Category Archives: Liberal

The presidential candidate of the center-left coalition that has governed Uruguay for 15 years conceded defeat on Thursday, four days after a close and contentious runoff election, as the nation joined others in the region in shifting rightward.

The concession ushers in Luis Lacalle Pou of the center-right National Party as the countrys new leader. It also spells an end to the tenure of the Broad Front, a coalition of leftist and center-left parties that oversaw the legalization of abortion, same-sex marriage and the sale of marijuana.

Mr. Lacalle Pous rival, Daniel Martnez of the Broad Front, conceded even as the vote count continued on Thursday. Mr. Martnez acknowledged on Twitter that the counting of provisional ballots would not modify the trend and said he would meet with Mr. Lacalle Pou on Friday.

Brazil, Chile, Bolivia and Colombia have also moved rightward to varying degrees, though Argentina recently elected a center-left president. Venezuelas leftist government is hanging on despite political and economic turmoil.

Mr. Lacalle Pou, 46, the son of a former president, has vowed to unite the nation of 3.4 million people after the tight vote, a sentiment conveyed in his Twitter message thanking Mr. Martnez.

After the polls closed on Sunday, Mr. Lacalle Pou expressed confidence he would come out victorious but vowed to wait for the final tally to call himself president-elect.

Almost half voted for one candidate, and the other half plus a little bit for another candidate, Mr. Lacalle Pou said. Todays result confirms that the next government cant change one half of the country for another. We must unite society. We must unite Uruguayans.

That language marked a change in approach for Mr. Lacalle Pou, said Mariana Pomis, executive director of Cifra, a local polling firm.

That was about recognizing that there is a large group of people who voted for the other side, Ms. Pomis said. It was a recognition that there is an important group of people who see reality in a different way.

Mr. Lacalle Pou did suggest Thursday that he would pursue a change in the countrys foreign policy, exchanging a friendly message on Twitter with Juan Guaid, Venezuelas opposition leader, who has proclaimed himself the countrys rightful leader.

Uruguay had been one of the few countries in the region that did not recognize Mr. Guaid over the embattled Venezuelan president, Nicols Maduro. Mr. Lacalle Pou vowed to change that during his campaign, and on Thursday he responded to a congratulatory message from Mr. Guaid by vowing to defend democracies and human rights.

Mr. Lacalle Pou won in the runoff election by drawing support from candidates who did not make it to the second round. He will now face the challenge of keeping them united despite their disparate ideologies, at a time when several countries in the region are mired in protests and economic malaise.

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Center-Right Candidate Wins in Uruguay, Ending 15 Years of Liberal Rule - The New York Times

Published: 19:25 Wednesday 04 December 2019 Updated: 07:21 Thursday 05 December 2019

The Liberal Democrat candidate who stood against Ian Blackford in Ross, Skye and Lochaber at the last election has backed the SNP in the 12 December polls.

Jean Davis, who stood for the Lib Dems in the constituency at the 2017 election, has announced she will now support the SNP as the best option to stop Brexit and because we need to have a further debate and referendum on independence, especially if we do end up leaving the EU.

Ms Davis also said Ian Blackford had a strong connection to the constituency.

Mr Blackford said: At this crucial election, only a vote for the SNP can beat the Tories, escape Brexit, and put Scotlands future in Scotlands hands - not Boris Johnsons

I am delighted former Lib Dem candidate Jean Davis is backing the SNP at this election - joining thousands of former Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters supporting the SNP on 12 December as the main challenger to the Tories, the strongest party of Remain, and the only party offering people in Scotland a choice over our future.

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Liberal Dem who stood against Ian Blackford at last election is now backing the SNP - Scotland on Sunday

We are at a pivotal moment in Albertas history. Once again, Alberta has no representation, no voice in a newly elected federal Liberal government. We are in in our fifth year of recession and unprecedented unemployment. Premier Jason Kenney has responded by creating the Fair Deal panel to consult Albertans on how best to respond to this crisis.

To make informed decisions, its time for Albertans to do a policy audit of the past 30 years. Where have we been? Where are we today? The results are not happy.

Alberta is worse off today than it was 30 years ago. Despite the considerable efforts of such exceptional leaders as Peter Lougheed, Preston Manning, Ralph Klein and others, Alberta is more vulnerable to destructive federal policies than we were in the 1980s. Heres the balance sheet:

Lougheeds greatest achievement was the addition of Section 92A to the 1982 Constitution Act. Section 92A affirms and protects all provinces rights to develop their own natural resources. For Alberta, this meant primarily oil and gas and was intended to prevent a repeat of Pierre Trudeaus National Energy Program. But today, his sons carbon tax and Bill C-69 the no-pipelines-ever law are NEP 2.0. They make section 92A almost meaningless. This stranding of Albertas oil is aggravated by the Liberals tanker ban off the north coast of B.C., Bill C-48. Of course, there is no similar ban on oil tankers in the St. Lawrence River bringing OPEC oil to refineries in Quebec.

