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

“Cameron’s charm fails to halt slide in party membership”

By Mark Pack | Mon 7th September 2009 - 8:14 am

So writes The Independent:

David Cameron’s charm offensive has failed to attract new members to the Tories – or keep hold of tens of thousands of people who were already in the party when he arrived.

Local Conservative parties have lost almost a quarter of their rank-and-file members since Mr Cameron took over in late 2005…

The total membership in more than 200 constituency associations – barely a third of the overall number

…

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Mark Pack

Lembit Opik bests Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jordon and others

By Mark Pack | Sun 6th September 2009 - 2:20 pm

Praise for Lembit Opik’s role in Britain’s rural communities comes with Country Life’s list of 100 most influential people. As the Evening Standard reported:

The Lib Dem MP, more famed for his love life than political achievements, has been included in Country Life’s list of the 100 people who wield the most power over the countryside. “ often unintentionally adds gaiety to the nation for his romantic adventures, but is actually the Liberal Democrat MP with the most genuine, considered understanding for the countryside.” At number 44 he beats the likes of, Peter Florence, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Sir David Attenborough and

…

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Mark Pack

Get Lib Dem Voice direct to your inbox

By Mark Pack | Sun 6th September 2009 - 12:20 pm

What better way to start the day than with Liberal Democrat Voice appearing in your inbox? (Well, discovering you have won a free lifetime’s supply of chocolate possibly, but that aside…)

You can sign up to our daily email news service, which contains the headlines from the latest stories on the site, along with links you can click on to read those which catch your fancy. You can also see which posts have attracted the most comments, and also get handy links to find us on Facebook and Twitter.

We also have a special once-a-week email you can …

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Mark Pack

Daily View 2×2: 6 September 2009

By Mark Pack | Sun 6th September 2009 - 7:50 am

Welcome to the Sunday edition of The Voice’s Daily View. And as it’s a Sunday, it’s also time for a multimedia chocolate extra. But first…

Big Stories

Straw admits Lockerbie trade link

Trade and oil played a part in the decision to include the Lockerbie bomber in a prisoner transfer deal, Jack Straw has admitted.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, the UK justice secretary said trade was “a very big part” of the 2007 talks that led to the prisoner deal with Libya.

However, Mr Straw’s spokesman accused the press of “outrageous” innuendo. (BBC)

G20 papers over cracks on bank capital, pay

The G20 made progress on Saturday in toughening up financial rules but vague compromises over bank capital and pay curbs indicate that fundamental issues remain unresolved.

The crash of Lehman Bros that brought the world’s financial system to its knees last September was uppermost in minds at the April G20 meeting, which adopted pledges to make it harder for banks to mess up economies in future.

Translating pledges into concrete action is proving to be more painstaking as vested national interests emerge and economic recovery takes the heat out of pressures to reform.

Still, the mood music at Saturday’s meeting contrasted with the tense summit five months ago when fear stalked the corridors of governments and banks were on tenterhooks as to their fate.

(Reuters)

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

(Both of these posts have been selected from those which appeared on Lib Dem Blogs on Saturday. To read more from other Liberal Democrat blogs, take a look at the Lib Dem Blogs website and to see what Lib Dems have been saying on Twitter, take a look at Liberal Tweets.)

Sunday Bonus

Men eating chocolate. It’s what YouTube was invented for.

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Mark Pack

Hackney Council vs Banksy: some graffiti should be left alone

By Mark Pack | Sat 5th September 2009 - 3:45 pm

If there was an Olympics for graffiti reporting, I’d rather fancy my chances in the final (137 items reported so far this year to Islington Council; let’s not get started with Haringey, Westminster or Hackney Councils). But despite my enthusiasm for getting graffiti cleaned away, there’s some I regularly pass that I’ve never reported. It’s the graffiti that really counts as art.

Banksy is by far the most famous example of someone who paints items that add to the location rather than detract from it. His paintings are inventive, humorous, famous and widely praised. His Bristol exhibition this year has resulted in …

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Mark Pack

Hamas: sickening behaviour

By Mark Pack | Sat 5th September 2009 - 8:55 am

Reuters reports:

Hamas condemned the United Nations Sunday, saying it planned to teach Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip about the Holocaust … the movement’s Popular Committees for Refugees said: “We refuse to let our children study a lie invented by the Zionists.”

Hat-tip: Matthew Harris

Posted in News | Tagged and | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

Is Peter Mandelson heading to defeat?

