Category Archives: Online politics

Simon McGrath

Ed Davey interview with Tory think tank, Bright Blue

By Simon McGrath | Sun 28th August 2022 - 3:56 pm

Ed Davey has been interviewed by ‘Centre Write ’ the magazine of Bright Blue – who describe themselves as “an independent think tank for liberal conservatism. We defend and improve liberal society.”

The interview is billed as talking to Ed about “about coalitions, what it means to be a liberal, and what the future, holds for the party he leads” and Ed provides some robust answers  to their questions. When asked if he regrets entering the Coalition he talks about his fighting the Tories over renewable energy – but as a result of winning those fights we have cheaper energy and lead the world in offshore wind. He doesn’t answer the question about whether he regrets us joining the Coalition but could not be clearer when asked “ Would you ever enter into a coalition with the Conservatives again?: 

“The answer is no. It’s quite simple.”

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Web Magpie

How a Liberal pamphlet from 1980 led to the collapse of the British political system

By Web Magpie | Sun 2nd February 2020 - 2:05 pm

Original cover artwork from “The Theory and Practice of Community Politics”

Over on Medium.com, Councillor Nick Barlow has written a remarkably astute retrospective on the 1980 pamphlet “The Theory And Practice of Community Politics” written by Bernard Greaves and Gordon Lishman and published by the Association of Liberal Councillors (now the ALDC).

Nick’s narrative takes us from the ideologically based idea of Community Politics in the 1970s and how it morphed into the quite different concept of Customer Service Politics, which dominates our civic arena today:

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Also posted in Liberal History | Tagged , , , , and | 18 Comments
Paul Walter

Brexit: The betting on what will happen next

By Paul Walter | Thu 21st July 2016 - 10:55 am

CGP Grey is an Irish American You Tuber and podcaster. He’s done some excellent animated YouTube videos which explain complex issues very quickly. I recommend viewing his masterpiece on what would happen if the USA’s presidential electoral college is tied, and his corker on the Canadian-USA border. They are both priceless.

CGP Grey has now turned his attention to the Brexit options. He talks very fast on this following video. In fact, I don’t remember him talking this fast on any of his previous videos. He talks faster than the actors on West Wing. In 6’57” he beautifully explains the Brexit scenario and the post-Brexit options. It really is brilliant.

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The Voice

Tweets from the campaign trail: Snow edition

By The Voice | Sat 16th January 2016 - 7:53 pm

All over the country, Liberal Democrats have been campaigning today, some of them in the snow. Here are some of the icy tweets. Thankfully, the reception on the doorsteps was much warmer.

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Newspuppy

A funny BBC captioning fail…

By Newspuppy | Tue 5th January 2016 - 7:45 pm

Since he became leader, Tim Farron has been confused with Michael Fallon and today a BBC New Channel caption labelled maverick Eurosceptic Tory MP Michael Fabricant as Tim Farron. I wonder which of them was more embarrassed by the error.

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The Voice

The Lib Dem Press Office gets sassy

By The Voice | Sat 28th November 2015 - 12:11 am

I have no idea who had the Lib Dem Press Office Twitter account tonight, but they need to have it more often. They had certainly had their Weetabix this morning and took on all-comers:

 

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Helen Duffett

Manifesto 2015: Join the debate

By Helen Duffett | Tue 5th November 2013 - 5:10 pm

Following David Laws’ call for proposals for the Liberal Democrats’ 2015 Manifesto, the first submissions from members are now up on the Manifesto Website.

Watch this space for more members’ ideas to be discussed. Or submit your own idea and maybe you’ll see it up there soon!

Also posted in General Election | Tagged | 2 Comments

Opinion: No social media identity? Be very afraid

By Andy Boddington | Wed 23rd January 2013 - 11:45 am

Twitter logoYesterday the government chief scientist issued a thoughtful Foresight report on social media and social identity. It has important implications for political campaigning. For those in a hurry, here is the main message in a tweet:

@andybodders No online identity? You will fade out of existence #beveryafraid

The report uses rather more eloquent words to express this:

As people have become accustomed to switching seamlessly between the

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Also posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 15 Comments
Mark Pack

Now here’s a good email to send to local members and supporters

By Mark Pack | Fri 23rd November 2012 - 9:50 am

Top marks Haringey Liberal Democrats for taking up my idea on this (properly formatted version here). Simple, practical and providing people with useful information:

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Mark Pack

Romney’s polling day technology meltdown: Orca

By Mark Pack | Mon 12th November 2012 - 11:53 am

The usual post-electoral defeat search for explanations and people to blame has an added edge for the Republicans after Mitt Romney’s defeat earlier this month. Not only did Romney lose, he lost in all the states that were picked as being in serious contention, the Republicans actually lost ground in the Senate (when they had hopes of making gains) and the initial voting analysis shows the Republicans with a big problem: the parts of the electorate that are growing are the parts which vote against them the most heavily.

