With the general election looking to be heading towards a hung Parliament according to the latest prediction we’ve published from a group of academics, how are things looking for the Liberal Democrats?
The fast-moving story that sweeps round the world may catch the headlines, but the reality of most internet campaigning is very different: it’s the gradual, consistent and sustained effort that reaps the reward. Unless you’re very lucky, it’s a commitment to building up email lists, web visitors and so on over time which brings results.
2. Don’t expect people automatically to come to you
It’s easy to stick something online – a Facebook page, a blog, a simple website or whatever. But that won’t make people come to it. Just as there’s no point printing a …
My party, the UK Liberal Democrats, and group, the Alliance for Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), have been amazingly tolerant of finding a militant federalist in their midst.
Although an enthusiast for a closer European Union, Andrew Duff recognises the need for pro-Europeans to make their case and starts with the roots of the EU in the ruins of post-1945 Europe. He quotes Winston Churchill saying:
In a furious letter sent to Conservative MPs in Westminster, and leaked to the New Statesman, Edward McMillan-Scott describes the decision to allow Michal Kaminski to become the Tories’ new group leader in the EU as “disastrous” and says that his own expulsion for opposing the move was designed “to divert attention from political misjudgements” …
Perhaps most controversially, McMillan-Scott accuses Tory high command of a “smear campaign” against him. In a footnote to the letter entitled “ten killer points”, he makes a series of extraordinary claims including: …
It’s Sunday. It’s 9am on the day when in 1984 Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won gold at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. You want to see the easiest leaflet delivery in the world, don’t you? But first, the news and blogs.
2 Must-Read Blog Posts
What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here’s are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:
Weekend voting has been discussed for a long time. Back in 1991, for example, the all-party Hansard Society’s report Agenda for Change discussed moving voting to a Sunday and highlighted that the Society of Local Authority Chief Exeuctives (SOLACE) backed this idea. Similarly, in 1997, the Home Affairs Select Committee recommended that weekend voting should be tested out.
Partly as a result of this, the system of election pilots that was then put in motion by the 1999 Home Office Working Party on Electoral
We’ve covered before the campaign by Jo Swinson and others to change the antiquated Parliamentary rules which ban MPs (and in theory other people too) from placing footage from Parliament on YouTube.
One of the more dramatic areas of Liberal Democrat advance against Labour in the last few years has been in Ashfield, where Jason Zadrozny is fighting to gain the seat from Labour.
His campaign has received a boost with the news that Labour MP Geoff Hoon is standing down at the general election, a decision made so late in the day that it will deprive the new Labour candidate of much time to establish themselves against Jason’s record of campaigning over the years.
Candidates who make extensive use of social media will receive a boost to their election campaigns, courtesy of Sky News’s plans to feature such material in a set of special constituency pages being created for the election.
Each constituency will have its own page and those pages will pull in feeds from candidates. Sky is asking for information on candidate blogs, Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts, In addition, Sky will also pull in photos from Flickr and films from YouTube if they are tagged with the names of both the constituency and the candidate. (Let’s hope Sky are remember to …
Earlier today Nick Clegg today launched another plank of the party’s green economic policies for the general election, pledging to create 57,000 jobs by investing £400 million in upgrading disused shipyards so that they can produce off-shore wind turbines.
It’s a triple win: boost the economy, help parts of the country which have been hit the hardest and improve Britian’s environmental record.
Current plans to expand wind farms in the North and Irish seas could see every one of the 6,400 turbines needed brought in from abroad, as there are currently no turbine manufacturers in the UK.
British ports are ideally located to host turbine manufacturers due to their proximity to the off-shore wind farms; however, they are currently unable to invest due to the lack of appropriate docks with suitable space.
The proposals to invest in physical infrastructure to support a greener economy also include a pledge to invest £100million in training and testing facilities, including at universities with specialist engineering research facilities such as Loughborough, Durham and Newcastle.
It’s a favourite quote amongst Conservatives who are opposed to electoral reform wheeled out to suggest that there’s something fundamentally alien to this country about coalition government “England does not love coalitions”.
But what did Disraeli really mean when he said it on 15 December 1852? The words were uttered during a debate on the Conservative budget, which was under attack for proposing a deficit. What’s more, the day before he had tried to get the group of Radical MPs to agree to back him and eventually join the Cabinet.
In other words, it was more a matter of “England does not …
The Government has backed a move to amend election law to ensure that general election counts are started on the evening of polling day, exception in exceptional circumstances.
This exception will mean that counts for constituencies where there are severe logistical problems in getting ballot boxes in from polling stations, such as from Scottish islands, are likely to continue to commence on Fridays. However, for other constituencies counts will commence on Thursday evening.
The new clause in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill will require the counting of votes at a UK Parliamentary general elections to commence within four hours of the …
“Whatever happens in the election this week it is not going to make all that much difference” – Peregrine Worsthone, just before the 1979 general election in which Margaret Thatcher defeated Jim Callaghan.
Hey ho.
Mind you, even in the first few months after the 1979 general election he was far from alone in the view that the choice in 1979 between Labour and Conservative was an incremental one rather than one of major choice.
