Author Archives: Mark Pack

Mark was the Liberal Democrat Head of Innovations until June 2009 and is now Head of Digital at MHP Communications. As well as being part of the Lib Dem Voice team, he blogs at www.markpack.org.uk and is on Twitter as @markpack. He likes chocolate. Lots of it.

Follow @markpack

Ed Davey’s approach to green issues: they make for better growth

By Mark Pack | Published 6th February 2012 - 6:13 pm

Ed Davey’s choice of words when presenting a political case is always worth close attention as he is a man very interested in the details and nuances of political messaging. (He was for a while under Ming Campbell’s leadership in charge of refashioning the party’s messaging.)

So what to make of his initial description of his role in charge at the Department of Environment and Climate Change? He said,

Posted in News | Tagged chris huhne, ed davey | 2 Comments

Campaign Corner: How can we be better at handling possible new helpers or members?

By Mark Pack | Published 6th February 2012 - 4:54 pm

The Campaign Corner series looks to give three tips about commonly asked campaign issues. Do get in touch if you have any questions you would like to suggest.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: Your mystery shopper survey of local parties criticises local parties for not treating possible new members better. We’re a small, struggling local party and it’s hard enough to run the basic operation. How can we be better without exhausting overselves?

Posted in Campaign Corner | Tagged featured | 3 Comments

The fallout from Chris Huhne’s resignation

By Mark Pack | Published 4th February 2012 - 6:10 pm

I’ve been busy with the media yesterday and today giving my take on Chris Huhne’s resignation, so here are the two main highlights if you missed them:

The Lib Dem Voice survey results I mention are covered in the piece Which four Liberal Democrat ministers have most improved their standings in 2011? and for more on why I rate Ed Davey’s record see Community Buying: a welcome move from Ed Davey (an approach very relevant to his new post) and Ed Davey: someone getting the messaging right.

Helped by having known for a long time …

Posted in News | Tagged chris huhne, diversity, ed davey, gender balance, jenny willott, jo swinson, nick clegg | 2 Comments

Lib Dem achievements, communicating peers and election timetables

By Mark Pack | Published 3rd February 2012 - 12:50 pm

A trio of resources for your weekend’s delectation:

Electoral timetable for May’s elections: I’ve recently updated my May 2012 election timetable post with extra details

Posted in News | Tagged Online politics, twitter | 1 Comment

Paddy Ashdown’s eight steps to winning a Parliamentary constituency

By Mark Pack | Published 3rd February 2012 - 8:25 am

In December 1976 Paddy Ashdown put to the local party in Yeovil a plan for winning the constituency for which he had been recently selected and where the party was third at almost every election. Thirty-five and a bit years on, it still reads as a pretty good plan.

Posted in News | Tagged featured, paddy ashdown | 5 Comments

Why I (still) read the Daily Mail

By Mark Pack | Published 2nd February 2012 - 8:25 am

Four years on, I’m still a Daily Mail reader (even if they think I’m a foreigner). Here’s an updated explanation.

I once rang the Daily Mail to mildly complain about a story I had a connection with. The journalist I spoke to put me on hold while he conferred with a colleague. At least, he thought he put me on hold. But courtesy of him hitting the wrong button, I got to hear what they were saying. And it wasn’t exactly a master class in concern for accuracy. Yet I still read the newspaper regularly.

Why? Because it would be foolish not …

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged daily mail, journalism | 16 Comments

Haringey Liberal Democrats show two ways to make use of new legal powers

By Mark Pack | Published 1st February 2012 - 11:50 am

I am currently putting together a new book for ALDC which has at its heart ways that councillors and local campaigners can make use of the new legal powers heading their way under the Localism Act and other devolving legislation. Many of the powers are very effective for getting local issues sorted and local communities improved, but will sit on the shelf achieving nothing if active campaigners do not pick them up and put them to use.

It is good to see that Haringey Liberal Democrats are already well ahead of me putting into practice two of the ideas which the book will include.

Posted in Local government | Tagged haringey liberal democrats, localism bill, richard wilson | 1 Comment

The other issue Lib Dem peers can win on tomorrow

By Mark Pack | Published 31st January 2012 - 4:25 pm

Moves in the House of Lords to amend the health and welfare bills have been getting the lion’s share of recent coverage, but this week sees a quartet of Liberal Democrat peers leading the charge on a different topic – the Legal Aid Bill.

