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

How to get Lib Dem Voice by email

By Mark Pack | Tue 4th September 2012 - 3:50 pm

Why not join hundreds of other Lib Dem Voice readers in getting our latest headlines by email?

Some people like regularly visiting a site to see if there’s new stories of interest. Some people like subscribing to its news feed (RSS) and checking that way. But if you prefer email, you can instead sign up to get a daily early morning email with a summary of the previous day’s posts from Lib Dem Voice, complete with a note of how many comments each post has got and convenient links to click on if any take your fancy and you want to take a read.

Continue reading »
Posted in Site news | Leave a comment
Mark Pack

Reports to party conference: two good things

By Mark Pack | Tue 4th September 2012 - 11:50 am

In amongst the paperwork for the Autumn 2012 Liberal Democrat Conference in Brighton is the bundle of reports from various party committees and bodies. The idea of the reports, and the ability to question them, is a great one. The content of the reports can have a tendency to be a little too banal or general to make for a meaningful report back from committees to people who elected them.

Take this shock news from the FCC report, for example:

Continue reading »
Posted in Conference and Party policy and internal matters | Tagged , , and | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Mid Term Review: not much to show for it in the end

By Mark Pack | Mon 3rd September 2012 - 4:25 pm

As I predicted, the Mid Term Review is peetering out into a Q&A session as the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton. As the report from the party’s Federal Policy Committee explains, glossing over a little how the plans have changed from the original ambitions:

The Coalition Government has stated its intention to have a Mid Term Review of its programme, which will be published in Autumn 2012. However, this will not be a general re-opening of the Coalition Programme for Government. Instead, it will essentially be a progress assessment exercise to identify which of the goals set out in the

…

Continue reading »
Posted in Conference and Party policy and internal matters | Tagged | 7 Comments
Mark Pack

How to write, with the help of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and Tim Leunig

By Mark Pack | Mon 3rd September 2012 - 11:50 am

How to speak. That’s a common topic in training for would-be candidates and a frequent chapter in books for would-be campaigners. How to write? Much less so.

That’s an omission I plead guilty to, for 101 Ways To Win An Election has a chapter called “Making speeches” with no accompanying “Writing words”. Implicit in many of the other chapters are ideas that will help you to write effectively. Yet on reflection there should really have been explicit advice too.

Short, sharp writing has always been important for leaflets and news …

Continue reading »
Posted in Campaign Corner | Tagged , , and | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Just the sort of thing local campaigners should be trying out

By Mark Pack | Sat 1st September 2012 - 11:25 am

The changing nature of high street shop windows picks up many threads of wider change in society. Not only the increasing homogenisation of them as national chains with standard shop front designs have spread out across the country. But also varying attitudes towards, and technologies for, tackling crime. Large glass panes frequently sprouted metal shutters – immediately effective, relatively cheap and yet ugly ways of stopping the classic smash and grab crimes.

Then a move away from shutters following an increasing awareness that ugly, off-putting high streets bring about their own problems with crime and fear of crime, with empty, dehumanised hearts of …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Police and Crime Commissioner elections: where the Lib Dems are standing

By Mark Pack | Sat 1st September 2012 - 9:25 am

Although the party has been warming to fighting the Police and Crime Commissioner elections, estimates as to how many Liberal Democrat candidates there will be in the November contests vary hugely.

So here’s a first attempt from me to track the answer comprehensively, based primarily on the adverts which have so far appeared inviting people to apply for the selection in particular contests. As a result, the list will (so far) miss out some areas where the party has 100% decided to contest the election but an advert has …

Continue reading »
Posted in Selection news | Tagged | 17 Comments
Mark Pack

The party with the British instincts

By Mark Pack | Fri 31st August 2012 - 7:18 pm

Rather nice graphic from Liberal Martin:

Posted in News | Tagged , , and | 13 Comments
Mark Pack

Pendle investigates claims of postal vote fraud

By Mark Pack | Thu 30th August 2012 - 6:37 pm

News via the BBC:

The council’s chief executive Stephen Barnes had written a letter to the Electoral Commission last year, saying allegations and perceptions of malpractice around postal voting “are seriously undermining public confidence in the whole electoral process”.

In the letter, the council cited examples of probable malpractice and the difficulties in taking action…

The leader of the borough council’s Labour Group, Councillor Mohammad Iqbal, said his party had won seats from the Conservatives fairly, adding: “There isn’t a problem in Pendle”…

The panel, consisting of cross-party councillors and representatives, will gather evidence at five public hearings across the borough.

