I find it painful to watch Gordon Brown these days. He was wandering around the garden of 10 Downing Street with Barack Obama during the ‘coming one’s’ UK visit looking like an overgrown schoolboy trying to please. How ironic that this brooding presence during the New Labour years, who hung like the sword of Damocles over Tony Blair, brooding and plotting to get his job, has seen it all go so very sour.

Gordon Brown, who to all accounts privately is warm, witty and bright – and who wanted this job all his political life – appears though to be in his political death throes. The convulsions: the early blow he struck himself by bottling the election that never was; three by-election defeats including the cataclysmic Glasgow East (22% swing away from Labour); the removal of the 10p tax band which hit the totemic most vulnerable and poor that Labour is meant to stand up for; the dithering over Northern Rock which its eventual nationalisation and perhaps above all – his lack of ability to make the right call with confidence (or stick to any position he takes). These have all taken their toll. Maybe he will fall; maybe he will limp on.

Whenever we see him now he is ‘getting on with the job’ because that’s ‘what the nation expects’ and ‘listening and learning’ – rubbish soundbites loyally echoed by each of his ministers when caught in the glare of media interview.

Long before Brown became leader, I voiced my doubts as to how he would perform in the role, in particular because of the incessant plotting around him and the way he kept on dodging the big decisions (often by setting up a long term review). Whilst it’s nice to have your prediction come right, it would be far better if I’d been wrong and we had a Prime Minister thriving in the job and leading the country in the right direction. The country is facing extreme hardship and need skill and leadership the Brown – and the Labour Party more widely – appear unable to deliver.

So – what’s a nation to do? Well, no great shock to say that I hope when the nation is asked in a General Election – that it delivers loads and loads of Liberal Democrat MPs.

Labour’s tide of energy and renewal is long gone and the Tories won’t deliver for a nation that has so many different needs. the very, very few snippets of policy statements that have sneaked out from the Tories – all I have learned is that tax changes proposed to date will benefit the 6% of those already the richest in the land and that it is the poor’s fault for being poor.

I think it is time for politics itself to change. Seems to me that simply changing from one dysfunctional party to another isn’t the answer. That sort of politics delivers the same thing time and time again. Initially – there’s a burst of enthusiasm and relief and the new broom sweeps away the by now discredited Government – and then the pattern repeats.

I love to think that each issue might have to be debated and won because it wins enough support in the House of Commons to be voted through on its merits – and not simply because one lot can steamroller it through. This Labour era has seen enough steam-rollering to last a life time. And all that Labour have done has been based on a minority vote in this country – on a mandate (loosely termed in my view) of 35% of the vote.

So roll on the General Election. I’m looking forward to the Liberal Democrats fighting to win every seat and every vote we can – but my personal heart’s desire is that no party should simply be swept in because of disgust with the last one. That will deliver same old same old. We need more than that – we need a change to the way our politics operates.

Time for change – but hopefully not just the faces!

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

“Now Labour plans to bar white men from jobs” – just one of the screaming tabloid headlines about the Equality Bill. What a fantastic nine-word summary of what is wrong with so much of our tabloid journalism: whipping up fear and division based on a fairy tale. I’m not sure what is worse – believing that the person who wrote the headline was so ignorant of the story they thought it was true – or so cynical they were happy to write it knowing it wasn’t.

Because the truth is there is no provision like that in the Equality Bill. Nowhere. All the Bill proposes is that if two different people are equally qualified for a job (and that is a very big if!), it should be ok to choose between them on gender or race grounds.

And why may you want to do that? Well, to take one example – there’s a real shortage of male teachers in primary schools. We all bang on about the need for more male role models for children at this stage. So why shouldn’t the law allow give the school the option if it wants (because yes – that’s all the Bill would do – it wouldn’t force this upon any organisation) to decide that faced with two equally qualified people, it wants to introduce a bit more balance amongst its teachers and employ a man? And if the school wanted just to ban white men regardless (or indeed black men – though notice how that didn’t make it into the headline) – then that would be illegal. End of story.

