Chris White

Opinion: Snow’s here – watch out for the Russians

By Chris White | Tue 12th January 2010 - 11:41 am

So: whose fault is it? The winter chaos I mean.

It was fun before Christmas but we have all grown heartily sick of it and there is now rumour of crisis. The Independent on Sunday’s front page was a bumper crop of statistics: £690 million in lost production, 14,188 cancelled trains, 25 deaths and so on. The Army is on standby in Kent, the fire brigade is delivering meals on wheels and farmers report that they can’t get crops out of the ground. Meanwhile there are warnings of gas shortages.

Locally people are cursing councils for failing to grit roads and pavements. …

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Posted in Local government and Op-eds | 1 Comment
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The Voice

Lib Dem PPC resigns over blog comments

By The Voice | Tue 12th January 2010 - 11:21 am

Greg Stone yesterday resigned as Lib Dem PPC for Newcastle East, a month after revelations over comments he posted anonymously on Guido Fawkes blog.

Reporting the story on 19th December, the Telegraph wrote:

Using the pen-name Inamicus, Mr Stone left his comments on the Guido Fawkes website as part of a weekly live discussion of Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons, in which many contributors make personal criticisms of MPs.

Among Mr Stone’s targets were David Miliband, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, the justice secretary, and Jacqui Smith, the former home secretary.

He twice attacked Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, once asking

…

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Posted in News | Tagged | 28 Comments
Stephen Tall

The Guardian’s approving verdict on the Lib Dems’ manifesto principles is correct … but for the wrong reasons

By Stephen Tall | Tue 12th January 2010 - 10:10 am

Nick Clegg will have enjoyed reading this morning’s Guardian editorial (Nick Clegg: Liberal parenting) over his breakfast porridge today. The paper commends Nick for yesterday’s launch of the principles which will underpin the Lib Dems’ election manifesto.

At the same time it betrays the Guardian’s usual unawareness of the party’s democratic decision-making principles. According to the Grauniad, Nick “ordered his party to drop some of its favourite policies”, issuing “instructions” in order to transform the Lib Dem manifesto from “a third-party wishlist” into “a credible agenda for directing a government”.

Hmmm, not so much.

In fact, all that …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , , , , , and | 13 Comments
Sara Bedford

Daily View 2×2: 12 January 2010

By Sara Bedford | Tue 12th January 2010 - 8:55 am

On this day in 2001, Sven Goran Eriksson took over as manager of the England football team. On the same day, the carers of eight year old Victoria Climbié, who died after being tortured and fed like a dog, were found guilty of her murder, leading to questions being asked of Haringey Social Services.

Today is the 281st anniversary of the birth of Edmund Burke. It’s also the 59th and 56th birthdays respectively of  US radio ‘personalities’ Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

2 Big Stories

Four steps to a fairer Britain

Yesterday saw Nick Clegg set out the priorities which will be at the heart of the party’s …

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Posted in Daily View and General Election | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and | Leave a comment
Mark Pack

Sunday Telegraph and Mail on Sunday accused of printing false comments from health and safety experts

By Mark Pack | Mon 11th January 2010 - 11:49 pm

The Sunday Telegraph and Mail on Sunday both ran very similar stories at the weekend:

The professional body that represents health-and-safety experts has warned businesses not to grit public paths. (Mail)

The professional body that represents health and safety experts has issued a warning to businesses not to grit public paths. (Telegraph)

Both then went on about health and safety gone mad etc.

Only one problem.

The experts had said nothing of the sort.

The Sunday Telegraph had approached the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health who in fact gave a comment which said the opposite of what the newspaper subsequently reported. Far …

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Posted in News | Tagged , , , , and | 9 Comments
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Mark Pack

Peter Robinson’s other problem

By Mark Pack | Mon 11th January 2010 - 11:29 pm

In amongst all the political trouble for the DUP’s Peter Robinson, one other problem has been largely overlooked – an Electoral Commission investigation into donations. The problem? In public he’s talked about giving donations to the DUP which would have required declaring. But there is no trace of them in the DUP’s records of declared donations.

This is just the sort of issue which, for a popular politician at the height of their powers, rarely turns in to a big deal – apologise, blame bureaucratic details and move on. However Peter Robinson is anything but that at the moment.

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Stephen Tall

What David Miliband could have learned from Chris Huhne

By Stephen Tall | Mon 11th January 2010 - 10:50 pm

David Miliband’s reputation has taken a bit of a knock over the past week. Today Labour MP Geraldine Smith went on the record to give her withering assessment, as noted by The Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow:

David Miliband needs to display a more mature attitude, really. … I think he’s yet to prove himself in any capacity. … I think David Miliband is probably finished as a potential leadership candidate. … he hasn’t covered himself in a glory. I think he’s behaved in quite an immature way. Labour party members are very angry about what’s gone on in the last few days.