Lougheed also was familiar with the centralist bias of the Supreme Court of Canada. He understood that the adoption of the 1982 Charter of Rights amplified this risk. As a precaution, Lougheed insisted on the addition of the Section 33 Notwithstanding Power to protect Alberta (and other provinces) from policy vetoes by judges appointed unilaterally by the prime minister. Today, the notwithstanding power is in disrepute and disuse.

Lougheed was also the strongest advocate for the new constitutional amending formula that treated all provinces equally and gave no special veto to Quebec. This was a major victory for all the western provinces. In 1996, Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien gave the veto power back to Quebec via ordinary legislation.

A final Lougheed achievement was his insistence on limiting the scope of Section 35 to existing aboriginal rights. He successfully demanded the insertion of existing to prevent it from becoming a blank cheque for judicial policy-making. The Supreme Court subsequently ignored the framers intent and invented the duty to consult, words found nowhere in the Constitution. The result is that Canadian pipeline policy is now made mainly by unelected, unaccountable judges.

Albertas economic collapse has been exacerbated by Ottawas abdication of federal responsibility for interprovincial pipelines. In the 1980s, it was unthinkable that a province could block the construction of an interprovincial pipeline that had been approved by the federal government. Now its happened twice: Energy East by Quebec and Trans Mountain by British Columbia. Nothing falls more clearly under federal jurisdiction. But in this falls election campaign, Justin Trudeau pandered to Quebec voters with the promise that he would fight (premiers Kenney and Ford) and the energy companies that support them.

Equalization and other federal transfer programs continue to drain billions of dollars a year out of Alberta over $300 billion since 2000. Meanwhile, Quebec continues to see its share of equalization dollars increase from less than $3 billion a year in the early 1980s to over $13 billion a year today or 66 cents of every dollar Ottawa sends out.

While shocking, these numbers are not that surprising. The Liberal party can and does form majority governments without electing any MPs from Alberta or Saskatchewan. But winning a big chunk of Quebecs 78 MPs is key to the Liberals strategy to build a majority government. Indeed, in 2015, Trudeau was the first Liberal leader to win a majority of Quebecs seats since his father did it in 1980. That hasnt changed.

What has changed is the federal civil service that administers all these programs. When Pierre Trudeau introduced bilingualism, it was sold as only a language proficiency test. But in practice, it has meant that a disproportionate number of federal bureaucrats, especially in the upper levels, are Quebec francophones. The result: administrative decisions in Ottawa are made through an ideological lens that is sympathetic to Quebecs concerns and interests.

In the 1980s, Preston Manning helped to form the new Reform party under the banner, The West Wants In. During the 1990s, Manning and the Reformers did well. They swept the Mulroney Conservatives off the electoral map in 1993 and in 1997 formed the official Opposition in Parliament. Fiscal reform, balanced budgets and Triple E Senate reform all seemed within reach. Today, federal deficits and debt are at record levels. The project of an elected Senate is dead, killed by an arbitrary 2014 Supreme Court ruling and a new Liberal government that was only too happy to let it die.

In the early 2000s, foreign capital investment poured into Alberta. ConocoPhillips, Marathon, Apache and Chevron all made major new investments. But it wasnt just American energy companies. New investors included Shell, BP and Centrica from the U.K.; Total from France; Statoil (now Equinor) from Norway and a host of smaller companies from South Korea, China and Japan.

Today, they are almost all gone. Since 2015, there has been a $50-billion exodus of foreign capital. Add the equity sell-off of Canadian oil and gas companies, and the loss soars past $100 billion. As noted, this collapse has been driven by policy, not oil prices. Where Alberta used to rank near the top in terms of energy sector competitiveness, we now rank 16th in a recent survey of 20 North American states and provinces. The problem: regulatory uncertainty, lack of pipeline access and taxes.

This explains why even Canadian energy companies are bailing out of Canada. TransCanada Pipeline has purged Canada from its new name, TC Energy, and is re-allocating its investments to Texas and Mexico. Encana, which began as Alberta Energy Corp. and grew to the highest-valued Canadian-owned energy company in the world, has changed its name to Ovintiv and slinked away to Denver.

The bottom line is clear: The political strategies of my generation of Albertans have not worked to improve Albertas position within Confederation. It would be a disservice to our childrens generation to say otherwise. Today, we are even more vulnerable to the Liberals tried and true strategy of pillaging Albertas economy to buy votes in Quebec and Ontario.

Its time for a Plan B.

Ted Morton is a former finance minister for Alberta and a senior fellow at the University of Calgarys School of Public Policy.

