Labour is frightened to face the people with a referendum on a mayoralty and lacks the wit to work with us on better forms of governance which would bring the new powers and money for which we have fought for so long and are now delivering.

This sad move had reinvigorated our Party in the City and we will stand against him in the council chamber and then seek to unite all democrats in the city to defeat him on May 3 if those Labour members who are opposed to a mayoralty lack the guts to join with us in the council vote.

This is our exchange of e-mails this morning

Dear Cllr Anderson,

Thank you for this. I listened with interest to you squirming as you avoided several points on Radio City.

The Government has made it absolutely clear that the new powers, which my Party have fought for over many years are dependent on a change in governance of which a mayoral model is just one potential change although it is then one that your Tory friends prefer.

That is why in November we suggested that we needed to review our internal governance to be ready to make an offer to them which described how we would take up those powers.

It is still possible for us to work together to construct such a  change in governance to enable us to be ready for May.

In practice being ready for May is not that essential as there are still many steps that the council have to go through before those powers will eb transferred in practice rather than principle.

The offer to you is still open. Let’s work together and come up with a modern form of governance which will enable those new powers to be introduced.

On the question of honesty I would grateful if you would send all councillors a copy of the written agreement between yourself and the government which says, as you claim on the radio:

1.    That the powers are only available if there is a mayoral model;

2.    That the Government wants you to avoid the referendum in their own legislation and go for a mayoralty immediately.

This is the biggest change in the governance of Liverpool since the 1890s. Liverpool is not owned by the Labour Party or the council as a whole it is ‘owned’ by the people. It is their right to choose our system of governance not ours.

I have no doubt that the people of Liverpool would have voted No is a referendum having seen the dreadful state of affairs in Stoke, which has already removed the mayoral model and Doncaster, which will  a referendum in may to do the same.

Unfortunately they will not have the chance because you are too scared to trust the people.

Kind regards

Cllr Richard Kemp CBE,

Deputy Leader,

Liverpool Liberal Democrats

Tel:      07885 626913 (mobile)

PS you are right the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office confirmed to me this morning that everything I am saying here is correct.

Subject: deceitful Cllr Anderson

Dear Cllr Kemp

I heard with great interest your comments about deceit and underhanded behaviour from myself over the Mayoral deal.

Can we just cut straight to the chase and ask you to explain in real simple terms how we are going to get the estimated

£130 package within three months from your Government please, the Members of the Council and indeed the public

have a right to know. I am sure your Party Leader told you when you rang him so early this morning. I am more than happy

to cancel any move towards a City Mayor if you can get us the package from your Leader or if you wish I will join you in a

conference call to him or indeed go to Parliament to visit him with you so he can tell me he will get it for us.

I await your early response.

Joe Anderson

Liverpool Liberal Democrats,

16, Dovedale Road,

Liverpool L18 1DW;

E-mail: Richardkemp68@yahoo.co.uk

Rt Hon. Edward Milliband Esq. MP.,

Leader of the Opposition,

House of Commons,

London SW1A 0AA

24^th January 2012

Dear Mr Milliband,

Suggested visit to Liverpool

At our council meeting last week the Labour Party moved an amendment to a resolution that we had put down requesting the Chief Executive to invite Nick Clegg to Liverpool. We are, of course, always happy to see our Leader in Liverpool, indeed he came to see us last summer.

It appeared to me to be discourteous to invite Nick without sending a similar invitation to you especially as since Christmas You and Mr Balls have made some major changes in Labour policy.

In accepting that:

1. The deficit arose on your watch
2. That you accept public sector pay and pension constraint
3. That you have said that you cannot reverse the cuts that have been made
4. You would have made many of those cuts yourselves to deal with both the deficit and the Eurozone crisis

you have moved into an entirely different position in respect of the debate that we should be having about how to take the country out of its current problems.

This has created a major problem for your colleagues in Liverpool who have opposed every cut that the Government has made, have suggested that you wouldn’t have made them and have basically been in deficit denial.

So I thought that it would be useful for you to come to Liverpool and meet public sector workers and community activists and explain why you have publicly adopted the 4 positions above and what you would have done in the last 18 months to curb the deficit that would have been markedly different to the cuts made by the Government.

This clarity would massively improve the debate in thiscountry about future pressures which are not only financial but also demographic.