Strong stuff, even in a backbiting party hellbent on imploding this side of the general election. But I don’t feel much sympathy for Mr Miliband, who has brought his woes on himself.

The big decisions in life are nearly always binary: you either choose to do something, or you choose not to do it.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , and | 1 Comment
Iain Roberts

Mrs Robinson – an Internet campaign too far?

By Iain Roberts | Mon 11th January 2010 - 6:20 pm

There was no little schadenfreude, especially amongst LGBT folks, when news of Iris Robinson’s indiscretions broke last week.

Back in June 2008, in the same week as a particularly nasty homophobic attack, she declared that homosexuality was an abomination, and that homosexuals could – with help – be turned around. Stonewall voted her the UK Bigot of the Year 2008.

So the reaction to her fall from grace is hardly surprising – a woman who was only too happy to attack what she saw as the moral lapses of others turned out to have sizeable feet of clay herself – in …

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Posted in Online politics and Op-eds | Tagged | 27 Comments
Alex Foster

Conference deadlines approaching

By Alex Foster | Mon 11th January 2010 - 5:10 pm

The calendar and the clock are marching ever on, and whilst it might feel like you’ve barely blinked since Christmas, important deadlines in the Conference office are fast approaching.

LDV have booked a big room for a conference fringe event on the Friday night and we have until the 15th to decide how much information to put in the conference pack about the Exciting Secret Project our boffins and wonks are collaborating on late into the night. We’re of course stuck between a pillar and post – will the event be so massively oversubscribed we might need to remove walls, like …

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Mark Pack

How to be a Lib Dem blogger: get our collected series of articles

By Mark Pack | Mon 11th January 2010 - 3:10 pm

In the run-up to Christmas, Lib Dem Voice ran a series of articles from bloggers giving advice on how to start a blog, what to write about, where to find readers and many more. All written from direct personal experience from a range of (very different!) bloggers, the pieces provide a handy guide to anyone who is thinking of starting a blog or is already blogging but wants to get more from their blog.

I’ve now collated the articles into one pdf booklet, including some updates to individual pieces. You can read the guide below or view and download it from Scribd (the download option is to the top left of the document window).

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Posted in Blogging guide and Online politics | Tagged and | 2 Comments
Iain Roberts

Indy bigs up Mark Pack but exposes Twitter’s weakness

By Iain Roberts | Mon 11th January 2010 - 1:30 pm

The Independent today asks “Could the next election finally provide a reason for the microblogging service?”

There are many reasons for Twitter, some better than others, but if today’s Independent article is anything to go by, the General Election won’t be one of them.

“It’s Twitter that will make this election unique.”, the Indy proclaims, before going on to show why that claim is almost certainly not true.

The paper lists the political twitterati, a mixture – it turns out – of established figures doing a bit of tweeting and political bloggers.

Most excitingly for us at Lib Dem Voice, our …

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Posted in Online politics and Op-eds | Tagged , , , , and | 10 Comments
The Voice

Elaine Bagshaw resigns as Chair of Liberal Youth

By The Voice | Mon 11th January 2010 - 1:23 pm

The news has just this moment broken – via Twitter, where else? – that Elaine Bagshaw, chair of Liberal Youth, has resigned her post. The website carries Elaine’s resignation letter in full. Below is an excerpt:

Dear all,

It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I have to inform you that I will stepping down as your Chair, effective immediately.

This is not a position I wanted to be in, but unfortunately recent events have meant that I’m no longer able to give this position the attention it deserves, and to give all of you the Chair that

…

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

Media to start getting marked for quality of opinion poll reporting

By Mark Pack | Mon 11th January 2010 - 12:20 pm

The quality of traditional media coverage of political opinion polling has been a common cause of complaints amongst political bloggers. The most obvious problem is when an opinion poll from one polling company is compared not with the previous poll from that company but against an older one because the intervening one happened to have been published by a different media outlet.

Whilst comparing, say, the latest ICM poll with the previous ICM poll is the most useful comparison to make, if that previous ICM poll appeared elsewhere, in the part it has got airbrushed out of report of the latest …

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Posted in Polls | Tagged , , , and | 3 Comments
The Voice

Nick sets out Lib Dem election principles: “Four steps to a fairer Britain”

By The Voice | Mon 11th January 2010 - 11:15 am

Nick Clegg has been outlining the principles behind the Lib Dems’ general election manifesto this morning. Below is Nick’s speech, and below that are this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today Programme interview, and a video excerpt from the launch …

Last week’s phoney election campaign was a depressing experience.
The other parties managed to produce a greatest hits compilation of almost everything that has turned people off politics.
Airbrushed posters, meaningless slogans.
All set against the spectacle of the Government turning in on itself when the country is crying out for leadership.

