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Tag Archives: featured

Social media’s impact on politics, part one: the groups that face extinction

By Mark Pack | Thu 28th January 2010 - 10:20 am

Welcome to a two-part series about the real impact social media (or social networking) is having on politics in Britain. In part one I look at the groups which face extinction, whilst in part two I will look at why pundits searching for the impact of social media on politics in 2010 are looking in the wrong place.

What impact has the introduction of cheap colouring printing technology had on British politics? Almost none. Certainly many more leaflets are colour than used to be the case, more target letters contain colour inserts and a generation of amateur designers have had the …

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Posted in Online politics and Op-eds | Also tagged #trafigura, clay shirky, shami chakrabati and social networks | 8 Comments

100 days to work, 100 days to win

By Iain Roberts | Tue 26th January 2010 - 9:05 am

One hundred days until the local elections and the most likely date for the General Election: May 6th.

And, whilst blogs, websites, Facebook and the rest of it will play a supporting role, our real battles will be fought on the ground in Liberal Democrat held and target seats up and down the country. It will be fought with leaflets, target mailings, canvassing, posters, phone calls and getting the vote out on polling day. Even email – extremely effective at reaching local audiences in marginal seats – needs that ground work to build up the list of addresses in the first …

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Posted in General Election and Op-eds | 5 Comments

If you want to understand modern government, understand the Office of the Public Guardian

By Mark Pack | Tue 19th January 2010 - 11:20 am

The Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) neatly encapsulates much of how modern government is run, its weaknesses and the problems our democratic systems face in trying to control or improve bureaucracy.

The Office of the Public Guardian was created for the best of reasons following the 2005 Mental Capacity Act in order to administer a new Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) process by which people can lay down what should happen to them and who can make decisions for them if they lose the ability to decide for themselves.

Giving people more and clear control over their own lives is what government should do. Moreover, the OPG is, in theory, an accountable public body with annual reports, performance standards laid down by the Ministry of Justice and its operations open to questioning in Parliament.

But the reality of how it works also reveals the dark side of modern government.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged andrew selous, annette brooke, ian taylor, lasting power of attorney, mental capacity act, office of the public guardian, paul burstow and tom brake | 6 Comments

A challenge to the Press Complaints Commission to improve its code

By Mark Pack | Mon 18th January 2010 - 8:32 pm

The Press Complaints Commission is currently reviewing its Editors’ Code of Practice so a group of bloggers, including myself, have got together to propose five changes – and we’re running an online petition which you can sign too.

Amongst any group of people, the exact reasons for supporting the suggestions will vary but for myself they are:

(a) All the suggestions are obvious and easy ones which ask no more of newspapers than to meet the sorts of standards many journalists and editors have long since said they should meet.

(b) They pass the “what if your kids asked…?” test, by which …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged press complaints commission | 12 Comments

It’s “Let’s Make Nice Month”: experimental change to LDV’s comments policy

By Stephen Tall | Mon 18th January 2010 - 7:45 am

The Internet is a fantastic place. It can also be an angry place. Lib Dem Voice has a high quality of passionate-but-reasoned debate in our comment threads, with many of our 30,000+ readers contributing their thoughts and enjoying LDV’s role as “Our place to talk”.

However … it’s not unknown for debate on LDV to get heated, for commenters sometimes to get personal with the authors of articles, or with each other. The editorial collective has generally adopted a laissez faire moderating policy: save a handful of exceptional circumstances, comments are left untouched.

Partly this policy has been driven of …

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Posted in Op-eds and Site news | Also tagged blogging and internet | 48 Comments

Clegg calls for full gay equality – what will Cameron do?

By The Voice | Wed 13th January 2010 - 8:45 pm

Nick Clegg has taken the opportunity of an interview with The Independent’s Johann Hari for Attitude magazine to lay out a comprehensive range of measures to promote gay equality – and has laid down the gauntlet to the Tory leader David Cameron to justify his ‘liberal Conservatism’ by following suit.

