It’s always tempting to view the verdict of investigations through a partisan filter – if ‘your side’ does not get punished, it’s a great result by a wise team of investigators; if on the other hand it does get punished, it’s a muddle-headed verdict from dangerously ignorant investigators, whether that means the police, the courts or a regulator.
However, the case of Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith’s election expenses raises important issues which deserve a more careful consideration that the immediate partisan filter. Some are longer-term ones about how regulation of election expenditure is changing as the methods people use alter; others …
Paul Moorcraft’s account of his several decades touring the world’s violent trouble-spots as a journalist and some-time government representative entertains as well as informs. From Rhodesia in the 1970s through to his contemplation of pioneering a niche market in blind observers for African elections in 2010, Moorcraft’s account reflects plenty of the swagger of many war correspondents but with enough self-mockery to make the account illuminating and interesting rather than a macho display. Even the clichés about drinking and womanising journalists, which he seems to have often fulfilled to the maximum, are full of his own failings.
The result is a portrait of not only the countries he visited but also the breed that makes up war correspondents, with their bravery, their bravado and their desire to get the story and the footage even at great personal risk. The motivation for such story getting may often be as much ego as public service, but in the end the public benefits from people willing to take remarkable risks with their personal safety in the name of journalism.
Even I would concede that 100,000 maltesers would be quite a large number, but what about when it comes to signatures on a petition? The fear that all sorts of humorous and trivial ideas could get 100,000 verified signatures from people on the electoral register is one of the reasons some people have given for criticising the government’s plans to give proposals that get 100,000 signatures some debating time in Parliament.
I think those criticisms are misplaced because, as I said previously, “The usual tiny number of votes deliberate joke candidates get at election time (unless there is a …
Here’s your starter for ten in our Saturday slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…
Directly-elected Mayors were introduced by Labour to a very mixed reception. Now the idea is back again with the Government pushing for more, arguing that direct accountability of an individual makes for better decision-making and more meaningful democracy.
Just before Christmas we covered the government’s plans to give the vote to prisoners serving sentences of less than four years, a delayed response to the adverse court ruling on the current rules from 2005 which the Labour government had not yet properly responded to.
Unsurprisingly, the plans have triggered opposition in some parts of the Conservative Party, including from Paul Goodman over on ConservativeHome: “The essence of the Clegg/Harper case is that the Government has no alternative. However, there at least four”.
Carl Gardner on his Head of Legal blog explains the legal background in more detail:
It’s a well established pattern that candidates with names higher up the alphabet do slightly better in multi-member ward elections in the UK than those with names further down the alphabet. Other factors (including the perceived ethnicity and gender of a name, along with other information such as the party label) usually have a larger effect, but there is something of an alphabetic effect all the same.
New research has shown this to be the case in the first STV local council elections held in Scotland, leading to calls for change.
Here’s a curious detail about the voting record of MPs on the alternative vote: before the general election, the House of Commons agreed to introduce elections for select committee chairs using the alternative vote (and the first set of these such elections have now been held).
Most of the Conservative and Labour MPs who have said they oppose AV for public elections were also MPs when this decision was taken – and not one of them forced a vote on the matter, let alone vote against introducing AV. Instead, they all let the introduction of AV go through.
Lionel Zetter’s book, Lobbying: The Art of Political Persuasion, has become the default British guide to how lobbying works. A detailed publication of over 450 pages, it is a ‘how to’ guide for the profession that also acts as an introduction to lobbying for people whose encounter with the subject has previously been mainly through the medium of newspaper headlines about scandals.
It is an insider’s account – Zetter was voted Public Affairs Personality of the Year in 2008 by readers of Public Affairs News – and unashamedly argues about the benefits of lobbying in a democracy. As Zetter’s book …
A senior Lib Dem who abstained from the vote on tuition fees has been appointed by the government to help encourage poorer teenagers to go to university.
Simon Hughes was among Lib Dems to raise concerns about a hike in the cap on university tuition fees in England.
David Cameron and Nick Clegg said it would be a tragedy if youths were put off applying due to “misinformation”.
Labour said the appointment was “window dressing” and showed they were worried students would be put off by the rise.
The Lib Dem deputy leader has been appointed to the unpaid, six-month
Yesterday I mentioned the moves afoot to replace the mothballed 10 Downing Street petition website with a new system, whereby if 100,000 registered electors signed a petition a debate could be secured in Parliament.
This seems to be an attractive idea to those who haven’t seen how useless this has been in other parts of the world when it’s tried.
