Tag Archives: mark valladares

Welcome to our new volunteer editors!

By Stephen Tall | Published 20th December 2011 - 7:23 am

Liberal Democrat Voice has always aimed to be ‘Our place to talk’, a site primarily for Lib Dem members to discuss and debate. We welcome readers’ contributions, whether financial (hem-hem) or intellectual.

Building and maintaining a site like this, with fresh news and opinion day-in-day-out, is a labour of love. We are therefore delighted to be able to welcome a clutch of new day editors to afforce the Voice Collective:

All have volunteered to do an occasional turn here at LibDemVoice.org (while continuing their own sites)… so don’t be surprised to see …

Posted in Site news | Also tagged caron lindsay, nick thornsby, paul walter, prateek buch | Leave a comment

Chris White writes: Approving Police Commissioner candidates

By Chris White | Published 16th July 2011 - 8:55 am

Readers of LDV will have noticed that there is an announcement about Police Commissioner candidates – presumably placed by the English Party.

Of course, none of us want these elections (and most councillors in other parties don’t either) but it’s in the Coalition agreement and so we are to an extent stuck with a particularly silly bit of the Tory manifesto. Such, I guess, is the nature of Coalitions.

What is troubling, however, is the fact that the English Party has decided to play the centralist card: candidates need in essence to be approved like parliamentary candidates.

One of the main …

Posted in Op-eds, Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged elected police commissioners, english party, policing | 14 Comments

Ten ways to make your local party AGM better

By Mark Pack | Published 27th June 2011 - 8:20 am

At the weekend Mark Valladares rightly pointed out that now is a good time for local parties to start thinking about their autumn AGMs. AGMs are important not only for their role in party democracy and accountability but also for the role in having a lively, healthy local party that does politics, campaigning and socialising.

Here are my ten top tips to make an AGM (or indeed pretty much any local party meeting or event) a success. Individually, each of them are pretty straight-forward but the collective impact can make a huge difference to how well a local party does …

Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged agms | 5 Comments

Lords reform: the Liberal Democrat trio announced

By Mark Pack | Published 6th June 2011 - 7:23 am

Over the weekend Mark Valladares blogged about the three Liberal Democrats being appointed to the Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament carrying out pre-legislative scrutiny committee on Lords reform:

From the Lords, representing the constitutional wonk tendency (in a good way), Lord Tyler is the first of the two nominees. Paul has been leading calls for a complete overhaul of the Second Chamber for a very long time and is one of the Party’s foremost constitutional experts…

From the Commons, that rather unusual beast, a former member of the House of Lords, John Thurso. As he has already been abolished once,

…

Posted in News | Also tagged constitutional reform, david steel, house of lords, john thurso, lords reform, paddy ashdown, paul tyler, paul walter, ros scott | 12 Comments

Learning the lessons from last week #5: You can’t be distinctive with someone else’s vocabulary

By Mark Pack | Published 13th May 2011 - 8:58 am

A favourite pastime of cynical journalists with space to fill is to take select phrases from the speeches of different party leaders, remove the names of the authors, jumble up the order and then ask the reader to guess which leader said which. Even with the wondrous variety of the English language, it’s no surprise that words and phrases often overlap, even between politicians with radically different views of the world. There is, even so, sometimes a deeper truth in this parlour game for cynics.

It’s a truth that the words of Liberal Democrats in the run up to last Thursday’s …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged community politics, jonathan calder | 5 Comments

The VAT rise: a refresher course for Labour

By Stephen Tall | Published 4th January 2011 - 1:58 pm

Today’s increase in VAT from 17.5% to 20% — announced in the Coalition’s emergency budget last year — has triggered a fresh burst of ~~opportunism~~ criticism from Labour. The “wrong tax at the wrong time” claims their leader Ed Miliband.

How Labour’s last Chancellor backed a VAT rise

I suspect there’s a Labour MP we won’t be hearing from today, though: Alistair Darling*, Chancellor until the party’s defeat in May. As Mark Pack noted here last July, Mr Darling was a strong advocate of increasing the rate of VAT in order to tackle the UK’s massive deficit, with The …

Posted in News | Also tagged michael gladwell, nick hollinmghurst, vat, vince cable | 89 Comments

Our new year signing: Mark Valladares

By Mark Pack | Published 27th December 2010 - 8:55 am

In the new year Mark Valladares, of Liberal Bureaucracy and a sometime contributor to this site, will be starting up a regular fortnightly guest piece for The Voice concentrating on letting members know what party bodies are getting up to in their name and how they can influence their decisions.

If there’s any particular topic you’d like Mark to cover, just pop up a comment below…

Posted in Site news | 10 Comments

Paul Walter to guest edit Liberal Democrat Voice tomorrow

By Mark Pack | Published 29th October 2010 - 2:50 pm

Tomorrow we’ve got our fourth guest editor running the site for a day, Newbury blogger Paul Walter. He follows Caron Lindsay, Mark Valladares and Linda Jack.

Paul’s got a great set of guest posts lined up already, so do pop back tomorrow to take a read.

