When the dulcet tones of the BBC’s Shipping Forecast turn to the weather in German Bight, two thoughts often flit through my mind – both related to the history of Heligoland, an island (or strictly speaking, an inhabited island and a small uninhabited neighbour) that previously gave its name to that shipping forecast area until a name change in 1956.
The first thought is a reminder of how unbalanced the information provided online can be. Google “Heligoland” and you will usually find results dominated by music (Heligoland was an album title for Massive Attack) and military history (Heligoland was the site …
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 was one of the contributors to Great Liberal Speeches. Here is my introduction to the selected speech from George Tierney, followed by the speech itself. The issues are arguments are still very pertinent …
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.
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…
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.
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 …
Will The Times’s paywall work? It’s the question that’s been asked ever since Rupert Murdoch’s News International announced its intention to place The Times and The Sunday Times websites behind a paywall, blocking any user not prepared to pay a subscription for access.
Last week saw publication of early unofficial statistics which were extrapolated at length in The Guardian and suggest The Times’s website now attracts somewhere between 84,800 and 195,700 daily unique users – compared with c.1.2 million daily unique users pre-paywall.
It’s stating the obvious to point out that’s a huge drop: after all, the point of the exercise is to make money from the few, not be free to the masses. So far, it’s understood there are 15,000 paying users – though whether that figure includes those who signed up for cheap one-month trial offers is not certain – in addition to 12,500 iPad users.
Assuming The Times can retain all those paying customers (which is a big assumption), it’s estimated the paywall could attract revenues of £1-2m a year. I’ve not yet seen, though, a reliable figure showing what the cost in lost advertising revenue associated with a fall in online circulation will total – which make it difficult as yet to work out if News International will generate an immediate net profit from the paywall. That, after all, would be Mr Murdoch’s ultimate response to the naysayers.
What I don’t understand is why News International decided to go all out for the paywall at The Times without at least first testing the market by adopting a ‘freemium’ model, making basic content available free, but charging for premium content.
The Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year Awards, run by Lib Dem Voice, are back for their fifth year. As usual, they’ll be awarded in a budget lavish ceremony at the party’s autumn conference in Liverpool. (There’s further information on the event over at the Lib Dems’ Flock Together site). Click on the following links to see last year’s Shortlist and the Winners.
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. Today’s is about Google. I’ve updated the social network usage figures.
Google dominates the search engine market, both in the UK and internationally. Although there are some countries where a local search service has the lead …
Channel 4’s investigation with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism into MPs’ election expenses has raised questions about another five MPs in addition to Zac Goldsmith.
Having already looked at some of the legal questions around Zac Goldsmith, how do the other five stack up? Two raise important points of how the law should be interpreted, one has unclear evidence so far and two appear to involve administrative errors without any actual overspending.
It can be surprisingly easy to excite some journalists. Today is a case in point. Nick Clegg stood in for David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions. During his exchanges with Jack Straw (who was standing in for Labour’s Harriet Harman), the Deputy Prime Minister referred to the invasion of Iraq as “illegal”.
To most people watching this is not a surprise. The Lib Dems’ opposition to the Iraq war, which was supported by both Labour and the Tories, is pretty well-documented, I think it’s fair to say. The fact that the Lib Dems and Conservatives have reached a coalition agreement does not alter the past, nor does it alter politicians’ individual views. Why should it?
And yet the response from some journalists has been to label this a “gaffe” – a term otherwise known as a politician saying something he believes which a journalist hopes to be able to spin into a story.
Indeed, it’s interesting to see how a story like this can develop.
Deborah Mattinson’s account of what she saw during her time as a leading pollster to the Labour Party certainly doesn’t stint in portraying her own role in what the book calls “Europe’s greatest election winning machine of the modern era”. The fact that Labour won three general elections in a row and yet the fact that, even looking no further than the same country and the same part of the century, the preceding Conservative government did one better and won four general elections in a row, does provide a warning against taking everything in the book – whether from the …
Here’s your starter for ten in our Saturday slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate:
Why should a political party restrict itself to fighting public elections? Why not also take part in the myriad of other elections that exist, including those for directors of companies?
Instead of complaining from the sidelines about how a council behaves, we fight elections to change its decisions and methods. The same logic could apply to companies, hospital trusts, housing bodies and may more, all of which – like the bodies we fight elections for – have significant power over communities and individuals.
Lib Dem party membership is up a remarkable 14% this year, according to official figures released by the party in England. 4,500 new members have joined the party since the election and the coalition agreement was reached, and the party is having greater success in retaining current members than in previous years.
