The Voice

Lib Dems urge Tories not to join with homophobes

By The Voice | Wed 18th March 2009 - 9:39 am

Lib Dem equalities spokesperson Lynne Featherstone has written to the Tories shadow foreign affairs spokesman William Hague asking him to clarify if his party intends to join forces with a Polish party in the European parliament known for its homophobic remarks. Politics.co.uk reports:

The party in question is called the Polish Law and Justice party. The Tories are being pulled towards them after leaving their grouping in the European parliament – the centre-right European People’s party. It was the culmination of a promise David Cameron made while running to be party leader, but he must now form a grouping with at least six other parties to earn EU recognition and funding.

But Liberal Democrats and Labour warned the party could easily be thrown into the arms of non-mainstream parties, putting them on “the lunatic fringe” of European politics. Senior politicians from the Law and Justice party have made homophobic statements, as well as describing Barack Obama’s election in the US as marking “the end of white man’s civilisation”, the Liberal Democrats said.

The full text of Lynne’s letter to Mr Hague is below:

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Posted in Europe / International and News | Tagged , , and | 3 Comments
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Stephen Tall

Tory ‘fictional minister’ broke Parliamentary rules

By Stephen Tall | Wed 18th March 2009 - 9:31 am

As the BBC reports here, Tory MP for Hertford and Stortford Mark Prisk has been publicly rebuked by the Speaker of the House of Commons for for breaking Parliamentary rules in relation to political campaigning.

Parliamentary rules state that MPs are not allowed to use their role as a Member of Parliament to undertake activity in other constituencies, in order to prevent Parliamentary casework being used for party political campaigning. But speaking in the House of Commons yesterday, Lib Dem MP Matthew Taylor asserted that Mr Prisk was guilty of using the invented title of ‘Shadow Minister for Conrwall’ …

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Posted in News and Parliament | Tagged , , , , and | 5 Comments
Stephen Tall

That hoary old Hung Parliament chestnut

By Stephen Tall | Tue 17th March 2009 - 8:38 pm

There’s an interesting article by The Independent’s Steve Richards today, focusing – as the media does every three months or so – on the prospect of a ‘Hung Parliament’, and what the Lib Dems would do in such an eventuality.

Actually the article’s a bit broader than that, and I can’t let the opportunity pass without briefly digressing to agree wholeheartedly with his snipe at the Tories’ two key initiatives of the past week: David Cameron’s ‘apology’ for failing to anticipate the economic crisis until way too late (Steve accuses the Tories of “still playing student-like games”); and yesterday’s …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , , , and | 12 Comments
Stephen Tall

LDV readers say: government should stick by pension promise to Sir Fred

By Stephen Tall | Tue 17th March 2009 - 7:42 pm

Two weeks ago – at the height of the political storm surrounding RBS’s Sir Fred Goodwin’s £693,000 £703,000 a year pension pay-out – LDV asked our readers: How do you think the issue of Sir Fred Goodwin’s RBS pension should be resolved?

Here’s what you said:

>> 15% (45 votes): The government should legislate to claw back a large part of Sir Fred’s pension
>> 29% (89): The government should instruct that Sir Fred be paid a minimum amount, and he should sue if he wants his full entitlement.
>> 52% (160): The government should abide by the agreement entered

…

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Posted in Voice polls | Tagged | 1 Comment
Stephen Tall

How to prove you’re qualified to be a British citizen

By Stephen Tall | Tue 17th March 2009 - 6:28 pm

David Boyle brings us news that one of the sample questions in the ‘Britishness test’, which immigrants must pass if they wish to become British citizens, is

to define a quango.

As David comments:

It really is extraordinary, though perhaps not very surprising, that Whitehall Man believes knowing the meaning of government acronyms is one of those pieces information which defines Britishness – alongside knowledge of Shakespeare and all the panoply of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish culture.

For those unsure of the answer (go on, admit it, it’s not like Jacqui Smith will have you forcibly repatriated or anything), the answer is:

An

…

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 2 Comments
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Helen Duffett

New voting system proposed: Majority Judgement.

By Helen Duffett | Tue 17th March 2009 - 4:09 pm

Do the voting systems of the world’s democracies elect the candidates the electorate really wants? Voting theorists Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki say that often they don’t, and that this raises serious questions about legitimacy to rule.

