Author Archives: Mark Pack

Mark was the Liberal Democrat Head of Innovations until June 2009 and is now at Blue Rubicon. He also lectures at City University and is co-author of 101 Ways To Win An Election. He blogs at www.markpack.org.uk and is on Twitter as @markpack. He likes chocolate. Lots of it.
Mark Pack

Daily View 2×2: 25 October 2009

By Mark Pack | Sun 25th October 2009 - 7:00 am

Morning all. Clocks changed? Good. Now it’s time to catch up on the news including, as it’s a Sunday, another in my occasional series of “Forget Obama; forget West Wing – now THIS is what we should be copying from US politics”.

It’s the political ad that is just bursting to be copied for our next party political broadcast. Send you lobbying email to Cowley Street now. (Probably best do that now rather than after watching the ad. In case you don’t agree with me. But you’d be mad not to. This is quality political advertising at its very best.)

2 Big Stories

Pakistani army takes Taliban chief’s hometown

Pakistani soldiers captured the hometown of the country’s Taliban chief Saturday, a strategic and symbolic initial prize as the army pushes deeper into a militant stronghold along the Afghan border. An army spokesman said the Taliban were in disarray, with many deserting the ranks.

The 8-day-old air and ground offensive in the South Waziristan tribal region is a key test of nuclear-armed Pakistan’s campaign against Islamist militancy. It has already spurred a civilian exodus and deadly retaliatory attacks.

Washington has encouraged the operation in the northwest because many militants there are believed to shelter al-Qaida leaders and are also suspected to be involved in attacks on Western troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. military has also kept up its own missile strikes in the lawless tribal belt, including a suspected one that killed 22 Saturday. (Associated Press)

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Posted in Daily View | Tagged , , and | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

Mansion Tax: FT praises, Government doesn’t reject

By Mark Pack | Thu 22nd October 2009 - 9:20 am

From Left Foot Forward:

Martin Wolf, writing in yesterday’s FT, has praised the Liberal Democrats “mansion tax” policy:

“Taxation of property should be heavier, not lighter. But it should also be less regressive. That is why the mansion tax is the germ of an excellent idea.

“Taxes on property have other benefits: they automatically rise with prosperity; they are hard to evade; and they are automatically imposed on otherwise untaxed foreign owners. The latter benefit from the amenities of the UK without paying for them. A higher property tax is a simple – and inescapable – way of making them contribute to

…

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Posted in News | Tagged , and | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

Conservative Bedford woes

By Mark Pack | Wed 21st October 2009 - 11:23 pm

Fresh from losing the Mayor election in Bedford to Dave Hodgson comes this news of further Conservative problems, via the BBC:

The leader of the Conservative group on Bedford Borough Council has been suspended from the party for two years.

The Tory Party said the action against Nicky Attenborough was taken because of comments she made about the selection process for the Tory mayoral candidate.

She described the open meeting, where non-Conservative Party members had a vote, as a disgrace.

Posted in News | Tagged and | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

Cabinet Office: correspondence chaos update

By Mark Pack | Wed 21st October 2009 - 11:50 am

Back in September I blogged about how difficult it’s been to get a response from the Cabinet Office to a small complaint I had about possible misuse of letterheads by Gordon Brown:

Tally so far: two emails and one letter from me plus four letters from my MP spread out over nine months and what to show for it all? Just one

…

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Lib Dem website comes close second in policy search tests

By Mark Pack | Wed 21st October 2009 - 8:55 am

News from Brand Republic:

Tamar, the natural search conversion agency, has today released the results of its first Political Search Index, which tracks how easy it is for voters to find official policy information from the mainstream political parties online.

The results show the Labour Party trailing badly behind the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Green Party and the Scottish National Party.

Tamar’s research looked at fifteen specific policy areas of interest to voters and examined how effectively the political parties have optimised content on their own websites for Google.

The overall scores were:

Conservatives 1.5
Liberal Democrats 1.9
Greens 3.1
SNP 6.8
Labour 25.9

You can read more here.

