

[update: non-Greens support also from: peezedtee, Dave Cole, Stuart Jefferey, Socialist Unity, Unbeliever, Pamphlet Labour]

Yes, it really does look like many lefties really will cut off their noses to spite their face on this issue. Well, I’m not sitting here praying David Davis fails miserably because the outcome would a vindicated Gordon Brown willing to push it through with the Parliament Act if the Lords reject the 42 days bill as expected.
Continue reading…

It’s a dark day for me as a Liberal, but I find myself in agreement with the Daily Fail. I despise the Mail, and pretty much everything they stand for, but Harperson’s Equality Act definitely has a sting in the tail.

In my view, Positive Discrimination is still discrimination and it is wrong. Even in this limited way, endorsing discrimination perpetuates it, rather than eradicating it. It adds vast amounts of resentment for little perceivable benefit.
Continue reading…

It’s time to stop the bullshit, we’ve now been sitting around for about a week and a half doing little more than bicker about the integrity of a single person while standing around gawking.

The question now should be: what can we do, and can we do it, in a way that can unite those that support and loathe David Davis’ stance?

I’ll be heading on the journey over to London today for the Liberal Conspiracy gathering and hope that this subject can be explored in more depth by those that attend.
Continue reading…

I’ve been pretty critical of two massive government IT projects – the existing plans to introduce mandatory identity cards with a huge database behind them and also the Home Office talk of a database of all phone calls and emails made anywhere in the country.

My criticisms in both cases are three-fold: the money involved could be better spent on other projects (such as giving us more police rather than keeping huge databases of the activities of innocent people), they involve a huge infringement of our liberties and privacy, and – thirdly - big IT projects like this are likely to go wrong and to be vulnerable to misuse.

But I’m not a Luddite. Over time I’ve found embracing IT innovations has made my life easier and made me more efficient - whether it was years ago buying a laser printer to speed up production of casework letters or more recently starting to use the text-messaging based blogging service Twitter to help keep residents informed of what I’m up to as an MP.
Continue reading…

There are some who say that the past is a different country and they do things differently there; those people aren’t involved in politics. For people who are, there are valuable lessons to be learnt from the history books — not least when deciding whether or not it is advisable to eject one’s Parliamentary toys out of one’s pram.

On 20th November 1997 a by-election was held in Winchester. It was technically a re-run of the General Election that May which the Liberal Democrat candidate Mark Oaten (of later infamy) won by a mere two votes. The deposed Conservative — one Gerry Malone — had contested the result and the voters of the area duly returned to the ballot box. They weren’t the only ones who were returned: the Conservative vote collapsed the second time around leaving Oaten with a majority of 21,556, a swing of 19.72 percent from the Tories to the Liberal Democrats.
Continue reading…

Word reaches me that the New Statesman editors have been looking for a candidate to run against David Davis in the by-election.

You may already be aware that today New Labour announced they wouldn’t stand anyone against Davis. Part of the problem apparently was that the Labour PPC for the area himself was against the 42 days.

Yesterday I was told that New Statesman magazine has been actively looking for someone to stand to the left of David Davis on a platform of even more civil and social liberty.

Its not clear whether they’ve found someone yet. The current edition will go to print today or tomorrow and we’ll know when it hits the news stands.
Continue reading…

David Davis’ resignation has generated a huge amount of debate on how the liberal-left should respond. Conor Foley said we should support him, and was met with stiff resistance by Jennie Rigg and Unity on here. On OurKingdom, Anthony Barnett openly welcomed his move.

In our internal email list too we’ve been having a raging debate, especially since the talk has moved on to discussions of what action we can take.

The dilemma is painfully obvious.
Continue reading…