A quick aggregation of the declared donations to the Ed Miliband for Leader campaign (so far – I’d expect some donations in the last stages of the campaign still to appear):
£133,000 from trade unions (43% of the total)
£80,951 from other large donors (i.e. over £1,500) (26%)
£95,000 from small donors (31%) £308,951 in total
Knowing what it takes to be a good candidate and then a good councillor is vital to winning elections – and to then making something out of the opportunity the voters have given you. So here are seven questions to ask yourself if you are thinking of standing in the local elections next May or in a council by-election.
What will you do different from a councillor of another party?
There are decent people who will be conscientious and work hard in (just about) every party. And even in the most rural of wards, there is more than one person who is local to the ward. So what …
We have previously reported on Conservative MP David Mundell’s admission that he exceeded the election expense limit in this year’s election. His expense return showed him within the limit but wrongly classified one bill. A correct return would have shown him over the limit.
The police have decided to investigate the matter and news has just emerged that he was questioned by them several days ago.
Mundell can apply for legal relief for making the mistake, though the police’s interest suggest this is not as simple a case as most relief cases are where a simple mistake is involved but …
Saying something highly uncomplimentary about your own party is one thing. Saying it, denying it and then having a recording surface of you saying it is rather different though. Step forward, Hazel Blears and her “wicked and malicious” comment:
The Tower Hamlets Mayoral election campaign continues to do its best to beat political fiction for implausible twists, witness the appearance and then disappearance of a disgraced ex-Assistant Chief Executive in Lutfur Rahman’s election film as recounted on Harry’s Place.
The Liberal Democrat candidate is John Griffiths, who you can find on Facebook and Twitter for the latest news and how to help his campaign.
It has been a regular finding of both MORI and YouGov research that the public’s trust in members of different professions has been steadily declining for many years. However, the latest survey from YouGov suggests this decline has stopped, with several professions – including politicians – seeing a recent recovery in their standings.
In 2003 on average 49% of people said they trusted different professions on average to tell the truth a great deal or a fair amount. This fell to 42% in 2006 and 37% in 2007 but was 39% this August. The two point rise is not statistically significant …
We’ve often covered the issue of press standards on Lib Dem Voice, including posts such as those from myself calling for the Press Complaints Commission to be reformed – which was also the subject of a speech I gave at party conference. So it is only fair to give credit where some is due – as it is in the case of the PCC ruling against the Daily Star:
The Press Complaints Commission has upheld a complaint against the Daily Star about an article titled “Muslim-only public loos”, ruling that it was inaccurate and
In your speech today you warn against “the destruction of a 200-year-old constitution” and give this as a reason to oppose AV.
But aside from our voting system, there is another part of that 200 year old constitution that is also currently up for change before Parliament.
200 years ago the size of Parliamentary constituencies varied hugely. Much more than 5% or 10% and not simply on islands or in the Highlands. Massive variations were built into the system, specially to protect particular vested interests.
So if you are wanting to protect our 200 year old constitution, I …
One of the fringe meetings I spoke at during the Liverpool conference was ResPublica’s on the topic of “Growing a civil economy through a civil society”. Accompanying ResPublica’s fringe program is a pamphlet with pieces accompanying the talks we all gave and here is my piece from it.
Both a successful market economy and a healthy democracy require individuals from all walks of life to feel they have the power to change the future. The belief that you can make a success of your own business, that your firm can innovate and that existing suppliers are not locked in to permanent dominance creates the vibrancy which generates wealth in a market economy. The optimism that your voice can count and your actions can alter your community gives live to a democracy, making it more than a token intermittent meeting of pencil and paper in the polling booth.
Our economy and our democracy therefore present us with a common challenge – to tackle that lack of confidence in your own ability to alter the future which suffocates far too many communities and far too many parts of society. Removing that malaise requires a mix of many policies, only a few of which I highlight in this piece.
