By NewsHound | Published Mon 14th December 2009 - 4:30 pm
Lib Dem shadow home secretary Chris Huhne has an article in today’s Times noting that how much it costs the Treasury to borrow money depends on three ratings agencies … and asks the crucial question: are they fit to wield this power?
Chris’s credential for writing an article outside his brief? Well, he founded the sovereign group at Fitch Ratings, and was group managing director. Here’s an excerpt:
Last week Moody’s — one of the big three international ratings agencies — warned that the UK’s top bond rating would be under threat if Britain failed to sort out its public finances
By Mark Pack | Published Sun 13th December 2009 - 4:50 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 convenient links to click on if any take your fancy and you want to take a read.
Just go to our email sign up page to start getting these emails. You can also sign up for a special once-a-week email, bringing …
By Philip Young | Published Sun 13th December 2009 - 10:05 am
Over at the Daily Mail, is the shine coming off Brand Cameron, or, is this just a kick up the pants? First comes the big slap…then the boot, with a stiletto heel.
Daily Mail, leader-column, 12.12.09:
“At a time like this, it’s madness to ring-fence any budget at the expense of the rest. Even sacred cows can be hugely overweight. Since 1977, billions have been poured into health and education, without the improvements in standards we’d expect.
“How can Mr. Darling claim there’s no scope for cuts in the NHS, on the day we learn it is spending £1 …
By Stephen Tall | Published Sun 6th December 2009 - 2:00 pm
If you could choose up to three items for your Christmas stocking, what would they be? That was the question LDV posed to a group of Lib Dem bloggers. And over the next two days we’ll reveal what they told us, with all their choices added to the Amazon carousel widget featured on our home-page, referral fees from which will help support Lib Dem Voice: so get clicking and ordering. In part one, four bloggers – Jennie Rigg, Millennium Elephant, Mark Pack and Alex Foster – give us the low-down on their Xmas faves.
By Stephen Tall | Published Fri 4th December 2009 - 1:20 pm
After two months of poll fluctuations triggered by the ups-and-downs of party conference-dominated media coverage, November gives us an opportunity to look at the parties’ popularity, as measured by the polls, for the first time since early September.
Here, in chronological order, are the results of the 10 polls published in November:
By Helen Duffett | Published Fri 4th December 2009 - 8:27 am
It’s December 4th, and 210 years since the day William Pitt the Younger introduced income tax to help pay for the Napoleonic Wars. By that time, The Observer (the world’s first Sunday newspaper) was already celebrating its ninth birthday.
2 Must-Read Blog Posts
What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:
By Robson Brown | Published Wed 2nd December 2009 - 2:17 pm
December 5th will see the Copenhagen climate change summit get underway, for two weeks of talks that must lead to a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and perhaps something as binding and successful as the 1987 Montreal Protocol that led to the phasing out of harmful CFC and HCFC propellants.
The talks are a long time coming; 2009 is the tail-end of the deadline for agreement already set by world leaders in Bali in 2007.
Frankly, this is unacceptable, and we think it’s time for a bit of old-fashioned co-ordinated civil action to remind world leaders that actually, the people of this planet want to see radical action on a bold, even savage, scale. The time for talking is over – we need firm commitments on what will happen and how, before it’s too late. So why not join us and thousands of others this Saturday to help save the world?
By Alex Foster | Published Wed 2nd December 2009 - 11:20 am
Just two weekends ago, we helped run a moderately successful Bloggers’ Unconference in Edinburgh, the guests of the Scottish Liberal Democrats at their HQ in Clifton Terrace. The Scottish Lib Dems were generous with their facilities and their time, giving us a room for a day, feeding us, and making sure lots of interesting senior Scottish Lib Dems came to talk to us. In the end four English bloggers made the …
By Stephen Tall | Published Tue 1st December 2009 - 12:50 pm
… We’d say a big thank you to the 29,252 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in November.
This brings our absolute unique visitor readership for the last year to date (1 Dec 2008 – 30 Nov 2009) to 292,073, over 40% higher than the equivalent figure for 2007-08 of 205,099.
By Alex Foster | Published Mon 30th November 2009 - 3:53 pm
Yesterday saw the conclusion of ALDC‘s annual training event Kickstart, designed for councillors and campaigners who are defending and targetting council seats at next year’s local elections.
Next year is a special year indeed, because in all probability the General Election will happen on the same day as local elections. Whilst this is nothing new, the councils that are facing election this time are …
By Alex Foster | Published Mon 30th November 2009 - 11:15 am
Last Saturday at the Bloggers’ Unconference, our final interview of the day was with Jo Swinson MP – which was particularly kind of her, since she’d flown back from New York the day before, and must have been jet-lagged.
