After a slightly slow start, a wide range of questions have now been asked in the online hustings at forum.libdems.org.uk (open to party members only) with many answers also already appearing from both Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne.
Meanwhile, over on YouTube yesterday’s film launching the party’s YouTube hustings is comfortably on course to be the party’s most popular film ever on YouTube and has already resulted in ten people filming themselves and submitting their questions:
Last week Simon Hughes and I spent an hour and a half or so talking with a group of 20 students at South Bank University
I was so struck by how alienated they all felt from political discussion, and from the political classes. The idea of getting involved in politics had never even occurred to most of them – though I think we managed to change that. Two of them told us they’d be joining the party that afternoon!
You can watch the video here:
If our party is to reach out beyond the narrow debates of Westminster, and become the mass …
Congratulations to Brian Paddick for being selected as the Liberal Democrat London Mayor candidate, winning 73% of the first preference votes. The party’s website has the story as does the BBC.
PS: The Wimbledon Guardian reports the story under the intriguing headline, ‘Former Gay Copper Picked For Lib Dems’. We knew Brian had retired from the police, but…
There are eight hustings taking place across the country in which Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg will get to make their case to Lib Dem members. But there are other opportunities to see the candidate put through their paces.
On TV
Thursday, 15th November (BBC1, 10.35 pm): Question Time Lib Dem leadership special. This is, without doubt, the biggie. The QT audience might only amount to a couple of million, but it’s a fair bet that a high proportion of party members will vote according to their perception of how the candidates performed here.
Sunday, 18th November (BBC1, 12 noon): …
Last month, David Cameron went to great obfuscatory pains to refuse to give a straight answer to journalists asking if the Tory party would offer a post-ratification referendum on the EU Reform Treaty if they found themselves in government – a position not helped by a member of his shadow cabinet promising “absolutely” that the Tories would.
Now it’s Dave’s own shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, who’s broken ranks with his leader in today’s Commons debate on the Queen’s Speech – as the BBC’s Nick Robinson notes on his blog:
The Shadow Foreign Secretary went through the usual list
…
Chris Rennard, the Liberal Democrat Chief Executive, revealed today that the party will be running a YouTube hustings as part of the leadership election:
You can submit your own clips of yourself asking a question on the YouTube page.
Well, well, here’s a puzzle.
In response to my previous blog posting about the Labour councillor convicted of smearing her opponent, Joanne made numerous comments defending Miranda Grell, including this one:
Rubbish. I have read the transcript of the trial and Grell said during that trial that she thought Mr Smith’s partner was 19 because she had seen him with her own eyes and that is the age he looks. She said nothing about knowing or not not knowing about him being 39. Read the transcript before sounding off.
and also:
Read the transcript.
not to mention:
I have read the transcript
and then:
I have just had
…
Five weeks’ today, the Liberal Democrats will be announcing who is to be the next leader of the party: Nick Clegg or Chris Huhne. One of the first jobs for whoever is the victor is to decide who should be in their shadow cabinet – never an easy task.
First, you have to reward those who’ve backed your campaign. Then you have to bend over backwards to be nice to the runner-up against whom you’ve been sparring for two months. And then you have to prove your unifying credentials by giving some key posts to those MPs who didn’t back you. …
Writing about Michael Ashcroft, Iain said:
Not a single story has actually alleged any wrongdoing. Everything has been duly declared.
Now, that’s a rather careless choice of words. Why? Well, because Ashcroft gave money to the Conservative Party in North Norfolk whilst Iain was their candidate, and the party broke the law by failing to declare it – as the Electoral Commission subsequently found out and reprimanded them for. Not quite all duly declared Iain 🙂
Senior Returning Officer Jonathan Davies published some of these figures in a comment thread, but as they’re likely to be of some interest, here they are with some extra detail:
Eastern 42.7% (-1.6% on last time)
East Midlands 49.1 (+1.9)
London 50.9 (+2.3)
North East 63.9 (-2.7)
North West 57.9 (-0.7)
South East 45.4 (-3.8)
South West 50.3 (+6.4)
West Midlands 62.4 (+6.2)
Yorkshire & the Humber 49.4 (+3.2)
Average 52.4 (+0.9)
Welcome to the 38th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (4th – 10th November), together with a hand-picked quintet you might otherwise have missed.