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Morton: Here's how the Liberals sabotaged Alberta's historic rights - Calgary Herald

After Parliament returns next week, everyone will be watching to seewhether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's minority government survives a vote on the throne speech.

Butthat's not the only upcoming votethat could topple the Liberal government. It's not even the first one on the agenda.

Senior House of Commons officials told reporters Thursday that the first do-or-die vote after Parliament returns will be on a motionto allow the government to continue operating.

In last month's general election, the Liberals landed 13 seats shy of a majority in the House of Commons. That drop in seats means the Liberals will need the support of other parties on "confidence" votes, such as the speech from the throne and money bills, which include budgets.

In the parliamentary system, the government has to hold and maintain the confidence of the House of Commons. Parliamentary convention says that if a government loses a vote of confidence, the prime minister is expected to visit the governor general and either request a new election or resign.

There's no legal definition ofa confidence vote but, traditionally, they're considered to be votes to approve spending or implement the budget. The government can, if it chooses, hold a vote on the throne speech, which is considered a confidence vote.

The House of Commons can pass a motion that explicitly declares its lack of confidence in the government. The government can also declare a vote to be a matter of confidence.

The speech from the throne is usually the first vote of confidence (if the government chooses to hold a vote). But because this Parliament is resuming onDec. 5,the first vote of confidence on its agenda will be one to allow government spending to continue.

That vote is known as the "business of supply" in Commons-speak. Basically,MPsvote to supplythe government with money to operate to pay public servants, for example, or to cover the costof federal-provincialtransfer payments.

Parliament is scheduled tovote on the business of supplyon or before Dec. 10.

This year'sthrone speech will be the first to be deliveredin the new but temporary Senate building. Traditionally, the House of Commons and the Senate sit in the same building: centre block. But both chambers have been relocated temporarily to make room forrenovations that could take more than a decade to complete.

Instead of walking over to the red chamber for the throne speech, MPs and the newly elected Speaker will take a bus over to the Senate building on Rideau St. across from Ottawa's famed Chateau Laurier hotel.

Becauseit's not logistically possible to bus all 338 MPs to the Senate, a select few from the government and the opposition sides will take the bus. The ceremonial macethe gilded sceptre that represents the authority of the Speaker will also ride along.

The first session of Canada's 43rdParliament opens at 8.55 a.m.Thursday. The first order of business will beelecting a Speaker. After that, Governor GeneralJuliePayette will read the throne speech.

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The new Liberal minority government will face its first do-or-die vote by Dec. 10 - CBC.ca

As Parliament resumes, Foothills MP, John Barlow, is already hard at work advocating for the agriculture sector.

Barlow, who's the Conservative Party's newly appointed Shadow Minister of Agriculture, along with Conservative Associate Ag Critic, Richard Lehoux, sent a letter to the Liberal's Agriculture Minister calling for immediate action on the file in areas such as the Canola trade spat with China.

In the letter to Minister Marie Claude-Bibeau, they say while Canadian canola sits in the bins across Canada, the Government's support has been "underwhelming".

"There is no reason why it should have taken months for your government to follow through on the Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer's call to take the Chinese government to the WTO (World Trade Organization)," the letter reads.

They say in order to reverse the trend, the Liberals must act on the Conservative's recommendations.

The outlined recommendations in the letter include the Government's immediate withdraw from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to increase inspections on all Chinese imports and examine possible retaliatory tariffs on Chinese imports.

The letter highlights a number of other actions they'd like the government take, such as providing compensation for supply managed sectors, reduce taxes and support farmers with mental health challenges.

"You can take these mental health issues seriously by first addressing the review of the Business Risk Management which is critical," the letter says.

Barlow and Lehoux conclude the letter by saying they will continue to fight for the ag sector and hold the Minister to account.

They say they're looking forward to meeting at the her earliest convince.

Send your news tips, story ideas and comments to [emailprotected]

Follow on Twitter @GoldenWestABAg @JessicaR_Giles

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Conservatives Calling The Liberals To Task On Agriculture - HighRiverOnline.com

Declaring ones major can be intimidating for many college students. As young adults with limited experience in the real world, it can be hard to know what one will do for the rest of their life.

Students must not only consider what they are interested in, what they are good at and what jobs are available in the real world, but also how they can make a living doing what they want to do.

As our society undergoes rapid technological development, the skills universities around the nation value have evolved as well. Many universities now emphasize preparations for a career in STEM instead of the liberal arts education that many students historically pursued.

We have thought about the ultimate mark of a good education as you get a job and you get a decent salary, UW-Madison Professor Carol Ryff said.

A shift away from liberal arts

Although STEM degrees draw students with the promise of a good paycheck and ever increasing job opportunities for new graduates, they ignore the lifelong value of a liberal arts education, Ryff added.