By Mark Pack | Fri 4th September 2009 - 1:10 pm

Peter Mandelson’s desire to introduce stringent penalties for internet piracy look to be heading for deep trouble, with heavy criticism coming from senior businessmen, internet service providers and key parts of the music industry.

First there’s this from paidContent:UK:

The government’s revised, tougher plans to tackle online piracy have been dismissed as “grossly unfair” and “misconceived” by the leaders of ISPs and consumer groups, who warn against creating an “extrajudicial kangaroo court” to cut off persistent P2P offenders.

The CEOs of BT and TalkTalk (the UK’s two biggest ISPs) as well as Orange UK, the Open Rights Group, Which? and Consumer Focus are signatories to a letter in The Times on Thursday which calls for re-think on the plans. It reads: “We are concerned that the Government’s latest proposals on the ‘how’ to reduce illegal filesharing are misconceived and threaten broadband consumers’ rights and the development of new attractive services.”

The industry heavyweights warn of the way the plans threaten freedom of speech: “usually, constraints to freedom of expression are imposed only as the result of custodial sentences, or incitement to racial hatred, or libel.”

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Mark Pack

Taxpayers’ Alliance: a case of Web 2.0 hypocrisy?

By Mark Pack | Fri 4th September 2009 - 8:21 am

Alex pointed out yesterday the Taxpayers’ Alliance opposition to the public sector using Web 2.o technologies:

Taxpayers don’t want more Web2.0. They want an end to wasteful spending.

Now, if you think that spending money on Web 2.0 is necessarily wasteful (and that was the full depth of the Taxpayers’ Alliance – no nuanced point about some Web 2.0 technologies, or some projects – it was just this blanket opposition), you’d have thought the Taxpayers’ Alliance would apply the same standards  to themselves?

In which case, they really had better shop themselves to their funders for wasting money as, er…, their own website is build on Web2.o technologies. As Simon Dickson points out:

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Mark Pack

The Government’s farcical slowness over updating election imprint rules

By Mark Pack | Thu 3rd September 2009 - 2:20 pm

Six years on from receiving a recommendation from the Electoral Commission that existing legal powers should be used to clarify how the rules regarding election imprints apply to internet campaigning, the Government has still failed to act. This is despite the Government acknowledging in its official response to the recommendation the “importance” of getting this right. But it has decided that due to it being a “fast-evolving” area doing nothing for six years is the right response.

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Mark Pack

The Sun versus reality: how do they compare?

By Mark Pack | Thu 3rd September 2009 - 8:23 am

The Sun says: “Every August poll carried out before a spring election since 1996 has predicted the result to within one per cent.”

Reality says: MORI 24 August 2001 2000 – Con 29% (out by 4%), Lab 51% (out by 9%), lead 22% (out by 9%)

Although this is the most striking example, overall for example eight out of the 12 August polls since 1996 had the Labour lead out by more than 1%. Similarly, only three got the Labour share to within 1%.

Not exactly a case of “every”.

UPDATE: Himmelgarten Cafe points out that the graphic accompanying the Sun story isn’t …

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Posted in Polls | Tagged | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

How is public opinion playing out over MPs’ expenses?

By Mark Pack | Wed 2nd September 2009 - 2:20 pm

At the weekend, I saw a presentation of the June polling findings from the British Election Study. The BES is a collaborative academic exercise run before and at each general election. It is designed to gather some of the key raw material about the public’s opinions which will then be available to anyone who subsequently pours over the election, trying to explain why it turned out as it did.

The June results including some striking figures on the public’s reaction to the MPs’ expenses scandal:

  • Have you heard reports and MPs’ expenses? Yes: 95%
  • Do you think the scandal proves most MPs are

…

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Mark Pack

Forthcoming PPC selections

By Mark Pack | Wed 2nd September 2009 - 11:20 am

Courtesy of the LibDems4Parliament website, here is the list of PPC selections closing this month:

Surrey Heath (03 Sep 2009)
Derbyshire Dales, Kettering, Loughborough, Gedling, Mansfield, South Leicestershire (04 Sep 2009)
Hertsmere (05 Sep 2009)
Rushcliffe (21 Sep 2009)

For further details on how you could become the Liberal Democrat prospective candidate in any of these constituencies see http://libdems4parliament.org.uk/events

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Mark Pack

TV leaders debate set to happen: if Sky keeps its nerve

By Mark Pack | Wed 2nd September 2009 - 9:19 am

I’ve always wondered why the media don’t call the bluff of party leaders when it comes to holding leaders debate at general election time.

