Edwin Loo

Opinion: The Elephant In The Room

By Edwin Loo | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 7:15 pm

There is something very wrong with the House of Lords- but it is nothing compared to the consequences of a botched attempt at reform under our ‘flexible’ constitution.

The recent outbreak of the ‘Peers-for-Hire’ scandal has led to renewed calls for ‘reform’ of the House of Lords – and from all sides of the political spectrum. Labour members would love to see a fully elected House of Lords, while Conservative members, despite their reservations, are now slowly heading in that direction. Both parties, however, seem to completely miss the point. And we as Liberal Democrats – as much as it seems …

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Posted in Op-eds and Parliament | Tagged and | 9 Comments
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Stephen Tall

LDV up-and-running again – help keep it that way!

By Stephen Tall | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 6:49 pm

Our apologies to LDV readers who’ve found themselves deprived of our company for the last couple of hours. As regulars will know, we do run into these occasional technical problems – normally it’s near the end of the month when our bandwidth limit’s been exceeded and we need to shove another 50p in the meter. This time we collapsed under the strain of search engine requests (as I understand it from our tech-wizard Ryan who genuinely does understand it).

Paul Walter over at his Liberal Burblings blog has helpfully posed the question ‘Should we have a whip round for LibDem …

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Alex Foster

CC all your email to Jacqui Smith Day

By Alex Foster | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 4:04 pm

The Government have plans to start a massive database recording every phone call you make, every email you send, and every text you remove the vowels from.  They have named this bizarre plan the Interception Modernisation Programme, which hardly sounds reassuring, and is still more concerning as the acronym IMP.

But just as the plan to exempt MPs from the FOI bill spurred an impressive new generation of campaigning via Twitter, the big mad database plan has prompted some novel forms of protest.

“CC your email to Jacqui Smith Day” is a group and a fan page on Facebook that …

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Posted in Big mad database and Online politics | Tagged , , , and | 2 Comments
Stephen Tall

David Heath ‘begs to move’

By Stephen Tall | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 2:52 pm

I flagged up last night that yesterday was the Lib Dems’ opposition day in the House of Commons, and that the party used it to stake out its stance on the two biggest topical matters of the moment – Vince Cable spoke of the recession, while Lib Dem shadow leader of the House David Heath advocated the need for constitutional reform to remedy Parliamentary standards. Here’s the motion he begged to move:

That this House believes that the United Kingdom needs and deserves a Parliament that is fit for purpose and free from the taint of partial interests; is

…

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Stephen Tall

Comment IsLinked@LDV: Vince Cable – This crisis must spur us to take on the tax avoiders

By Stephen Tall | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 2:19 pm

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog, Lib Dem deputy leader Vince Cable argues that the shocking scale of systematic corporate tax avoidance strikes a particularly ugly note in these straitened times. You can read it in full here, but here’s an excerpt:

How should the government tackle corporate tax-dodging? Tax simplification would help. There could be lower headline rates of corporation tax in return for eliminating the complex network of tax allowances which companies currently enjoy. It has been estimated that simplification alone could cut the headline rate by 5%. There is then less incentive for tax avoidance.

Beyond

…

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Posted in LibLink | Tagged and | 4 Comments
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The Voice

Lembit reveals all to the Mail

By The Voice | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 1:20 pm

After a year of reading about himself in the press, Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik has decided to open up to the Daily Mail about last year’s annus horribilis by writing an exclusive two-part feature article. The first part focuses on his relationship with Gabriela Irimia – here’s an excerpt:

Frankly, I had no expectation of anything romantic happening between us, although I must admit that I was secretly hopeful. When, two months later, we became more than just friends, cynics derided our alliance. To them it just had to be a stunt, after all I was 41 and she was

…

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Posted in News | Tagged | 12 Comments
Mark Pack

How to backup Twitter

By Mark Pack | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 12:10 pm

Why backup Twitter?

It’s very easy to end up behaving as if an internet service will always be there and always be working, at least reasonably. But that’s a risky proposition, especially for free services – as was demonstrated at the weekend when Google, of all people, managed to wreck all the searches done on their search engine because of one wrong character in one place. Or as the Greek dramatist Agathon put it, “It is probable that the improbable will sometimes happen.”

Twitter is a relatively small company, with a technical track record that isn’t the finest and without an …

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

Missing: one marked register

By Mark Pack | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 11:54 am

News via the Press Association:

The SNP demanded an inquiry after it emerged that a record of everyone who voted in last year’s Glenrothes by-election has gone missing.

The party had asked to see the marked registers from November’s crucial by-election – which resulted in a shock victory for Labour.