This value is a matter of perspective, according to UW-Madison business professor Anne Miner.

If I am 19, and my parents are on my case saying you better do something that gets you a real job, Miner said. Its part of a general problem of the person at that point only sees this short term perspective.

When a student is 19, they dont have the life experience to place as much value in a class that teaches them about power and human complexity.

But after spending 10 or 15 years at a job and wanting to advance, they may find that understanding humans is just as important as their technical skills, she added.

There is a tendency of a pendulum shift to and from placing value of the benefits of a liberal arts education every couple decades, according to Adam Nelson, a professor of educational policy studies at UW-Madison.

We emphasize liberal education when we recognize that even economic development requires more than just practical education. It requires a much broader view of society, he said.

People who study the humanities are more able to deal with societal changes and have a richer quality of life, according to studies by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Even so, liberal arts degrees are being squeezed out of some college campuses across the US, especially among smaller two-year colleges unable to fund these programs.

Following a decrease in enrollment and subsequent loss in funding through student tuition, UW-Stevens Point came under fire in early 2018 when they proposed cutting 13 liberal arts majors including history and English.

UW-Madison doesnt have that problem the Fall 2019 freshman class was the largest in university history.

While the university is known as a world-class research institute, students who graduate from the College of Letters and Sciences have employment rates similar to graduates from the School of Business or College of Engineering according to an alumni survey administered by the university.

Different majors, not always different skills

The disconnect between values offered by STEM versus liberal arts can come down to the culture surrounding certain majors.

There are physical subcultures and often the students in the more math oriented subjects will sort of roll their eyes at teaching about organizational structure and motivations and things that are more tightly linked to psychology and sociology because they think: Who can care about that? Miner said.

Liberal arts classes teach students how to write well and be able to express themselves at a level necessary to succeed in STEM related policy positions.

If you know how to follow the direction of your corporate managers thats great but if youre going to be the corporate manager, youre going to need to know how to foresee and understand social problems and solutions, Nelson said.

Its this way of thinking that is often fostered through a liberal arts education as opposed to an education that focuses solely on professional skills.

People in technology fields had better conceptual and analytical skills if they took liberal arts classes, according to the same Mellon Foundation studies.

Many people, in many places, including in medical schools and in big research universities are beginning to advocate for the importance of the arts and humanities, not as an end to themselves, but because of what they contribute to students who might want to major in a whole host of other fields, Ryff said.

This doesnt mean liberal arts students are inherently different than STEM field students; all students who are successful across majors have some inherent characteristics which liberal arts courses help foster, said history professor William Reese.

A good history major has the same characteristics of a good major in any other subject. Are you intellectually curious? Do you love reading? Love analyzing and trying to sort out contradictory pieces of information as you make sense of major events? Reese asked.

The point of a liberal arts degree is to form students into people who can think out a better world, he added.

Young people need to read things that would fall under the heading of humanism, humanism is something you learn about if you have a deep exposure to the arts and humanities as an undergraduate, Ryff said.

Following passion over paychecks

Viewing a college degree solely to market oneself to future employers is missing the mark, Nelson explained.

Instead, a university education prepares you to think creatively and make an individual contribution to society.

Parents sometimes worry about student loans and future earning, but pushing their children to pick a major based solely on money isnt good for the student or the world.

Theres nothing worse than young people who get forced into a career path that doesnt feel right for them, Ryff said. I really believe that each of us has unique contributions to make and education helps us figure out what that might be.

Everyone has different talents and abilities and not all students are focused on making a lot of money in their career they want to make a difference and follow the path that aligns with their values, she added

I dont know anyone in the liberal arts who would say [economic value] is not important, but its the distinction of how you make a living or how you make a life, Reese said.

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Amid increased focus on STEM, some re-emphasize value of liberal arts education - The Daily Cardinal

We know were living through a period of crisis, but its sometimes hard to know of what kind. The financial crash of 2007-8 seemed to mark the beginning of the most recent crisis of capitalism; 2016 brought news of a crisis of democracy, and the political and constitutional crisis created by Brexit marks its second act. Every day the climate crisis heats up. Crisis has become the new normal.

Its often said that we are also witnessing a crisis of liberalism: liberal norms are being eroded, institutions are under threat, and across Europe, parties of the centre are haemorrhaging votes. Meanwhile, the critics of centrism are louder than they have been for years. Even many in the mainstream of British politics have begun to acknowledge that in the past decade centrists have been neoliberalisms willing bedfellows, supporting policies to shrink the welfare state and crush unions. Liberal centrism has left people behind, and in its support for free markets and globalisation, created new forms of exclusion. More damning critiques are also gaining currency: that the liberal way of running politics was always bound up with imperialism and colonialism, sceptical of democracy and workers and a cover for capitalist exploitation. Even the Financial Times the pinnacle of economic liberalism recently argued that the capitalist model needs to be reset .

