For example, restricting the tax relief on pension contributions to 20% (the standard rate for most people) rather than the current 40% for those earning over £100,000 would raise over £3.5 billion more each year. Last year, in a clear sign of the way in which senior Liberal Democrats are thinking, David Laws asked a series of Parliamentary questions fleshing out the details of what would be raised by different moves.

So it is no surprise that Danny Alexander has returned to the theme in the Daily Telegraph:

Danny Alexander, a Liberal Democrat Cabinet minister, says the better-off are receiving overly-generous tax relief when they invest money for their retirement.

Mr Alexander’s proposals would see tax relief halve from 40 per cent to 20 per cent. He also wants workers on the minimum wage, who earn up to £12,500 a year, to pay no income tax at all.

Mr Alexander claims that removing the higher-rate tax relief would save the Exchequer more than £7 billion and make the system fairer. Even restricted to those earning more than £100,000 the Treasury could save £3.6 billion.

“If you look at the amount of money that we spend on pensions tax relief, which is very significant, the majority of that money goes to paying tax relief at the higher rate,” Mr Alexander told The Daily Telegraph.

His remarks may open up a new dispute between the Tories and Lib Dems over tax. They are already at odds over Lib Dem calls to keep the 50p top rate of tax and introduce a “mansion tax” on high-value homes. George Osborne, the Chancellor, is expected to strongly resist any calls to scrap higher-rate tax relief.

Arguing for cutting pension tax breaks for the richest in order to fund income tax cuts for millions is both sensible economics and smart politics. Sensible economics – because the net effect does not undermine the struggle to cut the deficit and in fact is likely to cause an economic boost with the extra spending caused by the income tax cut greater than the reduction in spending caused by the tax rise. Sensible politics – because once again it puts the Liberal Democrats on the side of tax cuts for the millions whilst the Tories are on the side of the very richest.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Not even I’m willing to believe it was the power of that blog post alone (plus natty diagram) which cowed the political classes into giving up semaphoring addiction. Yet the phrase does seem to crop up rather less often now, perhaps because of a change from the Labour government’s love of telling people what to do?

But we have not arrived in a happy new post-Brown cliché free world.

Instead, the one that now has taken its place as the object of my political ire is “ideological” or more precisely, “ideological” used as if it were a self-evident insult, mistake and appalling blunder.

You know the sort of phrase I mean. When people talk about “ideological cuts” they mean “despicable, dreadful actions that quite possibly involve killing some first-born”. Having something “driven by ideology” means it’s a sure recipe for a car crash catastrophe. And as for “ideological policies”, well they’re clearly the sort of deeply distasteful actions that people should be ashamed to be seen talking about in public during daylight hours.

What does this dreaded “ideology” mean? Here it is in its full horror, courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary:

A system of ideas and ideals.

And even worse:

[A] set of beliefs.

Doing something because it’s based on what you believe. I mean, what could be more so self-evidently wrong that it can be used as a term of abuse without need for any explanation, clarification or emendation?

Forget the idea that policies based on beliefs might be better than policies based on whatever the latest opinion polls says. No, beliefs are ideological and so evil and wrong.

Forget the idea too that policies based on beliefs might be better than policies based on the random toss of a coin. Cut or spend? Regulate or liberate? Toss a coin and decide. And hooray, you win the prize for political sainthood because you’ve avoided that nasty taint of ideology in your embrace of chance.

In fact, there’s often a rather nasty arrogant authoritarian tone about such criticisms, because of course the people making them aren’t short of a belief or two themselves. They don’t go round self-flagellating for the temerity of themselves having beliefs and following them. Oh no, it’s only someone else who has different beliefs who should be hounded for having them.

It’s the Henry Ford approach to acceptable politics – you can believe whatever you want as long as you believe the same as me.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Many people (including myself) criticised the plans to weaken the legal requirement to register, either because they oppose voluntary registration in principle or because even if they are warm to voluntary registration in theory they think that switching to individual registration and voluntary registration at the same time is a recipe for disaster. One should be done, sorted and settled in before the other is addressed.