One of the most important is improving education in people’s early years. Those formative early years leave intellectual and psychological marks that can be very hard to shift in later years. It is a tough question for government, because so much of the evidence shows that what matters above all is the commitment of parents to their children. That is a deeply private and personal affair which the state can only touch the edges of. Nick Clegg’s commitment to the Pupil Premium to channel extra funds to help educate the most disadvantaged children is one example of the exceptions to that where the government can take effective action.
A second strand is the sort of political reform the coalition government is embarked on, devolving power from Westminster to local councils, to the Scottish Executive and offering a referendum in Wales. Going too is the worst sort of insular political elitism –one of the two houses of Parliament still completely locking out the public from electing its members. It shows a fantastic contempt by for the public that when MPs are booted out at a general election, how does the political establishment react? By giving a good number of those defeated MPs a seat for life in Parliament courtesy of the Lords.
A third strand is – or should be – tackling the elitist insularity in the commercial sector. Whether it is the deeply lopsided rules that give the favoured company directors a huge head-start in elections or the widespread use of “commercial confidentiality” clauses to keep scrutiny at bay, what would cause outrage if tried by a politician is far too often par for the course by those who like to look down on politicians.
Tying the different strands together needs to be a stronger sense of how people can successfully work together, because so often the collective voice has the strength and skill to succeed where lone individuals are thwarted. Whether it is the Community Politics of the Liberal Democrats or the Big Society of the Conservatives, success will come not from seeing voluntary collective action as an excuse for cost cutting but as a means to a vibrant and successful country.
The Portsmouth News carries some more comments concerning the reports of a police “investigation” into alleged/reported allegations concerning Mike Hancock MP. I am somewhat astounded that the police have not actually contacted Mike Hancock concerning this matter, according to his spokesman. You would have thought that, with the papers bandying about words such as “police investigation” and “sex”, the police would have at least contacted the MP.
In the London Mayor selection contest, Lewisham councillor Duwayne Brooks has just publicly thrown his hat in the ring. More information on his Facebook page.
The other declared candidate so far is Lembit Opik, who also has his own Facebook page. The number of fans for that latter page has been growing slowly but now there is a direct competitor to judge it against. So far, Lembit is ahead though Duwayne’s page has only very recently appeared.
Matters have moved on quickly since then, with Lembit’s Mayor page continuing to grow slowly (now up to 216 fans) …
KAYA Cheshire may have only recently turned 18, but she’s got far bigger things to worry about than boyfriends, make-up and A-levels.
The aspiring journalist has turned her compassionate personality and hard working skills to a global issue in the fashion industry – whether airbrushing in magazines is really right.
The student from South Wales used London Fashion Week this week to promote her Natural Beauty: Keeping It Real campaign that she launched via Battlefront, a Channel 4 funded project that helps 14-21-year-olds platform charity campaigns…
She says: “When I started studying media at school, my eyes
The Electoral Commission is plugging a gap in the record of political donations following a decision to change its policy on retaining copies of constituency candidate expense returns.
Donations made direct to a candidate (rather than to their party) are only recorded in these constituency returns and do not appear in the donation records published by the Electoral Commission. However, in previous Parliaments both the local copies of these returns kept by electoral officials and the copies gathered in by the Electoral Commission were destroyed after a handful of years. This meant that even before the next general election was held, …
One of the most commonly made comments about insurgencies such as those in Afghanistan or Iraq, and most famously Vietnam, is that in order to win the insurgents simply need to survive. It’s a piece of conventional wisdom challenged in a thoughtful piece in Foreign Affairs, based on looking at 89 insurgencies over the last fifty years:
Many have assumed that insurgents invariably win by simply holding out. This is incorrect. Historically, governments have won more often than insurgents in the long run. And even wars that seemed to be spiraling inexorably toward defeat, such as Colombia’s against the Revolutionary
This article is appearing in The Total Politics Guide to Political Blogging in the UK 2010-2011, which is available from Amazon.
