Tag Archives: featured

Stephen Tall

What Lib Dem members think about talking to the Tories: LDV poll results

By Stephen Tall | Mon 10th May 2010 - 2:25 pm

Lib Dem Voice has been conducting a survey today of party members registered on our members’ forum asking them for their views of the discussions that have been taking place between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives. Here’s what you’ve told us …

  • 89% support Nick Clegg’s decision to let the party with the most votes and most seats try and form a government;
  • 90% support Nick Clegg’s decision to enter into discussions with the Conservative party on that basis;
  • 80% say that significant progress on electoral reform is a deal-breaker;
  • 98% rate Nick Clegg’s performance during the campaign as effective or very effective, with Vince Cable scoring 85%.

Full results below:

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Posted in General Election and LDV Members poll | 91 Comments
Stephen Tall

Deal or no deal? Here’s what I think

By Stephen Tall | Sat 8th May 2010 - 12:45 pm

Who would want to be in Nick Clegg’s place today? For all the talk during the campaign that the Lib Dem leader would end up as ‘Kingmaker’, that now looks the least enviable position imaginable.

I’ve read and absorbed lots of the commentary of the last 24 hours – both on this site and elsewhere – and am amazed by the striking naivete of those who appear to imagine there is an easy option for the Lib Dems, that whatever choice we make in the days ahead won’t involve compromise and pain. Sorry guys: it will.

Nick Clegg has just three realistic choices, and all of them are unappetising in one way or another.

A deal with the Tories:

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Posted in News | 300 Comments
Stephen Tall

The morning after the night before: 10 questions we need to answer (but maybe not today)

By Stephen Tall | Fri 7th May 2010 - 12:55 pm

Here’s a few to ponder … Or perhaps best to sleep on them.

1. What happened to the predicted Lib Dem surge? Did people change their mind at the last minute? Did young people not turn out? Did floating voters turn their back on us?

2. How did the opinion polls get the Lib Dem share of the vote so badly wrong? They were pretty accurate in terms of the Labour/Tory vote, but all nine of the final polls put the Lib Dems in the 26-29% range when in fact we scored 23%.

3. What happened to our targeting strategy? Given our share of the vote was higher than in 2005, how did we lose so many seats? Did we over-reach ourselves? Or did we underestimate the residual Labour/Tory vote?

4. Why were there such differences between results in individual Lib Dem seats, sometimes making gains against the Tories (eg, Wells, Eastbourne), sometimes suffering horrendous swings (eg, Oxford West & Abingdon, Montgomeryshire). Incumbency seems to have helped in some places, not in others: why?

5. Should Nick Clegg have ruled out any form of coalition before the election to avoid a week of the campaign getting bogged down in the usual hung parliament media process stories? Was it a mistake to state openly the party wouldn’t work with Gordon Brown if Labour came third?

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Posted in General Election | 101 Comments
Mark Pack

The significance of May 27th

By Mark Pack | Thu 6th May 2010 - 8:49 pm

One of the tragedies of the general election campaign was the death of John Boakes, UKIP candidate for Thirsk & Malton. As a result polling in the general election there has been delayed until May 27th.

These sorts of delayed polls happen thankfully rarely and are not usually of wider political significance. However, if the election result is as close as the polls suggest it will be, May 27th could turn into one of the first significant political tests for whoever is Prime Minster and whatever arrangements they’ve made (or not made) to get that post.

The notional result in 2005 …

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Posted in General Election | Also tagged | 10 Comments
Mark Pack

Dear Ian Cowie…

By Mark Pack | Sat 24th April 2010 - 1:42 pm

Dear Ian,

I’m a bit confused by your article about hung Parliaments in the Telegraph, where you wrote:

The last time a British election failed to produce a decisive result, in February, 1974, the FTSE All Share Index – a broad measure of the stock market – fell nearly 15pc in a month and ended the year more than 50pc below where it began.

The piece even has a graph starting in January 1974 and going through to late 1974.

Why does this leave me confused? Well, I’m sure on most financial matters you know far more than me. But even I know …

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Posted in News | Also tagged , and | 13 Comments
Mark Pack

The technological impact no-one was expecting

By Mark Pack | Sat 24th April 2010 - 9:50 am

I’ve often written about my scepticism of excited comments about 2010 being the first internet general election both because they miss how much at the organisational level has already been altered by the internet over the last two general elections and also because people looking at the internet’s impact on the external side of politics spend far too much time looking at the national scene when instead they should be looking at the local scene.

