By The Voice | Published Fri 17th June 2011 - 10:22 am
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander writes in the Telegraph today on public sector pensions reform, calling the Government’s offer “by far the best that is likely to be on the table for years to come”:
This debate is often polarised between two extremes. There are some trade unions who seem to believe that pensions for public service workers should not change. Then there are those equally misguided voices who seem to think that the public services should be the front-runner in a race to the bottom.
Between these two, I believe there is an indisputable case for reforming public
However, what has been less commented on in the coverage in the last few days is the way Jane Collins escaped being investigated by the General Medical Council last year:
The chief executive of Great Ormond Street Hospital has escaped investigation over the Baby P scandal …
By Helen Duffett | Published Sun 12th June 2011 - 4:53 pm
… We’d say a big thank you to the 56,674 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in May.
This brings our absolute unique visitor readership for the last year to date (1 June 2010 – 31 May 2011) to 531,005, 5.8% more than the equivalent figure for 2009-10 of 501,773.
The 5 top-read stories during the month were:
By Mark Pack | Published Mon 6th June 2011 - 12:54 pm
Why not join hundreds of other Lib Dem Voice readers in getting our latest headlines by email?
Some people like regularly visiting a site to see if there’s new stories of interest. Some people like subscribing to its news feed (RSS) and checking that way. But if you prefer email, you can instead sign up to get a daily early morning email with a summary of the previous day’s posts from Lib Dem Voice, complete with a note of how many comments each post has got and convenient links to click on if any take your fancy and you want to take a read.
(At the foot of this post is the full breakdown of cash and non-cash donations received by quarter since 2005, and annually between 2001 and 2004.)
By comparison, the party raised just £219,915 in the first quarter of 2006 (the equivalent stage of the parliamentary cycle), suggesting a far more sustainable level of fundraising success is being achieved; although the party has been hit very hard since …
By Helen Duffett | Published Thu 26th May 2011 - 1:49 pm
Collette Dunkley is to join the Liberal Democrats next week as Director of Marketing, reporting to Chief Executive Chris Fox.
Collette, who was born in Liverpool, has led marketing and communications in global organisations including General Motors and Vodafone. She has also lectured on these subjects in various universities, advised many large organisations and is an expert and commentator on increasing engagement with women.
The new Marketing Department at Cowley St will bring together internal and external communications. These will include development of our messages and the ways we deliver them, as well as collecting vital feedback. Collette will undertake an …
By Joanne Crouch | Published Tue 24th May 2011 - 11:52 am
In the run up to the 2011 G8 summit in Deauville, France, this May, international humanitarian organisation Concern Worldwide is pushing for commitment and clarity on the agricultural aid promises pledged by G8 members in the 2009 G8 summit in L’Aquila.
Back then, the British Government alongside the other G8 countries committed $22 billion in aid to be distributed over three years as part of the L’Aquila Global Food Security Initiative. The British commitment in particular was for £1.1 billion. These numbers may appear substantial, however they pale in comparison to the $30 billion per year that the UN Food …
By The Voice | Published Sun 15th May 2011 - 7:00 pm
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 221st 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 (8-14 May, 2011), 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:
We’ve tried different approaches to comment moderation on Lib Dem Voice. Initially, we were uber-liberal almost laissez-faire, only moderating comments which we judged were legally risky. Then, at the start of 2010, we decided in response to feedback from readers (including from those who ‘lurk’ but rarely comment) to moderate more actively, declining to accept comments which were at all abusive, or were completely off-topic. Our aim was, and …
By Matt Boyes | Published Thu 12th May 2011 - 10:48 am
With councillors starting new terms following the local election, now is a great opportunity to review how they communicate and get involved with people in their communities. This is actually quite a challenge. Would you be surprised to hear that over two thirds of voters are unable to identify any of their local government representatives? Worryingly, despite the hours of work and campaigning that councillors invest in their local areas, most people admit that they wouldn’t be able to pick them in a line-up. That’s what we found in our Connecting Communities Report, having surveyed over …
By Mark Pack | Published Fri 6th May 2011 - 12:25 pm
Why not join hundreds of other Lib Dem Voice readers in getting our latest headlines by email?