Posted in Online politics | Tagged and | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

+++ Parliamentary authorities clear Lord Rennard of breaking expense rules

By Mark Pack | Tue 20th October 2009 - 8:17 pm

This just in from the Clerk of the Parliaments, the official who has been investigating a complaint against the Liberal Democrat peer and former Chief Executive Lord Rennard.

The ruling rejects allegations that Chris Rennard claimed overnight subsistence for days that he was not present and also rejects allegations that he made claims related to having a home outside London that he wasn’t entitled to make:

In these circumstances and after due consideration, I have decided not to uphold complaint: I have concluded that Lord Rennard’s claims for expenses were in accordance with the rules and guidance on Members’ expenses applicable

…

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Posted in Parliament | Tagged and | 28 Comments
Mark Pack

The inside story of how the Lib Dem general election manifesto will be drawn up

By Mark Pack | Tue 20th October 2009 - 12:20 pm

The debates and disputes around the Liberal Democrats’ Bournemouth conference give a taste of what is likely to be a tricky process of drawing up the party’s manifesto for the next general election.

Formally, there is a three part process to that manifesto: the manifesto working group chaired by Danny Alexander will present work to the Shadow Cabinet which will then in turn (quite possibly amended) go to the Federal Policy Committee (FPC).

How will this process work and who will the key people be in drawing up the manifesto?

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , and | 10 Comments
Mark Pack

What the media didn’t tell you about the Bedford Mayor election

By Mark Pack | Tue 20th October 2009 - 10:30 am

Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:

Good news, though you’d be hard press to spot it from the media reports. On a like-for-like basis turnout was up significantly in the Bedford Mayor election this week.

In the first Mayor election, in October 2002, turnout was just 25% whilst this Thursday it was up to 31%. Six percentage points is a big increase, particularly from a base of only 25%.

Ah, you might be saying – but wasn’t turnout higher in the Mayor election in between those two? Yes, in the May 2007 Mayoral election in Bedford turnout was 41%. However, that election coincided …

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Mark Pack

UKIP faces £367,697 bill after court rules magistrate wrong to levy small ‘fine’

By Mark Pack | Mon 19th October 2009 - 8:57 pm

Good news all in all for both the Electoral Commission and for the laws regulating donations to political parties with the decision today by an Appeal Court to overturn a previous strange ruling by a magistrate in the case of a series of donations to UKIP that the Electoral Commission had investigated and decided broke the law.

The donations, from an Alan Bown, totalled £367,697 and were given by him personally, despite not being on the electoral register at the time. This made them impermissible. Until this case, everyone’s interpretation of the law had been that, for better or worse, it …

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Posted in Election law and News | Tagged , , and | 41 Comments
Mark Pack

“We can’t turn back the tide of internet piracy, says TV boss”

By Mark Pack | Mon 19th October 2009 - 7:59 pm

Interesting news from The Herald:

Internet piracy is merely demand where appropriate supply does not exist, people will never go back to buying music legally, and protecting information online will only destroy businesses, according to a provocative essay set to appear on a Scottish Government-funded website tomorrow.

Written by Alice Taylor, commissioning editor for education at Channel 4, the essay flies in the face of Westminster’s Digital Britain report, which recommended that persistent file-sharers should have their internet access restricted or even barred.

Taylor argues that enforcing out-dated attitudes on how information is shared – ie, paying for it – is “a dying behemoth”.

She writes: “We must not let these dying behemoths take away someone’s internet access – and connection to the world – for some accusatory, unprovable ‘piracy’ claim, ever.”

These views chime with the instincts of Nick Clegg when I asked him about this at the party’s Bournemouth Conference.

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Posted in News | Tagged , , and | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

The police get a bit of a surprise when they try to stop someone taking photos

By Mark Pack | Mon 19th October 2009 - 2:10 pm

Here’s a snippet from the story:

I want to discuss this at the station, I say. I’m not happy with this situation. I don’t like being stopped in the street and told in a threatening tone, to delete my photos. They look at me blankly, not expecting this burst of ire. Come on I say, I want to make an official complaint. They look somewhat taken aback at that. I walk ahead and look over my shoulder, beckoning for them to follow. Come on, I say, lets go. Now they look a a bit mortified. I daresay this is the

…

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Posted in News | 8 Comments
Mark Pack

The inside story of how the Lib Dem general election manifesto will be drawn up: coming soon

By Mark Pack | Sun 18th October 2009 - 5:50 pm

A brief trail for a meaty post being published this coming Tuesday: “The inside story of how the Lib Dem general election manifesto will be drawn up”.

