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 …
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”.
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.
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 …
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:
See what’s happened? What should be a downward Labour line has become a flat …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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
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.
(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.
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 …
The next general election, if it held as widely expected on 6th May, is less than two months away. In which case, there is less than eight weeks for the Lib Dems to work for every vote we can in order to put an end to Gordon Brown’s disastrous Labour Government, and make sure David Cameron cannot wreak havoc at the helm of the Tories.
No one can be sure what will happen, what the results might be. But one thing’s for certain. Labour and the Tories will have the advantage of being bank-rolled by the unions and big business and folk like Lord Ashcroft. There’s only one way to level the playing field, and that’s for all of us who want the Lib Dems to have the best chance possible to dip into our pockets and give what we can to the party.
That’s why Lib Dem Voice is running an election appeal to promote making a donation to the party. We have identified five Lib Dem candidates standing in five seats, all of them in real need of a helping hand. Any donation you can spare – £10, £100, £250, or any amount inbetween or higher – will make a difference.
To make a donation to the Lib Dem Voice election appeal fund to be shared equally between LDV’s five profiled candidates, please click here.
Here are the five we are asking you to help us get behind:
If you go to Amazon searching for “Why vote Liberal Democrat?”, edited by Danny Alexander and just published by Biteback, you may be surprised to find yourself being presented instead with a book of the same title from 1997, written by William Wallace. The new book is misfiled by Amazon under the title “Why vote Lib Dem?” but actually the 1997 volume provides an interesting contrast with the 2010 version.
The 2010 book is one of a series, covering also Labour, Conservatives, SNP, Plaid and the Greens. All the others are single person authored books (with the exception of …
Two things to note when reading it. First, this sort of public exchange of letters is unusual, but very welcome. Although journalists sometimes struggle with the concept of a party that debates policy openly …
For the third day, the revelation that Lord Ashcroft has dodged paying full UK taxes for a decade with the complicit knowledge of the Tory leadership has been dominating the serious news media. And congratulations are due here to Chris Huhne and his research team for unearthing the estimate that the Tory deputy chairman has saved himself £127m in tax by maintaining his non-dom status despite promising to live in the UK as an ordinary resident.
It’s not been a pretty couple of days for the Tories. Here are three points which have struck me:
Despite some alarms along the way, the rules are now set for the first-ever head-to-head general election debates in the UK a mere 46 years after the first suggestion.
(And no, yawn yawn, it isn’t only in the US that such debates take place: the US wasn’t first and the US isn’t a particularly good place to look for lessons, what with not being a Parliamentary democracy unlike many of the other countries which also have TV debates.)
Now the rules are set, what do they tell us about how the debates may play out?
By Stephen Tall
| Sat 27th February 2010 - 8:15 am
Here’s your starter for ten as we continue our new Saturday slot posing a view for debate:
All liberals will happily sign up to the concept of free speech. But the practise of it often makes us uneasy. JS Mill summed up the dilemma by asserting that while all opinions should be aired, one can’t “shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre”. In other words, freedom of speech must be tempered by individual responsibility. The inevitable question then arises: who should exercise that responsibility: the individual, or should it be regulated by the state in some way?
By Stephen Tall
| Thu 18th February 2010 - 7:15 pm
Blogging Labour MP Tom Harris has an interesting story today, revealing that Tina Stowell, the BBC’s head of corporate affairs “is not only a wannabe Tory candidate, but still has a live website proclaiming her love of all things Cameron.” But Tom doesn’t point this out in order to fulminate or demand her resignation:
And you know something? I don’t have a problem with this. I would much prefer to know the politics of someone I’m dealing with because at least you know where they’re coming from. She wants to become an MP? Good for her! I hope she
With the general election looking to be heading towards a hung Parliament according to the latest prediction we’ve published from a group of academics, how are things looking for the Liberal Democrats?
By Stephen Tall
| Sat 13th February 2010 - 10:50 am
Over the next five weeks, Lib Dem Voice is going to be asking all our Lib Dem-supporting readers to consider making a donation to support five candidates standing for the party at the imminent general election.
We know many of you will already be donating to the national party and/or your local party. We know not everyone will be able to afford to make a donation. But we hope that as many of you as are able will spare whatever spare cash you can to support the Lib Dem candidates we will be profiling in the coming weeks.
Earlier today Nick Clegg today launched another plank of the party’s green economic policies for the general election, pledging to create 57,000 jobs by investing £400 million in upgrading disused shipyards so that they can produce off-shore wind turbines.
It’s a triple win: boost the economy, help parts of the country which have been hit the hardest and improve Britian’s environmental record.
Current plans to expand wind farms in the North and Irish seas could see every one of the 6,400 turbines needed brought in from abroad, as there are currently no turbine manufacturers in the UK.
British ports are ideally located to host turbine manufacturers due to their proximity to the off-shore wind farms; however, they are currently unable to invest due to the lack of appropriate docks with suitable space.