Voting Power and Procedures is presenting a series of lectures this week at the London School of Economics by Professors Balinski and Laraki, who will introduce their new voting system, Majority Judgement.

From the Voting Power and Procedures press release:

“From political and corporate elections to wine and figure skating competitions (and Strictly Come Dancing), the speakers claim their system succeeds where others fail.

Lecture 1:

…

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Posted in Events | 6 Comments
Cllr Jenni Clutten

Opinion: Can we trust in our young people?

By Cllr Jenni Clutten | Tue 17th March 2009 - 2:20 pm

To hear someone talk down a youth organisation purely because it is being run by young people and therefore ‘set to fail’ is offensive to my ears. I have long witnessed and experienced the importance of young people being able to make decisions for themselves and to be involved in the production and implementation of the services they access. It is along these lines that I must defend Liberal Youth and the young people that it represents.

I have fallen in and out of love with LDYS, now Liberal Youth, various times but I would never proclaim that it should not exist. To state that it should not have the freedom it currently enjoys is misguided. There are so many ways that young people can offer an amazing and refreshing way of dealing with problems and really carve out a place for themselves by being given the freedom to experiment.

Yet it is important that as young people we are not expected to get things right all the time and that we should not be overtly punished for getting things wrong. Whether or not we like to forget it, LDYS gave a lot to the party, including a number of MPs and good strong campaign messages with the ability to mobilise a large amount of energetic support. Liberal Youth will be the same and has already shown encouraging signs of engaging young people with the party, including two of this years executive becoming Liberal Democrat Councillors and the success of the recruitment at Reading University branch leading to the leaders award for membership.

I wonder what is the point in life if we are not allowed to make mistakes? I know we as a party are concerned about reputation and media perception but it is important we allow young people the space to practise, to engage and to enjoy being both young and politically active. Much of the problems that arise within Liberal Youth centre around the reputations that people build. I have always found that we as a party tend to expect a lot from a small number of people, this seems to be a natural development which we could all try our best to break away from. The fact remains that decisions are best made by the people that they directly affect and as far as youth provision is concerned it should be coordinated and developed by young people of a variety of ages and backgrounds.

There are several problems that it is possible to identify in regard to Liberal Youth which I think cause problems in the long term.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 30 Comments
Alex Foster

Bristol council candidate killed in car crash

By Alex Foster | Tue 17th March 2009 - 10:23 am

News reaches the voice that a talented local campaigner died last week when his car hit a tree.

A man who died in a car crash in Bristol has been named locally as community figure and Liberal Democrat candidate for Horfield – Tony Lewis.

Mr Lewis, aged 48, of Rodbourne Road, Manor Farm, was involved in an accident in Pen Park Road, Southmead, just after 6.10pm on Tuesday.

As reported by the Bristol Post, his Renault Clio hit a tree and a parked car.

Mr Lewis, who was also chairman of Manor Farm Action Group, has been described by his colleagues as a

…

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Posted in News | 1 Comment
Stephen Tall

MPs decide (eventually) to allow UK Youth Parliament to meet in Commons

By Stephen Tall | Tue 17th March 2009 - 9:45 am

The UK Youth Parliament will be allowed to hold a meeting in the House of Commons following overwhelming approval from MPs – after a two-hour long debate. The BBC reports:

The move, which was resisted by a handful of Conservative MPs, will see the chamber being used by non-elected parliamentarians for the first time. Opponents said the Commons would abandon its traditions by agreeing, and set a precedent for other groups.

The Youth Parliament, whose 500 members are aged between 11 and 18, is expected to convene over the summer recess. This summer’s meeting will be a one-off event after

…

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Posted in News and Parliament | Tagged , , and | 12 Comments
Mark Pack

‘Sent back by Britain. Executed in Darfur’

By Mark Pack | Tue 17th March 2009 - 9:09 am

So reports The Independent today:

A failed asylum-seeker who returned to Darfur under a government repatriation scheme has been murdered by Sudanese security officers after they followed him home from the airport in Khartoum, The Independent has learnt.

Adam Osman Mohammed, 32, was gunned down in his home in front of his wife and four-year-old son just days after arriving in his village in south Darfur.