Find out in 1,691 words the who, what and why of the party’s manifesto process, including why The Guardian couldn’t have been more wrong about Evan Harris, the key people who will matter, the divided opinions over what really happened before and at Bournemouth conference and how the manifesto may get split in two.

See you back here Tuesday, 12:20pm, servers permitting.

Posted in Party policy and internal matters | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

Daily View 2×2: 18 October

By Mark Pack | Sun 18th October 2009 - 7:00 am

It’s 7am. It’s Sunday. So it’s time for the musical steps. But first, the news.

2 Big Stories

Royal Mail to hire 30,000 temps

Royal Mail will recruit up to 30,000 temporary staff to deal with upcoming strikes by postal workers and the Christmas rush, the service has said.

The Communication Workers Union has called two nationwide strikes next week over pay, conditions and reform.

The firm said it would hire twice the usual number of extra pre-Christmas staff to cut the impact of “unjustified and irresponsible” industrial action.

But the CWU said managers should be talking, not “planning for failure”. (BBC)

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Mark Pack

Jan Moir: the dilemma for the PCC (and what you should say in your complaint)

By Mark Pack | Sat 17th October 2009 - 12:54 pm

The reaction to Jan Moir’s article about the death of Stephen Gately has been widespread and swift. Fuelled primarily by Twitter and Facebook, complaints about homophobia flooded in on the Daily Mail, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) and the firms who were unlucky enough to have their adverts appearing on the page. The headline was changed, the PCC’s website crashed, the adverts were pulled and many members of the public got a taste of how effective a simple tweet, email or phone call can be.

The big dilemma now is for the Press Complaints Commission because, although many of the messages urging people to complain to the PCC were helpfully specific about which clauses of its code should be referenced, the real issue for the PCC to decide is not in the code itself.

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Mark Pack

MPs expenses: some MPs still don’t get it

By Mark Pack | Sat 17th October 2009 - 11:16 am

If being brazenly out of touch with the public mood is your idea of being a top-notch MP, it’s time you started singing the praises of Ann Keen, Jacqui Lait and Harry Cohen. For as the Evening Standard reported yesterday:

Five London MPs are refusing to say if they are being asked to repay part of their Commons expenses.

They are Ann and Alan Keen, the couple dubbed Mr and Mrs Expenses, senior Tories Jacqui Lait and Richard Ottaway and Labour’s Harry Cohen…

Mrs Keen told the Standard to “get stuffed” when approached politely at the Commons.

Her husband Alan also declined to answer

…

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Mark Pack

Five of the seven top seats for graduate population have LibDem MPs

By Mark Pack | Fri 16th October 2009 - 12:20 pm

A new analysis of how many graduates there are living in each Westmister Parliamentary constituency shows that five of the seven seats with the highest proportion of graduates amongst their working age population have Liberal Democrat MPs.

The figures, from the University and College Union, show that overall 29% of the working population have degrees with Susan Kramer’s Richmond Park constituency topping the list at 63.61%.

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Mark Pack

How do you get people to do things?

By Mark Pack | Thu 15th October 2009 - 1:00 pm

Here’s a smattering of experimental research findings, courtesy of the Fostering Sustainable Behaviour site (which also provides sources for the data):

  • When asked if they would financially support a recreational facility for the handicapped, 92% made a donation if they had previously signed a petition in favor of the facility, compared with 53% for those who had not been asked to sign the petition.
  • Residents of Bloomington, Indiana, were called and asked if they would consider, hypothetically, spending three hours working as a volunteer collecting money for the American Cancer Society. When these individuals were called back three days later by

…

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Posted in What do the academics say? | Tagged | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Tory councillors suspended: Tony Arbour and Bertha Joseph

By Mark Pack | Wed 14th October 2009 - 11:51 pm

In Richmond, it’s Conservative councillor and London Assembly member Tory Arbour who has been suspended for disclosing confidential information, whilst in Brent it is Conservative Mayor Bertha Joseph for misusing charitable donations by spending them on clothes for herself. Oops.