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Also posted in Campaign Corner | Tagged , , and | 6 Comments
Paul Walter

Can you believe in free speech and moderate comments?

By Paul Walter | Mon 12th November 2012 - 9:53 am

The Telegraph’s assistant comment editor, Tom Chivers, has written a thought-provoking article about moderating comments on web sites. In it he tackles the apparent mismatch between a website advocating free speech while disallowing some comments under its articles:

It’s a funny thing. You write a piece saying that the state shouldn’t outlaw rudeness and insults, and about one

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Tagged | 8 Comments
Caron Lindsay

LibLink: Mark Pack’s five lessons from the US election

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 7th November 2012 - 7:48 pm

I’ve long suspected that the Voice’s Mark Pack doesn’t need to sleep and his clear thinking after a long electoral night kind of backs up my theory. As my neural pathways crumble from lack of sleep, he has already put together five lessons we should learn from both Obama’s win and Romney’s loss.

He talks about the important of the non white male vote. While Romney might have done well amongst white men, he lost many other important groups of voters, including women, who make up the majority.

Mark also made a good point about the many emails which came out of …

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Also posted in LibLink | Tagged , , , and | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

New campaign buttons up and running on Prater Raines and MyCouncillor sites

By Mark Pack | Sun 4th November 2012 - 10:25 am

Thanks to the kind efforts of Tim Pickstone and colleagues at ALDC and Tim Prater and co. at Prater Raines, the newly revived Liberal Democrat campaign buttons have now been tested successfully on websites run using their own systems.

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Mark Pack

Lib Dem campaign buttons for your website available once again

By Mark Pack | Mon 29th October 2012 - 2:53 pm

A new set of automatically updated campaign buttons is now available for Liberal Democrat websites.

As I wrote in September, during my time working at party HQ doing online campaigning one of our most successful projects (cooked up with the help of Rob Fenwick and Martin Tod) was the ‘campaign buttons’ – a simple piece of code which let bloggers and those with other websites easily display campaign adverts and news stories from the party.

It was a great way for the party to be able to push out quickly and widely adverts for new campaigns, policy launches and the like, whilst for …

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Tom Brake

Tom Brake MP writes… Romney’s bought the latest gadget, but he’s forgotten to read the manual

By Tom Brake | Thu 13th September 2012 - 3:29 pm

Romney’s bought the latest gadget, but he’s forgotten to read the manual.When Obama stormed to the Presidency he did so in glorious Technicolor while his opponent was still campaigning in black and white (or at least fifty shades of grey). In contrast, Obama campaigned with panache and proved what can be achieved by harnessing the power of social media.

His victory, for me, was a Kennedy/Nixon moment – one campaign looked modern and dynamic, the other looked tired, sweaty and frankly a bit outdated. The result was rather predictable in the end. Obama triumph. Slam dunk.

But if Obama’s victory four years …

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Also posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 1 Comment
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.

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Also posted in Campaign Corner | Tagged , , , , and | 4 Comments
Ryan Cullen

Welcome to the new bloggers…

By Ryan Cullen | Sat 23rd June 2012 - 8:01 pm

Seventeen blogs have recently joined my Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

Good luck to all the new bloggers, and why not take a moment to pop over to their blogs, take a read and post a comment?

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Tagged | 2 Comments
Caron Lindsay

We’ve heard about Marr on Pack, but what has Pack said about Marr?

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 24th May 2012 - 8:55 am

You will forgive, I hope, a bit of collective pride from the Liberal Democrat Voice team. It’s not every day one of our co-editors is mentioned, in glowing terms, at a judicial enquiry, as Stephen has already written.

To recap, Andrew Marr was talking about the authority and credibility of the political blogosphere. Top left on page 83 if you don’t want to read the whole thing.

“You look around and a lot of the most influential highly respected political commentators aren’t newspaper journalists, actually, they are bloggers. I’m thinking of people like Tim Montgomery on Conservativehome or Mr Pack

…

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Mark Pack

Campaign Corner: How can I best use Facebook?

By Mark Pack | Mon 5th March 2012 - 3:50 pm

The Campaign Corner series looks to give three tips about commonly asked campaign issues. Do get in touch if you have any questions you would like to suggest.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: How can I get the best out of Facebook for my ward branch?

Around half the UK’s population is on Facebook, so if you’re wondering what to spend time on campaigning online, then Facebook is a very good choice (perhaps these days it is second only to email). Three pieces of advice then, as is traditional:

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Also posted in Campaign Corner | Tagged and | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

A Twitter gem for seeing what Liberal Democrats are saying

By Mark Pack | Wed 22nd February 2012 - 11:50 am

Liberal Tweets is an aggregator (run by the king of Lib Dem aggregrators, LDV’s very own Ryan Cullen) which displays in one convenient place all the latest tweets from Liberal Democrat members who are using Twitter.

If you are one of those but aren’t yet being included, you can email [email protected].

Also posted in News | Tagged | 1 Comment
Alan Muhammed

Opinion – Twitter: powerful campaign tool or waste of effort?