I look forward to hearing from you and perhaps welcoming you once again to this wonderful city of ours.

Yours sincerely,

Cllr Richard Kemp CBE,

Deputy Leader,

Liverpool Liberal Democrats

Church Ward Liberal Democrats,

16, Dovedale Road,

Liverpool L18 1DW;

e-mail : Richard.kemp@liverpool.gov.uk

Cllr Joe Anderson,

Leader,

Liverpool City Council

By E-Mail       

20^th January 2012

Dear Joe,

An Elected Mayor for Liverpool

As always rumours swirl round this city. The latest of these being about the Mayoralty. I am told that disaffected members of your group are leaking to the press that an announcement is to be made next week that not only will Labour support a Mayoral model but that you intend to sneak it past the electorate without a referendum by using the existing Labour Government legislation before the new legislation which makes a referendum compulsory comes into force.

Of course I do not know if these rumours are true. I do, however, know that they would contradict everything that you told Paula and me at our meeting before Christmas.

At that meeting the three of us agreed that it would not be worth going for an elected mayor unless there were substantial new powers, freedoms or cash. We now all know that this will not be the case. Very senior people in Government made clear to all DCLG Ministers last week that mayoralty and powers were not linked. As we discussed if we get new powers we will need to robustly review our governance mechanisms to be able to accept those powers and none of us would disagree with that.

As Paula made clear earlier this week in her letter to all group leaders:

1. We should campaign  together for a no vote
2. We should work together to look at the new powers that you and we believe the council should have and to get the government to agree them
3. We should all work together to review the governance of the council to take advantage both of potential new powers but also the new freedoms granted in the Localism Act.

My particular concern about the rumour is the suggestion that you might move to a Mayoralty without popular support. I am under no illusion that there is NO clamour in the city on this issue and that if a full debate on the issue does take place the people of Liverpool would reject it.

This is a major constitutional issue for the city which will have major and long-term consequences for the City. It is the people who should decide this issue not a handful of politicians initiating the idea in a closed room and then using their majority to force it through council.

If this rumour is wrong I will be absolutely delighted and pledge that the Liberal Democrats will work with you to achieve the three things above.

Kind Regards,

Cllr Richard Kemp CBE

Deputy Leader, Liverpool Liberal Democrats

Cc:       All Councillors

We have already made the most important decision – that our paper will be about people, neighbourhoods and communities. We believe that those who just chase ‘hard’ policies – typically how many can we build – are responsible for many of our current housing and social problems.

For 60 years governments chased each by boasting about how many properties they could build and how quickly. This government is no exception. But anyone who has been involved in housing for a long period, I first became involved in 1975, knows that much of the work we have done has been correcting the mistakes of the post WWII period and not dealing with pre 1919 houses or the inter war estates.

People forgot that housing is not just a building but a home. Homes work better in communities where young and old, rich and poor, black and white can live together. Places where grandparents can look after their grandchildren and where there is social capacity to assist those in need instead of putting all those in need in selected locations where they cannot help each other.

The key new area that I want the Party to tackle is the whole area of private landlords. Some have complained that this will drive a wedge between us and the free market, no holds barred section of the coalition. If that is the case bring it on!

I have no objection to private landlords per se. There are many good ones whom I would recommend to prospective tenants. Plus dane, the housing association that I chair develops some properties for market rent or near market rent on which we make a profit. That profit has enabled us to continue to build homes for people who cannot afford market rents. We have a 10 year lease on almost a third of the flats in the prestigious L1 shopping development in central Liverpool. This is at the request of Grosvenor, the owners of the properties, who are themselves first class landlords. They had two objectives in involving us:

1. To stop the development from becoming a  zombie land of uncontrolled buy to let tenancies; and
2. To ensure that properties are available on site for people who work in the stores beneath them.

We make a profit, Grosvenor make a profit and the properties are let below market value to people who want city centre living who could not otherwise afford it.

But not every landlord is a good one. Our PCT realised this when they did an analysis of who uses the health service. They found, unsurprisingly, that tenants of private landlords took up a proportionately higher level of health care use than those from any other tenure. So they did something about it.

They created a fund which would enable every private tenant to be visited with a health and housing questionnaire. They enlisted the help of:

• The fire service who have to deal with proportionately more fires in private landlord properties.
• Housing Associations whose own stock is often damaged by poorly maintained adjoining properties.
• The Council who did not have the resources to use the environmental health powers available to them but could come behind information provided to them.