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

OECD tax data: updated, still surprising

By Mark Pack | Tue 21st August 2012 - 2:50 pm

Back in December last year I blogged about how tax hasn’t changed over time, quoting the Mirrlees review:

Despite some predictions to the contrary, countries are not being forced inexorably to tax less in an increasingly globalized and competitive world economy. Between 1975 and 2008, taxes rose as a proportion of national income in virtually every OECD country. On average, the tax take rose from 29.4% to 34.8% of national income. In no OECD country was there a significant fall in the tax take over this period…

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

Scrapped Greater Manchester Police Authority holds party at 5-star hotel

By Mark Pack | Sat 18th August 2012 - 12:47 pm

The Manchester Evening News reports:

Members of Greater Manchester’s axed police authority are to toast their own demise – with a taxpayer-funded bash at the five-star Lowry Hotel.

About 100 people are expected for a three-course meal at the swish city-centre venue to mark the scrapping of the authority.

Set up to hold Greater Manchester Police to account, it will make way for the region’s first elected police commissioner in November.

Well, that’s one way for the (Labour-run) body to spend money…

UPDATE: The dinner has now been axed (though may still cost some money).

Posted in News | Tagged | 5 Comments
Mark Pack

Have I gone mad?

By Mark Pack | Fri 17th August 2012 - 12:39 pm

I’m wondering if I’ve gone mad.

There’s this issue that I just can’t think about without one question occurring to me. For me, it is blindingly obvious, absolutely basic and impossible to avoid if you want to talk about the issue.

And the thing is, it doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone else.

I’ve read plenty of media stories about the issue, and I’ve not found one that asks, answers or even obliquely mentions this blindingly obvious question.

The problem gets worse than that, however.

I’ve waded through lots of public comments on the …

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 50 Comments
Mark Pack

Lib Dems publish plan for 300,000 homes to be built a year

By Mark Pack | Thu 16th August 2012 - 12:44 pm

I’ve talked a few times about how housing has become an increasingly important policy in the rhetoric of Liberal Democrat ministers (see Danny Alexander set to up the ante on anti-Tory rhetoric and housing and Vince Cable on “one of the great acts of economic vandalism in modern times”).

Whether or not that rhetoric will produce policy results is the big question.

At which point, enter stage left a policy motion in the agenda for next month’s Liberal Democrat conference:

Continue reading »
Posted in Conference and News | Tagged , and | 47 Comments
Mark Pack

The sensible campaigner is the campaigner with backups

By Mark Pack | Mon 13th August 2012 - 2:55 pm

The office wall in one of my former jobs had a cartoon with two drunks slumped in an alleyway bemoaning their fate. One was saying to the other, “It all started to go wrong when I realised the backups hadn’t been working…” He at least had been trying to use backups.

Sometimes people fear trusting data to computers, worried that a wrong key press may result in valuable information being lost. That is to get things wrong: data is safer on computers because it is much easier to do regular backups.

Continue reading »
Posted in Campaign Corner and Online politics | Tagged , , , , and | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Labour Police Commissioner candidate set to defy ban on magistrates

By Mark Pack | Mon 13th August 2012 - 11:50 am

As if two Labour candidates for Police and Crime Commissioner posts running into problems with past misdeeds wasn’t enough, now a third is set to defy the ban on magistrates standing:

Lee Barron, the Labour candidate for the new post, has revealed how is prepared to refuse to stand down as a magistrate before the election, which will be held in November.

Guidance issued last Friday by a senior judge has effectively barred magistrates from standing for the post, which in Northamptonshire comes with an estimated £70,000 salary…

Continue reading »
Posted in Election law | Tagged and | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

Clegg set to open the way for churches to hold gay marriages

By Mark Pack | Sat 11th August 2012 - 1:55 pm

Via The Independent:

Nick Clegg will allow Parliament to go further in its plans to legalise gay marriage and enable churches and other religious institutions to conduct the ceremonies, The Independent has learned…

In a letter to the Quakers, Unitarian and Free Christian churches and Liberal Judaism, who all want to conduct same-sex marriages, Mr Clegg indicated that religious groups could be given the option.