So liberal centrists arent wrong that their institutions, parties and ideas are being challenged. But the problem may be a deeper one: that the categories of mainstream politics as we know it can no longer explain the world.

As an ideology, liberalism can be hard to pin down. Its capacious and it has adapted throughout history. From John Locke to John Maynard Keynes, liberals have prioritised the values of liberty and equality (though theyve disagreed about how much the latter matters to the former and what those values mean in everyday politics). They have supported the rule of law, rights and representation, as well as private property, markets and, for the most part, capitalism against socialism. During the cold war, liberals often defended the status quo, seeing a slide into totalitarianism behind every scheme for political change. There is a long liberal tradition of attacking the left to defend the centre. In the 1980s, a faction of Labour MPs left the party to found the SDP. In the 90s, as New Labour disciplined the partys left wing, liberalism took the form of the Third Way. Today, many liberal centrists paint Jeremy Corbyn as an extremist on a par with Boris Johnson, and draw false equivalence between left and right.

At the end of the 1990s, there was one thing that many liberals shared: an optimism about the direction of history

Yet in many countries, Britain included, liberals also helped to build the welfare state and have used the machinery of central government to enact progressive reforms and benefit the poor defending the NHS, civil and human rights, social equality, migration. Often, they aimed not to liberate workers but compromise with them, in order to minimise the risks individuals face. Social liberals have sometimes opposed economic liberals: the concern to limit inequality has trumped the defence of laissez-faire and capital markets. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown enshrined minimum wage laws but encouraged the privatisation of public services; they founded Sure Start but helped sell off the NHS.

At the end of the 1990s, there was one thing that many liberals shared: an optimism about the direction of history and about the fate of liberalism. Famously many agreed that history had ended, following the end of the cold war. All that was needed was steady incremental reform of the status quo. These 90s assumptions survived well into the new century. We now know that such declarations were hugely complacent. The biggest mistake of liberalism was thinking it was all over.

Today, few have properly come to terms with that mistake. Many are on the back foot, insisting that any move away from their ideas marks a step backwards into a far nastier history. Such defensiveness is not novel: liberalism has often been a negative sort of politics a politics of second best that protects against worse scenarios. Liberals have been the first to prophesy new end times the demise of democracy and the Pax Americana and see in Brexit and Trump a slippery slope to war and fascism. Where conservatives look to restore a lost past, liberals defend the gradual reform of an established order and respond aggressively to any threat to it, whether real or imagined.

All this worry about values and norms makes it possible to miss the fact that liberalism as an ideology still dominates how we see the world. It does not just occupy a place between left and right; it cuts across both.

The liberal worldview frames politics as something that happens mostly in Westminster, and about which most voters care little, so it downplays the politics of everyday life in the home and workplace. On this view, the political realm is inhabited by powerful individuals whose decisions make a difference, and who operate in institutions that are neutral. Values conflict, but compromise is the aim except where liberal values are deemed to be threatened; it can sometimes seem that liberals believe in the possibility of consensus, but only if the other side accept the basic facts that liberals hold as true. This can mean touting virtues in principle but refusing them in practice: the Liberal Democrats demanding compromise and cooperation while they reject a Corbyn-led coalition is a case in point.

For liberal remainers, Brexit is either a giant misunderstanding or a mistake: it has been brought about by voters lack of knowledge, or by party misjudgments and the rightwing media; it has been prolonged by Rasputin-like advisers (whether Dominic Cummings or Seumas Milne). Undoubtedly, centrist thinkers, with their focus on institutions and those who control them, can provide answers to important questions: how the common law relates to the constitution; how EU regulations and the referendum dilute parliamentary sovereignty. At a time when we are meant to have had enough of experts, it is ironic that expert knowledge is in extremely high demand in public institutions in the civil service, parliament, the courts, and the press. But its easy to mistake symptoms for causes. Though Brexit will surely have disastrous consequences hurtling us towards a neoliberal, deregulated and depressed Britain with an empowered right on the rise that doesnt mean the liberal diagnosis tells the full story.

Hampered by the need to defend the EU as a site of cosmopolitanism in the name of stopping Brexit, many remainers have framed any opposition as a threat to a political order that has no need for change. The rightward drift of the Lib Dems as they look to rebuild their vote by becoming the party of remain illustrates this bias to the status quo. For all its references to history (particularly to the totalitarian threats of the 1930s), the current liberal vision is often quite ahistorical: we dont hear much about Britain before the referendum. Even the most radical version of liberal centrism has only a partial diagnosis: it points to rising inequality and a growing generational and educational gap. Liberals may focus on defending norms, but norms themselves are only how particular political settlements are made legitimate. They dont tell us much about the limits of the settlement itself.

