Welcome news from Birmingham regarding postal votes (not a phrase I’ve often typed…):
A former Liberal Democrat candidate has been cleared of forging 12 postal votes application forms.
It had been alleged that Mohammed Khan, who stood for election in the Nechells area in the 2006 local elections, was involved in the fraud in order to further his own election prospects. (Birmingham Post)
More than 800 people with haemophilia have received contaminated blood products putting them at heightened risk of developing vCJD, the Government has disclosed for the first time.
The figures were revealed in a parliamentary answer from Lord Darzi, a Health minister, following the death of a haemophiliac who had received infected blood products…
Lord Morris, who established the privately funded two-year inquiry into the haemophilia “tainted blood” scandal after the Government declined to hold one, said yesterday: “There were only 6,000 haemophiliacs and almost 2,000 died of infection with hepatitis C and HIV. Now another 800 are
March 1997: John Major is Prime Minister and there’s a Parliamentary by-election in the Conservative-held seat of Wirral South. With a general election expected within weeks, the by-election is a major political event, with widespread media coverage.
New Labour use the campaign to showcase their mix of new and old, in the form of their candidate. He is Ben Chapman, the son of a farm labourer (tick the traditional Labour box) who became a successful senior civil servant, went into business and was a very recent recruit to the party (tick the New Labour box).
Carefully marshaled by minders through the campaign, …
The BNP like to style themselves as the party that tells the truth, which is why the tales of their fake photos and made-up statistics matter. Here’s the latest BNP fakery:
AN ex-Guardsman branded the BNP “scumbags” last night for using his photo and faked words on an election flyer.
Former Scots Guards NCO Stuart Walker, 37, was shocked to see a picture of himself in uniform outside Buckingham Palace on a poll leaflet.
He told The Sun: “I was completely outraged when I saw this leaflet. I think they got the photo off a website and the quote they’ve made
May 12th saw voting in the British Columbia elections. This Canadian provincial election saw Gordon Campbell’s governing Liberals re-elected and also a few barbs thrown about internet polling. As in the UK, internet polling has both its fans and its detractors. So does the Canadian experience help shed any light on the UK polling debates?
Perhaps the most striking fact about Canadian pollsters is that they haven’t yet had a “1970″. In Britain, pollsters got the 1970 general election badly wrongly with much of the blame being placed on having fieldwork that ended too far ahead …
Last summer an unholy alliance of Labour and Conservative MPs voted to block a series of major reforms to MP expenses, such as requiring receipts for all claims, having outside checks and major changes to the Additional Costs Allowance (ACA).
I commented on Dawn Butler’s role in this yesterday and on looking through the details of the vote it is good to see that all the Liberal Democrat MP voting went through the lobbies in favour of reform. Of course, the bulk of the blame for blocking the reforms must lie with the Labour Party as 146 of their MPs …
The BNP’s European leaflets have attracted some attention for their fake photos and the law suit arising from their use of another photo, but they’ve also got a made-up statistic.
I don’t mean, “Why did he think the public should pay for them?” but “Why did he need 16 bed sheets?” I mean, what would you do with 16 bed sheets?
That’s enough to change your sheets every day for a fortnight, without doing any washing, and still have a couple spare. Even if the country voted in a referendum to give MPs as many sheets as they like, 16 would still seem a bit excessive. So what …
Welcome to the first Sunday outing for The Voice’s new daily post series highlighting two big stories from the media and two “must read” blog posts from Liberal Democrats. As it’s a Sunday, there’s also a bonus extra supplement. If you spot anything for future posts, do let us know on [email protected]
2 Big Stories
Indian elections
The big election story of the week is India: massive democracy, increasingly influential in the world and located right next to some of the world’s trouble spots which most make their impact felt here in the UK.
The election results, which have been coming through on Saturday, are looking good for the Congress Party. Indian politics are sufficiently complex and different from the UK’s that for Liberal Democrats it isn’t a simple matter of cheering on one party in particular, but overall it looks like religious extremists are faring poorly. The BBC has an extensive write-up of news as it came in, including the person with a majority of over 350,000, the political analyst who commented that expert predictions turned out to be less accurate than astrologers, the Twittering candidate and links through to lots more detail.