As has been heavily trailed, the government is indeed thinking again and it is now:

Reconsidering an individual’s ability to opt out [of registering] – looking to either tighten this provision or remove it altogether.

Another area of criticism during the consultation was over concerns that the last ‘traditional’ electoral register would be too dated by the time the new process is brought in for it to be a good basis for the new process. However, running the traditional process for another year would run up extra costs running into the tens of millions. The government is therefore proposing a sensible sounding compromise of postponing the autumn 2013 electoral register canvass to spring 2014, so that it is much less dated when it is used as the basis for the new process but without requiring an extra canvass.

Many traps lie in the administrative details of electoral register canvasses, which is why I only say “sensible sounding compromise”; we’ll have to see how the details look as people pour over them in the coming days and weeks.

The government is also proposing to make more extensive use of data matching so that different public sector records are used to help populate the electoral register. You can read more about this and the other parts of the government response below.

If you are wondering why bother with individual electoral registration in the first place and why Labour first kicked off the plans for introducing it, see What’s the point of switching to individual electoral registration?

Government Response to Pre-legislative Scrutiny and Public Consultation on Individual Electoral Registratio…

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

1. Polly Toynbee sends tweet encouraging all and sundry to take part in an open-access online poll being run by the BMJ.

2. The Guardian reports result of said BMJ poll.

Then only thing missing, alas, is:

3. The Guardian then realises that reporting a voodoo poll which its own staff have been encouraging people to take part on is low grade self-referential journalism and pulls poll report.

Hat tip: Anthony Wells

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

The case has now finally worked its way through the system and he has been banned from holding public office:

A Glasgow Labour councillor has been banned from holding office over alleged comments he made about a case involving the alleged rape of a nine year old.

William O’Rourke, who represented the Greater Pollok ward, was suspended from the party last March after he allegedly suggested that the young victim may have been a willing participant and that the girl “wanted it to happen”.

O’Rourke is alleged to have made the comments at a personnel appeals committee hearing into the case after the care worker who was dismissed for allegedly having sex with the child, O’Rourke is said to have asked if the girl “wanted it to happen” because no force was used and that she was not a “typical innocent nine year old”.

He also made a comment about the child’s mother being a prostitute and went on what the Police Officer described as a ‘rant’ about promiscuous children and the need to lower the age of sexual consent.

Glasgow Labour were accused of closing ranks in order to protect O’Rourke after it emerged Baillies Jim Scanlan and Jim Todd were also present at the hearing, but had said nothing.

O’Rourke’s comments were only made public after a Strathclyde Police Officer who was a witness at the hearing reported concerns and an official complaint was lodged with the Standards Commission for Scotland, which regulates the behaviour of politicians.

UPDATE: Apologies, the story I quoted from above is a little misleading as in fact the Public Standards Commissioner concluded that O’Rourke had not broken the code of conduct. What happened was that the Labour Party nonetheless decided to ban him from standing as a Labour candidate for public office in future.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Some people like regularly visiting a site to see if there’s new stories of interest. Some people like subscribing to its news feed (RSS) and checking that way. But if you prefer email, you can instead sign up to get a daily early morning email with a summary of the previous day’s posts from Lib Dem Voice, complete with a note of how many comments each post has got and convenient links to click on if any take your fancy and you want to take a read.

Just go to our email sign up page to start getting these emails.

You can unsubscribe at any time and we won’t pass your email on to anyone else.

You can also sign up for a special once-a-week email, bringing you the best of the posts from across the Liberal Democrat blogosphere (aka the Golden Dozen, which is also posted up on this site).

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

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

Greening the economy isn’t just good for the planet – it’s good for the wallets, purses and pockets.

In choosing to present issues in that way, he’s very much following in the footsteps of Chris Huhne. It is not so much a deep green message that is against economic growth, as a lighter shade of green, saying environmental action is good for economic growth.

It’s a broad tent approach – pitching green measures not just at those deeply concerned about the environment but also at those who are much more concerned about other issues – such as jobs and income.

That’s a wise approach, because long-term policies with long-term objectives require a broad consensus not only amongst politicians but also amongst the public. That requires pitching to the wider audience in just the way he is doing.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

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?

