During the 2005-10 Parliament I blogged several times pointing out how the trends in turnout in British elections were more positive than many of the media reports suggested. One reason for this was simply an interest in the gap between the widely accepted clichés in political and media circles about turnout and the reality. The other was that the gap is not simply of academic interest, as misplaced stories of turnout can in turn alter turnout.
Whether it is because of a herd effect (you know that other people are voting, so you copy them) or social pressure (you know that other people …
“I hear from a well-placed source that the list of peers, with about 55 names from across the party spectrum, will be published on Wednesday 1 December.”
The list was published on Friday 19 November with 54 names from across the party spectrum, so not bad at all.
“A normally astute and well-informed Lib Dem observer reckons the following people are in line to be among the expected 15 new Liberal Democrat peers:
* Brian Paddick (2008 London Mayoral candidate and former senior Metropolitan Police officer)
* Sal Brinton (Parliamentary candidate in Watford in 2005 and 2010)
* Dee Doocey (member …
Back when Tony Blair was Prime Minister Labour tried to get through Parliament sweeping powers to change the law without requiring full Parliamentary scrutiny. Then Liberal Democrat MP David Howarth was one of those who led the charge against this, writing in The Times:
The Government proposed an extraordinary Bill that will drastically reduce parliamentary discussion of future laws, a Bill some constitutional experts are already calling “the Abolition of Parliament Bill”.
A couple of journalists noticed, including Daniel Finkelstein of The Times, and a couple more pricked up their ears last week when I highlighted some biting academic criticism of the
Andrew Reeves is reporting that the police have decided not to take any further action after investigating Conservative MP David Mundell’s election expenses. As we reported previously:
His expense return showed him within the limit but wrongly classified one bill. A correct return would have shown him over the limit.
Although the police have decided that this mistake is not worthy of further action, the publicity, embarrassment and investigation are a strong reminder of the importance of candidates and agents properly checking legal paperwork before submitting it.
Last night Cambridge MP Julian Huppert, former Oxford West and Abingdon MP Evan Harris and Jeremy Hargreaves were elected to be the Federal Policy Committee’s three Vice-Chairs. Evan and Jeremy have long been high-profile figures in the party’s policy-making process and Julian has rapidly joined their ranks as his profile in the party has risen over the last couple of years.
So what is notable about the trio is not any of their presence in it, but that Danny Alexander, former FPC Vice-Chair and in charge of the 2010 manifesto team but now a Cabinet Minister, is no-longer one of the …
There is consistent evidence that in public elections people with names higher up the alphabet, and hence higher up the ballot paper, do slightly better than people lower down. It is not a major effect, though in a marginal seat a small difference can mean you win rather than lose, and seems to be strongest where ballot papers are more complicated, e.g. if all three seats in a council ward are up for election.
So it is no great surprise that after the Liberal Democrat federal committee and interim peers panel election results were declared on Saturday, several people made comment about how the results looked to benefit people higher up the ballot paper. The large number of candidates means these were just the sort of contest where you might expect an effect to come into play, and with the final few places on committees or panels often decided by small margins, there might be an important prompt here for reform.
It is nothing new for a government to be talking about improving electoral registration by matching data between different sources. What is different about Nick Clegg’s latest comments on the subject, in a speech to the Hansard Society, is that the talk is now becoming much more specific, with pilot projects starting next year.
Local councils, for example, hold name and address information about people in several different databases. If they are able to make use of the data from other sources to highlight either gaps in the register, or suspicious entries that may be the result of fraud, this …
The following piece by Dinti Batstone and myself appeared in the November edition of ALDC‘s Campaigner. It follows up on two common themes of ours – Dinti’s on targeting European voters and mine about direct mail:
It’s been a case of two steps forward, one step back in many local parties when it comes to getting more out of direct mail over the last few years. As covered previously in of Campaigner, the emphasis on doing direct mail more often and to more people has sometimes come at a cost in variation. Rather than, say, one batch of direct …
An intended side-effect of the government’s decision to close the Strategy Unit is that some civil servants are being redeployed to beef up Nick Clegg’s team. As the Financial Times reports,
The addition of some more policy specialists will be welcome relief for his hard-pressed team. The sheer range of issues he has to handle has left them struggling to cope at times. Clegg’s office was in danger or being branded a Whitehall black hole, from which policy submissions never re-emerge.
