Tag Archives: featured

Mark Pack

The sensible campaigner is the campaigner with backups

By Mark Pack | Mon 13th August 2012 - 2:55 pm

The office wall in one of my former jobs had a cartoon with two drunks slumped in an alleyway bemoaning their fate. One was saying to the other, “It all started to go wrong when I realised the backups hadn’t been working…” He at least had been trying to use backups.

Sometimes people fear trusting data to computers, worried that a wrong key press may result in valuable information being lost. That is to get things wrong: data is safer on computers because it is much easier to do regular backups.

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Posted in Campaign Corner and Online politics | Also tagged , , , and | 4 Comments
Stephen Tall

By 48% to 19%, Lib Dem members prefer post-2015 alliance with Labour to continuing pact with Tories

By Stephen Tall | Mon 13th August 2012 - 7:55 am

Lib Dem Voice polled our members-only forum recently to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. Some 500 party members have responded, and we’re publishing the full results.

Post-2015, 48% choose Lib-Lab pact; 19% a Lib-Con pact; 13% prefer opposition

LDV asked: Assuming the Lib Dems do not form a majority/minority government after the next election, which would be your most preferred outcome:

    2% – A Labour majority government with the Lib Dems in opposition
    6% – A minority Labour government with the Lib Dems in opposition
    19% – A Labour-Lib

…

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Posted in LDV Members poll | 20 Comments
Mark Pack

Danny Alexander set to up the ante on anti-Tory rhetoric and housing

By Mark Pack | Sat 11th August 2012 - 12:52 pm

One of the best speeches given by a Liberal Democrat Cabinet Member in the last year was Danny Alexander’s to the GMB conference. It was not only a good speech, it went down well with a tough audience that disagrees strongly with many things the government is doing.

As I wrote at the time:

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Stephen Tall

62% of Lib Dem members agree with Clegg decision to vote down boundary changes over Tories’ Lords reform retreat

By Stephen Tall | Tue 7th August 2012 - 8:15 am

Lib Dem Voice polled our members-only forum recently to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. 446 party members responded, and we’re publishing the full results.

What party members say about Tory breach of Coalition Agreement

LDV asked: Within the package of constitutional reforms proposed in the Coalition Agreement was a pledge to reduce the number of parliamentary constituencies and re-draw them to ensure each individual’s vote counts roughly equally no matter where they live. It is believed by electoral experts this will benefit the Conservatives and have an adverse …

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Posted in LDV Members poll | Also tagged and | 24 Comments
Mark Pack

Lords reform: what the failure means for the Coalition, David Cameron and Nick Clegg

By Mark Pack | Tue 7th August 2012 - 8:06 am

First up, here’s Nick Robinson’s take on yesterday’s events followed by myself, via the BBC News Channel:

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Stephen Tall

The Lib Dem membership slump: how it compares and how we can respond

By Stephen Tall | Mon 6th August 2012 - 8:25 am

The Lib Dems published its statement of accounts this week, including the most recent membership figure for the calendar year 2011. If you don’t want to know the score, look away now…

As at 31 December, 2011, there were 48,934 Lib Dem members. That’s 25% down on the previous year, 2010, when there were c.65,000 members. True, that figure was inflated by the ‘Cleggmania’ of the 2010 election and the initial excitement of the Coalition, but it is still down 17% compared to the pre-election year, 2009.

Though this is by some way the sharpest recorded decline in the modern party’s membership, …

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Stephen Tall

Are politicians really getting younger?

By Stephen Tall | Sun 5th August 2012 - 2:15 pm

“The worship of youth has diminished – perhaps generally – in recent years.” So said Vince Cable a couple of weeks ago in a newspaper interview which inflamed speculation he’d be partial to a tilt at leading the Lib Dems. It also prompted various politicians-are-getting-younger pieces in the media.

LibDemVoice’s Mark Pack took the time and trouble to dig out the data. He showed that while the trend-line in the first half of the last century was for prime ministers to get older, in the 50 years since there has been a movement towards younger premiers (James Callaghan being …

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Mark Pack

Reframe: How to solve the world’s trickiest problems?

By Mark Pack | Fri 3rd August 2012 - 10:25 am

How you view Eric Knight’s book by the end will depend very heavily on what you want out of it. At one level it works extremely well: a very readable and lively introduction to many of the issues which dominate the agendas of politicians and diplomats – fighting terrorism, regulating the financial markets, handling immigration, dealing with climate change and more.