The case is to be used by asylum campaigners to counter Home Office attempts to lift the ban on the removal and deportation to Sudan of failed asylum-seekers. Next month, government lawyers are expected to go to

…

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

Ooops! Someone forgot to double-check a written answer in Parliament

By Mark Pack | Tue 17th March 2009 - 7:45 am

The last five words are not perhaps the best in this written answer from last year:

Andrew Rosindell: To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform how many letters his Department has received (a) in favour of and (b) opposed to post office closures in the last 12 months.

Mr. McFadden: The Department does not hold this information in the form requested. I understand that, nationally, Post Office Ltd. has received over 180,000 pieces of correspondence in response to the local area plan consultations on its Network Change proposals, half by e-mail (or …

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Posted in Humour and Parliament | 1 Comment
Stephen Tall

Some evidence that Lib Dem supporters are a liberal and coherent grouping

By Stephen Tall | Mon 16th March 2009 - 6:31 pm

There are a couple of interesting titbits from the latest Sunday Times / YouGov poll, published at the weekend, and published in full here.

For years, opposition parties have levelled the charge at Lib Dems that our supporters are chiefly a ‘neither of the above’ option, that the party is merely a repository for disenchanted protest votes. For years, Lib Dems have refuted the charge, arguing that the party is the only one which has continued to stand by its founding ideology, liberalism.

So I always take a close look at detailed opinion poll data to see if …

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Posted in Op-eds and Polls | Tagged | 11 Comments
The Voice

Poll: 72% back official inquiry into the UK’s role in the invasion of Iraq

By The Voice | Mon 16th March 2009 - 6:01 pm

The BBC reports:

Almost three quarters of British people believe there should be a public inquiry into the invasion of Iraq, an opinion poll suggests. The BBC Radio 5 Live poll also found almost two thirds are not convinced UK soldiers should be kept in Afghanistan. …

The survey, conducted by ComRes for the BBC, found 72% of those questioned believe there should be an official inquiry into the UK’s role in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This figure increases to 81% in the 18-24 age group.

Just last week, Lib Dem shadow foreign secretary Ed Davey repeated the …

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 1 Comment
Alex Foster

Catchup to 15/03/09

By Alex Foster | Mon 16th March 2009 - 3:17 pm

Welcome to Catchup, bringing you the tastiest nuggets of LDV from the last fortnight, apart from Conference, which we caught up here.

We started the period with a debate about fairtrade. Good? John Pugh MP thought so; Julian Harris wasn’t so sure.

We learned where thousands of Lib Dems will be trekking to conference over the coming years.

We learned the Government had caved on individual voter registration – and Mark Pack explained why that was a good thing.

Our peers came out top. Ros Scott unleashed hell. Bob Russell MP campaigned …

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Posted in A weekly catchup | 3 Comments
Stephen Tall

In memory of Ron Silver

By Stephen Tall | Mon 16th March 2009 - 1:50 pm

Danny Finkelstein at The Times’s Comment Central pays tribute to Ron Silver, known to West Wing fans everywhere as political strategist Bruno Gianelli, who has died:

Ron was one of the most committed political figures in Hollywood, but not in the usual way. A brilliant debater and public speaker, he had been the actor’s union leader for a decade and a well known advocate of abortion rights. And then, in 2004 he took one of the biggest political steps in his life. He endorsed George Bush for President.

Meeting him in New York after he had addressed the Republican Convention, he explained to me that he had taken this big step because he believed that Islamist terrorism was a danger to liberal values, and he didn’t believe the Democrats realised this.

He expected to pay a big professional price. And he did. He found it much more difficult to get big roles in quality productions after his Bush endorsement. But he did get another stint as Bruno, with Gianelli switching sides to become a Republican. …

Ron wasn’t a Republican, though. He remained a liberal. And in 2008 he voted for Barack Obama, telling me that Sarah Palin was the final straw.

Here’s one of his – and indeed the series’ finest moments:

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Jock Coats

Opinion: The Opportunity of a Lifetime to “Build Anew, to Build Better”

By Jock Coats | Mon 16th March 2009 - 12:15 pm

I watched with some discomfit Nick Clegg and Vince Cable’s Harrogate conference speeches. Discomfit because, whilst there was rhetoric a-plenty about how the economic crisis affords us an opportunity to, indeed demands that we must, build a new order from the very foundations, I can’t help feeling that our policy makers have not even got the keys to the JCBs yet.

