Iain Dale, bless his cotton socks, has kindly brought The Voice’s attention to his blog posting yesterday, Top Ten Signs You Are About to Defect to the Lib Dems. Would LDV readers care to reciprocate in a suitably light-hearted manner, and come up with some Signs You Are About to Defect to the Tories?
Your suggestions below, please, ladies and gentleman…
Thank you to everyone who emailed in nominations for this year’s Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year awards. The judges (Kate Bevan, Rob Blackie, Ryan Cullen, Lynne Featherstone, James Graham, me, Sunny Hundal, Mark Pack and Stephen Tall) have pored over around 80 nominated blogs to whittle them down to the shortlists below.
The shortlists do, of course, represent the subjective opinions of the judges, so congratulations if you’ve been shortlisted but don’t worry if you haven’t – as always, the standards were high and there were tough decisions to make. The awards are a bit of fun that we hope will highlight some of the best examples of Liberal Democrat blogging and introduce you to some blogs you might not have read before.
I know you’re on tenterhooks, but assuming you haven’t skipped this bit already I have three announcements before we proceed.
The first is a reminder that the winner of the Best non-Liberal Democrat politics blog category will be decided by a public vote here on Liberal Democrat Voice, so please have a read of the nominated blogs and then head on over to the sidebar or to the bottom of this post to cast your vote.
Secondly, a plug for the awards ceremony itself. If you’re coming to party conference in Bournemouth, do head along to Old Harry’s Bar in the Marriott Highcliff Hotel from 9.45pm on Saturday. They’ll be refreshments on arrival (thanks to soon-to-be-announced sponsors), so come early!
Finally, I’m very pleased to announce that, with the kind agreement of Tim’s widow, Baroness Garden, the award for the best blog by a Liberal Democrat holding public office will from now on be known as The Tim Garden Award, in honour of Lord Garden, a blogger for many years, who died last year.
Without further ado, here are the shortlists.
I think we may have mentioned once or twice already that we have the odd event or two at conference.
Just to help you keep us in your mind, LDV’s resident PagePlus Monkey has now produced a handy flyer for you to print out and put with your conference papers before heading down to Bournemouth on Friday night or Saturday morning – or even making a special trip just to drink with us on Monday evening.
The flyer even includes a helpful map showing the venue of our chosen pub in relation to the conference centre, thanks to our friends …
Nick Clegg’s pledge to go even further than the current Lib Dem commitment to cut the basic rate of income tax by 4p was the main topic for his interview on BBC Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour on Sunday night. You can listen to it here, and read the views of Lib Dem bloggers Linda Jack and James Graham here and here.
All this week, Lib Dem Voice will be publishing the results of our September survey of party members conducted through Liberty Research via our private members’ forum. This is the second of our monthly surveys – if you have ideas for future survey questions, please email me at [email protected].
We began by asking about the party presidency. Every two years, the Lib Dem party membership has the opportunity to elect a Party President, and Simon Hughes MP has been party president since 2004. His term of office ends this year, and a ballot will take place this autumn to elect his successor.
LDV asked: What do you think the main role of the President should be?
Here’s how you rated the four options on offer:
* To become a known face in the media representing the Lib Dem position on the TV and radio news. 12.5%
* To tour the country visiting constituency parties, listening to members, and representing their views to the Parliamentary party. 45.8%
* To become a senior behind-the-scenes figure, chairing key policy and organisation committees, balancing the wishes of the membership and the leadership. 33.3%
* To lead the party’s fundraising among the membership and wealthy supporters, ensuring the party is on the best possible election footing. 8.3%
Of course none of the options are mutually exclusive, and doubtless many members will be looking to the presidential candidates to spell out how they will achieve all four of them (and more) if elected. But it was interesting to note that the role felt most fitting for the president should be to ‘rally the troops’ up and down the country; though the desire of members to see the president full involved with policy formulation was not far behind. Neither the PR nor the fundraising aspects to the job were felt by members in this survey to be of prime importance.
