Before and during the election there was a great deal of talk about the Lib Dem use of social media as a way of getting our message across cheaply and effectively. Since then though the Party seems too place very little importance on social media with the result that an important and effective way of communicating with our members and supporters is being ignored.
Look at the three main Social media outlets, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
On Facebook the Lib Dems official Page has 97,000 fans but is rarely updated – there have been just 5 updates since …
On Friday, the Daily Mail splashed with a story headined “England Star’s Gagging Order”. The story concerned an unnamed member of the England football team who had used the courts to stop a story about him from being published.
It was the second such injunction granted in a week, the Mail reported. The injunctions were granted by a High Court judge on the grounds that the stories would breach the players’ right to a private life.
For Liberal Democrats, such injunctions will be seen as a worrying development.
Our party’s constitution emphasises that we must “defend the right to speak, …
That’s a shame because there’s a sensible debate to be had – with Lib Dems being the first to admit that the Alternative Vote system isn’t the best of all possible options, though most would rate it as a great improvement on what we have now.
Dale writes
There’s a reason only one other country in the world uses AV. It’s a half way house. It tries to be a PR equivalent of the First Past the Post system, but in reality
So today, at last, the news media is finally reporting the pretty unsurprising news that Charles Kennedy, leader of the Lib Dems from 1999 to 2006, is not leaving the Lib Dems in 2010.
Now it is of course the silly season, and we can easily write off this journalistic confection as mere desperation to fill some column inches / dead air-time. But actually I think it’s a symptom of a wider malaise in political journalism, its ‘tabloidisation’.
How an unsourced rumour went viral
Let’s go back to Friday afternoon, when the Kennedy defection rumours started circulating, and work out how …
There have been a rather astonishing 36 opinion polls in the six weeks since LDV’s last polls round-up at the beginning of July. Thirty of those 36 originate from just one polling company, YouGov.
So let’s bring you up-to-date with July and August’s polls in chronological order of publication:
Con 40, Lab 36, Lib Dem 16 (YouGov, 4-5 Jul)
Con 41, Lab 36, Lib Dem 15 (YouGov, 5-6 Jul)
Con 40, Lab 36, Lib Dem 17 (YouGov, 6-7 Jul)
Con 42, Lab 35, Lib Dem 16 (YouGov, 7-8 Jul)
Con 42, Lab 34, Lib Dem 17 (YouGov, 8-9 Jul)
Con 42, Lab 35, Lib Dem
The Coalition’s apparent decision not to hold an enquiry into the Energy Industry, as reported by the Independent , is something which Lib Dems of all stripes should campaign against.
Those who may regard themselves as economic liberals will object to this decision on the grounds that it is an example of a Government refusing to act to free up a market which currently is dominated six major players who control 99% of a market where inflation busting annual profit rises have become the norm, with British Gas reporting a staggering 98% rise in profits last July.
Officialdom seems to have opened a new front in its battle against those who commit the terrible sin of studying while black.
One of my students has been sent a summons to appear in court for not paying full Council Tax. The problem arises because non-EU students come in on a visa that specifies they must be recorded as being actively taught in college for at least 15 hours per week in college premises.
However, to be exempt from Council Tax a “full-time” student must study for 21 hours per week. Hands up anyone who got a degree …
Iain Duncan Smith is a right-winger. He was one of the first politicians to call for an invasion of Iraq, he is a eurosceptic. So, obviously, anything he’s proposing on welfare reform will be anathema to left-wingers. Right? Well, maybe not.
Under the current welfare system, many claimants aren’t interested in low paid work because they believe they’ll be worse off. This isn’t a guess, I’ve heard it with my own ears. This is outrageous. In the eighties, I was incensed when the Conservatives used to bang on about using …
‘Good News’ people cry, like the tricoteuses of revolutionary France, when another quango head rolls into the basket. Such was the whoop (at least from aficionados) when the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council was given its P45. It seemed an obvious move and one that I had advocated myself.