It’s no surprise that the Clegg-Huhne leadership race is dominating the blogs. It’s perhaps also not surprising that those postings which focus on the more negative aspects of the campaign are the ones garnering the most attention. And so it is this week:
Thanks to Stephen and the Lib Dem Voice editors for this chance to speak to members. The blogosphere has certainly been buzzing, and I’ve enjoyed reading a lot of posts and comments, as well as having the pleasure to meet Millennium Elephant and his friends last week.
I thought I’d use this first post to show you my manifesto launch, because its theme summed up my vision for our party. In the video below, you’ll see why I think we must be a party offering a revolution in politics not just a change of faces in the cabinet.
You can read …
The Campaign Team has set out a “Clegg So Far” briefing to be circulated on Monday to journalists – but Lib Dem Voice is getting a first look.
Manufacturing
In a Radio 5 Live hustings where Nick was the favourite candidate for all four callers he championed the cause of British manufacturing. Listen again.
Affordable Housing
Speaking at a Cumbrian hill farm, Nick outlined proposals to use vacant buildings in rural areas, especially on farms, to develop new affordable housing.
Ambition
Having challenged the party to be bold and ambitious in his declaration statement, Nick went further, pledging to …
In the next few weeks, we’re delighted to welcome both Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne to Lib Dem Voice as twice-weekly guest contributors. Both Nick and Chris will be given a blank page of 500 words (or multimedia we can handle!) to address party members reading this site.
The first contributions will be today, with regular doses every Tuesday and each weekend. Good luck to both candidates!
Tomorrow the Liberal Democrats will table an amendment to the Government’s parliamentary motion proposing the Queen’s Speech. Our amendment calls for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.
This does not signal a change in our party’s attitude towards the Europe. We remain constructively pro-European, but we see this referendum as an opportunity to have a proper debate about the future of Britain’s relationship with the EU.
Over thirty five years as a member state, we have seen the EU widen both its membership and share sovereignty from Mrs Thatcher’s Single European Act through to a succession of …
The party’s just published the results of the selections for our European Parliament election candidates in England. More details over on the main Liberal Democrat website.
Ever missed seeing a Liberal Democrat on Question Time, or a party political broadcast, or some other media appearance because you didn’t know about it in advance?
Courtesy of Flock Together, you can put those days behind you. It includes a service to advertise in advance major appearances in the media by Liberal Democrat MPs and other senior figures.
There are three different ways you can tap into this information:
…
Another day, another Liberal Democrat MP in the Daily Mail. Following Jo Swinson’s appearance on the issue of (un)equal pay for women, this time it is Steve Webb:
Tens of thousands of women who gave up work to raise children are in line for a pension windfall of around £3,000.
The Government has caved in to demands to close a loophole which meant stay-at-home mothers missed out on credits that would boost their pensions.
Ministers have pledged to trawl through masses of social security records dating back to the 1970s to pinpoint how many women are owed money…
Liberal Democrat MP Steve Webb,
…
The Voice will be publishing an exclusive piece from acting party leader Vince Cable at 10:30am on Sunday. From the whispers we hear, it will contain some exciting news that will get many people debating…
Nick Clegg has been interviewed by Steve Richards for this Sunday’s GMTV, as Chris Huhne was last week.
I’ve been sent the full transcript, and it looks, on first reading, like the first real stumble by Nick in his campaign so far. Judge for yourselves below, as I’ve filleted some of the key passages. Of course, what won’t come across when you read it is Nick’s emphasis or body language – which might make his meaning clearer, and his performance more impressive. After all, politicians are judged not just by what they say, but also how they say it.
The real question, as James Graham has already noted in his preview, is why Nick didn’t have a much clearer answer ready for the obvious question, ‘How do you pay for your pupil premium?’ Because ‘Er, yes, there’s a black hole’ just ain’t good enough.
Other issues covered below include:
– whether he was attacking Chris Huhne by saying the party needed to communicate better its ‘green tax switch’ proposals;
– whether the campaign has got nasty; and
– is he going to win the contest?
Also covered in the full interview – this Sunday, 9 am – are questions to Nick about the Government’s proposals for increasing the number of days suspects can be detained without charge, and on a referendum for the European Reform Treaty.
Interview transcript extracts follow:
Commenting on the decision today to grant a judicial review of the dropping of the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the Al-Yamamah arms deal, Liberal Democrat Acting Leader, Vince Cable MP said:
“I am delighted that this is going to get a full hearing in the High Court.