Here’s how the paper summarises Nick’s proposals:

* Force all schools – including faith schools – to implement anti-homophobia bullying policies and teach that homosexuality is “normal and harmless”.

* Change the law to allow gay men and women the same marital rights as straight couples, including the symbolic right to use

…

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Posted in News | Also tagged conservative party, david cameron, equalities, gay rights, johann hari, nick clegg and the independent | 55 Comments

Political polling hit record levels in 2009

By Mark Pack | Tue 12th January 2010 - 4:20 pm

The number of published opinion polls into British general election voting intention hit a twenty plus year high in 2009 with 141 polls carried out during the calendar year.

That is the highest figure since at least 1987 (when my records commence)* and more that completes the polling industry’s recovery from its post-1992 nadir. You can see the quarterly trend in this graph:

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Posted in Polls | 4 Comments

How to be a Lib Dem blogger: get our collected series of articles

By Mark Pack | Mon 11th January 2010 - 3:10 pm

In the run-up to Christmas, Lib Dem Voice ran a series of articles from bloggers giving advice on how to start a blog, what to write about, where to find readers and many more. All written from direct personal experience from a range of (very different!) bloggers, the pieces provide a handy guide to anyone who is thinking of starting a blog or is already blogging but wants to get more from their blog.

I’ve now collated the articles into one pdf booklet, including some updates to individual pieces. You can read the guide below or view and download it from Scribd (the download option is to the top left of the document window).

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Posted in Blogging guide and Online politics | Also tagged blogging | 2 Comments

NEW POLL: Who is your Liberal Voice of the Year?

By Stephen Tall | Sat 9th January 2010 - 11:45 am

Ten days ago, in the dying days of the last decade, LDV launched our search for the Liberal Voice of 2009, to find the non-Lib Dem individual or group which has had the biggest impact on liberalism in this country in the past 12 months.

Our thanks to all who put forward nominations, all of which were considered carefully by the LDV editorial collective, which has agreed to short-list the following (in no particular order):

Guy Herbert, general secretary of NO2ID, for his campaigning work against the database state;
Peter Tatchell, for his tireless and fearless international human

…

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Posted in LDV Awards and Voice polls | Also tagged #trafigura, alan rusbridger, ben goldacre, gurkhas, guy herbert, henry porter, joanna lumley, liberal voice 2009, no2id, peter tatchell, rory stewart, terry pratchett and twitter | 24 Comments

Ten predictions for the general election televised party leader debates

By Mark Pack | Tue 5th January 2010 - 11:40 am

1. Military language will be the order of the day for debate pundits. Fighting to the finish, knock out blows and accounts of who is ahead on points: deploy your military phraseology at dawn.

2. 99% of pundits who have previously expressed support for a party will declare that party’s leader the real winner from each debate – even if the party and leader did not appear in the debate.

3. Each party participating in the debate will say beforehand that its leader is not going to easily best the other leaders – and will say afterwards that its leader did easily …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged leaders tv debate | 15 Comments

A look back at the polls: December ’09

By Stephen Tall | Thu 31st December 2009 - 1:45 pm

The last month of the year: a time for taking stock, and anticpating the challenges of the 12 months to come. So what could be more fitting than for LDV – no slavish followers of the polls, we – to reflect on 2009’s polls? Let’s start, though, with the latest polling data. Here, in chronological order, are the results of the nine polls published in December:

Tories 40, Labour 29, Lib Dems 19 (6 Dec, ICM)
Tories 40, Labour 27, Lib Dems 18 (6 Dec, YouGov)

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Posted in Op-eds and Polls | 6 Comments

Fighting media bias – you can help us

By Jonny Oates | Wed 30th December 2009 - 11:20 am

An opinion poll taken at the end of the Liberal Democrat Conference earlier this autumn put the Liberal Democrats ahead of the Labour Party, it was accompanied by a raft of other polls which also showed significant increases in our support.

