Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:

The question of who can stand for election to a local council should be clearly defined and easy to understand – so that those new to politics can be candidates, so that voters don’t end up with a false choice where not all the candidates are actually allowed to be candidates and so that elections can be about choices between people and policies, rather than battles between lawyers.

In England and Wales the law was last codified and laid down in the 1972 Local Government Act. With the passage now of nearly forty years, plus frequent subsequent legislation which gave the opportunity to clarify any ambiguities, matters should now be clear.

Alas, though, a combination of poor drafting, changing interpretations and equivocation from the Electoral Commission has left part of the law in an ambiguous mess.

A bit of background for any Voice readers who either have seen some of the slightly elliptical comments posted in earlier threads by a couple of people about the past actions of Rupert Read, the Green party candiate for the Nowich North by-election.

Last year, Rupert Read accused a Liberal Democrat councillor, Judith Lubbock, of perjuring herself more than once. Given that perjury is a serious offence which can result in someone being jailed (see Jeffrey Archer), this is a pretty serious allegation. It was also wholly untrue.

Rupert Read subsequently had to apologise and withdraw the allegations he had made.

Welcome to the Sunday outing for The Voice’s near-daily Daily View series. As it’s a Sunday, today it comes with a special bonus military film.

2 Big Stories

Spotlight turns to MPs’ outside earnings

The Telegraph, in a surprise departure, runs a big story on MPs and money:

A survey has uncovered the outside interests of dozens of MPs who hold down paid positions, ranging from legal and media work to crofting, and even grave digging. One earns £750 an hour for helping to organise an awards ceremony for the drinks industry, while another is paid more than £1,300 a day to provide business

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One of the oddities about London Assembly  Member Brian Coleman’s record in running up huge expenses bills (e.g. in one year he managed to run up more taxi bills than all the other 24 Assembly member added together) is the incredibly soft line that Boris Johnson has taken on them.

For all Mayor Johnson’s talk about value for money, clearing out dodgy practices and so on, his message to Brian Coleman has in effect pretty much been, “Carry on as you were”. Of course, the news about Boris’s own big taxi bills does help explain this. And so perhaps it …

Carl Minns is the Liberal Democrat leader of Hull City Council. Lib Dem Voice has quizzed him about why he’s in politics, what he’s achieved and how being a Liberal Democrat means he does things differently from other parties.

1. What made you get involved in politics originally?

I was recruited into the party by Lembit Opik at a student rally against tuition fees in 1998. A few weeks later a Lib Dem activist, John Robinson, (now executive member on the council for inward investment) turned up at my house with a bundle of leaflets and a mars bar. The rest, as they say, is history!

2. …

Two pieces of troubling news regarding London Mayor Boris Johnson and his approach to expenses: he’s been running up big bills himself and he also personally signed off expenses on the controversial corporate credit card, the use of which resulted in (yet another) Deputy Mayor having to quit.

Paul Waugh has the details of Boris Johnson’s expensive taxis:

I know Boris loves London’s cabbies, but this is ridiculous. A new written answer to City Hall today shows that the Mayor seems to be following in the footsteps of Ken Livingstone when it comes to his love of the hackney carriage.

Boris’s total bill

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Courtesy of the London Assembly:

On 15 June 2009, the Assessment Sub-Committee of the GLA’s Standards Committee met in private and considered a complaint from Mr Shaun Lee, a member of the public, concerning the conduct of Mr John Biggs, London Assembly Member.

Set out below is a brief and general summary of the complaint:

In a letter dated 23 February, John Biggs’ Personal Assistant responded to correspondence from the Complainant to explain that John Biggs was not related to the Great Train robber, Ronald Biggs.

In response to this, the Complainant wrote to John Biggs on 26 February 2009 demanding an explanation

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Winding up usage of my old work email address in the last few weeks, after using it for nearly a decade, has given me far more experience than I’ve ever wanted about the idiosyncracies of trying to change your email address on different lists and for different organisations and firms.

(Double black marks to the people running some of the Barack Obama email lists who (a) don’t tell you how to change your address, (b) don’t tell you have to join the list from your new address and (c) don’t reply if you contact them. But then, as you may have heard …

Here’s the email which has gone out to party members today:

Seasoned conference-goers might have been expecting the Preliminary Agenda for the autumn conference in Bournemouth to have arrived by now. Well, it hasn’t – because conference last year agreed a set of sweeping changes to the timetable for submitting motions for debate. They’re designed to make it easier for local parties and conference reps to submit motions and amendments, and to increase your chance of having a say in party policy.