Just as people running political campaigns often learn from other disciplines, those active in other disciplines can learn from political campaigns. Much has been written (including by myself, such as in the Hansard Society report http://scr.bi/hansardsociety) on how social media was used in the 2010 general election campaign; far less common have been pieces looking at the lessons that those outside politics can learn from the deployment of social media in that election.
The Wednesday lunchtime at Liverpool conference saw myself chairing the last of The Voice’s fringe meetings, this one looking at lessons from the 2010 general election.
Our guest speakers were Hilary Stephenson (Director of Campaigns), Duncan Hames (newly elected as MP for Chippenham) and Paul Holmes (former MP for Chesterfield).
Thanks to Alex for sorting out the recording and podcasting wizardry.
Love your coalition partner all the time in public: that was the clear line taken by Nick Clegg, reinforced by other senior party figures and not challenged directly in any high profile way during conference (save for one question during the Nick Clegg Q&A). And yet… whether or not the party should let its strong debates with the Conservatives within the coalition show a little more in public was …
In the London Mayor selection contest, Lewisham councillor Duwayne Brooks has just publicly thrown his hat in the ring. More information on his Facebook page.
The other declared candidate so far is Lembit Opik, who also has his own Facebook page. The number of fans for that latter page has been growing slowly but now there is a direct competitor to judge it against. So far, Lembit is ahead though Duwayne’s page has only very recently appeared.
You select a candidate in a keenly contested election.
You then receive complaints about how the contest was run.
So you suspend the candidate and, er…, don’t rush through an investigation or recount the votes to find a new winner or put the runner-up in post but instead your national committee hands the candidature to someone else, without members getting a say in the matter.
Oh, and the original winner decides to stand anyway, but as an independent.
Welcome to the tale of Labour’s Mayoral selection in Tower Hamlets, as told over on Dave Hill’s blog.
The Liberal Democrat candidate is John Griffiths, who you …
An update on one of the stories mentioned in our previous coverage of Nigel Waterson, the now former Tory MP for Eastbourne. As ConservativeHome reports:
It was reported in 2008 that Nigel Waterson, then the Conservative MP for Eastbourne, had been arrested for allegedly assaulting his teenage children.
The Metropolitan Police has now apologised to Mr Waterson, and agreed to pay him damages and costs. It accepts that the accusations made against him were “wholly unfounded”, and apologises for any distress caused.
Tomorrow we’ve got a new guest editor running the site for a day, well known Lib Dem blogger Linda Jack. She’s the second in a series of guest editors, with Mark Valladares having been the first and several more lined up over the next couple of months.
If anyone else would like to be a guest editor for the day, please drop an email to [email protected] with some details of your blogging or editing experience.
As Stephen mentioned earlier in conference, we’ve done a little experiment with the latest Lib Dem Voice survey of party members by asking exactly the same questions as were very recently asked of party members in a YouGov survey. It turns out that the answers from our two different approaches are very similar:
As you may know, there is currently debate about whether or not the UK should replace its Trident nuclear weapons system. Current policy is to replace the Trident submarines with a new fleet of boats, and to replace the ballistic nuclear missiles they carry at a later …
… is to be found over on Left Foot Forward: Party democracy alive and kicking at Lib Dem conference. I don’t agree with all of it – such as the use of “indefensible” 🙂 – but it’s a good post that shows an understanding of how parties work and makes good use of details of what has happened at conference.
An excellent speech today from (Lord) Tom McNally:
What was so sad about the last Labour Government was that it slipped far too easily in to authoritarian behaviour and authoritarian measures.
Labour created thousands of new offences and used a steady stream of criminal justice and anti-terrorism laws to ratchet up the powers of the state and to diminish the rights of the citizen.
This coalition comes into office to reverse that tidal flow of laws and restrictions on individual liberty. Which is why my department, the Ministry of Justice, will now check each new criminal offence. And if we don’t need
Slipped in near the end of Nick Clegg’s keynote speech to Liberal Democrat conference was the news that the first democratic elections to the House of Lords are pencilled in for 2015.
