Tag: Liberal Democrats (UK)

Live: BBC News Channel UK Prime Minister Theresa May has seen off a bid to remove her government from power, winning a no-confidence vote by 325 to 306. Rebel Tory MPs and the DUP - who 24 hours earlier rejected the PM's Brexit plan by a huge margin - voted to keep her in Downing Street. What is a vote of no-confidence? Giving her reaction to the result, Mrs May told MPs she would "continue to work to deliver on the solemn promise to the people of this country to deliver on the result of the referendum and leave the European Union". But Mr Corbyn, who tabled the no-confidence motion, said in the Commons that before any "positive discussions" could take place, the prime minister should rule out a no-deal Brexit. Mr Corbyn's no-confidence motion was backed by all the opposition parties, including the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats. His party has not ruled out tabling further no-confidence motions - but Mr Corbyn is under pressure from dozens of his own MPs and other opposition parties to now get behind calls for a further EU referendum instead. How did my MP vote on the motion of no confidence? Mr Blackford has also written to Mr Corbyn, along with other opposition leaders, to urge him to back another referendum as Labour's official position. "As the prime minister says, Brexit has to mean Brexit, not a different relationship that doesn't actually deliver on Brexit," he added.

Representatives of more than 70,000 doctors have urged ministers to suspend regulations that force hospitals to charge overseas visitors upfront for NHS care. Three royal medical colleges and one faculty say the charging regime is harming people’s health by deterring them from seeking NHS help when they fall ill. Payments in advance are “a concerning barrier to care”, they say. They have voiced particular concern about pregnant women being denied care and children missing out on treatment for life or death illnesses. Their plea is the strongest opposition yet from the medical community to hospitals in England being compelled to charge migrants up to tens of thousands of pounds before they treat them. The statement has been signed by the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Faculty of Public Health. They want Matt Hancock, the health and social care secretary, to suspend regulations brought in in 2015 and 2017 that specify when overseas visitors should be charged for receiving NHS care. Charges should not be enforced until a full independent review is undertaken of how they are affecting migrants’ access to healthcare, the four groups say. Citing evidence of mothers-to-be and children being left without medical aid, the colleges say: “We do not believe that regulations that lead to such situations are appropriate. They are having a direct impact on individual health and have potential implications for wider public health. “Early diagnosis and treatment are vital to improve patients’ outcomes and – in the case of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV – to protect public health.” Some patients have been wrongly charged because they could not prove they were entitled to free care, the statement adds.

A row has broken out among campaigners for a second referendum about when to push the issue to a vote in parliament, with the Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston resisting pressure not to table her amendment demanding a “people’s vote”. With the Labour leadership withholding its support, some campaigners fear forcing the issue to a vote on 11 December would undermine their cause. They believe once it has been shown that there is no majority for a second referendum – and achieving one is likely to be impossible without Labour backing – it will be difficult to return to the question again if May’s deal is rejected. Wollaston said she remained a “passionate supporter” of a people’s vote, but would wait until after the weekend before deciding whether she would table her “doctors’ amendment”. If MPs reject the deal, there are seven possible paths the country could go down next. Labour tries to force an election The opposition tables a vote of no confidence. Some MPs fear the government could then say parliament had definitively rejected a second referendum. The government’s announcement that it will accept amendments to the motion approving May’s Brexit deal – with up to six to be voted on, before the deal itself – has sparked a scramble to decide which questions to press. Meanwhile the Conservative former minister Jo Johnson warned on Thursday that May’s Brexit deal could lead to electoral Armageddon for his party. Johnson described the package their party leader had agreed with the EU as a “botched deal” that would put British firms at a competitive disadvantage and fail the services sector, which he said had been “scandalously” neglected during negotiations on Brexit.

Mr Mundine is reportedly considering a tilt at the marginal NSW seat of Gilmore, which will not be recontested by Liberal Ann Sudmalis at the federal election. "When he couldn't get a seat in the Labor Party, he's looking elsewhere. I guess that's his democratic right," Mr Shorten told reporters in Sydney on Wednesday. Mr Mundine was Labor's national president between 2006 and 2007 but has been a strident critic of the party in recent years. Pressed on why he turned his back on Labor, he said "loyalty cuts both ways". "I gave my life to the Labor Party, I worked very hard for the Labor Party, and I've stood up for the Labor Party for many years," Mr Mundine said. "The issue here is if you want to contribute to society and want to contribute to the political space and a political party says 'no' to you on several occasions, then loyalty goes both ways." Mr Shorten said Labor's candidate for Gilmore Fiona Phillips would fight on local issues, rather than personalities. "She doesn't want a seat in parliament because she thinks that's her right, that she's owed a seat," the opposition leader said. Ms Sudmalis announced her decision to quit in September, launching an extraordinary spray at NSW state MP Gareth Ward for running a campaign against her, an accusation he denied.

