Paul Pettinger

Should religious worship be part of school assembly?

By Paul Pettinger | Wed 11th August 2010 - 2:20 pm

Last week LDV ran an article from Sara Bedford asking whether prayers should be a part of council meetings. The issue of compelling people to engage in religious worship is not just confined to Parliament or some of our more old fashioned council chambers, but affects a significant proportion of our population.

Unbeknown to many, all state maintained schools in England and Wales are legally required to provide their pupils with daily Collective Worship. In faith schools the worship is supposed to be provided in accordance with the school’s designated religion or religious denomination, while in all other schools …

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , and | 33 Comments
Advert
Stephen Tall

Huhne goes on the attack: “Labour’s next leaders in denial about deficit”

By Stephen Tall | Wed 11th August 2010 - 1:40 pm

Lib Dem climate change and energy secretary Chris Huhne joined with Conservative party chair Baroness Sayeedi Warsi today to launch a blistering attack on Labour’s financial legacy.

You can read Chris’s speech in full, below, in which he issues a stark challenge to Labour to “face up to the challenge of fixing our nation’s finances”, warning that if they don’t “they won’t deserve power for another generation.”

However, it is Baroness Warsi’s demand to David and Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham to forfeit their £20,000 severance pay as cabinet ministers – branded their “reward for failure” – which …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged , and | 65 Comments
Mark Pack

How the central finances of parties have been panning out

By Mark Pack | Wed 11th August 2010 - 11:20 am

The following three graphs are from the Electoral Commission and show income and expenditure for the three main political parties as reflected in their annual accounts. There are some important exceptions to what they show, such as the money brought in and spent directly by election candidates, though from what I know of these exceptions they paint a similar picture to those annual accounts of the relative trends over time.

As Stephen has often noted on this site when reporting on the quarterly donation figures, the Liberal Democrat figures show a consistently higher level of income in this Parliament than …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged , , , and | 8 Comments
Iain Roberts

Twitter’s fun, but let’s not pretend it’s revolutionising democracy

By Iain Roberts | Wed 11th August 2010 - 10:20 am

As a local councillor, I want to reach my constituents and make sure they can reach me.

If I put out a leaflet it costs a bit and takes a while to deliver, and I can reach thousands of constituents.

I write a blog post and then let people know about it by email – that reaches a few hundred (and it’s much quicker and cheaper).

Or I can tweet and reach about ten.

Because, despite the promise of Twitter as providing a great two way link between politicians and those they represent, it’s a long way from achieving that.

The reason? Twitter for …

Continue reading »
Posted in News and Op-eds | Tagged and | 5 Comments
Mark Pack

Shropshire Council stands by controversial website rules

By Mark Pack | Wed 11th August 2010 - 9:20 am

Shropshire Council has admitted it has only ever approved one official request for someone to link to its website, but is insisting that it is right to demand people apply to the council for permission before linking to its website.

As I highlighted last month, the Shropshire Council website has a set of terms and conditions says that people must contact the council with details, including their home address, to request permission before they link to the website. However, although there are numerous links to the Shorpshire Council website around the internet (such as this list from Google) the …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged | 7 Comments
Advert
NewsHound

LibLink: Vernon Bogdanor – Change the voting system, change the UK

By NewsHound | Tue 10th August 2010 - 8:15 pm

Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at the University of Oxford, and David Cameron’s tutor at Brasenose College, looks at the alternative vote referendum in an article in today’s Financial Times, and suggests it could have far-reaching consequences. But first he points out the Alice in Wonderland politics of the referendum:

The Lib Dems, who favour true proportional representation, now back a system that can yield even more disproportional outcomes than first-past-the-post. Labour, the only party to propose a referendum on AV in its manifesto, will oppose the bill providing for it. The Conservatives will oppose change, but in muted fashion, since

…

Continue reading »
Posted in LibLink | Tagged , and | 11 Comments
Stephen Tall

AV campaigns able to spend more than £11 million

By Stephen Tall | Tue 10th August 2010 - 6:50 pm

Today’s Financial Times reports:

Campaigners for and against electoral reform will be able to spend a total of more than £11m in a blizzard of promotional material and advertisements in the run-up to next year’s referendum, the Electoral Commission has confirmed.