Eric Knight, however, sets out to do more than present a primer on major current issues, as the subtitle suggests: “How to solve the world’s trickiest problems”.

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Posted in Books | Also tagged | 3 Comments
Ben Yong

The Independent View: Making coalition government work – lessons for the future

By Ben Yong | Tue 24th July 2012 - 10:50 am

In 2011 the Constitution Unit spent one year examining how the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition works. We interviewed almost 150 people about the Coalition: individuals from both parties—both in and outside Parliament—as well as civil servants, journalists, and interest groups. We have just published the result of our study in a book: The Politics of Coalition: How the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Works

We are particularly grateful to all those Lib Dems who were so generous in giving their time to be interviewed, and for Mark Pack’s very kind review of our book. And in the same spirit, we offer some thoughts on lessons for the future. Professor John Curtice argues that the conditions that led to a hung parliament in 2010 remain; and even if the boundary reforms goes through, the possibility of a hung parliament is still quite high. Even if, as some suggest, the Liberal Democrats will lose a large number of seats in 2015, they may still be in a position to determine the shape of a new government. So what lessons are there to be learned from the last two years of the Coalition, and how might the Lib Dems approach a hung parliament in 2015?

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Posted in Op-eds and The Independent View | Also tagged , and | 10 Comments
Stephen Tall

Sticking up for David Gauke and his tax-avoidance comments

By Stephen Tall | Tue 24th July 2012 - 8:15 am

David Gauke, the exchequer secretary to the treasury, is a Conservative minister I’m quite happy to stick up for. He’s in the headlines this morning for an interview he gave to the Telegraph in which he states it is “morally wrong” to pay cash-in-hand to get a nod-and-a-wink no-tax discount:

“Getting a discount with your plumber by paying cash in hand is something that is a big cost to the Revenue and means others have to pay more in tax. I think it is morally wrong. It is illegal for the plumber but it is pretty implicit in those circumstances that there is a reason why there is a discount for cash. That is a large part of the hidden economy.”

His comments have provoked an unfair backlash.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , and | 41 Comments
Stephen Tall

The crisis of trust facing the news media

By Stephen Tall | Sun 22nd July 2012 - 8:45 am

The Hansard Society this week published part two of its annual Audit of Political Engagement, focusing on the media and politics. Three graphs in particular stood out for me…

63% of public say tabloids “look for any excuse” to tarnish politicians

… tabloid newspapers are consistently identified by two-thirds of the public as displaying negative traits in their coverage of politics and politicians. … Tabloids are three times more likely to be perceived to be negative in their approach to the coverage of politics than are the other

…

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Stephen Tall

The graph which shows how many Tory, Labour and LibDem voters support House of Lords reform

By Stephen Tall | Sat 21st July 2012 - 8:45 am

The London Evening Standard reported this week a new poll under the headline Even Lib-Dems say Lords reform is not a priority. Buried two-thirds of the way down, however, was this interesting data:

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Posted in News and Polls | Also tagged , and | 18 Comments
Mark Pack

The compromiser’s dilemma: House of Lords reform

By Mark Pack | Wed 18th July 2012 - 2:10 pm

House of Lords. Photo: Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of ParliamentYou propose something. Someone objects to it, giving many reasons. You offer to make some changes to meet some of the objections. A deal is made and progress is achieved.

A perfectly normal sequence of events, both inside and outside politics and whether the matter is as mundane as what to eat for dinner tomorrow or as public as the wording of Parliamentary legislation.

One big …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , and | 17 Comments
Stephen Tall

Do the Lib Dems have a core vote, and can we grow it?

By Stephen Tall | Wed 18th July 2012 - 10:45 am

Is it possible to build a bigger Lib Dem core vote? Mark Pack has previously written here on the need for the party to adopt a ‘core vote’ strategy to protect the party from the adverse headwinds of the next election. I don’t disagree with the aim, I’m just not sure of its realism. Here’s why.

What do we mean by a ‘core vote’?

First, let’s define what’s meant by a ‘core vote’: voters who identify with the party and stick with it through the bad times as well as the good. Traditionally this identification has tended to be class-based: working-class …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 49 Comments
Stephen Tall

Immigration: a supply-side measure to boost growth the Tories fiercely oppose

By Stephen Tall | Wed 18th July 2012 - 8:25 am

I suggested at the weekend that there was one over-riding policy area where the Lib Dems and Conservatives agree more often that we disagree — the economy, and the need for deficit reduction — and that we should focus our combined energies on ‘reforming capitalism’. But of course there are also fundamental disagreements between the two Coalition parties on how best we can boost growth.