In all some 9 organisations have come together and they are having quite an impact. More than £3,000,000 of repairs has been carried out by landlords. More than 300 people have now registered with a GP. More than a thousand now have a dentist. More than 2,000 have been given benefits advice which has helped them improve their living standards. In all more than 3,000 tenancies have received major improvements to correct damp, draught, electric or gas problems. GPs in some areas are reporting less people presenting with chest and other problems and thousands of people have fuel poverty problems alleviated if not removed.

Housing is a basic human need and a basic human right. We regulate water, utilities, communications in fact we ‘Off…” all sorts of things so why not housing?

I believe that no-one should be allowed to let a property unless that property has been inspected and that inspection is regularly updated. I believe that to be a landlord individuals or companies must either be registered or have to let solely through registered lettings agencies.

Some will say that this is a restriction on fair trade. I believe that it is a restriction of unfair trade. Out of desperation hundreds of thousands of people are living in squalid conditions which are funded by the tax payer through housing benefit. Some of the key supporters of such registration are good landlords who have to compete on price with modern day Rachmans and who get tarred with the brush of ‘racketeer’.

Over a period of time landlord registration will drive up quality; reduce housing benefit costs; reduce health service costs and provide more stable communities. I hope that is an argument that my Party will buy!

If you have any opinions on this or anything else which you think we should be looking at please contact me at richardkemp68@yahoo.co.uk

This article first appeared in Inside Housing on 12th January 2012

Erica’s Blog posting

I was delighted to hear today that our local Children’s Centre will not be closed.

I want to put it on record that this is a real tribute to all those parents and staff who mounted wonderful campaign to lobby the council and make their arguments for the centre to remain open.

At a recent council meeting they made one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard and one that I would have like to have made myself.

Throughout their wonderful campaign I have supported the parents and staff as I felt our area was being discriminated against very unfairly.

The e-mails I’ve received from those parents who have been involved in the campaign have reiterated how hard they have worked and how from the beginning they wanted to act in a non political way.

Indeed I was very struck by a particular paragraph from one parent:-

“We thank you for acknowledging the work of the campaign group. It was very hard as parents to devote the time to the campaign but it was worth every minute. It’s not easy to lobby a city council when you have no experience of politics or campaigning but we are highly satisfied that, after much lobbying on our part – writing letters, attending council meetings and voicing our concerns through local media – the Leader of the Councillor and the Cabinet Member for Children’s Services entered into dialogue with us and listened to what the parents had to say. We had no interest in party politics throughout this campaign and tried to ensure we did not enter into the game of political point scoring on this issue. What we can say is that when politicans reconsider decisions as a result of pressure from the electorate, it is a real victory for democracy.”

So, once again congratulations to you all. As a Grandma who likes to use the centre on days when I’m looking after our Granddaughter a big thank you.

We can all now be grateful that this much needed and much used facility in our area will remain open.

Church Ward Liberal Democrats,

16, Dovedale Road,

Liverpool L18 1DW;

E-mail: Richard.kemp@liverpool.gov.uk

Cllr Joe Anderson,

Leader,

Liverpool City Council,

Dale Street,

Liverpool 1

6^th January 2012

Dear Joe,

Firstly, Happy New Year!

I understand from David Bartlett that you will be writing to me following my comments about the lack of imagination used in the library report which you considered this morning. I thought I would save you the trouble by writing to you myself!

Before touching on libraries however perhaps you would use you undoubted influence within the Labour party to thank three Labour members for me.

The first is Jim Murphy, the Shadow Secretary of State for Defence. This morning Jim agreed £5 billion of defence cuts. He is thus, the first Labour Minister to actually come up with a definitive view of the cuts and publicly accept their inevitability.

The second is Lord Glassman, who is apparently a senior adviser to your Party Leader. He made clear yesterday that Labour has no credible alternative economic policies. Borrowing more to deal with a problem caused by borrowing too much lacks any serious credibility.

Thirdly Cllr Roz Gladden. At the special meeting of the Adult Services Committee Roz thanks the Lib Dems for our responsible behaviour in not playing politics with the cuts that Labour had to make. She is right – we did not seek to use this as a political issue.

