NewsHound

LibLink: Lembit Öpik – Notes on a progressive decision

By NewsHound | Fri 5th February 2010 - 3:30 pm

Lib Dem MP Lembit Öpik has written an article for the Progressive London blog based on his speech to their recent conference on the topic, The Tories are not Progressive. Lembit reveals himself to be a “left-leaning libertarian” with deep scepticism that the Tories under David Cameron have actually changed. There’s lots of eminently quotable material, but here’s just a few excerpts:

I’m a practical kind of person. I don’t like the high levels of dogma which seems to attach itself to party politics and elections. There are good people in every political party, and no major grouping is

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Stephen Tall

MPs’ Expenses Repayments: how the parties compare

By Stephen Tall | Fri 5th February 2010 - 12:55 pm

I’m very grateful to a pseudonymous Lib Dem commenter, Goupillon, on PoliticalBetting.com for emailing through to LDV his tables showing how the parties compare when it comes to the expenses repayments demanded of MPs by Sir Thomas Legg.

The tables which follow are based on data from the list of expenses
miscreants provided by the BBC.

Total expenses to be paid back based on party affiliation:

    Labour: £446,416.28
    Conservative: £449,821.83
    Lib Dem: £42,945.18
    Others: £38,575.96
    Total: £977,759.25

MPs per party who have been called on to pay back expenses:

(not including those who have successfully appealed against Sir Thomas Legg’s ruling in their individual cases)

    Labour: 180
    Conservative:

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 13 Comments
Mark Pack

Test your political knowledge: the answer

By Mark Pack | Fri 5th February 2010 - 11:50 am

Yesterday’s political poser was:

The Swedish election of 1956 saw a political first. What was it?

The answer? This was the first election to feature a televised debate. Forget Kennedy, Nixon and 1960: it was the Swedes in 1956 who led the way.

Congratulations to Bernard Salmon for being first with the answer.

(By the way, the 1948 US Presidential election had a set of pre and post surveys to gauge why people voted the way they did, which is why Oranjepan’s and Toby were both wrong.)

I’ll search further in the recesses of history next time to try to fox you all…

Posted in News | 4 Comments
Helen Duffett

Daily View 2×2: 5 February 2010

By Helen Duffett | Fri 5th February 2010 - 11:15 am

Happy birthday to Jo Swinson, Lib Dem MP for East Dunbartonshire!

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

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

  • Biometric data

    • How many people have had theirs taken under the Terrorism Act 2000, and how successful have they been at getting the samples destroyed? Lord Eric Avebury has put down a Parliamentary Question.

  • Will libertarian bloggers ever grow up?

    • Jonathan Calder wants libertarian bloggers to widen their repertoire beyond “Get out of my room Mom!”

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

Liberal Democrat MEP celebrates French equality win

Since August 2007, French couples in a Pacte Civil de Solidarité (PAC) have enjoyed the same rights in relation to tax and inheritance laws which had previously only applied to married couples. However, due to a legal anomaly, British civil partnerships were not recognised under French law, meaning couples living in France were liable for a 60% inheritance tax and were treated like any other unmarried couple.

Graham Watson pointed out the ridiculous situation that many people faced: “Up until now, the practicality of French law has meant that British civil partners living in France would have to dissolve their partnership and enter into a PAC in order to secure the same rights as French couples. This violated the idea of European citizenship and equality, and something had to be done.”

Watson asked the European Commission to press the French Government on the issue.
Ministers have now announced that British civil partnerships are recognised as equal to PACs, and reimbursements will be made to individuals who have made undue tax payments since August 2007.

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Posted in Daily View | Tagged , , , , , and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

How did the media do at reporting opinion polls in January?

By Mark Pack | Fri 5th February 2010 - 9:50 am

As I blogged last month, The Voice is going to start rating the quality of the media’s coverage of opinion polls, which is often far from perfect:

There is progress, helped no doubt by the criticism from Anthony Wells and Mike Smithson, both of whom are respected by many of the relevant journalists.

However, there is still much more that could be done to raise the overall quality of such reporting, so here at The Voice we’re going to start scoring each poll commissioned by a traditional media outlet and the way in which its initial report is worded.

