Blog Posts by Alex Stevenson

Nick Clegg's party are good at steadfast resilience. You don't become a Lib Dem unless you are a glutton for punishment, and so — in spite of the bleak picture of the last year — they remain determined to do something, anything, to get out of trouble.

Nearly halfway through the five-year coalition, things look black. Liberal Democrat poll numbers have remained anaemic, barely creeping into double figures. Their leader's approval ratings are now comparable to Gordon Brown's at his nadir. On the key metric of 'fit to govern', where they might have expected to have seen some sort of improvement, there has been very little progress. They are viewed as an irrelevance in policy terms — mere aiders and abetters to the Conservatives, propping up David Cameron to continue cutting as usual.

The Liberal Democrats need a grand change of narrative to meet the magnitude of these challenges. Bold moves are needed — and there are signs that the party's threatened leader is prepared to make them.

Britain's military power has already helped oust three regimes this century. The bleak outlook in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan forces us to ask again: was it really worth it?

Before this week, the world's gaze had slowly turned away from Libya. Everything had calmed down following Muammar Gaddafi's bloody demise at the hands of the mob in his hometown of Sirte last October. It was replaced in global headlines by the grim civil war in Syria, occupying the concerns of diplomats and commentators the world over.

And then, on Tuesday night, there came the violent assassination of US ambassador Christopher Stevens. His unexpected death has been a wake-up call for Westminster.

UK politicians had spent the summer of 2011 wondering if Britain made a big mistake in getting embroiled in the effort to protect rebels and effect regime change in Libya. Since then they had themselves to forget about the country's problems. British lives were not at stake. The national transitional council (NTC) was

It's going to take 20 years to finish and cost the taxpayer an eye-watering £32 billion. No wonder the government's High Speed Rail 2 (HS2) project has plenty of advocates — and enemies.

This kind of timescale dwarfs even the government's aviation strategy agonies. Under the coalition's plan — and this is subject to delays, of course - it won't be until 2032/33 that the Y-shaped network is opened in full. Passengers will be able to whoosh up and down from London to Birmingham at speeds of up to 250mph from 2026. It will then take another seven years or so before the network is extended along two branches: one heading up to Manchester, the other to Sheffield and Leeds.

The politics of HS2 is not straightforward. For a start the opposition does not oppose it; this was New Labour's brainchild. The "spadework", as shadow transport secretary Maria Eagle says, was done by Andrew Adonis. After Labour lost the general election she reviewed the proposals and decided to back it. "It's going to

Knock on your average door in these Great British Isles and ask someone what bugs them about the country. The chances are before not too long has passed they'll mention immigration.

Politicians, whose job it is to find out what their constituents think by doing exactly this, know all too well that this evergreen problem of British politics remains as potent as ever. Immigration is vital for the prosperity of the British economy, but its positive effects on GDP are not felt as directly as the pressure new arrivals can put on local services.

So when the government launched its e-petitions system last year it didn't take long before the public were invited to express their concerns. There are now over 143,000 signatures to the 'no to 70 million' e-petition, which opposes the UK's population growth to that number in the next 20 years or so. This increase is the equivalent of seven cities the size of Birmingham, it warns. It will have a huge impact both on our quality of life and on our

Getty ImagesConservative cheering couldn't drown out the memory of boos which greeted George Osborne at the Paralympics earlier this week.

There is nothing more damaging to a politician. Short of actually throwing eggs at the chancellor (presumably those had been removed by security) the Great British Paralympic spectators poured their scorn on Osborne in what might end up being the audio clip of the year.

This was supposed to be a fresh start for the prime minister after the end of the long summer recess. He was back for the first PMQs with a brand new frontbench team and a new feelgood British public, buoyed by an Olympic spirit of goodwill. Only it didn't last long, did it? The warm glow of euphoria had well and truly evaporated as soon as Osborne dared show his face. Even Gordon Brown was cheered by the Paralympic crowd. If you're less popular than New Labour's last prime minister, you know there's something wrong.

Nor was the restart really a clean slate. On the frontbench there sat Andrew

It is, perhaps, a reflection of the calamitous state of Britain's economy that the Heathrow third runway question is once again on the table.

"No ifs, no buts, no third runway," the campaign leaflet declared. The Conservatives couldn't have been clearer in their 2010 election literature that, if they got into power, New Labour's plans to expand Heathrow wouldn't go ahead. The necessities of coalition forced some compromises with the Liberal Democrats, but aviation strategy wasn't one of them. Under the Tories and the Lib Dems, Labour's third runway looked dead and buried.

Now, as the coalition's third year drags miserably on, the game has changed. Britain languishes in a double-dip recession. Impulses towards getting the economy moving again have, for many Tory MPs worried about their seats and Tory ministers worried about their government, grown steadily stronger. For many they are now irresistible.

Business lobby groups have been steadily increasing their calls for a rethink, warning

If the Lib Dems' policy demands are simply ignored by the Tories, more voters will begin asking: what's the point of Nick Clegg?

The new political season is getting underway a week early - and it looks like the 'new politics' of coalition is now entering a new, rowdier, phase.

Nick Clegg fired the starting gun with his interview in this morning's Guardian. The deputy prime minister has got a great idea, lads: he's calling for some sort of raid on the coffers of the country's wealthiest, to make the rest of recessionary Britain feel better. This is a bold demand. It goes much further than the 'mansion tax' included in this year's Budget. It is designed to make the voters sit up and take notice of the Liberal Democrats, who are viewed in the minds of many voters as cardboard Tory sell-outs.

This was the result of overdoing it in the early stages of the coalition, when the goal was to convince the markets that this government was the real deal. Now some serious backpedalling is required -

Parliament needs more than a five-year refurbishment to fix Britain's politics. We need to strip back Britain's politics and start again.

Just as the economy continues to drag along, failing to recover from the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis, so Britain's politics does too. Three years have passed since the 2009 expenses scandal, but public confidence in our elected leaders remains at rock bottom.

This was an opportunity for parliament to reform itself. There have been some positive steps forward — the select committees MPs use to scrutinise suspect figures from elsewhere in public life (Rupert Murdoch, Bob Diamond etc) have been improved, for example — but other measures have proved disappointing. They may even prove to have backfired.

The introduction of epetitions was supposed to spark a great revival of direct democracy. Voters assumed 100,000 signatures would lead to an instant change in direction from ministers. They are now discovering what MPs have known for a long