Tag Archives: robin cook

In other news… electoral reform, bribery, sexy IT and paperwork problems

By Mark Pack | Wed 30th March 2011 - 11:08 pm

Will Straw has rightly taken the Conservative Party’s Baroness Warsi to task for not only trying to whip up fake scares about AV benefiting the BNP (who are actually against AV) but also for claiming that AV may make politicians try to appeal to the supporters of extremist parties when in fact her very own election literature did just that.

Ken Clarke is pushing on with implementing the Bribery Act – despite claims from Labour earlier in the year that the government could be about to delay implementing the Act indefinitely.

A Whitehall IT chief has admitted that, “Labour …

Posted in News | Also tagged av referendum, bribery act, ken clarke, sayeeda warsi and will straw | 2 Comments

The plans to cut election expenses may be dead but there are still lessons to learn

By Mark Pack | Sun 1st November 2009 - 1:49 pm

Blink and you might have missed it: first details of a discussion about ways to cut the costs of running elections are leaked and then Jack Straw promptly disowns them and kills off the discussion.

Given how weak the proposals were – and the relatively small sums involved – I think that was the right decision by Straw and, although he and Liberal Democrats are usually not the best of friends, I think there’ll be widespread agreement in the Lib Dems with his comment, “Democracy has to be paid for”. Ideas such as replacing the general election freepost leaflets with one booklet would go quite against the current appetitie from the public to hear more from individual candidates about what the believe and what they want to do.

There are, though, three lessons to learn from the ideas that were floated.

Posted in Election law and Op-eds | Also tagged electoral commission, jack straw and turnout | 8 Comments