Once the scores

…

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The Voice

“A Liberal believes in the raucous, unpredictable capacity of people”

By The Voice | Fri 5th February 2010 - 7:20 am

That’s the striking quote from Nick Clegg which opens The Power of Creativity, a set of new proposals for the arts and creative industries published today by the Liberal Democrats. The paper goes on to make the point that,

The first chairman of the Arts Council was that great Liberal John Maynard Keynes. His vision as set out in 1946 remains ours in 2010: “to create an environment, to breed a spirit, to cultivate an opinion, to offer a stimulus to such purpose that the artist and the public can each sustain and live on the other in that union which

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Tagged , , and | 2 Comments
Stephen Tall

Annoyed by BBC Question Time panel selection? Then you know what to do.

By Stephen Tall | Thu 4th February 2010 - 10:25 pm

A couple of years back, I was moved to write to the BBC complaining about Question Time’s pro-Tory bias, regularly featuring Tory-supporting journalists alongside Tory MPs.

Well, that’ll learn me to be careful what you wish for. Because what do we have to look forward to on tonight’s QT panel? The following: an official Labour representative (Lord Falconer), and two former Labour MPs (Clare Short and George Galloway); and, for balance, an official Tory representative (Theresa May), and professional right-wing agitpropette (Melanie Phillips). Deep joy.

As Love and Liberty’s Alex Wilcock acerbically notes:

It’s not as if the Liberal Democrats have

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NewsHound

LibLink: Norman Lamb – A healthier Health Service

By NewsHound | Thu 4th February 2010 - 7:15 pm

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free site, Lib Dem shadow health secretary Norman Lamb argues that instead of slashing NHS budgets, we can get smarter services by devolving power to patients and professionals. Here’s an excerpt:

Opinion polls suggest that satisfaction with NHS has never been higher. The challenge facing all political parties is to sustain that support in an era of reduced public spending. The NHS is facing a perfect storm of rising costs due to our ageing population, a range of lifestyle conditions and a constant flow of expensive new treatments, but there will be no significant new

…

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Stephen Tall

Lembit wins MPs’ expenses appeal, is now owed £40

By Stephen Tall | Thu 4th February 2010 - 6:25 pm

Last week it was Lib Dem MP Jeremy Browne has won his appeal against repaying £18,000 of expenses. Now fellow Lib Dem Lembit Opik has also had his appeal against repaying hundreds of pounds in parliamentary expenses allowed by Sir Paul Kennedy, the judge brought in to arbitrate on disputed claims. The BBC reports:

Montgomeryshire MP Lembit Opik was ordered to pay back £900 he claimed for a mobile phone bill. Sir Thomas Legg, the retired civil servant auditing MPs’ expenses, said the Liberal Democrat MP should not have been able to claim for the phone bill. But Mr Opik won an appeal against the ruling.

Intriguingly, this leaves the taxpayer in debt to Lembit:

The MP, one of almost 80 MPs to challenge Sir Thomas, has actually repaid £195 in total, so is now technically owed £40 by the Commons authorities.

Now there’s an ethical dilemma for an MP just months away from seeking re-election.

Menawhile, here’s a brief clip of Lib Dem MP Norman Baker talking about the publication of Sir Thomas’s report.

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Posted in News | Tagged , , and | 3 Comments
NewsHound

Lib Link: James Graham on electoral reform

By NewsHound | Thu 4th February 2010 - 4:21 pm

James Graham gives Comment is Free the benefit of his views on Gordon Brown’s electoral reform fudge:

AV is the perfect electoral system for Gordon Brown. It enables him to look in two directions at once: supporting a system which ensures that fewer votes are wasted while being resolutely non-proportional. Superficially it sounds like a big deal, but in most elections it will probably only change the result in a handful of seats. And, like all Gordon Brown policies, it has a fair chance of blowing up in his face; because of AV’s habit of exaggerating swings, the system is

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Chris White

Opinion: will councillors watch over private companies?

By Chris White | Thu 4th February 2010 - 3:06 pm

First Capital Connect has been in the news. Commuters have finally lost patience with poor service, high costs, questionable pricing policies and overcrowding. An overtime ban coupled with a feeble reaction to recent snowfalls has compounded the situation into one of genuine public anger.

Railways in many parts of the country are monopolies. You buy a house away from where you work, relying upon public transport to get you to and from your place of employment. The car is often not a realistic alternative. Other railway lines may well not be available.