After the first TV debate you could already imagine the election post mortems headlined, “First internet election? Or first TV election?” Old-fashioned TV has …

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Posted in News and Online politics | Also tagged | 11 Comments
Mark Pack

Agree with Nick, too? Here’s 4 things you can do today #iagreewithnick

By Mark Pack | Fri 16th April 2010 - 10:10 am

You’ve watched the debate, you’ve heard Nick Clegg, and like millions of others you like what you saw and heard. But what next?

Here are four simple things you can do to help turn Nick’s words into
actions that bring about real change and make Britain fairer:

1. Join the Liberal Democrats:

Politics isn’t about one man bands: Nick Clegg and Vince Cable need a strong team behind them supporting their work.

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Posted in General Election | Also tagged | 7 Comments
Mark Pack

Liberal Democrat manifesto by numbers

By Mark Pack | Wed 14th April 2010 - 9:35 am

The Liberal Democrat manifesto by numbers:

  • 9 different formats for the manifesto (hard copy, video, on screen, iPhone app etc.)
  • 6 photos of Nick Clegg
  • 5 pages of index
  • 4 pages of detailed costsing
  • 4 steps to a fairer Britain
  • 3 photos of Vince Cable
  • 0 mentions of chocolate
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Posted in General Election and Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged , , , , and | 7 Comments
Mark Pack

Liberal Democrat manifesto: advance peek

By Mark Pack | Tue 13th April 2010 - 10:00 pm

Tomorrow Nick Clegg is launching the Liberal Democrat manifesto, but tonight The Voice can give you an advance peek at what it will be saying. We’d like to report that this is due to our cunning radio controlled artificial pigeon which we have flown in to the roof of Cowley Street and used to point a webcam at the desk of the Director of Campaigns, but instead it’s thanks to the more prosaic method of receiving email, reading it and then blogging. Ah well, next time.

But back to the manifesto and let’s start with the cover:

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Posted in General Election and Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged and | 12 Comments
Mark Pack

Tactical unwind or tactical rewind?

By Mark Pack | Tue 13th April 2010 - 1:49 pm

For a long time after David Cameron’s election to leader of the Conservative Party there was widespread talk of “tactical unwind”, that is how his changes to the Conservative Party may result in much less anti-Tory tactical voting at the next general election. It’s one of the range of reasons that many Tories quote for believing that they will do better in terms of seat numbers than the overall vote numbers suggest.

However, what’s struck me for some time is how the overall political campaigning is playing out in a way that is likely to rewind the unwind.

For example, on cutting …

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Posted in General Election, Op-eds and Polls | 7 Comments
Mark Pack

New government powers to snoop on your post – forced through by Labour and Tories

By Mark Pack | Mon 12th April 2010 - 12:20 pm

The ramming through of the Digital Economy Bill during Parliament’s ‘wash-up’ period has got the most attention, online at least. However there is another measure that was forced through, and this one without even a proper vote, which should have people up in arms.

A change to Section 106 of the Postal Services Act 2000 might not at first sound that important, but the change means that in future postal operators (such as the Royal Mail) can decide to detain any item of post and send it on to Customs and Excise for inspection.

Previously this could be done, but only if …

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Posted in News and Parliament | Also tagged and | 9 Comments
Stephen Tall

Lib Dems attack Tories’ tax-war on widows, working couples and jilted wives

By Stephen Tall | Sat 10th April 2010 - 10:50 am

A tax-break for married couples, is how the Tories are trying to spin it. The reality could scarcely be different – here are the groups of people the Tories are now officially classifying as undeserving:

  • Two married teachers bringing up a child.
  • A co-habiting couple who have lived together for years but not married.
  • People whose partners have abandoned them and their children.
  • A widow whose husband has died in Afghanistan.

But perhaps I’m being unfair … after all the Tories will reward some people at the expense of those clearly undeserving groups:

  • Those happily married for 50 years.
  • Over a million people in Britain who have separated but are still legally married.
  • Somebody who abandons their partner and children and then remarries.