The view of Brexit and Trump as a crisis of institutions, norms or civility, and the focus on the narcissism or hubris of political personalities, is too limited. The alternative is not merely to accept the narratives of the right that Brexit is about a defence of sovereignty or kicking it to liberal elites. Both of these inhabit the conventional terms of debate. By slipping into a kneejerk defence of the status quo, we risk not understanding where the threats come from and how they can be fought. By focusing on individuals, we ignore how classes are changing. By looking to reason and forgetting ideology, we miss the pleasures of resentment and commitment, and how new political forces have developed to capitalise on those pleasures in particular how the Conservative party has reinvigorated itself by building new class alliances and using a heady mix of Thatcherite, nationalist and colonial tropes (a strategy that is haphazard but may well prove successful).

If we define politics too narrowly and dwell on historical parallels, we miss our own history and the social and economic changes that have paved the way to where we are now a situation where the institutions and infrastructure of British public life are dysfunctional, where productivity, investment and wages are low, where the public sector has been hollowed out and the steady job all but disappeared. If we worry only about the breakdown of parliamentary checks-and-balances, we miss that this gives the lie to the liberal dream that certain institutions are neutral and beyond politics. When we see the rise of the right in terms of a crisis of civility, we fail to ask what resentments the veneer of civility masks, as well as who it benefits and harms. When we focus on constitutional crisis, we risk forgetting how Brexit manifests deeper disruptions and social instability and that the coming election is also about our prospects for fixing these.

We risk forgetting how Brexit manifests deeper disruptions and social instability

These alternative diagnoses have major implications. The end of the liberal dream of neutrality opens up a view of the world where politics is found in new places the courts, the market, the workplace, the home and where political analysts take seriously arguments that have long been made by those outside mainstream politics, who have been marginalised by class, race, gender, geography, immigration status and age. This may be unsettling, but it can point us away from the old divisions of parliament versus the people, so easily deployed by the right and point to new battle lines: not between norms and their violation, or Brexit and its reversal, but to what we want for the future of the UK.

Crucially, these diagnoses can also show us where the deeper political crisis lies. The lasting damage to Britain may not be caused only by the constitutional chaos, but by the long-term collapse, defunding and decay of our public institutions the NHS, legal aid, our underfunded schools. Paradoxically, it was the stability of such institutions that made liberal centrism make sense as a way of thinking about politics. With public institutions dysfunctional and liberal democracy hollowed out, liberalism no longer looks like an ideology that can explain the world: its basis falls away. Liberal political thinking is stuck. It can no longer give a convincing account of politics, except to describe whats happening as an assault on itself. What would help liberalism make sense again is the rebuilding of those public institutions. It is an irony for liberals that this is precisely what the Labour party today is proposing.

What is needed is a longer and wider view than the liberal vision of politics allows one that enables us to see how social, economic and ideological changes intersect with and shape personality and procedure. This is why elements in the press have started to listen to the left once again, discussing resetting capitalism in the context of inequality and climate crisis, and engaging with talk of interests, class and ideology that has for so long been labelled as irrelevant. Now liberals also have to choose: to stay where they are and try to squeeze new developments into old paradigms, or to recognise these limits. Instead of a revival of liberalism, we might need a reckoning with it.

Katrina Forresters In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy is published by Princeton.

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The crisis of liberalism: why centrist politics can no longer explain the world - The Guardian

The Partnerships first tax filing, obtained this week by Andrew Perez of Maplight, details how the organization has embedded itself within a network of Democratic shit-hawking shops to conduct its work against health care reform. Its biggest vendor was consultancy Forbes Tate, whose relationship with the organization is well known: The Partnerships operations are run out of the firms office, according to Politico. Shaver is a partner at Forbes Tate; before that, she worked for Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign and Obamas Department of Health and Human Services. Forbes Tate received $1.7 million for this work last year, a third of the Partnerships total income. (We are not informed who donated to the Partnership, because it is a 501(c)(4).)

The second-biggest winner from the Partnerships activities: Bully Pulpit Interactive.* It has, according to its website, worked with clients ranging from the Democratic Party and Tammy Duckworths campaign to such society-ruining, law-flouting tech giants as Airbnb and Uber. In 2016, the firm was a major vendor for Hillary Clintons campaign, collecting more than $10 million for its work handling digital advertising and digital media buying for both the Hillary Clinton campaign and its joint fundraising organization with the Democratic National Committee. Bully Pulpit Interactives clients include some of the biggest center-left advocacy joints in town, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, Emilys List, and Everytown for Gun Safetythough these are just the clients it makes public. For some reason, its site doesnt list its work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a cartel dedicated to exploiting the labor of student-athletes, which was worth $12 million in 2017. Who knows what other clients the firm services but doesnt publicizeas it chose not to do for the Partnership? Thanks to our feeble transparency laws, it doesnt have to tell us. Public relations work doesnt count as lobbying for the purposes of lobbying disclosure rules.