That is good news as far as it goes, though as I wrote before,
“Ineffective in the fight on terror – but a devastating blow to freedom” – that’s the pithy and accurate summary of control orders by Mary Riddell over in the Daily Telegraph. And the newspaper in which the piece appeared is are reminder of how civil liberty issues cut across the political spectrum in not always expected or neat ways.
Riddell points out,
Within the next few days, Mr Cameron and his deputy must reach agreement on the future of security in Britain and, in particular, on control orders and how long to hold terror suspects without charge. The “car crash” foreseen
The investigations have not only failed to locate the missing electoral register but also found that part of the marked register also went missing in a second Parliamentary constituency, Wolverhampton North East.
Meanwhile, the investigation into the ballot paper number discrepancy …
Last month I blogged about an experiment in Sweden where a speed camera records all the cars keeping to the speed limit with all the legal drivers going into a prize draw for cash prizes. The trial has now been carried out and here’s the result (quick version – the average speed of traffic fell from 32 km/hour before the trail to 25 km/hour during the trial):
Given how I’ve previously pointed out that Yes, ministers can disagree and the world doesn’t end, it would be wrong to shout “splits! splits!” at what is going on in the Labour Party over economic policy. The latest disagreements between leader Ed Miliband and Shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson do however highlight just how much work Labour has to do to work out its economic policy.
Johnson made clear to Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson that he did not share his leader’s enthusiasm for making the 50p-in-the-pound top income-tax rate permanent: “I am only
You have me confused with your claim that the Parliamentary Constituencies and Voting Systems Bill is a hybrid bill (and so should go through a different and slower Parliamentary procedure).
Now, I know that you have many more years of legal training and experience than me, so I wouldn’t be confused if there was just the one reason for you appearing to be wrong. But there are three, you see.
First, as you know when a Bill is introduced the Department of the Clerk of the House has to rule on whether or not it is a hybrid bill. …
No, this isn’t a plot from a political satire but it’s a bona fide news story:
An error on Google Maps has caused an international conflict in Central America.
A Nicaraguan military commander, relying on Google Maps, moved troops into an area near San Juan Lake along the border between his country and Costa Rica.* The troops are accused of setting up camp there, taking down a Costa Rican flag and raising the Nicaraguan flag, doing work to clean up a nearby river, and dumping the sediment in Costa Rican territory.
La Nacion — the largest newspaper in Costa Rica — says
The BBC has a poignant map showing where members of the British armed forces have died on active service since 1945, bringing out clearly how even before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Middle East has been a regular location for British military deaths.
The Royal British Legion’s appeal to fund its welfare work for current and former Service people is here.
To promote defence exports consistent with export control criteria; as part of a defence diplomacy programme to strengthen British influence and help support British industry and jobs.
Should the MoD have that as a goal? And if it does, should it fourth of the seven? Over to you…
Dizzy Thinks has been on the case again about the costs run by Early Day Motions in Parliament. As he delicately puts it:
Yes, we really do have to spend £150K alone on the salary, pension and NI contributions for the poor sods that have to sort out the latest self-congratulatory bollocks that our MPs want to spout off fruitlessly about.
The combination of cost and triviality of many EDMs has caused some people to call for their abolition. I think this is going too far, as some EDMs do provide a useful mechanism, as a focus for external campaign groups, …
Co-founder of the Campaign for Body Confidence and Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson has given the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) details of 172 scientific studies which show that exposure to idealised media images has a negative effect on body image for adults and children.