This sums up the difference between us and indicates why we cannot work with Labour because you are ‘deficit deniers’. Large cuts in budgets would have been made whoever won the election in May 2010. Jim has admitted it but not Ed! In Liverpool Labour continue to deny the fact that we are in a mess largely but not exclusively caused by the last Labour Government which allowed spending to outstrip income and who failed to regulate the banks. Even Ed Balls admits this but not Anderson and Brant.

Let me then turn to Libraries. I thought the report that you have agreed today was dismal. In August last year the LGA and the Government produced a report “Future Libraries Programme” which reported back on 10 pilots undertaken by councils of all political persuasions looking at how to modernise libraries and make them more efficient. This report is crammed with ideas – why not pop over to Manchester and see what Sir Richard Leese is up to because it is very good indeed, at least in this field.

So let me ask you a number of questions.

1. Have you future proofed today’s proposals in light of the electronic revolution taking place? More and more people, not just young people but across all ages, no longer buy books. Instead they use Kindle and other electronic devices. What do you think will be the take up the devices in 10 years and what effects will that have on book buying and lending? Incidentally, whilst I don’t advocate this, the library budget could have bought about 26,000 electronic books from WH Smith which have free access to more than 1,000,000 book titles.
2. The council is not the only provider of libraries in the City. We also have:

3 Universities

1 College with a number of campuses

30+ secondary schools throughout the City

Many of these facilities are only used for part of the year. Would you please indicate what discussions have taken place with these institutions to examine a wider community use especially for young people at school and college who use the library more as a quiet place to study than a place to acquire books?

1. Key users of library services are the elderly. They like the library not only as a centre for books but as  a ‘community’ centre in the widest sense of the term. There are already many community centres in the city. In addition there are many sheltered blocks run by housing associations which have little used community facilities. Would you please indicate to me how many of these organisations have been approached and what their response has been to the use of their premises as a neighbour reading facility?
2. The other key set of users are parents of young children who wish to acquaint their children with the spoken word. It seems to me that the opportunity has been lost to link up ‘toddler’ provision with the financial problems of Sure Starts. Most of these Sure Starts are part of junior and infant schools which also have library provision. What review of sure start buildings was made with a view to effecting appropriate merger of facilities?   What discussion have taken place with school governing bodies to look at out of school use of these types of facility?

I am not an expert in this field but these are just of the few of the ideas that have come to me from reading the booklet I referred to above and thinking about applying successful models elsewhere to the problems and opportunities of Liverpool. If I can read this publication why can no-one else in Liverpool?

I hope you find these thoughts useful and look forward to receiving answers to my questions in good time for my colleague on the relevant select committee to use before the meeting.

Yours sincerely,

Cllr Richard Kemp CBE,

Deputy Leader, Liverpool Liberal Democrats

As I recovered from a bad head cold caused, according to my long-suffering wife Erica, by the afore mentioned naked dancing I had time to ponder over the past year and look forward to the new one.

When my son was young I used to read him a story in which a character called Henny Penny used to run round predicting that the sky will fall in. Well the Henny Pennys who were so loud this time last year have been proved wrong. The housing movement and indeed the country as a whole have proved mightily resilient to many of the changes made by the Government in response to the international financial crisis. Although some of the most difficult implementations of policy are still to come, notably in the field of benefits, there are clear signs that the movement is changing to meet new demands and the Government is trimming its sails to recognise changes in national circumstances and the fact they have got some things wrong.

I was particularly struck by an RSL Chief Executive who told a conference. “I wouldn’t consider building a house unless there was a £60,000 subsidy until a few years ago. Now I have found that I can do it for £20,000!” I don’t buy into the Government’s claims that there will be 170,000 new social homes being provided by their actions. There may be 170,000 new homes but the 80% rent changes will mean that only about half of those would be what I recognise as ‘social’.

Nevertheless, the reductions in grants and the squeeze on benefits have made us think again about the people we house. Some, but not a lot, are being subsidised when they could and should pay more. We have lost track of many of our tenants and cannot without our hand on our heart say precisely who lives in our properties or what their income is. The Government has made minor concessions on benefits but they don’t have much room to manoeuvre. They are also putting more money into capital with the regional grants fund being expanded and some large scale capital programmes being brought forward. Of special interest to me is their drive on apprenticeships and other programmes which are wage subsidies which are aimed at putting people back into work. I hope all housing associations will take advantage of them.