The proposals to invest in physical infrastructure to support a greener economy also include a pledge to invest £100million in training and testing facilities, including at universities with specialist engineering research facilities such as Loughborough, Durham and Newcastle.
By Stephen Tall
| Thu 11th February 2010 - 10:25 am
The last 24 hours’ focus on voting systems – surely every Lib Dem’s dream come true? – have highlighted just how hard it will be to gain acceptance for the party’s preferred proportional voting system, the single transferable vote.
It’s no surprise that almost all MPs from the two establishment parties, Labour and the Tories, are desperate to hold onto the electoral system that secures their cosy hold on power: just five Labour/Tory MPs voted to include STV in any referendum on voting reform.
But it will also be the case that a significant portion of the country will …
Tony Benn’s lament that politics should be about issues, not personalities, is one echoed even by many who would struggle to find any issues on which they agree with him.
But it’s not a view I share. Why? Because the detailed policies of election manifestos or conference speeches frequently get swept aside in power by events. It’s not just the unexpected new event, it’s also the fallibility of forecasts which mean that decision making is often made from a very different perspective from that used to draw up pre-election policy promises.
Take the economy. It’s hard enough to know whether it is …
The Tories were today forced to recall a consignment of hybrid policies following widespread complaints that their economic model failed when it encountered bumpy or slippery surfaces. The party is already facing criticism over the recent recall of many of its other policies, including marriage tax-breaks, which have been affected by the potentially dangerous acceleration towards an election.
The Tory leadership of David Cameron and George Osborne are due to give details of their latest recall today, and on most other days leading up to 6th May. “We’ve tried applying the brakes,” they admitted, “but the …
With new polling figures in, the general election prediction model we covered in November and December has churned out a new prediction for the next general election – and it’s a striking one:
New prediction: Conservative lead of 6% but Labour largest party with 299 seats (27 short of an overall majority)
December prediction: Conservative lead of 9% with 315 seats (11 short of an overall majority)
November prediction: Conservative lead of 10% with 322 seats (4 short of an overall majority)
The academic team who have compiled the prediction say,
The race remains too close to call under reasonable scenarios, either favorable to the government or the opposition. The election of a hung Parliament cannot be discarded at this point.
Background to prediction
In November Lib Dem Voice published the first of our exclusive general election predictions, based on the work of a group of academics who have analysed polling data (not just party support levels) in the run up to previous British elections:
Welcome to the concluding part of a two-part series about the real impact social media (or social networking) is having on politics in Britain. Last week I looked at the groups which face extinction; today it’s why pundits searching for the impact of social media on politics in 2010 are looking in the wrong place.
For the third general election in a row, people are lining up to debate whether or not this one will be the internet election; the election when politics radically changes in the face of the technological change that has already swept the world.
I have an article published in the January edition of the Government Gazette, the monthly magazine of the Centre for Parliamentary Studies, looking at the Lib Dems’ prospects for the coming general election. Here’s what I say …
A missed opportunity. That was the consensus, inside and outside the Liberal Democrats, on the party’s general election results in 2005.
The disappointment was the greater as realisation dawned that the unique set of circumstances of that election – an unpopular government and an even more unpopular opposition – might never again be repeated. What could have been the Lib Dems’ breakthrough …
In the two months since my last report, the election campaign has started in all but name.
After a phenomenal amount of work by the manifesto team – led by Danny Alexander, the party’s policy unit headed by Christian Moon, and the Federal Policy Committee – we have now established the broad outlines of our campaign:
Reform of the tax system to create a fairer base,
introducing the pupil premium to give all children a fairer start in life,
creating sustainable housing and jobs and
political reform to bring in a fairer voting system, and
Here’s the proportion of local election candidates of the three main parties who were female over the last twenty-five years. As you can see, proportions for all three parties grew in the late ’80s and since then have stalled (Lib Dems, Conservatives) or only crept up (Labour), all remaining under 40%.
The dips every four years are due to county council elections having a much lower proportion of female candidates than other local elections.
Sandy Walkington Man is born free and everywhere s/he is in chains…
Michal you are an outstanding mayor, proud to have you as my first citizen....
Jana “ There is no offence of using the wrong lavatory and there never has been”
This is correct - an offence would only be committed if there were some malicio...
cim Agreed with a lot of the above, "compulsory voting" is just a way to mask the symptom that there's not much in our current democracy that gets people excited to...
Stephen Gosling I was against compulsory voting until a few decades back when I saw in my then ward the age & assumed income cohorts of those currently voting. If we want t...
SteveTrevethan Thanks to all for a most interesting and relevant article and set of comments!
From the information and possibilities therein contained, is it the case that ...
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Ian Christie on the pioneer British filmmaker Robert Paul
Ravensworth Castle visit
Kemi Badenoch's dismissive attitude towards local government
Tories select former neo-Nazi activist for Somerset council election
Sandy Walkington 
Jana 
cim 
Stephen Gosling 
SteveTrevethan 