I still support it: but, as I have pointed out before, there are potentially unintended consequences.
The libraries improvement regime can be taken over easily by the LGA. But what about museums? It seems that ‘responsibility’, whatever that may mean, for museums will pass to the Arts Council. So in fact we …
The latest round of media sniping was triggered by Simon Hughes’ comments yesterday, widely – but inaccurately – reported as Lib Dems ‘need backbench veto’. So let’s look at what Simon actually said, as opposed to what the news media chose to paraphrase:
If the coalition wants to deliver votes, neither party on its own has a majority, so we have to make sure everyone is brought into that. It’s a matter of practical politics, the answer is therefore: yes, the parliamentary party, on behalf of the wider party, on big issues has to say, ‘No, we can’t go down this road.”
My reading of Simon’s words is this: if big proposals are brought forward by government ministers on behalf of the Coalition then the MPs of both parties are going to have to be satisfied otherwise they won’t vote for them.
All of which, to me, seems plain, obvious and utterly uncontroversial. Which isn’t good enough for the news media, hence the misleading headlines that Simon is demanding a Lib Dem veto – with rent-a-quote Tories like John Redwood and James Cleverly on hand to take the media’s bait and amp up this non-story a little further.
The media’s approach to the reporting of the Coalition’s (yawn) ‘splits’ and ‘tensions’ puts me in mind of The Day Today’s Chris Morris inciting two studio guests to declare war on each other by putting ever more inflammatory words in each other’s mouths. See what you think:
Move along please, nothing to see here. Just a body of ideas that died a natural death some time in the 1990s.
I have just read Gordon Lishman’s Federal Executive paper on future party strategy. It is encouragingly clear and geared towards future action and it contains a number of interesting proposals. But is it undermined by its insistence on tying future party strategy to the ideology of community politics?
Questioning the relevance of community politics in a Lib Dem forum feels a bit like trying to sell Richard Dawkins in a seminary but there are a number of reasons …
The third element of the coalition agreement relates to the powers of the Welsh Assembly. At present we can only pass laws piecemeal. An order passing legislative competence in a specified area of policy is requested by the Assembly, scrutinised by us and by the Welsh Affairs Select Committee and then passed in Cardiff Bay and in both houses of Parliament before receiving royal assent.
It is a long and expensive process not to mention frustrating. The Housing order for example took three years to be approved. The referendum, which is now scheduled to be held in the spring, will …
I write as a former chair of Liberal Youth, currently studying at York University who was educated at an independent school. Yet with A-Level results out today, I am backing calls for universities to consider students from state schools who have achieved lower grades than their counterparts from private institutions.
‘This is discrimination’ the wealthy middle classes cry. ‘They both sat the same exams’, it is pointed out to me. Yet this faux fairness is exaggerated, a continued belief that seems to run through education that wishes children and young adults to develop in a different system to that which us …
We have a well understood way of electing MPs and forming governments for UK-wide elections. Not that you’d know it from the comments of some, particularly those opposed to the coalition.
Here’s how it works. We elect MPs by first past the post. Those MPs then decide who forms a government. If a Prime Minister can get the support of a majority of MPs, he or she can form a government. If the PM loses that support, the government will normally fall.
That system has produced some odd results over the years (as do all systems, depending …
Last month, YouGov’s Peter Kellner penned a rather premature post, which stated categorically: The honeymoon is over. I took him to task at the time, and stand by my view that the Coalition is still regarded generally favourably by a plurality of the public.
It’s been interesting, then, to read some of the barrage of opinion polling which has greeted the Coalition’s first 100 days. Perhaps most significant is this article in The Guardian – Coalition winning argument on economy – detailing ICM polling which shows 44% believe the coalition is doing a good job in securing economic …
Previously, I referred to the fact that the Coalition Agreement contained three specific provisions relating to Wales. One of these concerned the drawing down of legislative powers over housing.The second provision relates to the way that Wales (and Scotland for that matter) is funded. This is a matter of some controversy here and the coalition agreement offers little clarity on how it is to be resolved. It is safe to say that the rather esoteric phrase referring to it needs to be subject to negotiation with UK Treasury Ministers so as to establish the best way forward.
