The Voice

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #262

By The Voice | Sun 26th February 2012 - 7:00 pm

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 262nd weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the seven most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (19-25 February, 2012), together with a hand-picked quintet, normally courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox — just click here — ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.

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

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Stephen Tall

In other news… London PPBs, Clegg paint attack, Turing pardon latest, Darlington Lib Dem leader barred

By Stephen Tall | Sun 26th February 2012 - 5:35 pm

Here’s a round-up of stories we haven’t had time to cover on the site this past week…

  • Lib Dems fight reduction of their party political broadcasts in London (Guardian)

    • Provisional plans being drawn up by the BBC suggest giving the Lib Dems two party political broadcasts for the elections – the same as the Green party – rather than the three the Lib Dems enjoyed alongside Labour and the Conservatives in 2008. … A party source said the Lib Dems were confident the decision would be overturned, given that they have seven MPs in the capital, 246 councillors, and

    …

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    Posted in News | Tagged , , , and | 4 Comments
    Mark Pack

    How internet voting can go wrong

    By Mark Pack | Sun 26th February 2012 - 3:50 pm

    News from America:

    Small coding mistake led to big Internet voting system failure

    The main security weakness that let University of Michigan researchers take control over a planned city of Washington, D.C. Internet voting system pilot for overseas voters in 2010 was “a tiny oversight in a single line of code,” …

    It’s evidence, say the researchers – led by Assistant Professor J. Alex Halderman – that Internet voting should be postponed until, when or if major new breakthroughs in cybersecurity occur. Mistakes like the one they exploited are all too common, hard to eradicate, and indicative of a brittleness in web applications,

    …

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    Posted in News | Tagged | 7 Comments
    Mark Pack

    Labour sticks to its support for the Digital Economy Act

    By Mark Pack | Sun 26th February 2012 - 12:55 pm

    Cory Doctorow writes,

    Harriet Harman, deputy leader the UK Labour Party, has explained her party’s programme for the British Internet: “implement the Digital Economy Act under a clear timetable including getting on with the notification letters.” “Notification letters?” Why yes, those would be the letters notifying you that you have been accused, without proof, of downloading copyrighted material without permission, and that everyone in your household is now at risk of being disconnected from the Internet, without a trial. If that costs you your job, if that costs your children their education, if that makes it harder to engage with politics, civics,

    …

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    Posted in News | Tagged , , and | 5 Comments
    Joe Bourke

    Opinion: guaranteed employment for young people

    By Joe Bourke | Sun 26th February 2012 - 10:45 am

    This is part two of a two-part post regarding policies to tackle youth unemployment – part one is here.

    Welcome as the youth contract initiatives have been, I do not believe that they are yet comprehensive enough to adequately address what has been and remains a long-term endemic problem with youth employment in the UK.

    For 16-24 year olds not in education, training or employment, we ultimately need to be able to offer a guarantee of paid work within a structured training program, albeit at minimum wage, even if this is in the public sector. The jobs and training would …

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    Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 5 Comments
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    Stephen Tall

    ‘Workfare’: the depressingly sterile ‘left/right’ debate is a challenge to liberals to sharpen our thinking

    By Stephen Tall | Sun 26th February 2012 - 8:50 am

    Deborah Orr has a must-read article in the Guardian highlighting the inverted absurdity of this week’s row about the Coalition’s workfare programme, The slanging match over workfare is getting us nowhere.

    She points out that the very essence of workfare is government intervention in the workings of the free market, the state urging private companies to offer work experience placements to the unemployed:

    For the right, such hapless, inefficient intervention by the state is anathema. When the private sector is left to make its own arrangements, neo-liberals never tire of pointing out, it functions better, to the advantage of all.

    …

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    Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , , and | 24 Comments
    Stephen Tall

    10 things you might not have known about party political funding over the last decade

    By Stephen Tall | Sat 25th February 2012 - 6:55 pm

    The Electoral Commission website is a data-mine of information for those interested in all aspects of party political funding.

    For those who’d rather not get their hands dirty doing the mining themselves, below you’ll find 10 interesting (in my opinion) facts I discovered there.

    But for those of you interested in excavating further, I’ve uploaded Google spreadsheets of the three main parties’ donations received between 2001 and 2011 (incl.):

    And here are those 10 interesting facts I promised you…

    1) In total, the Lib Dems raised £33,742,984 in donations from 2001-11. This compares with £173,742,956 for the Labour Party, and £182,418,146 for the Conservatives.

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    Posted in News | Tagged , , , , and | 15 Comments
    Stephen Tall

    LDV Caption Competition: Steve Webb & IDS “Supermarket (Chimney-) Sweep” Edition

    By Stephen Tall | Sat 25th February 2012 - 5:15 pm

    There’s no prize at stake – just the opportunity to prove you’re wittier than any other LDV reader…

    Here’s the Coalition’s Work & Pensions team — former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith and Lib Dem pensions minister Steve Webb — enjoying the sight of fully-stacked shelves at a supermarket. What do you think might be being said or thought by or about them?

