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!
By Mark Pack | Published Sun 13th February 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 Prateek Buch | Published Thu 10th February 2011 - 2:20 pm
Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech on security and tackling terrorism in Munich in has re-ignited a debate over whether ethnic and racial segregation is the root cause of so-called home-grown terrorism, in particular the species that manifested itself so tragically on July 7th 2005 in London. Given my ethnicity (I’m the UK-born son of Hindu Indian immigrants) you may expect me to be apoplectic over the tone and content of Cameron’s rhetoric; at least I should be according to Labour’s Sadiq Khan MP, who accused the PM of ‘writing propaganda for the English Defence League.’ Yet I find …
By Stephen Tall | Published Mon 31st January 2011 - 9:58 am
Lib Dem Voice polled our members-only forum recently to discover what Lib Dem members think of a variety of key issues, and what you make of the Lib Dems’ and Government’s performance to date. Over 660 party members responded, and we’ve been publishing the full results of our survey over the past couple of weeks.
Today, in the final part of our survey, we focus on the performances of the leading lights of the Liberal Democrats — those of our MPs in the cabinet, those occupying ministerial positions, and other leading Lib Dems:
For the first time since his election as leader of the Labour party, I found myself agreeing with Ed Miliband during Prime Minister’s Questions this week.
With his new Shadow Chancellor sat next to him and in response to the news earlier in the week that the economy had contracted by 0.5% during the final quarter of 2010, Miliband urged David Cameron to think again over the upcoming spending cuts and VAT rise.
To make matters worse for the Coalition, the outgoing director-general of the CBI accused the government of putting politics before growth. Sir Richard Lambert argued that “politics …
By Jason Mehmet | Published Wed 19th January 2011 - 2:06 pm
The last article I wrote conjoured up a utopian vision of Liberal Democrat e-campaigning. However, it might not be a realistic aim for individuals or groups who lack social media expertise, or time, to develop a fully fledged social media presence. How, then, should Liberal Democrats prioritise the different elements of social media?
The first choice is an absolute no-brainer. If you do nothing else, start a Facebook page. Don’t mistake a Facebook ‘group’ for a Facebook ‘page’. Though they share some features, they are different beasts. A local Party group should have an ‘official’ Facebook page. Individuals may …
By Mark Pack | Published Wed 19th January 2011 - 12:25 pm
A press release from the Local Government Boundary Commission for Wales explains,
The Minister for Social Justice and Local Government has announced that he will not be making any changes to the present electoral arrangements for any local authorities in Wales until after the 2012 local government elections.
However, despite this the Local Government Boundary Commission for Wales is pressing ahead with some of its boundary reviews, with draft proposals for County Borough of Caerphilly published on Monday and feedback requested by 22 March. The reviews for Wrexham are also continuing, but those for Swansea are on hold after their proposals …
By Jason Mehmet | Published Mon 17th January 2011 - 2:33 pm
The internet is a regular topic on LibDem Voice and one of the most incisive comments I’ve seen about the how the internet applies to the Liberal Democrats was written here:
…at a local level – whether for council or parliamentary elections – email and Facebook, blogs and Twitter, websites and YouTube can each make a real difference to an individual candidate’s campaigning efforts, offering them the chance to motivate supporters, and communicate directly with voters. None of these are a replacement for regular Focus leaflets and door-to-door personal contact; but they are an increasingly essential addition to our traditional
By Mark Pack | Published Wed 12th January 2011 - 8:55 am
In November I blogged my suggestions for how the party’s internal election rules should be changed. In brief – fewer restrictions on candidates and voters being able to talk about the contests and who they support, more leeway for online campaigning and a series of steps to encourage more debate and discussion within the party about the elections and merits of candidates. The last point was fuelled by my experience of standing (successfully) for the Interim Peers Panel – and being asked almost no policy questions by voters in the process.
Following the federal committee, interim peers panel and …
By Richard Clare | Published Sun 9th January 2011 - 12:50 pm
With the looming by-election in Oldham East & Saddleworth and each candidate eager to win, with each of their respective parties hoping to be able to boast about the win for years to come, I’d imagine the people of OE&S are probably scratching their heads. A Labour party that endorsed the Phil Woolas who combined pretty much everything we hate about politicians in his lies intended to stir racial tensions? A Liberal Democrat party that, let’s be honest, is not the most glamorous of groups at the moment, still reeling from scandals and broken pledges? A Conservative party barely even …
By Stuart Bonar | Published Thu 6th January 2011 - 2:32 pm
The Government should have stuck to its guns, and ended its relationship with Booktrust.
There was never any withdrawal of funding or cut as far as I can tell. The last government signed a time-limited deal with the charity to dish out books to children of various ages. That contract is due to come to an end next April, and the Coalition has always had every intention of honouring that contract.
From the media coverage and the reaction of some, you might imagine that instead of not renewing a contract, the Coalition had instead decided to indulge in human …
By Mark Pack | Published Wed 5th January 2011 - 10:25 am
Building up traffic to a local party or councillor website is much like building up a delivery network: it brings big benefits, but it’s not the sort of thing you can do overnight. They are both best achieved by making slow and steady progress over a period of time.
Steadily work your way down the list over the next couple of months and by the time this May’s election campaigns proper kick off you should really notice the difference.
Make sure the site is listed:there are numerous websites and blog directories, but generally only two really matter for political sites: DMOZ …
By Stephen Tall | Published Tue 4th January 2011 - 1:58 pm
Today’s increase in VAT from 17.5% to 20% — announced in the Coalition’s emergency budget last year — has triggered a fresh burst of opportunism criticism from Labour. The “wrong tax at the wrong time” claims their leader Ed Miliband.
How Labour’s last Chancellor backed a VAT rise
I suspect there’s a Labour MP we won’t be hearing from today, though: Alistair Darling*, Chancellor until the party’s defeat in May. As Mark Pack noted here last July, Mr Darling was a strong advocate of increasing the rate of VAT in order to tackle the UK’s massive deficit, with The …
By Stephen Tall | Published Sun 2nd January 2011 - 5:58 pm
… We’d say a big thank you to the 51,153 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in December.
That’s a notch down on our November figure of c.59,000, but almost double the equivalent figure for December ’09 of c.27,000.
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 the start of last year. The arguments still stack up, I think.
The 5 top-read stories during the month were:
Hywel "Only 9% picked a customs union and 7% the single market, the party’s current policy. "
Maybe people have a limited understanding of what these are. Hell ...
Nonconformistradical "I would rather win 80 seats and be third everywhere else than win 30 and second in 100 plus. No points for second place"
Seconded...
Tim Rogers Nick. Time is the essential element here. Only with time will we be able to see if it worked. Voting for us at elections at all levels will require us to unders...
Ian Patterson It’s all down to the difference between fluffy seats where we can do well in parts of UK and the larger number of non fluffy seats where we do not. As the las...
Nick Baird Hi Tim - that may be a reasonable assessment of where we are now, but it also confirms the problem. When you talk about "those Conservative voters" that's an ac...
Paul Walter reports …
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Peter Kellner: Zack Polanski should have won at a canter
Liverpool near bottom of the league for recycling
Labour's recovery in by-elections continues.
Vote Tory, get Reform?
Looking good!
Hywel 
Nonconformistradical 
Tim Rogers 
Ian Patterson 
Nick Baird 