Mikey, The Terror Suspect gets a write-up from Stephen Glenn. There’s just one problem with him being a terror suspect as the photograph on the blog post reveals.
Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.
Here’s your starter for ten as we experiment with a new Saturday slot posing a view for debate:
The enthusiasm across the political spectrum for using choice to raise standards in public services is misplaced because:
For many public services, it’s vital to get the service right first time – for everyone. Children only get to go through school once. You don’t want to discover after a botched operation that you should have chosen a different surgeon.
Choice requires surplus capacity to be meaningful – but it’s hard enough to fund minimum capacity in public services without also building in surplus capacity.
What was the typical total on the constituency election expense returns from candidates in the 1910 general elections who fought contested elections? Answer in today’s money is below the jump.
As Helen has covered on The Voice, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority is running a public consultation on MPs’ expenses. Comments on its proposals can be submitted until 11 February 2010.
A couple of people mentioned in comments to that post that the proposals are rather better than the media coverage made them fear, and reading through the IPSA’s proposals I’ve had the same reaction.
Even so, it is well worth responding to the consultation because the IPSA will very likely be receiving significant lobbying from some MPs to water down various proposals. Unless other MPs and the public lobby back, there is a risk of a lopsided impression being changed and important reforms being lost.
So here’s my response, which picks up on a couple of weak areas but otherwise backs the proposals:
The Electoral Commission and police have just published a report into the allegations of electoral practice held in June 2009. What does the latest one show about the state of our electoral system?
The good news is that the headline figures for number of allegations and convictions are relatively modest:
A total of 48 cases involving 107 allegations were recorded by police forces across Great Britain.
The largest single case in Great Britain involved allegations that 24 photocopied ballot papers were sent to a Returning Officer in Aylesbury.
A total of 38 cases (79% of all reported cases) involved only one allegation against a single individual.
Less good is the degree to which time continues to be consumed and hassle generated by imprint issues. Just under one in five of all cases were about imprints. The occasional imprint case involves (alleged) serious abuse – passing off a leaflet as if it were from another party – but many involve simple clerical errors with not only no intent to deceive but with it being clear who the published material was from and how to contact the publisher/promoter.
It is a reminder that good intentions are not enough to keep election agents free from police cautions – or worse – but it is hard to see how this ends up being a good use of time for the police and CPS.
That is particularly so because other, more serious, cases can take a long time to be resolved. At the time of the report, just over a third of cases are still under police investigation or awaiting a decision by the CPS (Crown Office in Scotland). For allegations to be left hanging in the air so long after an election has concluded is highly unsatisfactory.
Of course, electoral law is by no means the only area of law to suffer from this problem and it is an oddity of the tough on crime rhetoric of the last few decades that speeding up the exercise of justice almost never features. Perhaps in part that is because the big losers are the innocent people who have police investigations or charges hanging over them for months and years, with the hurt, anger, disruption and depression that often goes with that. But the hurt and damage done to people who turn out to be innocent is only rarely talked about.
Both the question of imprint allegations clogging up the system and the speed of justice problems are not new and the 2009 round of elections does not seem to have thrown up any new problems or trends in electoral fraud.
With the measures taken over the last few years against postal vote fraud having had a good impact in most areas, the main danger for the future looks to be personation (stealing someone’s vote by turning up to the polling station and pretending to be them). Over a quarter of all cases and nearly half of all allegations arising from the June 2009 elections related to personation.
A plan to try tackling personation by requiring people to sign for their ballot papers (which would provide a paper trail, including finger prints, to help track down fraud as well as providing an extra security check) was previously abandoned in farcical circumstances. Although the law allowed polling station staff to ask for a signature, due to faulty drafting they would still have had to hand over a ballot paper even if someone refused to sign. Hence signing for ballot papers is still stuck in the starting blocks.
Here is the full Electoral Commission / police report:
Earlier this week I highlighted how Nick Clegg’s speech laying out the foundations of the Liberal Democrat general election manifesto was based around four steps in which health and crime did not feature. Those two policy areas have been dominant in the party’s campaigning over the previous three general elections – in particular in marginal seats.
However, whilst the party seems to be at least dallying with downplaying the emphasis on those two issues from the key national headlines, Labour is headed in the opposite direction. Labour’s 1997 five pledges included one each on health and crime, whilst their likely …
Congratulations to all those shortlisted in the various categories for the Councillor of the Year awards, run by the Local Government Information Unit and CCLA.