This sorry tale is though a good reminder as to how we can’t take the case for equality for granted – particular when there are Conservative MPs like Mark Pritchard jumping on the bandwagon happily exaggerating away and mirroring these fairytales too.

It is also a distraction in some ways from the big issue missing at the heart of the Bill – effective action to tackle the continuing discrimination in pay. So, the private sector – in which around 80% of the population work – will escape any form of mandatory measures to ensure that there is no discrimination in their workplaces – thus probably ensuring that the gender pay gap and the employment barriers that exist in race, disability and so on continue barely troubled by the Single Equality Bill.

Given that there are something like 120,000 cases waiting to be heard at equal pay tribunals this is not some trivial niche issue. That is approaching 200 cases per Parliamentary constituency. It should be a huge scandal, grabbing every MPs’ attention – but instead, it is overlooked and sidelined by our political system.

So I will aim to help push those better intentioned MPs in all parties to add in more effective measures to the Bill as it wends its way through Parliament. Lord Lester (our Lord Lester) who basically wrote the book on the equalities agenda is quite clear that mandatory pay audits are absolutely vital to deliver any sort of significant change.

What is to be welcomed in particular in the Bill, and which seems to have been agreed at the eleventh hour, is the inclusion of our older citizens into the public sector equality duty and following on from that – although no timetable was given – the end of discrimination against them in goods and services.

Helped the Aged – and others – have done some great work to illuminate just what goes on at the moment. Take two examples. First, the Disability Living Allowance. People aged 65+ who become disabled are not eligible to receive this allowance – they qualify instead for Attendance Allowance, which takes longer to qualify for and pays less. Second – car insurance, where it is seen as acceptable to charge people more for being old, regardless of their health or driving record. Charging more because someone is genuinely a higher risk – that would be fine- but simply assuming “old = risky driver” in the absence of evidence to back that up – that is discrimination as plain and simple as if someone was to say, “they’re black – so let’s charge them more”.

The Bill will also bring in a much-needed consolidation of the huge number of different laws, rules and regulations – good news again. And of course the passage through Parliament will provide plenty of opportunities to try to make the legislation better!

This article first appeared in Liberal Democrat News. For subscription details, click here.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

It’s the season of street parties and summer fairs, horticultural shows, local fetes and strawberry teas. This is British – and then some. But I wonder if it is more than it seems on the surface – for I wonder if it is part of the answer to many of the ills that beset us today by helping to give a greater and stronger sense of community with our neighbours.

The question of how engaged someone is with their neighbours has huge knock-on effects on their participation in society, level of crime, happiness and even health. For example, there is a direct correlation between how many people you know within 15 minutes walk of your house – and the crime level. The more people you know – thelower the crime rate!

Government can hardly order people to talk to or like their neighbours (you can just imagine the New Labour enabling strategy for how many inter-neighbour verbal interactions per seven day period you must have!). But at the micro-scale I believe there is more that could – and should – be done.

Where communities are blessed with the tradition of community events and the enthusiasm of people to keep them going, that is so wonderful – but far too many miss out. And we all know how much harder it is to start something from scratch as opposed to keeping something already in existence going.

So – for example – I would like to see local councils doing more to help and encourage the organisation of street parties so people get to know each other. We’ve seen with the spread of Neighbourhood Watches how a little bit of an external helping hand can work its magic to unleash the good neighbourliness latent in communities and help create a local organisation where otherwise there was none.

Lots of streets already do have their own street parties – and it does create neighbourliness and bonhomie.Perhaps then we should be having an annual ‘street party week’ to encourage all those who mutter about how nice it would be to know the people in their street to actually get round to it?

Many streets in my constituency hold street parties – and I particularly love the one where each person has the number of their house on a badge. And you hear all the time ‘oh – you’re number 46 – you’re the one with the beautiful roses over your porch’ or whatever.