You’re right to identify the difference between working harder and working smarter. Working both hard and smart is often required, but it is usually possible to do things in a way that gets more out of your time rather than simply needing always to spend more time on party matters. So here are three tips for how to treat possible new members or helpers well:

1. Get them on your mailing lists: Some local parties reserve their newsletter mailing list for paid-up members and send occasional email updates to an even smaller group (such as just the local party executive). What a waste of the effort that goes into producing such communications! If someone is new and interested, get them on your newsletter and email lists straight away and do the same for helpers who aren’t members. Keeping in regular contact with such people secures more help from them in the long-run.
2. Make use of other people’s mailing lists: Don’t think you have to do all the communication yourself. Most MEPs run a good email list for members and supporters in their region, as do holders of many other elected posts, such as the London Assembly team. If you get a new person on some of these (e-)mailing lists, then other Lib Dems will do part of the work of keeping in touch and informing people for you.
3. Make use of events held by neighbouring local parties: Similarly, your own local party does not have to be the only possible place where new people can come to event. Many regions and party bodies organise good events and, in all but the most geographically sparse parts of the country, events held by neighbouring local parties are often as easy or easier for people to get to as your own. I live right on the border of my local party, so there is not only the neighbouring local party but also the local party that covers my place of work whose events I can get to as easily (in fact, often more easily) than my own local party. Get on the mailing lists for your neighbouring local parties and pass on news about their events.

Got any other tips? Please do share them in the comment thread below.

Want to know more about local campaigning? Campaigning In Your Community by myself and Shaun Roberts should be right up your street. It’s available for only £4 from ALDC and you can read an extract for free here.

Previous Campaign Corners have included:

• How do we get more leaflet deliverers?
• What to do on the doorstep
• How to make Focus leaflets looks better

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

As The Observer reports:

Fresh revelations have raised a series of questions about the links between the former Conservative deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft and a company responsible for luxury projects across a string of islands…

Who controlled Johnston International, which won building contracts across the Caribbean worth tens of millions of pounds, has triggered awkward questions for the Tories, and above all for their major donor, Lord Ashcroft.

The Tory peer, who has given the party more than £10m, is spending a small fortune on lawyers and spin doctors to deal with inquiries about his relationship with Johnston, whose interests before it collapsed with debts of $30m stretched across Belize, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago.

The company, and its relationship with politicians in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British overseas territory, plays a central role in a libel action being brought by Ashcroft against the Independent newspaper.

A BBC Panorama investigation, broadcast last Monday, suggested that the Tories’ former deputy chairman had misled the stock market about his links to the firm.

And now an investigation by a court-appointed liquidator into the relationship between Johnston’s parent company, a plethora of interlinked companies and Ashcroft’s British Caribbean Bank (BCB), is raising as many questions as it answers.

You can read about those questions in the full article.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

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 that Friday’s events might occur, Nick Clegg and the media team handled events very calmly and efficiently in the circumstances I thought, with the reshuffle and surrounding media coverage looked after well.

The reshuffle also throws some light on how far Nick Clegg is willing to take his commitment to greater diversity in Liberal Democrat ranks. Both the new entrants to government are women (Jo Swinson and Jenny Willott), but once again the Liberal Democrat Cabinet ranks are solidly male. How much you view that as glass part full or glass mostly empty depends mostly on your expectations I suspect.

It is likely that in addition to joining the government, Jo Swinson will take over as chair of the Federal Policy Committee – the first time a woman has chaired the body. This is a very influential role in the party, particularly when it comes to general election manifestos, and given that the majority of the electorate is female it is perhaps about time that the party had a talented woman in the post. Jo has also got a very good track record at turning potentially dry, abstract policy into effective campaigns which generate media coverage. Assuming she does take up the post, her influence on the policy process will be fascinating to watch – and very positive.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

• Electoral timetable for May’s elections: I’ve recently updated my May 2012 election timetable post with extra details
• Liberal Democrat peers on Twitter: having commented adversely in the past on the lack of communications from many of them, I’ve been hunting out how many are using Twitter. You can find them all in this Twitter list (which is a little more comprehensive than the other lists I’ve come across). Let me know if you spot anyone I’ve missed.
• Liberal Democrat achievements: over on Facebook, I’ve started up a daily posting of a Liberal Democrat achievement in government.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

1. We should adopt a three-election strategy and should plan on that basis that I would probably not be in a position to mount a genuine challenge for the seat until my third attempt. [It took him two rather than three attempts as it turned out.]