By Alan Muhammed | Thu 9th February 2012 - 2:55 pm

The simple tweet “F*ck” at 10am with the reply “Agreed” last Friday was the only source and all the evidence I required to know that Chris Huhne had been charged. Two words tied emotion with cognition. I followed Nick Clegg’s tax cut speech live through the medium of 140 character paraphrase: a sort of Focus-speak reduction I can only imagine would have the speech-writers crying. The utterance “Borgen – Danish West Wing” was all the persuasion necessary to watch it religiously.

Twitter is free, fast and tragic. And if it wasn’t powerful in facilitating the fall of …

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Mark Pack

Lib Dem achievements, communicating peers and election timetables

By Mark Pack | Fri 3rd February 2012 - 12:50 pm

A trio of resources for your weekend’s delectation:

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Also posted in News | Tagged | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

This 2008 political advert is still hard to beat

By Mark Pack | Thu 12th January 2012 - 11:25 am

Enjoy (but please, don’t copy):

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Tagged | 5 Comments
Mark Pack

Campaign Corner: Is it better for a candidate to have a website or a blog?

By Mark Pack | Mon 2nd January 2012 - 2:55 pm

The Campaign Corner series looks to give three tips about commonly asked campaign issues. Do get in touch if you have any questions you would like to suggest.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: I’m standing in May and not sure what matters most – my website, having a blog or both?

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Also posted in Campaign Corner | Tagged | 4 Comments
Ryan Cullen

Welcome to the new bloggers…

By Ryan Cullen | Thu 22nd December 2011 - 3:12 pm

Twenty three blogs have recently joined my Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

Good luck to all the new bloggers, and why not take a moment to pop over to their blogs, take a read and post a comment?

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Tagged | 1 Comment

Jake Holland writes: Connect is here to help you win

By Jake Holland | Wed 16th November 2011 - 3:25 pm

All Liberal Democrat campaigners will agree that there’s no worse feeling at the end of a hard-fought election campaign than losing by a handful of votes.

In the 2010 General Election, we were less than 1000 votes away from winning in 10 constituencies. Analysing these results, it was clear that our campaign technology had fallen behind the other two main parties. Tasks that our opponents took for granted, such as linking a campaign system directly to a website, or organising a nationwide volunteer phone bank, were beyond our capabilities.

Connect is the cutting edge in campaign technology that will put us …

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Also posted in Party policy and internal matters | Tagged , and | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

Campaign Corner: How do I make my ward emails more effective?

By Mark Pack | Mon 14th November 2011 - 4:50 pm

The Campaign Corner series looks to give three tips about commonly asked campaign issues. Do get in touch if you have any questions you would like to suggest.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: I have built up quite a large number of emails for residents in my ward and I’m expecting a close fight in May. How can I get the most out of emails to them?

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Also posted in Campaign Corner | Tagged | 5 Comments
The Voice

Calling all Lib Dem bloggers… Orwell Prize 2012 open to entries

By The Voice | Fri 11th November 2011 - 3:53 pm

A short public service announcement for the benefit of all Lib Dem bloggers follows:

Entries for the Orwell Prize 2012 are now open, for political writing first published in 2011. Entries will remain open until Wednesday 18 January 2012. Full details of the launch, including this year’s judges, are available on our website, www.theorwellprize.co.uk.

Online forms for the Journalism Prize, Blog Prize and Book Prize are now available (along with PDF versions of the Journalism and Book Prize forms), along with the rules and values of the Prize, at http://theorwellprize.co.uk/the-orwell-prize/how-to-enter/. Entry for all three Prizes is completely FREE.

As

…

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The Independent View: Local government, social media and what the public really wants

By Rob Dale | Thu 20th October 2011 - 2:53 pm

To many, social media seems the ideal way for government – especially local government –  to engage in more dialogue with communities in a way that is low cost, time-efficient and allows a two way (or indeed a multidirectional) relationship.

But how many normal people follow their council on Twitter? Research done by the LGiU found that in the vast majority of cases it is about 1% of the constituency.

Social media has the potential to play a huge role In engaging people with political system whilst saving cash. Examples like the BwD Winter  page – which Blackburn with Darwent …

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Also posted in Op-eds and The Independent View | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

Commons votes to allow Twitter but MP demands minister communicates via letter

By Mark Pack | Fri 14th October 2011 - 8:50 am

Yesterday Parliament voted by 206-63 to allow MPs to (continue to) tweet from the Chamber, by rejecting an amendment that would have gutted this proposal, subsequently passed:

That this House notes the Third Report from the Procedure Committee on Use of hand-held electronic devices in the Chamber and committees, HC 889; and resolves that hand-held devices (not laptops) may be used in the Chamber, provided that they are silent, and used in a way that does not impair decorum, that Members making speeches in the Chamber or in committee may refer to electronic devices in place of paper speaking notes and

…

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Also posted in News | Tagged and | 2 Comments
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