Liberal Democrat Voice | Page 954

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Is 100,000 a big number?

By Mark Pack | Sun 2nd January 2011 - 8:55 am

Even I would concede that 100,000 maltesers would be quite a large number, but what about when it comes to signatures on a petition? The fear that all sorts of humorous and trivial ideas could get 100,000 verified signatures from people on the electoral register is one of the reasons some people have given for criticising the government’s plans to give proposals that get 100,000 signatures some debating time in Parliament.

I think those criticisms are misplaced because, as I said previously, “The usual tiny number of votes deliberate joke candidates get at election time (unless there is a …

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Posted in Op-eds | 15 Comments

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New Year messages from Welsh and Scottish Lib Dem leaders

By Helen Duffett | Sat 1st January 2011 - 8:55 pm

From Kirsty Williams, Leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats:

2010 has been a challenging year for many. There are some positive signs but the economic recovery will be slow and uncertain.

The Liberal Democrats made the right decision to be part of turning things around in government. Of course, in government, some decisions will be controversial, particularly in a time when there is not as much money as we would like. But having a stable majority government to steer us through difficult times is of vital importance.

Coalition government is a new experience for many in England. In Wales, as Scotland, it

…

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Posted in News | Tagged kirsty williams, nick clegg and tavish scott | 12 Comments

NEW POLL: Who is your Liberal Voice of the Year?

By Stephen Tall | Sat 1st January 2011 - 7:45 pm

Earlier this week, in the dying days of the last decade, we launched our search for the Liberal Voice of 2010, to find the individual or group which has had the biggest impact on liberalism in the past 12 months. And as is our tradition, we’re looking beyond the ranks of the Lib Dems to find the greatest liberal who’s not a member of our party.

Our thanks to all who put forward nominations — here is the short-list of 12 (in alphabetical order):

Bob Ainsworth, former Labour secretary of state for defence, for his controversial public call

…

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Posted in LDV Awards | Tagged liberal voice 2010 | 34 Comments

Lib Dem Voice: 2010 in stats

By Helen Duffett | Sat 1st January 2011 - 7:25 pm

Happy New Year and thankyou to all our readers!

Here are a few statistics which sum up the past year on LDV:

384 authors have written a total of 3239 posts. (For more on how to write for us, click here.)

Readers have visited our site 1,473,760 times, making 3,140,977 pageviews.

Our busiest day was Friday 7th May, the day after the General Election. This is typical for political websites the day after an election, and a reminder to defer that lie-in until after you’ve updated your site with results and commentary. The surge in readers the day after Polling Day is often greater than the steady trickle who’ve been visiting a site during an election campaign.

The 5 most-read stories on LDV in 2010:

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The 12 Op-Eds of Xmas (Day 8)

By The Voice | Sat 1st January 2011 - 6:45 pm

Throughout the festive season, LDV is offering our readers ~~a load of repeats~~ another chance to read the 12 most popular opinion articles which have appeared on the blog since 1st January, 20109. The fifth most-read LDV op-ed of 2010 was by Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson, and originally appeared on 3rd November …

Jo Swinson MP writes on tuition fees

Today the Government has outlined its response to the Browne review, and the future of higher education funding. This is arguably the most challenging issue for Liberal Democrats in the coalition so far.

Our party has long prided …

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The Independent View: Child detention – mind the gap between rhetoric and reality

By Clare Sambrook | Sat 1st January 2011 - 2:25 pm

‘Today marks a big culture shift within our immigration system,’ said Nick Clegg two weeks ago, announcing plans purporting to end child detention. ‘That practice, the practice we inherited, ends here,’ he said.

Sadly, it didn’t end there.

Liberal Democrats interested in these matters might take a look at two dossiers of evidence compiled by End Child Detention Now and published on openDemocracy.

