Ming will be one of the keynote speakers at a public rally in support of the Sustainable Communities Bill on Monday March 26th. Further details are on FlockTogether. The bill would give local communities much more say over what happens in their areas.
You can read more about the bill in the articles by Lib Dem MPs Julia Goldsworthy and Lynne Featherstone or you can watch Julia’s short film on the topic:
Following the House of Commons votes in favour of an elected House of Lords, Ming Campbell said:
“After nearly 100 years the House of Commons has at last taken the momentous step to reform the upper house and make it fit for a modern democracy. This is a famous victory for progressive opinion both in Parliament and in the country.”
During a visit to Brussels to meet with the Liberal Democrat MEP team, Ming Campbell MP signed the OneSeat petition to have the European Parliament meet in only one location, rather than shuttling back and forth between Brussels and Strasbourg. The petition was started by Cecilia Malmström, an MEP from the Swedish Liberal Party, a sister party to the UK Liberal Democrats in the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. Over 1,036,653 other European citizens have signed the petition.
Find out more about the campaign to have the European Parliament in only one location »
Ming Campbell addressed the Liberal Democrats’ Taking Power consultation at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Brighton as follows:
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During the summer Elspeth and I like to spend as much time as we can at the Edinburgh Festival and one of the remarkable features now of the Edinburgh Festival is the way in which the book festival has become so significant, and it’s true all round the country. Book festivals have become enormously important. And when Roy Hattersley and Tony Benn and Denis Healey and people come to speak the tickets for these events are sold out within a matter of minutes of booking opening. And there is a sense in which book festivals have become a substitute if you like for the political meetings. If we’d taken a room in the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh in George Street and said we had all these politicians to speak we’d have got thirty people. Instead they talk to audiences of a thousand with others clambering outside.
But the person whose presence struck me more than any other as well as that was Helena Kennedy. Now some of you will know Helena Kennedy as the tame Labour Peer that Tony Blair put in to the House of Lords who’s turned in to a tigress, who has defended the right to trial by jury, who has defended the systematic authoritarianism of this Government, and who was the chair of the Power Inquiry. And at half past ten on a wet Monday morning in Edinburgh it was standing room only for Helena Kennedy to come and talk about the Power Inquiry.
Ming Campbell addressed the launch of the ‘Taking Power‘ virtual conference as follows:
Over the next few weeks, the UK’s political parties will descend on towns throughout the UK in order to hold their traditional autumn conferences. Political activists – the usual suspects – will flock to Brighton, Bournemouth and Manchester to discuss the issues that they consider important, and to consider their strategies for the coming year.
Only a small number of voters will ever go to a party conference and it should be of real concern to all of us that there are 17 million people in this country who did not vote in the last general election.
60% of young people stayed away from the ballot box in polling day last year. For them, the prospect of voting for their local MP, or playing a part in choosing the next government was clearly not a real priority.
This is a serious problem. It threatens the very legitimacy of our political system – because if you do not vote when you are young, you may never develop the habit of voting at all. And with successive generations turning there back on conventional politics in ever greater numbers, our participatory democracy is beginning to lack participants.
My party has often diagnosed problems with the health of Britain’s democracy. And written prescriptions too.
But this year, the POWER Commission, has reported on its mission to identify practical ways of reconnecting voters with the political process.