The firm Seven Letter, formerly Blue Engine, made $140,000 off the Partnership last year. The Intercept reported that Seven Letter handled the Partnerships interactions with the media. Its staff includes prominent spin doctors such as Brendan Buck, who has previously worked for Paul Ryan and Americas Health Insurance Plans, and Adam Abrams, who used to work for the Obama White House. (If you long for a lost era of bipartisan comity, youll find it thriving on K Street.) According to a tax filing viewed at ProPublica, in 2014 Blue Engine worked for a group called Reforming Americas Taxes Equitably, a coalition of some of Americas biggest corporations that exists to push for lower corporate tax rates; it would go on to celebrate the 2017 Trump tax bill.

The New Republic asked Karthik Ganapathy, a former Bernie Sanders campaign staffer who recently founded MVMT Communications, which bills itself as primarying the consultant class: What is the deal with these firms? A lot of people come into politics to make peoples lives better, he said. Somewhere along the way, though, those folks get ground down by its institutions and start to understand that politics is a business just like any other, run by really rich folks who call the shots, and begin to see a lot of potential money on the table. So they start to work for and with people that the 25-year-old version of themselves would have thrown tomatoes atand thats just really sad to me. It is worthy of lament: Youll meet very few young people who moved to Washington for the purpose of feathering the nests of petrochemical corporations.

The pressure on all sides in this towninstitutional, ideological, financialto accept the broad status quo is immense; candidates who make a habit of challenging the established order are rare. Many of the firms that work for the Partnership were started by or staffed with former members of Obamas Yes, We Can brigade, with others going on to work for Amazon or Uber (or Theresa May). The ability of people who come to public service as righteous, justice-and-fairness-seeking liberals to transform themselves into dedicated laborers against the goals they once espoused is astounding, but every road in Washington is laid to funnel people toward that stupid, cynical end.

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The Lucrative Liberal Business of Killing Health Care Reform - The New Republic

Back Johnson or Corbyn? Thats not necessarily the right question. Photo: Aaron Chown/PA Wire/PA Images

Every general election presents the Liberal Democrats with a challenge. How should they position themselves against Labour and the Conservatives? Over the years they have tried a variety of tactics. A glance back at them helps to understand the way Jo Swinson is wrestling with that question today.

In February 1974, the Liberals argued that they were Britains only radical party. They asked of their two rivals: Which twin is the Tory? Their vote more than doubled to 19 per cent, but they won only 14 seats.

In 1983, the Liberal/Social Democratic Party Alliance sought to break the mould of British politics by replacing Labour as Britains main progressive party. They came close in votes (Labour 28 per cent, Alliance 26 per cent), but Labour still won almost ten times as many seats (209 versus 23).

In terms of seats gained, the Lib Dems most successful election by far was 1997. They jumped from 20 MPs to 46the largest third-party number since 1929. Actually, the partys vote share slipped slightly, from 18 to 17 per cent; but tactical voting by Labour supporters helped Lib Dem candidates defeat more than two dozen incumbent Tories. It helped that Paddy Ashdown, the Lib Dem leader, abandoned the partys policy of equidistance between Labour and the Conservatives, and moved closer to Tony Blair and New Labour.

There is one obvious example of the Lib Dems co-operating with the Toriesafter the 2010 election. Nick Cleggs party paid the price: it lost 49 of its 57 seats.

Today, Swinson finds it far easier to say what she doesnt want than what she does. She hates Boris Johnsons Brexit, and Jeremy Corbyns far left prospectus. She says she wants to be prime minister; but she knows that this is nonsense. Corbyn is more likely to become Chief Rabbi.

More relevantly, she says that if we end up with another hung parliament, she wont prop up either Johnson or Corbyn. This leads to the obvious follow-up point: since one of them is almost certain to be prime minister after the election, she really should tell her voters what she would do.

Here is my suggestion. It is not to change her stance but to make it more credible.

Swinsons starting point should be to acknowledge that, in a hung parliament, the initiative will not lie with her. Either Johnson will try to soldier on without a majority or he will step down. If he tries to stay in Downing Street, Ed Davey, Swinsons deputy, has told Andrew Neil on his BBC show that the Lib Dems might be up for discussions with Johnson on a new Brexit referendum. I doubt Johnson would agreetoo many of his MPs hate the ideabut it would not be crazy for the Lib Dems to make the offer.