Under the law, the Yes and No campaigns on the alternative vote (AV) system can each spend £5m of private money as well as £600,000 apiece of public funding. The two sides will also be given free use of public rooms such as council buildings, a TV broadcast and free postal delivery to households across the UK of 20m

…

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged and | 9 Comments
Iain Roberts

Daft speed camera story of the day

By Iain Roberts | Tue 10th August 2010 - 5:57 pm

The BBC is keenly promoting a story about speed cameras.

The cameras have been switched off in Oxfordshire: they still measure the speed of passing motorists, but no longer take pictures. Motorists can therefore speed with impunity and remain point-less.

The shocking news is that, after this change, the cameras have recorded more speeding motorists than before.

In Cowley some 62 people were clocked speeding, representing a rise of 88%.

And in Woodstock 110 drivers were over the 30mph limit, which is 18% more than the average for 2010.

Why daft? Because it tells us nothing useful.

We’d expect more people to speed …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged | 22 Comments
Mark Pack

Lessons from the disappearing phone boxes for the internet and politics

By Mark Pack | Tue 10th August 2010 - 3:20 pm

A new report about the internet and the 2010 general election (not headlined some variant on “was it an internet election?” thank goodness) has just been published by the Hansard Society. It contains some excellent contributions from across the political spectrum and, er…, one by myself.

A phone boxWill Straw from Left Foot Forward has blogged about his own contribution here and The Voice’s very own Helen Duffett was one of the speakers at the launch event.

My own piece looked at ‘Lessons from the disappearing phone boxes for the internet and politics’ which tries to get at why people so often ask the question ‘Will the next election be an internet election?’ followed shortly after by’Well, that wasn’t an internet election’ – and yet the use of the internet has become so pervasive in politics:

Does the rhetoric and analysis of Joe Trippi and Clay Shirky or the reality of the mobile phone more accurately foretell the future impact of the internet on British politics? That isthe central question for anyone looking to predict how technology may change politics andcampaigning over this new Parliament…

Here’s the report in full, including my piece:

The internet and the 2010 election: putting the small ‘p’ back in politics?

Continue reading »
Posted in Online politics | Tagged , , and | Leave a comment
Mark Pack

Is annoying people the way to persuade them to change their mind?

By Mark Pack | Tue 10th August 2010 - 2:20 pm

That’s the question which is – or perhaps more accurately, which should be – at the heart of many online lobbying campaigns which seek to flood people’s inboxes with emails. Done well, at the right moment and aimed at the right target, these mass email campaigns can be a very effective tool for stressing the level of support for a point of view and making people engage with it. Done badly, they are an extremely effective way at lowering the reputation of the lobbying organisation and damaging its cause.

A good recent example has been the online campaigning around electoral reform, …

Continue reading »
Posted in Online politics | Tagged and | 14 Comments
Ed Butcher

Opinion: social housing rent should be means tested

By Ed Butcher | Tue 10th August 2010 - 1:20 pm

Our Lib Dem MPs seem to be lining themselves up against the Prime Minister’s suggestion to review they way council houses are allocated, but doesn’t the desperate shortage in affordable housings mean we need to look at reforming the allocation system? Few benefits are given without continued means-testing, so why should council housing be any different?

I am completely against turfing out council tenants when they no longer need it. However, regularly assessing how much council tenants can afford, and adjusting rents accordingly, would be a fair way of allocating what is a precious and finite …

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 40 Comments
Kerry Hutchinson

Opinion: The automaton body-politic

By Kerry Hutchinson | Tue 10th August 2010 - 11:20 am

Not for nothing was England once known as ‘Perfidious Albion’ – it would change policy stances more often than a modern quick-change model on a catwalk. Ah yes, those days when foreign policy was as reliably firm as blancmange in a microwave set on high. But not nowadays, of course.

No, Foreign Secretaries and their FCO policy officials who devise and draft policy these post-Great Game days can be relied upon to issue policy that is robustly embedded in the nine points of policy-making as set down by the Cabinet Office and the Better Regulation Executive (BRE). To which all Government …

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 25 Comments
Helen Duffett

Autumn conference agenda and papers now online

By Helen Duffett | Tue 10th August 2010 - 10:25 am

Liberal Democrat autumn conference agenda 2010All the papers for next month’s Liberal Democrat Conference in Liverpool are now available online at the party’s website.