Many in the media regularly and sincerely go on the record about believing such debates would be good for democracy, but in the past they’ve always held back from the idea that a debate could go ahead without all the relevant party leaders first agreeing.

That’s a view that has puzzled me because – particularly since the law was changed a few years ago – there are pretty strong legal grounds for being able to hold a debate, …

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Mark Pack

Portsmouth Council rejoices at discovery staff only spending 11 seconds a day on Facebook

By Mark Pack | Tue 1st September 2009 - 10:23 pm

There has been widespread praise for Portsmouth Council after it was discovered that on average its staff only spend 11 seconds a day using Facebook. Despite the huge growth in the number of people using Facebook and the growing number of hours spent on the site by its users, Portsmouth Council staff are barely using the site. It may even be that much of this time is spent outside of work hours.

Facebook is going to be banned at Portsmouth Council after new figures outrageously revealed that its 4,500 staff waste an average of 413 hours a month in total on …

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Mark Pack

Will the City’s troubles boost our high tech firms?

By Mark Pack | Tue 1st September 2009 - 11:50 am

In his book Reality Check, published last October, American entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki wrote about the ingredients for Silicon Valley’s success in nurturing new firms:

If your companies have to compete with conglomerates or banks like Goldman Sachs throwing money at people, it’s going to be hard to get anyone for a startup. Pity the startups in New York, London and Singapore. Come to think of it, how many tech success stories have come from these cities?

Although he doesn’t directly address the impact of the credit crunch, the implication is that there is a silver lining to the City’s current troubles.

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Mark Pack

Lembit Opik on internet piracy

By Mark Pack | Mon 31st August 2009 - 9:49 pm

From Lembit’s Daily Sport column:

PIRATES could soon be in power in the UK! But they’re not the swashbuckling Johnny Depp-type –– or even our uzi-wielding chums from the Somali coast. I’m talking about the Pirate Party –– the Swedish outfit who campaign for free file-sharing online. They’re fed up of big fees being charged for music downloads, copyright being slapped on YouTube videos and internet usage being tracked. They won a couple of seats in Brussels and are now planning on standing in the UK general election next year. These buccaneers shouldn’t be underestimated. They’ve got a big supporter

…

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Mark Pack

Even Martin Luther King repeated the same message

By Mark Pack | Mon 31st August 2009 - 9:20 am

Plugging away with the same message time after time may sound the obvious way to get your message over, but think how often discussions about what should go in a leaflet revolve around coming up with new things to say – or how when you look through the collection of leaflets from a campaign some people complain, “But they all said the same thing!”.

So let’s look at Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech: an amazing piece of oratory and, surely, if you can utter such moving words, you don’t need to repeat them time and again? Well, no …

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Mark Pack

More people use Facebook in the UK than it takes to elect a government

By Mark Pack | Sun 30th August 2009 - 8:21 pm

A bit of whimsical statistical trivia for the bank holiday weekend:

Number of votes won by the winning party at the 2005 general election: 9.6 million (BBC)
Number of Facebook users in the UK: 11.2 million (TechCrunch)

(Before anyone starts threatening me with a slide-rule: yes, this does compare apples and oranges a bit since Facebook’s minimum age requirement is less than 18 and also allows people who aren’t qualified to vote to become users . However, unless there’s a very unusual skew in their user base, the broad picture still stands.)

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Mark Pack

“Soc-Nets and Web Strategies Can’t Replace Door-to-Door”

By Mark Pack | Fri 28th August 2009 - 10:20 am

An interesting piece from the American Campaigns & Elections site which acts as a salutary reminder that, for all the impressiveness of Obama and his use of the internet, there’s rather more to campaigning:

Two recently released surveys on how Americans perceive brands and make decisions gives us geeky political junkies an idea of how different campaign tactics work to win votes. The first survey, released by Harris Interactive last week, indicates that while adults “use a mixture of traditional media and new media, including those that would constitute ‘push’ (advertising and websites) and ‘pull’ (information from neutral, informal communication),” Americans are persuaded (and informed) most by face-to-face communication.

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Mark Pack

MPs on Facebook: leading the way or forgetting to change the defaults?

By Mark Pack | Tue 25th August 2009 - 2:20 pm

Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:

A new studyof MPs on Facebook shows widespread use of the social network by Parliamentarians, but also a range of curious choices about how to use the medium which may in part reflect a failure to change default settings.