And perhaps councils should be doing more to help online communities emerge in their areas, through measures like providing easy-to-use and free website and online discussion forums so that anyone can within a few minutes set-up an online community for their street or neighbourhood – and of course click a link to print off some flyers to then distribute to their neighbours?

All small steps in their own way, but better then railing against the fading of the night and simply getting nostalgic for how communities used to be. Rather than moan or reminisce – do something, I say!

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

I am truly sick of the Westminster Village sneering attitude to (now former Conservative Home Secretary) David Davis. Quite frankly – I don’t care if David Davis’s resignation as an MP to fight a by-election in his Haltemprice & Howden constituency was motivated by a desire for truth, justice and liberty or because he was never going to get Home Secretary anyway, or because he is a loner, or is an egomaniac, or because he hates David Cameron – all doing the rounds in political gossip circles as explanations.

What I do care about is the issue – and if his actions help secure the same outcome that I want, then good for him – and I don’t see why I should have to pretend that I don’t really agree with him – or have to pretend that him helping to achieve what I want too isn’t a good thing – just because we are in different parties or disagree about 1,001 other issues.

Why does the issue of 42 days detention without charge matter so much? Quite simply – because locking an innocent person up for a month and a half is an awful, ghastly thing to do. Imagine it happening to yourself. How it can wreck jobs, pull apart relationships and leave a deep and abiding sense of anger and hostility.

And we know that innocent people will get locked up. When the police and other authorities think they know that someone is guilty – they ain’t always right. That’s why people get acquitted.

Even with the best will in the world, mistakes are made. And we know too – the best will often is missing. We’ve seen in the fight against Irish terrorism how some police were so convinced they knew who was guilty that evidence was forged – to frame people for crimes they didn’t commit.

We know we can’t just assume that all involved in security matters follow the rules and do their job properly – look at the repeated incidents of secret documents being lost!

The Government’s key argument is that investigations are complex and take too long: that people (including the innocent) have to be locked up whilst investigations are carried out. But that is an argument for more resources to expand capacity and speed up investigations – not an argument to extend detention without charge.

We have already extended the period of detention without charge from 7 to 14 to 28 days in recent years – already longer than any other country in the Western world by a long shot. Even the US – not exactly a shining beacon of remembering human rights whilst fighting terrorism! – only permits two days detention.

Go back to imagining your life. If you’ve got a diary for the next month or two take a look at it. And then imagine being locked up for 42 days without being told why you’re being held. And think of the impact it would have on you and your family.

That’s why this issue cuts to the very core of the point of having elections and Parliament in the first place. If MPs aren’t there to protect people from the almost inevitable demands for greater and greater powers over them from all parts of the state then what is the point of much of what we do?

The Counter Terrorism Bill will now wend its way through the Commons and the Lords. The fight is not over yet – not by a long way.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

I’ve been pretty critical of two massive government IT projects – the existing plans to introduce mandatory identity cards with a huge database behind them and also the Home Office talk of a database of all phone calls and emails made anywhere in the country.

My criticisms in both cases are three-fold: the money involved could be better spent on other projects (such as giving us more police rather than keeping huge databases of the activities of innocent people), they involve a huge infringement of our liberties and privacy, and – thirdly – big IT projects like this are likely to go wrong and to be vulnerable to misuse.

But I’m not a Luddite. Over time I’ve found embracing IT innovations has made my life easier and made me more efficient – whether it was years ago buying a laser printer to speed up production of casework letters or more recently starting to use the text-messaging based blogging service Twitter to help keep residents informed of what I’m up to as an MP.

Indeed, the idea of organising information in an efficient way so that it helps people make decisions and find out what’s going on is fundamentally a very liberal approach – getting computer code to do the heavy lifting so that individuals can find out and act.