Falling at the end of the day, the discussion we had with Jo was one of the most informal of the day, but was all the better for that. Her enthusiasm for finding new ways of communicating really shone through, and she talked to us about creating the video below. In particular, she was really keen to show us her new Flip video camera, which is extremely portable and can be used by just the one person, without needing fancy lights, an off-camera microphone or an extra person working as camera operator.
Jo used her Flip to make a series of mini videos about the work she was doing at the UN, and quite simply to give some basic impressions of what visiting the UN buildings in New York are like. The buildings are iconic, but not particularly fancy. Working in the main office block is like working in any slightly old fashioned tower block. She also takes time out of her schedule to show us a moving statue rescued from the rubble of Hiroshima – on the face, undamaged and intact; on the rear, scraped raw by the heat and debris of the nuclear explosion.
If you follow LDV’s twitter feed, you may also have seen this message promoting a short audio interview with Helen Duffett asking Jo the questions.
Lots of familiar names on the 2009 Q3 list, with five/six-figure gifts coming from the following: Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (£231k), Bloomberg Tradebook Europe Limited (£25k), Mr Christopher Nicholson (£21.5k), Professor John Howson (£10k), Mrs Joan Ramsden (£10k), and Philip Young (£10k).
Fewer Parliamentarians than normal contributed this quarter – the most generous I spot-checked were:
By Stephen Tall | Published Sun 29th November 2009 - 10:50 am
Welcome to the 145th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (22nd – 28th November 2009), together with a hand-picked quintet, partly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.
Don’t forget, by the way, you can now 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:
Guido’s story is that of all the reportable donations given to all the parties in the Electoral Commission’s third quarter, 55% of the moolah went to the Blues.
This report from Guido came hot on the heels of a couple of bits of information about Conservative fundraising efforts in Ealing, which has caused a bit of a stir in the local papers. An email arrived with a copy of a Tory letter, and a letter in the Ealing Gazette, which I reproduce below:
By Mark Pack | Published Sat 21st November 2009 - 8:50 am
Welcome to part seven of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via this page. The series will then be revised and collated into an e-book, so please do post up your comments as the series progresses. Today it’s the turn of The Voice’s Mark Pack to talk about building up your audience.
There are many reasons for blogging and, depending on your own …
Clegg, who had called for the speech to be cancelled and the remaining Parliamentary time before an election to be used to clean-up politics, said there was nothing in the proposed legislation to help create jobs, boost bank lending and fix the UK’s “rotten” political system.
And here in full is what Nick said today in response to the government measures announced by HM The Queen:
All the pageantry in the world cannot cover up the fact that this is a fantasy Queen’s Speech from a government that has run out of road in a Parliament that has lost the people’s trust.
This Queen’s Speech won’t give people the help and jobs they need in this recession and it won’t fix our rotten politics.
After 12 long years, in which this government has passed nearly 500 different laws, along with countless thousands of statutory instruments, it is right to stop and ask the question: what is this Queen’s Speech really for?
Gordon Brown will begin a six-month election campaign this week with one of the shortest but most deliberately political programmes of recent years. … In a podcast on the Downing Street website, Mr Brown said that Britons wanted world-class public services underpinned by “guarantees not gambles”. He was referring to legislation this week that will enshrine in law the right of NHS patients to get treatment within 18 weeks or to see a cancer specialist within two weeks — or be granted
By Paul Walter | Published Sat 7th November 2009 - 8:50 am
Welcome to part five of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via this page. The series will then be revised and collated into an e-book, so please do post up your comments as the series progresses. Today it’s the turn of Paul Walter, who looks at the question of how to handle comments which appear on your blog.
There are a number of approaches on handling comments. It’s a question of finding a method which you are comfortable with.
By Stephen Tall | Published Mon 2nd November 2009 - 11:00 am
… We’d say a big thank you to the 31,331 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in October.
That’s a 10% uplift on last month’s readership, and a 38% increase on the same period a year ago, when just over 22,000 readers visited LDV.
This brings our absolute unique visitor readership for the last year to date (1 Nov 2008 – 31 Oct 2009) to 312,829, almost double the equivalent figure for 2007-08 of 169,320.
By Mark Thompson | Published Sat 24th October 2009 - 9:00 am
Welcome to part three of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via this page. The series will then be revised and collated into an e-book, so please do post up your comments as the series progresses. Today it’s the turn of Mark Thompson (the one with the blog rather than the one with TV empire) addressing one of the problems that befalls many would be bloggers: how do you keep on coming up with ideas for new posts?