I’m not hugely surprised by this, as after the 2005 general election there were numerous complaints from people who tried to access the marked register for their constituency about the records being in a poor shape, delayed for long periods on in part missing. The rules then were that marked registers were …

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Posted in Election law and News | Tagged , , , and | 6 Comments
The Voice

The Future Shape of Capitalism – Vince Cable & Andrew Neil

By The Voice | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 11:00 am

21st Century Challenges is the flagship public engagement series at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). Their next event, and one possibly of particular interest to our readers who are within reach of London, will be ‘The Future Shape of Capitalism’, on 17 March 2009, 7pm at the Society’s headquarters in South Kensington.

An expert panel, including Vince Cable MP, writer and broadcaster Andrew Neil, and John Micklethwait, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist will discuss whether the current financial crisis and the downturn in the global economy will change the shape of capitalism as we know it today.

Tickets are £10 / £7 …

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Jonathan Fryer

Jonathan Fryer’s Diary of a Euro-candidate

By Jonathan Fryer | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 10:04 am

Saturday
Most of the day is spent at the Keynes Forum Policy Conference at LSE, at which one of the sessions is specifically about the European elections, or at least the interlinked campaign themes of the economy and the environment. Both Sharon Bowles (South East) and Fiona Hall (North East) are MEPs who know their briefs intimately, which is reassuring and underlines the value of electing people willing to specialise in specific fields. But through conversations during coffee breaks it becomes clear to me that local activists are really thirsting for simply-worded, bite-sized Euro-items they can just slot into their Focuses. …

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Mark Pack

Praise for Tom Brake’s use of Facebook

By Mark Pack | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 7:52 am

Praise for Tom Brake and how he uses Facebook to engage with his constituents in Carshalton and Wallington:

Tom Brake, LibDem MP for Carshalton and Wallington, uses Facebook. Not especially as an ordinary member, in terms of ordinary (mundane) status reports or poking or that sort of thing, but as an MP … This is a perfect example: Tom updates his Facebook friends on the weather reports and is thanked by five for doing so. It is part of the job of the modern day MP, but it also builds up a link between him and constituents, perhaps earns a degree

…

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Posted in Online politics | Tagged and | 2 Comments
Stephen Tall

And in non-snow related Parliamentary news …

By Stephen Tall | Mon 2nd February 2009 - 8:32 pm

As the whole of the south-east (y’know the bit the media lives in) Britain is brought to a grinding halt by the descent of some iced preciptation, rumour had it that the House of Parliament had also shut down for the day. And just think what chaos might have ensued then!

Fortunately, reports of its dearth proved to be exaggerated, and so today’s Lib Dem opposition day has proceeded as planned (though I concede the possibility it might have been slightly overshadowed by metereological events on the news):

(1) Government capital expenditure during the recession; (2) Standards of conduct in

…

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Posted in News and Parliament | Tagged , , and | 1 Comment
Benjamin Mathis

Opinion: Angry Union Men – whose fault are the Lincolnshire strikes?

By Benjamin Mathis | Mon 2nd February 2009 - 4:57 pm

As Britain stares down a 1970s-style Spring of Discontent, with the Credit Crunch now being supplemented by industrial strife and wildcat strikes, who is to blame for the crisis on the Humber, and how can it be resolved?

First of all, these workers have every right to feel angry. We all do. Like the rest of the country, they were told that ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, they were even promised ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, and yet here they are again, back to picketing and strikes. Now, that isn’t to say that companies like Total shouldn’t be able …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 11 Comments
Lynne Featherstone

Opinion: Civil liberties in a modern context

By Lynne Featherstone | Mon 2nd February 2009 - 12:41 pm

What does an innocent person have to fear?” That’s one of the most common arguments rolled out time and time again to justify chipping away at our freedoms. If you’re innocent why should you be worried if the government can do X, knows Y or stops Z?

The counter-arguments tend to be a mix of principle and pragmatism. Principled arguments around issues such as rights that we have as humans and the restrictions there should be on what governments can do. Pragmatic arguments such as the costs (e.g. spend money on ID cards or on police?), practicalities (e.g. what odds that …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , and | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

What planning applications are being made near where you live?

By Mark Pack | Mon 2nd February 2009 - 12:08 pm

This service has been around on a trial basis for a little while, but I’ve only just started using it myself: www.planningalerts.com

It’s pretty straight-forward: give your postcode and email address and in return you get news of planning applications by email. The email alerts look to me to be better than many offered by councils themselves, so this may also be a useful service for councillors and colleagues to promote to the public in their patch.