“It is in the public interest to fully investigate the circumstances surrounding the dropping of this important investigation.
“It appears that the judiciary is more open than the British Government.”
This is the party’s official news release.
This morning PoliticalBetting.com held an online hustings with Nick Clegg, which you can read here.
(One took place with Chris Huhne last Sunday – you can read it here).
Boris Johnson: “A senior source inside CCHQ has approached ConservativeHome to warn of “worrying drift” within the Boris Johnson campaign.” (ConservativeHome)
Lord Ashcroft: “Lord Ashcroft, the multimillionaire bank-rolling the Conservatives’ controversial campaign in marginal constituencies, was last night coming under increasing pressure to explain whether he has honoured pledges, made before he received his peerage, that he would return to the UK and pay income tax.” (Guardian)
David Lee: “The Mayor of Chelmsford has been suspended from his party after a police investigation into pornography.” (BBC)
The Times’s leading political commentator analyses the Lib Dem leadership race to date here. Well worth reading in full here, but simply for the sake of shameless self-promotion, here’s the bit which name-checks Lib Dem Voice:
Mr Huhne starts from having done well last year, though neither he nor Mr Clegg is well known among less-active Lib Dem members, the armchair voters. The choice is blurred by their similarities (both have foreign wives, were MEPs and went to public school and Oxbridge) and on policy. Attempts to claim big differences smack of pedantry and mean nothing to most voters. …
The
…
There’s been a noticeable burst of new Liberal Democrat bloggers in the last few weeks, possibly driven in part by the leadership contest, including David Boyle, Charlotte Gore, “Harold Muckle“, Alix Mortimer, Bernard Salmon and Andrew Tate.
So now seems a good time to remind Lib Dem bloggers about some of the tools and widgets the party has available – including the Liberal Democrat campaign buttons, the Lib Dem TV feed and an easy way to let people sign up as party supporters.
Details of them all are on the party website. You don’t need any …
Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne have given interviews to ePolitix which, amongst other matters, covered their views on how to handle a hung Parliament:
Asked about what their ‘red lines’ would be on forming a coalition with either the Conservatives or Labour, they set out differing approaches.
Whilst Huhne said electoral reform was the key to “partnership politics”, Clegg said singling out any conditions would be “extremely ill-advised”.
Huhne said: “If other parties want to talk about partnership politics, about going into a longer-term relationship, then they have to be on the wavelength that allows that to happen.
“If you look
…
Acting Lib Dem leader Vince Cable is one of the panellists on tonight’s edition of Question Time (broadcast on BBC1 and online from 10.35 pm GMT).
He’ll be alongside Home Office minister Tony McNulty, former Tory deputy leader Lord Heseltine, the British-Egyptian novelist and political commentator Ahdaf Soueif, and the journalist and writer Douglas Murray.
If you’re watching, and want to sound-off, please feel free to use the comments thread.
Congratulations to Lib Dem MP for Colchester – aka ‘Bingo’ Bob Russell – for breaking what is believed to be a Parliamentary record. For the sixth year running he has managed to table the first Commons motion of the new parliamentary year.
How has he achieved this feat? By spending 15 hours camped outside the office which deals with requests, accompanied only by a sleeping bag, sandwiches, biscuits and drinks.
The BBC website reports Bob saying:
“I did sleep, sort of dozed on and off… I know that the minute I ease up someone else will ease in, so I
…
The launch of Liberal Conspiracy has generated a fair amount of discussion over whether it’s really about liberalism (the founding document only refers to the Labour party, only one Lib Dem blogger was at the launch etc) or rather just a collection of terribly nice left of centre middle class moderates.
Today’s post about equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome (which seems to be one of the issues coming up in the Liberal Democrat leadership debate) rather neatly highlights the question over Liberal Conspiracy: the “left” features seven times in the piece, with just one passing …
Miranda Grell, the Labour candidate who was convicted of smearing a political opponent as a paedophile, is back in the news.
She’s appealing the guilty verdict, and Labour supporters are mostly (though with a few exceptions) using the pending appeal to argue that, “oh, nothing’s been proved yet, she’s really a lovely person, all will come right on appeal”.
(Do you notice the irony here by the way? Labour is also the party that is oh so keen for people who haven’t been convicted of any offence to be locked up, given detention orders or have their DNA records kept by …
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