2. I would need to stay full-time in the constituency. So I had to get a job locally and could not afford to get distracted by anything other than the single task of winning Yeovil (i.e. I could not afford to allow myself to get interested in national Liberal Party affairs).

3. Our immediate aim at the next election was not to beat the Tories, but to beat Labour. Once we were the clear challengers for the seat, we would be able to squeeze the Labour vote in subsequent elections.

4. Our effort, therefore, should now be not in the rural areas, where we had traditionally concentrated, but in the towns – and especially in the Yeovil estates, where Labour’s traditional vote was based.

5. We needed to build up our base from the bottom, concentrating first on local government elections.

6. We could not rely on any newspapers, either locally or nationally. So we would have to find other means to communicate directly with our electorate if we were to succeed in getting our messages across.

7. We would nevertheless need a strong Press effort – we should aim to get at least one story, with genuine news appeal and about a local issue, into the local Press every week.

8. The national Party’s standing was not very high, so our key messages should be about local service not national politics. What was subsequently to be known as ‘community politics’ would be our battleground.

Taken from Paddy Ashdown, A Fortunate Life.

Some of the steps in his strategy are very specific to particular local circumstances. The general principles are however sound, especially having a political strategy and then shaping your campaigning to fit it, rather than simply campaigning where you are used to working or are comfortable with working. Still very relevant too is the need to make your own channels for getting out news, one which these days involves the internet alongside the traditional printed local Focus newsletters.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

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 to.

1. The Daily Mail is read by 4.6 million people, making it by some margin the most read daily national newspaper. And that’s without even getting into its website, which is now the most popular newspaper website in the world. You can’t be interested in what the media is saying and ignore it.

2. Very large numbers of Liberal Democrat voters read it: around 576,00 Daily Mail readers voted Liberal Democrat in 2010, a number only topped by the 796,000 or so Sun readers who voted Liberal Democrat. That Daily Mail figure is more than the equivalent figures for The Guardian and The Independent put together.

3. The Daily Mail invests heavily in its journalistic resources. Whatever you may think of how they write-up their stories, its journalists frequently break stories due to having the time to do the old-fashioned legwork. Its record in breaking stories about dodgy Labour donations under Gordon Brown was a classic example: the Mail unearthed the story because it sent journalists door-to-door calling on Labour donors until they found something.

4. And then there’s the question of how the stories are written up… In my view, all manner of stories end up being written up in a distorted manner, but you can usually do a reasonable job of extracting the truth from a Mail political story by:

• Ignore the headline: it often exaggerates so much for effect that it doesn’t really match the story.
• Read the first line to get what the story is about, and then read the story from the end upwards: there is often a defence included in the story towards the end which undermines what goes before. Although I’ve read plenty of their stories on political topics which I know about and thought the headline and first-half of the story was distorted, I’ve not (yet) come across one of these where the second-half didn’t provide the explanation as to why the story was wrong.
• Watch out carefully for who is quoted to support the story. The usual structure of the political scandal story is to have a quote from an opposition politician, often calling for an inquiry. There are some, from all parties – such as Vince Cable in the example linked to above – who have a track record of only calling for an inquiry or condemning someone when they have very good grounds to. Then there are others seemingly will happily condemn something based on the merest prod of encouragement from a journalist.

Apply these three tests and you can do pretty well at getting to the truth of a Daily Mail political story. I’ve seen plenty of devastating demolitions of Mail political stories, but those have all been ones where these three tests had warned me already. Of course, one day there’ll be a story that breaks all these rules, and all this leaves aside the question of what stories to choose to run in the first place…

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

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.

Stroud Green ward Councillor Richard Wilson has blogged about how the new powers to create cross-council bodies can be used in those areas where council boundaries chop up natural communities.