Posted in News | Tagged , , and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

The Obama grassroots campaign: glass half empty or glass half full?

By Mark Pack | Wed 14th October 2009 - 12:50 pm

Time for a bit more probing underneath the figures about how big, amazing, awesome and must be copied the Obama 2008 Presidential campaign was. (See in particular my previous post about his fundraising.)

New figures which have seeped out this month from a confidential report by Catalist, one of the big data and technology suppliers to Democrat campaigns, show that 49 million adults were contacted more than 127 million times.

So far, so big.

But let’s put that in a UK money. Pro rata, it is equivalent to around 13,000 people per Westminster constituency being contacted an average of 2.5 times. That’s pretty …

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Posted in LDVUSA | Tagged and | 5 Comments
Mark Pack

The bigger the cuts, the bigger the team

By Mark Pack | Tue 13th October 2009 - 2:50 pm

One for the ironic statistics corner.

Count up the number of people in each of the three main party’s Cabinet/Shadow Cabinet (taking the listings from their official national party websites).

Line up the party’s in order of enthusiasm for cutting public spending.

And what do you find? The keener the party is on cutting public spending, the bigger is its team:

Labour – 23 members
Liberal Democrats – 30 members
Conservatives – 32 members

Hmm.

Posted in News | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

What does the future hold for British political blogging?

By Mark Pack | Mon 12th October 2009 - 12:20 pm

Predictions that the next general election will be the one in which the internet will make a huge impact have regularly come and gone. Post-Obama ready yourself for another such clutch of predictions, but underneath this punditry froth the internet has got on with quietly shifting the way politics works. It’s been more at the unglamorous organisational end (imagine trying to organise a campaign without email) than at the eye-catching systems-shattering dramatic end beloved of pundits, but it’s been a major change nonetheless.

Following in the footsteps of email, blogging has also established a firm place in the logistics of politics, even if its impact on the overall style and conduct of politics is less clear and less dramatic. Blogs have become a key news medium for people involved in or significantly interested in politics, they have become a key part of the flow of news to and from journalists and for some MPs and candidates they reach local audiences large enough to be a significant factor in their election efforts.

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Posted in Online politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , and | 5 Comments
Mark Pack

Jon Sopel’s round-up of the best of the Sunday TV shows

By Mark Pack | Sun 11th October 2009 - 2:59 pm

The BBC’s Jon Sopel has produced another round-up of the best of the Sunday TV political shows (BBC and non-BBC). It includes Liam Fox on Brown’s eyesight, Alan Johnson on the role of government, Chris Grayling on leadership over expenses, Alistair Darling on Conservative plans and Lord Tebbit in conversation with Frank Gardner about terrorism.

You can watch it here.

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Mark Pack

Daily View 2×2: 11 October 2009

By Mark Pack | Sun 11th October 2009 - 7:00 am

It’s Sunday. It’s 7am. It’s time for the Daily View, today with an science fiction meets ukulele musical extra.

2 Big Stories

English Defence League takes to streets, violence follows

Perhaps someone should tell the English Defence League that the best way for them to defend the values they claim to stand up for would be to wind themselves up given how little of that traditional English value of tolerance its members display. But in the meantime, here’s the latest news:

More than 40 people have been arrested during two political demonstrations in Manchester city centre.

At least 2,000 people attended the protests, by the English Defence League (EDL) and members of Unite Against Fascism (UAF) on Saturday afternoon.

Witnesses said “ugly scenes” broke out between rival protestors and police.

Forty-eight people have been arrested, four among them were held on suspicion of affray. Most of the other arrests were for public order offences. (BBC)

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Mark Pack

An introduction to political blogging

By Mark Pack | Sat 10th October 2009 - 8:18 pm

Welcome to the first part of a new weekly series on political blogging which we’ll be running here on The Voice between now and Christmas. It’s designed primarily to be an introduction for anyone thinking of starting a political blog, but packed full of enough information to be useful for existing bloggers too.