Looking ahead only a fool would be prepared to say what things will be like this time next year. Leader writers in the Mail and Express might welcome the possibility of the demise of the Euro but if that happens the financial problems of 2007 will look like a Teddy Bear’s picnic. Being out of the Euro will not save our banks and pension funds that are so heavily involved in sovereign debt.  Interest rates would have been put up so much that the financial integrity of the balance sheets of many RSLs will have been put in jeopardy.

Looking on the bright side there are some things we can take heart from. The Localism Act comes into force which will mean that local people will become much more important in the planning process. This is a gift for forward thinking RSLs who want to take on a greater leadership role within their communities. The big Cities have been promised freedom from the HCA and indeed all government interference as they plan their capital programmes. This will surely eventually come to all councils with the HCA increasingly being left as just the regulator.

So having spent the Christmas season with glasses which might be described as too full its once again back to a glass half full scenario as we contemplate 2012.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL MY READERS AND FELLOW BLOGGERS!!

I have used this extreme case before so forgive me if you have heard my rant but let’s take the baby Peter case. 14 sets of professionals from 14 different organisations intervened in the life of that child and his family. All of them were responsible but not one of them took responsibility. The result was that a child dies and a council officer was scapegoated but no fundamental changes were made in the system.

The Laming reports into the successive failures in Haringey should have been called the lame duck reports. They failed to deal with the fundamental failures of the system but instead tinkered with something that is inherently rotten. We have too many organisations defending their own professionalism and their own interests and too few organisations that are prepared to drop their identity and work in true partnership with others.

Where I disagree with Cameron is over the use of the phrase ‘trouble-shooters’. The last thing that these stressed families need is a trouble shooter. What they actually need is a Saint in their lives. If we cannot manage that what they all need is an Aunty Mary. Every family used to have an Aunty Mary and it was never an Uncle Malcolm. Aunty May was the source of all knowledge. The matriarch of the tribe she would dispense internal justice and advice. She was the overseer of the family’s relationship with the outside world and the arbiter of disputes within it. But the state killed off Aunty Marys. We partly did it through the planning process. We spilt families up. In the words of a well known Liverpool folk song, “Don’t want to Kirby, to Skelmersdale or Speke; don’t want to go from all I know in back Buchannan Street”. We don’t do it as crudely as we did back in the 50s, 60s and 70s but we are still doing it. Our investment programmes for social housing combined with ridiculous land values and arcane planning laws are still splitting up families.

A spilt family is one that cannot manage the storms of life. Grandma and Grandpa cannot baby sit or pop in whilst mum and dad go to work. Kids get separated from their older relations. As one of those older relations this concerns me a lot! The old mechanisms have been destroyed and the new mechanisms have been shown to be ineffective. The idea of generic, caring social workers has been destroyed in a mass of specialisms, targets, complex laws and facile regulations. We need people who will go into families and help not people who will be constrained by well meaning busy bodies.

Do not listen to the siren calls of Labour who complain about less money for child care at this level. Actually not only is the system wasteful of lives and families it is wasteful of resources. The organisations overlap, interfere with each other and lose their base contact with the family. In this area as in many others we could do a lot more with a lost less. Having money available has obscured solutions not created them.

So in this, if nothing else, Dave stick to your guns and produce the big changes in working that are so desperately needed.

Everyone seems to be at it.

• Parents cheat by ‘helping’ kids with course work
• Schools cheat by teaching only to a strict syllabus
• Exam Boards cheat by selling information about exams to teachers prepared to pay to go to seminars.

Well let me apologise because some people don’t cheat. Children don’t cheat – they are just abused by the system. Lot’s of schools and teachers don’t cheat but they probably lose out as much as the kids do as other schools are seen to do better than them.

So now although it appears that results are getting better. Although we know children are working harder their level of education is being reduced because thy knowledge and imagination is being confined within ever narrower boundaries. We get people with A Level maths who have to go on maths courses before starting as an undergraduate. We have English students who cn onl spk in txt lng!

So what should we do about this? Scrap three things

School League Tables

This where it all started to go wrong. For more than 20 years now we have been churning out meaningless league tables which have failed to recognise the very difficult circumstances in which many children are brought up. There is little recognition of the fact that kids in nice areas who can go to nice schools with supportive mums and dads are likely to get further than children with the opposite experience.

