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.

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 …

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Posted in News | Tagged , , , | 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?

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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 …

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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 …

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Tagged , | 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:

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Posted in Local government | Tagged , | 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 …

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

Can polling station location alter how people vote?

By Mark Pack | Published 26th January 2012 - 9:55 am

I’ve written before about how the number and location of polling stations has an impact on turnout, but what about the candidate choices people make when they are in a polling station?

A new academic study of 99 people suggests the choice of building for a polling station can have an impact on people’s political outlooks:

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Posted in Election law, What do the academics say? | Tagged | 16 Comments

Nick Clegg returns to income tax

By Mark Pack | Published 26th January 2012 - 7:34 am

Later this morning, Nick Clegg will be giving a speech to the Resolution Foundation (word cloud here) in which, after recent talk about wealth taxes, he is returning to the topic of income tax cuts. More specifically, speeding up the progress towards a basic income tax allowance of £10,000 whilst keeping the 50p rate.

This is of course closely linked to wealth taxes as they are a way to raise the funds to pay for the income tax cuts.

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Posted in News | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Official rebukes Iain Duncan Smith over immigration figures (mis)use

By Mark Pack | Published 25th January 2012 - 7:04 pm

The BBC reports:

The UK’s statistics watchdog has rebuked a minister over his handling of controversial figures on benefits claimed by immigrants.

Sir Michael Scholar, head of the UK Statistics Authority, has written to Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, questioning the way he released the figures almost week ago.

He highlighted that the figures were presented to the public as if they were official figures but in fact had not been through the rigorous and impartial process for publishing such numbers:

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Posted in News | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Ashdown, Glover and Williams on the party’s history

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

The latest edition of the Journal of Liberal History caries this account from me of the conference meeting which launched the new history of the party, Peace, Reform and Liberation. You can watch the meeting in full here.

It would be a brave person who walked up to Paddy Ashdown or Shirley Williams and told them to their face that they are history, or even old, but they are two of the most charismatic, interesting and thoughtful members of the living history class – people who have been around in politics long enough to be able to talk at first …

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Posted in News | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Campaign Corner: What makes for a good action photograph?

By Mark Pack | Published 23rd January 2012 - 2:50 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: I saw you talk about the importance of (captioned!) photos in leaflets, but what makes for a good photo?

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Andrew Marr bids for record-breaking number of different topics in one interview

By Mark Pack | Published 22nd January 2012 - 11:15 am

I wonder if somewhere deep in the BBC there is a target for how many different topics must be asked about in political interviews each month and someone woke up this morning to realise that January’s quota is about to be missed. Or perhaps there was a typo in Andrew Marr’s contract and his BBC salary is based on number of topics covered rather than number of minutes of screentime filled.

Whatever the reason, this morning’s interview with Nick Clegg saw a helter skelter tour around a huge number of topics, making for a  comprehensive tour of current political issues but …

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Posted in News | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Should Police Commissioner candidates get election addresses?

By Mark Pack | Published 21st January 2012 - 2:25 pm

The Electoral Commission’s Peter Wardle last week gave a speech to local government Chief Executives, during which he made this point about election addresses:

The constituencies in the PCC [Police and Crime Commissioner] elections are big, with over a million voters in some cases. There’s currently no provision for candidates to have Freepost facilities to deliver their election addresses to voters. Nor is there a provision for any sort of booklet for voters that would include candidates’ election addresses. Alongside the PCC elections, of course, there may well be elections for Mayors in the larger English cities. And candidates for Mayor will, on current plans, be

…

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Posted in Election law | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Ken Livingstone attacks Boris Johnson for, er…, agreeing with Ken Livingstone

By Mark Pack | Published 21st January 2012 - 8:55 am

Ken Livingstone has me a bit confused.

Hearing him attack Boris Johnson is certainly not a surprise.

But hearing him attack Boris Johnson for saying what Ken Livingstone himself said previously? That’s a bit odd, shall we say.

Compare and contrast now and then.

The now:

Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone were engulfed in a war of words today over whether Londoners are too “lazy” to find work. The Mayor claimed some young people in the capital lacked the “energy” to go out and get jobs which were instead going to immigrants. His Labour challenger Ken Livingstone immediately accused him of branding Londoners “lazy and workshy”.

And …

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Posted in London, Opposition watch | Tagged , | 3 Comments

How should Diana Wallis be replaced?

By Mark Pack | Published 19th January 2012 - 11:22 pm

A question for Liberal Democrat members to mull… Under the law used for regional list elections, the decision over who should take over following Diana Wallis’s resignation as an MEP is up to the party (technically, the party’s Nominating Officer).

The general assumption in the past has been that if a list member stands down, it is whoever would have got their place on the list that takes over. That is the process followed in the past, such as in deciding Liz Lynne’s replacement as an MEP on her retirement or Lynne Featherstone’s replacement as a GLA member on her election …

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Tagged , , | 54 Comments