Banker-bashing is all very well, and seemed popular at least in the conference hall. Yet just strengthening the new building with high-tensile regulations and restricting openings for excess while leaving the old foundations will miss the biggest opportunity of all: to redesign the very footings of the system behind this crisis and others before it. And it is a system which also underpins the entire divide between those we desire to help, currently eking out their living in the basement, and the fabulous wealth of the penthouses.

Our well-meant policies about redistribution and raising opportunity and aspiration will ultimately be utterly futile without understanding this; realizing that the building’s escalators are running the wrong way. Yes, we can and must assist those are unable to scramble out of the rubble themselves, but we must also level the site before we rebuild if that is to bring permanent benefits.

But unlike previous economic crises, the opportunity this time is not merely to rebuild familiar institutions, but establish an economic structure plan for a world radically different from that which applied in previous melt-downs. A truly globalized world of opportunities for real people; a whole new market paradigm in which we can move freely around the world; trade freely with people directly in other countries; reduce the power and influence of the intermediaries made necessary by the difficulties of communication and commerce in earlier centuries.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 12 Comments
Mark Pack

Are you squandering the votes of 1 in 10 of your supporters?

By Mark Pack | Mon 16th March 2009 - 10:20 am

The latest Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (Volume 19, Number 1) has some interesting research into how many votes people cast in English local elections where this is more than one vacancy to be filled at once, e.g. a three member ward with all the seats up for election at once:

7-15% of total potential votes are unused …

Unused votes occur when electors have a restricted choice of candidates, principally when parties fail to field as many candidates as there an available seats … unused votes stem from a misunderstanding of the electoral procedure … even when parties

…

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Stephen Tall

NEW POLL: do you support a minimum price for alcohol?

By Stephen Tall | Mon 16th March 2009 - 9:37 am

Government ministers have spent the last 24 hours distancing themselves from the proposal of chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson to establish a minimum price for alcohol which would see the doubling of the price of many beers and spirits.

Today’s Guardian reports:

Plans to charge a minimum of 50p per unit of alcohol are to be put forward by Sir Liam Donaldson today. The Scottish government is planning to introduce minimum prices for alcohol and these could come into force by the end of the year. It would make Scotland the first country in Europe to introduce minimum pricing,

…

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Posted in News and Voice polls | Tagged , , and | 27 Comments
The Voice

£853 a night – Lib Dems reveal true cost cost of locking up prisoners in police cells

By The Voice | Mon 16th March 2009 - 9:15 am

The BBC reports:

The cost of housing prison inmates in police cells is double the amount previously thought, the Lib Dems claim. The Ministry of Justice says it costs £385 a night to detain an inmate in a police station when prisons are full. But the Lib Dems say the true cost of ‘Operation Safeguard’ is £853 a night – a figure disputed by the government.

The article quotes Lib Dem justice spokesperson Paul Holmes:

For this amount of money, you could stay in the Ritz. … The government’s incompetence in managing our prison system is staggering and has left the

…

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 3 Comments
Stephen Tall

Top of the Blogs: The Golden Dozen #108

By Stephen Tall | Sun 15th March 2009 - 9:50 pm

Welcome to the 108th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (8th-14th March 2009), together with a hand-picked quintet, mostly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

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

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York Membery

Opinion: Going to the polls after a Labour government

By York Membery | Sun 15th March 2009 - 12:44 pm

What lessons does the past offer for the future?

If there is one thing history teaches us it’s that the Liberals invariably face a challenging time at the polls following a period of Labour government.

Indeed, taken together, the evidence from a string of post-Labour government 20th century elections makes for depressing reading. That said, recent electoral history does offer a glimmer of hope.

This downward trend in Liberal support began with the election of the first – minority – Labour government of 1923, when Ramsay MacDonald became prime minister with Liberal support.

The Liberals came within a whisker of Labour in the popular vote, taking 29.6 per cent to Labour’s 30.5 per cent, but, with 159 seats to Labour’s 191, were obliged to let Labour try to form a government. But less than a year later, when MacDonald’s government collapsed and Britain again went to the polls, the Liberals crashed and burned, so to speak, polling 17.6 per cent of the vote and emerging with just 40 seats.