Gullible parents have looked at the crude figures and have bought into it – often literally by buying a house in a catchments area of a perceived good school.

This has take away much of the initiative of teachers and has allowed far too many schools and teachers to coast. The didn’t need to be good teachers in some schools because they had the right ingredients for success

The National Curriculum

This Stalinist approach to education needs to be abolished. Every child matters because every child is different. Teachers used to be able to recognise this to a much higher level that they do now. Lessons would be crafted around the potential of the day. If it was snowing they might discuss the structure of snow in a science lesson and poetry about snow in English. Not now! The broiler house of education makes people try to achieve the same constants for lessons and therefore pupils across the system

OFSTED

Lastly we need to abolish this pretentious, useless organisation. About 4 years ago I did an inspection alongside an OFSTED team. What an incompetent shower they were. No wonder they were no longer teachers – they wouldn’t have lasted 5 minutes in front of a class. Instead they behaved little Hitler’s inside the authority they were supposed to be helping.

All this cheating has passed by the over paid inspectors of OFSTED who have been happy with an extremely tick box approach to their work

What would I put in the place of all this? Teachers who have been enabled and encouraged to work with their children to provide a good high quality and ROUNDED education, which could be assessed by real examinations.

The end result of the education process should be people who want to learn, who know how to learn and have learnt. They are rounded individuals who have been given skills for life. Too often we produce narrow minded weak intellects who have travelled down unimaginative railway lines of learning and add little to our society

Today however, is definitely an ‘up day’. Our leader, the Deputy Prime Minister has announced yet another roll back of theWhitehallcentred bureaucracy which has held backLiverpooland so many other cities for so long.

No longer will we have to go on bended knee toWhitehallfor permission to do this or that. Many, but not all, of the financial restrictions placed on us will be swept away.

Some believe that we can only get these powers if we move to an elected mayor. This is not true. The speech from Nick makes clear that we will have to review our governance to ensure that we are for receiving the new powers but contains no proscription about how that should be done. Clearly part of the coalition government likes the mayoral option – but our part doesn’t.

What this does flush into the open is a major need for a debate on the issue of the governance of the conurbation. Nick says why not a Transport for Liverpool in the same way as we have Transport forLondon. The fact is, of course that Transport forLondoncovers the whole of the conurbation of 33 councils. It is not Transport for Newham, Croydon orWestminster. That means we need to look afresh at how we do things across the Merseyside area.

We currently have a City Region Executive. We don’t really know what it does; it is clearly not transparent or accountable to local people but presumably wields power. The Merseyside wide bodies have different abilities and strengths. Fire has always had strong and responsive political leadership whilst the political leadership of the Transport Authority has always been dire. Hence abortive schemes for Trams and owning the Merseyside rail tracks.

Liverpool Lib Dems have already floated an options paper about this which is available at www.liverlibdems.org.uk. No other party has been prepared to discuss this in the open way that we have been prepared to.

I also welcome this new allocation of powers as chair of a housing association. Decisions about spending priorities will no longer be made by a remote quango but by the council in consultation and partnership with its delivery agents. That is entirely right. The only organisation inLiverpoolwith a mandate is the council. I may (and do) regret the people to who the mandate ahs been given but I would prefer the Labour Party in Liverpool to be the decision makers for capital spending and not faceless bureaucrats in Whitehall making often ill informed decisions. 

I also welcome the return of the business rate to the council. Nick Clegg makes it absolutely clear that he understands that councils in poorer areas will need to be sheltered from these changes BUT and it’s a big, big BUT we will be able to keep cash given to us that we generate by growth. If that had happened over the previous 10 years we would have had a bigger uplift in spend than we got from increased handouts fromWhitehall. With ambitious proposals from Peel Holdings amongst others Liverpool can only benefit from this freeing up of a key resource.

I also welcome the news about apprentice hubs. The Council has tried to ‘big up’ the apprentice work that they have done although they have yet to take on any apprentices externally themselves. This will create the mechanism by which an ‘exchange’ can be created between employers and the public sector which will increase the number of places available. 

Of course I may have some concerns about the detail. I will, as always, make such concerns crystal clear. But in terms of direction and ambition I am very proud to be a Lib Dem today