Particular congratulations to the nine Liberal Democrats:
Warren Bradley (Liverpool) – Leader of the Year
Carla Butler (Newhaven) – Young Councillor of the Year
Alexis Rowell (Camden) and Paul Tilsley (Birmingham) – Sustainability councillor of the year
Alex Folkes (Cornwall) and Dennis Meredith (Northants) – New Councillor of the Year
Daisy Benson (Reading) and Alex Perkins (Canterbury) – Online Councillor of the Year
Tracy Ismail (Islington) – Community Champion of the Year
Just over a year ago, I highlighted how YouGov consistently found the Conservatives relatively more popular amongst women than men compared to other pollsters:
YouGov, MORI and ComRes are the three of the main polling companies who also provide a gender breakdown of party levels of support using the same methodology as for their headline voting question…
Whilst YouGov consistently finds the Conservative party more popular amongst women than men, the other two consistently find the opposite. There is a similar difference amongst the pollsters when it comes to Labour support, though this time the gender pattern is reversed.
Ministers have given a concession over what critics claimed were “draconian” powers which would enable them to crack down on online copyright infringement.
A clause in the Digital Economy Bill would have allowed ministers to amend existing laws on online piracy without the need for further legislation.
Google and Facebook were among firms to complain about the measure, saying it would hamper digital innovation…
Section 17 of the bill, which has attracted the most anger, would give ministers “reserve powers” to draft fresh laws to tackle net-based copyright infringement without needing parliamentary approval.
A city councillor has been expelled from the Conservative Party after making offensive remarks about rape at a meeting.
Eddie Wake, 56, a Tory councillor at Sunderland City Council, is alleged to have made the remarks at a meeting of the authority and left one woman in tears.
Conservative party chiefs said comments by Washington South member Mr Wake, at the end of a meeting with police about a rape prevention campaign, were “totally unacceptable”…
Group leader Lee Martin told the BBC: “When I ask anyone to go out and vote for a Conservative candidate, I’ve got a
Political coverage and blogging in the UK has a rather odd love-hate relationship with electoral numbers. On the one hand, the latest opinion poll figures get reported, re-reported and mis-reported at length, with the mere fact that a change in ratings is well within the margin of error not being reason enough to stop a cavalcade of comment.
Yet despite this love of talking electoral numbers, those that are talked about come from a fairly narrow range of sources.
So here instead are three other numbers – all simple in concept, but interesting in implication.
The number of published opinion polls into British general election voting intention hit a twenty plus year high in 2009 with 141 polls carried out during the calendar year.
That is the highest figure since at least 1987 (when my records commence)* and more that completes the polling industry’s recovery from its post-1992 nadir. You can see the quarterly trend in this graph:
First up, there’s a report from the Hansard Society which has surveyed MPs and their use of the internet (“A study into how MPs use digital media to communicate with their constituents”):
To recap, the four steps to a fairer Britain which Nick Clegg laid out yesterday were:
Fair taxes.
A new, fair start for all children at school.
A rebalanced, green economy.
And clean, open politics.
In terms of what’s there, no huge surprises. After the MPs’ expenses scandal, it’s no great shock (and very welcome to many members) to see political reform back in the list of top issues for the party.
The emphasis on early years education reflects a common theme of Nick Clegg’s speeches before and after becoming party leader. Expect that story about ‘a young child in Sheffield…’ to be said many, many …
The Sunday Telegraph and Mail on Sunday both ran very similar stories at the weekend:
The professional body that represents health-and-safety experts has warned businesses not to grit public paths. (Mail)
The professional body that represents health and safety experts has issued a warning to businesses not to grit public paths. (Telegraph)
Both then went on about health and safety gone mad etc.
Only one problem.
The experts had said nothing of the sort.
The Sunday Telegraph had approached the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health who in fact gave a comment which said the opposite of what the newspaper subsequently reported. Far …
In amongst all the political trouble for the DUP’s Peter Robinson, one other problem has been largely overlooked – an Electoral Commission investigation into donations. The problem? In public he’s talked about giving donations to the DUP which would have required declaring. But there is no trace of them in the DUP’s records of declared donations.
This is just the sort of issue which, for a popular politician at the height of their powers, rarely turns in to a big deal – apologise, blame bureaucratic details and move on. However Peter Robinson is anything but that at the moment.
In the run-up to Christmas, Lib Dem Voice ran a series of articles from bloggers giving advice on how to start a blog, what to write about, where to find readers and many more. All written from direct personal experience from a range of (very different!) bloggers, the pieces provide a handy guide to anyone who is thinking of starting a blog or is already blogging but wants to get more from their blog.
I’ve now collated the articles into one pdf booklet, including some updates to individual pieces. You can read the guide below or view and download it from Scribd (the download option is to the top left of the document window).
The quality of traditional media coverage of political opinion polling has been a common cause of complaints amongst political bloggers. The most obvious problem is when an opinion poll from one polling company is compared not with the previous poll from that company but against an older one because the intervening one happened to have been published by a different media outlet.
Whilst comparing, say, the latest ICM poll with the previous ICM poll is the most useful comparison to make, if that previous ICM poll appeared elsewhere, in the part it has got airbrushed out of report of the latest …
The Law Society could have done some good last week.
