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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.
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Searching YouTube: two handy sites

By Mark Pack | Sat 14th February 2009 - 7:55 am

YouTube’s built in search facilities are pretty good for finding clips based on keywords. There are though a range of other free tools which search YouTube and present the results in different ways. Two of these are likely to be of particular interest to people involved in politics.

Mappeo: searching an area

Mappeo lets you see all the recent films added to YouTube plotted on a map – handy for people wanting to see what’s been added in their ward, constituency or region.

This only works on films which have had their location set by the person who uploaded them, but many …

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Posted in Online politics | Tagged mappeo, nick clegg, timetube and YouTube | 1 Comment

LibDig sprouts two new features

By Mark Pack | Thu 12th February 2009 - 5:41 pm

Ryan’s LibDig is a social bookmarking service for Liberal Democrats. In other words, it’s an easy and convenient way for party members to share interesting, funny, useful or panic-inducing stuff* they find on the internet, and to see what other people have come across.

If you are a LibDig user, thanks to some new coding by Ryan you can now use an RSS feed to display your choices in other places, such as on your website. For example, if you look at my page – http://libdig.co.uk/profile.php?id=5&cmd=dugg – there is now an “RSS” option to the right of the photo.

Why …

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Posted in Online politics | 2 Comments

Boris Johnson: you shouldn’t have expected me to be good on details

By Mark Pack | Thu 12th February 2009 - 4:50 pm

You’re about to appear before a Parliamentary Select Committee. You’ve been in some controversy about who you spoke to and when. It’s an affair involving the police, Parliament and heavy media coverage. Do you therefore:

(a) Prepare yourself to answer detailed questions about what you did and when, or
(b) Stuff all that, decide to turn up, wing it and moan afterwards if people complain you keep on changing the details of what you said?

If (b), congratulations – looks like you have what to takes to be Mayor of London, for as the Evening Standard reports:

Boris Johnson launched a furious F-word

…

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Posted in News | Tagged boris johnson | Leave a comment

Early voting: why did we bother spending years (and lots of money) on piloting it?

By Mark Pack | Thu 12th February 2009 - 2:31 pm

For several years, the idea of letting people vote in person ahead of polling day (e.g. at the Town Hall or in a local shopping centre) was tested out in a range of different British elections. Lots of time and money went on the tests, all of which came up with the same answer: it makes almost no difference to turnout, and the money that it takes up could have gone on other measures which would have been just as good, if not better, at raising turnout (e.g. general publicity campaigns reminding pepole to vote).

The pilots themselves went on long …

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Posted in News | Tagged early voting, electoral commission, LabourList, linda riordan and turnout | 12 Comments

A letter to Conservative Central Office

By Mark Pack | Wed 11th February 2009 - 6:26 pm

Dear Conservative Central Office person,

If your party leader has got his facts wrong, editing Wikipedia to try to hide this isn’t likely to work. (Whisper it quietly, but, you know, there are other places people get information from.) Editing from a Conservative Party IP address is also likely to be spotted.

Yours,

Mark

PS Nice to know though that it was someone in Conservative Central Office who made the anonymous comment on LDV last year saying, “I would hate to live in Dr Packs bitter world of bile”. I may well quote that as an endorsement in future 🙂

Posted in News | 3 Comments

Reasons to doubt that Darwin poll

By Mark Pack | Wed 11th February 2009 - 11:54 am

Last week, an opinion poll supposedly showing relatively low levels of public belief in Darwin’s theory of evolution did the media rounds. Typical was this write-up from the Daily Telegraph:

Poll reveals public doubts over Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution
Belief in creationism is widespread in Britain, according to a new survey.

Having heard some more coverage of the poll this morning, I thought I’d take a look at what the poll actually said. It was conducted by ComRes, a reputable polling firm (and, regularly readers of my posts about BPIX will be glad to hear, a member of the British Polling …

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Posted in News | Tagged bpix, charles darwin, comres, daily telegraph and evolution | 11 Comments

The political make-up of the House of Lords

By Mark Pack | Tue 10th February 2009 - 12:25 pm

Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:

With reform of the House of Lords back in the news following the latest scandals over who is in it and how they behave, now seems a good time to provide some background on its political make-up.

Since political parties first emerged in British politics, the then wholly hereditary House of Lords consistently had a very large Conservative majority.

For example, in 1900 there were 354 Conservative peers out of the 574 adult peers, giving a “majority” of 134. By 1938 it had grown to 761 adult peers, and of these 519 were Conservative, giving a “majority”

…

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Posted in Parliament | Tagged house of lords | 1 Comment

How accurate are YouGov polls?

