With the impending demise of Liberal Democrat News, the question of what to do about advertisements for Parliamentary and other candidate selections suddenly becomes important. Happily, the English Candidates Committee is on the case. Returning officers around the country have received an e-mail from Great George Street as follows;
Dear Returning Officer,
As you may be aware, Lib Dem News is changing to be a monthly magazine from 16 November onwards and the old libdems4parliament site no longer functions effectively. As such, in future, selection adverts will go direct to the Candidates Office and adverts will be hosted for free online on the new members’ site.
The English Candidates Chair, Margaret Joachim is currently drafting some wording to update the selection rules with the relevant changes, which will go to ECE for approval on 17th November 2012. This will then be sent to the Welsh and Scottish parties for adaption and approval.
Once that has been approved we will update the rules as they appear on the website and will send out a further email to inform all Returning Officers and Candidates Chairs.
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8 Comments
What is proposed looks feeble – that would-be candidates will have to trawl through a specific section of the members-only website on the off-chance of a seat that interests them. It sends another signal that parliamentary candidates just aren’t very important and are not worth any effort from the central party. It cannot be beyond the wit of Great George Street to e-mail out a round-robin of seats advertising to all approved candidates – as they do with by-elections. As people get selected, they can ask to be removed from the list.
Sandy is right – but we also need a way for non-approved candidates to come forward so they can get approved and that is where Lib Dem News helped in the past.
“The English Candidates Chair, Margaret Joachim is currently drafting some wording to update the selection rules with the relevant changes, which will go to ECE for approval on 17th November 2012. This will then be sent to the Welsh and Scottish parties for adaption and approval.”
So the English Party will tell the Welsh & Scottish – these are the rules for England you must adopt them as well. Why not draw up rules at the Federal level so the Welsh & Scottish can have a say rather then dictating to them a fait accompli
I agree with sandy ,
I agree with Sandy too; perhaps an email list could be set up specifically for this purpose, and advertised on this site? It should be easy to check submitted email addresses to see if they belong to actual party members – perhaps if one submits an email address to be added to the list it should be with name rank and serial number, er, membership number in the content?
“What is proposed looks feeble – that would-be candidates will have to trawl through a specific section of the members-only website on the off-chance of a seat that interests them.”
Whereas before they had to pay to subscribe to a newspaper to do just that. There needs to be somewhere where there is a definitive list of PPC vacancies (sort of our equivalent of the London Gazette).
If finding new candidates is an issue surely it isn’t beyond the party to email all members.
At the moment approved candidates are emailed directly. Why not just continue with that? I don’t mind, and if I don’t want to receive the emails I’ll just ask. I don’t want the cost of buying Lib Dem News or the hassle of hunting through a website, so that works for me.
You could go better and even let me restrict my options. Living in Scotland, I’m not interested in seats in Surrey / Dorset / wherever in the South – or even North – of England, so just send me the ones for Scotland.
Can the notices on the website have an RSS feed please? I will then subscribe to said feed and so can everyone else.