The study, carried out by Woodnewton Associates and based on evidence gathered in May this year, found that:

  • 26% of MPs have a Facebook presence (a page or profile).
  • Liberal Democrat MPs lead the way in Facebook usage, with 65% being on Facebook. 25% of Labour MPs and 21% of Conservative MPs are on Facebook.

Whilst a static presence in …

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Mark Pack

Daily View 2×2: 23 August 2009

By Mark Pack | Sun 23rd August 2009 - 7:50 am

The rest of The Voice’s Daily View team may have decided to have a lie in each morning during August, but we’re made of sterner stuff here on the Sunday slot. And as it’s a Sunday, it’s also time for the now traditional bonus musical extra.

Big Stories

The release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi

The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has blasted Scotland for releasing Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi saying the decision “gives comfort to terrorists.”

In a letter to Scottish Minster Kenny MacAskill dated August 21, FBI Director Robert Mueller said he was “outraged” at the decision to release Megrahi, who is dying of cancer, on compassionate grounds.

“Your action in releasing Megrahi is as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice,” Mueller wrote. “Indeed, your action makes a mockery of the rule of law.

“Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world who now believe that regardless of the quality of the investigation, the conviction by jury after the defendant is given all due process, and sentence appropriate to the crime, the terrorist will be freed by one man’s exercise of ‘compassion.'” (AFP)

Fraud allegations over Afghan elections

Reports of widespread and systematic fraud and intimidation continued to emerge amid delays in the counting of votes in the Afghan elections, raising the spectre of turbulence when the results are announced.

Allegations of ballot-rigging were particularly prevalent in the southern Pashtun belt. The region, which holds the key to the contest, also suffered from drastically low turnout due to Taliban violence and threats. There were accounts of the insurgents’ retribution against voters, including fingers being chopped off. (The Independent)

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

  • Paul Walter explains how his views of the party’s Real Women policy proposals are changing.
  • Simon Goldie’s post is probably the shortest that’s been highlighted in these round-ups, being basically just a link through to a provocative and thought-provoking article in the Financial Times.

(Both of these posts have been selected from those which appeared on Lib Dem Blogs on Saturday. To read more from other Liberal Democrat blogs, take a look at the Lib Dem Blogs website and to see what Lib Dems have been saying on Twitter, take a look at Liberal Tweets.)

Sunday Bonus

It’s Sunday. Ready your vocal chords. Hit play and sing along. You know you want to.

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Mark Pack

Lessons from the Republican internet catch-up efforts

By Mark Pack | Sat 22nd August 2009 - 1:06 pm

The way the Repubicans are trying to get to grips with improving their internet presence following last year’s Presidental election defeat suggest some interesting pointers for the UK. As I’ve often written in the past, US politics is very different from British politics – and so one should be cautious at reading across lessons from one country to another. Nonetheless, the Republicans efforts to catch-up do highlight what they feel are the most important areas.

Yesterday’s CNN report on the topic highlights two facets to this: the importance of Twitter and the degree to which a successful internet presence relies on senior figures being willing to move away from traditional modes of communication.

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Mark Pack

Will the changes to Scottish election law gives us a data bonanza?

By Mark Pack | Wed 19th August 2009 - 11:20 am

The main change to election law this summer has come with the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009, but Parliament has also approved the Scottish Local Government (Elections) Act 2009.

The primary purpose of the Act is to change the cycle for Scottish local elections, so that in future they will not be held on the same day as Scottish Parliamentary elections. Instead, the next round of local elections is being delayed by one year – from 2011 to 2012 – and the local elections will then run on a four-year cycle from there.

Also in the Scottish Local Government (Elections) Act 2009  is a new provision to publish much more information about election results:

The Scottish Ministers may by order make provision as to the publication of
information about votes cast at elections of councillors.
(2) Such an order may, in particular—
(a) specify information to which the provisions shall apply,
(b) make provision about access to information to facilitate publication,
(c) specify limitations on the publication of information,
(d) make provision relating to votes cast in part of an electoral ward.

(1) The Scottish Ministers may by order make provision as to the publication of information about votes cast at elections of councillors.

(2) Such an order may, in particular—…

(d) make provision relating to votes cast in part of an electoral ward.

In other words, there is now the power for voting breakdowns by polling district (or other sub-ward level unit) to be published. With STV it’s unlikely that full results will be provided on a sub-ward level, but even so this is good news for confidence in election results.