So this has got me thinking – if I could commission just one IT project from government, what would it be? Because that’s really the implicit fourth reason for my rejection of ID cards and logging all emails and phone calls – if you were going to spend that amount of money and hoover up that amount of IT expertise, surely there are better things they could go on?

Having pondered this a bit, I think my choice of project would be one that there isn’t currently any clamour for but which in a quiet way could revolutionise the way in which people contact public services – and so in turn the benefits garnered from having those services.

It all boils down to this. There are a myriad of different contact details for public services which most people – even MPs who are making numerous contact each week on behalf of constituents! – struggle to remember, if that is they even know they exist. For example, how many people do you think know how to contact their local police, other than on the emergency 999 number?

But we pretty much all know the postcode of where we live. So why not introduce a national scheme for matching up email addresses containing public services with the relevant public service? Imagine if you could email yourpostcode@police.gov.uk and you knew it would automatically go the relevant team? Or yourpostcode@nhs.gov.uk or yourpostcode@libraries.gov.uk or yourpostcode@schools.gov.uk or any other of a myriad of public services?

There’s no doubt it would be quite a meaty set of data sitting behind all this, but these days matching up postcodes to geographical units to public services is increasingly common – just look at what http://www.writetothem.com or http://www.upmystreet.com achieve – and this database would frankly be tiny compared to one holding records of all the phone calls and emails in the country or the national ID cards database.

Sure you have to factor in the email forwarding and other overheads, such as having to deal with the emails because the whole point of making contact easier is that you end up with more contacts.

But it seems to me feasible and practical – and is the sort of innovation that, once introduced, we would soon end up wondering how we ever lived without.

So my choice is ‘the Peoples’ Database’ – a database we the people might actually want rather than one that they – the Government – want to impose. What’s yours?

This article first appeared on Liberal Conspiracy, where you can also post up your comments.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

Stephen Tall’s post last week on Liberal Democrat Voice – Lib Dem tax policy: the media’s starting to listen, so now will the public get to hear about it? – highlighted how the media are increasingly rating our approach – and Vince Cable’s in particular – to economic issues.

As ever with Stephen, the post was full of good points and insight, but I think a key point was missed when he said that the reason for this not translating yet into higher support for the party is in part due to "anti-Lib Dem media bias and external factors beyond our control."

Well yes – both are factors. But as a liberal, one of the key parts of my beliefs is in the power of all of us to take power into our own hands – and bring about change.

So we shouldn’t just rail against "external factors against our control" – but instead look to what we can all do. Our party’s MPs – including myself – have a responsibility with the opportunities we are offered or can make – but the party is about far more than just the Parliamentarians. So I’ve mentioned four simple things below that anyone can do – and I’m sure you can think of others too.

The thread that joins them all together is this – if you see something you don’t like, you can do something about. You don’t have to just moan, or find reasons to self-flagellate and blame it all on someone else in the party who must be getting something wrong or not doing something. Instead – ask, "what can I do about it?" So act away!

Write to your local newspaper:

The letters page of is usually one of most keenly read section of a paper – and people who read them are more likely to vote than average. Most local newspapers are only rarely over-run with good letters to choose from, so your chance of getting published is often very high.

Link to our Economic Recovery plan from your website/blog:

The party’s website has a page setting out a summary of our economic policies – and also linking through to more detailed information for those who want to know more: www.libdems.org.uk/recoveryplan

In truth – not many people sit down at their computer thinking "I think I’ll go and look up what a political party is saying today." But you can help bring more people to read our recovery plan by linking to it from your own website/blog – some people will follow your link, and more links makes the page come out better in Google search engine results – bringing more people in that way too. Win, win!

Share our Economic Recover plan on social networking sites:

Do you use Facebook or Twitter or MySpace or Delicious or LibDig or Digg or any one of the myriad of other social networking sites? If you do – then you’ve got a – potential – audience waiting in front of you. What a shame if you don’t let them know about our Economic Recovery plan!