    And the winner of our last caption comp is…

    Some fantastic entries for our most recent caption competition, Ed Miliband “Basking in The Sun” Edition.

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    Posted in Caption Comp | 13 Comments
    Carl Quilliam

    The Weekend Debate: Should we boycott the Murdoch machine?

    By Carl Quilliam | Sat 25th February 2012 - 2:53 pm

    Here’s your starter for ten in our weekend slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…

    This week Labour MP Tom Watson and others made a fair amount of fuss on Twitter about ‘Blue Labour’s’ Lord (Maurice) Glasman intending to write for the new ‘Sun on Sunday’, Rupert Murdoch’s replacement for the disgraced News of the World.

    Watson’s position seems to be that anyone associating themselves with the Sun or the Murdoch press is tacitly condoning their behaviour over phone hacking.

    So firstly, should we as …

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    Posted in Op-eds | 23 Comments
    Mark Pack

    Sometimes a bus is just a bus

    By Mark Pack | Sat 25th February 2012 - 10:50 am

    When Boris Johnson promised that if elected Mayor of London he would introduce a new Routemaster bus, I don’t think many expected him to interpret that quite as literally as he has.

    For by the end of his term in office, there won’t be hoardes of new Routemaster buses on London’s roads. Not even scores or dozens. But there will be a new Routemaster bus. One bus. Just the single bus.

    As London Assembly member Caroline Pidgeon puts it:

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    Posted in London and News | Tagged and | 25 Comments
    Mark Pack

    Electoral register grew 0.6% in 2011

    By Mark Pack | Sat 25th February 2012 - 9:25 am

    This week the Office of National Statistics published its latest round-up of electoral registration figures for the UK, showing a 0.6% increase in 2011 for the total number of entries on the electoral register.

    As the UK has a growing population, it is likely that this growth was in large part caused by an increase in the total number of people theoretically entitled to register.

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    Posted in Election law | Tagged | Leave a comment
    Mark Pack

    LibLink: Lynne Featherstone on marriage – this is not gay rights versus religious beliefs

    By Mark Pack | Sat 25th February 2012 - 7:50 am

    Writing in the Daily Telegraph Lynne Featherstone says:

    I believe that if a couple love each other and want to commit to a life together, they should have the option of a civil marriage, irrespective of whether they are gay or straight.

    We are not prioritising gay rights, or trampling over tradition; we are allowing a space for the two to exist side by side…

    Marriage is a right of passage for couples who want to show they are in a committed relationship, for people who want to show they have

    …

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    Posted in LibLink and News | Tagged , , and | 12 Comments
    Joe Bourke

    Opinion: tax and benefit reform to help tackle youth unemployment

    By Joe Bourke | Fri 24th February 2012 - 6:00 pm

    In a two-part investigation, Joe Bourke looks at youth unemployment. Sunday’s part two will have details of policies designed to provide guaranteed employment for 16-24 year-olds. In part one, we discuss changes to the tax system that would make such policies affordable.

    If the 2012 budget sees the personal allowance increased to £10,000 we will have achieved a key plank of the 2010 manifesto and provided some welcome relief to the squeeze on incomes that has come not least from the increase in VAT to 20%.

    Whether the increase in the personal allowance is achieved in this budget or subsequently, we will soon need to …

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    Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , and | 8 Comments
    The Voice

    The LDV Friday Five: 24 February 2012

    By The Voice | Fri 24th February 2012 - 5:00 pm

    It’s Friday. It’s five o’clock. Here’s a fistful of lists that sum up the LDV week:

    5 most-read stories on LDV this week

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    Baroness Liz Barker

    Baroness Barker writes… How the private patient income cap can benefit the NHS

    By Baroness Liz Barker | Fri 24th February 2012 - 2:53 pm

    Labour’s 2006 NHS Act deliberately opened up health services, including acute hospitals, to wide-ranging competition on price, not quality. Labour’s legislation allowed private companies to receive £250m for contracts which they never delivered. Liberal Democrat peers are working hard to ensure that the NHS, including Foundation Trusts (FTs), remain public services.

    Indeed, in order to protect them from the full force of competition law and the threat of takeover by American healthcare companies, hospitals must not be deemed ‘undertakings’ or look more like private sector bodies. One way to achieve that is to make it explicit in law that the majority …

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    Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 11 Comments
    Jonathan Hunt

    Opinion: LibsLeft – because it’s the Left’s turn

    By Jonathan Hunt | Fri 24th February 2012 - 12:46 pm

    Some 18 months ago, just before the Liverpool conference, The Voice kindly carried a piece by me about the need for a body I call LibsLeft.

