Author Archives: Mark Pack

Mark was the Liberal Democrat Head of Innovations until June 2009 and is now at Blue Rubicon. He also lectures at City University and is co-author of 101 Ways To Win An Election. He blogs at www.markpack.org.uk and is on Twitter as @markpack. He likes chocolate. Lots of it.

Did journalists really not misuse one of the UK’s largest databases of personal contact details?

Here’s a little conundrum for you.

Imagine you are a journalist working on one of the  many titles that the Information Commissioner found was involved in dubious practices to get hold of personal information about people.

Don’t you think it’s quite likely you would now and again have wanted to get hold of someone’s home address? Perhaps to track down someone to doorstep them. Or maybe to trawl round the relatives of someone famous to find if anyone is willing to give you an interview.

Now imagine there is a database of people in Britain which is so comprehensive and has been built …

Posted in News | Tagged , , , and | 11 Comments

Ken Livingstone: mine won’t be a grassroots funded campaign

It was Ken Livingstone’s poor taste joke about Boris Johnson, Hitler and people who don’t vote for him being sent to burn and flayed for all eternity that got the most attention following his interview in Total Politics.*

Taking a look at the printed version of the interview (and forcing my eyes to move past the awful shirt and dreadful trousers) there was one other comment from Ken Livingstone that stood out: “80 per cent of my funding will come from the trade unions”.

Livingstone made the comment in the context of having a go at the sources of Conservative Party funding …

Posted in News | Tagged and | 25 Comments

Campaigning In Your Community: new book out

Phew, book number 18 that I’ve been involved in as author or editor is now out. It’s written by myself and Shaun Roberts, called “Campaigning In Your Community”. Think of it as as guide to getting going with community politics, starting from your own doorstep.

A free copy is being sent to every ALDC (Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors) member or you can buy copies from the ALDC online shop (sales only open to party members).

Posted in Books | Tagged , and | 3 Comments

Local liberal heroes: Monroe Palmer

Earlier in the year, I penned a series of posts profiling forgotten liberal heroes (to which a couple of other people also kindly contributed), looking at some of those who achieved great things for liberalism in their time but have been unjustly forgotten – such as Margaret Wintringham, the very first female Liberal MP.

There is also another group of people who I think are often unjustly obscure – those local campaigners who are often at the heart of their local community and local party, delivering liberalism and helping others, but as their stage is a local one they are often

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 3 Comments

So you think you know how to improve campaigning? Come to Conference Dragons’ Den

Autumn conference in Birmingham will see a new type of campaigning event which sounds rather fun: a Dragons’ Den style fringe meeting at which people pitch their ideas for new approaches to campaigning.

The panel will be Alistair Carmichael MP, James Gurling (Chair, Campaigns & Communications Committee), Hilary Stephenson (Director of Elections and Skills) and Kirsty Williams AM. It will be on Sunday 18th September at 1pm in Room 103 of the Jurys Inn.

Submissions are open to any party member except for Campaigns Department employees.

Step one is to submit your idea by Monday 12th September to Tim Pollard on [email protected]. …

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Nick Clegg: The Biography published today – is it worth reading?

The pre-publication newspaper serialisation of Chris Bower’s biography of Nick Clegg used extracts which covered the Deputy Prime Minister’s early life. When you read the full book the reason for this is amply clear. It has much interesting to say about Nick Clegg’s multi-national family and their close brushes with the tragedies of the early twentieth century. As it gets on to Clegg’s political career, however, it increasingly has little to say that will not already be familiar to close followers of political news from other accounts.

In a few cases it even has less to say than has already …

Posted in Books | Tagged , and | 3 Comments

Censoring social media during riots: good news, mostly

Talking to Liberal Democrats in Whitehall about Cameron’s misguided talk of social media bans during riots, the reactions range from the bluntly oppositional to the intriguing repeated suggestion that Cameron himself misspoke and didn’t really mean to suggest anything more than looking at how the police can best use existing laws.

So far, so good.

The one caveat to watch out for is that in other areas Conservative ministers such as Ed Vaizey have shown a strong liking for self-regulation by industry. Applied to social media and riots, this could see attempts to encourage the industry to agree sweeping procedures with …

Posted in News | Tagged , and | 4 Comments

Book review: Andrew Murrison on the military covenant

Taking its title from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, this book by Conservative MP Andrew Murrison is rather a mixed bag. There is much that is interesting and thoughtful in his study of how wider society views and treats the military in Britain, but that is rather let down by a meandering structure which results in some topics being returned to frequently, the flow within many chapters being unclear and indeed the actual origins of the military covenant being largely unmentioned. We get a little detail of who first wrote the words and when, but almost nothing about what triggered the …

Posted in Books and Op-eds | Tagged , and | 1 Comment

Local liberal heroes: Daniel Brown

Earlier in the year, I did a series of posts profiling forgotten liberal heroes (to which a couple of other people also kindly contributed), looking at some of those who achieved great things for liberalism in their time but have been unjustly forgotten – such as Margaret Wintringham, the very first female Liberal MP.

There is also another group of people who I think are often unjustly obscure – those local campaigners who are often at the heart of their local community and local party, delivering liberalism and helping others, but as their stage is a local one they are often unacknowledged in the wider party.

So welcome to a new series, profiling some of those local liberal heroes from around London. The first is Brent councillor, Daniel Brown.

For Daniel, liberalism was a family affair as his mother was already a party member when he joined (and she too was a Lead Member when the Liberal Democrats led Brent Council). Becoming a councillor seemed the natural progression for someone who wanted to do more than talk about liberalism.

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 7 Comments

The flaws in Ed Miliband’s media policy are no cause for rejoicing

It isn’t often that the members of one party should be worried about a proposed policy from a rival party’s leader collapsing under examination. However, David Elstein’s demolition of Ed Miliband’s proposal to limit ownership of newspapers by circulation should not provide more than a passing smile to Liberal Democrats, for it highlights the difficult of coming up with any meaningful change in the rules over newspaper ownership.

As David Elstein puts it:

Ed Miliband has proposed a 20% limit on ownership of national newspapers, measured by circulation. As the Sun’s circulation is more than 20% of all national newspaper sales, that would require News International to close The Times and either sell the Sunday Times or reposition it as a non-national newspaper (by ceasing to publish in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, where would-be readers would have to subscribe digitally). Even then the Sun’s circulation would need to be forced down, perhaps by restricting access to newsprint. In all likelihood any such measure would result in the combined circulation of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday rising above 20%, so requiring similar measures to be targeted at them.

Banning a newspaper from appearing in parts of the UK? Making it illegal for a newspaper group to buy ‘too much’ paper? There are just too few newspaper titles with a mass audience for restriction on ownership by circulation to be practical.

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , and | 2 Comments

Media ownership: what have Liberal Democrats said?

Flicking through old general election manifestos of the Liberal Democrats and our predecessor parties at the weekend, I was surprised to find how recent references to concerns over the pattern of media ownership in the UK are. It really is only with the 1997 general election manifesto that explicit policies about protecting or improving the diversity of media ownership feature.

Given the number of technological innovations over the years, it is no surprise that some of the manifesto policies now read as very dated – 1983’s concerns over the impact of video tapes in particular. Yet the actual or feared power …

Posted in News | Tagged and | 1 Comment

A very unusual use for a Conservative Party membership card

Take a young man, alcohol, a police station, a Conservative Party membership card, a police-issue balaclava and a cup of tea, and what do you get? Why, this story of course (with further details from here).

Hat-tip: Richard Clare

Posted in News | Tagged | 5 Comments

Brentwood & Ongar Conservatives apologise for false claims

Here is the apology leaflet put out door to door by Brentwood & Ongar Conservatives for “false” and “inappropriate” claims:

Posted in News | Tagged , and | 2 Comments

Petition launched to retain the ban on the death penalty

Does what is says on the tin, and it is here, created by Lib Dem Martin Shapland.

Posted in News | Tagged | 22 Comments

Explaining Cameron’s Coalition: politics as seen through the eyes of MORI polls

Explaining Cameron’s Coalition is the latest in the series of general election analysis by MORI’s Robert Worcester and Roger Mortimore, this time joined by two other authors. The book is therefore very much the tale of the 2005-2010 Parliament and subsequent general election seen through the eyes of MORI’s opinion polling, with an often pungent analysis which certainly fits Robert Worcester’s happiness to point out when he got predictions right and others got them wrong.

Though there is a smattering of references to polling results from other firms, the great strength of the MORI data is that many of the …

Posted in Books and Polls | Tagged , , , , , and | 2 Comments

Could you edit The Guardian? Take a simple test

Here’s a simple test to see if you too have what it takes to edit The Guardian.

a. You have an interview lined up with a Treasury minister.

b. You have a journalist who happily admits they don’t understand the difference between a cyclical and structural deficit.

Do you say:

1. “Pah, so what? It’s not like we need an interviewer who can understand the basics of economics to interview an economics minister”, or

2. “Err, could we get a different interviewer?”

If your answer is #1: well done, you’re made it (as the third paragraph of this new interview with Danny Alexander demonstrates).

If your …

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Tony Benn: A Biography

Weighing in at 550 pages, including a long and detailed index, Jad Adams’s biography of Tony Benn is just the sort of traditional and detailed work of biography that befits a politician who was an MP for half a century and who became a government minister, won promotion to the Cabinet and served his last day as a minister all before most of the current generation of ministers were even in Parliament.

Tony Benn’s career was not only lengthy, it was high profile and – at least before the twilight years as ‘the nation’s favourite retired politician’ – deeply controversial. …

Posted in Books and Op-eds | Tagged , and | 11 Comments

The ever-shrinking timetable for by-elections set to be expanded

Good news from the Cabinet Office, with its announcement of pre-legislative scrutiny of plans to increase the timetable for general elections and, more significantly, for Parliamentary by-elections:

  • the deadline for parties to nominate candidates should continue to be 6 days after the start of the timetable, so parties will have the same time as now to put forward candidates to stand for election. In practice this will now be 19, rather than 11, days before the date of poll, which will allow administrators to begin printing ballot papers further in advance of polling day;
  • provision should be made for updated versions

Posted in Election law | Tagged | 5 Comments

Electoral register database scrapped, at last

Back in 2009 I speculated that the plan for a centralised version of the country’s electoral registers (the CORE project) should win a prize for worst government IT project:

Back in early 2001 I sat in a consultation meeting where the project was being planned, with the data available on CD (ah! those were the days) and then securely online in early 2002 …

One of my favourite memories of this whole saga was when both the Electoral Commission and the Government in fairly quick succession carried out a consultation that went over pretty much the same ground. As a result,

Posted in Election law and News | Tagged and | 4 Comments

Who is Ed Miliband?

Authors of the best accounts of the New Labour years delved deeply into the rival Brownite and Blairite versions of events before coming to their own conclusions. Those who did not frequently ended up with embarrassingly lopsided and inaccurate accounts.

Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre, the authors of Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour leader, have avoided making the next generation’s version of the same mistake by talking to both sides of the Miliband family, even returning more than once to the conundrum of when Ed told David he was going to run against him for leader. …

Posted in Books and Op-eds | Tagged , , , and | 16 Comments

A sideways look at a Liberal Democrat institution

Chances are, if you’ve been to a Liberal Democrat event, you’ve bought a raffle ticket or two. Now don’t get me wrong. I like raffles. Some of my best friends run raffles. I’ve even won two raffle prizes in the last year. But for such a popular Liberal Democrat activity, we are often surprisingly poor at running them.

In perhaps three raffles out of five, by the time you get to the final few prizes, just about everyone in the room (if they are still paying attention) is impatient for the raffle to end, with too many prizes then exacerbated by …

Posted in Op-eds and Party policy and internal matters | Tagged , , and | 8 Comments

See you in September

I’m mostly taking a break from Liberal Democrat Voice over July and August to write a book with Ed Maxfield on political campaigning.

The rest of the team will be keeping the site running, but if you’ve ever half-thought of writing a post for us, now’s a particularly good time to put fingers to keyboard.

I may now and again break my Lib Dem Voice fast 🙂 But I’ll still be tweeting and doing my monthly email newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Otherwise, see you in September.

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Government takes a small step forward in removing sexism in Royal inheritance

The Evening Standard reports:

George Osborne just made a historic announcement about the Royal finances.

His reforms, signalled first in his Budget a year ago, pave the way for a first-born daughter of Kate and William to be Heir to the Throne.

The heir is supported by £16 million a year revenues from the Duchy of Cornwall estate. At present the Duke is Prince Charles.  But a girl cannot become a duke, so Osborne is changing the rules.

“We propose to correct this anomaly by making clear that in future the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall will go to the heir whether

Posted in News | Tagged , , and | 4 Comments

Labour prisons expert attacks party for “shameful” stance on penal reform

Frances Crook, a Labour member and Director of the Howard League for Penal reform, has launched a stinging attack on the Labour Party’s approach to penal reform calling recent moves by Shadow Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Sadiq Khan “shameful”.

Writing on the Howard League’s website, Frances Crook said,

I was so angry with the Labour Party I found it hard to put into words. For the record I am a Labour Party member and was a Labour Party councillor and I have been a huge admirer of Sadiq Khan, a man who has up until recently had an exceptional record

Posted in News | Tagged , and | 2 Comments

Electoral Commission apologises for misleading Welsh candidate

WalesOnline reports:

THE Electoral Commission expressed its “regret” yesterday as it admitted providing the wrong information to one of the Liberal Democrat AMs disqualified from office …

Mr Roberts said he was given incorrect information by the Electoral Commission, whose official guidance for candidates said he could not stand if, at the time of the nomination, he held an office which was mentioned in the National Assembly for Wales (Disqualification) Order 2006.

The Order that the Electoral Commission referred to was not the most up-to-date, and did not include the Valuation Tribunal for Wales as one of the bodies. That was added

Posted in Election law and Wales | Tagged and | 5 Comments

30 things every would-be politician should do this summer

Inspired originally by Journalism Grads: 30 Things You Should Do This Summer and prompted by Stephen Tall, it’s become a summer tradition for me to run a list of 30 suggestions for would-be politicians, particularly those new to public office or seeking it in the next few years.

As ever, a new summer brings a new lick of paint for the list, with a few updates here and there and my thanks to those who commented on the previous lists:

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 7 Comments

Kent County Council Chief Executive broke law with payments to himself

The then Chief Executive of Kent County Council, Peter Gilory, authorised payments to himself “not permitted in law” of £18,350 for running the 2009 county council elections.

The minutes and agenda for a county council’s Electoral and Boundary Review Committee are not normally top of the media’s “must read” list, but the paperwork for this Kent County Council meeting of 21st June contains some damaging revelations about the council’s former Chief Executive Peter Gilroy who, it is revealed, authorised illegal payments to himself from public funds for the 2009 Kent County Council elections.

The chief executives of other councils in the area, …

Posted in Election law and News | Tagged and | 2 Comments

Teaching union spokesman attacks Gove’s “licence for paedophiles”

It’s no surprise that Michael Gove’s call for parents to help out in strike-hit schools has caused a fair amount of controversy, but I didn’t expect a union spokesman to wheel out the old paedophile scare line:

suggested parents enlist to help out stricken schools and give children something constructive to do, adding that it would save working parents a fortune. But union leaders in Dorset slammed the proposal, claiming it lacked common sense and would cause a “safeguarding nightmare”. Phil Jacques, Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) secretary for Bournemouth, Poole and Dorset, claimed implementing the plan would be

Posted in News | Tagged and | 25 Comments

Boundary Commission for England publishes its explanatory booklet

Yesterday the Boundary Commission for England published its booklet explaining how it will be running the review process. The content does not contain any surprises, though it is worth noting the strength of its comments about (not) splitting wards:

In the absence of exceptional and compelling circumstances … it would not be appropriate to divide wards in cases where it ispossible to construct constituencies that meet thestatutory electorate range without dividing them.

The Lewis Baston / Guardian projected constituency boundaries which got a fair amount of news coverage recently divide wards in far more cases than is compatible with this sort of language, which is worth bearing in mind as another reason not to place too much weight on them.

I’ve posted up in the Members’ Forum details of the regional and state coordinators for the boundary review process. By all means post any questions there or pop me an email if you’d like to discuss issues about the review. (I’m helping with the central co-ordination of the boundary review work.)

Boundary Commission for England – Guide to the 2013 Constituency Boundaries Review

Posted in Election law | Tagged | 5 Comments

What the future holds for Liberal Democrat tax policies

More economically competent than Labour, fairer than the Conservatives – that’s what many at the top of the party hope the message will be come the next general election. If the economy is not doing well at the time of the next election . However, if it is then the party will need the right combination of economic policies to support that proposition.

That is why people such as Danny Alexander are starting to sketch out possible tax policies for the next general election which will involve giving tax cuts to the least well off, paid for by taxing the richest more.

That combination …

Posted in News | Tagged , , , , , , , and | 23 Comments
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  • Peter Davies
    Another group for whom this does not work are those in all-electric homes including many poor tenants in blocks of flats. Their overall bills may well be high b...
  • Tom Bailey
    “according to Mark Pack’s website, party membership dropped by a third over the course of the Con – Lib Dem Coalition. “ Did anyone ask those lost memb...
  • Ruth Bright
    During the unrest in 2011 Simon Hughes made a powerful statement telling rioters to go home. It came from a place of profound respect for, and understanding of,...
  • John Reed
    This is such a disappointing announcement. We must push to have the present system for pricing all electricity based on the cost of the most expensive, usual...
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    I would add caring to bold and relevant. Getting a sympathetic ear at the end of a telephone help line is as important as an extra pound in your pay slip. Under...