Lib Dem Voice reported last week the anecdotal evidence of one parliamentary candidate, Gareth Epps in Reading East, that Lib Dem membership has been on the increase, with a ratio of 10 new members for every one member leaving.
Well, it’s now clear that the experience in Reading is …
First published in 2008, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers is a rebuttal of the traditional American emphasis on people’s success coming from the individual merit and triumph of exceptional humans as epitomised in the quote from Robert Winthorp who urged people at the unveiling of a statute of Benjamin Franklin to, “look at the image of a man who rose from nothing, who owned nothing to parentage or patronage, who enjoyed no advantages of early education which are not open – a hundredfold open – to yourselves”. Instead, Gladwell argues that although individual ability matters, it also requires three other crucial elements …
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. This one is from Spring last year and has been slightly updated.
After a long period of stalling, the Labour Government finally announced in spring 2009 a timetable for switching Britain’s electoral registration system from one …
In the early twentieth century, large public meetings and lengthy public speeches were expected of – and needed by – Parliamentary candidates fighting vigorous campaigns. A century on, candidates fighting vigorous campaigns frequently get by without organising any public meetings or giving any public speeches longer than a few minutes of opening remarks at a local organisation’s hustings.
Yet although these forms of personal, direct contact between candidate and voter have declined sharply over the last century, the opportunities for such contact via the internet have increased sharply in the last few years.
In 2008 – when the general assumption was that the Tories would win an overall majority – the Hansard Society published a collection of essays on the impact of a balanced parliament on British politics, titled No Overall Control.
One of its contributors was Simon Hughes, then the Lib Dems’ shadow leader of the House, now our deputy leader. So how does what Simon said over two years ago about a hypothetical future measure up to what’s happening in the current reality?
Pretty well in most respects is the answer. While arguing that a balanced parliament was a less-than-likely eventuality, …
With an AV referendum coming (most likely in the spring), there is plenty that local parties can already be doing to help win the referendum. I’ve already talked about the importance of fielding more local election candidates, so today’s post is about starting to ask questions of the public.
It’s never too early to start gathering voting intention data, even if you don’t yet know the exact candidate line-up, and likewise it’s never too early to start gathering referendum voting intentions, even if we don’t yet know the exact question.
When it comes to electoral reform, opinion polls show us …
Whether driven by circumstance or long-term plan, the reaction of David Cameron to the general election result has been an attempt to realign British politics around the centre-right, using the need to strike – and then keep an agreement – with the Liberal Democrats as a way to drag his party away from its more right-wing elements. Doubtless future biographers will spill much ink over what might have been had he got closer to the winning post on his own, or even past it, just as the question of how pluralistic Tony Blair would have been had he not got …
Largely overlooked in the Budget was the confirmation of plans to introduce across the state sector a new standard for fair pay. The intention is that the best paid will receive no more than 20 times the salary of the lowest paid.
There is a wealth of detail still to be worked out, though reassuringly much of that work lies in the hands of Will Hutton, who is heading up a commission on fair pay in the public sector. Particularly important are questions of how broadly the public sector is defined (similar to the questions raised by Freedom of Information legislation, whose remit …
Inspired by Journalism Grads: 30 Things You Should Do This Summer and prompted by Stephen Tall, last summer I ran a list of 30 suggestions for would-be politicians, particularly those new to public office or seeking it in the next few years. As it went down well, here it is back for a new summer and a new Parliament, with a new lick of paint, a few updates along the way and my thanks to those who commented last year:
Running Canada a close second as the current country of choice to look at for deficit cutting lessons is Sweden. As I previously looked at the Canadian experience, now it’s the turn of Sweden.
The think tank Bruegel has published a pamphlet from Jens Henriksson about the Swedish experience of turning a budget deficit of over 11% of GDP into a surplus. He was a policy adviser to the Swedish government during this period.
The pamphlet spreads over more than 40 pages, though politically the most important point is made by him right at the start:
is not a paper about how to get rid of the welfare state. On the contrary, it is about how to strengthen the economic foundations for whatever kind of social model that is preferred. The budget consolidation in Sweden was dramatic but it preserved, and in many ways modernised and improved, the welfare system.
As with Canada, Sweden was able to tackle its budget deficit at a time of a much healthier world economy than the one that provides the backdrop to our own current efforts. Even so, it’s worth bearing in mind just how bad the Swedish economy had got:
Sweden experienced negative growth three years in a row between 1991 and 1993, averaging minus two percent. Over three years the debt almost doubled, unemployment tripled and the budget surplus turned into a large deficit. The combined effect of an exploding budget deficit, high interest rates and record-high levels of unemployment was staggering.