This is the last of our little run of experiments with guest editors so if you’ve got any views on how it has gone and whether we should do something similar in future, please comment below.

Posted in Site news | Also tagged caron lindsay, guest editor, linda jack, paul walter | Leave a comment

Presidential prospects, passionate debate and poll confidence – a day of inspiration, optimism and hope

By Caron Lindsay | Published 14th October 2010 - 8:55 am

Mark Valladares, who was the first guest editor to be let loose on this hallowed site, was sober at the time he agreed to it. I can’t say the same, but if Dr Pack will insist on asking for volunteers very late on a Friday night, then he probably deserves everything he gets.

When Mark offered me a day this week, its proximity to our first Scottish Conference was too opportune to turn down.

Normally Autumn Scottish Conference is an earnest but modest gathering. This year’s was keenly anticipated, though. How would we adjust to being part of a Westminster Government with …

Posted in Site news | Also tagged guest editor | 3 Comments

Caron Lindsay to guest edit Liberal Democrat Voice tomorrow

By Mark Pack | Published 13th October 2010 - 6:25 pm

Tomorrow we’ve got a new guest editor running the site for a day, Scottish Lib Dem blogger Caron Lindsay. She’s the third in our series of guest editors, following Mark Valladares and Linda Jack.

I’m really looking forward to reading the posts Caron’s already talked about having ready to publish. Do come back tomorrow and see how Caron adds a different perspective and touch from the usual on here.

We have a couple more guest slots lined up later this year already but if anyone else would like to be a guest editor for the day, please drop an …

Posted in Site news | Also tagged caron lindsay, guest editor, linda jack | 4 Comments

Guest editors on The Voice

By Mark Pack | Published 24th July 2010 - 2:20 pm

Many thanks to Mark Valladares, who this week was the first in a series of guest editors. They will be running this site for a day each over the next few months.

As Mark demonstrated so well, having a guest editor can give the site something new; in his case a very pertinent theme for the day and a range of new contributors.

If anyone else would like to be a guest editor for the day, please drop an email to with some details of your blogging or editing experience.

Posted in Site news | Also tagged guest editor | Leave a comment

Pay attention, there’s more than one Parliament, you know!

By Mark Valladares | Published 22nd July 2010 - 7:40 am

One of things that has bothered me for longer than I care to remember is the Party’s fixation on the green benches at the north end of the Palace of Westminster, almost to the total exclusion of anything, and everything, else. As a bureaucrat deep within the Party’s structures, I long for the day when more and better people come forward to be Local, Regional and State Party officers, candidate assessors, returning officers and trainers. But we bureaucrats are not alone in being overlooked in favour of the Commons…

Down the corridor, there are seventy-nine Liberal Democrat Peers (with Richard …

Posted in Parliament | Also tagged guest editor, house of lords, liberal democrat peers | 4 Comments

Today’s guest editor, in his own words…

By Mark Valladares | Published 22nd July 2010 - 12:05 am

When the inestimable Mark Pack wrote to a number of bloggers looking for volunteers to guest edit Liberal Democrat Voice for a day, there was an initial chorus of ‘sounds interesting, get back to me when I’m sober’. My response was:

I, on the other hand, am sober. Sober enough to realise that Mark’s offer might not suit my particular skill set. Unless, of course, you want a day enriched by constitutional and organisational minutiae…

Back came the response;

“Thanks for offering to guest edit Lib Dem Voice for a day. Would a day in the week of Sat 17 July – …

Posted in Site news | Also tagged claret, guest editor, minutiae (organisational) | 6 Comments

Hames, Swinson to wed

By Alex Foster | Published 20th June 2010 - 9:13 am

I had hoped not to write this story immediately after the last, less happy one, but sometimes, them’s the breaks.

Not since Baroness Scott and the Lib Dem’s bureaucrat of choice Mark Valladeres changed their facebook statuses to “engaged” has the Lib Dem online world been so charged with romance.

Now Jo Swinson and Duncan Hames used the medium of Twitter to tell the world of their engagement, to cheers of encouragement all round.

Every congratulation and wish for happiness from all your friends at t’Voice.

Posted in News | Also tagged duncan hames, engagement, jo swinson, ros scott, twitter | 8 Comments

Can the surge last? Lib Dem bloggers give their views …

By The Voice | Published 20th April 2010 - 2:35 pm

Lib Dems leading the election race, and polling above 30% – that’s not a line (m)any of us expected to be able to type with a straight face. But it’s the present reality. The questions is: can the Lib Dem surge last? Here’s what a handful of Lib Dem bloggers think …

James Graham

Anyone who claims to know what will happen electorally next month simply doesn’t know what they are talking about. But there are a number of reasons to suggest that the Liberal Democrats’ poll leap over the weekend might last.

Firstly, polls tend to be mutually reinforcing. This is why some countries ban them during election time. The same factor which has reinforced the Lib Dems’ image as no-hopers in the past might well work in our favour now, especially since it is such a dramatic development.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged james graham, mark thompson, stephen tall | 49 Comments

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