Liberty put on a one-night fundraising show tonight at the Hackney Empire (a grand old Victorian theatre now well restored) under the title ‘Bonfire of the Liberties’.

Performers included Rory Bremner and Marcus Brigstocke, and several other stand-up acts, introduced by Shami Chakrabarti, and we went along.

I was surprised not to see more Liberal Democrats I recognised there - there were a few but not many. But seeing several Labour people made me realise that there are many Labour members who still see civil liberties are a Labour issue - for much as we Liberal Democrats see the Government as limiting them and lazily think that so by extension presumably Labour members must also think the same, many longstanding Labour members see themselves as the internal opposition to their own Government on this issue (and indeed for many, other issues too).

In fact most of the performers didn’t really talk a lot about civil liberties - but it was nevertheless a very entertaining evening.

But the most striking satire of the evening for me wasn’t about civil liberties at all, but about Europe. Read the rest of this entry »

It was the chap in the wing collar and spats who started all the trouble. He asked a question at last night’s meeting at the Royal Society for Arts (RSA) about nuclear policy - and what until then had been a reasonably interesting but fairly predictable debate between the leadership candidates, suddenly turned into something really quite interesting.

As Clegg said in response, this is an area where the two candidates really do disagree. Clegg backs existing party policy on this (which was agreed, let’s not forget, by party conference after extensive internal debate less then seven months ago) which would halve Britain’s nuclear capacity, and then promotes further nuclear disarmament on a multilateral basis.

Huhne is saying something different from that. But just exactly what it is that he is saying becomes less and less clear every time he answers a question about it - and I’m afraid it has now reached the point where I think what he is saying is totally confused and makes pretty much no sense at all.

The basic question that I am unclear about is whether Huhne supports unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain, or not.

Read the rest of this entry »