The Tories’ feeble defence of their Edwardian tax-war on groups in society they regard as unworthy is that it their £150 a year will help solve the much-talked about ‘Broken Britain’ – so what will the Tory policy do for those living in poverty?

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Posted in General Election | Also tagged , and | 19 Comments
Stephen Tall

Tory VAT tax rises and Michael Caine … the spoof posters collection

By Stephen Tall | Fri 9th April 2010 - 8:20 am

On the day that the Lib Dems tried to smoke out the Tories’ true position on whether they’ll jack-up VAT by 3% – annual cost to the average household, £389 – to pay for their unfunded tax-cuts, David Cameron was joined by a man worth £45m who rather likes the Tories’ promise to cut taxes for the wealthiest at the expense of everyone else.

Full marks to Lib Dem HQ who were smartly on the case to splice the two stories memorably together:

Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson had his own pithy take on it:

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Posted in General Election and Humour | Also tagged , and | 7 Comments
Mark Pack

How do the media election websites compare? (UPDATED)

By Mark Pack | Tue 6th April 2010 - 11:50 pm

The FT beat me to the punch with a review of the different election websites, so I’ll give my review a slightly different focus: which are best for local information about candidates? And if you are a candidate (or helping a candidate) what online information should you worry about making sure is correct?

BBC:

  • More extensive constituency descriptions that others listed below, but otherwise the constituency pages are surprisingly skimpy by comparison with only very limited election results and candidate information.
  • Some links to BBC news stories where there has been one relevant to the constituency.
  • Uses Thrasher & Rallings for the

…

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Posted in General Election and Online politics | Also tagged | 4 Comments
Stephen Tall

Donate today – help get the Lib Dems off to a flying start! #ge2010

By Stephen Tall | Tue 6th April 2010 - 4:35 pm

Today marked the official start of the general election campaign. And today’s the day you could help ensure the Lib Dems get the best possible result – by making a donation to support the Lib Dem Voice election appeal.

Thanks to the support of LDV readers, we have just crossed the £1,000 threshold – a terrific response. But the candidates in our five battleground seats will need more than that to help get their campaigns off to a flying start.

So please: make a donation to help the Lib Dems today.

Here are some examples of what your gift could do to help the party get its message across:

    * £10 will pay for a Focus newsletter for 500 houses
    * £25 will buy 2,000 tabloid-style newspapers
    * £50 pays for a dozen super-size election garden posters
    * £100 will cover a Focus leaflet for a whole ward
    * £250 will pay for 10,000 addressed letters to be delivered by volunteers
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Posted in General Election | Also tagged | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Opinion poll reporting: The Times does it best, the Daily Mirror the worst

By Mark Pack | Mon 5th April 2010 - 10:20 am

It’s not been a great month for newspapers reporting their own polls. Despite the concept of newspapers accurately reporting their own polls – i.e. a story that they’ve paid for and been given the full details of – being a fairly basic standard to aim for, we’ve had such low lights as the skewed graph in the Mirror along with its over-hyped language and the Sunday Times so twisting the findings of its own poll you’d have thought there must have been two. Not to forget the attack in The Telegraph attack on that dodgy process of …

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Posted in Polls | 1 Comment
Stephen Tall

3 ways the Labservatives blocked the Lib Dems cleaning up politics

By Stephen Tall | Fri 2nd April 2010 - 2:45 pm

Labour and Conservatives, Conservatives and Labour: same difference, as the Lib Dems’ rather fabulous Labservative website points out. Here are just three examples from the past 12 months of ways in which the Labservatives have blocked Lib Dem attempts to reform our broken political system …

The public’s right to sack MPs

The Liberal Democrats tabled an amendment in June 2009 to place a responsibility on the Secretary of State to review and report on procedures for constituencies to recall their MPs if they have been found guilty of misconduct.

Labour voted against these measures and the Tories refused to back them.

Cap on party donations

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Posted in News | Also tagged and | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

Sarah Teather cleared, mystery of forged letters remains

By Mark Pack | Tue 30th March 2010 - 7:40 pm

The Parliamentary Standards Commissioner has cleared Sarah Teather of allegations that she broke Parliamentary expense rules. You may remember those claims being enthusiastically hawked around by Tory Bear and others as if they were copper-bottomed fact; actually their claims were more like a rusty colander.