These include the agenda, which contains details and times of speeches, debates and consultative sessions. There’s also an introduction from the new Federal Conference Committee chair, Andrew Wiseman, and an article by party leader Nick Clegg: “Delivering in Government.”

The training programme, reports to conference, “Accountability to the poor” policy paper and consultation papers on health, IT and volunteering are all …

Continue reading »
Posted in Conference and News | Tagged , and | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Who is popular with party members?

By Mark Pack | Tue 10th August 2010 - 9:20 am

The choice of which Liberal Democrat Parliamentarians to feature in the party’s fundraising letters is usually a hard-headed choice of who is most popular and will bring in the most money, sprinkled with a dusting of covering internal political sensitivities. So it’s interesting to see who was selected to feature in the lastest fundraising letter from Party President, Ros Scott: Vince Cable, Simon Hughes, Lynne Featherstone and Nick Clegg.

All of them came out well in the most recent Lib Dem Voice survey of party members which suggests the evidence the party sees paints a similar to picture to that …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged , , , and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

Do the polls matter?

By Mark Pack | Tue 10th August 2010 - 9:00 am

Today’s Independent runs quotes from Sandra Gidley, Lembit Opik, Bob Russell and myself alongside their latest poll report. Here’s the full length (i.e. 3 sentence rather than 2 sentence) version of what I said to them:

Politics isn’t about winning elections, it’s about implementing policy – and Liberal Democrat ministers are getting to do that day in, day out regardless of what that week’s opinion polls say. Winning elections certainly also helps in politics, but with the next general election years away, national voting intention questions don’t mean very much this far out. After all, three months after the 1979

…

Continue reading »
Posted in Polls | Tagged | 23 Comments
Sara Bedford

Cable: It’s more fun being in opposition

By Sara Bedford | Tue 10th August 2010 - 8:24 am

The Business Secretary Vince Cable is the subject of a profile in today’s Guardian. In a somewhat affectionate piece, Decca Aitkenhead reports:

There has been much speculation that frugality is the only feature of this government Cable will find to his taste. Perceived as the Lib Dem furthest to the left – a former Labour party councillor and parliamentary candidate, the man Gordon Brown phoned in the frantic post-election days – Cable is widely tipped as the minister most likely to resign from the coalition. He made no secret of his preference for forming a government with Labour – but was forced by the arithmetic of the election result to abandon that dream, “and follow my head, not my heart”.

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged | 13 Comments
The Voice

Charles Kennedy and wife Sarah to separate

By The Voice | Mon 9th August 2010 - 7:05 pm

The Press Association reports the sad news:

Former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy and his wife Sarah are to separate. A statement issued by the couple’s respective lawyers said it was “with great sadness” that they had decided to split.

“In doing so amicably, our ongoing and overriding priority will obviously remain our son,” it went on. “We wish this to remain an entirely private family matter.”

Mr Kennedy married Sarah Gurling in 2002 and their son, Donald, was born during the 2005 general election campaign while he was still party leader.

Posted in News | Tagged | 7 Comments
Mark Pack

Southampton bans photographs; newspaper employs cartoonist

By Mark Pack | Mon 9th August 2010 - 7:01 pm

Southampton football club have joined the long list of clubs that ban or want to ban the media from their matches as it suits. Back in November it was Portsmouth FC banning a journalist whose coverage it didn’t like and Alex Ferguson for a long time did not allow the BBC to interview him, again because he didn’t like the tone of its coverage.

This time it is photographers in the firing line as Southampton has banned them from its matches, wanting people instead to buy official photographs for use in media coverage. This has at least been good news for …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged , and | 2 Comments
The Voice

Vince’s verdict on the Tories: “I’ve been pleasantly surprised that they’re not as I’d envisaged them”

By The Voice | Mon 9th August 2010 - 5:15 pm

There’s a fascinating interview of Lib Dem business secretary Vince Cable by Decca Aitkenhead in today’s Guardian (much more revealing than yesterday’s in the Telegraph).

As ever with Vince, there are some great one-liners – and, more importantly, a very down-to-earth and honest assessment of his work and that of the Coalition.

