Author Archives: Alex Foster

Alex Foster is a former Lib Dem councillor in Nottingham and has been a party staffer working in the constituency offices of MPs and MEPs in the East Midlands. He is Lib Dem Voice's bursar and likes to create podcasts.

Read Lib Dem Voice on your Amazon Kindle

By Alex Foster | Published 22nd September 2011 - 3:05 pm

Did you know you can subscribe to Lib Dem Voice using Amazon’s Kindle service? You can do so either on their Kindle device or using their apps for iPhone, Android, Mac or PC.

The link to Lib Dem Voice on Amazon is here. It will set you back a modest £1.99 a month.

Of course, if you think the content we produce here is worth £2 a month, and you don’t have a Kindle, you are more than welcome to cut out the middle-person and donate it to us directly by standing order.

You can also donate money to us indirectly by using any …

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Liberal Drinks / #tweetup at #ldconf

By Alex Foster | Published 6th September 2011 - 2:32 pm

LibDemVoice have for the last few years nominated a time and a place for an informal drink and meet-up for internetty Lib Dems to let their hair down and have a chat.

This time around, we weren’t quite fleet enough of foot to get any such event in the conference directory, so we will have to rely on word of mouth helping to spread the details.

After a quick chat on the topic in Lib Dem Voice’s private members’ forum, we settled on meeting at the Wellington pub, a short distance from the conference centre itself, on the Monday night of the conference week. Kickoff will be around 7.30pm.

If you’d like to come along, why not click here to let your twitter friends know.

In addition, Lib Dem Voice have our usual strong presence at the conference, with the following events planned:

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Posted in Conference, Events | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Read Lib Dem Voice on your Amazon Kindle

By Alex Foster | Published 20th August 2011 - 3:04 pm

Did you know you can subscribe to Lib Dem Voice using Amazon’s Kindle service? You can do so either on their Kindle device or using their apps for iPhone, Android, Mac or PC.

The link to Lib Dem Voice on Amazon is here. It will set you back a modest £1.99 a month.

Of course, if you think the content we produce here is worth £2 a month, and you don’t have a Kindle, you are more than welcome to cut out the middle-person and donate it to us directly by standing order.

You can also donate money to us indirectly by using any …

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Posted in Site news | Tagged | 3 Comments

Cross-party smackdown for Home Secretary

By Alex Foster | Published 18th August 2011 - 5:32 pm

A tweet crosses my desk from Cllr Kemp, itself a retweet from LGCPlus journalist Ruth Keeling. It contains a link to the Association of Police Authorities – not a body I am overly familiar with, but it has a fairly self-explanatory title.

The link is directly to a fairly draw-dropping cross-party letter from chairs of Police Authorities around the country who have a fairly serious beef with the Home Secretary’s accuracy in a recent speech.

Theresa May appears to have tried to shore up support for the Conservative policy of elected police commissioners by insinuating that in London, taxpayers got a better service from the elected police chief (and Mayor) Boris Johnson, than in other parts of the country where there are indirectly elected Chairs of Police Authorities instead.

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Posted in News | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

80 dead in Norway shootings

By Alex Foster | Published 23rd July 2011 - 3:33 am

I’ve been keeping late hours baking but as I was getting ready to turn in, the news began breaking about the extent of the awfulness in Norway. As I write, 80 are confirmed dead at a summer camp for youth members of Norway’s ruling Labour party.

It’s terrible, terrible news, all the more vivid for me for the thought that this meeting must have been a similar sort of thing to the dozens run by our own party over the years. None of us would ever have considered Activate, or a Liberal Youth meeting a target for such an atrocity. …

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Posted in Europe / International | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

PODCAST: A forgotten liberal hero

By Alex Foster | Published 22nd July 2011 - 1:17 pm

In June, Mark Pack addressed the Liberal History Group‘s summer meeting on the topic of Forgotten Heroes for a Governing Party.  Further details of the event can be found here.

And who was Dr Pack’s choice? You will have to listen to find out.

PS don’t check the tags

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Read Lib Dem Voice on your Amazon Kindle

By Alex Foster | Published 17th July 2011 - 3:02 pm

Did you know you can subscribe to Lib Dem Voice using Amazon’s Kindle service? You can do so either on their Kindle device or using their apps for iPhone, Android, Mac or PC.