Elsewhere in the borough, the Liberal Democrat councillors in Fortis Green are running an online local survey to help put into action the new powers to protect community assets.

There is nothing Haringey-specific about either of these ideas and they will in fact work well in many other places right across the country. So why not take a look and think about adapting them for you area?

The book, by the way, will be sent free to all ALDC members so if you have been thinking of joining ALDC, now is a good time to do so. It is a follow up to the Campaigning in your Community book, already out and available.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

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 are behind ambulance-chasing lawyers encouraging people to put in spurious claims.

As picked up by Kiran Stacey in the FT, the Liberal Democrat peers have tabled amendments to ban law firms from (among other things) sending those annoying unsolicited spam texts and from advertising in hospitals. They also seek to end the reprehensible practice of insurers forcing accident victims to settle for low-level damages without letting them speak to a lawyer, and to protect legitimate routes to justice for genuine accident victims.

There’s a risk the amendments will get squeezed out due to lack of time unless the Lib Dem peers insist on pushing the issue. They should do. It’s an important issue in its own right, the changes will help ensure the legal system is there to help those in need rather than clogged up by profiteers pursuing dodgy claims – and it’s a popular cause with the public to boot.

Here’s hoping tomorrow brings goods news from the Liberal Democrat team in the Lords…

Full disclosure: One of the clients of the company that I work for in my day job, National Accident Helpline, has an interest in these issues.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Now that we have the full set of figures for normal applications (late applications will carry on for some time yet), it is worth returning to the same basic points.

Once you strip out the spike last year and factor in the population decline (the 18 year old population peaked in 2009), the figures show something rather remarkable:

The proportion of English school leavers applying for university places this year is higher than it ever was under Labour, and is the second highest on record (second only to last year’s pre-fees change spike).

It’s worth saying that again, as judging by the initial news reports just about all of the media have missed it:

The proportion of English school leavers applying for university places this year is higher than it ever was under Labour, and is the second highest on record (second only to last year’s pre-fees change spike).

What certainly has dropped is the number of applications from would-be mature students. That is an important (and almost wholly neglected) issue. Against that, on the up side, applications from people from the most deprived backgrounds have held up.

The ironic net effect is that with applications from the most deprived backgrounds holding up, if anything the changes overall have produced a small net improvement in social mobility, albeit via a slightly bizarre back door route. (Stephen Tall has highlighted the evidence from UCAS on this and put together this excellent graph.)

Moreover, what we don’t yet know is how much of the fall in would-be full time mature students is caused by them shifting to applying for part-time courses instead, as they are excluded from these figures. Given that the changes in fee arrangements includes providing tuition fee loans to part time students for the first time, it would be logical to expect some people to shift from full time to part time. It is likely too that the general economic situation is encouraging more people to think about part time rather than full time study to help sustain overall levels of household income. We will need more data to judge that later in the year.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

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

1. Stickers and badges: As Greenwich Liberal Democrats reminded me at the weekend, if you are going out delivering and people see you walking past, it is rather a missed opportunity if they don’t know that the Liberal Democrats have been out and about in person in their area. Not everyone who sees you will see a leaflet later. So make sure everyone has a sticker (or, thinking of the longer term and the environment, a badge).

2. Give people sheets and pens to record casework: if you have a group of people covering a large amount of ground in a short space of time, it is a great opportunity to pick up issues you can then campaign about. Perhaps graffiti is an issue in the area, in which case ending up with a long list of actual graffiti locations means you can take action much more effectively.

3. Give a quick briefing session at the start: how to deliver may be self-evident, but even the most experienced need to know where you are meeting up for a drink or coffee afterwards! The chances are, anyway, that at least one person in the group could pick up a tip such as looking out for the number of meter cupboards and bins to work out how many flats there are in a building and so whether there is likely to be a letterbox  round the back / down the stairs which they have missed.

Got any other tips? Please do share them in the comment thread below.

Want to know more about local campaigning? Campaigning In Your Community by myself and Shaun Roberts should be right up your street. It’s available for only £4 from ALDC and you can read an extract for free here.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

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 unacknowledged in the wider party.

Today it is the turn of Alexi Sugden.

