After a slow start the Clegg campaign have now got a good website up and running. It allows ordinary party members not only to pledge their support for him, but also to post up a short statement of why they are doing so. These show well that Nick’s support includes grassroots party members from around the country - and some of their statements make interesting reading: if there’s one theme that comes across to me from them, it is the ambition for the party that shines through from these people, and that they firmly believe he is the man to lead us towards that success.
Today I did something I don’t often do, and for reasons I won’t bore you with, bought the Daily Telegraph. And flicking through it searching for what I was looking for, I was delighted to find a large photograph and interview with Mr Clegg taking up most of one of its pages.
It’s generally a positive interview and the journalist, Rachel Sylvester, runs through with Nick his views on quite a wide range of major policy issues, from tax levels to drugs reclassification and employment rights. Personally I was particularly pleased to see him going strong again on what for me is the central liberal theme of putting people in control of their own lives, as well as, strikingly, going particularly heavily on the importance of giving local councils real power to act, including to tax.
But the greater significance of the interview, it seems to me, is that the Telegraph ran it at all. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the reasons that I’m backing Nick for leader is his enthusiastic and wide-ranging interest in policy ideas - and this afternoon in a major (not to say fairly lengthy!) speech, he set out what he stands for, as a potential Leader of our party.
He identified five major challenges for defining what his vision for Liberal Britain means, across a whole range of policy ideas:
”¢ how to tackle what he called ”˜the epidemic of powerlessness’;
Ӣ how to create real social mobility;
Ӣ where to strike the balance between national security and individual liberty;
Ӣ how actually to engage the public and business in real action to tackle global warming;
Ӣ and how to make sense of globalisation.
So nothing if not a daunting agenda!
I hope the full speech will become available (Update: it is now here) so I’m certainly not going to run through all six closely-typed pages of it here, but a few things that particularly struck me were these.
And I have been pleased with the way that as they have been interviewed over the last week first over Ming’s resignation and now in the leadership contest, various senior Liberal Democrats have used the opportunity well to get across some of the key beliefs and values that are important to us.
To many of us who spend a lot of our time kicking around such ideas these don’t always sound very new - but inexplicably many people of course don’t spend their time following every last Lib Dem policy pronouncement in great detail - and so it is very good that both the candidates and others are able to use the opportunities we now have to expose them to it.
I have in fact been surprised by how much media interest there has been in us over the last week. There certainly currently seems to be a press buzz about the contest and the future of our party that, shall we say, does not always distinguish media reporting of the Liberal Democrats!
For convenience of access I post up here both the video and text of Mr Clegg’s speech from yesterday morning (I’m afraid the video, which is from YouTube, is missing just the first couple of paragraphs of the speech).
I would like to say a few words about my plans for the future.
But before I do, I would like to pay tribute to my close friend and colleague Menzies Campbell.
Ming is a man of integrity, honour and decency. Over the years he has also shown himself to be a man of impeccable judgement and extraordinary political courage. He led the opposition to the Iraq war. He stood firm against this government’s criminal disregard for our hard won freedoms and rights. He has done our country a great service. He stabilized the Liberal Democrats in a time of crisis. He made us more professional. And he gave us a clear sense of direction and purpose. He has done our party a great service too.
It sets out typically fluently his vision for how the Liberal Democrats can best move forward and serve the British people. It’s best summed up in one phrase of his, I think: Read the rest of this entry »
Over the last few years I have come to know and, at different points, have collaborated together with both of the two main leadership contenders (as well as Steve Webb, who while I was writing this, seems to have withdrawn from the race!).
But the one I will be voting for is Nick Clegg.
I’ll be doing that because I believe he would bring to the leadership of our party many of the things which would give us the opportunity to break forward from the plateau that we have reached over the last few years, following rapid success through the 1990s.
Firstly, he obviously has undoubted skills in presenting what he and we believe, in a way which is not only liberal, but which comes across well to normal people, as well as paid-up Lib Dems. He is very much, as was often said about Charles Kennedy, a fully-signed up member of the human race - and he has a facility in talking about real life which I think comes across very well to people who are not very interested in politics. And of course anyone who has seen him speak at party conference or elsewhere will know how effective he is at presenting political ideas too. So I can’t see any other of our MPs who can come close to him in doing the crucial part of the Leader’s job which is presenting us coherently and appealingly to the outside world.
Nick is however not just a presentable mouthpiece, of no particular fixed ideological abode - or in other words, David Cameron. I don’t say this just to be abusive about Cameron - this seems to me to be, along with their political views, to be the crucial difference between Clegg and Cameron. Read the rest of this entry »
In fact he told a whole roomful of people - and although obviously we all realised that it meant a new era for the party, no-one seemed particularly surprised. Over the last few weeks this had become quite widely known by staff and MPs and others who were interested. He had clearly given thought to smooth succession planning, and in fact had a preferred successor lined up.