Parliament and Labour in race to the bottom
It’s a tough call at the moment as to who is taking the worst battering: Parliament’s reputation or the Labour Party, who are plumbing new polling depths and now bumping along in the low 20s. There are stories aplenty in the Sunday papers, but the one I’d pick out is The Observer’s round-up as it contains perhaps the oddest comment from a Minister:
“This has been Gordon being too scrupulous: it’s not that he doesn’t get it, but he has felt you have to take parliament with you,”
Silly me, I thought he’d tried to bounce Parliament with his expenses reform proposals and had to pull key parts after it turned out hardly anyone supported them.
2 Must-Read Blog Posts
Is our electoral system partly to blame? Mark Reckons asks the question and does some analysis, concluding that the safer an MP’s seat, the more likely they are to have abused the system – and of course our electoral system means that many MPs have safe seats.
Our political system is still getting some things right
Meanwhile, Caron’s Musings rightly highlights that there is more to our political system than MPs’ expenses and lists some of the good things that MPs have done in the last week.
Sunday Bonus
For a bit of Sunday enjoyment, here’s a great spoof advert from last year’s American elections:
The House of Commons used to be filled with men of renown. Sir Christopher Wren was an MP. So was Sir Isaac Newton – and John Stuart Mill.
It’s an easy jibe to make – ‘MPs aren’t as good as they used to be’ – but his examples seem to me to be rather badly chosen. John Stuart Mill, I’ll grant you, was a man of renown and an admirable, hard-working MP who used Parliament to promote the causes he believed in.
Today’s election broadcast from the Conservatives simply features David Cameron talking to camera about MPs and their expense claims. The message is meant to be about him facing up to the problems and talking frankly about them.
But listen to his language:
I want to start by saying sorry … sorry for the actions of some Conservative MPs…
principle of thrift should apply to Conservative MPs too. So from now on I want them to claim what is reasonable to do their job…
Members of my Shadow Cabinet, including Michael Gove, Oliver Letwin and Andrew Lansley, have agreed to pay back money…
The current leaflets feature a section titled “Why we’re all voting BNP” with photos accompanied by a bit of text, presumably this is to encourage people to think BNP voters are just like you. Unfortunately for the BNP none of these voters are real and you can prove it by using web-based reverse image searches.
Rather unfortunately for the *British* National Party, it looks not only as if none of the people are real supporters, but several of the photos are most likely of people who are not British. Ooops.
Here’s the story from the Not The Barnet Times blog:
Yesterday, Not The Barnet Times broke the story that Mike Freer was wasting £10,000 of taxpayers money providing legal services for a councillor being investigated by the Standards Committee. The real scandal of this story was that the council’s insurers were willing to provide a lawyer at no cost to the taxpayer, but the councillor in question wanted one of the biggest London firms to act for him instead.
Our friends at The Barnet Times followed this up with an article of their own in which
The Liberal Democrat President, Ros Scott, has emailed out the following message to party members:
It has not been a good few weeks to be a be a politician. Liberal Democrat parliamentarians have made mistakes and errors of judgement. I would like to apologise to you – the members of our party that tirelessly contribute so much to our cause – for those mistakes. At the meeting of the Federal Executive on Monday we will discuss the issues of expenses and the party’s reaction to it. I can guarantee it will be a full and frank exchange of views.
When things go wrong or bad news breaks, it can be tempting to hunker down and say nothing. If you’re a blogger, particularly one who allows comments, the idea of having to write something for your blog can be very off-putting. The thought of ignoring the keyboard and just wishing that time would move on more quickly can be very alluring.
But is that the right response? It is a situation on which I have advised various people over the years, and nearly always the best advice is actually, “keep blogging”.
News just in from Burnley where the local Liberal Democrats have put out this press release:
COUNCIL DRAMA: BNP, TORIES AND LABOUR IN UNHOLY ALLIANCE
Councillors from the BNP, Tories and Labour parties tonight joined together to try to unseat Coun Gordon Birtwistle as leader of Burnley Council – but failed after one opposition councillor abstained.