If you ask people the question ‘do you want to pay less tax?’, they vote yes. If we get the e-petitions in there will be some asking for Jeremy Clarkson
News from David Allworthy, the Deputy Acting Returning Officer:
Nominations are now open for the election of:
· Chair of the Federal Finance & Administration Committee (FFAC)*
· Five members of the FFAC
· Party Treasurer
· Chair of the Campaigns & Communications Committee (CCC)
· Chair of the International Relations Committee (IRC)
· Two members of the IRC
· One representative on ELDR Council
· Two representatives on ELDR Congress
· Two representatives on the Liberal International (LI) Executive
· Two representatives to the LI Congress
· Chair Campaign For Gender Balance
· Two Vice Chairs Campaign For Gender Balance
· Three members of the Diversity Engagement Group
*The Chair of the FFAC is registered as the Party’s Treasurer for the purposes of the PPERA 2000, …
You may have seen mentioned in the weekly Golden Dozen round-ups reference to LibDig – but there’s much more to the site than sharing a story for hopeful inclusion in the round-ups. Thanks to LibDig, Liberal Democrat members can easily share interesting, useful or enjoyable stories, videos or blog posts.
You can either post up content you have seen, or vote on content that other people have posted up; either way it’s a way of saying, “I found this interesting. I think you’ll find it interesting too.”
Social bookmarking sites like this have been around for a while, but they tend …
First, fuelled in part by Labour’s debate about how it should be seen relative to the trade unions, we have the news that Ed Miliband may be about to break the logjam on party funding reform:
Ed Miliband is to distance Labour from its trade union paymasters by diluting the party’s financial dependence on them and reducing their role in electing the party leader.
Labour has proposed introducing a ceiling on donations to any political party which could be as low as £500, The Independent has learnt.
The move could break the long-running deadlock between the parties on agreeing a new system of
Over the last week I’ve had a series of posts about the main Liberal Democrat challenges for 2011. In case you’ve missed any of them over the Christmas festivities, here is a quick recap:
The economy – get this right, or little else matters
Winning elections – for a political party winning votes is key to success
In the new year Mark Valladares, of Liberal Bureaucracy and a sometime contributor to this site, will be starting up a regular fortnightly guest piece for The Voice concentrating on letting members know what party bodies are getting up to in their name and how they can influence their decisions.
If there’s any particular topic you’d like Mark to cover, just pop up a comment below…
This is the final piece in a series of posts on the main Liberal Democrat challenges for 2011. You can find all the posts in the series here.
Having started this series with the economy and then moving on to more internal issue in latter posts, it seems fitting to return to economic issues for the final post in this series.
Getting the substance on economic fairness right is and should continue to be a top priority for the party. In addition, getting the messaging right will help differentiate not only the Liberal Democrat contribution to the coalition from that of …
Over the festive season we’re running a series of posts on the main Liberal Democrat challenges for 2011. You can find all the posts as they appear here.
Looking back through the emails I have received from the party centrally since the formation of the coalition, very few have asked me to do anything. Some have asked for money, requested I come to conference or suggested I go and help in elections – but even those, whilst being good stuff, have been drawn from a very narrow conception of what members and supporters can do. When it comes to policy areas, campaigning …
Yesterday the Electoral Commission decided not to refer Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith’s election expenses to the police for further investigation. Though this brings to an end official inquiries into whether Zac Goldsmith had kept within election law, the details of the Electoral Commission’s rulings leave several questions about Goldsmith’s expenses unanswered and also suggest that in future spending under the limit during the long campaign may be seen as a defence for breaking the short campaign limit.
Over the festive season we’re running a series of posts on the main Liberal Democrat challenges for 2011. You can find all the posts as they appear here.
When it comes to getting public support in return for making a positive impact on the coalition government, there are two requirements for the party. It has to have achievements that people know are down to the Liberal Democrats and also to have achievements which add up to more than a scattering of interesting details. Unless there is a clear thread running through them, the details will get lost in the non-political noise …
One of the great strengths of Christian Woolmar’s highly readable account of Gordon Brown’s drive to part-privatise the London Underground, Down The Tube, is that although he is very hostile to the policy he explains why so many transport managers were really keen to see it introduced. They may have had many second thoughts since, but at the time involving private firms in long-running legal contracts seemed to many the solution to the regular problem of short-term decision making over transport infrastructure.
Cutting investment in transport was often a popular option at times of cutbacks and the swings from grand plans to big cuts and back again resulted in much wasted effort on plans that never materialised and higher costs for those that did. Long-term legal contracts which politicians could not just axe come the next budget round seemed the answer.
London’s PPP may have turned out to be a really bad answer, but the problem it failed to answer is still very much there – as this week’s Infrastructure Cost Review report from HM Treasury / Infrastructure UK reveals. (It was on your Christmas reading list, wasn’t it?).
The review found that infrastructure work in the UK costs more than in comparable countries, for reasons including, “stop-start investment programmes and the lack of a visible and continuous pipeline of forward work”. In total, the extra costs in the UK amount to around 15% of what is spent on infrastructure work, making this issue a significant one – getting the same value for money as in other countries would in itself be the equivalent of a major boost in government spending on our infrastructure.