It covers 315 local authorities at the moment, and if your isn’t one of them then you can help add it to the …

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Posted in News | Tagged | 4 Comments
Stephen Tall

25 random things … about the Lib Dems

By Stephen Tall | Mon 2nd February 2009 - 11:40 am

As Facebook devotees will know, there’s currently a rather virulent meme afflicting all users, called self-explanatorily enough, 25 random things:

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

So far LDV’s Facebook page has escaped being tagged … but why let that stop us? So here goes with 25 random things about the Lib Dems:

1. The …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 2 Comments
Stephen Tall

Clegg set to spell out Lib Dem post-election demands

By Stephen Tall | Mon 2nd February 2009 - 10:10 am

There’s a rather remarkable feature in today’s Independent – a fair and balanced feature article highlighting Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s town hall tours. The first part focuses on what Nick’s learned from the process, and how he feels these Q&As have helped keep him grounded as leader:

The public meetings have convinced him that all politics is personal as well as local; people want to know what it will do for them. He is straight, not flashy, very good at connecting with people, and genuinely enjoys the town-hall circuit. “It’s good to know what people are thinking; sometimes you see

…

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Posted in News | Tagged , , , , and | 39 Comments
Mark Pack

What’s going to happen to UK property prices?

By Mark Pack | Mon 2nd February 2009 - 9:20 am

Here’s a bit of historical context: in the last major house price slump, prices peaked in the third quarter of 1989*, hit bottom in the first quarter of 1993 when they were 20% lower and did not rise back above the pre-slump peak again until the first quarter of 1998.

What would similar timescales mean for us this time round? Prices peaked in the third quarter of 2007, so that would mean them not hitting bottom until the first quarter of 2011 and not getting back to their pre-slump levels until the first quarter of 2016. In other words, not only …

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Posted in News | Tagged and | 5 Comments
Stephen Tall

Clegg condemns Brown’s ‘British jobs for British workers’ dog-whistle

By Stephen Tall | Mon 2nd February 2009 - 9:08 am

As wildcat strikers adopt Gordon Brown’s dog-whistle slogan of ‘British jobs for British workers’, the Lib Dem leadership has made clear that it sees no point in getting in to “a blame game” with other European workers.

Vince Cable, the party’s deputy leader, commented at the weekend:

We’ve got to be very careful – on the one hand we’ve got to listen to workers who are angry, we need to help them to find some way forward. But it would be very, very dangerous and foolish to fall into this beggar my neighbour game with people in one country

…

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Posted in Europe / International and News | Tagged , , and | 5 Comments
Stephen Tall

Top of the Blogs: The Golden Dozen #102

By Stephen Tall | Sun 1st February 2009 - 7:17 pm

Welcome to the 102nd of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (25th-31st January 2009), together with a hand-picked quintet, mostly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

This week’s crop have something of a by-election flavour – something to do, I suspect, with this week’s stunning crop of Lib Dem victories. As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down.

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Mark Pack

What’s Labour’s internet operation like?

By Mark Pack | Sun 1st February 2009 - 7:16 pm

Two reviews out today. One from Christine Bennett in The Observer:

Although a commitment to democratic engagement with the online public is now compulsory for any party official, LabourList’s fondness for joyless affirmations of party solidarity, along with official reports on the modern equivalent of tractor production and Draper’s corrections of perceived thought crimes, can easily make it appear, to visitors from the free world, to have less in common with Obama’s style of civic engagement than with Vladimir Putin’s…

On each new, Obama-inspired Labour website, there is a patch of nothing where a picture of the party leader should go. Up

…

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Posted in Online politics | Tagged , and | 1 Comment
Stephen Tall

LDV doesn’t do statporn, but if we did… (Jan ’09)

By Stephen Tall | Sun 1st February 2009 - 3:20 pm

… We’d say a big thank you to the 23,696 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in January, our second highest total ever, and a whopping 53% increase on a year ago.

Whether you’re a regular here, or an occasional ‘popper-by’, we’re delighted you looked in. And if you enjoy reading LDV, why not try writing for LDV?

* Google Analytics’ term: it broadly means people using over 23,000 different computers visited LDV at least once. Some people may be counted more than once (e.g. home and work computer),whilst some people may not be counted (e.g. two different …

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Mark Pack

What will the political fallout from the peers lobbying scandal be?

By Mark Pack | Sun 1st February 2009 - 1:03 pm

An intriguing report in today’s Sunday Times:

PEERS who avoid tax or have criminal convictions – such as Lord Archer and Lord Black – are to be expelled from the House of Lords in the wake of the lords for hire scandal.