Mind the Gap! Coalition claims and realities for child detention in the UK tests the new ‘compassionate approach to family returns’ as expressed in government documents released on December 16

Drawing on evidence elsewhere, for instance an HMIP report on …

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Posted in Op-eds and The Independent View | Tagged child detention | 18 Comments

Opinion: Coalition must resist the easy option of raising interest rates

By David Thorpe | Sat 1st January 2011 - 1:20 pm

When historians looking back on Gordon Brown’s career are searching for an epitah, they may well settle on the former Chancellor’s claim to have “abolished boom and bust”.

Questionable at the time it was uttered, the crash of 2008 rendered it a nonsense, but there are lessons to be learned for the coalition as they try to unravel the mess left by the Labour Government. The comment mentioned above is an example of a Chancellor falling victim to hubris, and the Coalition must be careful to not to be afflicted by the same condition.

Inflation and how best to prevent it wrecking …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged economy, gordon brown and norman lamb | 22 Comments

Our starters for 2010 – how did we do? (Part II)

By Stephen Tall | Sat 1st January 2011 - 10:55 am

A year ago, Lib Dem Voice posed 10 questions, the answers to which we believed might shape the Lib Dem year – time to revisit them, wethinks. You can read Part I of our round-up here.

6. Will any of the party’s senior figures – within or without the Lib Dem shadow cabinet – take an official position offered by whoever forms the next government?

When I posed this question I rather had in mind Gordon Brown’s GOAT appointments — such as Lib Dem MP-turned-peer Lord (Matthew) Taylor’s housing review, or Baroness (Shirley) Williams’ advice on nuclear proliferation. …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged featured | 4 Comments

The Saturday debate: Should we have more directly-elected Mayors?

By Mark Pack | Sat 1st January 2011 - 8:55 am

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

Directly-elected Mayors were introduced by Labour to a very mixed reception. Now the idea is back again with the Government pushing for more, arguing that direct accountability of an individual makes for better decision-making and more meaningful democracy.

Agree? Disagree? Post your comments below…

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged weekend debate | 14 Comments

The 12 Op-Eds of Xmas (Day 7)

By The Voice | Fri 31st December 2010 - 6:45 pm

Throughout the festive season, LDV is offering our readers ~~a load of repeats~~ another chance to read the 12 most popular opinion articles which have appeared on the blog since 1st January, 20109. The sixth most-read LDV op-ed of 2010 was by a long-standing Lib Dem member who preferred, for professional reasons, to remain anonymous, and originally appeared on 22nd January …

Opinion: UK Border Agency plunges colleges into crisis

I wrote recently about the train-wreck that is happening before our eyes with the new student visa rules. Well, there has been a new development. The UK Border Agency has …

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Posted in Op-eds | 1 Comment

The LDV Friday Five: 31st December 2010

By Helen Duffett | Fri 31st December 2010 - 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

Nick Clegg’s New Year message to Liberal Democrat members (36 comments) by Helen Duffett
Opinion: It is time to get out of the Coalition (173 comments) by Paul Elgood
Diffindo! Has Daniel Radcliffe hexed the Lib Dems? (11 comments) by Stephen Tall
Convictions for historic gay sex offences to be erased (12 comments) by Helen Duffett
Simon Hughes takes up education post (83 comments) by Mark Pack

5 sample LDV Members’ Forum threads

5 from the LDV archive

(31st December, 2006-09)

10 key Lib Dem questions for 2010 (8 comments) by Stephen Tall, from 2009
Five tech tips for the new year: get yourself listed (3 comments) by Mark Pack from 2009
A look back at the polls: December ’09 (6 comments) by Stephen Tall from 2009
LDV Awards 2008: Lib Dem Campaigner of the Year & Most Desperate Press Release of the Year (3 comments) by Stephen Tall, from 2008
Opinion: January Reshuffle – Big Surprises and the Liberal ‘Big Beasts’ (Part I) (10 comments) by Letterman, from 2008

5 top reader search returns to get to LDV

(excluding Liberal Democrat Voice or its variants)

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Reactions to plans to give some prisoners the right to vote

By Mark Pack | Fri 31st December 2010 - 3:58 pm

Just before Christmas we covered the government’s plans to give the vote to prisoners serving sentences of less than four years, a delayed response to the adverse court ruling on the current rules from 2005 which the Labour government had not yet properly responded to.