There was tension in the chamber as the votes were counted, with the four BNP, six Tory and eleven of the twelve Labour councillors voting against Coun Birtwistle. But for the abstention of a single senior Labour councillor, the vote could have seen the Council without a …
Millions of pounds have been spent in total in recent years in the UK on testing various forms of electronic voting, in the hope that this might raise turnout in elections. The overall verdict across different technologies – such as voting by SMS or online – has been remarkably consistent: it’s expensive, not very reliable, of dubious security and, above all, has almost no impact on turnout levels.
It’s easy to see how the idea of using modern technology has caught the eye and budget of decision makers. But with the emphasis on the high-tech, boringly …
An ironic twist in the latest MP expenses story – this time is it James Purnell, the minister in charge of ensuring that the rest of us don’t claim too much in expenses, who is accused of claiming back more in rental costs than he actually paid out. The Sunday Express writes:
CABINET Minister James Purnell was under pressure last night to explain why he claimed £10,000 more in Parliamentary expenses than he paid in rent for his London flat.
The Welfare and Pensions Secretary, tipped as a future leader of the Labour Party, pocketed £10,143 more than the rent he
The awful news about the second case of child abuse involving someone Haringey Council was meant to be protecting – with the conviction of the boyfriend of Baby P’s mother for raping a two-year old – has rather pushed to one side the publication of the second Serious Case Review into Baby P’s death.
The original Serious Case Review concluded that essentially nothing too significant was done wrong by those involved in protecting Baby P, but was rapidly discredited once its finding were publicised. This new review paints a very different picture, including the key conclusion that the death of Baby
Finding out what’s going on, communicating and getting feedback are essential parts of the job of any politician or would-be politician. Facebook offers great opportunities for all three, but it can also suck up huge amounts of time. So how can a busy person ensure they get the most from both Facebook and their precious time? A good starting point is to ensure you don’t fall into the trap which others have before.
If you flick through the media stories featuring the words “politician”, “Facebook” and “gaffe”, you will find that nearly all involve something which in a pre-Facebook world would have been kept private, but was put on Facebook and then leaked. Like it or not, you must assume that anything you put on Facebook will end up being seen by journalists and opponents. Act accordingly. Keep your genuinely private life away from your political Facebook presence.
Get your Facebook privacy settings right
Whilst this is good advice for anyone in politics, it can cause problems for someone who has been using Facebook long before they thought of standing for public office. Must they really axe their private use of Facebook and remove past private information before going in to politics?
Seeing this photo of Barack Obama’s small TV reminded me of this story about the size of the TV installed in the office of the then Labour leader of Haringey Council. I’m sure there are plenty of good reasons why the leader of a council needs a much bigger TV than the leader of the free world 🙂
The question of pay audits has been one of the big areas of contention within the Government ahead of the publication this week of the Equality Bill. Should firms be required to carry out an audit to see if they are paying men and women the same rate for equivalent jobs? Should small firms be exempted? How small is small? Should there be an initial voluntary phase? And so on. At various times, different camps seem to have had the upper hand in this debate, with Peter Mandelson pushing for very little on this front and Harriet Harman pushing for …
Alex Macfie @George Thomas: What would work better is better regulating the design features of social media platforms, so that (for instance) they have to modify algorithms...
Margot Wilson Yes, indeed, Michael's message is clear: we must remember Jo Cox. I was in a room full of teachers of speakers of other languages the day she was killed and our...
George Thomas I think the basic idea is that tech companies are now richer and more powerful than many governments while having none of the responsibilities and demonstrating...
Chloe What I'm saying Mick - is I don't trust the institutions in charge. After the recent horrific events , the NHS , social services , and all the other 'profession...
cim What part of the "triple lock" would you end, though? Allowing pensions to reduce below either CPI or average wage increases inevitably leads to pensioners stea...
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Reform inadvertently lose their majority
The Major Oak is dead and Phil Harding has discovered another ancient site near Stonehenge
Reform own goals
Trumps' White House thuggery appals the world including most Americans
Alex Macfie 
Margot Wilson 
George Thomas 
Chloe 
cim 