Some people like regularly visiting a site to see if there’s new stories of interest. Some people like subscribing to its news feed (RSS) and checking that way. But if you prefer email, you can instead sign up to get a daily early morning email with a summary of the previous day’s posts from Lib Dem Voice, complete with a note of how many comments each post has got and convenient links to click on if any take your fancy and you want to take a read.
By Helen Duffett | Published Sat 30th April 2011 - 9:43 am
When you’re out campaigning this weekend for the elections and Fairer Votes referendum, make sure you let your friends on Facebook and Twitter know what you’ve been up to.
Hundreds of people are already using Lib Dem Voice’s new Facebook app to do just this. It’s a great way of building up a buzz around our campaigning – and the more someone sees their friends have been campaigning, the more likely they are to join in.
You get a list of actions – select one and publish it to your …
By Helen Duffett | Published Fri 15th April 2011 - 9:53 am
Lib Dem Voice have launched a new Facebook app to make it easy for you to let your friends on Facebook and Twitter know what campaigning you’ve been doing.
This is a great way of building up a buzz around our campaigning – and the more someone sees their friends have been campaigning, the more likely they are to join in.
You get a list of actions – select one and publish it to your newsfeed.
Some actions are of the simple “I have done” variety whilst others have the …
By Mark Pack | Published Fri 8th April 2011 - 12:28 pm
Some people like regularly visiting a site to see if there’s new stories of interest. Some people like subscribing to its news feed (RSS) and checking that way. But if you prefer email, you can instead sign up to get a daily early morning email with a summary of the previous day’s posts from Lib Dem Voice, complete with a note of how many comments each post has got and convenient links to click on if any take your fancy and you want to take a read.
By Stephen Tall | Published Wed 6th April 2011 - 11:07 pm
The right-wing press was today in full self-righteous cry, accusing Nick Clegg of ‘hypocrisy’ for seeking to ensure fairness on internships when he’s stated in interviews before he benefited from family connections. Their argument is comprehensively refuted by the BBC’s home editor Mark Easton, who points out here quite how spurious such attacks are:
The charge is that he is a hypocrite – trying to deny to others what he enjoyed himself. But does the accusation really hold water? Are we saying that no politician can ever pursue reforms to a system because he or she is a consequence of
By Stephen Tall | Published Tue 5th April 2011 - 8:00 am
Yesterday, Pollwatch looked at the current state of the parties; today it’s the turn of the party leaders, Messrs Clegg, Cameron and Miliband.
As with all polls, what follows comes with caveats. Five of the polling companies – YouGov, Ipsos-Mori, ComRes, ICM and Angus Reid – ask questions specifically to find out the public’s views of the party leaders. And each asks variants on the basic question – do you think Clegg/Cameron are doing a good job – to come up with their figures, so comparison ain’t easy. For that reason, I’m taking a 3-month rolling average which isn’t very statistically …
By Stephen Tall | Published Sat 2nd April 2011 - 4:35 pm
… We’d say a big thank you to the 52,224 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in March.
It’s three months since last the Voice indulged in our statporn, so here’s 2011 figures so far: January (44,998) and February (40,206). This brings our absolute unique visitor readership for the last year to date (1 April 2010 – 31 March 2011) to 766,283, almost double the equivalent figure for 2009-10 of 395,014.
Incidentally, if you’re wondering why we publish our readership figures — is it show-off vanity, or pedantic statophilia? — I came up with a few reasons at …
By David Thorpe | Published Sat 26th March 2011 - 11:46 am
If the regular politics of coalition is a walk in a minefield, the Libya crisis presents Lib Dems with a walk in a minefield while being haunted by a pair of malevolent ghouls.