What should you do if the prospect of five more years of Conservative government makes you feel sick but you don’t want Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister? That’s the question that is a frequent topic of conversation at Westminster, particularly among Labour MPs of a New Labourish persuasion. Although some are open to the idea of splitting away, most are opposed, though there is a small but influential cadre of New Labour alumni who are willing to bend their ears about the benefits of a split. The central thesis is that the two big political parties are in a terrible mess: the Conservatives have “dragged the nation into its own private feud” over Brexit, while Labour, beset by antisemitism, anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism, is “no longer a noble institution”. As for the Liberal Democrats, their brand is “fatally tarnished” and they should give up and shut up shop. Collins claims that the ideas in the book are “hard to classify” on the left-right spectrum, but this isn’t true Collins then proceeds to set out a number of areas in which the two parties are failing and suggests ways in which a new movement could “start again” and offer something new. The proposals include, in no particular order, a radical increase in the amount of money spent on early years; a rebalancing of the welfare state to favour the working young; a significant increase in inheritance tax; a shift in British taxation away from income and towards wealth; that the House of Lords be replaced with a proportionally elected chamber; and that voting be made compulsory and the franchise extended to 16- and 17-year-olds. They are, almost exclusively, policy proposals from the left and centre-left. The only policy proposal that wouldn’t fit comfortably within a speech from John McDonnell is that university technical colleges be expanded. Start Again?

The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Vince Cable, urged Michel Barnier to stop talking up a no-deal Brexit and instead make contingency plans for a second referendum after the EU’s chief negotiator admitted that a parliamentary impasse in the UK was standing in the way of a deal. Cable said the government and Brussels had up until now been emphasising the danger of the UK crashing out in order to sell a “bad deal” to parliament. But the former business secretary told Barnier during a meeting in Brussels that the so-called people’s vote was gathering support across the political spectrum, and the European commission needed to ready itself for the eventuality. “It’s very clear really: it is a British problem rather than one on the European side.” But Cable, who was meeting the EU official with the leader of the SNP in Westminster, Ian Blackford, and representatives of Plaid Cymru and the Greens, said the message to Barnier was that there was no way out of the logjam, and that the strength of support for a second referendum was growing daily. Cable said: “My main message was that a people’s vote is a very live political option. He obviously had an very clear understanding of what was happening in the UK.” A joint statement from the British politicians attending the meeting said: “With sensible politicians from all parties uniting, we pointed out to Mr Barnier that there is a genuine cross-party consensus that our exit from the European Union must not be assumed.” The president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, said on Thursday that the moment was coming where businesses would have to assume there would be no deal. He said: “If this lack of a solution continues, and approaches the end date, the private sector itself will have to prepare on the assumption that it will be a hard Brexit. We know that the British government has been preparing because that has been reported, and when I asked Theresa May she declined the opportunity to deny it. I want to hear what the commission is doing.” Cable said he did not believe attempts by Tory whips to convince Labour MPs to support a deal or else face a no-deal Brexit would work. “We have a 100 MPs, including 40 Labour MPs and eight Tories, now in support of a people’s vote and it is like an iceberg.

