Author Archives: Mark Pack

This week’s Conservative Party Political Broadcast (PPB) featured a builder talking about how his firm is struggling due to the recession. However, it turns out he went bankrupt in 2006, at the height of the building boom:

Shane Prescott starred in the Conservative party broadcast on Thursday, claiming his business had struggled because of the recession.

But Companies House records show the 51-year-old father-of-four’s loft conversion firm actually went into liquidation at the height of the boom in 2006.

It is believed when his business went into liquidation he owed £240,000 to creditors and £174,000 to Revenue and Customs.

He was used in a

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Although I’m not exactly a stranger to writing about US elections, I do generally feel that they get too much attention compared with those of other countries. Canadian, Australian and New Zealand elections all potentially provide many campaigning lessons, have the convenience of being heavily covered online in those countries in the English language, and indeed are really better prospects for lessons for the UK as their electoral and political systems are much more similar to Britain’s than America’s is.

So in order to redress the balance a little, here’s a pointer to a controversial Canadian election which, I suspect, had …

From Liberal England comes the frankly bizarre story of a Conservative councillor (yes, a Conservative councillor – you know, the unionist party) who has resigned over links with the IRA. Read on.

The newly published Thrasher & Rallings analysis of May’s local election results once again gives a breakdown of candidates and councillors by gender.

Here they are, with 2007’s figures in brackets:

31% (30%) of Conservative candidates were female
31% (30%) of Labour candidates were female
34% (34) of Liberal Democrat candidates were female

“28-29%” (29%) of Conservative councillors are female
“28-29%” (31%) of Labour councillors are female
“A third” (34%) of Liberal Democrats councillors are female

They conclude that:

The proportion of men and women candidates contesting local elections now appears fixed in the ratio 2:1 and the rapid rise in women candidates during the second half of the

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Yesterday Jenny Willott appeared on the BBC talking about figures unearthed by the Liberal Democrats showing that the number of people on low-incomes applying for “Crisis Loans” has jumped by over 40% in the past year.

Click on the screenshot to watch her interview via the BBC website:

As sure as night follows day, just as I warned to prepare for a round of misreporting of party debts, the Press Association’s piece gets the party figures for debt wrong and reports them as being higher than they really are (by counting as debt unused credit facilities).