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Posted in News | 23 Comments
Stephen Tall

Daily View 2×2: 11 January 2010

By Stephen Tall | Mon 11th January 2010 - 10:50 am

Happy Monday morning, everybody! It’s 440 years to the day since the first lottery was held in Britain; 60 years since the first recorded snowfall in Los Angeles; and the 56th birthday of actor-comedian John Sessions. But enough factoids, here are the factuals …

2 Big Stories

The fall-out from the Labour SnowStorm plot

We’re in the final months of Gordon Brown’s premiership, and the Labour debate is focusing on what happens after the party loses the election. James Purnell, who resigned from the cabinet in June to no discernible effect, tells us his differences with Mr Brown in an article in

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Posted in Daily View | Tagged | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Law Society does the legal profession no favours

By Mark Pack | Mon 11th January 2010 - 8:50 am

The Law Society could have done some good last week.

The Law Society could have put out a press release reassuring people that the legal risks if you decide to be a good neighbour and clear the snow and ice from outside your home are hugely overstated (i.e. the risk is so tiny no-one I’ve asked has yet been able to come up with an example of this actually happening and there are numerous major legal hurdles any such claim would have to overcome).

Or, if it was feeling very cautious about the law, it could have called for the law to …

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Posted in News | 7 Comments
Mark Pack

Businesses get off lightly in the snow

By Mark Pack | Sun 10th January 2010 - 9:58 pm

There’s now a consistent murmur in the media’s coverage of the snow spell about how people clear snow from outside their homes in other countries, how it might be a good thing for people to do the same here (example) and how it might not quite bring down The End Of The World (Legal Department) on your head if you clear snow from outside your own home and someone falls over.

Two things have been notably missing from the coverage though. First, any example of a successful legal action in such a case. There is plenty of “Oooh, well perhaps …

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

Top of the Blogs: The Golden Dozen #151

By Stephen Tall | Sun 10th January 2010 - 6:45 pm

Welcome to the 151sh of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (3rd – 9th January 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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Posted in Best of the blogs | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Book review: the Anthony Seldon solution to restoring trust in national life

By Mark Pack | Sun 10th January 2010 - 4:50 pm

Written over last summer by Professor Anthony Seldon and a mini-army of assistants, Trust is at heart both an optimistic and a pessimistic book.

Optimistic because one of Seldon’s arguments is that “trusting and being trustworthy are the sovereign human virtues we need today trust is natural: we were born trusting and the state of nature is to be trusting”. Pessimistic because his formula for restoring trust is not a simple checklists of policies but rather a harder and more fundamental shift in how individuals behave and a recipe of broad change across nearly every part of public policy.

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Posted in Books | Tagged and | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Gina Ford vs Nick Clegg

By Mark Pack | Sun 10th January 2010 - 4:12 pm

It should be no contest, you’d have thought. Public spat between million selling child-care author and a politician. Who’s the public going to instinctively trust? And what’s the general tenor of online comments on the stories going to be like?

So when I saw the news that Nick Clegg has said that Gina Ford’s highly prescriptive and detailed child care instructions weren’t for him and his family, I expected the coverage to be at least mildly critical and the online comments to be far more so.

That’s not how it has turned out though. It’s both to Nick’s credit (the reasons he …

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 21 Comments
The Voice

Opinion: How student visas are creating crime incentives

By The Voice | Sun 10th January 2010 - 11:35 am

I am tired of reading arrant rubbish about student visas in the newspapers. So let me (as someone who helps to administer a small private college) supply an insider’s view of what is really happening.

Most political parties support the new “Points-Based System” of immigration rules as a Good Thing, and maybe it would be, if only the Home Office was fit for purpose. In practice, the UK Border Agency simply cannot keep up with its workload. Therefore the process of licensing private colleges to sponsor student visa applications is running months late and has actually tipped the …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 3 Comments
Stephen Tall

Revealed: the Lib-Con pact election poster

By Stephen Tall | Sun 10th January 2010 - 10:45 am

Liberals and Conservatives united together in a British general election to fight for freedom and vanquish Big State corporatism:

Over half a century ago, mind.

***


Disclaimer: this poster, photographed by me, is from the Bodleian Library’s modern political papers archive – copyright is believed to reside still with the party. Could Cowley Street please contact me if they wish this image to be removed.

Posted in Humour | Tagged | 40 Comments
Mark Pack

Daily View 2×2: 10 January 2010

By Mark Pack | Sun 10th January 2010 - 7:00 am

It’s Sunday. It’s 7am. It’s time for an exclusive peak at the next Conservative Party election poster, but first 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

New Karzai cabinet snubs warlords

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Posted in Daily View | Tagged , and | 1 Comment
The Voice

“Tories covered up cash donations from Zac Goldsmith”

By The Voice | Sat 9th January 2010 - 11:36 pm

So says the Sunday Times:

The Conservative party hid donations of £40,000 from Zac Goldsmith, his brother Ben and two billionaire brothers in an apparent breach of the law.

