Mark Pack

MPs who opposed expenses reform: how did the three Labour MPs facing trial vote?

By Mark Pack | Mon 8th February 2010 - 7:07 pm

A footnote to my post about the subsequent expenses revelations regarding the 21 Conservative MPs who voted down expenses reform in 2008, before the Daily Telegraph revelations forced everyone’s hand. Of the three Labour MPs now facing criminal charges, two also voted against reform (David Chaytor and Elliot Morley) whilst the third, Jim Devine, abstained on the vote. Well there you go.

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Mark Pack

Clause 81 of the New Roads and Street Act 1991 is your friend

By Mark Pack | Mon 8th February 2010 - 12:20 pm

You may have been following some of my travails trying to get repairs made to some of those telephone, broadband, traffic light etc boxes which appear on many pavements.

Although  my own local council (Islington) is very good at dealing with them either directly themselves or passing on to the relevant company and ensuring the work is done, other councils, including Haringey and Westminster, are far less so.

Haringey in theory also gets the job done if a member of the public reports a problem to them, but in practice I’ve often found problems of things going wrong or being forgotten.

Worst of …

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Posted in Local government | Tagged , and | 3 Comments
Stephen Tall

FT: Tories face “tough battle” to oust Chris Huhne in Eastleigh

By Stephen Tall | Mon 8th February 2010 - 11:25 am

As the Financial Times notes of the battle to win the Lib Dem / Tory marginal of Eastleigh:

The Hampshire railway town is 11th on Mr Cameron’s target list; the Liberal Democrats’ majority of a little more than 500 should be easily within reach.

But is it really?

… the Tories are by no means certain to win Eastleigh. Lib Dem strategists believe Chris Huhne, the sitting MP, will easily hold the seat – a view privately shared by some Conservatives. …

Eastleigh is the kind of seat that defies the traditional “swingometer”. Like many Lib Dem MPs, Mr Huhne has dug

…

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 8 Comments
Stephen Tall

Daily View 2×2: 8 February 2010

By Stephen Tall | Mon 8th February 2010 - 10:20 am

Happy Monday morning, everyone. Let’s plunge straight in …

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here’s are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

…

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Posted in Daily View | Tagged , , , , , and | 17 Comments
Mark Pack

+++ Exclusive general election prediction: too close to call

By Mark Pack | Mon 8th February 2010 - 9:20 am

With new polling figures in, the general election prediction model we covered in November and December has churned out a new prediction for the next general election – and it’s a striking one:

New prediction: Conservative lead of 6% but Labour largest party with 299 seats (27 short of an overall majority)

December  prediction: Conservative lead of 9% with 315 seats (11 short of an overall majority)
November prediction: Conservative lead of 10% with 322 seats (4 short of an overall majority)

The academic team who have compiled the prediction say,

The race remains too close to call under reasonable scenarios, either favorable to the government or the opposition. The election of a hung Parliament cannot be discarded at this point.

Background to prediction

In November Lib Dem Voice published the first of our exclusive general election predictions, based on the work of a group of academics who have analysed polling data (not just party support levels) in the run up to previous British elections:

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Posted in General Election and News | Tagged | 10 Comments
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Stephen Tall

NEW: Feb ’10 LDV members’ survey now live

By Stephen Tall | Mon 8th February 2010 - 6:24 am

After a bit of a hiatus, the new LDV members’ survey is now live. So if you are a registered member of the Liberal Democrat Voice forum – and any paid-up party member is welcome to join – then you now have the opportunity to make your views known on a range of issues in our February members’ survey. Topics we are asking your opinion on include:

– whether you think the end of the recession will benefit Labour;
– will the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war be a ‘whitewash’;
– John Terry’s sacking as England captain;
– what the Lib Dems …

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Posted in LDV Members poll | 1 Comment
Stephen Tall

Top of the Blogs: The Golden Dozen #155

By Stephen Tall | Sun 7th February 2010 - 7:25 pm

Welcome to the 155th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (31st January – 6th February 2010), together with a hand-picked quintet, usually courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

Don’t forget, by the way, you can now sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox – just click here – ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.

As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:

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Stephen Tall

Vince: financial markets have nothing to fear from hung parliament

By Stephen Tall | Sun 7th February 2010 - 6:25 pm

Here’s how the Financial Times reports it:

A hung parliament might frighten the markets, but according to Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, the concerns are “completely and totally irrational”.