LDV then asked: How effective do you think Simon has been as party president?
Here’s what you told us:
Very effective: 9.4%
Quite effective: 15.6%
Okay: 34.4%
Quite ineffective: 27.1%
Very ineffective: 13.5%
Simon’s tenure as Lib Dem president has attracted a fair amount of critical muttering around the blogosphere, so he may be reasonably gratified to discover that 59% of LDV members (who are a pretty hard-nosed bunch) rated his performance as okay or better. Of course, that still leaves 41% who felt his performance had been ineffective to one degree or another.
To drill-down a little further LDV then asked: What do you think has been Simon’s greatest achievement or failure during his time as party president?
Some 60% of those who completed the survey chose to answer this. Most were critical, chiefly of Simon’s unfulfilled pledge to double the Lib Dem membership – though events largely beyond his control haven’t exactly assisted him for the past three years. Here’s some of what you said:
Colin Ross has the story, from today’s Sunday Mirror:
According to the Sunday Mirror two Wolverhampton Conservative Councillors – Councillor Carol Bourne and Councillor David Bourne are running a brothel at their house.
I am not prude and I don’t really care what people get up to in their sex lives but I do seem to recall hearing at least of these Councillors moralising on what other people should be doing and not doing.
Below is the article, I believe both will be resigning and their will be two by-elections.
Read the rest of
…
From The Observer:
A Prime Minister cannot be on perpetual probation. That is a recipe for the government to carry on fragmenting, for his reputation to continue to disintegrate and for the Conservatives to cement their huge poll lead. It is evident what the Labour party should do for the good of its own political health. It ought to make a collective decision either to get rid of Gordon Brown or to rally around him. But Labour can’t do either and why that is so has become evident from the events of the past few days.
The Prime Minister does not
…
There’s a rather remarkable turnaround from former top Tory Michael Portillo in his column in today’s Sunday Times:
Labour – and the Conservatives – have manoeuvred themselves into the stance of opposing taxation (at local level at least) based on ability to pay. It is not an easy argument to sustain. Salmond has effortlessly cornered his opponents and could be just a few moves from checkmate. … His proposal cuts away at Labour support because it is redistributive towards poorer voters. However, the Tories need to watch out, too, because it would also help those widows in large houses, the
…
In an interview with the Telegraph published today Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg makes clear that the 4p basic rate income tax cut the party has already announced is just the start:
Mr Clegg has announced that he will cut £20 billion from public spending, which will be ploughed into tax cuts for middle earners. “We are now in a process of identifying what I believe will be the most radical package of tax- cutting measures for people on middle incomes,” he said. “We will bear down on the ballooning government budgets. Vince Cable and I have been working over
…
The spectre of Michael Brown – currently on the run ahead of a fraud trial due to begin this month – and his £2.4m donation to the Lib Dems in 2005 returns to the headlines today, with news from The Observer that Lib Dems face court over funding:
The Liberal Democrats are facing an embarrassing High Court battle with a lawyer who says that the party wrongly accepted £632,000 of his money as part of a donation. Robert Mann, 60, claims that the party failed to carry out adequate checks on the money which was received as part of a
…
Last night, a post from Stephen about our current survey degenerated in the comments to a rather ill-tempered argument about whether Clegg should be proposing now to cut taxes in general when he didn’t mention that he wanted to when standing for the leadership.
All that aside, the key interesting thing the comments generated from my point of view was the following list of times when Lib Dem leaders wanted one thing and Conference sent them packing.
1994 – party debates motion on setting up a Royal Commission to review drugs policy. Motion carried, despite clear steer from leadership. Ashdown storms
…
It’s a well-established pattern that during this Parliament internet pollster YouGov consistently gives the Liberal Democrats lower levels of support than other pollsters (as, for example, I previously blogged about on this site).
Looking at the details of polls published so far this year, this pattern remains but there is also an interesting detail when it comes to male versus female voters.