Unsurprisingly, the plans have triggered opposition in some parts of the Conservative Party, including from Paul Goodman over on ConservativeHome: “The essence of the Clegg/Harper case is that the Government has no alternative. However, there at least four”.

Carl Gardner on his Head of Legal blog explains the legal background in more detail:

Obviously this

…

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Posted in News | Tagged carl gardner, paul goodman and votes for prisoners | 7 Comments

Opinion: Answers on no more than 2 sides of A4 (part 3)

By Alex Feakes | Fri 31st December 2010 - 12:09 pm

In the last part of my series of articles on The Importance of Teaching schools White Paper published by the government last month, I want to look at the proposals for changes to the measurement of schools’ performance. The first two pieces were on exclusion and the range of languages included in the proposed English Baccalaureate.

Contextual Value Added

The value added by schools is in many ways more important that the actual raw results achieved – is a school good because its students have got the results commensurate with their potential when they entered the school, or because …

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Posted in News | Tagged contextual value added, cva, education, importance of teaching, schools, schools white paper, value added and white paper | 2 Comments

Calls to end alphabetic ordering of candidates on Scottish local election ballot papers

By Mark Pack | Fri 31st December 2010 - 11:24 am

It’s a well established pattern that candidates with names higher up the alphabet do slightly better in multi-member ward elections in the UK than those with names further down the alphabet. Other factors (including the perceived ethnicity and gender of a name, along with other information such as the party label) usually have a larger effect, but there is something of an alphabetic effect all the same.

New research has shown this to be the case in the first STV local council elections held in Scotland, leading to calls for change.

The Scotsman reports:

Across Scotland there were 247 cases where candidates

…

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Posted in Election law, Local government, News and Scotland | 3 Comments

The Labour and Conservative MPs who were in favour of AV before they were against it

By Mark Pack | Fri 31st December 2010 - 10:25 am

Here’s a curious detail about the voting record of MPs on the alternative vote: before the general election, the House of Commons agreed to introduce elections for select committee chairs using the alternative vote (and the first set of these such elections have now been held).

Most of the Conservative and Labour MPs who have said they oppose AV for public elections were also MPs when this decision was taken – and not one of them forced a vote on the matter, let alone vote against introducing AV. Instead, they all let the introduction of AV go through.

Now of course …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged av referendum and electoral reform | 54 Comments

Our starters for 2010 – how did we do? (Part I)

By Stephen Tall | Fri 31st December 2010 - 8:30 am

A year ago, Lib Dem Voice posed 10 questions, the answers to which we believed might shape the Lib Dem year – time to revisit them, wethinks.

1. In the 2010 general election, how many Lib Dem MPs will be elected? Will we increase our number from the current total of 63; or will we fall back? Will we increase our vote percentage compared with 2005, when we polled 22% of the popular vote? Or could we do, as we did in 1997, see our popular vote drop, but our Parliamentary strength grow?

My prediction at the start of 2010 was …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged featured | 6 Comments

The 12 Op-Eds of Xmas (Day 6)

By The Voice | Thu 30th December 2010 - 8:58 pm

Throughout the festive season, LDV is offering our readers ~~a load of repeats~~ another chance to read the 12 most popular opinion articles which have appeared on the blog since 1st January, 20109. The seventh most-read LDV op-ed of 2010 was by Lib Dem parliamentary candidate Nick Perry, and originally appeared on 7th July …

Opinion: I admit it, I am shocked by Labour’s hatred

Call me naive, but I have been genuinely shocked by the bilious and unbridled hatred that has been pouring out from every Labour orifice you could care to mention.