The Lib Dems point out that many of the world’s leading economies, including Germany and Italy, hold elections that almost always produce results where the leading party has to do deals with smaller parties. They add that some countries with single party governments, such as Greece, have some of the worst records in dealing with fiscal crises, while multiparty coalitions, such as the one in Sweden in the 1990s, conducted fierce

…

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Mark Pack

How to get your picture to appear next to your comments on Lib Dem Voice

By Mark Pack | Sun 7th February 2010 - 5:50 pm

It’s been a while since we last reminded readers about this, so now seems a good time to publish the information again. You may have noticed that next to some people’s comments is a small picture of themselves, such as:

If you want a picture to appear next to your comments you need to do two things.

  1. Visit Gravatar.com, create an account

…

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Posted in Site news | 9 Comments
Stephen Tall

LDVideo … Nick on Reddit, “misleading” Grayling, and dancing BoJo

By Stephen Tall | Sun 7th February 2010 - 4:45 pm

Welcome to this latest LDVideo instalment, highlighting three political video clips from the past week.

Nick Clegg answers the top 10 questions posed by Reddit.com users as voted by users of the site. (You can see all of the questions posed to him here).


(Also available on YouTube here).

BBC reports Tory shadow home secretary Chris Grayling gets into trouble for using misleading crime statistics. Sara Bedford covered the story for LDV here).

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Posted in YouTube | 1 Comment
Iain Roberts

The John Terry Plan

By Iain Roberts | Sun 7th February 2010 - 3:34 pm

Here’s the plan. We take a bunch of teenage lads. We pay them tens of thousands of pounds a week, tell them how wonderful they are and have 40,000 fans chant their names at football matches each week.

We eagerly follow their testosterone and cash-fuelled antics as they do the sorts of things lads in their late teens and twenties across the country do: get drunk, cop off and all the rest of it.

We happily encourage young women to see them as a meal ticket that’ll at the very least show the ladies a good time and …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 8 Comments
Stephen Tall

Pollwatch – State of the Leaders: Clegg +15%, Brown -31%, Cameron +10% (Jan. 2010)

By Stephen Tall | Sun 7th February 2010 - 2:15 pm

Yesterday, Pollwatch looked at the state of the parties in January; today it’s the turn of the party leaders. As with all polls, what follows comes with caveats. Only three polling companies – YouGov, Mori and Angus RS – regularly ask questions specifically to find out the public’s views of the three main party leaders. And each asks variants on the basic question – do you think Clegg/Brown/Cameron are doing a good job – to come up with their figures, so comparison ain’t easy. But, still, we don’t indulge in polls often, so here goes …

Here, in chronological order, are …

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Posted in News, Op-eds and Polls | Tagged , and | 1 Comment
The Voice

Electoral Reform Bill must give voters real choice – Howarth

By The Voice | Sun 7th February 2010 - 12:19 pm

A news release from the party reports:

The Liberal Democrats have tabled amendments to the Government’s proposals for a referendum on electoral reform that would:

  • Offer voters a real choice between first-past-the-post and a truly proportional system (Single Transferable Vote), rather than AV
  • Bring forward the date of the referendum to next May
  • Close a loophole allowing the next Government to kill the proposals without an Act of Parliament

Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Justice Secretary, David Howarth said:

“Voters deserve a real choice – between the discredited status quo and a system where every vote matters and there are no safe seats.

“The Alternative Vote system is …

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Posted in News and Parliament | Tagged and | 2 Comments
Iain Roberts

Binge-drinking England? We’re just playing catch-up

By Iain Roberts | Sun 7th February 2010 - 11:37 am

Whilst crime in London fell between 1870 and 1910, the story north of the border wasn’t quite as rosy.

As the Daily Express reported at the turn of the century:

“The most notable fact of the statistics for 1899 is the immense increase of the criminal work of the country”. Thus opened the report on Scotland’s prisons and court for the past year, which was an unenviable record.

No fewer than 176,524 persons were apprehended or cited, a figure which has never before been reached by 10,000. Drunks and disorderlies alone totalled 112,033.

South Queensferry holds the proud position for 1899 of

…

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Mark Pack

What happened to the 21 Conservative MPs who voted to block expenses reform in summer 2008?

By Mark Pack | Sun 7th February 2010 - 10:20 am

As I wrote previously about the voting down in the summer of 2008 of plans to reform MPs’ expenses:

The bulk of the blame for blocking the reforms must lie with the Labour Party as 146 of their MPs voted to block the reforms but given David Cameron’s strident recent comments, it’s striking to see that seven of his frontbenchers, and 21 MPs in total, voted to block reform when they had the chance. This was enough to see the measure defeated.

A year and a half on from those 21 voting against changing the expense rules, what do we now …

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Mark Pack

Daily View 2×2: 7 February 2009 featuring the latest from Ethiopia – and a letterbox

By Mark Pack | Sun 7th February 2010 - 9:00 am

It’s Sunday. It’s 9am on the date when, in 1974, Ted Heath called a snap election and, in 1812, Charles Dickens was born.

