‘Tis the season for lists… All this week we are publishing the top 100 posts by Lib Dem bloggers, in descending order of popularity, for the last year – August 2007 to July 2008, inclusive, according to click-throughs from the Aggregator.
(Profuse thanks to techno-wizard and stat-monkey Ryan Cullen for compiling this table.)
In today’s penultimate instalment we run through 11-20:
This from Newsweek:
Memo to restaurant owners: if there are particular dishes you want more customers to order, list them on the right side of the menu…
Simply put, we associate the side of space where we’re clumsier with bad, stupid, dishonest, unhappy and other negative qualities, finds Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.
In a series of five clever studies, reported Aug. 1 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, he had university students take tests probing their unconscious attitudes toward the left and right side of the world. In one, 219 students from Stanford University and the University of California, Riverside, were told that a cartoon character loves zebras but hates pandas (or vice versa).
St Albans Conservative Association voted last night to keep Anne Main MP as its candidate – despite criticism of her Commons expense claims.
From the BBC:
St Albans MP Anne Main allowed her daughter to live rent-free in a taxpayer-funded flat, which she said was cleared by Commons authorities.
Her constituency party has voted to keep her as its candidate for the marginal seat and she was “delighted”.
Claims against Ms Main, an MP since 2005, are still being investigated by the parliamentary sleaze watchdog.
The Telegraph reported back in May that Anne Main claimed mortgage interest of £1095.68 a month on …
I suspect it may in part have been because it gave them a chance to take a pop at Harriet Harman – but there’s big coverage in The Sun, and other media, today for figures collated by the Liberal Democrats about the gender pay gap in central government:
Official figures show female civil servants are paid up to A THIRD less than male colleagues.
The revelations are an embarrassment to the party’s self-styled women’s champion Harriet Harman.
She has vowed to close the gap between the sexes – and has threatened to name and shame firms who give men more.
Furious critics last night
…
Yesterday we brought you news about the bizarre battle between American rightwingers spreading misinformation about the NHS, and British users of the NHS who were actually quite proud of it.
24 hours later and Tweetminster (which monitors the twitter updates of MPs and PPCs and provides a service where you can search them) reports
65 #welovethenhs tweets from MPs & PPCS. 8 from @UKLabour MPs & 4 PPCs, 3 from @LibDems MPs & 3 PPCs, 1 from @Conservatives PPC
Our own Nick_Clegg was amongst them, as was Prime Minister Brown (whose tweet looks like it’s had help from …
‘Tis the season for lists… All this week we are publishing the top 100 posts by Lib Dem bloggers, in descending order of popularity, for the last year – August 2008 to July 2009, inclusive, according to click-throughs from the Aggregator.
(Profuse thanks to techno-wizard and stat-monkey Ryan Cullen for compiling this table.)
In today’s fourth instalment we run through 21-40:
At the time, there was stringent criticism from a vocal minority expressed online (such as in the comments thread on this site) of the court’s decision to keep secret the names of the adults involved in the Baby Peter case.
Now we know for sure the reasons:
There were two reasons behind the veil of secrecy. The first being the need to protect the identity of Baby Peter’s four siblings.
Connelly has three other children by Baby Peter’s father and gave birth to her youngest, who is Barker’s child, in prison.
The anonymity order was lifted because all four of Connelly’s remaining children are
…
It’s March 2000 and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill is going through Parliament. Then Home Secretary Charles Clarke is defending the Bill during its second reading. Reading the views expressed by Conservatives in the debate shows up an interesting split: some MPs concerned about civil liberties but also some pressing for the powers to be made much more widely available. For Liberal Democrat MPs, the concerns are about the scale of snooping the Bill will permit and the controls over it.
But all would be fine according to Charles Clarke:
MoneySavingExpert is reporting that Nick Clegg answered an open letter to David Cameron before the Tories managed to get their boots on:
It came about in an unusual way. Clegg (pictured, right) is one of the 3.5 million recipients of the MoneySavingExpert.com (MSE) weekly money tips email. In it, three weeks ago, he spotted an open letter to David Cameron where MSE asked the Tory leader to back the campaign for automatic refunds.
While Cameron has not replied, Clegg, and his Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable, in a letter to MSE this week (see full text below), have promised to table a
…
‘Tis the season for lists… All this week we are publishing the top 100 posts by Lib Dem bloggers, in descending order of popularity, for the last year – August 2008 to July 2009, inclusive, according to click-throughs from the Aggregator.
(Profuse thanks to techno-wizard and stat-monkey Ryan Cullen for compiling this table.)