The portfolio of evidence gives a comprehensive overview of research examining the link between airbrushed media images and people’s dissatisfaction with their own bodies.
The Campaign for Body Confidence is calling on the ASA to amend its codes of conduct for advertisers to require airbrushed images of people to be clearly labelled.
Over on the BBC website is a set of graphs about health spending, neatly and clearly laying out some of the issues with health spending, how it has grown in the past and what future plans may mean. Go take a look here.
A defeated candidate from the May 2010 general election is facing court action following claims he made false statements during the election. The Portsmouth News reports:
Les Cummings, who stood as the city’s Justice and Anti-Corruption Party will appear at Portsmouth Magistrates’ Court on Friday, charged with breaching the Representation of the People Act.
Police at Fareham Police Station charged Mr Cummings on Thursday afternoon, with having made, on April 22, before an election, for the purpose of affecting candidate Mike Hancock, false statements that he knew to be untrue.
Meanwhile in other election law news, Nick Clegg has rejected calls from …
Letter sent to the Daily Express, 10 November 2010
re your article “Cameron must say no to votes for prisoners”
Dear Sir
The EU is always interested in what one of its leading members has to say, but if David Cameron takes Ann Widdecombe’s advice, it won’t get him very far. It is the Council of Europe, a completely separate organisation, that is responsible for the ruling on prisoners’ votes.
Yours faithfully
Antonia Mochan
Head of Media
European Commission Representation, London
The Coalition Government’s detailed planning to destroy most of the IT infrastructure and data for ID cards, following the decision to axe Labour’s ID cards plans, has revealed disturbing news about how data was mishandled.
As the BBC reports, equipment is having to be destroyed because it looks like data was wrongly stored on it:
Destruction of equipment might have been avoided if the data it collected had been stored centrally as it was meant to be. But there is evidence that some was accidentally stored locally, the document reveals, so off to the dump it must go…
There are two simple tests I have for books that recount events I was in some way involved in: do they accurately retell events that I have direct first-hand knowledge of and do they tell me something new about events I was one step removed from? If a book pasts both those tests, chances are the rest of the book is interesting and well-informed too – and The British General Election of 2010 by Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley passes both tests with near flying colours (the description of Guildford as a “top” Liberal Democrat target betraying an over-attention to swings to win list over actual party priorities whilst the quote from Disraeli about coalitions is actually rather misleading).
In large part that is because their account is based on hundreds of off the record interviews carried out during the last Parliament and in the immediate aftermath of the general election. Because the interviews have been carried out across political parties (and across factions within them), the authors present a much more robust picture of events than is the fate of some journalists who source their off the record information much more narrowly.
Thanks for speaking up about how outrageous it is for the courts to oust someone elected by the public with a surprise ruling that sets an awful legal precedent for what was a spur of the moment decision people made during the election.
As the media are building up a welcome interest in the number of MPs who share your views and mine, I have prepared the following brief notes to help you avoid any snarky questions from journalists on this topic.
DON’T say it’s awful for someone the public elected to be ousted from office …
Yesterday the Armed Forces Minister and Lib Dem MP for North Devon, Nick Harvey, gave a speech to Chatham House about the cyber-based threats to Britain’s security.
Nick Harvey’s speech started with a welcome nod in the direction of liberal optimism with technology often offering the opportunity to increase people’s freedom and choices. However, he quickly moved on to darker territory:
As a liberal, I am excited about the capacity of the internet and digital technology to increase the freedom and opportunity available to our citizens – to enhance people’s ability to control their own lives and make their own choices –
The cover of Bruce Riedel’s The Search for Al Qaeda shows a group of armed men working their way up a hillside overlooking a beautiful valley that stretches away to rolling hills. It captures the wonder and the tragedy of Afghanistan in one frame.