By Mark Pack | Sun 8th February 2009 - 8:50 am

It’s a well-established pattern during this Parliament that YouGov generally gives lower ratings to the Liberal Democrats than other pollsters, and this appears to be due to YouGov finding female voters to be more Conservative than other polling companies. Whilst YouGov did well in last year’s London Mayor elections, its record in other elections is more mixed. Most notably, its exist poll at the last European elections got the Conservative and UKIP vote shares badly wrong.

Interesting then to see Ben Goldacre’s column in yesterday’s Guardian which, on the way to rubbishing the PR of an insurance company, took to …

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Posted in Polls | Tagged ben goldacre and yougov | 5 Comments

How accurate should forecasts claim to be?

By Mark Pack | Sat 7th February 2009 - 6:25 pm

In a blog posting earlier today I touched on the issue of forecasts which are given to a spurious degree of accuracy, and by coincidence I’ve just come across another example, this time from the world of online advertising.

Nate Elliott of Forrester has produced a report on the outlook for online advertising, saying that:

We had previously forecasted that online ad spend would account for 12.6% of all European advertising in 2012; thanks to the recession, we’ve increased that forecast to 14.8%.

Do you think that you can forecast (a) how much advertising there will be in Europe in three years …

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Posted in News | 6 Comments

Credit where credit’s (mostly) due: Sunday Telegraph and polling

By Mark Pack | Sat 7th February 2009 - 2:58 pm

The internet seems to have got a bit excited about the latest ICM poll, something which The Voice tends not to do, but given my past complaints about the media and polling it seems only fair to point out that the Sunday Telegraph looks to have given up its brief flirtation with a non-British Polling Council firm (a flirtation I criticised at the time).

Moreover, the paper’s report sensibly compares the poll results with the previous ICM poll, even though that was commissioned for (shock! horror!) a different newspaper. The tendency to airbrush out polls carried …

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Posted in Polls | Tagged bpix and icm | 14 Comments

Taxis ahoy: how Boris Johnson is spending other people’s money

By Mark Pack | Sat 7th February 2009 - 2:16 pm

Tory Troll has highlighted just how Boris Johnson’s political rallies public meetings are racking up the bills, including taxi fares and very expensive “Audio/Visual services” for one. What on earth was done at one meeting to require £9,800 on “audio/visual services”, and why should a meeting in London which ends mid-evening require £1,000 in taxi bills?

Posted in London and News | Tagged boris johnson | 5 Comments

An unusual messaging choice by the London Labour Party

By Mark Pack | Thu 5th February 2009 - 4:59 pm

You run the London website for a political party. You’ve been told to put a series of photos of people on the front page of your site. Who do you think you’d select? Perhaps some of your London MPs? MEPs? Council group leaders? GLA members? If you’re Labour, the answer is … er, none of them. Instead you feature photos of all your staff. Me? I’m off to put a big photo of myself on all our sites I can find. It’s clearly the way to go.

Posted in Online politics | 2 Comments

Nick Clegg announces radical education proposals for England

By Mark Pack | Thu 5th February 2009 - 1:06 pm

Today’s the day when the education policy paper going to our Harrogate conference is released to the media.

The official news release doesn’t hold back on the scale of the challenge or the ambitions for the policies:

Nick Clegg announced radical new education policies to fix inequalities in Britain’s ‘class-based education system.’

The plans would narrow the gap between the state and private sector, raising funding for the most disadvantaged pupils to private school levels and delivering extra money to cut infant class sizes to 15.

The proposals will reverse decades of standardisation and centralisation. In its place, more freedoms would be granted to

…

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Posted in News and Party policy and internal matters | Tagged education and nick clegg | 13 Comments

John Prescott vs Iain Dale

By Mark Pack | Wed 4th February 2009 - 2:49 pm

Earlier this week, Iain Dale doubted whether or not John Prescott really pens his blog. John Prescott has taken to YouTube to make his case:

Iain seems to have taken it all in good heart.

Posted in Online politics | Tagged iain dale and john prescott | 2 Comments

Why giving out your web address may not be such a good idea

By Mark Pack | Wed 4th February 2009 - 12:10 pm

Over the last few months, Transport for London has been running a series of adverts, principally on tubes, buses, stations and shelters encouraging people to behave responsibly when using their services and encouraging people to visit their site www.togetherforlondon.org.

However, the website side of the campaign has been criticised for getting only derisory amounts of traffic with, for example, only 12 ideas posted up during December. Or as an Evening Standard story put it before Christmas:

An official website hailed as “Facebook for commuters” was branded a disaster by experts today.

Together for London was billed as a forum where travellers could work together to improve the capital’s transport system. Yet two months after a high-profile launch by Transport for London, the site is a virtual ghost town.

So what went wrong? And what are the lessons which also apply to advertising political sites?