The Tories would prioritise implementing in full the ‘Beecroft proposals’ — including no-fault dismissal of employees — to make it easier for businesses to …

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Merlene Emerson

The new Naoroji Award

By Merlene Emerson | Tue 17th July 2012 - 9:36 am

Dadabhai Naoroji

I have written here before about the case for community outreach by our Party and cited amongst other statistics results from the Ethnic Minority British Election Survey (EMBES) which showed in the 2010 elections: 68% of ethnic minorities had voted Labour, 16% Conservatives and only 14% Liberal Democrats.

To encourage local parties to do more to promote support from diverse communities, we have of course implemented various initiatives. These range from the appointment of a National Diversity Advisor for the Party in Issan Ghazni (2007-2010) and permanent staff …

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Mark Pack

The Politics of Coalition: How the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government Works

By Mark Pack | Mon 16th July 2012 - 2:25 pm

Robert Hazell and Ben Yong’s work, The Politics of Coalition: How the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government Works, is a very readable volume, written mostly in the style of an introductory politics textbook and based on extensive interviews with the participants, including at very senior levels.

The book is well done, readable, comprehensive and has a few gems lurking in the revelations from all the interviews, such as the limited involvement of Andrew Lansley and Paul Burstow in drafting the health section of the Coalition Agreement.

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Stephen Tall

How Jeremy Thorpe (and then Nick Clegg) broke the electoral system

By Stephen Tall | Sun 15th July 2012 - 2:45 pm

Democratic Audit this week published its latest analysis, its depressing conclusions summed up by The Guardian’s headline British democracy in terminal decline.

A fascinating aspect of the Audit, even for those of us still scarred by the rejection of electoral reform in the 2011 referendum, is its detailed dissection of how the First-Past-The-Post system is failing democracy. And in particular the pinpointing of the year when FPTP started to go bad: 1974, and the Liberal insurgence under Jeremy Thorpe, when the party increased its support from 7.5% in 1970 to 19.3%.

This, say the Audit’s authors, marked a turning point in the UK’s electoral history, a moment when ended the dominance of the ‘Golden Age’ of FPTP (1950-70) and introduced instead its ‘Dysfunctional Age’ (1979-2005):

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 41 Comments
Stephen Tall

Why the Lib Dems cannot end the Coalition. And what we should do to try and rescue it.

By Stephen Tall | Sun 15th July 2012 - 8:55 am

How do we revitalise the Coalition? I realise that for many Lib Dems that’s the very last question on your minds. After a week in which Tory rebel MPs forced the Government to delay a key plank of the Coalition Agreement — House of Lords reform — rather more Lib Dems, and not just the ‘usual suspects’, are turning to the question: how quickly can we be shot of the Tories?

After all, didn’t enough of our MPs walk the plank on the Coalition’s behalf on tuition fees, a policy directly counter to the Lib Dem manifesto? Meanwhile David Cameron cannot even persuade his party to back a reform that’s featured in the last three Tory manifestos. So what’s the purpose of the Coalition any more?

I get the emotional pull of the argument… but it doesn’t persuade me.

Coalition matters more to the Lib Dems than the Tories

The simple truth is that it’s more important for the Lib Dems to try and make this coalition work than it is for the Tories.

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Posted in News and Op-eds | Also tagged , , , and | 65 Comments
Mark Pack

Nick Clegg gives the William Beveridge lecture

By Mark Pack | Sat 14th July 2012 - 6:28 pm

Nick Clegg gives the William Beveridge lecture

Speaking at the at Social Liberal Forum Conference 2012 on Saturday morning, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg gave the William Beveridge memorial lecture. Here are my tweets of the event, interspersed with some links to older blog posts that expanded on some of the issues which came up.

Storified by Mark Pack · Sat, Jul 14 2012 10:25:17

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Mark Pack

The best reason for House of Lords reform is one almost nobody mentions

By Mark Pack | Tue 10th July 2012 - 4:05 pm

My post from last year is rather relevant again, so here it is with some slight updates:

The voters have cast their verdict and an MP is out of office. What should happen to them next? Most people’s answers are somewhere on the spectrum from the polite (let them tidy up their affairs and see their staff properly treated as their contracts end) through to answers best not published before the watershed.

But our political system has a remarkable answer.

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

Why doesn’t Theresa May want mandatory tracking of all cars?

By Mark Pack | Tue 10th July 2012 - 2:25 pm

Because it is an absurd idea may well be your answer to that question even before you’ve reached the end of it. But bear with me a moment.