As the local newspaper reports of the Commissioner:

He discontinued the inquiry because he had no grounds for believing that claims Ms Teather made from parliamentary funds for her office provided support to the cost of the Lib Dem party…

Brent Liberal Democrats said the party contributed over and above its usage of the office, as approved by

…

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Posted in News | Also tagged , , and | 19 Comments
Philip Sheldrake

In Vince Cable We Trust

By Philip Sheldrake | Tue 30th March 2010 - 11:50 am

A pretty obvious statement to make on this site, “In Vince Cable We Trust”, but it’s also the name for a new campaign established by a small group of marketing, communications and technology professionals with the single stated aim of making Vince Cable the next Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The group is apolitical. In fact, despite being the leader of this merry band, I have voted for all three main parties at some point in my life. But with all government departments’ policy making being strangled by the emptiness of the public purse, the role of Chancellor of the Exchequer will …

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Posted in Online politics and Op-eds | Also tagged | 12 Comments
Mark Pack

Your handy guide to how to be a journalist

By Mark Pack | Mon 29th March 2010 - 8:45 am

There’s nothing like a practical example for learning a skill. So here’s a little example of how to take a story and then carefully apply journalistic skill and judgement to make it into one of those proper stories they put in newspapers. Or something like that 🙂

The core of the story is this: child climbs up tree, child climbs down tree, stranger walks up to child, school staff walk up to stranger, stranger walks off, police have a word with stranger.

Fact 1: “At no point was any child ever stuck in a tree”.

How do you report this? Easy:

  • TEACHERS LEAVE BOY

…

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Posted in News | Also tagged and | 9 Comments
Don Foster MP

Don Foster MP: Standing at football grounds

By Don Foster MP | Sat 27th March 2010 - 1:45 pm

Football fans are getting a raw deal. 1.4 million who want to play football can’t due to scant facilities. Season tickets for top clubs are a rip-off; costing 5 times more than in Spain and Italy. Disabled fans are treated shamefully. Only two Premiership Clubs meet the recommended level of number of spaces specially designed for wheelchair users. The game is disappearing from free-to-air TV.

And fans can’t stand at matches, though many want to. According to the Football Fans’ Census, 91% of fans think they should be able to choose to stand.

Of course, none of us can forget …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 11 Comments
Jennie Rigg

Electioneering the social networking way

By Jennie Rigg | Thu 25th March 2010 - 11:15 am

So you’ve been selected as a candidate for council or general election as a Lib Dem. Hurrah! The first step on the path to world domination and ever-lasting glory has been taken, and now you’re wondering what the next step is. You look at your campaign budget. You realise that thruppence ha’penny and a tin of organic pasta sauce is not going to go as far as the Ashcroft millions the Tories have access to, or the union funding of Labour. You’re going to have to use all your wiles and cunning to even get noticed as a member of …

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged , , and | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

Ooops! Mirror gets poll graph wrong and inflates Labour’s position

By Mark Pack | Wed 24th March 2010 - 11:03 pm

I blogged earlier today about how the Mirror bigged up a poll showing Tory support unchanged (within the margin of error) into a story of how their support was plunging.

But looking again at the story, I realise just how badly wrong their graph is.

The two key pieces of information about Labour’s rating in the poll are that:

(a) It was 30%

(b) It was 32% in the previous poll

Now look at the graph:

Mirror poll graph

See what’s happened? What should be a downward Labour line has become a flat …

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Posted in Polls | Also tagged | 20 Comments
Mark Pack

The low earner Liberal Democrats

By Mark Pack | Tue 23rd March 2010 - 10:20 am

Yesterday The Voice ran an op-ed from the Resolution Foundation’s Sophia Parker about the, “9.4 million working-age ‘low earners’ – those people living on an average household income of £15,800 while remaining broadly independent of state support.”

It’s a group of people that is not that often explicitly addressed in Liberal Democrat policy debates or campaigning and messaging discussions, expect in as much as they are part of the millions who would benefit from the party’s policy of raising the income tax threshold to £10,000.