The reason for this sudden upswing in our poll rating was relatively simple: for one short period in the political calendar, the broadcast media had provided us with a fair volume of coverage and the public had liked what they saw.

Regrettably, conference season and General Election campaigns apart, the broadcasters rarely comply with their duty to give us due prominence. We think it’s time that changed and we need your help to make it happen.

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Posted in News | 24 Comments

Televised party leader debates: get your worms at the ready

By Mark Pack | Tue 29th December 2009 - 11:50 am

The “worm” is an instant poll tracker which wriggles across people’s TV screens, showing the net negative or positive reaction of a small group of the public to what is happening on screen. Running a worm across a politician’s speech or a debate between politicians has become a not uncommon feature of political coverage across many democracies.

The worm has even occasionally surfaced in the UK – so will it surface again for our TV party leader debates at the general election? And will worms offer a chance for Channel 4 to repeat an Australian trick and put one over the other channels who have excluded it from the debates?

Known in the US as dial groups (because a group of people is each given a dial to twist towards positive or negative), worms have often been the cause of controversy there. Joe Klein in Politics Lost recounts how badly they got the 2000 Bush-Gore debates wrong:

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Posted in News | Also tagged al gore, channel 4, george bush and leaders tv debate | Leave a comment

‘A lot less disagreement’ between Lib Dems and Tories, says David Cameron. Excellent news!

By Stephen Tall | Mon 28th December 2009 - 11:52 am

And verily did David Cameron spake forth unto the multitude of political journalists desperate for Bank Holiday copy, and lo he did utter his New Year platitude:

Let’s be honest that whether you’re Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat, you’re motivated by pretty much the same progressive aims: a country that is safer, fairer, greener and where opportunity is more equal. It’s how to achieve these aims that we disagree about – and indeed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats there is a lot less disagreement than there used to be.

How wonderful!

Mr Cameron is, we understand, preparing this …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged conservative party and david cameron | 17 Comments

NEW POLL: will the TV debates make any difference to the Lib Dems?

By Stephen Tall | Sat 26th December 2009 - 6:37 pm

We now know the UK will see its first ever televised debates between the leaders of the three major UK-wide parties in the run-up to the 2010 general election. The consenus is there have been two winners: Sky News, which, with brilliant audacity, put the issue front and centre, and by so doing ensured that (i) the debates will happen, and (ii) it muscled in on the act, instead of being excluded by the BBC and ITV. (There’s a lesson there for Channel 4, which had been comprehensively outmanoeuvred).

The second winner, according to the commentariat, is Nick Clegg. Here’s Andrew …

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Posted in Voice polls | Also tagged andrew grice, jonathan calder, leaders tv debate, nick clegg and steve richards | 12 Comments

Voting started in Britain’s best MP campaign

By Keith Halstead | Wed 23rd December 2009 - 1:20 pm

You may remember that back at the beginning of December we launched our ‘Best MP’ campaign to highlight the fact that not all MPs should be tarred with the same brush as the ‘expenses cheats.’

We asked users of our website – Yoosk – to send in their nominations for Best MP and to send us the questions they would like to put to the nominees. All eight nominated MPs agreed to answer and you can compare what they said on our website now and cast your vote in our Poll, which will be ‘live’ until the 31st December.

Here is a sample of how we edited the answers together to make them easier to compare. This question came from ‘artichelper’ and received most votes from our users:

‘What do you believe is the best change in policy that you, yourself played a significant role in making that change happen?’ And you can view a compilation of the answers below.