The old series of three deadlines for submitting motions has been replaced by two, and we’ve scrapped the Preliminary Agenda.

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With all the genuine expenses targets available, you’d have through the Taxpayers’ Alliance would have found a better target than attacking a Plaid MP, Adam Price, for using part of his Parliamentary expenses to pay for his staff to go on training courses.

MPs, rightly, get to employ staff via the expenses schemes. (How else, for example, would an MP deal with the hundreds of letters and emails that many get each day?) If people are being employed to work for MPs, then in return MPs should be good bosses. Part of that involves identifying training needs for their staff …

Welcome to the Sunday outing for The Voice’s Daily View series. As it’s a Sunday, today it comes with a special Obama in tights extravaganza.

2 Big Stories

Iranian protests continue despite crackdown

The BBC reports:

Iranian police have used water cannon, batons, tear gas and live rounds to break up protests over the presidential election, witnesses in Tehran say.

A BBC reporter said he saw one man shot and others injured amid running fights

Defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi repeated calls for the election to be annulled on the grounds it was rigged.

Their round-up page for the latest Iranian news is well worth a …

Yesterday the Financial Times ran an obituary from Liberal Democrat peer William Wallace:

Ralf Dahrendorf, who has died at the age of 80, crowded several careers, in Germany and Britain, into a single life.

First a leading academic sociologist, then a rising Liberal German politician, director of the London School of Economics and later warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, he combined political engagement and intellectual debate. He was successively a German minister, a European commissioner and a British peer. He was a European public intellectual; the author of nearly 30 books, and a long-standing columnist for Die Zeit and La Repubblica

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No, I didn’t either. But the odd thing is, there’s plenty of evidence that the public were keener to vote in European electins than previously. The evidence is certainly patchy and incomplete, but the uniformity of the turnout gloom and doom stories seems to me to say rather more about the media’s fixed image (’turnout? must be down’) than about the actual evidence.

The key is to compare like-for-like data. For example, in several parts of England the last European election were run using an all-postal ballot, in which all possible voters were sent a ballot paper that they could then …

Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:

I’ve blogged before about some of the myths around Obama’s campaign – the exaggerated tales of seas of small donors and soaring turnout. Now it’s time to look at how the votes played out across the country and see what it tells us.

The US Presidential election is (with some minor exceptions) a first past the post election run across each state, with the winner scooping all the spoils. It doesn’t matter whether you win New York state by 1% or 99%; either way the result counts the same in the tally towards winning the Presidency. Therefore, when it comes to targeting campaign activities, there is a strong incentive to ignore states that are likely to be either landslide victories or defeats and instead pour efforts into the marginal areas. These ‘swing states’ in the US political parlance therefore have much the same place in campaign calculations as marginal constituencies have in the UK.

Traditionally, that targeting has primarily involved deciding where to run TV adverts, where to direct direct mail and where to send your campaign’s big names for visits. Plot Obama and McCain’s visits for 2008, for example, and you see a huge cluster in the key swing states.

The broad story of the Obama campaign is that it was well run, highly successful and used the internet in particular to mobilise large amounts of grassroots campaigning. Up against a McCain campaign that had far less money and is seen as having been much weaker, you might therefore have expected to see a fair amount of variation in the swing to Obama between different parts of the country. A good campaign, targeting its efforts well, would garner extra support in key swing areas.

The evidence, however, suggests otherwise.

From The Telegraph:

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, is facing demands to “pay back” £55,000 in capital gains tax, which critics say he is morally obliged to pay after “flipping” his designated second property.

The Liberal Democrats said they had calculated how much capital gains tax Mr Osborne avoided by the way he designated his London family home. They called on David Cameron to force him to pay it back.

The Tory leader has clamped down heavily on backbench Tory MPs who have abused the expenses system, but he has yet to censure a senior member of his inner circle…

Lord Oakeshott of

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Welcome to the Sunday outing for The Voice’s Daily View series. As it’s a Sunday, today it comes with a bonus complaint and the easiest quiz question of the week.

2 Big Stories

Could Alan Johnson scrap ID cards?

Gordon Brown’s weakness means there is a set of senior Cabinet members who are now unsackable. If any of them were to take it upon themselves to indulge in a very un-Brownian desire to do something dramatic and decisive, it would be extremely hard for Gordon Brown to stop them.

Step forward then possibly, perhaps, just maybe Alan Johnson. (He is, after all, one of …