Welcome to the Sunday outing for The Voice’s new daily post series highlighting two big stories from the media and two “must read” blog posts from Liberal Democrats. As it’s a Sunday, there’s also a bonus extra supplement. If you spot anything for future posts, do let us know on

2 Big Stories

MPs’ expenses
Heading into its third week, the MPs’ expense story shows no sign of abating. The latest scalp is that of Andrew MacKay, again. The story has been running for so long that not only was he one of its first victims (losing his Conservative Party job) but …

Yesterday’s Observer reported that one of the Lib Dems’ bigger donors, Sudhir Choudhrie, faces allegations of “accepting tens of millions of pounds in kickbacks from an arms deal between an Israeli company and the Indian government”:

Sudhir Choudhrie, who has personally donated £95,000 to the party and whose relatives’ companies have donated a further £475,000, was named as a key arms broker in foreign reports. … This is the second time that Choudhrie, 59, has been accused of being paid an illegal commission from a major arms deal in India. The allegations are said to be politically motivated, and to

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At our autumn conference last year, this blog introduced a reluctant world to the concept of hashtags. We coined a cumbersome phrase, “hashtag taxonomy” which has dogged us around the political and technical worlds ever since.

By the end of the conference week, I was regretting the phrase utterly. We’d made a simple technology sound complicated, and in doing so had hidden its value from many people who could benefit.

That bad taste in the mouth was extant up until the start of our Spring conference – and brought home to me once more in the words of our founding editor:

A little jealous of #labour20 – if LibDems attempted similar one-day conf the whole day would be spent giggling about “hashtag taxonomies”

From my dimly remembered German degree, Heideggerian terminology has two terms for tools: Zuhanden and Vorhanden. Vorhanden is when something is strange and new. You can see it, but you’re not sure how it works or what it does. It’s that strange feeling when you are learning to drive of a number of controls in front of you, and no sense of how to use them. But once you have been driving for a while, the car becomes Zuhanden: a tool so familiar that you use it without a second thought. It fits your hand comfortably and has become a part of you, not a separate, strange tool.

And that’s exactly what happened with hashtags and twitter at Spring conference.

Helen Duffett announced before Spring conference began that there would be one hashtag for all future Lib Dem conferences:

#ldconf is the hashtag we’ve adopted for this, and all Liberal Democrat Federal conferences. All tweets with this tag can be viewed together at sites like Twitter Search. It’s handy to bookmark the address and refer back to it to see the story developing, through the contributions of many people.

That last sentence of advice proved truer than I guessed. For when conference got underway, we were staggered at the extent to which people were availing themselves of the service. A brief calculation while I write this suggests that there very nearly 1,000 individual messages.

There has been a big increase in the use of Twitter in recent months, fuelled mostly by newspaper reports of celebrities such as Stephen Fry using the service to keep in touch with their fans. One of the clearest indications of just how many people are joining in is related to Fry: at the start of 2009, he launched a competition to celebrate 50,000 followers. Before the competition concluded just days later, he had over 100,000. Although not on that scale, this week both I and @libdemvoice breached the 200 followers mark.

As a result, there’s a wider community of people to talk to each other on twitter, and this weekend, using the hashtag, that’s precisely what they did. The previously strange technology is now so zuhanden that dozens of people used the hashtag during the conference, generating hundreds and hundreds of short messages. The hashtag even “trended” – that is to say it became so popular that it was amongst the most widely used tags in the world.

Over at the Channel 4 News politics website, Lib Dem blogger James Graham gives his brief take on the latest YouGov poll of Conservative-Labour marginals showing Labour on 36% (-2% since Oct ‘08), the Tories on 43% (n/c) and the Lib Dems at 13% (+1%). Here’s an excerpt:

This poll tells us nothing about how the Lib Dems might be doing in terms of seats because of the constituencies chosen, but nonetheless it does give us some idea about how the party is doing in terms of fighting the ‘air war’. The headline figures show a small, albeit statistically insignificant,

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Anyone from any political persuasion can list things this Government has done that annoy them.

Personally, I was annoyed enough to join millions of others on the march against the war in Iraq – now it’s time to hold them to account.

I’m not so sure how I will react if and when I get the orders from the Government to present myself at the interrogation centre in nearby Derby and hand over more personal information than is currently demanded from sex offenders.  I’m not certain I’m ready to join Simon Hughes in jail for refusing an ID card.

I’ve never …

Welcome to the 95th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (14th-20th December), together with a hand-picked quintet, mostly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

‘Tis the season of tradition, so let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down.

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog yesterday, James Graham gave one cheer to Nick Clegg’s recent Why I am a Liberal speech, but urged the party to develop a much stronger response to the new recession politics. Read it in full here, but here’s the conclusion:

At a time when the Department for Work and Pensions is to be put under renewed pressure, limiting talk of social justice to tax cuts is unconvincing. What’s worse, it is clearly failing to win people over. Today’s ICM poll may show us slightly up, but over the past year the trend

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Welcome to the 95th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (7th-13th December), together with a hand-picked quintet, mostly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

‘Tis the season of tradition, so let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has emailed party members today to publicise Saturday’s National Climate Change March in London (email reproduced below).

Hashtag fans like me particularly liked the PS: Nick is encouraging participants to use the hashtag #climatemarch on Twitter and Flickr. As far as I know, Nick Clegg is the first British politician to promote the use of hashtags.

Whilst it’s a powerful thing for thousands of people to join together in one place and show their solidarity for a cause, this is a way for individuals to give their own report on events. Tweets bearing the …

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog, James Graham takes a frank and forthright look at the unguarded remarks allegedly uttered by Nick Clegg within the hearing of a Mirror journalist. Read it in full here, but here’s the conclusion:

The generous interpretation is that Clegg, like both Kennedy and Ashdown before him, needs to fight a general election before he can expect to acquire a decent public profile. Broadly speaking, I happen to still believe that. But while Clegg, the odd blip aside, isn’t the liability his opponents might wish him to be, thus far he has

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Welcome to the 93rd of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (23rd-29th November), together with a hand-picked quintet, mostly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

There’s no doubt which tragic story has been dominating Lib Dem blogs this last week: the untimely death of Neil Trafford, a friend and colleague to many in the party throughout the country.

Welcome to the 92nd of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (16th-22nd November), together with a hand-picked quintet, mostly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

How about starting with the most popular blog-posting, and we work our way down? Here goes…

Nick Clegg has been interviewed by Steve Richards for this Sunday’s GMTV, as Chris Huhne was last week.

I’ve been sent the full transcript, and it looks, on first reading, like the first real stumble by Nick in his campaign so far. Judge for yourselves below, as I’ve filleted some of the key passages. Of course, what won’t come across when you read it is Nick’s emphasis or body language – which might make his meaning clearer, and his performance more impressive. After all, politicians are judged not just by what they say, but also how they say it.

The real question, as James Graham has already noted in his preview, is why Nick didn’t have a much clearer answer ready for the obvious question, ‘How do you pay for your pupil premium?’ Because ‘Er, yes, there’s a black hole’ just ain’t good enough.

Other issues covered below include:

- whether he was attacking Chris Huhne by saying the party needed to communicate better its ‘green tax switch’ proposals;
- whether the campaign has got nasty; and
- is he going to win the contest?

Also covered in the full interview – this Sunday, 9 am – are questions to Nick about the Government’s proposals for increasing the number of days suspects can be detained without charge, and on a referendum for the European Reform Treaty.

Interview transcript extracts follow: