The elections watchdog, the Electoral Commission, has been mildly trumpeting the results of the latest survey of electoral registration work carried out across Great Britain by local councils.
Electoral registration service improving but more work needed
Electoral registration services in Great Britain are improving ahead of the forthcoming elections and referendum on Thursday 5 May, but some can still do better, says a report by the Electoral Commission, the independent elections watchdog.
The Commission has published its annual assessment of performance by Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) across Great Britain. The report assesses how effectively EROs are delivering
In amongst the details of this week’s government announcements on social mobility was a commitment to extend name-blank employment, a long-term campaign of Liberal Democrat MP and now Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone.
As Lynne explained in a newspaper column back in 2009 the logic is this – blanking out names on job applications would remove subconscious discrimination at a key stage in the job application process. Discrimination at later stages could of course still occur, but if subconscious decisions are being made based on people’s names before they even get the chance to get into a room and impress in …
Ringing up a radio phone-in and giving a fake name may not be a smart move.
Doing so if you are a candidate in the forthcoming local elections is even less smart.
Doing so from a phone number recognisable as yourself is most certainly not smart.
Sticking to your fake name on the radio and then denying it was you even when rung back subsequently three times by the radio station, well that’s just being in a hole and digging.
But doing all of that when the radio phone-in was about honesty in politics?
That’s genius.
Well done Ashley Waterhouse (Conservative candidate, Normanton ward).
With yesterday’s holding announcement from Andrew Lansley – yes, the health plans might be changed but no, there are no details as yet – the future of the health White Paper is very much up for grabs. It’s not quite as simple as Liberal Democrats versus Conservatives, as although there are not many Conservatives who share the principled objections to parts of the plans from the Liberal Democrats, there are many who share concerns over the practical workings of the detail and fear the political impact.
As the situation in violence-ravaged Ivory Coast deteriorates even further, there has been a belated stepping up of the UN’s role in the country in an effort to prevent civilian casualties. UN and French helicopters yesterday opened fire on military camps loyal to defeated President Gbagbo, who refused to leave office after November’s Presidential elections.
The situation in the Ivory Coast is rather like that in the former Yugoslavia, which followed a similar cycle of political systems failing, rising violence with civilians often the victims and an international community for a long period only willing to take very limited steps …
The phrase “social mobility” is one I still don’t like. It is too much like that other inside-politics phrase “street furniture”. Councillors and council officers talk about street furniture works, improvements, strategies, investments and proposals with abandon but you never hear someone say, “I’ve just moved into my new flat and the local street furniture is lovely”. Street furniture matters, but falling into the habit of using an uncommon piece of jargon hinders understanding, …
It looks as if Warrington MP David Mowat could be the first Conservative MP so far to back the alternative vote in May’s referendum. The Liverpool Daily Post reports:
A Warrington MP is ready to defy David Cameron by voting to scrap the first-past-the- post voting system – potentially making him the only Conservative to do so.
David Mowat said he was considering backing a switch to the “alternative vote” (AV) for Westminster elections in the nationwide referendum to be staged on May 5.
The Warrington South MP described himself as an “agnostic” on the issue, but also stated his belief that
I’m walking down the street here in Duekoue and there are bodies all around me. They’re being brought out by Red Cross workers, pulling them out of the bushes, they’re being wrapped in plastic.
I’ve seen 30-40 already, and that’s just a fraction of what they’ve collected over the past few days.
They’re taking the bodies to a mass grave that they’re just digging now nearby.
The situation in the town remains very unstable. It’s held now by Alassane Ouattara’s forces – we’ve been talking to a lot of them. They deny any role in
During the week the Federal Executive agreed to support a series of proposals from the party’s Acting Returning Officer, David Allworthy, to relax the restrictions on campaign in party internal elections. To quote the paper put to the FE:
These can be summed up in the following five areas:
– the introduction of Acting Returning Officer (ARO) electronic communications as per Leadership and Presidential elections
– the introduction of an ARO published e-mail and telephone contact for each candidate to encourage voter candidate contact
– the removal of the no endorsements rule for the Interim Peers Election and bringing into line with the Committee,
Must be something in the air at the moment for, in addition to the news from Hinckley & Bosworth Council about a Conservative switching to the Liberal Democrats, two more in East Hampshire have also switched.
East Hampshire councillors Maureen Comber and Eve Hope have joined the Liberal Democrats and will be standing for the party this May.
Cllr Comber said, “There is a nasty atmosphere. Elected councillors are being excluded or browbeaten into following the party whip as dictated by the leader and his inner circle”.
Earlier this year Ian Dowdle also switched from the Conservatives to the Liberal …
To coincide with the start of the delivery of its educational booklets, the Electoral Commission has also launched a TV advertising campaign to inform people about the referendum and elections being held in May. This is the first of two planned TV adverts:
Councillor Groby Martin Cartwright has left the Conservative Party and joined the ruling Liberal Democrat group on Hinckley & Bosworth Borough Council.
He is also a parish councillor and has been joined in his switch by fellow parish councillor Ted Hollick. Both will be standing for the Liberal Democrats in May’s elections, boosting the Liberal Democrat campaign to retain control of the council.
Cllr Cartwright said, “There comes a time when an ordinary working bloke has to stand up and be counted. I’ll be better placed to continue my fight to preserve and improve our village from within the ruling group on the …
The 1911 Parliament Act, introduced in the wake of the rejection by the House of Lords of Lloyd George’s People’s Budget and the two general elections of 1910, was the first successful reform of the powers of the upper house and gave constitutional supremacy to the elected House of Commons.
One hundred years after the 1911 Parliament Act, the Liberal Democrat History Group’s fringe meeting at Sheffield Conference examined the development of Lords reform since and looked forward to the Coalition’s plans for the most far-reaching changes to the House of Lords since the Liberal governments reforms of 1911 ended the upper houses ability to block legislation:
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD): As well as encouraging Ministers to persist in their efforts to resolve the conflict, may I have an assurance that they are keeping in touch with the small but not insignificant community here in order
In a speech yesterday Minister for the Armed Forces Nick Harvey both showed how ministers can stake out clearly different ground from the Conservatives and also gave a hint of major debates over nuclear weapons yet to come.
In his speech to the Franco-British Council Defence Co-operation Conference Nick Harvey said,
As you will know, the two parties in the UK coalition Government have a different approach to the renewal of the current Trident system, but we are jointly pledged to maintain Britain’s nuclear deterrent…
As a Liberal Democrat Minister in this UK Coalition Government, I have the freedom to explore and argue
Welcome to the latest in our series giving the human face behind some of the blogs you can find on the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator.
Today it is Liberal Democrat peer (and former MP) Paul Tyler who blogs at www.lordsoftheblog.net.
1. What’s your formative political memory? Suez, October 29th 1956. Israel with British collusion bombed the Suez Canal on my 15th birthday!
2. When did you start blogging?
About three years ago.
3. Why did you start blogging?
I was invited to do so by the Hansard Society, who set up LordsoftheBlog to try to engage people outside Westminster in the work of the House of Lords.
4. What five words would you use to describe your blog?
Irreverent analysis of anachronistic antics.
5. What five words would you use to describe your political views? Radical, egalitarian, pragmatic, fundamental liberal.
6. Which post have you most liked writing in the last year (and why)? Exit Routes: this post got the most sensible comments but also has been repeated in the media.
7. Which post have you most liked reading in the last year (and why)?
The excellent analysis of Michael Ashcroft’s polling of, and focus groups with, Liberal Democrat voters: The verdict of Liberal Democrat voters so far.
8. What’s your favourite YouTube clip?
President Obama’s speech at Tucson Memorial:
If only one crucial detail in history had turned out differently… such is the premise of many a work of fiction, especially counter-factual histories and time travelling science fiction tales. Yet for all the popularity of the well known piece of verse, “For the want of a nail the shoe was lost…” which culminates in a kingdom being lost, serious counter-factuals by experts in a field are rather rare.
Those who see themselves as proper academics have often looked down on counter-factuals as light entertainment for the not-so-serious, missing that, as The Guardian’s review of this book put it, “It’s …
Good content produced at the right time is at the heart of any successful blog. Good content often needs a helping hand courtesy of sensible promotion too. All of which is to say that fiddling with the technical details can be a tempting distraction from main business at hand, but it can make a difference even if it isn’t the main factor in success or failure.
In a major foreign policy speech in Mexico this week, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg laid out five reasons why intervention in Libya was the right course to take and different from Iraq. However, applying those five reasons to the Ivory Coast raises the question why it is being treated so differently from Libya.