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Posted in The Independent View | Also tagged bob russell, david howarth, Jo Swinson, lynne featherstone, tom harris and yoosk | 1 Comment

Libel law needs major reform

By Robert Sharp | Tue 22nd December 2009 - 1:25 pm

The clamour for a change to our pernicious libel laws grows louder every day. In November, Index on Censorship and English PEN published Free Speech is Not For Sale, a report into the state of libel in England & Wales, and the bizarre phenomenon of libel tourism. Impressed by this report, Jack Straw announced the creation of a working group to deliver reform. Lib Dem peer Lord Lester announced on the BBC Radio 4 PM programme he will begin drafting a libel bill, and MPs have begun to sign EDM 423 (tabled by Dr …

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Posted in Op-eds and The Independent View | Also tagged evan harris, libel and lord lester | 7 Comments

Danny Alexander writes … Campaigning on Our Manifesto

By Danny Alexander MP | Tue 22nd December 2009 - 11:50 am

On Friday, Nick emailed all members to outline our position on the abolition of tuition fees. It was great to see our position, agreed by both the Federal Policy Committee and the Parliamentary Party, broadly welcomed on LDV and elsewhere.

Saddling students with huge debts as they leave universities, particularly at a time when many are failing to find jobs through no fault of their own, is clearly wrong. And the prospect of such debts putting talented young people off going to university is equally wrong. That is why our plan to scrap tuition fees over 6 years from the election will be one of a very small number of core commitments in our manifesto.

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Posted in General Election and Op-eds | Also tagged general election manifesto, higher education, tax, tuition fees and universities | 9 Comments

Opinion on Nick’s second anniversary: Mark Thompson – The next few months the biggest test of Clegg’s career

By Mark Thompson | Mon 21st December 2009 - 6:30 pm

Last week saw the second anniversary of Nick Clegg’s leadership of the Liberal Democrats. LDV marked the occasion by inviting three Lib Dem bloggers to assess Nick’s contribution to date, and to look ahead to what the future might hold. You can read Neil Stockley’s post here, and Iain Roberts’ here. Today is Mark Thomspon’s turn …

The first thing I would say is that had I have been a member in 2007 I would have voted for Chris Huhne. I think his politics are closer to my own personally and I felt he had the higher profile. …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged clegg+2 and nick clegg | 6 Comments

D-Day -1: Confusion in Copenhagen

By Fiona Hall MEP | Sat 19th December 2009 - 12:30 pm

This is the third article for LDV by Fiona Hall, Lib Dem leader of the European Liberal Democrats, giving her account of the Copenhagen climate change summit. You can read Part I here, and Part II here.

What a mess.

After yesterday afternoon’s impasse on an international agreement, President Obama took matters into his own hands, struck a deal with China, India, Brazil and South Africa – and promptly left the country. It’s leadership of a sort – but, sadly, in the wrong direction.

The rest of the world has been offered a watered-down Accord which – as it …

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Posted in Europe / International and Op-eds | Also tagged climate change and copenhagen summit | 4 Comments

Why blog?

By Alix Mortimer | Sat 19th December 2009 - 9:20 am

Welcome to the final part of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s been appearing each Saturday in the run-up to 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 we’re finishing where we started, with reasons to blog. Alix Mortimer is at the keyboard…

Why blog?

The whys and wherefores of political blogging generate a lot of heat. Amble around the internet a little, and you’ll find denunciations of blogging as a …

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Posted in Blogging guide | Also tagged blogging, daniel hannan and jo christie-smith | 2 Comments

So, why can’t you call yourself an MP?

By Mark Pack | Thu 17th December 2009 - 10:26 am

The rules against people calling themselves an MP usually get a flurry of publicity in the run-up to a general election. Indeed, it’s part of the pre-election “Will it be an internet election this time?” tradition to have a story about how “MPs who use face disaster because they’ve called themselves an MP”.

This time round it’s been Twitter, with the story that MPs who have chosen a Twitter username containing “MP” will run into problems as they officially stop being MPs when Parliament is dissolved for a general election. So if they tweet during the campaign as if …

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Posted in Election law | Also tagged Parliament and twitter | 5 Comments

Ros Scott writes… Party President’s report to members, November ‘09

By Baroness Ros Scott | Tue 15th December 2009 - 10:30 am

The two months since the party’s last Federal Executive have, as usual, been pretty busy. In that period I have visited local parties in Aldershot, Altrincham & Sale, Winchester, Islington, Sutton, Wycombe, Amersham & Chesham, Swindon, Gloucester, Stroud, Cheltenham, East Dunbartonshire, Glasgow North, Edinburgh Pentlands, North & Leith, West, Ochil, and Consett. I have also attended the North West and West Midlands Regional Conferences.