The ten lessons Henriksson lays out are:
Sound public finances are a prerequisite for growth. That does not have to mean an aversion to borrowing or major monetary expansion. Henriksson is happy with plenty of the former if the money is wisely invested and Sweden did plenty of the latter, but you cannot just forever put off dealing with public finances.
If you are in debt, you are not free. His underlying point is a sound one: if you are in too much debt then you end up in thrall to the international financial markets. However, becoming debt free is not the only way to avoid this problem; many countries (including Britain) have run manageable debts for long periods of time without running into that problem. So although the exact criteria may not apply to the UK, the basic point does – the less dependant you are on international borrowing to keep the government’s finances afloat, the more freedom you have to do what you want.
The one responsible must put her or his job on the line. The argument here is that this is what gets credibility with the public, financial markets, civil service and political colleagues. If they all know that person X is deadly serious, it then becomes easier to achieve the goals. For example, civil servants may be tempted to try to avoid having to make cuts in their budget and ride out the political impetus to curb the deficit. If they know that they can’t do that, they are more likely to offer up suggestions based on their detailed knowledge of the more obscure corners of the public sector.
Set goals and stick to them. Once again the theme of strong public commitments making the overall job easier features in Henriksson’s list. Here he argues that just as public targets for inflation make controlling inflation easier, so too do they for a deficit.
Consolidation should be designed as a package: “An ad hoc hodgepodge of measures will only have a limited chance of success. Presenting the consolidation measures in one package makes it clear to all interest groups that they are not the only ones being asked to make sacrifices … If a consolidation package consists of both tax increases and expenditure cuts the distributional effect can be fair. When studying the distributional consequences, do not only use the income distribution perspective. There are other dimensions that also are important, such as for instance gender, age and geography.”
Act structurally but be consistent. Perhaps the most surprising recommendation in the pamphlet, this point in Sweden meant a uniform 11% cut from all budgets – a very different approach from the Canadian one of looking at each area of government activity and deciding if it is necessary. The downside of a flat rate cut across the board is that there is no particular reason to believe that the least desirable expenditure is equally distributed across the board. Against this Henriksson argues that only flat rate cuts really get an understanding of the absolute need to find efficiencies seeping in to all corners of the state. It also avoid problems with some sectors feeling they have been picked on unfairly compared to others. In this respect, our coalition government, with its ring fencing of certain expenditure including the NHS, is going for the Canadian model rather than the Swedish one.
Do not leave the problems to the local authorities. Again, this contrasts with the Canadian approach of displacing many issues from the federal government to lower levels. Henriksson’s warning is based on the Swedish experience where local authorities faced a really tight squeeze: “In Sweden it meant that we saw big cuts in schools, healthcare and childcare because they are financed through local taxes. This created enormous political problems.”
Be honest to citizens and financial markets: “Never say that it won’t hurt. Never say that it is peanuts. Having been honest about the effects will not make it much easier, but being dishonest can lead to disaster. This will help ordinary people to plan ahead and to limit shocks.” The comments of Cameron, Osborne and Clegg neatly fit this lesson.
Stick to one message. Tackling a deficit is not simply about producing a list of items to cut or taxes to raise; it’s also a communications challenge to bring the public with you and to win confidence from the financial markets. That makes mixing in tax cuts with the rest of the package tricky: “At one time the government decided to cut down on expenditures to finance a tax cut in VAT on food. The result was that people became furious. ‘You are not cutting down because you need to. You are cutting down because you want to’. That was an impossible argument to handle, since the message was budget discipline, but the action was .” On this point (and the linked argument against making any spending increases, even small ones in popular areas), the coalition government is taking a very different course from Sweden – looking to use tax cuts and targeted spending increases to garner wider support for the tough measures and also because they are justified in their own right.
Stick to it. Once you have sorted out the deficit, make sure you reform the systems that caused the problem in the first place.
Overall there are many similarities between Sweden’s approach and the current British one, but also some notable differences – no across the board percentage of cuts and a mix of the tough measures with tax cuts and spending increases. On both those fronts the British approach looks to better suit our circumstances, provided that the rest of the package delivers the necessary financial changes. Whether or not that is the case will be much clearer after the forthcoming budget.