YouGov, MORI and ComRes are the three of the main polling companies who also provide a gender breakdown of party levels of support using the same methodology as for their headline voting question.
Comparing the results they find for each …
All rather bizarre (charity not noticing that it was making a political donation, Labour Party not noticing that it was taking money from a charity):
Labour was embroiled in a fresh row over donations last night after it was forced to pay back £15,000 to a children’s charity which illegally donated cash to the party.
Catz Club, which has received lottery money to run breakfast and after-school clubs across Britain, paid the money to attend Labour’s star-studded fundraising sports dinner this summer. But it was forced to ask for the money back after the Conservatives uncovered the donation and told the Charity
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If you are a registered member of the Liberal Democrat Voice forum – and any paid-up party member is welcome to join – then you have one last opportunity to make your views known on a range of current issues in our September members’ survey; including your first chance to say who you want to be elected party president.
It should take no longer than 5-10 minutes to fill in. To complete the survey simply log in to the members’ forum, and click on the topic ‘LDV MEMBERS’ SURVEY: SEPT. 2008′ under the General category. The results will …
According to the Independent’s Pandora column:
“I’m back in business,” announces Lembit Opik. “I’m definitely going to stand for president of the Liberal Democrats. It’s the one job I’ve always wanted.” … With the campaign set to begin at the party conference, the Montgomeryshire MP’s only current rival for the post, which Simon Hughes vacates in November, is Baroness Ros Scott. And Opik is sure he can win. “I’ve got to be regarded as the odds-on favourite,” he insists. “I came runner-up last time.” …
“Who are these people saying I’m not going to stand?” he retorts. “People used to say
…
Imagine you asked ten friends living in different parts of the country each to toss a coin twenty times and tell you how many times it came up tails. Perhaps it is your friend in Scotland who gets the most tails. Would you therefore conclude there was something special and different about the results of coin tosses in Scotland from the rest of the UK? Of course not; the result was just the luck of the draw and if you did it again, it may very well be another part of the country that came top with the most tails. …
The policy motion “Respect, Consent and Personal Data” is the culmination of many months’ work from Sue Miller, Tim Razzall and a number of other Lib Dem Lords including myself to address the increasing intrusion by government, public and private organisations into our privacy. At the core of Liberal Democrat philosophy is a fundamental belief in the freedom of the individual, and the importance of strengthening and upholding fundamental rights. In recent years we’ve protested as the government introduced more and more measures to collect and store more and more information about individuals, such as the extending the remit of …
Do you have a big idea that you think could improve democracy in the UK?
This opportunity to shine is open to any Liberal Democrat party member attending the party’s autumn conference. Give your proposal a title of not more than eight words, and summarise it in fewer than 30. (You can provide more detail if you wish, but we won’t be able to fit it on the ballot paper to select the ideas that get pitched to the panel).
Then submit your idea either here in the comments field, or by …
On the streets of West Wales there are a lot of people disaffected with New Labour. Indeed, that’s something that people like to emphasise to me: the ‘New’ part. Whether people hark back to a Labour under Attlee or Wilson., I’m not sure, but I catch their drift.
Maybe there will be a Tory government after the next general election, or maybe not. No-one knows for sure. But one thing of which I’m certain is that the Tories will not make much headway here in Wales. Only in the pockets of Monmouth, South Pembrokeshire and Clywd West are they strong, together …
This from today’s Scotsman:
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, yesterday gave his blessing to a deal with the SNP that could mean local income tax being introduced in Scotland. He said he wanted the party north of the Border to come to an agreement with the Scottish Government because he hoped a local income tax would be introduced and the council tax abolished.
Alex Salmond, the First Minister, announced earlier this week that he was going to push ahead with plans to introduce a local income tax, set centrally at 3p in the pound, and a bill would be published
…
Via the BBC:
Annual fitness tests for police and an end to the “job-for-life” culture are among the proposals in a Lib Dem policy document on fighting crime.