The book itself is similarly crisp, packing a wide-ranging history of Al Qaeda and its key figures into only 150 pages of moderate size print. It is penned by an ex-CIA man of thirty years service who was frequently closely involved with the figures and events painted in the book, but not so closely as to make the reader fear it is more a justification of his career than a fair account of events.
Former Liberal Democrat MP Alex Carlile is to step down as the government’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation on 31 December. He will be succeeded by David Anderson QC, a specialist in EU and public law and human rights and a visiting professor of law at King’s College, London. Lord Carlile will, however, provide expert, independent oversight of the official review of the government’s strategy (“Prevent”) for preventing violent extremism.
Politics.co.uk reports mixed views from Liberal Democrats about how the party’s backbench committees are working: “One co-chair charged with one of the biggest policy portfolios said the committees were a …
Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart, from the University of Nottingham, have been looking at how often backbench government MPs have been rebelling in this Parliament:
Out of the first 110 divisions in the Commons since Parliament resumed, there have been rebellions by government MPs in 59. That is a rate of rebellion of 54%, simply without parallel in the post-war era…
The Conservative rebellion rate of 35% … is higher than the rate of rebellion by government MPs in all but four of the post-war sessions. The Lib Dem rate of 28% is higher than that seen by government MPs in all but seven post-war sessions. (It is also noticeably higher than the rate of rebellion seen by Lib Dems in any session for which we have data, going back to1992-93 when the rate of rebellion was at 9%)…
For all that, at no point since May has the Government’s majority been in any way threatened. The lowest Government majority thus far has been 58.
For one thing, although the frequency of rebellions is alarmingly high, the average rebellion is small, comprising just six MPs. (The average Conservative rebellion is seven MPs, the average Liberal Democrat revolt is even lower at just three MPs). The largest Coalition rebellion thus far – on Europe – involved 37 Conservative MPs, not enough to threaten the Government’s majority, not least because the Labour Opposition frontbench abstained. The largest Lib Dem rebellion saw ten MPs support Charles Kennedy’s amendment during the Report stage of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill that would have made numerous exceptions for preserving large islands and large geographical areas as whole constituencies.
And second, so far the two sets of Coalition rebels – Conservative and Liberal Democrats – only rarely vote against the Government on the same types of issues.
That last point highlights an important asymmetry which points to the Coalition lasting for a longer rather than shorter time. When it comes to rebellions from the backbenches, it is predominantly one party or the other which has unhappy backbenchers. However, when it comes to disagreements at ministerial levels within the Coalition, the tensions have not been between the two parties in coalition; rather, they have been along shifting lines that cut-across parties. Ministers agreeing with each other across party lines yet rebellious backbenchers not doing so is almost the perfect combination for the Coalition’s long term survival.
It also shows how Liberal Democrat ministers are – so far – much more successful at finding allies in Conservative ranks (most notably over immigration, Trident and control orders, where heavyweight Conservatives have been arguing for the same policies as Liberal Democrats) than rebellious Liberal Democrat MPs, who have tended to rebel on issues that might win Labour, but not Conservative, backing.
Peter Martin "If we pumped loads of money into schools and hospitals, and insisted on getting all the money by borrowing rather than taxing, the bond markets would righ...
Tristan Ward @ David Allen
"getting taxes out of our wealthy oppressors is just too hard".
More importantly (possibly) is that it simply would not raise enough money t...
David Allen Where Vince goes wrong, in my view, is the next step. If we can't buck the bond markets, then we have a simple choice. Raise taxes, or accept that we "can't a...
David Allen "why can’t social care and NHS spending be treated as ‘investment’’. Of course, that won't wash”.
Vince is technically right. Of course, there is a...
Tristan Ward @ David Raw
"I would strongly advise you to remain healthy and not to grow old."
Not for the first time you have misunderstood. I am trying to make the a...
Following the revelations that the 
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Conference booked
New chair of North Northamptonshire Council stands down over social media posts
Are Labour going to cross another red line?
Peter Martin 
Tristan Ward 
David Allen 
Tristan Ward 