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Here are some inital reflections on George Galloway’s stunning by-election win in Bradford West… Devastating for Labour… It is not simply the fact that Labour lost a seat they’ve held at every election since 1974. It is not simply the fact that they’ve become the first opposition party since William Hague’s Tories at Romsey 12 [...]

Lib Dem party president Tim Farron has caused something of a storm within the party by co-signing a letter in his capacity as Vice Chair of the ‘Christians in Parliament’ group urging the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw their ruling “that the Healing On The Streets ministry in Bath are no longer able to claim, [...]

Here are my personal pick of the top 9 points from this year’s Budget… 1. A definite Lib Dem win on raising the income tax threshold Raising the income tax threshold — indeed, the biggest ever uplift, to £9,205 — is undoubtedly a big win for the Lib Dems. It’s two months since Nick Clegg [...]

It’s over 50 years since the campaign by Jimmy Hill, then chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, successfully scrapped the maximum wage which operated throughout the football league until 1961. Some probably lament the commercialisation of the game which it set in motion. But the idea that individuals should have a ceiling placed on their [...]

Deborah Orr has a must-read article in the Guardian highlighting the inverted absurdity of this week’s row about the Coalition’s workfare programme, The slanging match over workfare is getting us nowhere. She points out that the very essence of workfare is government intervention in the workings of the free market, the state urging private companies [...]

I’m going to do something now I haven’t had cause to do in a good few months: praise a Labour policy. Here’s why. On Tuesday night, I went along to listen to Stephen Twigg, Labour’s shadow education secretary, deliver a speech to a ProgressOnline debate on raising standards in education. (The event was in parliament’s [...]

Time to out myself. In the last year, three new Lib Dem groups have been launched to an unsuspecting world and to an often-suspicious Lib Dem blogosphere. In chronological order, they are: Social Liberal Forum (SLF), Liberal Left, and Liberal Reform. They will add to the already thriving discussion base within the party which exists [...]

There’s a must-read column by The Economist’s Bagehot this week focusing on the Lib Dems’ dilemmas, titled The Clegg paradox. It’s a serious and weighty analysis, which asks some uncomfortable questions of the party’s strategy. Here’s it’s conclusion: At a recent meeting of the Lib Dem parliamentary party, Tim Farron, an ambitious left-winger and party [...]

Tempting though the schadenfreude is, I think Lib Dems would be wise not to enjoy too much Labour’s discomfort at Ed Balls’ decision to declare Labour cannot promise to reverse any of the Coalition’s cuts. I can of course entirely understand the urge to shout ‘Ha! Told you so’ at the shadow chancellor. In an [...]

The shockwaves from David Cameron’s decision to reject the proposed ‘Merkozy’ EU treaty is still shaking politics. The UK stands isolated from the other 26 member states. Tory Eurosceptics and, early polls suggest, a majority of the British public think the Prime Minister has played a blinder, ‘sticking up for Britain’. This is difficult territory [...]