Author Archives: Mark Pack

The Liberal Democrats’ Green Tax Switch action week, when numerous local parties will be organising streets stalls all across the country, is approaching fast.

It’s been busy in the office today with my colleagues assembling the cardboard boxes to hold all the stall materials for each local party.

You’ll be plesantly surprised when the boxes arrive for your own stall I’m sure – it’s a bumper set of campaigning goodies that’s been cooked up!

You can find out more about the campaign at our website, www.greentaxswitch.com

Well, nearly … check out the audio files on the newly revamped Lib Dem History Group website, which I had a small hand in arranging:
http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/item_list.php?item=audio_source

When we (the History Group) get the content a bit more polished, the “On this day” RSS feed could be a fun bit of fun:
http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/on_this_day.rss

Oh dear, not a good day for Francis Maude. It started off with his links to a porn company being exposed and it ended with him telling fibs on taxes to the Evening Standard.

He was trying to explain Cameron’s refusal to commit himself to tax cuts. He told the Evening Standard:

 “You will look in vain through three Thatcher manifestos for any commitment to cut taxes.”

Being the sort of person who has a copy of the 1979 Conservative manifesto to hand, I turn to page 13, unlucky for some:

“We shall cut income tax at all …

Colin Ross has highlighed a rather “frank” comment from the former chair of Wolverhampton SW Tories on his colleagues, calling Tory councillors “far from outstanding” and saying that many Tories prefer white candidates.

Hat tip: http://www.colin-ross.org.uk/news/883.html

We’ve become the biggest party in Burnley after an independent councillor, Sam Holgate, decided to join the party.

Sarah, the party’s education spokesperson, is spending the week as a teaching assistant in a school in outer London. She’s blogging about it on the Guardian website: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/mortarboard/

For no particular reason other than I recently found a second-hand copy on sale cheaply, I have just finished reading Demos’s 1997 collection, Life after politics.

Although these days Demos –with its reports on the crucial importance of hairdressers to modern society – tries a little too hard to be different and thought provoking, it was in its heyday one of the most successful think tanks in the UK. Leading lights such as Geoff Mulgan – the editor of this collection – went on to exercise significant real political power under New Labour; he spent time as Director of Policy at 10 Downing Street and also headed up the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit for several years.

The Lib Dem website has a little film about climate change made for the party by Tim Ireland. Now don’t go humming the jingle all day…

This evening TV audiences will be flocking to switch on their kettles watch the new Liberal Democrat film (party political broadcast). But you can watch it now at: http://www.libdems.org.uk/news/lib-dem-ppb.html

Conference seems to have started very calmly and efficiently this weekend – no long queues at registration this year! – but we’ve already started our conference webcasts. First up is Lynne Featherstone, who will be presenting the Lib Dem blog of the year award this evening. Later today Ming Campbell and conference committee chair Duncan Brack will also appear. All their webcasts will be on www.libdems.org.uk/conference/webcasts.html

Oscars, here we come!

PS Nick Clegg has also done a webcast on his first six months as Shadow Home Secretary: http://www.libdems.org.uk/justice/issues/clegg-webcast.html

The run-up to party conference always helps focus people’s minds on finishing off projects and it’s often a mad dash to have things ready in time for conference. One of the many new things we’ve been getting ready for conference is our new policy consultation website that has been unveiled today – http://consult.libdems.org.uk

It is being used at first to support the four policy consultations the policy team are running in Brighton, but we are intending to make it a permanent fixture of the internet with new consultations using it too rather than just running the site down when the …

It’s here. The moment you’ve all been waiting for and more glamorous than the Oscars in a totally non-glamorous sort of way. It’s the shortlist for Lib Dem blogger of the year.

This is the first time we’ve run such a competition. The idea is to encourage more Lib Dem blogging and also to give some extra profile (and traffic) to those in the running for the prize. We’ll see how it goes … though I’m sure it will go better now that I’ve decided we won’t be giving

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