The two meetings of the party’s Chief Officers Group which I have attended are reported separately to FE, but I wish to highlight the work done to develop the business plan and budget which were …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged ACT, chief officers group, chris bones, chris fox, christian moon, eldr, federal executive, federal policy committee, ralf dahrendorf, robert woodthorpe brown and roy thomson | 4 Comments

How to get Lib Dem Voice by email

By Mark Pack | 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 …

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Posted in Site news | Leave a comment

If a gobby barmaid from Yorkshire can do it, anyone can

By Jennie Rigg | Sat 12th December 2009 - 1:57 pm

Welcome to part ten 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 Jennie Rigg.

So you’ve read all the foregoing articles, and you’re still doubtful as to whether this blogging thing is for you? This is where I come in. I am by no means a typical Lib Dem Blogger, as you …

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Posted in Blogging guide | Also tagged blogging | 10 Comments

Book review: British Electoral Facts

By Mark Pack | Wed 9th December 2009 - 11:50 am

For decades, FWS Craig was the doyen of British electoral statistics. His reference works were widely used and often contained facts and figures that he had created from original sources. Yet today he is almost completely unknown.

The reason? He died just before the internet took off. His hard work was locked away in reference volumes either sat on the shelves in libraries beyond the reach of an internet connection or available to purchase – at eye-wateringly expensive prices.

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Posted in Books | Also tagged colin rallings, fws craig and michael thrasher | 1 Comment

Book review: Total Politics Guide to the 2010 General Election

By Stephen Tall | Tue 8th December 2009 - 12:20 pm

One of the first publications from Iain Dale’s new Biteback publishing imprint dedicated to political books, The Total Politics Guide to the 2010 General Election (Eds, Greg Callus and Iain Dale) weighs in at just under 300 pages divided into two (unequal) sections: the first is a series of 14 articles examining different aspects of the coming election; the second non-half comprises over 200 pages of regional and constuency profiles. As you might guess, this is a for-geeks-only book. But, then, if you’re reading this review that label probably applies.

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Posted in Books and General Election | Also tagged byron criddle, greg callus, iain dale and robert waller | 4 Comments

Lib Dem Bloggers Christmas stocking fillers … Part I

By Stephen Tall | 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.

Jennie Rigg

1) The Very Sexy …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged alex foster, blogging, christmas, jennie rigg, Mark Pack and millennium elephant | 5 Comments

Why bloggers should tweet

By Charlotte Gore | Sat 5th December 2009 - 8:55 am

Welcome to part nine 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 Charlotte Gore.

So you’ve picked your blogging platform, created your blog-roll, found your niche and worked out your style – you’re blogging! But is it enough to rely on libdemblogs.co.uk to bring you new readers and win you new friends?

Sadly not. At least, not since the rise of Twitter. Oh no, you’re thinking. Not Twitter! Oh yes, Twitter. If you want to make the most of your blog, you’re going to want to join the “Twitterati” too.

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Posted in Blogging guide | Also tagged blogging and twitter | 6 Comments

Why David Cameron was right to claim for chocolate bars on expenses

By Mark Pack | Thu 3rd December 2009 - 4:41 pm

Given my love of chocolate, today’s Daily Mirror front page at first made me happy. Four big colour photos of bars of chocolate! And David Cameron in an expenses scandal!

But once I read the story, it quickly became clear David Cameron has done nothing wrong.

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Posted in News | Also tagged chocolate, daily mirror, david cameron and taxpayers alliance | 8 Comments

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