What better way to celebrate than to watch a YouTube clip about letterboxes? But first the blogs and the news.

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here’s are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.

2 Big Stories

You probably know the news from the UK. So here’s the news from Ethiopia, followed by that letterbox movie.

Punch-up at registration office as two people claim to the opposition coalition’s candidate

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Posted in Daily View | Tagged | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Will some BNP money shortly be heading the way of the Liberal Democrats?

By Mark Pack | Sat 6th February 2010 - 7:06 pm

The appointment of Tess Culnane, an ex-National Front candidate, to work for the BNP GLA member Richard Barnbrook has been well covered elsewhere.

But one detail intrigues me. As I understand it, Tess Culnane’s job is one that comes with a salary. So does that mean she’ll now start paying off some of the tens of thousands of pounds she owes to two Liberal Democrat members the Liberal Democrats?

The debt comes from her loss of a libel action taken against Lewisham Liberal Democrats Mark Morris (who now works at City Hall too) and Vijay Naidu. As a result of losing the case …

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Mark Pack

Councillor movements: Conservatives lose majority on Southend Council

By Mark Pack | Sat 6th February 2010 - 6:50 pm

Stockport’s Mayor, Colin MacAlister has switched to the Liberal Democrats from Labour (via Independent), whilst the Conservative deputy leader also recently switched to Independent.

That’s not the only bad news for the Conservatives though. In Aberconwy the local Conservative president (and councillor) Dennis Tew has also quit the party, switching to Plaid. Meanwhile in Southend, Jason Luty’s switch to Independent removes the Conservative Party’s overall majority on the council.

Perhaps surprisingly, Labour has also picked up two councillors recently – John McNamee from the SNP and Arshad Hussain from the Conservatives.

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Mark Pack

How to turn a contradictory comment into a media quote

By Mark Pack | Sat 6th February 2010 - 5:43 pm

Start with this pair of sentences:

Policing isn’t about communicating with people. It’s about communicating with people.

That would be a pretty daft instant contradiction, wouldn’t it?

But wait. Let’s say “PR” instead of “communicating”. Because PR = boo! bad! nothing to do with communicating!

Policing isn’t about PR. It’s about communicating with people.

Doesn’t quite work, does it? So let’s throw in something about the nasty internet:

Policing isn’t about PR and fancy websites. It’s about communicating with people.

Ah, that’s better. Second sentence is still a bit contradictory though. So let’s add in something about cutting crime. Cutting crime and communicating aren’t contradictory of course, …

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Posted in News | Tagged | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Welcome to the new bloggers…

By Mark Pack | Sat 6th February 2010 - 4:20 pm

Four blogs have recently joined Ryan’s 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?

Whether you are a new or experience blogger yourself, you may also find our compilation of “how to blog” posts useful:

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Posted in Online politics | Tagged , , , and | 3 Comments
The Voice

The LDV Saturday caption competition – the “mine’s a large one” edition

By The Voice | Sat 6th February 2010 - 3:15 pm

There’s no prize at stake – just the opportunity to prove you’re wittier than any other LDV reader …

Here’s Nick Clegg on a recent visit to cheer on Burnley Lib Dems and their candidate Gordon Birtwistle, as they attempt to unseat Labour and stop the BNP. (With thanks to Hywel Morgan for the picture). What do you think they might be saying to each other, or thinking about each other?

The winner of our most recent caption competition, the ‘never work with children’ edition just six weeks ago (ahem) …

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Posted in Caption Comp | Tagged , and | 14 Comments
Mark Pack

“BAE guilty plea a damning indictment of the Government”

By Mark Pack | Sat 6th February 2010 - 2:20 pm

So says Norman Lamb, who has campaigned for corruption charges to be brought against BAE since 2001, in response to the news that BAE admits guilt over corrupt arms deals … firm pays out £300m:

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Posted in News | Tagged , , and | 1 Comment
NewsHound

LibLink: The eminently quotable Nick Clegg

By NewsHound | Sat 6th February 2010 - 1:25 pm

If you haven’t read it yet, can I urge you to click here to read a fantastic interview of Nick Clegg by Mary Riddell in today’s Telegraph. For a start, it’s well-written; for another it covers a fair chunk of policy ground accessibly; but most importantly it is one of Nick’s most quote-tastic interviews. Here are a few of the highlights:

On taking over as party leader:

When I took over, morale was low. It was a horrid time, and I made mistakes. You get thick-skinned pretty damn quickly or you just get knocked over in the animalistic culture of the

…

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Posted in LibLink | Tagged and | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Parliamentary candidate told to remove large helium balloon

By Mark Pack | Sat 6th February 2010 - 1:12 pm

Conservative candidate for Edmonton, Andrew Charalambous, has run into trouble with the law after tethering a large advertising helium balloon to the grounds of his office and also placing advertising hordings outside it (see photo in the Enfield Independent’s story).

