I have been staring at the faces of Lib Dem councillors for days as part of a piece of work I have undertaken.  Although the highlight has been finding out Cllr Ken Ball has managed to wangle Deputy leader of Chorley Council despite leading a group of him and one other Councillor, my abiding thought

Would rent controls be the worst method of controlling housing benefit aside from all the others? With its mixture of good ideas and painful ones, the Welfare Reform Bill going through Parliament is causing more anguish among Liberal Democrats than anything since… Well, since the last horrible compromise the Coalition Government came up with. The logic is relentless: Labour wrecked the econ...

We will soon find out whether the coalition meant what it said about empowering parliament. The BIS select committee has rejected the government’s preferred candidate for the post of the head of the Office of Fair Access. The committee concluded that it was ‘unable to endorse the appointment of Professor Ebdon as the Director of OFFA and we recommend that the Department conduct a new r...

The thirty ministers of state in this coalition could be forgiven for feeling a bit unloved. They are notionally the most senior members of the government after the Cabinet. But every time there has been a Cabinet vacancy, they have been passed over. The three Cabinet positions that have become available have gone to a backbencher and two parliamentary under secretaries respectively. Judging from ...

Anything new the Labour Party claims they’d do if only they were in government now? It’s a great big lie. They had a booming economy* and absolute power for thirteen years**. So if they gave a flying fuck about it, they’d have done it. *Later revealed to be a debt-fuelled disaster that’ll probably take another thirteen years for the Libera-tory Coalition to repair and pay o...

Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. Some 570 party members responded, and we’re publishing the full results. 59% of Lib Dem members back benefits cap at £26,000 or lower LDV asked: Under the Coalition government’s

David Cameron has signalled that Andrew Lansley's job as health secretary is safe, despite growing attacks on the Coalition plans for NHS reform.

The last PMQs before recess gives Ed Miliband a chance to have another go at the coalition’s NHS reforms. I suspect that the ‘Andrew Lansley should be taken out and shot’ quote that appeared in Rachel Sylvester’s column (£) will make an appearance at some point.   Miliband will keep going on the NHS because he knows it is one of the Tories’ biggest vulnerabi...

George Osborne’s speech to the Federation of Small Businesses tonight tries to offer some reassurance that the coalition isn’t caving into the anti-business zeitgeist. Referring to the recent rows over executive pay, he deplores rewards for failure before saying ‘a strong, free market economy must be built on rewards for success. There are those who are trying to create an anti-b...

In a speech to the Aldersgate Group, a coalition of environment agencies, NGOs, think tanks and industry representatives, Caroline Flint, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, set out the case for an active industrial strategy to drive green growth, reboot the British economy and build a more resilient and responsible economy for the future