Author Archives: Mark Pack

Ming Campbell’s verdict on the budget:

“The big increase in taxation is a doubling of the starting rate of income tax rate. The income tax changes announced in the budget will mean that anyone earning less than around £15,000 will pay more in income tax.”

You can read more on the Liberal Democrat website.

Yesterday Susan Kramer MP and others presented the latest batch of Liberal Democrat ‘save our post offices’ petitions to 10 Downing Street:

The Liberal Democrat petition is online at www.libdems.org.uk/postoffices

As Sarah Ludford MEP has discovered, Labour Home Secretaries only bother to turn up to one in three meetings of the key European Justice and Home Affairs Council, whilst their German equivalents turn up more than nine times in ten.

Sad news of the death of another long-standing Liberal and then Liberal Democrat activist – Hugh Warren. For many years no Lib Dem by-election campaign has seemed complete until (a) Erlend was printing leaflets on the RISO and (b) Hugh had turned up to deliver them. I was amazed to discover that he was 89 when he died; his ability to keep going delivering leaflets put many people decardes younger than him to shame.

The don’t know where prisoners are. They don’t know who has committed major crimes. Oh and they don’t know what data they’ve got.

You can watch this update from Steve Webb about the consultation for the next Liberal Democrat (Westminster election) manifesto:

Party members can take part in the consultation at manifesto.libdems.org.uk

Buried at the end of today’s report in The Independent about the cash for honours police investigation is this paragraph:

A senior figure close to the probe said the issue of whether both main political parties broke the law by hiding donations as “loans” was still “live”.

The Conservatives have quite a lot of form on, shall we say, dancing around the rules about declaring donations and have been keeping the police and regulators very busy with a series of wheezes.

They includes taking large loans and then doing their best to keep them secret, taking money from foreign firms with only

…

Ming will be doing a Q+A session with Friends of the Earth after a special screening of Al Gore’s film about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. It’s on 19th March in central London; tickets £5. See FlockTogether for more details.

Note: if you buy the DVD from Amazon via this link, the Liberal Democrats earn a commission.

a) Patrick Mercer quits as a front-bencher because of his comments about black soldiers.

b) David Mundell‘s comments about Tory MSPs (in brief: they’re crap) are leaked.

Oh dear.

A new report from the National Audit Office has heavily criticised private finance initiative (PFI) deals – heavily pushed by Gordon “prudence” Brown – for wasting millions in public money.

This might be the answer.

The chairman of Malvern District Council, formerly an independent, has joined the Liberal Democrats. This balances out a switch away from the Liberal Democrats of another councillor the week before.

More details on the local paper’s website.

Hat tip: Liberal Review.

It’s been a bad, bad few days for long-standing party activists, with the sudden death of Julian Cummins the latest.

Julian was chair of the Yorkshire & Humberside regional party (as it then was) when I was in York and first got involved at a regional level. His enthusiastic leadership of the regional party had a major impact on focusing the party’s resources on Parliamentary seats that could be won, and therefore he too had a share in the credit for the victories in Harrogate and Sheffield Hallam in 1997.

There is more about his career on the regional party’s website. …

Andrew Spence, one of the most high profile organisers of protests about fuel prices (and taxes on fuel) in the last few years has announced that he wants to be a BNP candidate in May’s local election. He preivously stood as a UKIP candidate.

It’s the latest in a series of links between some fuel protestors and the BNP (for example, see here).

It’s been a very sad week for many Liberal Democrats with the death of two long-standing members.

David was active for many years, including in the early days of the Liberal growth in Southwark and most recently in Enfield. He was very generous with his time and advice and maintained a thorough optimism about the ability of anyone, anywhere to build up the party in their area.

I didn’t really know Peter personally, though I met him at several party events and he too was an activist for many years; there is more on the South East Lib Dems site.

I am sure that …

We’ve now got a page on Flock Together where people can advertise their printers, folding machines and other equipment so that fellow Lib Dems can find equipment to use if they don’t have their own or suffer a breakdown or bottleneck:

http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/GoogleMap.php?type=Resource

Advertising your resources through this page could also be a good way of earning a bit of extra cash to help pay for them in the first place!

I’m taking part next week in an international telephone conference call about internet campaigning techniques.

At least, that’s what I thought it was … until I rechecked my emails and realised it’s actually an international telephone balloon debate.

Oh and, from the very helpful instructions on how to take part, this tip: Speak clearly, be aware of the impact of accents and slow down accordingly (most of our audiences are not English-mother tongue).

This could be interesting…