What does the public do when faced with a monopoly? …

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Mark Pack

How to get Lib Dem Voice by email

By Mark Pack | Thu 4th February 2010 - 1:20 pm

Some people like regularly visiting a site to see if there’s new stories of interest. Some people like subscribing to its news feed (RSS) and checking that way. But if you prefer email, you can instead sign up to get a daily early morning email with a summary of the previous day’s posts from Lib Dem Voice, complete with convenient links to click on if any take your fancy and you want to take a read.

Just go to our email sign up page to start getting these emails. You can also sign up for a special once-a-week email, bringing you …

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Sara Bedford

Watchdog says Shadow Home Secretary ‘likely to damage’ trust in statistics

By Sara Bedford | Thu 4th February 2010 - 12:56 pm

Yesterday I wrote about Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling’s extraordinarily twisted use of statistics to try to justify part of the Conservatives’ ‘Broken Britain’ narrative.

Today the BBC’s Mark Easton, who broke the original story, has the news that Chris Grayling has just been sent a sharp letter from Parliament’s statistics watchdog, informing him that his mis-use of statistics about violent crime is ‘likely to damage public trust in official statistics’. The Chairman of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), Sir Michael Scholar, says he does ‘not wish to become involved in political controversy’,  but ‘must take issue’ with Grayling’s comments ‘yesterday about violent crime statistics’.

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Mark Pack

Test your political knowledge: what first took place in the 1956 Swedish election?

By Mark Pack | Thu 4th February 2010 - 11:50 am

Simple question, simple answer. But do you know it?

The Swedish election of 1956 saw a political first. What was it?

Post your guesses below and check back same time tomorrow to find out the answer.

Posted in News | 14 Comments
Mark Pack

Social media’s impact on politics, part two: where to find the big impact

By Mark Pack | Thu 4th February 2010 - 10:20 am

Welcome to the concluding part of a two-part series about the real impact social media (or social networking) is having on politics in Britain. Last week I looked at the groups which face extinction; today it’s why pundits searching for the impact of social media on politics in 2010 are looking in the wrong place.

For the third general election in a row, people are lining up to debate whether or not this one will be the internet election; the election when politics radically changes in the face of the technological change that has already swept the world.

Here’s my prediction. …

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Alex Foster

Congrats to Alex Folkes

By Alex Foster | Thu 4th February 2010 - 8:35 am

Last night, newly elected councillor Alex Folkes broke the news on his blog that he’d won the New Councillor award in the LGIU c’llr awards.

Obviously I’m very very chuffed at the news and want to thank the LGIU very much indeed.

LDV often share facilities with Cllr Folkes at conference when he’s working as a photographer – indeed much of his work is available for use, if correctly credited, at the Lib Dem Flickr group.

The criteria for the award were:

  • election for the first time in June 2009
  • visible positive impact on the political group and/or community
  • they will have pioneered

…

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Alex Foster

Daily View 2×2: 4 February 2010

By Alex Foster | Thu 4th February 2010 - 7:04 am

Good morning, on this misty day which in history saw three awful earthquakes – in Haicheng, Guatemala and Afghanistan.

This day is a birthday to American civil rights campaigner Rosa Parks (pictured) as well as to the American vice-president famously unable to spell “potato”, Dan Quayle.

Deaths on the 4th February include Liberace and American novelist novellist writer Patricia Highsmith, who wrote Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr Ripley, and – according to Wikipedia at least – the first lesbian novel with a happy ending.

Today is also Facebook’s 6th birthday. How many other 6 year-olds earned $300m last year, had new words entered into dictionaries, and caused moral panic?

2 Big Stories

Legg Report published

Later today, Sir Thomas Legg’s report will be published on Parliament’s website. The Guardian – MPs ordered to pay back more than £1m reports:

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Mark Pack

Luciana Berger hit by yet more Labour infighting in Liverpool Wavertree

By Mark Pack | Wed 3rd February 2010 - 8:36 pm

The story so far: Labour selects Luciana Berger as their candidate for Liverpool Wavertree, despite the fact that she was also a candidate for the local elections in Camden, London. Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle attacks Luciana Berger’s selection. Off the back of her Camden connection, a Liverpool paper decides to put Luciana Berger’s Livipudllian credentials to the test; a test that she then fails.