Such actions normally require planning permission and although there is a special exemption for the period of an election campaign, that exemption has not yet come in to play for the general election. Despite this, Andrew Charalambous has been unapologetic, defending to the media his use balloons and posters as a matter of freedom of speech.

However, seeing how countries which …

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 9 Comments
Stephen Tall

Pollwatch – State of the Parties: Lib Dems 18%, Labour 29%, Tories 40% (Jan. 2010)

By Stephen Tall | Sat 6th February 2010 - 11:15 am

A total of 13 polls were published during January. Now, as our readers know, LDV doesn’t cover them with the same breathless excitements as other parts of the media. Most poll movements are within the margin of error, so it is only looked at over a period of time that you can detect whether there has really been any significant movements between the parties. With those caveats in place, let’s succomb to the inevitable and start poll-obsessing …

Here are January’s polls in chronological order:

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Posted in Op-eds and Polls | 7 Comments
Stephen Tall

The Saturday debate: Let’s just admit it – our society actually is broken

By Stephen Tall | Sat 6th February 2010 - 8:15 am

Here’s your starter for ten as we experiment with a new Saturday slot posing a view for debate:

Here’s what David Marquand had to say in a recent issue of the New Statesman:

The truth is that the left commentariat’s default position – social permissiveness combined with economic regulation; toughness towards bankers, but softness towards cannabis hawkers – was always incoherent and has now become disastrous. Of course, the right’s alternative – economic permissiveness combined with social regulation – is equally incoherent. But for the left to rely on that kind of yah-boo retort only deepens its current malaise. After all,

…

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 15 Comments
Mark Pack

The most improbable MP expenses defence: my bank told me to do it

By Mark Pack | Fri 5th February 2010 - 10:29 pm

It’s a toughly contested field. But I think we have a clear winner in the “most improbable excuse for expenses claims” stakes.

Step forward David Amess, Conservative MP for Southend West.

He previously took to hiding in a hairdressers to avoid answering questions about his expense claims, he was one of the MPs who voted to block expense reform in the summer of 2008 and now he’s come out with this:

Southend Echo - Amess - Bank Told Me To Overclaim

…

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 3 Comments
Sara Bedford

Luciana Berger to be opposed by ‘Roylety’?

By Sara Bedford | Fri 5th February 2010 - 6:25 pm

Things may be going from bad to worse for Luciana Berger, the newly-selected Labour PPC for Liverpool Wavertree. After mutterings about the selection process, followed by concerns about the candidate living in the same house as hundreds of ballot papers, the actor Ricky Tomlinson, famous for roles in Brookside and the Royle Family, has announced that he will be seeking the nomination of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party for the seat.

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Posted in News | Tagged , , , and | 4 Comments
John Bridges

By-election news: Where we mess up, we lose

By John Bridges | Fri 5th February 2010 - 5:33 pm

There were four principal council elections held on the 4th February. The Tories held one seat. The Lib Dems held one seat but also lost two seats to Labour. There were three Parish council elections reported to ALDC.

Rarely, thankfully, do we have to report on an utter disaster, but that was the case in the Holmewood and Heath by-election in North East Derbyshire. In 2007 two Labour councillors were elected for the ward un-opposed. In fact they had been unopposed for the last 20 years and only Labour had ever been elected in this coal mining and largely council housing renting area. In April 2008 there was a by-election that we won with 42% and a 26 vote majority. Our sitting councillor was disqualified for non-attendance and we failed to stand a candidate to defend the seat.

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Posted in Council by-elections | 5 Comments
Helen Duffett

The LDV Friday Five: 5 February 2010

By Helen Duffett | Fri 5th February 2010 - 5:00 pm

It’s Friday. It’s five o’clock. Here’s a fistful of lists that sum up the LDV week:

5 most-read stories on LDV this week

1. So, what do you make of this graph about gender and politics? (24) by Mark Pack.
2. Opinion: UK Border Agency plunges colleges into crisis (20) by the Head of a private college.
3. Crikey, I appear to know more about Liverpool than the new Labour candidate (5) by Mark Pack.
4. The Independent View: Why Lib Dem, Labour and Green progressives must work together (46) by Anneliese Midgley.
5. The second biggest fight in Wales: Ceredigion …

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