Home Affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said more officers were needed on the streets to catch criminals.
But he said there also needed to be an urgent review of working practices to make it easier to sack those who could not do their job properly.
The party said it would also jail fewer criminals for minor offences.
And it would give police authorities the power to set their
…
The new conventional wisdom at Westminster is that the Conservatives are heading for an overall majority at the next election, and that the Liberal Democrats are therefore bound to take a pounding. On this view, the Lib Dems’ fortunes are inextricably linked with Labour and we are supposed to lose seats as we did when the Conservatives won in 1951, 1970 and 1979.
I don’t believe a word of it. After each Liberal Democrat advance – in 1997, 2001 and now 2005 – the commentariat has written our obituary. But we went on to increase our seats at the …
This is the fortnight of lists and awards in the political blogosphere. Not only has Iain Dale produced his annual little list, but the Lib Dem Blog of the Year awards are once again upon us. All of which may seem a little self-indulgent. And it probably is. But there’s a serious point to blogging, and one which is of unique relevance to the Lib Dems.
All the main national newspapers employ commentators who write regularly on politics. But cast your eyes down the lists of columnists in the serious press and you will see something missing: a …
As you may remember, we’re running a few events at conference – we first blogged about them here.
Well now, thanks to the miracle of Facebook, you can let us know whether you’re coming. Two of our events, Liberal Drinks and the Blog Award Ceremony now have funky event pages on Facebook, all neatly populated with hundreds of non-attending invitees, fancy pictures nicked from Stock Exchange.
Conference itself has a Facebook event too, and many individual associations are setting up events for their fringes, like this Delga AGM.
If you’d like to highlight an event at …
A quick reminder to LDV readers that Christopher Bones, chair of the Party Reform Commission, has agreed to answer questions submitted by LDV readers in our members’ forum. To put your question to him, please access the LDV members’ forum, and use the thread headed BONES COMMISSION ON PARTY REFORM – ask your questions here! in the Party Organisation section.
Lib Dem Voice has, we notice, come in 15th in Iain Dale’s / Total Politics list of top 100 blogs. More important for the Lib Dem blogosphere is the fact that all the top 10 Lib Dem blogs made it into the top 100, and a further 11 into the top 200.
But you won’t be surprised that the Voice’s attention was grabbed by this prediction from Mr Dale that in the next year:
LibDem Voice will receive a cash injection similar to LabourHome from a rich LibDem donor
I’m sitting by my BlackBerry now, just waiting for it to light …
Via Reuters:
“We will go into the next election with not just tax cuts for people on low and middle incomes, but net tax cuts overall, and that is a big shift for the party,” said LibDem MP and campaigns chief Edward Davey.
He said the party would seek to reallocate 20 billion pounds of public spending if elected to meet LibDem priorities, with any surplus passed on as tax cuts, under proposals to be considered by members at their Bournemouth conference.
Since the party’s creation in the late 1980s it has argued for consistent or rising government spending.
But Davey said spending
…
Peace at the top of the Labour party lasted a month. Indeed, it had almost begun to seem as if Labour’s leadership crisis in July – the disastrous Glasgow East by-election defeat, David Miliband’s manoeuvrings – had been a figment of the mass imagination of the political commentariat.
But first Alastair Darling went blisteringly off-message, declaring the UK was facing the worst economic crisis in 60 years. And now Charles Clarke has encored his over-familiar bull-in-a-china-shop routine with an acerbic (and rather peculiar) paean to ‘Blairism’ in the New Statesman which concludes with a less-than-veiled threat:
This past week, Alistair
…
At the beginning of the year Nick Clegg as Leader, Simon Hughes as Party President, and Chris Rennard as Chief Executive asked me and my colleagues, Cllr Duncan Greenland, Kate Parminter and Paul Burstow MP, to produce a report into how the Liberal Democrats’ internal organisation could be built upon to double our number of MPs over the next two general elections. I was delighted to have this opportunity to serve the party, which I have supported for nearly 30 years, in this way. The process has been hard work, frustrating at times, surprising – but in the end rewarding.