And now there are mutterings of discontent over how the selection process was run – because it turns out that during the selection contest she was staying in same house as Jane Kennedy, the retiring …

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Mark Pack

Chaos engulfs Southport Conservatives, part 94

By Mark Pack | Wed 3rd February 2010 - 7:36 pm

The infighting, missing money and resignations in Southport Conservative Party have been regularly reported over the last few years on The Voice, though our reports have only covered part (!) of the myriad events. So to keep you updated with the latest round as reported by The Champion:

The row over a letter showing infighting within the local Tory group has led to the removal of Jackie Glover as chairman of the Southport Conservative Association.

Last week The Champion reported on a leaked letter from Ken Porter, the husband of the Tory Parliamentary hopeful, Mrs Porter, to councillor Tom

…

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Stephen Tall

The Lib Dems and the 2010 general election … ‘The future’s bright, the future’s gold.’

By Stephen Tall | Wed 3rd February 2010 - 6:45 pm

I have an article published in the January edition of the Government Gazette, the monthly magazine of the Centre for Parliamentary Studies, looking at the Lib Dems’ prospects for the coming general election. Here’s what I say …

A missed opportunity. That was the consensus, inside and outside the Liberal Democrats, on the party’s general election results in 2005.

The disappointment was the greater as realisation dawned that the unique set of circumstances of that election – an unpopular government and an even more unpopular opposition – might never again be repeated. What could have been the Lib Dems’ breakthrough …

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Posted in General Election and Op-eds | Tagged | 17 Comments
Mark Pack

The story behind MyDavidCameron: five lessons for everyone

By Mark Pack | Wed 3rd February 2010 - 3:20 pm

Clifford Singer of MyDavidCameron, the site which lets you produce spoofs of the Conservative billboard posters such as mine, has written an excellent piece about the lessons he draws from the site’s success.

His points about humour, the role of Twitter but the much greater importance of the concept, the ups and downs of letting people create their own content and why being jolly worthy isn’t enough are all very well made. They are also widely applicable to other internet campaigning. So go and read his post.

Posted in Online politics | Tagged and | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

There are seven suicides for every one murder

By Mark Pack | Wed 3rd February 2010 - 1:50 pm

I sort of knew this statistic already, but was quite shocked when working out the actual numbers:

Number of murders in the UK: 786
Number of suicides in the UK:  5,706

The proportion of murders which get reported in the media is extremely high compared with nearly all other crimes or forms of death. Many of the reasons for that are understandable, but one risk of giving murders such prominence is that it unbalances public perception of how many people are murdered compared with other crimes or deaths. That in turn effects the issues which politicians speak out about.

Having looked up the figures, …

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Posted in News | 12 Comments
Sara Bedford

Conservatives’ use of crime statistics ‘selective and mendacious’

By Sara Bedford | Wed 3rd February 2010 - 12:10 pm

This morning’s Today programme provided another of those ‘mustn’t miss’ moments, as presenter Evan Davis  took the Conservatives’ Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling to task over the party’s misleading use of crime statistics.

Last week Mark Easton, the BBC’s Home Affairs editor, had asked ‘Are the Tories being honest with their claims on violent crime’:

Last week, David Cameron told me that one reason he could justify the phrase “broken society” was because of “significant” increases in violent crime, notably gun and knife crime in Britain.  When I challenged him to produce the evidence, his party press office sent the BBC a list of statistics. It emerges that the only way the Conservative leader can back up his claims is to ignore the klaxon warning attached to the statistics following changes in the way police record violent incidents in England and Wales.

Tory Central Office e-mailed this claim to me: ‘Violent crime has increased from 615,985 offences in 1998-9 to 1,034,972 in 2008-9, an increase of 68 per cent’. The document cited, however, includes this massive caveat: ‘The National Crime Recording standard was introduced in April 2002. Figures before and after that date are not directly comparable’. And yet, that is exactly what Mr Cameron appears to do.

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Chris White

Chris Clarke: an appreciation

By Chris White | Wed 3rd February 2010 - 11:20 am

This week sees the memorial service for Chris Clarke, former leader of the LGA Liberal Democrat Group

He was always Chris. Even when he gained a knighthood in 2005, he was just very occasionally Sir Chris. No pomposity there.