Not just from the Labour leadership contenders. Not just in the press. But even here in sunny Hastings, Labour is looking to knee-cap a Lib Dem or two.

It’s bewildering. It’s so far removed from the kind of national political culture that I want to be part of.

My sense of the Lib Dems is that we wear our political hearts on our sleeve a bit. We are passionate about social justice, civil liberties, political reform. And maybe that’s why the first 50 days of the Coalition have been so difficult to come to terms with.

Coalition policies are, de facto, not Lib Dem policies, despite our party having influenced (for the better) the policies that are now being brought forward.

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Posted in Op-eds | 12 Comments

The 100-plus Labour MPs publicly opposing electoral reform

By Stephen Tall | Thu 30th December 2010 - 7:45 pm

Poor Ed Miliband. In his first speech to the Labour party conference he tried his valiant best to show that Labour had changed, that it was a party which could re-claim the progressive liberalism it so happily junked in the Blair/Brown years.

No more ID cards, detention without trial, control orders etc — so said Ed. And yes to electoral reform in the shape of the alternative vote — so said Ed.

Unfortunately for Ed, not many of his MPs are listening to him. Today, the No2AV campaign proudly announced that over 100 of Labour’s 257 MPs would be opposing …

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Posted in News | Tagged alternative vote, av referendum, ed miliband, electoral reform and labour party | 57 Comments

Sonja Jenkins RIP

By The Voice | Thu 30th December 2010 - 7:25 pm

The Slough Borough Council website reports the sad news:

Councillor Jenkins, 72, died yesterday (29 December 2010) following a fall at her home. She had been a Liberal Democrat councillor for Foxborough ward since being elected in 2004.

Councillor Robert Plimmer, fellow Liberal Democrat councillor for Foxborough, said: “Sonja was a much loved and hardworking member of the local community in Langley. She was known by everyone in Foxborough and was regularly stopped in the street by people looking for help. As well as being a councillor she served

…

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Posted in News | Tagged slough council and Sonja Jenkins | 1 Comment

LibLink: the full shambles of the ID card trial in Greater Manchester

By Iain Roberts | Thu 30th December 2010 - 6:44 pm

The Manchester Evening News has been investigating Labour’s ID Card trial in Greater Manchester last November. Only 13,200 signed up from a population of over two million.

The MEN reveals how:

* Senior Whitehall officials were urged to email friends and relatives encouraging them to buy cards because of fears about the level of demand
* UK and overseas border guards refused to recognise the cards – with one traveller chased through an Italian airport after trying to use one as ID
* The Home Office discovered the cards could stop some credit

…

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Posted in LibLink | Tagged id cards | 8 Comments

Opinion: Answers on no more than 2 sides of A4 (part 2)

By Alex Feakes | Thu 30th December 2010 - 12:05 pm

In my earlier article, I looked at the new proposals for dealing with school exclusions set out in The Importance of Teaching schools White Paper, published by the government last month. Two other areas of concern in Paper, which otherwise contains some good ideas, relates to the curriculum changes and the measurement of schools’ performance.

Curriculum – the broad academic core

The White Paper gives some welcome attention to the breadth of the curriculum students study. Although the freedoms proposed for schools elsewhere in the paper allow them to adopt their own route, it is proposed to encourage the …

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Posted in News | Tagged baccalaureate, education, foreign languages, importance of teaching, languages, modern foreign languages, schools and white paper | 3 Comments

Book review: Lobbying by Lionel Zetter

By Mark Pack | Thu 30th December 2010 - 8:55 am

Lionel Zetter’s book, Lobbying: The Art of Political Persuasion, has become the default British guide to how lobbying works. A detailed publication of over 450 pages, it is a ‘how to’ guide for the profession that also acts as an introduction to lobbying for people whose encounter with the subject has previously been mainly through the medium of newspaper headlines about scandals.