Vince on continuing to travel by Tube:

I don’t feel comfortable with luxury, and I try to stay fairly normal. I mean, the first week I became a minister I discovered that there were ministerial cars and Jaguars and all this kind of thing, but I very quickly

…

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged | 57 Comments
Iain Roberts

Daily Mail takes a tip from the BNP

By Iain Roberts | Mon 9th August 2010 - 3:55 pm

A story in today’s Daily Mail looks like the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a BNP leaflet.

The headline says it all

Revealed: The UK maternity units in which only 1 in 10 mothers is of white British origin

Of course there’s variation around the country – always has been, always will be.

Nationally the figures (which appear later on in the Mail article) are:
62% white British
7% other white
5% black
4% pakistani
3% indian
8% other
11% unknown

Concern about immigration is legitimate, but why is the Mail so worried about the mothers’ skin colour?

Posted in News | Tagged and | 11 Comments
Stephen Tall

NEW POLL: Should nuclear power be part of the UK’s energy mix?

By Stephen Tall | Mon 9th August 2010 - 2:25 pm

Climate change and energy secretary Chris Huhne was on Radio 4 this morning with what will have been, for many Lib Dems, a surprise announcement: that the Lib Dem / Conservative coalition government is fully behind the opening of a new nuclear power station in eight years’ time.

Arguing in favour of in favour of a mix of more nuclear, oil and gas and renewable energy, Chris declared, “I have no intention of the lights going out on my watch.”

This is something of a change in direction for Liberal Democrat party policy. For example, in the 2010 manifesto the …

Continue reading »
Posted in News and Voice polls | Tagged , and | 70 Comments
Iain Roberts

Whither the professional journalist when we all write for free?

By Iain Roberts | Mon 9th August 2010 - 1:20 pm

The Guardian reports on the 19-strong “Facebook Users’ Union” which wants Facebook’s users to have more control over where the company’s money goes.

…people are effectively working for free to create wealth for Facebook’s shareholders. “Online tools really aren’t free. We pay for them with micropayments of personal information.”

Buchanan wants someone to calculate the value of each Facebook user, based on how much money Facebook (or Google, or MySpace) makes from advertising next to their information. “It may be a small amount but it adds up when scaled into the half billion. Thus I feel we, the users, should have

…

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

Book review: The Spirit Level – Why equality is better for everyone by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett

By Mark Pack | Mon 9th August 2010 - 11:20 am

Although first published under a Labour government in 2009, this book is still highly relevant now we have a Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition. In fact, it is even more relevant because the current political and economic circumstances are forcing Liberal Democrats to think carefully about how much we are worried about inequality of outcome. Wilkinson and Pickett argue that widespread inequality helps increase a huge range of social ills, with the result that everyone suffers – even the most well off. Inequality in their view isn’t just bad for the poor, it’s also bad for the rich.

Continue reading »
Posted in Books | Tagged , , and | 13 Comments
Iain Roberts

Huppert v Tredinnick: the EDM homeopathy smackdown

By Iain Roberts | Mon 9th August 2010 - 10:20 am

The last couple of months saw a battle emerging between science geek MP Julian Huppert and homeopathy fan David Tredinnick, and one of the battlegrounds was the Early Day Motion – those petitions that only MPs can start or sign.

Five times, David Tredinnick put down an EDM such as 284 (BMA ANNUAL REPRESENTATIVE MEETING MOTIONS ON HOMEOPATHY) or 285 (EFFECT OF HOMEOPATHIC REMEDIES ON BREAST CANCER CELLS), in each case singing the praises of homeopathy or lauding some study that generated a positive result. Five times Julian Huppert launched an amendment to the EDM pointing out what he saw …

Continue reading »
Posted in Parliament | Tagged , , and | 7 Comments
Stephen Tall

Half Lib Dem MPs have opposed Cameron’s plan to end lifetime tenancies

By Stephen Tall | Mon 9th August 2010 - 9:45 am

The Guardian reports today:

More than half of Liberal Democrat MPs, including two cabinet members and eight junior ministers, are on record as opposing plans by David Cameron to water down security of tenure for new social housing tenants.