Lib Dem Lords Thomas, Carlile, Clement Jones and Phillips have a set of amendments down for debate tomorrow to put right what Ken Clarke hasn’t got right in his zeal to end the so-called ‘compensation culture’. The amendments look to tighten up and improve the plans to ban so-called ‘referral fees’ in personal injury cases. Its these fees which …

Posted in Op-eds, Parliament | Tagged alex carlile, ken clarke, legal aid, lord (martin) thomas, lord phillips of sudbury, tim clement-jones | 5 Comments

Understanding the university application figures

By Mark Pack | Published 31st January 2012 - 8:10 am

Ahead of the preliminary university application figures late last year, I posted five questions by which to judge them when they were published. The gist of all the questions was, “what do the figures really mean if you scratch beneath the surface?”. In particular, the big spike in applications in the last year before the new fee arrangements, coupled with the declining teenage population, means that crude headline number comparisons can be very misleading. As it turned out, the five questions were a pretty good guide to what the university application figures really meant.

Now that we have the …

Posted in News | Tagged featured, stephen tall, tuition fees, university | 6 Comments

Campaign Corner: Getting the most out of a delivery session

By Mark Pack | Published 30th January 2012 - 3:50 pm

The Campaign Corner series looks to give three tips about commonly asked campaign issues. Do get in touch if you have any questions you would like to suggest.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: We’re organising a mass delivery session next weekend. Any last minute tips on what we should do?

Posted in Campaign Corner | Leave a comment

Local liberal heroes: Alexi Sugden

By Mark Pack | Published 30th January 2012 - 11:50 am

Earlier in the year, I penned a series of posts profiling forgotten liberal heroes (to which a couple of other people also kindly contributed), looking at some of those who achieved great things for liberalism in their time but have been unjustly forgotten – such as Margaret Wintringham, the very first female Liberal MP.

There is also another group of people who I think are often unjustly obscure – those local campaigners who are often at the heart of their local community and local party, delivering liberalism and helping others, but as their stage is a local one they are often …

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged alexi sugden, local liberal heroes | Leave a comment

A close escape – and now we should change our Euro-selection rules

By Mark Pack | Published 29th January 2012 - 2:50 pm

This week the Liberal Democrats have had a close escape. Diana Wallis’s sudden resignation as an MEP highlight flaws in the party’s rules for picking a successor.

Those rules aren’t new, but many people (myself included) have not paid that much attention to them in the past. It was only the circumstances of a resignation surrounded by controversy which brought attention to their weaknesses. Weaknesses only side-stepped by the decision of Stewart Arnold not to seek to succeed Diana Wallis.

Most of the events of the last few days are specific to the Diana Wallis resignation – the fallout amongst …

Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Tagged candidate selection rules, diana wallis | 30 Comments

How do you get people to trust councils?

By Mark Pack | Published 27th January 2012 - 10:25 am

With increasing numbers of people’s minds turning towards May’s elections, now is a good time to dust off and update a post from 2008 about how people view their council…

Improving trust in local government is important, and can’t be done just by focusing on improving services: that’s the verdict of State of trust: How to build better relationships between councils and the public, a piece of research from the think-tank Demos and IDeA (the local government Improvement & Development Agency), published in 2008.

The report sees trust as underpinning a wide range of objectives:

Posted in Local government | Tagged demos, IDeA | 2 Comments

What happens if someone tries to join the Liberal Democrats?

By Mark Pack | Published 26th January 2012 - 10:55 am

No reply. That’s what happens a third of the time if a member of the public contacts a Liberal Democrat local party via the internet according to a ‘mystery shopper’ exercise I carried out earlier this month.

Taking the publicly advertised email addresses for 25 local parties, I tried sending them all a test email from someone asking about joining the party. Just under two-thirds responded within 48 hours, which is a good response time. However, beyond that there were only a couple of further replies and the others have, after more than two weeks, not replied at all.

It is a …

Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Tagged featured | 34 Comments

Author Archives: Mark Pack

Search

Poll