Party sources have confirmed that the reference to Liberal Democrat candidates at the next general election fighting alongside candidates for a reformed Upper House means the draft Lords reform legislation due to be published early in 2011 is being planned on the basis of elections in 2015.
Strategy: the party’s official line of loving our coalition partners in public has been firmly stuck to by the party’s senior figures, and argued for by Nick Clegg during Q+A at the weekend. Bubbling under the surface are many questions about whether this is the right strategy and if the party could and would be better if it more often made public its disagreements, such as over the opting out of the EU directive
The coalition government is pledged to introducing a package of reforms to our electoral system, including extending it to cover the House of Lords. Quite what the impact of these changes will be is an issue addressed in the Litmus newspaper jointly produced by Lib Dem Voice, Left Foot Forward and Conservative Home. Here is my piece on the topic, and you can read the full newspaper, including the other pieces on this topic from Lord Norton and Will Straw, either via the hard copies in conference registration packs or online at www.litmustest.org.
The present House of Lords model gives a seat in Parliament for life without having to face any election. We need constitutional reform and an electoral system that reduces the number of safe seats, argues Dr Mark Pack.
A combination of meetings and media mean I cannot make it into the hall later this morning for the debate on the party’s Facing the Future policy consultation (pdf copy of document here). It is a document setting out the broad questions (sixty-two in all, though Q59 bears a striking resemblance to Q53) intended to shape the party’s future policy development. Had I been able to make it, this is the necessarily brief speech I would have wanted to give about the last three in the document, on international affairs.
There are two near certainties about any broad policy review …
Former Conservative MP Angela Browning, former Liberal Democrat MP David Howarth, former SNP MP and MSP George Reid and ex-Labour HQ staffer Roy Kennedy have been appointed as Electoral Commissioners by Parliament (see news release here).
These are the first ‘political’ appointments since the laws governing the Electoral Commission were changed to permit people with recent political activity to become commissioners.
Roy Kennedy’s appointment may cause some comment as he was the Labour Party’s Director of Compliance since 2005, a period during which there were many controversies over the Labour Party’s approach to finances. For example, there were no prosecutions over …
Sunday lunchtime saw Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander address Liberal Democrat conference. The packed nature of the hall, the fullest it had been so far save for the rally on Saturday night, reflects both the importance of Danny’s role and the interest from many members in hearing direct from him.
What’s really happening with the cuts? How much is fairness figuring? And can Danny present the message successfully? Not being David Laws is a burden that has hung over his early days in office and this speech was his opportunity to establish himself in party eyes as his own …
Tristan Ward @ David Allen
"PFI won’t help stop the planet burning"
Who said anything about PFI - I didn't.
The private money that is building (not enough) house...
Joey Vimsante I think the EU and UK needs to support not for profit, social media platforms that put the interest of the public, vulnerable people, young people, and nation a...
Nick Baird With regard to client-side image scanning, the danger of mission creep are real, but I have other concerns. One is whether this is truly a practical and effecti...
Tara Foster Hi Simon
"Has the author not heard of girls sharing pictures with boys who then share with their friends ? of boys and girls tricked in to sharing pictures w...
Sarah Agreed. We are far too smart as a party to abandon our liberal values to pretend that social media and photo bans will be effective. The method by which we woul...
Our economy and our democracy therefore present us with a common challenge – to tackle that lack of confidence in your own ability to alter the future which suffocates far too many communities and far too many parts of society. Removing that malaise requires a mix of many policies, only a few of which I highlight in this piece.
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Brechtian television: Leo McKern in Galileo (1964)
Good news on political donations?
Conference booked
Are Labour going to cross another red line?
Tristan Ward 
Joey Vimsante 
Nick Baird 
Tara Foster 
Sarah 