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Posted in Online politics | Tagged martin belam and tfl | 6 Comments

Why should opting out of double-glazing direct mail stop you hearing about a local planning application?

By Mark Pack | Wed 4th February 2009 - 10:20 am

Use of the electoral register is, quite rightly, tightly controlled. The full register can only be used for running elections and a very small number of other tasks, such as if the police want to use it to help track down a person. As a database of names and addresses is also useful for a wide range of other purposes there is an ‘edited’ version of the register which anybody can buy – but which anyone can also opt out from appearing on.

However, by having just the one type of register available for wider use all sorts of different uses …

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Posted in Election law | Tagged electoral registration | Leave a comment

Charlie Gordon MSP: the curious case of high expense claims and payments to his son

By Mark Pack | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 10:22 pm

Labour MSP Charlie Gordon has been in the news over his high level of expense claims. It’s not the first time he, money and politics have been in the news, for he’s the man who resigned as Labour’s transport spokesman over a dodgy overseas donation for Wendy Alexander’s Scottish Labour leadership campaign.

Charlie Gordon’s payments to his son

This time though it’s the level of expenses he has been claiming as an MSP that are in the news – including the fact that a large part of them have been paid to his son, Gavin …

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Posted in Online politics and Scotland | Tagged charlie gordon | 6 Comments

How to backup Twitter

By Mark Pack | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 12:10 pm

Why backup Twitter?

It’s very easy to end up behaving as if an internet service will always be there and always be working, at least reasonably. But that’s a risky proposition, especially for free services – as was demonstrated at the weekend when Google, of all people, managed to wreck all the searches done on their search engine because of one wrong character in one place. Or as the Greek dramatist Agathon put it, “It is probable that the improbable will sometimes happen.”

Twitter is a relatively small company, with a technical track record that isn’t the finest and without an …

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Posted in Online politics | Tagged agathon, flickr, tweetake and twitter | 2 Comments

Missing: one marked register

By Mark Pack | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 11:54 am

News via the Press Association:

The SNP demanded an inquiry after it emerged that a record of everyone who voted in last year’s Glenrothes by-election has gone missing.

The party had asked to see the marked registers from November’s crucial by-election – which resulted in a shock victory for Labour.

I’m not hugely surprised by this, as after the 2005 general election there were numerous complaints from people who tried to access the marked register for their constituency about the records being in a poor shape, delayed for long periods on in part missing. The rules then were that marked registers were …

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Posted in Election law and News | Tagged glenrothes by-election, guido fawkes, harriet harman, lynne featherstone and marked registers | 6 Comments

Praise for Tom Brake’s use of Facebook

By Mark Pack | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 7:52 am

Praise for Tom Brake and how he uses Facebook to engage with his constituents in Carshalton and Wallington:

Tom Brake, LibDem MP for Carshalton and Wallington, uses Facebook. Not especially as an ordinary member, in terms of ordinary (mundane) status reports or poking or that sort of thing, but as an MP … This is a perfect example: Tom updates his Facebook friends on the weather reports and is thanked by five for doing so. It is part of the job of the modern day MP, but it also builds up a link between him and constituents, perhaps earns a degree

…

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Posted in Online politics | Tagged facebook and tom brake | 2 Comments

What planning applications are being made near where you live?

By Mark Pack | Mon 2nd February 2009 - 12:08 pm

This service has been around on a trial basis for a little while, but I’ve only just started using it myself: www.planningalerts.com

It’s pretty straight-forward: give your postcode and email address and in return you get news of planning applications by email. The email alerts look to me to be better than many offered by councils themselves, so this may also be a useful service for councillors and colleagues to promote to the public in their patch.

It covers 315 local authorities at the moment, and if your isn’t one of them then you can help add it to the …

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Posted in News | Tagged planningalerts.com | 4 Comments

What’s going to happen to UK property prices?

By Mark Pack | Mon 2nd February 2009 - 9:20 am

Here’s a bit of historical context: in the last major house price slump, prices peaked in the third quarter of 1989*, hit bottom in the first quarter of 1993 when they were 20% lower and did not rise back above the pre-slump peak again until the first quarter of 1998.

What would similar timescales mean for us this time round? Prices peaked in the third quarter of 2007, so that would mean them not hitting bottom until the first quarter of 2011 and not getting back to their pre-slump levels until the first quarter of 2016. In other words, not only …

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Posted in News | Tagged economy and house prices | 5 Comments

What’s Labour’s internet operation like?