The lack of long-term commitment and planning isn’t the only problem the report identifies, but it does make the report a reminder that though PPP may have failed in London the original problem still needs fixing: how to get more long-term planning on subjects where consistency is needed for more than one Parliament, even if it is a five-year fixed-term one.
I was going to write a post about the Cable / Telegraph / other Lib Dem ministers story, but reading Robert Peston’s post I see he’s said what I was going to say – but said it first and said it better. So over to him:
What I still feel bemused about is why the Telegraph, for which I used to work, did not publish the one story that would have unquestionably legitimised its under-cover exercise to elicit the private views of Lib Dem ministers.
Pretty much everything these Lib Dems have been caught saying about their Tory colleagues is what one
Over the festive season we’re running a series of posts on the main Liberal Democrat challenges for 2011. You can find all the posts as they appear here.
Getting economic policy right may be at the heart of the government’s long-term fate, and crucial for the country, but even if everything goes right the benefits are long-term ones – so to keep the coalition working well over the next year will require a steady supply of other good news and much work on internal communications.
Ask Liberal Democrat activists why they are active in politics and why for the Liberal Democrats …
Michael Crick has the scoop about the ending of plans to fund open primaries:
A very senior Cabinet minister has told me that the Coalition has now scrapped its radical plans to pay for primary elections to choose party candidates in 200 safe seats.
The full Coalition Agreement last May said: “We will fund 200 all-postal primaries over this Parliament, targetted at seats which have not changed hands for many years.”
The money would have been allocated to parties which now have seats in Parliament, according to their shares of the vote in May 2010.
Primaries have been very controversial, so the need …
Vince Cable disagrees with Conservatives (shocking news, I know)
Vince Cable tells people he thinks are his constituents the truth when asked (grounds for questioning his judgement on this, yes, but isn’t it rather odd to see the Daily Telegraph thundering about how awful it is that a politician told the truth?)
Over the festive season we’re running a series of posts on the main Liberal Democrat challenges for 2011. You can find all the posts as they appear here.
Yesterday I took a look at the economy, an issue on which Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will sink or swim together. Where the parties will be directly fighting each other will be in the ballot box, both in the big round of scheduled elections in May, in by-elections all through the year and in the AV referendum, where most Conservatives will be lined up on the ‘no’ side.
When I talked before about the Liberal Democrats showing in public the behind-the-scenes disagreements in the coalition with the Conservatives rather more, this wasn’t quite what I expected…
Vince Cable has privately threatened to “bring the Government down” if he is “pushed too far” during fractious discussions with his Conservative colleagues, The Daily Telegraph can disclose…
He believes that policies are being rushed through by the Conservatives and that ministers should be “putting a brake on” some proposals, which are in “danger of getting out of control”. Mr Cable says that, behind the scenes, the Tories and Liberal Democrats are fighting
Earlier today the Government laid out in detail how it plans to abide by a court ruling against the current ban on prisoners voting in elections.
The plans, due to be put to the vote in Parliament next year, separate prisoners into two categories – those sentenced to four years or longer (who will be banned from registering to vote) and those on shorter sentences, who will normally be entitled to register to vote but on sentencing a judge will have discretion to remove their right to vote also.
This is the first in a series of posts on the main Liberal Democrat challenges for 2011 we’re running over the festive season. You can find all the posts as they appear here.
The state of the economy is central to the fate of the Liberal Democrats, both because it is so important in shaping people’s perceptions of the government and also because the better the economy does the more scope there is to get public interest in Liberal Democrat achievements in other areas. No matter how wonderful the government’s green achievements, for example, they would get very little attention …
This graph from Google shows how frequently “proportional representation” was mentioned in the vast Google Books archive. As you can see, the proportion of books which mentioned PR grew sharply in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reaching a peak in the inter-war years (when a minority Labour Government got an alternative vote bill through the Commons but it then stalled in the Lords and was abandoned when the government fell):
Steve Trevethan Might we have a definition of government debt?
Might we have a definition of democracy?...
David Raw @ Tristan Ward. Given your views on carers, I would strongly advise you to remain healthy and not to grow old....
Katrin Harding Thanks for grasping this issue! On the consultation sessions- I’d love to join one but the timings are impossible as a parent of young children. I’m happy t...
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...
London’s PPP may have turned out to be a really bad answer, but the problem it failed to answer is still very much there – as this week’s Infrastructure Cost Review report from HM Treasury / Infrastructure UK reveals. (It was on your Christmas reading list, wasn’t it?).
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Are Labour going to cross another red line?
Martin Wainwright's Guardian obituary of Michael Meadowcroft
Evaluating different electoral systems for the House of Commons
Steve Trevethan 
David Raw 
Katrin Harding 
Peter Martin 