    It is a slight play on words, aimed both at those who felt excluded from the party of coalition, and indicating our direction of travel if the party is to survive the 2015 election. Liberals have always fared badly from coalitions, readers were reminded.

    I wrote that the only party to emerge victorious from a coalition was Labour in 1945 – on the back of a Liberal programme. They stole Beveridge’s ideas for a …

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    Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 51 Comments
    Prateek Buch

    Wealth taxation is now firmly on the government’s radar

    By Prateek Buch | Fri 24th February 2012 - 12:09 pm

    As part of the long-standing Liberal Democrat commitment to fair taxation, expressed so clearly by David Laws, the party has often called for a greater emphasis on wealth taxes.

    As a direct result of these calls, it is now clear that the government is considering some form of wealth taxation to help deliver another long-standing Lib Dem tax policy – giving millions of low- and middle-earners a welcome boost by raising the income tax threshold to £10,000.

    The precise nature of increased taxation on wealth is a topic of much discussion. Radio 4’s Today programme carried an interesting discussion of …

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    Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , , and | 8 Comments
    Stephen Tall

    Lib Dem donation figures in full (Q4, 2011)

    By Stephen Tall | Fri 24th February 2012 - 11:45 am

    The Electoral Commission has this past week published the latest donation and borrowing figures for the political parties, showing that the Lib Dems raised £1,076,469 between October and December this year.

    (At the foot of this post is the full breakdown of donations (excluding public funds) received by quarter since 2005, and annually between 2001 and 2004.)

    By comparison, the party raised £1,724,842 in the fourth quarter of 2006 (the equivalent stage of the parliamentary cycle). This is the first time since I’ve been covering the Lib Dem donation figures I can recall the figure for donations received being lower …

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    Posted in News | Tagged and | 4 Comments
    Nick Hollinghurst

    Opinion: An Unlikely Defender of the Faith

    By Nick Hollinghurst | Fri 24th February 2012 - 9:00 am

    Eric Pickles recently sent forth an encyclical and counterblast to the “illiberal and intolerant secularists” seeking to overturn “the right to worship  a fundamental and hard-fought British liberty” and reverse “the fight for religious freedom in British history, deeply entwined with our political freedom”.

    Our Town Clerk at once e-mailed us all a copy – on the very day, as it happened, that I went to Hertford for a County Council Meeting.

    As usual, the meeting started at 10 30 a.m. And as usual those councillors who wished to pray met in the Council Chamber a little earlier at 10 20 a.m. Nothing wrong with that – their Prayer Meeting is not part …

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    Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , and | 21 Comments
    The Voice

    LDVideo: Lib Dem MP Andrew George calls for NHS risk register publication

    By The Voice | Thu 23rd February 2012 - 9:45 pm

    Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George voted on Wednesday to publish the NHS “risk register”, a document containing a detailed analysis of what could go wrong with the proposed changes in the health service in England. Here he explains why, and that though the Health Bill is now “less bad” he is yet to be persuaded it should go through:

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    Posted in YouTube | Tagged , and | 2 Comments
    Caron Lindsay

    PMQs: Tragedy, comedy and the Continuing Saga of the Family Bone

    By Caron Lindsay | Thu 23rd February 2012 - 4:28 pm

    I’m not used to learning anything from the weekly pantomime that is Prime Minister’s Questions. Sadly, though yesterday’s session brought  me the news of the death of Marie Colvin, the veteran Sunday Times reporter whose often heartbreaking reports from war zones I’ve been reading most of my adult life. Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband paid tribute to her work, the latter calling her brave, tireless and an inspiration to women in her profession. More tragedy followed as Sajid Javid, the MP for Bromsgrove, asked the PM to join in with sympathy for those killed and injured in the bus crash …

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    Posted in News and Parliament | Tagged , , , , , , , and | 4 Comments
    Nick T

    The Tories’ tax problem

    By Nick T | Thu 23rd February 2012 - 3:27 pm

    Cut national insurance contributions, says Liam Fox. Cut capital gains tax, says David Davis. Give tax breaks to married couples, say Stewart Jackson and others. Back wealth taxes to cut taxes on “families and employers”, says Tim Montgomerie.

    There’s no shortage of Tories suggesting taxes for George Osborne to cut when he delivers his budget. Yet it’s the junior party in the coalition which is leading the debate on tax cuts – a curious situation which no doubt shocks Tories as much as it infuriates them.

    The reasons the Lib Dems are leading the way on tax cuts are straightforward. First, the …

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    Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , , and | 12 Comments
    Tim Clement-Jones

    Lord Clement-Jones writes… Plugging the loopholes left by Labour

    By Tim Clement-Jones | Thu 23rd February 2012 - 11:53 am

    Widespread competition was introduced to the NHS by Labour’s 2006 National Health Service Act, but without the public debate that is now taking place. The 2006 Act opened up the NHS to the risk of EU competition law being applied in a way that leaves commissioners unable to choose the best way of delivering services. Labour’s legislation meant private providers were favoured over NHS hospitals and paid millions for work which they never did. Very simply, Labour’s 2006 Act does not put patients first.