By Mark Pack | Sun 1st February 2009 - 7:16 pm

Two reviews out today. One from Christine Bennett in The Observer:

Although a commitment to democratic engagement with the online public is now compulsory for any party official, LabourList’s fondness for joyless affirmations of party solidarity, along with official reports on the modern equivalent of tractor production and Draper’s corrections of perceived thought crimes, can easily make it appear, to visitors from the free world, to have less in common with Obama’s style of civic engagement than with Vladimir Putin’s…

On each new, Obama-inspired Labour website, there is a patch of nothing where a picture of the party leader should go. Up

…

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Posted in Online politics | Tagged barack obama, derek draper and LabourList | 1 Comment

What will the political fallout from the peers lobbying scandal be?

By Mark Pack | Sun 1st February 2009 - 1:03 pm

An intriguing report in today’s Sunday Times:

PEERS who avoid tax or have criminal convictions – such as Lord Archer and Lord Black – are to be expelled from the House of Lords in the wake of the lords for hire scandal.

The reforms are being drawn up by Jack Straw, the justice secretary, in an attempt to restore the Lords’ battered reputation after last weekend’s revelations in The Sunday Times. He plans to enact the legislation necessary to expel them before the general election…

Lord Ashcroft, the billionaire Tory donor, has repeatedly refused to confirm his tax status, while Lord Laidlaw,

…

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Posted in News and Parliament | Tagged baroness gardner, conrad black, david cameron, jack straw, jeffrey archer, lord ashcroft, lord laidlaw, lord paul and matthew oakeshott | 3 Comments

Is this what “making government work better” means?

By Mark Pack | Sat 31st January 2009 - 4:43 pm

The Cabinet Office says its overarching purpose is “making government work better”. Me? I’d change it to “making the Cabinet Office work better” or even “making the Cabinet Office reply to correspondence from the public, now and again, pretty please”.

As you may have guessed, I’ve been trying to communicate with them…

First I tried an email through their website, back in September. No response. Oh well, no technology is perfect I thought. Let’s be fair and given them another try. Another website submission in October. No response. Back to old-fashioned communications then, and a letter in December. No response again.

So …

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Posted in News | 2 Comments

Ouch! Someone doesn’t like Steve Hilton

By Mark Pack | Thu 29th January 2009 - 1:04 pm

The latest edition of Standpoint casts David Cameron’s top adviser Steve Hilton into its “Overrated” column:

Between David Cameron’s election as leader and his hoped-for entry into 10 Downing Street, Steve Hilton will have cost the Conservative party at least a million pounds. Despite vast debts, the Tories are reported to be paying their chief strategist an unprecedented £270,000-a- year salary.* Yet, apart from having helped to make Cameron leader, Hilton has no other notable political successes to his name. In the disastrous 1997 and 2005 general election campaigns, Michael Portillo’s two failed leadership bids, and Steve Norris’s two doomed efforts

…

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Posted in News | Tagged conservative party, david cameron, eric pickles and steve hilton | 4 Comments

Derek Conway: should the police investigate him for fraud?

By Mark Pack | Thu 29th January 2009 - 12:52 pm

Now that the Standards and Privileges Committee has decided that Derek Conway should repay several thousand pounds that wrongly went on employing one of his sons, Duncan Borrowman (who lodged a complaint originally about the whole affair) says:

I call again for the Metropolitan Police to investigate Mr Conway for fraud.

You can read more on Duncan’s blog.

Posted in News | Tagged derek conway and duncan borrowman | 3 Comments

Confusing letter-writers with terrorists: the PCC investigates

By Mark Pack | Wed 28th January 2009 - 11:13 pm

Earlier this month I blogged about the questions over a story run by The Sun claiming that the likes of Alan Sugar were being targeted by terrorists. There were two problems with the story: first, the initial discussion looked to be one purely about running a polite letter-writing campaign, and second, the subsequent inflammatory comments that were made looked to come from an agent provocateur.

Well now the Press Complaints Commission are investigating, as The Guardian explains.

Hat-tip: Tim Ireland

Posted in News | Tagged alan sugar, the sun and tim ireland | 3 Comments

Nick Clegg on tour

By Mark Pack | Wed 28th January 2009 - 5:31 pm

Here’s the latest YouTube film from Nick Clegg.

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Posted in Lib Dem TV | Tagged nick clegg | Leave a comment

Another Conservative councillor switches in Portsmouth

By Mark Pack | Wed 28th January 2009 - 4:32 pm

Interesting times continue in Portsmouth (see here and here for previous stories):

A second Conservative councillor has crossed the floor and joined the Lib Dems.

Central Southsea councillor Margaret Adair quit her party on Friday and signed up to the rivals.

As reported in The News, Cllr Adair was expected to follow in the footsteps of former Tory councillor Lee Hunt, who quit his party after claiming he was the victim of an internal hate campaign.

You can read the rest of the story from the local newspaper here.

Posted in News | Leave a comment