Autumn 1990. Alexi Sugden is sitting at home watching TV. Recently returned after several years working in America, from an apolitical family and uninterested in politics, on hearing the dreaded words “There now follows a party political broadcast…” she gets up to switch off the TV.

Paddy Ashdown starts speaking and she slows her progress across the floor. It becomes a race between Paddy’s words grabbing her attention and her hand reaching for the off switch which Paddy, just, wins. Having reached out for the off switch, her hand falls back, leaving the TV on and Paddy talking. The next day, Alexi joined the Liberal Democrats.

Unlike many people who join the party and then become a campaigner, Alexi was already one. Running an interior design business on the Fulham Road in London, she was already organising her fellow businesspeople against plans to make it a Red Route, stopping customers from parking outside their businesses. The campaign was not only a short-term success, it was a long-term one too for to this day the threatened Red Route has not been introduced.

Seeing her success at leading this campaign, local people then naturally turned to her to help on the next big issue to threaten the area – the future of Charing Cross Hospital which, despite its name, was also located in Fulham Palace Road.

By then Alexi’s community campaigning was overlapping with her Liberal Democrat campaigning. The hospital posters were all yellow diamonds, providing a neat reminder of her political links even whilst having non-partisan content on them which helped the campaign appeal to the widest audience.

As the 1994 council elections neared, with the local party looking to win its first ever council seat, Alexi’s local campaigning approach was a very straight-forward attitude to the basics of electioneering: “we copied the ALDC approach slavishly”.

In this she was aided by the experience in the local party. Despite it not having won any elections since the party’s creation, the turnover of the population in London meant it had several people with experience of winning elsewhere in the country. Crucially, as they saw the local party wanting to take fighting elections seriously, they got involved rather than drifting away in the manner that traps so many badly run local parties who put off the experienced incomers rather than make use of them.

It all came together in May 1994, though not without some alarms on polling day. The Liberal Democrats agent had a proxy vote for a supporter whose wheelchair meant they could not get to the polling station. On going to cast the proxy vote, he was told the person has already voted in person. He went back to check with the woman who was adamant that she had not been able to leave the house all day.

Suspicious that impersonation was going on to block their election, the Liberal Democrat team breathed half a sigh of relief when at the count, the final vote totals saw Alexi elected by a convincing majority. However, her colleague running in the two member ward missed out by just one vote – making those allegations of impersonation crucial. After months of legal wrangling the courts finally ruled in his favour. For several months Alexi was therefore not only the first but also the only Liberal Democrat elected to Hammersmith & Fulham Council, making the usual steep learning curve for new councillors even steeper.

That may have been a blessing in disguise, for the hostility from the massed ranks of the other parties probably encouraged her instincts – to remember to spend as much time on the streets as possible, talking to and helping residents, and not getting lost in a maze of Town Hall meetings and detail.

The demands of her job meant she was only able to stand one term as a councillor. Standing down did not mean stopping contributing to the party, however, with her since twice standing for Parliament in areas of party weakness and also many years helping with London Region’s Candidates Committee.

Having both been a candidate and seen so many other people go through the candidates processes, the central campaigning skill she identifies is that of winning over people. When campaigning you have to “make friends with people … they’ve got to like you first and then they’ll vote for you”. That means not only regular local Focus newsletters to tell people about your campaigns but also going and meeting people in person rather than hiding behind letters and emails. “They’ve got to like you,” insists Alexi.

You can read all the other profiles in this series here.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

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 Liberal Democrat MEPs after they decided to do one thing in the European Parliament election and she then took a different course, the unusual situation of a wife and husband at the top of a list, the memories of the disputes over the previous selection contest (and, in particular, how the news that two candidates were married to each other was kept semi-secret) and – just beginning to pick up in the last few days – the fact that Diana Wallis would have picked up a lump sum on standing down as an MEP even if her partner then took up the very same post.

The absence of similar factors when Chris Huhne or Liz Lynne stood down as MEPs mid-term (or indeed when Louise Bloom or Lynne Featherstone stood down from the London Assembly mid-term) meant that the party’s rules didn’t come under scrutiny or pressure previously.

But when they did in the last week, they were found wanting.