The reforms are being drawn up by Jack Straw, the justice secretary, in an attempt to restore the Lords’ battered reputation after last weekend’s revelations in The Sunday Times. He plans to enact the legislation necessary to expel them before the general election…

Lord Ashcroft, the billionaire Tory donor, has repeatedly refused to confirm his tax status, while Lord Laidlaw,

…

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Posted in News and Parliament | Tagged , , , , , , , and | 3 Comments
Stephen Tall

A look back at the polls: January ’09

By Stephen Tall | Sun 1st February 2009 - 12:20 pm

We tend not to be too poll-obsessed here at LDV – of course we look at them, as do all other politico-geeks, but viewed in isolation no one poll will tell you very much beyond what you want to read into it. Looked at over a reasonable time-span and, if there are enough polls, you can see some trends.

Here, in chronological order, are the results of the eight polls published in January:

Tories 41%, Labour 34%, Lib Dems 15% – YouGov/The Sun (9 Jan)
Tories 43%, Labour 33%, Lib Dems 15% – Populus/The Times

…

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Posted in Op-eds and Polls | Tagged , , , , and | 5 Comments
Alex Foster

Unforseen circumstances

By Alex Foster | Sun 1st February 2009 - 11:56 am

Wall Street bankers in New York are getting much smaller bonuses this year than last year.

That’s a good thing, right?  In view of the financial apocalypse, they deserve less.

Only thing is, New York City and New York State made a lot of money out of taxing those bonuses, and between them they are looking at over $1bn less money to spend on everything that city and state government needed to pay for. 

It’s a tough time for local government cuts.

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The Voice

Forthcoming PPC selections

By The Voice | Sun 1st February 2009 - 9:10 am

The Lib Dems 4 Parliament site brings news that there are seven selections closing during February:

DURHAM NORTH – PPC (6th Feb 2009).

DURHAM NORTH WEST – PPC (6th Feb 2009).

TYNEMOUTH – PPC (14th Feb 2009).

NORTH TYNESIDE – PPC (14th Feb 2009).

BRENT NORTH – PPC (20th Feb 2009).

BLAYDON – PPC (21st Feb 2009).

BEACONSFIELD – PPC (27th Feb 2009).

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Alex Foster

New from US campaigning

By Alex Foster | Sat 31st January 2009 - 7:30 pm

As we covered at the time, a feature of US elections is referendums on social issues, and an important one that happened last year was California’s Proposition 8.  Californian courts had ruled that marriage should be available to gay couples. Voters were asked whether they wished to change the constitution to revert to the status ante quo and remove marriage as an option for homosexuals.

The campaign was hard fought and tons of money was raised on each side.  Donations over a $100 had to be registered with records made publicly available.   During the campaign, there was some …

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Mark Pack

Is this what “making government work better” means?

By Mark Pack | Sat 31st January 2009 - 4:43 pm

The Cabinet Office says its overarching purpose is “making government work better”. Me? I’d change it to “making the Cabinet Office work better” or even “making the Cabinet Office reply to correspondence from the public, now and again, pretty please”.

As you may have guessed, I’ve been trying to communicate with them…

First I tried an email through their website, back in September. No response. Oh well, no technology is perfect I thought. Let’s be fair and given them another try. Another website submission in October. No response. Back to old-fashioned communications then, and a letter in December. No response again.

So …

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Posted in News | 2 Comments
Stephen Tall

See if you can spot the flaw in The Scotsman’s reasoning

By Stephen Tall | Sat 31st January 2009 - 10:45 am

LDV reported this week on the Scottish Lib Dems’ decision to open talks with the SNP, following the casting vote rejection by the Holyrood parliament of the nationalists’ £33bn budget. In its budget analysis, The Scotsman poses the question, Why did the Lib Dems change their tune?

The article begins by mounting a fierce attack on the Scottish Lib Dems for ditching their principles:

Why had the party, which had adhered to its principle of a 2p cut in income tax throughout the process, suddenly thrown it all away to offer the SNP its support in getting the Budget through?

…

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Posted in News and Scotland | Tagged , and | 3 Comments
Stephen Tall

Henry Porter: “Labour is about as conservative as my grandmother”

By Stephen Tall | Sat 31st January 2009 - 10:26 am

The question of which political party might have the best claim to the title of the most progressive force in British politics has been much debated here on the pages of LDV recently – Alix Mortimer posed the question, Yes, but is it progressive?, Mark Pack enquired into the motivation of Progressive London here, and I questioned the Tories’ attempt to reclaim the word here.

In his Guardian blog today, Henry Porter surveys the progressive scene – here are his judgements:

The Tories:

It is true that Conservatives have said they will scrap both the third runway and ID

…

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