    In the Lords, myself and colleagues are working hard to plug the loopholes left in Labour’s 2006 …

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    Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 16 Comments
    NewsHound

    LibLink: Mark Pack – Where next for the Lib Dems on NHS reform?

    By NewsHound | Thu 23rd February 2012 - 10:21 am

    Over on the MHP Communications blog, Lib Dem Voice’s Mark Pack has been pondering what will happen next on NHS reform:

    It is becoming a fixture on the political calendar, that as spring approaches so too does another Liberal Democrat conference debate on health.  Cue headaches for Liberal Democrat party managers and nervousness among Conservatives.  What will the Liberal Democrat grassroots demand? How much will Cameron and Lansley be prepared to concede in response?…

    At the moment, there are three different options for changes to the NHS Bill which different Liberal Democrats are pushing (I’ve yet to encountered anyone in the party

    …

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    Posted in LibLink | Tagged , , and | 6 Comments
    Stephen Tall

    Labour’s new approach to education: ‘Evidence, evidence, evidence’. What can the Lib Dems learn from this?

    By Stephen Tall | Thu 23rd February 2012 - 9:15 am

    I’m going to do something now I haven’t had cause to do in a good few months: praise a Labour policy. Here’s why.

    On Tuesday night, I went along to listen to Stephen Twigg, Labour’s shadow education secretary, deliver a speech to a ProgressOnline debate on raising standards in education. (The event was in parliament’s Grimond Room, so I felt reasonably at home.) The theme was ‘Evidence, not dogma’, and Mr Twigg stayed true to the spirit of it, announcing a heavily-trailed proposal that Labour will establish an Office for Educational Improvement. You can read his speech here, and …

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    Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , , , , and | 20 Comments
    Helen Duffett

    LDVideo: Nick Clegg “An extra £60 in your wages each month”

    By Helen Duffett | Thu 23rd February 2012 - 8:13 am

    Earlier this week, Tim Farron emailed Lib Dem members with a sneak preview of the latest Party Political Broadcast. Here’s the full version in case you missed it on TV last night:

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    Posted in Lib Dem TV | Tagged and | 3 Comments
    Mark Pack

    What David Cameron used to say about bankers and bonuses

    By Mark Pack | Thu 23rd February 2012 - 6:50 am

    As ever, it’s three things to remember:

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    Posted in News | Tagged and | Leave a comment

    Opinion: Work-fare or work fair? Why I shan’t be shopping at Tesco

    By Former Organiser | Wed 22nd February 2012 - 6:56 pm

    It seems that Tesco finally bowed to public pressure and is no longer expecting the jobless to line-up and provide them with four weeks of unpaid labour. Whilst I was pleased to read this, it was too little, too late for me. Do Tesco expect us to be pleased that they’re finally offering to pay people in return for their hard work?

    This has taught us an awful lot about Tesco’s ethical beliefs. The company was happy to accept unpaid labour before the public knew about it, but as soon as they started receiving negative press coverage, they brought the scheme …

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    Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 54 Comments
    Caron Lindsay

    Liberal Democrat MEP McMillan-Scott gets European Parliament Human Rights portfolio

    By Caron Lindsay | Wed 22nd February 2012 - 5:57 pm

    Liberal Democrat MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, Edward McMillan-Scott, re-elected as one of the European Parliament’s 14 Vice Presidents last month, has again been allocated the portfolio for Democracy and Human Rights.  He has also been given a new responsibility, for Transatlantic Relations. He was put forward by the Liberal Group (ALDE) and is only British MEP on the Parliament’s Bureau which is responsible for its management, organisation and finances.

    He has a long record in campaigning for human rights and democracy support. He was the first outside politician to get to Cairo after the fall of Mubarak and has …

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    Posted in Europe / International and News | Tagged , and | Leave a comment
    George Kendall

    How to win seats in 2015

    By George Kendall | Wed 22nd February 2012 - 4:25 pm

    Opinion polls this year have shown us between seven and sixteen per cent. That’s a significant fall compared to the twenty-three per cent we received in the 2010 election. One polling website recently stated that, on a universal swing, we would get only two seats.

    In 1997, our vote fell by one per cent to only 16.8%, nonetheless, but we made an electoral breakthrough, winning 46 seats.

    If polls continue to be difficult, can we again defy first-past-the-post, and retain a sizeable parliamentary party? I think we can.

    There’s been a lot of discussion about the strategy we should adopt to increase our poll …

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    Posted in News | Tagged , and | 12 Comments
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