All conference delegates should have received the executive summary of our work. An electronic version of both the executive summary and the full report, which runs to over 90 pages, will be available later today for party members in the members-only section of Liberal Democrat Voice. There will be an email from the Party President going out to all members later this week drawing their attention to our work as well as a number of articles in this week’s Lib Dem News.
I know that many Liberal Democrat bloggers, including Stephen Tall here on Lib Dem Voice, have expressed some concerns about how the distribution of the report has been handled. I understand and to some extent share those concerns. Communication in these circumstances is a problem straight out of the management textbooks, and unlike the answers in the textbooks I have to take issue with those of you out there who believe there is one right way of doing things.
Whilst the way we organise decision making and at times shroud it in unnecessary mystery is an area we take on in our report and address through some very direct proposals for streamlining and opening up party structures and processes, there was a very real dilemma in the way we rolled out the full report. The problem with resolving a dilemma is that, whatever you do, some people are not going to be happy and I take accountability for the decisions made on communication given the structures and processes we employ today.
Under our current setup we felt it would be wrong for affected party bodies and committees, and indeed potentially affected individuals, to read about our proposals for their futures at the same time as the mass of the party membership. Had we done this we would have faced equally powerful criticism from those who believe that the democratically elected bodies that run the party should be communicated to and consulted with first.
We as a Commission tried to ensure that we spoke to those who would be most affected by our proposals first, and explain our thinking to them and engage in dialogue with them – a process which is currently ongoing with, amongst others, the Federal Executive and the English Council Executive. Additionally we have had to present to the Federal Conference Committee, to the parliamentary parties in Westminster, and (rightly) to staff, many of whose roles are affected by the review. We have still to hold reviews with the party in Scotland and Wales, and no doubt there will be others along the way who want their say.
In addition we have the environmental dilemma of printing off a 90-plus page full report for every conference delegate or, as we eventually decided, to agree a shorter executive summary and issue the full report online, drawing as much attention to it as possible through channels such as LDV, Lib Dem News and others.
Finally, there was the issue of timing the release of the full report: August, when everyone is away on holiday, or wait till the first week of September when Lib Dem News re-starts, and we can get as much publicity for it as possible.
This may sound defensive – it isn’t meant to be: it is an explanation of the real dilemmas that face any leadership in how to communicate proposals for change. It is a shame that for a small minority the process of communication has led to entirely inaccurate speculations about motivations, hidden agendas and internal politics.
However, I can appreciate that from the outside the to-ing fro-ing between various opaque party committees and the communication dilemmas on timing may have looked somewhat unaccountable and undemocratic. Whilst the communication issues are real and sensitivities need managing in any organization, the to-ing and fro-ing does need challenging and changed for the better.
I believe that the whole process therefore made it clear that we a need a much more transparent and accountable decision making process for issues such as this report. And that, happily, is precisely what this report is proposing.
In coming to our conclusions we heard from hundreds of party members and local parties, spoke to many leading figures in the party with a diverse range of experience and knowledge and consulted widely with party bodies and committees. We received a great response from the party as a whole, which was characterised by consistency in the issues being raised.
There’s still time to register for federal conference in Bournemouth – but if you really can’t go, you can still participate in some of the sessions. For the four Q&A sessions, featuring party spokespeople and outside commentators, questions are welcome from any party member:
Sunday 14th September, 14.50 – 15.35: Q&A session with Nick Clegg, Leader of the Liberal Democrats.
Monday 15th September, 16.20 – 17.20: Q&A session on environmental policy, with a panel comprising Steve Webb MP (Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment), Chris Davies MEP (Environment spokesperson, European Parliament), Dorothy Thornhill (Mayor of Watford) and Jonathon Porritt (Chair, UK, …
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