You can read the full pamphlet from Jens Henriksson here:
When should the Government’s promised referendum on AV be held? That’s the question causing a fair amount of debate at the heart of the coalition.
From the simple good governance point of view, the answer is as soon as possible – because the sooner it is held, the more time there will be if AV is passed to get the law and then the administration right in good time ahead of the next general election. Late changes to election rules have been the bane of the electoral system far too often in the last decade.
A common thread running through the Press Complaints Commission’s defence of its work is that it has been primarily created to deal with individual complaints, rather than being a regulator whose role is to improve the press overall. That’s why, for example, the PCC emphasises the proportion of complaints made to it which are concluded with the complainant happy with the outcome rather than, for example, focusing on how widespread certain practices are and whether they are increasing or decreasing.
To give an example: if a blogger were to complain to the PCC about a newspaper taking their work and reusing …
In amongst the debate over capital gains tax and the politics of whether the Budget leans more towards the previous Liberal Democrat or Conservative policies on the topic is a significant issue of principle.
The Liberal Democrats (and previously the Liberals in particular) have traditionally been much keener on the idea that the tax system should treat ‘unearned income’ more equally to earned income, and so tax more equally the growth in capital value of assets compared with salaries.
Of course the use of the word ‘unearned’ is itself the trigger for a whole range of debates as increase values …
Before the election, Lib Dem Voice launched How Authoritarian is your MP?, a website which ranked how authoritarian – or liberal – were MPs in the 2005-10 parliament based on their voting record on 10 key issues. These ranged from ID cards to detention without trial to freedom of speech.
The five candidates for the Labour leadership are now official – so we can now see how their voting record compares, and name the contender who is, officially, the most liberal potential Labour leader …
(NB: if you click on their name you can see how their voting record stacks up).
Overseas places come and go as the fashionable one to talk about in Westminster political circles. After 1992 it was Japan, with the fourth Conservative general election victory in a row spawning comparisons with Japan and the long period of Liberal Democrat rule there. In the run up to 2005 it was the Australian state of Queensland, where an incumbent state government had seemed set for re-election but suffered a shock defeat, put down largely to complacency amongst its supporters. And of course, as a third example, when in doubt there’s always the 1960 US Presidential election, Barack Obama or …
Nick Clegg debuted in front of the House of Commons today in his new role (yes, it is still new: it’s only a month since the election) as deputy prime minister. And he used the occasion to set out how the new coalition government will make good the political reforms radical political reform plans that languished neglected during Labour’s 13 years in government. The government’s plans include:
* A referendum on the Alternative Vote
* The right to recall MPs who break the rules
* Fewer, more equal-sized constituencies
With a tip of our hat to the Daily Mail – which today asks its readers 13 questions so they can tell if they’re posh or not – Lib Dem Voice presents our special How Lib Dem are you? test:
(Click on the image to enlarge).
All you have to do is answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the following questions to get your answer …
1. Do you complain about long driveways and low letterboxes after an afternoon’s leaflet delivery?
2. Do you obsessively count the number of garden posters of the different parties
The small overall net loss of seats in this month’s general election understandably rather overshadowed the growth in the party’s share of the popular vote, which was up for the third general election in a row.
The seat total was hit by the party not getting the lucky breaks in very close contests. The party won five of these knife-edge results but lost eleventwelve.
That gives a hint as to what was happening overall to the number of seats won or close to won. If you total up the number of seats the party has won or come within …
David Sparrow Hurrah, we comfortably held all 3 seats in Idle & Thackley on Bradford MBC so some consolation fellow LDs
https://bradford.moderngov.co.uk/mgElectionAreaRe...
Jeff Ed Davey is right to say that the Labour Party’s talk of a ‘reset’ just seems like a more polite ‘No’ than the Conservatives managed.
Labour...
Jeff Secondly, rejoining the single market is not rejoining the EU.
It effectively is. The correct name for the ‘single market’ is the EU Internal Mark...
Jeff Ed Davey’s call for Labour to drop its ‘torpor and timidity’ and rejoin the single market…
That would end any pretence that the UK is a democr...
Matt (Bristol) Ben - However, I'd agree with Theo that the pragmatic / cynical policy you outline does need to acknowledge and chew down on the fact that in areas Lib Dems are...
Will Straw from Left Foot Forward has 
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A bumper set of of council and Parliamentary by-elections
The Joy of Six 1535
Makerfield: we can breathe again.
Brexit has cut trade in almost every sector of the UK economy
Replacement?
David Sparrow 
Jeff 
Matt (Bristol) 