OPINION

Danny Alexander MP has announced details of the government’s capital spending plans, which are a welcome indication of the long-term investment planned over the coming decade – a Liberal Democrat strategy. With no new money committed to capital spending over that announced in March’s Budget, however, the Social Liberal Forum is concerned that

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Prateek Buch,  director of the Social Liberal Forum, said: "Britain needs a more effective economic approach beyond hoping that cutting government spending will heal the economy….The additional cuts to local government, transport and public sector pay will squeeze already-strained public services, making a mockery of the localism agenda and adding more pressure on the cost of living. Such decisions are the painful consequence of prioritising a balanced budget over a balanced economy

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Nick Clegg’s speech to the ALDC Conference in Manchester this weekend was trailed  - these things rarely happen by accident – as ‘taking on his internal party critics’. In it, Clegg seems to set out a choice: ‘to become a firm party of Government... striving to govern at every level in order to make Britain a better pla

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SLF backs the Fair Deal for your Local campaign and publishes research showing reform will save Government money by lifting licensees out of poverty pay. The plight of publicans in the tied pub sector has been increasingly regularly documented in recent years, thanks largely to the single-minded determination of Lib Dem MP Greg Mulholland and the All-Party Parliamentary Save The Pub Group.  The facts, in a nutshell:

• Around half of Britain’s 55,000 pubs are owned by big property compan

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The Social Liberal Forum (Scotland) is holding a Conference in Glasgow on Saturday June 29.   Our speakers this year include Craig Harrow the Convener of the Scottish Liberal Democrats The sessions will include:

• Skivers or Strivers:  the causes of poverty in Scotland
• Independence, the debate we aren’t having?
• The Coalition, the record and the future
• Building the Party through 2017

Other speakers will be Cllr. Robert Brown, Peter K

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Reflecting on the departure of Baroness Margaret Thatcher and on her ideology (often described as “neo-liberalism”), it is a paradox that an individualist should put so much faith in an institution – the market.  To paraphrase her much quoted remark that there is “no such thing as society ... there are individuals and families”, might we use the same logic in our approach to economic thinking? There is no such thing as “the market” in a sense that it has a personality of its own: what we call a

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