In his speech, Clegg said that Libya different from Iraq because:
First, the Libyan action is unambiguously legal. Iraq was not.
Second, there is a clear humanitarian case for intervention in Libya. In Iraq the case rested solely on the danger posed by weapons of mass destruction, a
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.
THE Scottish Conservatives were plunged into a fresh crisis last night after a sacked election candidate said he had been denied natural justice by the party’s “dysfunctional” leadership.
Malcolm Macaskill, who was dumped as the leading candidate in Glasgow last week, said his treatment would cost the party £1 million, because his friend, Tom Coakley, a former footballer who made a fortune in property, had now withdrawn a pledge to give the Tories £100,000 a year for a decade.
It has also been reported that a second major Tory donor, John McGlynn, the airport car park magnate, no longer
A limit on the maximum number of people eligible to vote at a polling station has been imposed by the Electoral Commission under the powers given to its Chief Executive, Jenny Watson, to run the AV referendum in May.
Under the law for referendums, Jenny Watson is the Chief Counting Officer and thereby able to issue instructions as to how the vote should be conducted around the country. Because the referendum is being held on the same day as other elections, many of those instructions in effect also apply to the other elections as well.
Excellent news from the Federal Executive this week with the decision to appoint a preferred supplier for a new election fighting computer database. Voter Activation Network, the US firm which services many Democrat Party candidates, has been selected with a view to signing a multi-year contract shortly.
Amongst the other bidders were the party’s long-running suppliers EARS (though they may still have a role to play as data suppliers, especially given the team’s expertise and experience in dealing with different electoral register formats).
EARS has provided a valuable service to the party for many years, but the old model of individual databases …
Some good news from the government on the unfolding international crisis that almost no-one in Britain is interested in, namely the Ivory Coast. The Department for International Development (DfiD) is giving £16m in emergency aid to help deal with the large numbers of people fleeing the violence.
Many of them are crossing the border to Liberia, a country itself struggling to recover from its own violence. As The Guardian reported,
Last week the UN high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres,visited Liberia and warned that the influx of refugees threatened the country’s eight years of peace, following a civil war that left
Earlier in the month I talked about how the “little and often” rule is a good approach for candidates and those elected to public office when using the internet to keep in touch with voters. There have been two good recent examples of blog posts from Liberal Democrat councillors that illustrate the different roles blog posts can play in that.
First, Ealing Councillor Gary Malcolm and his short, simple summary of a residents’ association AGM. That sort of quick but very local information often has a ready audience, because even diligent readers of local newspapers rarely get that much information about what is happening day to day with local services.
Second, there is a post from The Voice’s own Alex Foster, who is also a councillor in Nottingham. His post, So What’s Going on at Broad Marsh?, takes a story which has been in the local news but provides the context and explanations which the local media very rarely have the time or space for. Yet for a big issue such as the fate of the centre of a town, again there is very often a ready audience for that sort of background and extended information.
Millions of pounds have been spent in total in the UK on testing various forms of electronic voting, in the hope that this might raise turnout in elections. The overall verdict across different technologies – such as voting by SMS or online – has been remarkably consistent: it’s expensive, not very reliable, of dubious security and, above all, has almost no impact on turnout levels.
It’s easy to see how the idea of using modern technology has caught the eye and budget of decision makers. But with the emphasis on the high-tech, boringly old-fashioned items such as paperwork have got much …
Peter Martin @ Kira,
The words you quoted were from Peter Davies'. Not me. I wouldn't agree with raising VAT on energy to 15% right now. I'd leave it as is.
The point ...
Peter Martin “‘why can’t social care and NHS spending be treated as ‘investment’’. Of course, that wont wash”.
I'd agree if were talking about re...
Peter Martin There's really only two fiscal rules that make any sense:
1) If inflation caused by an overheating economy is the main issue, then governments should tax mor...
Peter Davies @Kira Collins You seem to have missed the bit about raising tax allowances. That primarily helps those on low wages....
David Wright According to this well-argued article (by Lib Dem councillor Mark Ellis), a simple wealth tax wouldn't work, but tax on TRANSFER of wealth could, if current tax...
Paul Walter reports …
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Martin Wainwright's Guardian obituary of Michael Meadowcroft
Evaluating different electoral systems for the House of Commons
Brexit and summer holidays
The shame of Liverpool Labour councillors taking their allowances but not turning up to do the work
Peter Martin 
Peter Davies 
David Wright 