What, though, if Johnson decides that there are too few Tory MPs for him to carry on? He will then resign, and the Queen will invite Corbyn to try to form a government. The assumption that pretty well everyone makes in discussing what happens next is that the Tories, who will almost certainly still be by far the largest party in the new House of Commons, will oppose Corbyns Queens Speech. The decision of the Lib Dems to vote for Corbyn, or against him, or abstain, could be vital to what kind of government, if any, Britain has at the start of 2020.

Is that assumption correct? Twice in the past century, a Conservative prime minister has resigned following an inconclusive election. In January 1924 Stanley Baldwin made way for Ramsay MacDonald, even though the Tories had 67 more MPs than Labour. In March 1974, Edward Heath resigned after failing to do a deal with the Liberals, and Harold Wilson returned to office.

The key point is this. On both occasions, the Conservatives did not try to stop Labour governing. They voted against specific measures, but not to bring the new government down. Their reason was that, having acknowledged that they could not carry on, they would risk a huge public backlash should they seek to prolong political deadlock and intensify a great national crisis.

The same logic would apply this time. Indeed, one could go further. Neither Baldwin nor Heath faced an immediate challenge to their party leadership. In contrast, Johnson, having lost his election, would face a Conservative Party in turmoil. It is likely to retreat in order to sort outfight overits own future.

In practice, then, Swinson would not have to decide what to do. Corbyn would survive as prime minister thanks not to the Lib Dems or SNP but to the Conservatives. However, he would be a prime minister without the power to do anything much, apart from sort out Brexit and legislate for a new referendum. Parliament wouldnt turf him outbut nor would it vote for any of his more radical policies. He would probably get through a modestly expansionary budget, with more for health, schools, welfare, police etcbut not much more than the Tories have promised. But rail nationalisation? Free monopoly state broadband? Workers on boards? Big jump in corporation and income taxes? Forget them.

So Swinson should not tie herself in knots fretting over the Johnson-or-Corbyn question, for she will have no real power to answer it. Instead, should simply say: a) my MPs will oppose both a hard Brexit and a vast increase in the power of the state; and b) in a hung parliament, the more Lib Dem MPs there are, the more certain it is that we can, with other MPs, block either form of madness.

Sorted. Pleased to help.

The rest is here:

What everyone has missed about the position of the Liberal Democrats - Prospect

OTTAWA Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to meet with Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Friday, their first face-to-face meeting following a Liberal election campaign that relentlessly maligned the provincial leader over his painful spending cuts.

Ford will meet Trudeau in Ottawa, in part to discuss a package of public transit projects for which the province is seeking to secure federal funding of around 40 per cent, according to a memo seen by the National Post. The province has also announced that Ford will chair a new provincial council in Ontario aimed at negotiating with Ottawa on issues like infrastructure.

During his election campaign, Trudeau relentlessly hammered Ford as part of an attack that sought to tie the premier to Conservative leader Andrew Scheer. Liberal ministers constantly used Ford as a sort of proxy for Conservative spending cuts, which they warned would critically stifle public services.

The federal Liberals ran sizeable deficits every year of their majority government despite promises to return to balance by 2019, then categorized any plans by Conservative politicians to trim spending as austerity that would hurt middle class Canadians.

Scheer wants you to double down on Conservative politicians twice the tax breaks for big polluters and the wealthy, and twice the cuts for you and your family, Trudeau said during an Ontario stop early in his campaign.

Thats what happens when governments focus on buck-a-beer, Trudeau added later.

Ford refrained from attacking Trudeau in response, instead making light of Trudeaus relentless attacks during the campaign.

I think the guy loves me or something, cause he constantly mentions my name, Ford said at an infrastructure announcement on Oct. 16.

One senior official inside the Ford government said the premier honestly doesnt care about the attacks, and said he would be focused on issues like public transit funding and Canada health transfers. The person said Ford is a big relationships guy and has gotten on well with the federal government on infrastructure and the renegotiated NAFTA.

We disagree about the environment but there are lots of areas where we agree, the person said. I wouldnt expect it to be a hostile meeting and there will be no attempts to stick it to the prime minister.

Ontario, like other provinces, has sparred with Ottawa over funding for some infrastructure projects under Trudeaus massive $187-billion spending plan. Officials in the federal infrastructure office claim Ontario has called for funding on a host of projects that dont fit into its specific funding streams, causing some frustration over how much funding the developments would receive.

Trudeau and Ford had a phone conversation shortly after the election, after which Ford said that attacks by the federal Liberals would not inhibit his relationship with Ottawa.

This is the the pairs first post-election meeting. The last official meeting was last December at a first ministers meeting, though they had an informal exchange at the Toronto Raptors parade.

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Trudeau to meet Doug Ford Friday, just weeks after Liberal campaign that pummelled Ontario premier - National Post