Like with adding a link from your website – it may not seem a huge publicity step on its own, but added up across lots of us – it has a real effect. Many people all doing their little bid all adds up and amplifies.

Comment on newspaper websites:

Just as sharing our pages on social networking sites brings our message to other people, taking our message to newspaper websites does the same. The major newspaper websites are some of the most popular sources of online political news in the country – often leaving the most popular political blogs trailing. Again that’s an opportunity for us – to take our message out to a wider audience, rather than to complain about other people not doing it for us. So go ahead – comment away…

This article first appeared on Liberal Democrat Voice.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

I went into City Hall last Sunday to do the BBC’s Politics Show on the London election results. Ken Livingstone was already virtually gone. Desks were being cleared and the new regime was undoubtedly choosing the wallpaper and furniture. The King is dead. Long live the King!

This weekend eight years ago I was elected to the London Assembly – and Ken became London’s first Mayor. It was so exciting – a blank page on which to write the capital’s future. And now it’s Boris! Unbelievable…

What will Boris Johnson do to London? I have to ‘fess up immediately – I was upset by Boris even throwing his hat in the ring – let alone winning. To me he was not someone who had ever shown the slightest interest in London and its key issues prior to this opportunity knocking on his door.

Mind you – Ken had become arrogant from his years in office and really failed to tackle the issues of the sleaze and corruption allegations swirling around his advisers. Two of them had to quit in the end – but we are still left with a whole host of questions over what money went where and why, and Ken never looked like he was really interested in sorting out matters. The cheeky chappy of yesteryear had worn out our good will and we were clearly desperate for change. But will that change be for the better?

Liberal Democrat candidate Brian Paddick was mercilessly squeezed by celebrity – and the fight by the Labour and Tory armies to get their vote out showed in London’s results. I want to pay tribute to Brian for being such a good candidate. As he put it himself – he didn’t do bad for a ‘talented amateur’. But up against two big beasts and to be frank, old political stagers like Ken and Boris, he was caught in the cross fire as the big beasts slugged it out.

So now we watch to see what Boris does with his new job. It has to be one of the best jobs there is – to be Mayor of this great city. My fears are that he will take London backwards. To be a success as Mayor you have to get the details right – and when pressed on issue after issue Boris either floundered (as on the costings of his bus policies) or frequently back-tracked from previous statements. As Mayor he’ll have a huge staff to help deliver the details, so perhaps he will pull it off, perhaps not. Time will tell!

The voting would seem to say that outer London has wreaked its revenge on a Zone 1 Mayor. But the last thing we need is a Mayor who now spends four years shoring up his outer London vote ready for the next contest. That was Ken’s Achilles heel. He spent much of his time and money devoted to the groups that would repay him electorally.

The first four years of Ken’s reign, I stood shoulder to shoulder with him to introduce the first congestion charge – when it was still about reducing congestion, not raising revenue. I stood shoulder to shoulder with him against the Government’s expensive and ill-thought out private finance for the tube. But then he rejoined the Labour Party – and it was all down hill after that. And in the end the seeming use of the London Development Agency to fund his adviser’s friends’ projects (now being investigated) said it all. It was nicknamed ‘Ken’s Bank’.

That’s the main thing I had against Ken – that in the end it became more about funding his re-election and less about governing for all Londoners.

So my advice to Boris is don’t follow the same route. Don’t simply do the converse of Ken and engineer all your efforts towards those who support you. It is patently wrong for any Mayor to simply channel funds to their own political strongholds. London needs a Mayor who will fight for all Londoners. Ken became a divisive figure – and that is my real beef with him. He set outer London against inner, rich against poor and race against race. He did lots many good things in London and when history is written it will remember those kindly. But his cynical use of his office and divide and rule will also be part of his political epitaph.

Boris – you have the chance of a lifetime. Delivery is all!

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008