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged , and | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

Danny Alexander set to up the ante on anti-Tory rhetoric and housing

By Mark Pack | Sat 11th August 2012 - 12:52 pm

One of the best speeches given by a Liberal Democrat Cabinet Member in the last year was Danny Alexander’s to the GMB conference. It was not only a good speech, it went down well with a tough audience that disagrees strongly with many things the government is doing.

As I wrote at the time:

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged , , , and | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

The Conservative candidate dilemma

By Mark Pack | Sat 11th August 2012 - 11:50 am

Unsurprisingly, both the Liberal Democrat and Labour parties have decided to go ahead with selecting candidates for the 2015 general election based on the current constituency boundaries.

Where does that leave the Conservatives? In rather a tricky position given David Cameron’s talk of still pressing on hoping to win the boundaries vote.

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged , and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

Lords reform, Boris Johnson and Louise Mensch: Guardian podcast

By Mark Pack | Fri 10th August 2012 - 2:07 pm

This week’s Politics Weekly podcast from The Guardian features, ahem, myself alongside Martin Kettle, Nick Cohen and Tom Clark. Lords reform, Boris Johnson’s political future and the Corby by-election (so far, dreadfully lacking in jokes about trouser presses) all feature.

Nick Cohen made a particularly good provocative point about Boris Johnson – saying he’s the only Conservative in the UK to have won a major election since John Major won the 1992 general election. It makes the Tory right’s view of him rather contradictory: they really dislike some of his policy preferences (such as on immigration) yet also love him as …

Continue reading »
Posted in News, Parliamentary by-elections and Podcasts | Tagged , , , , , and | Leave a comment
Mark Pack

Second Labour Police Commissioner candidate falls foul of “exceptionally tough condition of eligibility”

By Mark Pack | Fri 10th August 2012 - 1:45 pm

Alan Charles has now joined Bob Ashford in standing down as a Labour candidate for November’s Police and Crime Commissioner elections due to a youthful brush with the law.

His statement points the finger at the Home Office and Electoral Commission:

The Labour Party has only now received clarification from the Home Office and the Electoral Commission that juvenile convictions for imprisonable offences will bar people from becoming a police and crime commissioner.

That is, however, not quite the full story because this issue was directly debated when the legislation was going …

Continue reading »
Posted in Election law | Tagged , and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

How to get Lib Dem Voice by email

By Mark Pack | Fri 10th August 2012 - 10:45 am

Why not join hundreds of other Lib Dem Voice readers in getting our latest headlines by email?

Some people like regularly visiting a site to see if there’s new stories of interest. Some people like subscribing to its news feed (RSS) and checking that way. But if you prefer email, you can instead sign up to get a daily early morning email with a summary of the previous day’s posts from Lib Dem Voice, complete with a note of how many comments each post has got and convenient links to click on if any take your fancy and you want to take a read.

Continue reading »
Posted in Site news | Leave a comment
Mark Pack

How Parliament walked eyes wide open into the Bob Ashford mess

By Mark Pack | Thu 9th August 2012 - 1:08 pm

Would-be Labour Police and Crime Commissioner candidate Bob Ashford is rightly getting a positive press and sympathy from across the political spectrum today for discovering he’s disqualified from standing thanks to a £5 fine he paid 46 years ago.

It is absurd that he can’t stand. It is an absurdity that Parliament deliberately decided to enact, for the ban does not arise from unintended side effects of another measure or from poor drafting. Instead, it was a deliberate decision to introduce an unprecedented restriction on who can stand in the Police …

Continue reading »
Posted in Election law | Tagged , , and | 11 Comments
Mark Pack

Twitter, trolling and the law

By Mark Pack | Tue 7th August 2012 - 8:50 am

Last week I took part in a discussion on Voice of Russia radio about the problem of abuse and threats on Twitter. We talked about questions such as what the law should allow and what Twitter’s terms and conditions should permit.

You can listen to the full discussion, in which I joined Vanessa Barnett, a partner at Charles Russell LLP, Carl Gardner, a former government lawyer who writes about law at Head of Legal blog, and Ian Cram, a Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at Leeds University:

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged , and | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Lords reform: what the failure means for the Coalition, David Cameron and Nick Clegg

By Mark Pack | Tue 7th August 2012 - 8:06 am

First up, here’s Nick Robinson’s take on yesterday’s events followed by myself, via the BBC News Channel:

Continue reading »
Posted in News and YouTube | Tagged , , , , , , and | 10 Comments
Mark Pack

The House of Lords just got even more dangerous for Cameron

By Mark Pack | Mon 6th August 2012 - 8:52 pm

Imagine the situation.