I came across Chris first of all as Leader of Somerset County Council and thus someone from one of our most successful counties and regions. He was larger than life at the Local Government Association even before he was successfully elected as Leader of its Liberal Democrat Group.

He gave clarity to the Liberal Democrat push within that organisation but also made it clear …

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Posted in Local government and Obituaries | Tagged | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Don Foster on the Digital Economy Bill: carrot, pause and then stick

By Mark Pack | Wed 3rd February 2010 - 9:10 am

Yesterday Don Foster (Shadow Culture, Media and Sport Secretary) kindly gave over some time to talk about his views on the Digital Economy Bill and the line the party is taking. It’s a topic we’ve often covered on The Voice, particularly the question of the balance between carrot and stick in responding to internet piracy. Should the response be making it easier for people to buy legal content and a move to new business models (the carrot) or should it be a crackdown based on the existing copyright rules (the stick)?

Don’s answer was that the carrot should be tried …

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Posted in News | Tagged , and | 4 Comments
Iain Roberts

Daily View: Electoral Reform Reader

By Iain Roberts | Wed 3rd February 2010 - 7:27 am

It’s not very often electoral reform tops the news headlines – which is probably no bad thing.

As yesterday was one of those rare occasions, let’s see what was being said – Lib Dem bloggers had some differences of opinion:

The Futility Monster took the subtle, understated approach with the headline “Stick Your AV Up Your Arse”

The problem is that this is purely a gimmick, done purely to ask questions of the Lib Dems. Brown has no history of interest in electoral reform,

LibCync, on the other hand, was more positive:

I can’t believe anyone can seriously suggest that we shouldn’t support

…

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NewsHound

LibLink … Simon Hughes: You Ask The Questions

By NewsHound | Tue 2nd February 2010 - 9:25 pm

Apologies, folks, we missed this one yesterday … Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem shadow secretary of state for Energy and Climate Change, was the subject of The Independent’s latest You Ask The Questions Q&A feature. Here are three of the 15 questions and Simon’s answers:

Why is your constituency still riven by inequality and lack of jobs 25 years after you became MP? TANYA AHMED, WOLVERHAMPTON

The short answer is that inequality and job creation is most influenced by the international economy, and national and regional government – and for all of my time as MP we have had Conservative and

…

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Baroness Ros Scott

Ros Scott writes … Party President’s report to members, January ’10

By Baroness Ros Scott | Tue 2nd February 2010 - 8:15 pm

In the two months since my last report, the election campaign has started in all but name.

After a phenomenal amount of work by the manifesto team – led by Danny Alexander, the party’s policy unit headed by Christian Moon, and the Federal Policy Committee – we have now established the broad outlines of our campaign:

  • Reform of the tax system to create a fairer base,
  • introducing the pupil premium to give all children a fairer start in life,
  • creating sustainable housing and jobs and
  • political reform to bring in a fairer voting system, and

…

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Posted in Op-eds and Party Presidency | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , and | 1 Comment
The Voice

Clegg pledges “A fair start for every child”

By The Voice | Tue 2nd February 2010 - 7:10 pm

Plenty of media coverage today of Nick Clegg’s announcement that the Lib Dems will pledge to give every child a fair start in life by investing an extra £2.5bn in schools which could be used to cut class sizes, offer one-on-one tuition and provide catch-up classes.

Once again we see the renewed Lib Dem emphasis on that f-word, Fairness; and in this case, a policy which has long been championed by Nick, the ‘pupil premium’. Here’s Nick describing it in ‘just a minute’ in a BBC interview:

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Mark Pack

It’s better by blog: why councils should embrace blogging

By Mark Pack | Tue 2nd February 2010 - 10:20 am

The January edition of Total Politics had the third in a series from me on councils and communicating. The first part, Yes, council websites can, looked at lessons from the Obama campaign for local council use of the internet. The second part, Adding some colour to council emails, looked at ways to make better use of email. Now it’s the turn of blogging.

“Councils should get blogging” – that was one of the headlines generated by a report from the local e-Democracy National e-Government project – back in February 2005.

Yet since then, although internet usage and tools have …

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Posted in Local government and Online politics | Tagged | 8 Comments
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