The Law Society could have put out a press release reassuring people that the legal risks if you decide to be a good neighbour and clear the snow and ice from outside your home are hugely overstated (i.e. the risk is so tiny no-one I’ve asked has yet been able to come up with an example of this actually happening and there are numerous major legal hurdles any such claim would have to overcome).
Or, if it was feeling very cautious about the law, it could have called for the law to …
There’s now a consistent murmur in the media’s coverage of the snow spell about how people clear snow from outside their homes in other countries, how it might be a good thing for people to do the same here (example) and how it might not quite bring down The End Of The World (Legal Department) on your head if you clear snow from outside your own home and someone falls over.
Two things have been notably missing from the coverage though. First, any example of a successful legal action in such a case. There is plenty of “Oooh, well perhaps …
Written over last summer by Professor Anthony Seldon and a mini-army of assistants, Trust is at heart both an optimistic and a pessimistic book.
Optimistic because one of Seldon’s arguments is that “trusting and being trustworthy are the sovereign human virtues we need today trust is natural: we were born trusting and the state of nature is to be trusting”. Pessimistic because his formula for restoring trust is not a simple checklists of policies but rather a harder and more fundamental shift in how individuals behave and a recipe of broad change across nearly every part of public policy.
It should be no contest, you’d have thought. Public spat between million selling child-care author and a politician. Who’s the public going to instinctively trust? And what’s the general tenor of online comments on the stories going to be like?
So when I saw the news that Nick Clegg has said that Gina Ford’s highly prescriptive and detailed child care instructions weren’t for him and his family, I expected the coverage to be at least mildly critical and the online comments to be far more so.
That’s not how it has turned out though. It’s both to Nick’s credit (the reasons he …
It’s Sunday. It’s 7am. It’s time for an exclusive peak at the next Conservative Party election poster, but first the news.
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:
Some Good News for Nick Clegg: Nick Thornsby mulls over some new poll findings on what attributes the public associate with each of the three main party leaders.
Here’s your starter for ten as we experiment with a new Saturday slot posing a view for debate:
Online discussion and interactivity works best when it is amongst people of common outlooks and shared assumptions, as that is what protects against it drowning in flames, drive-by verbal graffiti and point scoring rather than point development. But that means it works best when people are huddling together in communities of the like-minded. Such groups of like-minded don’t make for good political discussion or debate as they all agree on too much and don’t pay much attention to the occasional dissenting interloper.
There are many, many reasons why the snow coup melted away so quickly. In amongst them is the lack of any groundswell of support, whether from backbench MPs or activists around the country, for the latest attempt.
Today’s Guardian throws an interesting light on the detail of how such grassroots opinion is followed in contemporary politics:
Downing Street on Wednesday monitored the Labour grassroots response to Hoon and Hewitt through Twitter, finding little or no support for their push.
That certainly partly reflects Labour reaction but it also reflects the degree to which Hoon, Hewitt and their allies are of a different political generation from those who naturally …
Presenting a new analysis of the merits of the two main ways of converting party vote shares in to seat number projections:
Although uniform national swing (UNS) calculations are widely used to extrapolate likely seat numbers from party’s national ratings and have the merit of simplicity, they are not without their critics. For example, in November ConservativeHome ran a piece from Quentin Langley which said,
That it continues to be used when a superior system was developed more than three decades ago is a testament to incompetence in the media…
The Proportional Loss Hypothesis (PLH) developed by Dr Gordon Reece of
From today’s paper comes one of the more unusual stories about a councillor misbehaving:
A former lord mayor has been suspended from serving as a city councillor for three months after repeatedly asking a female guest at an official ball if he could have sex with her.
Married Andy Matchet, 57, also questioned the middle-aged chief executive about her orgasms and told her about losing his virginity as they spoke at the Lord Mayor’s Ball in Coventry.
As the city’s lord mayor at the time, father-of-two Mr Matchet was wearing his ceremonial gold chain and was accompanied by his wife Caron, 47.
In their absence, I will step up to the mark and do my best to fill the gap in our media commentary:
<start rant>
What is our country coming to when just about everyone expects the state to sort out everything for them and is happy to use the flimsiest of health and safety excuses to stop behaving sensibly? It’s the nanny state gone mad, that’s what it is.
Millions of people in other countries quite happily clear the snow from outside their own homes and shops at winter time. But in Britain, supposedly the liberal home of the free? Nope, pretty much …
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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From cinema to book shop
District council backs a parish council for Market Harborough
New by-election poll gives Burnham 5 point lead
Pope Leo speaks for all liberals when he condemns racism, supports migration, and supports Ukraine
Chloe 
paul barker 
George Thomas 
Nick Baird 
Peter Chambers 