One hundred days. How the media loves a yardstick.
We have US President FD Roosevelt to thank for the obsession with the first 15 weeks of a new government’s activity: in a race against time to save the US economy from its Depression slump, he signed into law over a dozen recovery programmes. Some worked, some didn’t… You can draw your own analogy.
It is of course far too early to know if the Coalition will succeed. It is also far too early to know whether the Lib Dems will be boosted by our involvement in government, or if we’ll be …
I voted for Tony Blair as Labour leader in 1994; I voted for him again to become Labour prime minister in 1997. I soon learned my lesson.
As Prime Minister, he failed. Not so much domestically: sure, he disappointed but show me a political leader who doesn’t.
But in foreign policy, Mr Blair was an unmitigated disaster, the most incompetent post-war Prime Minister bar none (yes, even worse than Anthony Eden).
His intentions are irrelevant: the results of his – and it was his – decision to wage war against Iraq have made Britain and the world less safe at huge …
The motion on the Press Complaints Commissionwhich has been selected for debate at the Liberal Democrat conference is concerning. It contains a number of inaccuracies and appears to be based on several false premises. It is especially disappointing because the philosophy behind the PCC and its independent self-regulation of the newspaper and magazine industry is entirely in tune with the Liberal tradition.
The PCC exists to protect freedom of expression, while upholding standards by ruling on strict criteria of inaccuracy, intrusion, harassment (and so on), and by establishing case law and the acceptable boundaries of practice. It provides a public service which is easily accessible, free to use and which speedily …
The Welsh Assembly is in a unique situation. Each of the four parties represented there are in government at some level. Whilst the Liberal Democrats have entered government in Westminster for the first time, Labour and Plaid Cymru are in their final year of coalition government in Cardiff Bay.
This has made for interesting Plenary sessions with both the Welsh governing parties intent on blaming the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives for long-standing problems, whilst we are intent on continuing our scrutiny of their record.
The Coalition Agreement contained three specific provisions relating to Wales. One of these concerned the drawing down …
When the dulcet tones of the BBC’s Shipping Forecast turn to the weather in German Bight, two thoughts often flit through my mind – both related to the history of Heligoland, an island (or strictly speaking, an inhabited island and a small uninhabited neighbour) that previously gave its name to that shipping forecast area until a name change in 1956.
The first thought is a reminder of how unbalanced the information provided online can be. Google “Heligoland” and you will usually find results dominated by music (Heligoland was an album title for Massive Attack) and military history (Heligoland was the site …
Many Lib Dems are angry: at Labour popularism on immigration and law and order to wrong-foot their opponents . That they’ve left the country in such a terrible financial mess. And that as we engage in the awful process of cuts, they jeer from the sidelines, making political capital out of their own mistakes.
But we need to temper our anger. Labour lost their way, but they may find their way back.
And for all their faults, they have qualities we share. A desire to help the unfortunate. A commitment to the welfare state. A belief in internationalism.
The weekend media was full of the news of Alan Milburn’s putative return to front-line politics with his appointment to a role advising the Coalition Government on policies to promote social mobility.
Reaction to the news has been mixed. John Prescott, never one to mince his words when he can mangle them instead, spat out that Mr Milburn was a “collaborator”. Conservative blogger Iain Dale was disappointed to see the Coalition’s big tent expanding to include a former New Labour cabinet minister: “One day they might actually appoint a Conservative.”
For the Lib Dems, Simon Hughes was more amenable to …
Each round of newspaper circulation figures makes grim reading for anyone trying to balance the books at a newspaper. Month after month circulation is dropping away across the board. The usual explanation is that newspapers are suffering because so much free news is now available online, and there is certainly a large degree of truth in that.