It is an insider’s account – Zetter was voted Public Affairs Personality of the Year in 2008 by readers of Public Affairs News – and unashamedly argues about the benefits of lobbying in a democracy. As Zetter’s book …

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Posted in Books | Tagged lionel zetter | 6 Comments

The 12 Op-Eds of Xmas (Day 5)

By The Voice | Wed 29th December 2010 - 6:45 pm

Throughout the festive season, LDV is offering our readers ~~a load of repeats~~ another chance to read the 12 most popular opinion articles which have appeared on the blog since 1st January, 20109. The eighth most-read LDV op-ed of 2010 was by new party member Chris Jones, and originally appeared on 12th May …

Opinion: I’ve joined the Liberal Democrats

Last night I watched as the helicopter above central London followed and filmed the new Prime Minister David Cameron’s car as it drove from Buckingham Palace back to Downing Street. I watched as Mr. Cameron arrived at number 10, made a speech …

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Posted in Op-eds | 5 Comments

Simon Hughes takes up education post

By Mark Pack | Wed 29th December 2010 - 4:02 pm

The BBC reports:

A senior Lib Dem who abstained from the vote on tuition fees has been appointed by the government to help encourage poorer teenagers to go to university.

Simon Hughes was among Lib Dems to raise concerns about a hike in the cap on university tuition fees in England.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg said it would be a tragedy if youths were put off applying due to “misinformation”.

Labour said the appointment was “window dressing” and showed they were worried students would be put off by the rise.

The Lib Dem deputy leader has been appointed to the unpaid, six-month

…

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Posted in News | Tagged simon hughes and universities | 100 Comments

“The blogosphere is not an area that is open to sensible debate” – Labour MP dismisses online petition plans

By Mark Pack | Wed 29th December 2010 - 2:10 pm

Yesterday I mentioned the moves afoot to replace the mothballed 10 Downing Street petition website with a new system, whereby if 100,000 registered electors signed a petition a debate could be secured in Parliament.

Labour MP Paul Flynn has since poured scorn on the idea:

This seems to be an attractive idea to those who haven’t seen how useless this has been in other parts of the world when it’s tried.

If you ask people the question ‘do you want to pay less tax?’, they vote yes. If we get the e-petitions in there will be some asking for Jeremy Clarkson

…

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Posted in News | Tagged paul flynn | 21 Comments

Opinion: Answers on no more than 2 sides of A4 (part 1)

By Alex Feakes | Wed 29th December 2010 - 12:30 pm

In the first of a series of three, school governor Alex Feakes looks at elements of the recent education white paper.

The Importance of Teaching schools White Paper published by the government last month has lots going for it and has attracted the qualified support of many in the teaching profession. As a discussion paper, however, there are still quite a few wrinkles to be ironed out. Here’s one:

Exclusions

Like many secondary school governors who have been on disciplinary panels, I occasionally have had to confirm the headteacher’s decision to permanently exclude a student from the school. If the …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged exclusion, importance of teaching, schools and white paper | 1 Comment

Party posts up for election: nominations close 7 January

By Mark Pack | Wed 29th December 2010 - 10:25 am

News from David Allworthy, the Deputy Acting Returning Officer:

Nominations are now open for the election of:
· Chair of the Federal Finance & Administration Committee (FFAC)*
· Five members of the FFAC
· Party Treasurer
· Chair of the Campaigns & Communications Committee (CCC)
· Chair of the International Relations Committee (IRC)
· Two members of the IRC
· One representative on ELDR Council
· Two representatives on ELDR Congress
· Two representatives on the Liberal International (LI) Executive
· Two representatives to the LI Congress
· Chair Campaign For Gender Balance
· Two Vice Chairs Campaign For Gender Balance
· Three members of the Diversity Engagement Group

*The Chair of the FFAC is registered as the Party’s Treasurer for the purposes of the PPERA 2000, …

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | 4 Comments

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