Those twin ghouls are ghosts of conflicts past, conflicts where Britain intervened and expedited disaster, such as Iraq , and the countries where the UK sat on its hands, and watched disaster unfold, such as in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
There are a number interesting, and from a Lib Dem point of view welcome, feature of the debate concerning the possibility of the western intervention in Libya, …
By Lee Savage | Published Thu 24th March 2011 - 1:23 pm
In the coming weeks, the coalition government will unveil its much-heralded strategy for improving social mobility. Nick Clegg has sought to make this the central tenet of the government’s social policy platform for the remainder of the parliament. He therefore has a great personal stake in ensuring its success.
An essential part of that will be ensuring that the strategy tackles the right issues – the causes of low social mobility. Here, there is some reason for concern because the dominant media (and political) narrative on social mobility suggests a misunderstanding of the current evidence.
By Paul Walter | Published Tue 22nd March 2011 - 4:03 pm
Recently, I have started taking an interest in the government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). My MP is one of their ministers. He seems to spend an awful lot of time on marine affairs, coastal defences and the natural environment. So, as a good citizen, I feel I ought to take an interest. For example, recently, I read through all the questions and answers at Thursday’s the DEFRA session in the House of Commons. Well done Andrew George and Duncan Hames for speaking. But, apart from their three queries, it was a Tory controlled zone.
By Mark Pack | Published Sat 19th March 2011 - 10:27 am
As part of Parliament’s deliberations over the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill, this week the House of Lords debated the possibility of moving to weekend voting.
Weekend voting has been once briefly trialled (in Watford a decade ago). It was not a success then, but there are good reasons to try again given the details of how the trial was conducted – especially holding the weekend elections just after the usual national round of local elections, with the result that residents in Watford were seeing in all the national
By Paul Hodgkin | Published Wed 9th March 2011 - 2:45 pm
For all the face time that health secretary Andrew Lansley gets, Lib Dems can’t forget that come election time, they’ll be judged by the success or failure of the NHS reform package too.
This isn’t a reality that many members of the party are warming to. After almost a year of being cast by both the public and media in the role of scapegoat or political cover for their coalition partners, nobody can blame them for being wary.
But the Health and Social Care Bill doesn’t have to be a poisoned chalice. The Lib Dems have succeeded in securing compromises in other …
By Nick T | Published Mon 7th March 2011 - 5:25 pm
There’s what you might think is a somewhat over-the-top headline on Dominic Carman’s piece on the Daily Mail website detailing his experience as the Liberal Democrat candidate in last week’s by-election in Barnsley Central, but after having read the piece it seems somewhat less hyperbolic. Barnsley is not natural Liberal Democrat territory – the content of Dominic’s article will demonstrate why. You couldn’t invent a better example of a Labour stronghold if you tried, and the historic and deep hatred of the Conservative party by many in such seats means campaigning there as a Liberal Democrat now is especially tough.
By Mark Pack | Published Mon 7th March 2011 - 8:55 am
Some people like regularly visiting a site to see if there’s new stories of interest. Some people like subscribing to its news feed (RSS) and checking that way. But if you prefer email, you can instead sign up to get a daily early morning email with a summary of the previous day’s posts from Lib Dem Voice, complete with a note of how many comments each post has got and convenient links to click on if any take your fancy and you want to take a read.
By Simon Beard | Published Fri 25th February 2011 - 10:17 am
After voting in elections, I doubt there is any civic duty more important than responding to the decennial census. The information it provides to governments for policy making is vital, and often very revealing. It simply is not mentioned enough, but the last time a census was taken, back in 2001, it was found that the population was over a million people smaller than predicted in 2000, and that estimates of the population growth rate, which fueled national hysteria about immigration in the late 1990s were twice what they should have been.