The donations were recorded on official records as coming from Unicorn Administration, an intermediary company which helps run the finances of the super-rich.

But The Sunday Times has discovered that they in fact came from Zac Goldsmith, his brother Ben, and Ben’s wife Kate Rothschild…

This weekend Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said he would write to the Electoral Commission calling for an inquiry into the apparent breach of electoral law.

He questioned whether

…

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 8 Comments
Stephen Tall

LDVideo … ‘British papers are rubbish’ special edition

By Stephen Tall | Sat 9th January 2010 - 5:45 pm

Welcome to this latest LDVideo instalment, featuring three video clips this week united by a common theme – the general uselessness of British newspapers and their inability to report facts.

First up, we have this classic clip from iconic 1980s’ political comedy, Yes, Prime Minister, in which Jim Hacker explains to the civil service who reads the British newspapers:


(Also available on YouTube here).

Secondly, here’s Stephen Fry’s QI – in Call My Bluff mode – exploding a few of the Euro myths peddled by the right-wing media:

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Posted in YouTube | Tagged , , , , and | 1 Comment
Stephen Tall

LDV readers say: Televised leaders’ debates will be great help to Lib Dems

By Stephen Tall | Sat 9th January 2010 - 3:30 pm

A fortnight ago, LDV posed the question, What difference, if any, do you think the televised leaders’ debates will make to the Lib Dems’ standing in the polls? Here’s what you told us:

  • 60% (258 votes) – They will be a real help to the Liberal Democrats
  • 24% (105) – They will make only a marginal difference either way
  • 8% (34) – They will backfire for the Liberal Democrats
  • 8% (33) – They will be utterly irrelevant to how people vote
    Total Votes: 430 Poll ran: 26th December 2009 – 8th January 2010

So, a convincing majority of you – six …

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Posted in Voice polls | Tagged and | 2 Comments
Robert Dobson

What the papers say…

By Robert Dobson | Sat 9th January 2010 - 2:20 pm

Brown sees off the plotters…just – The Daily Telegraph, 7.1.10

“Gordon Brown was forced to rely on lukewarm backing from senior Cabinet colleagues last night to see off an attempt to oust him as Prime Minister.

“By last night, the attempted coup, which had begun at lunchtime, appeared to have failed as no senior figures were prepared to back it. But while every senior minister issued a statement condemning the letter, few voiced strong support for Mr Brown.”

MPs could be in line for £15,000 pay rise – Daily Mail, 6.1.10

“MPs could receive a big pay rise to compensate …

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Stephen Tall

NEW POLL: Who is your Liberal Voice of the Year?

By Stephen Tall | Sat 9th January 2010 - 11:45 am

Ten days ago, in the dying days of the last decade, LDV launched our search for the Liberal Voice of 2009, to find the non-Lib Dem individual or group which has had the biggest impact on liberalism in this country in the past 12 months.

Our thanks to all who put forward nominations, all of which were considered carefully by the LDV editorial collective, which has agreed to short-list the following (in no particular order):

  • Guy Herbert, general secretary of NO2ID, for his campaigning work against the database state;
  • Peter Tatchell, for his tireless and fearless international human

…

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Posted in LDV Awards and Voice polls | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , and | 24 Comments
Mark Pack

The Saturday debate: Online political discussion is doomed to disappoint

By Mark Pack | Sat 9th January 2010 - 8:50 am

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

Online discussion and interactivity works best when it is amongst people of common outlooks and shared assumptions, as that is what protects against it drowning in flames, drive-by verbal graffiti and point scoring rather than point development. But that means it works best when people are huddling together in communities of the like-minded. Such groups of like-minded don’t make for good political discussion or debate as they all agree on too much and don’t pay much attention to the occasional dissenting interloper.

Agree? Disagree? …

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Posted in Online politics and Op-eds | Tagged | 22 Comments
Mark Pack

Were Hoon and Hewitt of the wrong generation to succeed?

By Mark Pack | Fri 8th January 2010 - 8:56 pm

There are many, many reasons why the snow coup melted away so quickly. In amongst them is the lack of any groundswell of support, whether from backbench MPs or activists around the country, for the latest attempt.

Today’s Guardian throws an interesting light on the detail of how such grassroots opinion is followed in contemporary politics:

Downing Street on Wednesday monitored the Labour grassroots response to Hoon and Hewitt through Twitter, finding little or no support for their push.

That certainly partly reflects Labour reaction but it also reflects the degree to which Hoon, Hewitt and their allies are of a different political generation from those who naturally …

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Posted in News | Tagged , , and | 3 Comments
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