By The Voice | Published Tue 20th October 2009 - 6:20 pm
Over at The Times, the Lib Dems’ shadow chancellor Vince Cable argues that the Financial Services Authority’s review on mortgages doesn’t go far enough to prevent a return to banks’ wild excesses. Here’s an excerpt:
Some of the more aggressive banks, seeking to expand their market share, are relaxing their offerings in terms of loan-to-value ratios. Any eagerness to return to former lending practices should be a source of concern. The housing market has not adjusted, at least yet, to realistic levels. Historical trends show a cyclical pattern of boom and bust, lasting roughly 15 to 20 years, going back to
By Mark Pack | Published Tue 20th October 2009 - 12:20 pm
The debates and disputes around the Liberal Democrats’ Bournemouth conference give a taste of what is likely to be a tricky process of drawing up the party’s manifesto for the next general election.
Formally, there is a three part process to that manifesto: the manifesto working group chaired by Danny Alexander will present work to the Shadow Cabinet which will then in turn (quite possibly amended) go to the Federal Policy Committee (FPC).
How will this process work and who will the key people be in drawing up the manifesto?
By Stephen Tall | Published Mon 19th October 2009 - 9:35 am
2 Big Stories
Labour’s Hain threatens BBC with legal action over BNP invitation
Labour’s Welsh secretary Peter Hain makes a bid for the media spotlight today by arguing that the BBC could face legal action over this Thursday’s edition of Question Time, due to feature an appearance by BNP leader Nick Griffin MEP:
… in his letter , Mr Hain … said the decision should be reconsidered in light of a legal case about ethnic restrictions on the BNP’s membership rules. The party has agreed to amend its constitution after the Equalities and Human Rights Commission sought an injunction, claiming the BNP was breaking the Race Relations Act by restricting membership to “indigenous Caucasian” people.
By Mat Bowles | Published Sat 17th October 2009 - 7:20 am
Welcome to part two of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via this page. The series will then be revised and collated into an e-book, so please do post up your comments as the series progresses. Today it’s the turn of Mat Bowles, advising on the technical side of getting started with a blog.
So, you’re thinking of starting a blog of your own. You could do what most people seem to do at this stage, and go sign up directly to Google’s Blogger service and just get writing. Personally, I don’t think that’s necessarily the best idea. I’m a Lib Dem, my membership card says on the back:
No one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity
By Gareth Aubrey | Published Mon 12th October 2009 - 3:15 pm
To Wales, then, where it’s goodbye from him, and it’s au revoir from him …
And So, With Tears In Either Eye
In fairness to him, Rhodri Morgan pretty much kept to his end of the bargain in announcing that he would stand down as First Minister after the Assembly budget was agreed on December 8th (but since the promise was that he’d announce his intentions on or around September 29th, his end of the bargain wasn’t that hard to keep up). The inevitable political and journalistic encomium followed and you can’t begrudge it him; whatever his political failings, his personal popularity is unmatched in recent memory.
With the flag dropped, Larry, Moe and Curly were soon off and running to succeed him (not that they hadn’t been before, unofficially).
By Mark Pack | Published Wed 7th October 2009 - 7:56 pm
A range of popular websites, providing useful services such as information on local job vacancies and planning applications, have been closed down following the Royal Mail’s decision to crack down on the use they made of its postcode address database.
With postcodes so increasingly important to national life, it’s ridiculous that they are not public data that is, as a minimum, free to use for non-profit organisations.
Chris Cory Completely agree. The stress that AI data centres will put on energy and water resources seems rarely mentioned by environmental activists. There also seems a...
George Thomas And the third story of the drought being declared in north and past of mid- Wales. In September of 2025 the "Government Digital Sustainability Alliance’s (GDS...
Peter Davies "Homes must be what local people can genuinely afford" which is not by any stretch of the imagination what is required by the affordable household threshold....
Hywel "I would expect Jeff is right to say that higher taxation will act as a disincentive to working legitimately"
I was though wondering of the evidence base for...
Peter Hirst Extending the school day should be primarily for children. For it to be done significantly there would need to be an overhaul of timetables. There would need to...
Welcome to part seven of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via 
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The infected blood scandal highlights the siloed nature of Whitehall
Reality hits the Burnham agenda
Reading Ulysses
Newcastle Pride - the video
My Liberator article on the Yorkists' New Deal
Chris Cory 
George Thomas 
Peter Davies 
Hywel 
Peter Hirst 