By Mark Pack | Published Thu 17th February 2011 - 10:25 am
After last month’s trip down memory lane looking at how internet campaigning worked in Brent East in the 2003 by-election, here is the piece I wrote for the Hansard Society after the 2001 general election (when I ran the Liberal Democrat online campaign). As with the Brent piece, it shows how many principles have stayed the same even as different internet phases have come and gone. And no, the power to draw up sensible imprint rules for the online world mentioned below still hasn’t been used.
Introduction
Perhaps the most notable Internet innovation during the 2001 general election was the ability …
By Jeremy Browne MP | Published Mon 14th February 2011 - 5:23 pm
I am instinctively very supportive of the Big Society. But it is not a new concept and I have another name for it. I call it liberalism.
My liberalism is a belief that power should start at the bottom and feed upwards. It is about personal empowerment, choice and, sometimes, quirky individualism. It is about self-pride, community and, often, a suspicion of authority. It is human in scale and organic in its development.
I have a nervous attentiveness to the need to protect this precious but delicate grassroots liberalism from the steam-roller of the overbearing state. What my liberalism is emphatically not is authoritarian or bleakly conformist. It does not idealise the placing of power at the top in the hands of the mighty and then working downwards. It is instinctively unsettled by orthodoxy and drab uniformity.
By Donald Reid | Published Mon 14th February 2011 - 4:10 pm
Now that the UK’s 1400 top scientists have spoken (“Climate Change, A summary of the science” from the Royal Society), there’s no longer any doubt that human activity is a significant cause of the steady warming of the planet over the last hundred years. So, unless we change our habits, we face an increasingly unstable climate, with rising sea levels and worsening floods and droughts leading to major disruption to food production. With the predicted rise in world population from six to ten billion by 2050, it is clear that humanity is in serious trouble.
1. What’s your formative political memory?
A toss up between my Mum voting in favour of joining Europe in the referendum and my Dad feeling agitated about and improving workers rights in industry.
2. When did you start blogging?
In January, so please be gentle with me! (though all constructive feedback from fellow LibDems welcome).
3. Why did you start blogging?
Have been thinking of doing it for some time, as occasionally you need a few more words than Twitter or broadcasting allows – plus the New Statesman asked me!
4. What five words would you use to describe your blog?
Politics, liberalism, media, coalition, punditry.
5. What five words would you use to describe your political views?
Liberal – that is all.
6. Which post have you most liked writing in the last year (and why)?
As a total novice there is little to choose from. However I enjoyed having a pop at the Daily Telegraph in this one about Nick Clegg’s Red Box.
7. Which post have you most liked reading in the last year (and why)?
I thought this was the most astounding blog of 2010. It’s by Peter Watt, former General Secretary to the Labour Party, and it summed up in so many ways why working with Labour right now would be such a challenge because, as Peter describes, they currently have an inability to listen and struggle to believe that others in politics wish to do good.
8. What’s your favourite YouTube clip?
God would love to do something political but I LOVE this Virgin Atlantic ad soooooooooo beautifully done I could watch it over and over. Enjoy!
Simon McGrath The author, rather oddly says "Anthropic’s latest model, is reported to be three times better than its predecessor at biology "
He seems to think this is a b...
David Allen Very clever Tristan, to pick up my rhetoric about "the planet burning" and turn it back against me. Unfortunately you've also missed my point. PFI wasted gove...
Tristan Ward @David Allen
"Thanks for the link". No trouble! Neidle is worth following.
"we also need to persuade middle-income people to pay more tax"
Thus cl...
Neil Sandison Perhaps in this increasingly busy political market . The bird of liberty needs sharpen its beak and talons and regain some street credibility on the core issues...
David Allen Tristan,
Thanks for the link, which is interesting. Neidle's "taxes people want to raise" are ideas like wealth tax, which Neidle thinks wouldn't work well....
Paul Walter reports …
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Good news on political donations?
Conference booked
New chair of North Northamptonshire Council stands down over social media posts
Are Labour going to cross another red line?
Simon McGrath 
David Allen 
Tristan Ward 
Neil Sandison 