Yet these low earner households have been the bedrock of many of the party’s biggest electoral …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 28 Comments
Mark Pack

Summary of today’s #cashgordon social media silliness

By Mark Pack | Mon 22nd March 2010 - 4:49 pm

Tories buy campaigning package off the shelf from US company.

Company also does some rather right wing work. This is either outrageous (Right wing? You shock me!) or unsurprising (Americans? Right wing? You surprise me!)

Package as launched by Tories includes unmoderated twitter stream.

Unflattering tweets start appearing.

Site pulled.

Lesson for the day: unmoderated feeds of content on political sites bring tears before bedtime. Those who have been awake for the last decade may not wish to call this “news”.

PS Myself, I’d have been suspicious of a US supplier that advertisers a “one pager” which is actually two …

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged and | 8 Comments
Mark Thompson

The Liberal Democrat general election prospects: what does history say?

By Mark Thompson | Mon 22nd March 2010 - 12:22 pm

I was having a look at data from previous elections recently with a particular focus on the number of seats and percentage of votes gained by the third party in the last few decades.

The first thing that is clear and which I already knew is that in the last three general elections, the Lib Dems have consistently increased their number of seats. The figures are:

1997: 46 (+26)
2001: 52 (+6)
2005: 62 (+10)

The huge leap in 1997 is often put down to our improved targeting campaign techniques championed by Chris Rennard.

There is something else interesting in the figures which I had not …

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Posted in General Election and Op-eds | Also tagged | 20 Comments
Mark Pack

Has Gordon Brown been making up numbers?

By Mark Pack | Thu 18th March 2010 - 7:20 pm

The Full Fact website reports:

For two weeks now Full Fact has been trying to find out the basis of Gordon Brown’s claim that 300,000 businesses in the UK have been provided with direct cash-flow help from the Government.

In a piece published on 4 March, Full Fact examined the claim made by the Prime Minister in a speech to the Welsh Labour party. Despite numerous requests, emails and phone calls neither BIS, HMRC, Downing Street, The Treasury nor the Labour party were able to say where the figures came from.

But with Mr Brown again using the claim during yesterday’s PMQs, Full

…

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Posted in News | Also tagged and | 3 Comments
Stephen Tall

Nick Clegg’s speech delivers on all fronts

By Stephen Tall | Sun 14th March 2010 - 4:45 pm

If Nick Clegg sounded a little hoarse from a sore throat throughout his leader’s speech to the Birmingham spring conference then it’s not surprising: he has been omnipresent in the media this week, winning the Lib Dems more coverage than I can remember outside of an election campaign.

The first responsibility of any Lib Dem leader’s speech is to forget that he is talking to the party faithful in the conference hall – they will vote for the party regardless – and to pitch directly to the wider public watching the speech live or on news bulletins.

The second …

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Posted in Conference, General Election and Op-eds | Also tagged | 12 Comments
The Voice

LAUNCHED TODAY: new Lib Dem Voice website – How Liberal / Authoritarian is your MP?

By The Voice | Fri 12th March 2010 - 7:05 pm

In just under an hour’s time, the Lib Dem Voice spring conference fringe takes place in Birmingham, marking the official launch of our new website: How Liberal / Authoritarian is your MP? The site’s web address is http://rank.libdemvoice.org.

(We will be uploading the podcast of the Lib Dem Voice fringe meeting here as soon as possible.)

How Liberal / Authoritarian is your MP? has a very simple aim: to provide an easy way for the public to find out online how liberal or authoritarian are the views of their MP according to his or her voting record in parliament.

Here’s …

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Posted in News | Also tagged , and | 17 Comments
Mark Pack

Nick Clegg’s conference speech: what does it need to do? #ldconf

By Mark Pack | Fri 12th March 2010 - 10:20 am

With the Liberal Democrat spring conference in Birmingham this weekend, Nick Clegg is giving his last conference speech before the general election. Who knows, there may even be two general elections before he gets to give his autumn conference speech…

So what does Nick need to achieve with his Sunday speech?

Conference speeches have two audiences: the external and the internal. For the external one, the job is in the main fairly straightforward: give a speech that has at least one eye-catching section which means it gets more than a nano second of passing media coverage.

The party’s overall messages for the general election …

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Posted in Conference | Also tagged and | 6 Comments
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