However, there are two important caveats to that. First, the massive lack of trust in journalists, who are regularly rated one of the least trusted professions in the UK. As I wrote last year on this topic,
Isn’t a major reason that people increasingly turn
The big electoral reform next year – or so everyone thinks – will be the referendum on AV. Alongside it, there will be a boring technical change to equalise constituency sizes and get rid of the present bias towards Labour. Most people assume that we won’t need to worry much about the constituency size changes.
Massive mistake! The change from natural to unnatural constituency boundaries, and rigidly fixed constituency sizes, will have profound and far-reaching ill effects. It will largely destroy the effective link between a local constituency and its individual MP. It could also threaten …
PM Cameron’s heavyweight government plus business trip to India went swimmingly, so we are to believe, despite that diplomatic faux pas about Pakistani support for terrorism and Indian discontent about proposed immigration quotas. One fortunate outcome for Mr Cameron was that both issues diverted attention from a highly contentious arms deal involving arms giant BAE.
Under the deal, 57 Hawk jets will be manufactured under licence in India with BAE’s Indian partner, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), with technical support from BAE. Roll-Royce also gets a slice of the deal as its jet engines will be used in production. The deal is …
A quick counterpart to my previous Lessons from Canada: poster design, this time looking at Australian election posters such as this one:
As you can see from this example from North Sydney, the usual Australian style (as is the case in European countries such as Germany) is to feature candidate or party leader photo very large, with the name of the candidate or party more like a caption to the poster than its main content.
Clarity of purpose is a virtue. But stubbornness doesn’t necessarily win any plaudits when more flexibility is appropriate. The shock tactics of Osbornomics have now been fully embraced. The message is clear: this Coalition is not for turning.
In the run up to the Election the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats adopted distinctive positions on the best approach to cutting the fiscal deficit. Despite Nick Clegg’s apparent secret conversion to the Conservative position of early and deep cuts, the LibDem manifesto commitments were directed at cutting in 2011/12 and after, and the rhetoric around budget reductions was to proceed at a …
David Cameron’s recent comments on council housing tenancies have sparked some controversy in the media and here on Lib Dem Voice.
First, I am delighted that at least there is a debate around housing policy. Many people are simply unable to afford to buy, leaving people in cramped overcrowded accommodation that is harmful to their and their family’s health. There are still many people sleeping on our streets and many more in homeless shelters and temporary accommodation.
I’ve seen both ends of the crisis. Ten years ago I was homeless myself and went through the shelters to temporary accommodation …
One of the many great things about our party is its steadfast refusal to bow to media pressure. Take, as Exhibit A, the sweet joy of being a conference rep and voting down the leadership’s preferred policy option. We don’t care that it will be portrayed by the next day’s newspapers, as erroneous as it is inevitable, as a party split.
We are also a truly radical party. Most policies taken for granted today entered the pages of our policy documents long before Labour or the Conservatives sheepishly followed. Come next month I hope that gay marriage will be the latest …
Meg Thomas @russel @david I thought the triple lock was unfair but it has brought state pensions up to the levels in most devleoped countries AND remember that younger peo...
expats Ever more scare mongering about 'DEFENCE' is putting basic living standards at risk; who exactly is threatening us militarily? Russia is unable to win a war aga...
Nick Hopkinson As usual another erudite article from William. Whilst I support the imposition of some taxes on excessive wealth, I would like to see the party focus primarily ...
Jenny Barnes How about joining in fewer discretionary wars. Stop the MOD wasting money. Cancel Ajax and the planned F35a purchase. Mothball or use for spares one of the airc...
Mick Taylor @Russell. The UK already has almost the worst state pensions in Europe even with the triple lock. We pay out millions in supplementary pensions, housing benefit...
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Has the Chancellor set the tone for a Burnham administration?
"His glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice": On being the monarch's second son
Meg Thomas 
expats 
Nick Hopkinson 
Jenny Barnes 
Mick Taylor 