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Mark Pack

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Vince Cable on the surveillance state

By Mark Pack | Sun 16th August 2009 - 12:50 pm

Vince Cable’s latest column for the Mail on Sunday is out and this time it’s about civil liberties:

A quarter of a century has passed since 1984, the titular year of George Orwell’s novel which described a world constantly spied upon by an all-powerful dictator, the fearsome Big Brother.

It never happened. Orwell’s nightmarish vision was realised, for a while, in communist Eastern Europe but the Stasi and similar agencies have now gone.

And yet in a quiet, insidious way our own democratic society is producing a surveillance state that Big Brother would have been proud to call his own.

You can read …

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Mark Pack

Daily View 2×2: 16 August 2009

By Mark Pack | Sun 16th August 2009 - 7:50 am

The rest of The Voice’s Daily View team may have decided to have a lie in each morning during August, but we’re made of sterner stuff here on the Sunday slot (for the moment). And as it’s a Sunday, it’s also time for another bonus musical extra.

Big Stories

UK death toll in Afghanistan reaches 200

A British soldier has died from wounds suffered in Afghanistan, taking the number of UK troops killed since operations began in 2001 to 200.

The soldier, from the 2nd Battalion the Royal Welsh, died in hospital in Birmingham. Family have been informed. (BBC)

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Posted in Daily View | 11 Comments
Mark Pack

The Pirate Party: the apolitical political party

By Mark Pack | Sat 15th August 2009 - 9:43 am

The formation of UK version of the Pirate Party could turn out to be a political development of more than passing interest, both because it may appeal to a section of heavy internet users who are willing to put considerable efforts in to promoting it and its policies, and also because its very existence may help shift the terms of political debate on some issues.

The Telegraph has a good interview with its the Pirate Party’s leader, Andrew Robinson, both covering him and his views at more than soundbite length but also throwing in some scepticism. It also has this …

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 106 Comments
Mark Pack

Whether you are left or right handed shapes our judgments of good and bad, smart and stupid

By Mark Pack | Fri 14th August 2009 - 8:50 am

This from Newsweek:

Memo to restaurant owners: if there are particular dishes you want more customers to order, list them on the right side of the menu…

Simply put, we associate the side of space where we’re clumsier with bad, stupid, dishonest, unhappy and other negative qualities, finds Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

In a series of five clever studies, reported Aug. 1 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, he had university students take tests probing their unconscious attitudes toward the left and right side of the world. In one, 219 students from Stanford University and the University of California, Riverside, were told that a cartoon character loves zebras but hates pandas (or vice versa).

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Even The Sun covers a Lib Dem press release today

By Mark Pack | Thu 13th August 2009 - 8:06 pm

I suspect it may in part have been because it gave them a chance to take a pop at Harriet Harman – but there’s big coverage in The Sun, and other media, today for figures collated by the Liberal Democrats about the gender pay gap in central government:

Official figures show female civil servants are paid up to A THIRD less than male colleagues.

The revelations are an embarrassment to the party’s self-styled women’s champion Harriet Harman.

She has vowed to close the gap between the sexes – and has threatened to name and shame firms who give men more.

Furious critics last night

…

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Mark Pack

So, were the courts right to keep names secret in the Baby Peter case?

By Mark Pack | Thu 13th August 2009 - 9:20 am

At the time, there was stringent criticism from a vocal minority expressed online (such as in the comments thread on this site) of the court’s decision to keep secret the names of the adults involved in the Baby Peter case.

Now we know for sure the reasons:

There were two reasons behind the veil of secrecy. The first being the need to protect the identity of Baby Peter’s four siblings.

Connelly has three other children by Baby Peter’s father and gave birth to her youngest, who is Barker’s child, in prison.

The anonymity order was lifted because all four of Connelly’s remaining children are

…

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Mark Pack

What they said about RIPA at the time

By Mark Pack | Thu 13th August 2009 - 8:50 am

It’s March 2000 and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill is going through Parliament. Then Home Secretary Charles Clarke is defending the Bill during its second reading. Reading the views expressed by Conservatives in the debate shows up an interesting split: some MPs concerned about civil liberties but also some pressing for the powers to be made much more widely available. For Liberal Democrat MPs, the concerns are about the scale of snooping the Bill will permit and the controls over it.

But all would be fine according to Charles Clarke:

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