In 1931, following the election of another minority Labour government two years earlier, in 1929, things were complicated by the emergence of a National Government, which saw the Liberal vote split three ways with disastrous consequences, as well as a collapse in the Labour vote.

But the usual pattern re-emerged in 1951, when the Conservatives took office after the 1945-51 Labour government, and the Liberal vote slumped to a historic low of 2.5 per cent, with just six Liberal MPs surviving.

Following a Liberal revival at the 1964 election, and the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour government (when the party gained 11.2 per cent of the vote), the party again lost ground in the subsequent 1966 (8.5 per cent) and 1970 (7.5 per cent) elections — even if, thanks to the vagaries of the electoral system, it emerged with three more seats (12 in all) in 1966 but just six in 1970.

Fast forward to 1979, and the Liberal Party again saw its vote fall back – to 13.8 per of the vote compared to 18.3 per cent in October 1974 – with a consequent drop in seats. Then leader David Steel is convinced the party’s victory in the Edge Hill by-election just weeks before the 1979 poll gave the party “a valuable eve of election bounce”.

However, the evidence from the last two elections — following the 1997-2001 Labour government — is less clear-cut.

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Posted in Op-eds | 7 Comments
Mark Pack

City Hall, a lift, a barchart, a photo

By Mark Pack | Sun 15th March 2009 - 8:50 am

Photographed this week inside a London City Hall lift: a barchart showing how good or bad different GLA departments have been at replying to a survey.

City Hall survey response rates

The worst performer by some margin? The Mayor’s Office. Ah well, nothing like leading by example from the top is there?

Posted in London | 1 Comment
Joe Taylor

Opinion: Lib Dem councils should scrap their free newspapers

By Joe Taylor | Sat 14th March 2009 - 4:40 pm

What is the point of free newspapers produced by local councils? These days, almost every council has one – but no one seems to know what they are for .

The argument you hear most frequently in favour of free newspapers is that they save councils money: without them, they would have to spend the money on advertising in local newspapers, and this works out more expensive than sending a out a free sheet via Royal Mail.

Another argument you hear is that sending free newspapers to every resident is the only way to deliver statutory notices to everyone. Leave it to the newspapers, the argument goes, and some people who don’t buy the paper might miss important news – such as (an example from my council newspaper I have in front of me) that the post of Independent Chair of the council’s Interim Standards Committee is up for grabs.

But let’s be honest – the real reason councils produce these newspapers is that they hate having an independent media that might, from time to time, draw the public’s attention to their shortcomings. What they really hate is having to spend (other people’s) money on newspaper advertising, only to then get criticised by those newspapers.

But as a strong advocate of a free press, allow me to make the argument against council newspapers in three succinct points.

1. They’re crap. No one wants to read 24 pages of council press releases, which is what all of them consist of. The photos are always dull: men in suits / council buildings / close-ups of staff on the phone. Any right thinking person who receives this through the letterbox will immediately shove it straight in the recycling, probably without even opening it. So this defeats the argument that councils are getting their messages out to “every resident”.

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Posted in Local government and Op-eds | Tagged and | 21 Comments
Mark Pack

What did Voltaire really say?

By Mark Pack | Sat 14th March 2009 - 3:20 pm

Liberals frequently quote Voltaire saying, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. But did he really say it? The provenance of this quote is often given as disputed, but Danny Finkelstein in The Times this week had an excellent summary where those words really came from. You can read his piece here.

Posted in News | Tagged and | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Peter Mandelson vs Norman Baker

By Mark Pack | Sat 14th March 2009 - 11:22 am

From the Daily Mirror:

Lord Mandelson yesterday was at the centre of a secrecy row after refusing to reveal his business interests.

The Business Secretary has placed all his shareholdings in a blind trust – meaning they cannot be seen by the public…

Lib Dem MP Norman Baker said: “He must know what has been put in and we ought to know too or it subverts the announcement.” No10 said: “The point is Lord Mandelson doesn’t even know, therefore it doesn’t affect his decisions.”

The Downing Street ‘rebuttal’ strikes me as particularly weak, because if you’ve put a whole load of investments in …

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Slough Conservatives update: three convicted of electoral fraud

By Mark Pack | Sat 14th March 2009 - 7:39 am

An update on our story from April last year:

Three men have been found guilty of charges relating to election fraud in a Berkshire town.