In today’s third instalment we run through 41-60:
Around 8 miles from the sizeable spa town of Buxton in Derbyshire, but in the quaint and tiny village of Great Hucklow, activists from across the country assembled together for Liberal Youth’s Activate/Motivate training weekend at the Foundry Adventure Centre. This was my first time at a Liberal Youth specific event, having only previously attended the Federal Conference in Harrogate as a Liberal Democrat member.
Intensive training from a team of four party campaigners, including one current councillor and a full-time training officer, gave us tuition on a range of skills including: canvassing technique; writing campaign literature; writing short speeches; …
One of Obama’s key pledges in the US Presidential elections was major healthcare reforms. The US is a deeply divided nation on health as in many other policy areas – it is simultaneously home to some of the planet’s best hospitals, the best research in medical advances and the best healthcare practioners – and also home to some of the worst poverty and barriers to healthcare, the worst developed-world child mortality rates.
Without being facetious, almost all of my knowledge of the American healthcare system comes from my knowledge of US TV. And whilst House has access to an amazing battery …
Catching up on council news from outside my home patch of London*, here’s a report from The Guardian:
A group of young people who claim an “atmospheric soup of toxic materials” released when an old steelworks was redeveloped caused their birth defects won a landmark ruling today when it was found that the local council had been negligent in its handling of the site.
The high court decision clears the way for 16 successful claimants, who are aged between 11 and 22 and have missing or underdeveloped fingers or deformities to their feet, to set out to prove their individual disabilities were caused by Corby borough council’s failings when reclaiming the former British Steel plant. Compensation could run into millions of pounds if they succeed…
The party’s Federal Conference in Bournemouth is now just a few weeks away – and the key policy papers including the Agenda are now available from the party website.
Conference is such a huge topic, and will be covered so extensively here on the Voice that it’s hard to know where to begin.
Here are just a few interesting things to highlight:
…
Last Wednesday I tweeted the unlikely words: “Never thought I’d say this, but Perez Hilton has blogged about a Lib Dem policy paper http://bit.ly/Dkfe5”.
It’s fair to say that the Real Women policy paper proposals on body image have stirred up quite a bit of debate: in the press, on TV & radio, in the blogosphere and, I also hope, in the pub, around the dinner table and over a cup of coffee.
Lots of women (and a few men) have got in touch to say they’re glad someone is finally trying to tackle the huge pressure on women to look slim, smooth and perfect.
Some have blogged their concerns about the policy, and I hope to answer some of the questions that have been raised.
Yes, and it starts young.
‘Tis the season for lists… All this week we are publishing the top 100 posts by Lib Dem bloggers, in descending order of popularity, for the last year – August 2008 to July 2009, inclusive, according to click-throughs from the Aggregator.
(Profuse thanks to techno-wizard and stat-monkey Ryan Cullen for compiling this table.)
In today’s second instalment we run through 61-80:
Ian Clement, former leader of Bexley Council, has been ordered to repay more than £2000 which he claimed in expenses for trips which had already been paid for.
From the Local Government Chronicle:
Bexley LBC had paid for Ian Clement’s accommodation at a BT conference in the United States, which brought together politicians, academics and businessmen.
More than half of the £2,087.85 the council has asked to be paid back was spent on this trip.
Mr Clement, who was council leader between May 2006 and May 2008, claimed £1,270.50 in overnight subsistence allowances for the trip.
Mr Clement has previously paid back £1,220 he
…
Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:
Hands up everyone who thought the problem with current rules for controlling constituency expenditure was that they work if a Parliament last for four years but not if it lasts for five? Nobody? Oh well, that’s the basis on which Parliament has just changed the law anyway.
This provision of the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 has its roots in a sensible concern, but along the way disagreements between parties and lack of understanding of how campaigns actually operate has landed us with this rather odd change in the law.
An email arrives from web guru and Lib Dem county councillor Tim Prater, who is the public-facing half of Prater Raines, the hugely successful company that now supply local websites to a large proportion of the nation’s Liberal Democrat local parties, council groups and MPs. (The full, awesome list, from Aberconwy to Yorkshire and the Humber is here). It’s no small boast that they probably run more political websites than anyone else in the country.
They have a good track record of innovating and keeping content going online. But things have changed in the seven years since they first started to provide their content management system to the party, and they are now proposing a major upgrade to the service they offer.
An email pops in to my inbox from the Electoral Reform Society:
Today we mark 100 days until the Queen’s Speech – and the government’s last chance to change politics for good.