What do you do after you’ve been the deputy prime minister to the United Kingdom? Historically, the answer is usually “retire” or “become prime minister.” For Nick Clegg, former leader of the Liberal Democrats and deputy prime minister between 2010 and 2015 under David Cameron, the answer is “move to Palo Alto, California, to work for Facebook.” “Instead of the gothic splendour of Westminster, I will be surrounded by the gleaming glass and steel of Silicon Valley,” he wrote in a Guardian op-ed officially announcing his new position on Friday. The idea being that, say, a Facebook executive is more powerful than, say, a deputy prime minister — a sentiment that isn’t wrong, exactly, but doesn’t quite get at the exact relationship between government and the tech industry. It’s also a reflection of their political principles, and those of the companies they turn to. The ideology of Clegg’s Liberal Democrats — centering around the economic liberalism of free trade, free markets, and the free movement of people — has fallen deeply out of favor in electoral politics in the U.K., as it has in most of the rest of the world, but it’s still the main political current in Silicon Valley — and at Facebook especially. Why waste your time on the unreceptive world of electoral politics when platform politics welcomes you with open arms? Clegg is known best for his, let’s say, transformative leadership of the Liberal Democrats. In 2016, he campaigned loudly against Brexit (we know how that one went); last year, he lost the election for his own seat to the Labour Party candidate. In that sense Clegg isn’t leaving politics for tech so much as exchanging one form of politics — the ballot box — for another — the platform. But if there’s one thing Clegg has made clear, it’s that he’s willing to compromise if he sees a clear benefit.

According to the last census, there are 433,150 ethnic Chinese in Britain, 0.7 per cent of the population, around 40 per cent of whom were born in mainland China. But at present there is only one, Alan Mak, the Tory MP for Havant, and one Chinese member of the House of Lords, Nat Wei. What is it about Chinese ethnicity that brings about this disparity? The candidate, Wu Kegang, actually increased the Tory share of the vote by 2 per cent. Mak has observed growing numbers getting involved in grass-roots politics and community campaigns, and says he hopes this will translate into more elected Chinese representatives in the future. In his own constituency of Havant, on the south coast of England, the population is 98.5 per cent white. There is nothing Chinese about Mak’s campaign or his politics. Chinese people bring their traditional virtues of diligence and intelligence, and in a well-administered society, they can develop these virtues for their own benefit of and for society. The Indo-Pakistani-Bangladeshi population, if taken as one group, amounts to nearly 5 per cent of Britain’s population, so it is perhaps not surprising that it feels more at home and participates more in public life. When this happens, it will benefit not just British Chinese, but the wider UK.

I have mixed feelings about leaving the UK’s public debate about the future of our country’s relations with the rest of Europe. But I will no longer seek to play a public role in that debate myself. Profile Nick Clegg's political highs and lows Nick Clegg: political highs and lows Even though Nick Clegg spent five years as deputy prime minister, his probable political highlight came about a month before he took the post, in the unlikely arena of the pre-election party leaders’ debate of April 2016. After the election, the Lib Dems had 57 MPs – enough to gain a share in government with Cameron’s Conservatives and get Clegg an office adjoining Downing Street. It was a rapid fall for a man who ended up spending just 12 years in the Commons, becoming Lib Dem leader little more than two years after becoming an MP, following his work at the European commission and five years as an MEP. I do not arrive in Silicon Valley with a monopoly of wisdom on these crucial questions, but I have been impressed in my numerous conversations with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in recent months by the seriousness with which they recognise the profound responsibilities that Facebook has – not only to its vast number of users but to society at large. As concerns about the impact of technology grow, the left has tended to condemn “big tech” as representative of everything that is wrong in an unleashed market economy. We cannot wish away technological progress. The worlds of politics and tech too often speak past each other. •Nick Clegg is a former UK deputy prime minister and former leader of the Liberal Democrats

Labour has recovered three points since the end of last week. Voters strongly back ‘trustworthy’ May as Johnson’s leadership bid backfires Read more The poll, taken after Theresa May’s conference speech, revealed that her personal approval rating rose from -14% to -12% since last week. Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn’s personal rating fell from -18% to -20%. In her conference speech she sought to drive a wedge between moderate Labour voters and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Of the two party leaders, 25% of respondents said they thought May had performed best during the conference season, while 20% thought Corbyn had. He said he was determined “to rebuild our economy, communities and public services, but also to democratise them, and change the way our economic system is run in the interests of the majority”. Among Tory supporters this figure rose to 87%. The latest poll findings are a boon for May’s leadership, because they place her ahead of both Corbyn and her Tory rival Boris Johnson – 43% of respondents said they thought that May has the nation’s best interests at heart, compared with 38% for Corbyn and only 30% for Johnson. The figures suggest that Johnson’s star appeal, which drew long queues of conference delegates to watch his speech, does not translate into broader political support among Tory voters. Opinium’s findings are based on a survey of 2,007 adults online.