In large part that is because – with one notable exception – the 1979 Conservative manifesto avoid radical specifics and the campaign itself saw both Sir Keith Joseph …
The switch of Councillor Alex Dingwall from the SNP to the Liberal Democrats is a great boost for Katy Gordon’s campaign in Glasgow North (Labour majority: 3,338).
Explaining his reasons for leaving the SNP after 31 years as a member, Cllr Dingwall said:
Paragraph 5.6.1 of “Guidance Notes for Barring Decision Marking Process”, which states in part:
“even where a jury has found someone not guilty of having done something, you must always remember that, at most, this means is that the court did not find that someone did something “beyond a reasonable doubt” (the criminal standard of proof).”
Tony Benn’s lament that politics should be about issues, not personalities, is one echoed even by many who would struggle to find any issues on which they agree with him.
But it’s not a view I share. Why? Because the detailed policies of election manifestos or conference speeches frequently get swept aside in power by events. It’s not just the unexpected new event, it’s also the fallibility of forecasts which mean that decision making is often made from a very different perspective from that used to draw up pre-election policy promises.
Take the economy. It’s hard enough to know whether it is …
That was one of two key votes where Parliament had had the chance to clean up its act before media stories and public outcry forced it to do so. The other was about whether or not MPs’ expenses should be susceptible to Freedom of Information requests. There was an attempt to change the law to keep them secret, via a Bill introduced …
The Times has reported its latest opinion poll. It has reported the changes in party share of the vote.
And then Peter Riddell has said,
These shifts are within the margin of error
Why’s that impressive? Because nearly every opinion poll only shows changes within the margin of error (you’ve usually got to look over a wider pattern to see statistically significant changes), but that doesn’t stop newspapers writing up their stories as if the changes in support are significant and therefore ones we can be sure actually happened.
It’s as if the newspapers think, “Look, we know the poll doesn’t …
A footnote to my post about the subsequent expenses revelations regarding the 21 Conservative MPs who voted down expenses reform in 2008, before the Daily Telegraph revelations forced everyone’s hand. Of the three Labour MPs now facing criminal charges, two also voted against reform (David Chaytor and Elliot Morley) whilst the third, Jim Devine, abstained on the vote. Well there you go.
You may have been following some of my travails trying to get repairs made to some of those telephone, broadband, traffic light etc boxes which appear on many pavements.
Although my own local council (Islington) is very good at dealing with them either directly themselves or passing on to the relevant company and ensuring the work is done, other councils, including Haringey and Westminster, are far less so.
Haringey in theory also gets the job done if a member of the public reports a problem to them, but in practice I’ve often found problems of things going wrong or being forgotten.
With new polling figures in, the general election prediction model we covered in November and December has churned out a new prediction for the next general election – and it’s a striking one:
New prediction: Conservative lead of 6% but Labour largest party with 299 seats (27 short of an overall majority)
December prediction: Conservative lead of 9% with 315 seats (11 short of an overall majority)
November prediction: Conservative lead of 10% with 322 seats (4 short of an overall majority)
The academic team who have compiled the prediction say,
The race remains too close to call under reasonable scenarios, either favorable to the government or the opposition. The election of a hung Parliament cannot be discarded at this point.
Background to prediction
In November Lib Dem Voice published the first of our exclusive general election predictions, based on the work of a group of academics who have analysed polling data (not just party support levels) in the run up to previous British elections:
It’s been a while since we last reminded readers about this, so now seems a good time to publish the information again. You may have noticed that next to some people’s comments is a small picture of themselves, such as:
If you want a picture to appear next to your comments you need to do two things.
As I wrote previously about the voting down in the summer of 2008 of plans to reform MPs’ expenses:
The bulk of the blame for blocking the reforms must lie with the Labour Party as 146 of their MPs voted to block the reforms but given David Cameron’s strident recent comments, it’s striking to see that seven of his frontbenchers, and 21 MPs in total, voted to block reform when they had the chance. This was enough to see the measure defeated.
A year and a half on from those 21 voting against changing the expense rules, what do we now …
The appointment of Tess Culnane, an ex-National Front candidate, to work for the BNP GLA member Richard Barnbrook has been well covered elsewhere.
But one detail intrigues me. As I understand it, Tess Culnane’s job is one that comes with a salary. So does that mean she’ll now start paying off some of the tens of thousands of pounds she owes to two Liberal Democrat members the Liberal Democrats?
The debt comes from her loss of a libel action taken against Lewisham Liberal Democrats Mark Morris (who now works at City Hall too) and Vijay Naidu. As a result of losing the case …
Chloe The Russian army is bogged down east of the Dnieper River in Eastern Ukraine. What possible motive does it have to attack anyone outside the conflict that has b...
paul barker Nine By-elections since May 7th & Reform have only won one, perhaps a sign of hope....
George Thomas I think this article is well written, thank you. This past week has seen a reminder in two different ways of when the LGBTQ+ community supported the miners and ...
Nick Baird Ajax should of course have been cancelled years ago. Unfortunately due to the sunk costs the MOD and Government seem to be converging on a plan to spend another...
Peter Chambers > The standout project is Ajax, which should be immediately cancelled.
Oh if only! Ben Wallace confided that "the money is spent" and that if the programme...
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Chloe 
paul barker 
George Thomas 
Nick Baird 
Peter Chambers 