If you’re a blogger or a web editor you can help the campaign today by adding our countdown widget to your posts or site:
http://voteforachange.co.uk/widgetFeeling creative? Well grab your camcorder and enter the campaign’s viral video competition. You’ve got less than a minute to tell us just what you think’s wrong with politics. Not long we know! But there’s a Macbook up for grabs for the best entry –
…
‘Tis the season for lists… All this week we are publishing the top 100 posts by Lib Dem bloggers, in descending order of popularity, for the last year – August 2008 to July 2009, inclusive, according to click-throughs from the Aggregator.
(Profuse thanks to techno-wizard and stat-monkey Ryan Cullen for compiling this table.)
In today’s first instalment we run through 81-100:
Tonight’s Panorama – at 8.30pm on BBC1 – features reports on a huge increase in violent attacks in bars in Oldham – and what the Lib Dem council there is doing about it.
Yorkshire Street is the main drinking area in Oldham which had a 200% increase in serious violent incidents in the first four months of this year.
That’s a stabbing or an assault with intention to kill on average every Friday and Saturday night.
But the Greater Manchester town has come up with a unique way of fighting back the recent spike in alcohol-related disorder.
The council believes promotions such as
…
Our Vince penned a piece for the Daily Mail yesterday with the delicious title “The economy is now sitting up and showing signs of recovery”
In it, Vince made the startling admission that he is not, in fact, an all-seeing mage with black powers over the future of the economy:
I am often asked to play the part of Nostradamus. Since I had been a reasonably successful prophet of doom, I am now assumed to know when the economy will turn round. I don’t. No one knows.
It does seem likely, however, that a major disaster has been averted. We are no
…
Kudos to Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem Shadow Home Secretary, for garnering excellent coverage for the awful statistics about state sponsored snooping.
The Daily Mail’s ire is justified:
The number of Big Brother snooping missions by police, town halls and other public bodies has soared by 44 per cent in two years.
Last year there were 504,073 new cases – an average of 1,381 a day. It is the equivalent of one adult in 78 coming under state-sanctioned surveillance.
One adult in 78? I wonder who it is on my street. Which member of the Lib Dem Group in the House …
It has been a busy time in Scotland over recent weeks and what with Holyrood in recess for a month before Westminster broke up, there have been holidays to work around, babies being born, MPs standing down and candidates being selected all over as well as an away day for all parliamentarians and campaign staff.
Archie Scott was born earlier this week, weighing 8.5lbs to the delight of Kirsten and Tavish, our sincere congratulations to them both.
Alison and Mike Moore also have recently had a baby, Ella Louise. Now, Ella Louise was born prematurely so Mike …
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
Dickens may well have been writing about 18th century France, but it’s likely that historians looking back at 2009 would conclude something similar about our current economic predicament.
In the midst of a recession triggered by a financial crisis, the economy at large has been in decline in the UK for five quarters. The knock-on effects of the credit crunch, brought on largely by unsustainable and deregulated banking speculation, have been dire; bail-outs in the billions which, according to Vince Cable’s sage analysis, “privatise profits and nationalise losses“; job …
Welcome to the 129th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (2nd August – 8th August 2009), together with a hand-picked quintet, mostly 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:
Back in April I blogged about how Twitter was being given the credit for helping to fuel a revolt against the Communist government in Moldova. The protests were against the conduct of parliamentary elections, won by the Communists.
The protests secured new elections in late July, following which a non-communist government has just been formed:
Twenty-five years ago in Buxton’s Pavilion Gardens, the SDP were debating a worthy paper on equality at their annual conference, when a novice speaker Ann Brennan came to the podium.
Brennan punctuated the pomposity of the discussion by making some pithy observations on the foibles of the Guardian-reading delegates and the high-falutin language used in many of the policy documents.
“The most refreshing speech we’ve heard so far”, commented Sir Robin Day wryly. In fact Mrs Brennan’s performance was not entirely spontaneous. She had received coaching from Max Atkinson, who was then an Oxford academic.
Professor Max Atkinson went on to be …
The rest of The Voice’s Daily View team may have decided to have a lie in each morning during August, but we’re made of sterner stuff here on the Sunday slot (for the moment). And as it’s a Sunday, it’s also time for another instalment of singing.
UK ‘may have 40-year Afghan role’
So reports the BBC:
The UK’s commitment to Afghanistan could last for up to 40 years, the incoming head of the Army has said.
Gen Sir David Richards, who takes over on 28 August, told the Times that “nation-building” would last decades.
Troops will be required for the medium term only, but the UK will continue to play a role in “development, governance security sector reform,” he said.
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