If the series is a success, we will turn it into a pdf e-book afterwards, putting all the advice together in one convenient document. There will be a chance to revise the posts before collating them, so you’re even more welcome than usual to post comments to the …

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Posted in Blogging guide | Tagged , and | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Taxpayers’ Alliance admits director doesn’t pay British tax

By Mark Pack | Sat 10th October 2009 - 9:34 am

From today’s Guardian:

The Taxpayers’ Alliance, a campaign group that calls for tax and spending cuts and claims to represent the interests of taxpayers, has admitted one of its directors does not pay British tax.

The Guardian has learned that Alexander Heath, a director of the increasingly influential free market, rightwing lobby group, lives in a farmhouse in the Loire and has not paid British tax for years…

“The least we can expect for an organisation that purports to represent the interests of British taxpayers is that it is run by people that pay British tax,” said Jon Cruddas MP.

You can read …

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Posted in News | Tagged , and | 9 Comments
Mark Pack

Councillors in the news: Barnet and Stoke

By Mark Pack | Fri 9th October 2009 - 5:40 pm

Via Liberal England we have:

Golders Green Tory Christopher Harris has been travelling Down Under since July on an “extended holiday” but has still managed to hang on to his job.

Despite being 10,000 miles away in a country with a 10-hour time difference, Cllr Harris is still claiming more than £800 a month in a council allowance to serve residents.

And then via Pits’n’Pots:

Mike Barnes’s future as Labour Group Leader hangs in the balance as the party’s National Executive have placed him under ‘administrative suspension’ with immediate effect.

Yesterday, Mike Barnes admitted to impersonating someone from this website to try

…

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Posted in News | Tagged , , and | 9 Comments
Mark Pack

The weird farce of Royal Mail parcel deliveries

By Mark Pack | Fri 9th October 2009 - 1:55 pm

Now, when I say parcel deliveries, you might think that this story involves parcels or indeed deliveries. If only.

I was already familiar with the problem in many areas of people getting “Sorry you were out” cards through the letterbox, saying the Royal Mail had tried to deliver a parcel, even though they were firmly sat at home at the time.

I’d always thought this was a case of rushed staff wanting to cut corners near the end of their rounds by sticking a few cards through letterboxes without knocking on the door.

The truth though is far stranger. For in many cases …

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 11 Comments
Mark Pack

David Cameron’s speech: Danny Alexander responds

By Mark Pack | Thu 8th October 2009 - 10:35 pm

Here’s what Danny has to say (and interesting to note that he’s being deployed as the Lib Dem person to attack the other parties, not Nick Clegg or Vince Cable):

This speech demonstrates the huge gulf between the sunny rhetoric of David Cameron and the grim reality of Tory policy.

The Tories claim to be honest on spending, but their proposals barely scratch the surface.

They claim they can fix the country’s finances, but their plans are economically illiterate. Cutting spending now would plunge us back into recession.

They claim to care about the poorest, but will only slash taxes for millionaires.

They expect to have the keys to Downing Street handed to them, but at a time of crisis they have the wrong solutions and the wrong priorities.

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 9 Comments
Mark Pack

Postcode campaign gears up to save popular web services

By Mark Pack | Wed 7th October 2009 - 7:56 pm

A range of popular websites, providing useful services such as information on local job vacancies and planning applications, have been closed down following the Royal Mail’s decision to crack down on the use they made of its postcode address database.

As Alex blogged previously:

With postcodes so increasingly important to national life, it’s ridiculous that they are not public data that is, as a minimum, free to use for non-profit organisations.

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Posted in LDV campaigns | Tagged , , , , and | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

Yes, council websites can

By Mark Pack | Wed 7th October 2009 - 1:20 pm

The October edition of Total Politics has a piece from me on how local authorities can learn from the Obama campaign’s mastery of the internet to build communities of active and engaged residents. You can read it over on my blog.

The basic theme – too many councils are trapped in the idea that a good online presence equals a 1990s style website which you then just expect people to come to – is one I also talked about in one of The Voice’s fringe meetings at Bournemouth Conference. The podcast of that, along the contributions of Jo Swinson MP …

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Posted in Local government and Online politics | 2 Comments
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