The scale of the opposition suggests Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem deputy leader, is speaking for the bulk of the party in opposing the ideas floated by the prime minister.

Cameron suggested the idea of fixed-term tenancies for new tenants last week, and the housing minister, Grant Shapps, continued to defend the plan this weekend, saying lifetime tenancies did not make sense.

The paper’s …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged | 24 Comments
Stephen Tall

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #181

By Stephen Tall | Sun 8th August 2010 - 6:15 pm

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 181st 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 (1st – 7th August, 2010), 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:

Continue reading »
Posted in Best of the blogs | Leave a comment
Mark Pack

Worth a second outing: Six ways to get more people watching your YouTube videos

By Mark Pack | Sun 8th August 2010 - 4:20 pm

Welcome to a series where old posts are revived for a second outing for reasons such as their subject has become topical again, they have aged well but were first posted when the site’s readership was only a tenth or less of what it is currently or they got published and the site crashed, hiding the finest words of wisdom behind an incomprehensible error message. I’ve slightly updated some information to keep it current.

It’s fairly cheap and easy to produce videos and make them available to the world via YouTube these days. But how do you get people to then …

Continue reading »
Posted in Online politics | Tagged and | Leave a comment
Sarah Harding

Opinion: Getting rid of ContactPoint – a great day for liberalism

By Sarah Harding | Sun 8th August 2010 - 2:25 pm

I would imagine Liberals throughout the country breathed a collective sigh of relief this past week when they opened their newspapers or turned on their computers to find the intrusive ContactPoint database was to be switched off at noon on 6th August.

28th February 2010 was the beginning of the end for ContactPoint.

On this day, an emergency motion submitted to Liberal Youth Spring Conference found its way through the ballot and ended up for debate on the final day of our conference. During the debate, we acknowledged the good points of ContactPoint and, whilst we understood its flaws and …

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 16 Comments
Stephen Tall

Telegraph’s dodgy “‘invisible’ Lib Dem ministers” survey: nothing to see here, folks

By Stephen Tall | Sun 8th August 2010 - 12:15 pm

Ah, opinion polls. Love ’em or hate ’em, you just can’t ignore ’em.

Today’s Telegraph reports a typically anti-Lib Dem story, Voters fail to recognise ‘invisible’ Lib Dem ministers. It claims to show that “Liberal Democrat cabinet ministers are far less likely to be recognised by ordinary voters than their Conservative counterparts”. However, the real clue to its accuracy is in the next few words, “a survey by The Sunday Telegraph has revealed”.

So how did the Telegraph commission its survey, you might ask. Did they pay a beyond-reproach polling firm (or even YouGov) to talk to a representative sample …

Continue reading »
Posted in News and Polls | Tagged | 13 Comments
Stephen Tall

Lib Dem conference to be asked to approve gay marriage proposal

By Stephen Tall | Sun 8th August 2010 - 11:00 am

Today’s Independent reports:

The Liberal Democrats are to use their first party conference in government to adopt a radical new policy calling for gay marriage.

The paper points out the tensions such a policy could spark with the socially conservative right-wing among the Tories. However, I’m intrigued by the paper’s suggestions that it also “risks causing deep divisions with … the traditional Methodist wing of the Lib Dems”. As a nonconformist myself (albeit not Methodist), I’d never realised that defined me as being part of a clique within the Lib Dems. Nor that my religious views would prevent me from supporting …

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Tagged , and | 34 Comments
Advert

Recent Comments

  • Mick Taylor
    I really do despair at some in our party supporting the scrapping of the triple lock. Let's put some facts out there. Even with the triple lock UK pensions are ...
  • Matt (Bristol)
    David Allen, I don't know about 'broad progressive movement' but the PM wants to make movement on topics where there is both entrenched warfare but also enough ...
  • David Allen
    Here's a contrast (BBC news today): "Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said ... "Talk is cheap. Burnham must stop with all the 'maybes' ... " Just carping from t...
  • expats
    Keith Legg 30th Sep '26 - 12:55pm...........I think the “triple lock” was needed when it was introduced, but there was always that risk that it would become...
  • David Allen
    I agree with Caron. Burnham deserves enthusiastic if critical support. He is taking big risks for the sake of progressive national renewal. He is bound to hi...