The counts related to an election in the Slough Central ward in May 2007 where Labour councillor Lydia Simmons lost her seat to Tory Raja Khan.

Khan, along with two others, had previously admitted the offences. Three other men were convicted by a jury. (BBC)

In addition to the three who pleaded guilty and the three who were convicted, a seventh man was cleared after the jury could not reach a verdict on him.

Posted in News | Tagged | 1 Comment
Laurence Boyce

Opinion: Losing faith in the Lib Dems

By Laurence Boyce | Fri 13th March 2009 - 4:20 pm

There must be few things more insane that we do as a nation, than to segregate our children’s education along the lines of which one or other of the ancient and now defunct religious mythologies are subscribed to by their parents. Simply writing it out in full has me reaching for the revolver. And if ever you wanted to hear an argument against faith schooling in just two words, they would have to be “Northern Ireland” – and so right on cue, following Saturday’s debate at Harrogate, we were given a chilling reminder of the havoc wreaked by generations of religious apartheid in that province, with its thirteen miles of “peace walls” still dividing the warring communities of Belfast.

But evidently this is a state of affairs insufficiently insane for Liberal Democrats who rejected sensible proposals to phase out faith schooling in England, instead opting narrowly for Tim Farron’s hopeless compromise of requiring schools to prove their inclusiveness over a five year period, whatever that means. James Graham has written an excellent piece (with lively discussion) about everything that is wrong with Tim’s amendment, describing it as being, “little more than a state-commissioned fig leaf scheme.” Certainly its full subtleties were lost on the BBC, who declared simply that, “Lib Dems back state faith schools.” Needless to say, that is not the headline I was looking for.

Under the Farron scheme, while we avoid the unspeakable evils of selection by ability or aptitude, faith-based selection for existing schools would remain intact. Yet if any form of selection were to be permitted, this must surely rank as the most absurd. As if parents didn’t suffer enough angst over the prospective quality and location of their child’s school, they also have to contend with questions of theology which are as ludicrous as they are obstructive. Under present Lib Dem policy, there would be no end to the spectacle of pushy parents with an eye on the local faith school, attending church for the first time in their lives and pretending to worship God alongside the regular churchgoers who have just been pretending for a bit longer.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 107 Comments
The Voice

Davey slams Labour’s foreign affairs shame

By The Voice | Fri 13th March 2009 - 2:39 pm

Ed Davey, Lib Dem shadow foreign secretary, has taken to the airwaves today to make the case for inquiries into the two dodgy areas of Labour’s foreign policy – the basis for the war in Iraq, and allegations of British complicity in in illegal abduction and torture.

A full inquiry into the Iraq war

Commenting on the latest evidence to show the extent to which Labour’s spin doctors intervened to ‘sex-up’ the Iraqi weapons dossier prepared by intelligence officials, Ed said on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today Programme:

He said the emails show, “there was intervention, and we didn’t know that

…

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Posted in News | Tagged , , , and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

Opinion: Can Google’s dominance be broken?

By Mark Pack | Fri 13th March 2009 - 10:56 am

Google dominates the search engine market, both in the UK and internationally. Although there are some countries where a local search service has the lead (e.g. Russia), overall Google is undoubtedly number one.

The world however is full of companies which used to be massive, even dominant, but fell from grace. Remember the days when Novell dominated the server market? Or watch Blade Runner and look at the brand names used back then, firms so big that it was easy to believe the future would include them. Names such as Pan-Am.

So could Google too fall from grace? And if so how?

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Posted in Online politics and Op-eds | Tagged | 9 Comments
Mark Pack

Mainstream media catches up with concerns over Haringey Chief Exec Ita O’Donovan

By Mark Pack | Fri 13th March 2009 - 7:55 am

Evening Standard, 12 March 2009:

The head of the council at the centre of the Baby P scandal faces questions today over a series of other child protection failures.

Haringey chief executive Ita O’Donovan has held senior positions at three councils that were condemned for failing children so seriously that the Government was forced to intervene.

Dr O’Donovan has worked in authorities embroiled in some of the country’s most shocking child deaths. She has said she considered resigning over the Baby P tragedy but decided the council needed stability.

She was in charge of Stoke-on-Trent council when 15-year-old Gareth Myatt choked and died

…

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Posted in Local government and News | Tagged , and | Leave a comment
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