The link to Lib Dem Voice on Amazon is here. It will set you back a modest £1.99 a month.

Of course, if you think the content we produce here is worth £2 a month, and you don’t have a Kindle, you are more than welcome to cut out the middle-person and donate it to us directly by standing order.

You can also donate money to us indirectly by using any …

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Is John Healey as dumb as a bag of spanners?

By Alex Foster | Published 15th July 2011 - 2:51 pm

In the grand scheme of things, not a lot of people know the rules MPs are subject to when it comes to using parliamentary stationery.

If you were an MP with a boatload of postage-paid envelopes, you could probably abuse them with impunity, and send them out unsolicited to 95% of your constituents without getting any redress.

But there is one group of people who are much more likely to know the rules: people who work in politics. A subset of those are councillors. And if you are really keen on getting shopped to the House authorities, who best to …

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Posted in Parliament | Tagged | 7 Comments

Opinion: Gay blood donation ban to be lifted – well, barely

By Alex Foster | Published 11th April 2011 - 2:51 pm

The news broke over the weekend that an announcement is imminent on the policy surrounding the lifetime ban on donating blood for any man who has ever had sex with another man.

The writing on the wall appears to be that gay men who have not had sex for a decade might in future be allowed to give blood.

This decision was the likely outcome of the scientific review into blood donation, when I researched the issue for an op-ed slot on Pod Delusion live. It was one of the things I mocked in front of a live pub audience. …

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Posted in News, Op-eds | Tagged , | 15 Comments

PODCAST: How do the government’s political reforms measure up to the Great Reform Act?

By Alex Foster | Published 3rd April 2011 - 5:15 pm

Soon after becoming Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg promised “the most significant programmes of reform by a British government since the 19th century…. the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832.” But how do the Coalition government’s constitutional changes actually compare to the changes brought in by the Great Reform Bill of 1832?

That question was addressed by a meeting organised by the Liberal Democrat History Group earlier this year, with speakers our own Dr Mark Pack (who studied nineteenth century elections and electoral reform for his PhD) and the History of Parliament Trust’s Dr Philip Salmon. Here now for those …

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Posted in Podcasts | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Read LDV on your Amazon Kindle

By Alex Foster | Published 28th March 2011 - 6:29 pm

Just a quick reminder that you can subscribe to Lib Dem Voice using Amazon’s Kindle service – either on their Kindle device or using their apps for iPhone, Android, Mac or PC.

The link to Lib Dem Voice on Amazon is here. It will set you back a modest £1.99 a month.

Of course, if you think the content we produce here is worth £2 a month, and you don’t have a Kindle, you are more than welcome to cut out the middle-person and donate it to us directly by standing order.

You can also donate money to …

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Roundup – Conference on LibDemVoice

By Alex Foster | Published 13th March 2011 - 5:33 pm

A quick summary post to give you a full list of everything we produced during Spring Conference 2011 in Sheffield.

Posts

…

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PODCAST: Who controls the internet?

By Alex Foster | Published 13th March 2011 - 3:45 pm

Here is a full podcast of our fringe last night, “Who controls the internet?”

Libel law reform campaigner and former MP Evan Harris, website pioneer Mary Reid, James Blessing of the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) and Jim Killock of the digital rights champions Open Rights Group debate recent issues about free speech and the internet with chair Mark Pack.

Posted in Conference, Podcasts | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

PODCAST: Diversity debate in full

By Alex Foster | Published 13th March 2011 - 2:51 pm

Following overwhelming demand from our twitter colleagues, we are now publishing in full the debate we had yesterday on diversifying our elected representatives.

You can find my written review of the debate here.

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PODCAST: Nick Clegg’s speech in full

By Alex Foster | Published 13th March 2011 - 2:00 pm

After a few minutes amplifying and chopping stuff off the beginning and end, and then many more minutes uploading large files to the internet, we can now bring you the audio recording of Nick Clegg’s conference speech.

You can play it by scrolling down and clicking the “play in another window” link.

And if you’d like to CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY, you will also find the published text here.

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