Wanting because the rules said that a selection contest from several years ago should be treated as still relevant. We don’t do that in other selections.

If Nick Clegg were to fall ill, Chris Huhne doesn’t get appointed party leader without a contest. If Gordon Birtwistle were to retire as an MP mid-term, we don’t automatically make the person he beat to win selection the by-election candidate. Yet when an MEP stands down, we recount the votes from several years ago as if nothing had happened in the interim.

There is a simple answer to this: democracy.

The law, quite rightly, says that if an MEP stands down their successor has to come from the list originally put up for election. (Otherwise a party could slip in a controversial completely new candidate by putting up one person in the election and then replacing them with someone else.) But who to choose from that list?

That’s up to the party.

And in the Liberal Democrats, that should be done by balloting party members. What’s more, the knowledge that this could happen would encourage those on Euro lists to keep working in the region. A handy side-effect.

This change would be simple, effective – and can be implemented in time for the next Euro selections.

It could be. It should be.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

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:

Trust is one of the most important assets that a governing institution can posses. Its presence helps to foster democratic participation, economic success and public sector efficiency.

For example, if people don’t trust an institution, they are less likely to think taking part in elections is worthwhile. Trust in varying degrees is required for most economic transactions: do you trust the goods are any good? do you trust the payment won’t bounce? and so on. The more people trust an institution, the easier it is for the institution to get the public to play a productive role, such as by responding to planning applications so that well-informed decisions are made, or by reporting graffiti so that it can be removed quickly.

However, the report argues that relying on improving the quality of local government services is not enough in itself to improve trust in them. Well run councils will be more trusted than badly run ones, but that is not the whole story. Communicating clearly, and developing two-way dialogue with residents, is also needed, as is having decision-making processes that not only produce good results but are seen as going about their business in a fair way.

None of this suggests any radical policy departures from what good Liberal Democrat councillors have been doing for many years, though talking about trust is a concise way of bundling up many of the benefits that a devolved, liberal approach brings.

It is also a good way of testing policies against the often all too tempting siren calls from some council officers for brave and decisive decision-making, when what they really mean is ignoring the public and doing what the officers want. Yes, difficult decisions have to be taken sometimes, and yes, councillors shouldn’t dawdle over making decisions, but pausing to ask whether the decisions taken, and the processes being followed, are ones that will improve or damage trust in the council could save many a councillor from a bad choice.

It is also useful to be reminded how strongly people’s perceptions of the quality of a service are related to their knowledge of it: almost always more information brings better reputations. In particular, the less remote that people feel a council is, the better value for money they feel they get from their council tax.

Where the report is likely to get a more controversial reception amongst Liberal Democrats is in its rather uncritical attitudes towards executive mayors and cabinets. There are numerous ways of describing the motivations for the introduction of mayors and cabinets, and many of those are far from flattering, but the report rather meekly merely describes their introduction as being driven by a desire to improve trust in local government without giving any reference to the controversial genesis of these reforms. With both more powers given to local councils to choose their own structures and also referendums on the introduction of Mayors, the questions of which structure works best and why are once again very relevant.

The report also takes a rather anti-politics attitude towards the role of councillors, warning of those who damage a council’s reputation by constantly criticising it and saying that all councillors – in opposition or not – have a role to play in building up a council’s reputation without any real caveat or justification. Again, it takes one side of a heated debate without even apparently acknowledging that the other side exists, let alone addressing the counter-points. Is it really the job of opposition councillors to build up the council, or is it to hold the council to close scrutiny, using criticism to get improvements and offering the public a clear choice by presenting an alternative vision for how things should be done?

Finally, there is also tucked away within the report a morsel of hope for the overall standing of politics in the public’s eyes. Trust in doctors is currently at historically very high levels. Yet when you consider all the challenges that doctors face – such as the regular whipped up health scares that undermine confidence in modern medicine, the heavy media coverage of doctors who go bad or even kill, the pressures on their time and the restrictions on what health treatments they can prescribe – it would in fact be very easy to excuse away falling levels of trust in doctors. If despite all these hurdles, doctors have managed to improve trust, why shouldn’t those involved in politics be able to do the same?

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.