You are a Liberal Democrat peer.

You have voted for several measures you did not like because they were in the Coalition Agreement.

You have now seen the Conservative Party walk away from a major part of the agreement.

You now know your place in Parliament is secure for a good few more years without the party’s whips being able to hold over you anything about your fate when reforms kick in, even if they should wish.

How do you think you are going to vote on future issue after issue that is in the Coalition Agreement but not the LibDem manifesto?

The …

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 17 Comments
Mark Pack

Quick, let’s bury the good news about teenagers

By Mark Pack | Mon 6th August 2012 - 12:25 pm

OK, let’s just keep this between you and me.

Don’t want to let anyone else know in case it upsets them. We both know how unsettling it can be for people who love to moan about how the country is going to the dogs* and how feckless the young are to be confronted with any evidence to the contrary.

I think I just about got away with sharing that poll finding with you last year about how the number of people thinking our society is broken has fallen.

So fingers crossed, let’s …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

Lords reform: what next?

By Mark Pack | Sat 4th August 2012 - 9:35 am

Four quick thoughts before I go off in search of chocolate, pizza and friends (in reverse order of priority, of course):

1. The last rites on Lords reform for this Parliament have not yet quite been uttered, though it’s striking how those in government I’ve spoken to are all now pretty much just talking about what the repercussions are rather than how it might yet go through. Will Ed Miliband be tempted to mix opportunism with principle and say, ‘No problem about those Tory backbenchers; we’ll support this measure?’.

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 13 Comments
Mark Pack

Reframe: How to solve the world’s trickiest problems?

By Mark Pack | Fri 3rd August 2012 - 10:25 am

How you view Eric Knight’s book by the end will depend very heavily on what you want out of it. At one level it works extremely well: a very readable and lively introduction to many of the issues which dominate the agendas of politicians and diplomats – fighting terrorism, regulating the financial markets, handling immigration, dealing with climate change and more.

Eric Knight, however, sets out to do more than present a primer on major current issues, as the subtitle suggests: “How to solve the world’s trickiest problems”.

Continue reading »
Posted in Books | Tagged and | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

“Tory membership in crisis” – Independent

By Mark Pack | Mon 30th July 2012 - 12:43 pm

Today’s Independent reports:

Conservative Party logoThree-quarters of local Conservative associations are losing activists as the party suffers a recruitment crisis which has seen membership halve since David Cameron became leader.

The latest estimates put Conservative membership at between 130,000 and 170,000, compared with almost 300,000 shortly after Mr Cameron succeeded Michael Howard…

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged and | 27 Comments
Mark Pack

Online electoral registration: not quite as novel at it sounds

By Mark Pack | Sun 29th July 2012 - 3:50 pm

Earlier this month Harrow Council caught the headlines for its new electoral registration system:

Harrow Council has become the first local authority in the country to take its electoral registration online.

As authorities across the country contact residents to ensure their details are added to the electoral register, Harrow will be asking people to respond to the annual canvass online.

The council said residents would be able confirm details “at the click of a button”, avoiding “cumbersome paper forms”.

Continue reading »
Posted in Election law | Tagged and | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

High Court orders recount in Denbighshire election mix-up

By Mark Pack | Sun 29th July 2012 - 9:50 am

Previously we reported how a block of votes for Labour candidate Paul Penlington were wrongly counted as being for similarly named Conservative rival Allan Pennington in the Prestatyn North ward count this May.

The High Court has now ordered a recount:

Continue reading »
Posted in Election law, News and Wales | Tagged | 4 Comments
Advert

Recent Comments

  • Nigel Jones
    @Mick Taylor, I agree we must be concerned about income inequality in current circumstances, though overcoming this is about taxing the rich, better public serv...
  • Nigel Jones
    @Mick Taylor, you are right to focus on strategy since we have plenty of policy, but i think we also need a vision and better messaging. It is easy to have stro...
  • Nigel Jones
    The New Deal graphic is very helpful but of course not perfect. As to preventing Reform from winning, we need to be an anti-establishment party as Chris Bowers ...
  • Nigel Jones
    It is certainly true that community politics is insufficient for long term gain. That was my experience in 13 yrs as a councillor and still active locally; at o...
  • Katharine Pindar
    Splendid stuff, well done Yorkists! 'The New Deal' seems a great idea in itself. Your graphic shows, however, how much work will need to be done to assert ourse...