Imagine a government policy to have mandatory tracking devices in all motor vehicles, which would record all the journeys and store the data. The data would normally be private but could be accessed by the police and others if they subsequently discovered a reason to suspect someone. (You may be able to guess where I am going with this…)

It would cost a fair …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , and | 14 Comments
Stephen Tall

The 15 words that mean the Coalition won’t fall, no matter what happens to Lords reform

By Stephen Tall | Mon 9th July 2012 - 10:45 pm

There’s a very simple reason why — even if enough Tory MPs inflict the Coalition’s first defeat on a key plank of the Coalition Agreement which appeared in their last three manifestos — the Government will not fall tomorrow. It’s these 15 words from the May 2010 Programme for Government:

The deficit reduction programme takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement.

There is also, of course, the small matter of the current opinion polls: neither the Tories nor the Lib Dems will relish a rush to the ballot box at the moment. A Coalition once held together by radicalism and conviction is now bound together by a pact of mutually assured destruction.

The inconsistencies in Tory backbenchers’ position on Lords reform are legion. I won’t unpick them here, as Nick Thornsby has already highlighted six examples on his blog here.

What the Lords fracas reveals about the Tories’ mood

More interesting than trying to pick through the rubble of Tory excuses is to try and understand why a policy on which the two Coalition parties officially agree should be showing up so clearly David Cameron’s inability to lead his party.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , and | 38 Comments
Paul Walter

Baroness Betty Boothroyd blusters on the BBC

By Paul Walter | Mon 9th July 2012 - 8:23 am

Betty Bothroyd is furious. So furious that this morning, on Today, she could hardly speak coherently at one point. Spitting feathers, she was.

She is livid about the “reckless” plans to make the House of Lords mainly elected. She spoke of her outrage at the idea that “millions of people” will be able to vote for House of Lords members, giving them some sort of democratic authenticity. This will create “chaos” she said.

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Posted in News | Also tagged | 43 Comments
Stephen Tall

The word ‘straight’ isn’t homophobic. Now can we get on to the stuff that matters, please?

By Stephen Tall | Sun 8th July 2012 - 12:20 pm

Two significant events this week in the campaign for equal LGBT rights…

First, as we reported this week, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg asked that the ‘Pride flag’ be flown from Whitehall to symbolise Government support for Saturday’s rally in London. As The Sun’s political editor Tom Newton-Dunn tweeted:

(The picture show here was taken by Verity Harding: you can follow her on Twitter here.)

Secondly, Nick Clegg voiced his personal support for religious gay marriage for those which wish to recognise and celebrate a same-sex union:

… in an interview with the London Evening Standard to mark the World Pride event, Mr Clegg said: “This is a personal view at the moment, but I think that in exactly the same way that we shouldn’t force any church to conduct gay marriage, we shouldn’t stop any church that wants to conduct gay marriage. I don’t see why two individuals who love each other and want to show commitment to each other should not be able to do so in a way that is socially recognised as being marriage.”

A couple of weeks ago, Nick recorded this message — described by Attitude as “a really passionate, well-articulated support for equal marriage” — for Out for Marriage:

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Stephen Tall

Lib Dems should back a judge-led inquiry into financial scandal

By Stephen Tall | Wed 4th July 2012 - 10:55 pm

I get why the Tories are opposed to a judge-led inquiry into the scandalous rate-rigging practices employed by Barclays and other banks: their experiences of the Leveson Inquiry show how scandals, even ones that blend across the red/blue parties, have a habit of rebounding on the government of the day.

I get why Labour are in favour of a judge-led inquiry: so complicit were Labour (and Ed Balls in particular) in the catastrophic financial mess of the last few years, of which the banks are just one part, that they are desperate to appear transparent in the hope the inquiry will rebound on the government of the day.

But I don’t get why the Lib Dems are lining up with the Tories to oppose a judge-led inquiry.

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Posted in News and Op-eds | Also tagged , , , and | 58 Comments
Stephen Tall

Barclays and the Bank of England: BAD rate-rigging and GOOD rate-rigging

By Stephen Tall | Wed 4th July 2012 - 11:15 am

The Barclays rate-rigging scandal has conflated a number of issues — Bob Diamond’s bonus, ‘casino’ banking, failed regulators — making it hard to get behind the media’s shouty headlines to understand the issues which should really concern us. Here’s my brief show-your-working attempt, starting with what Barclays.

What Barclays did right: ‘fess up

LIBOR (London Inter Bank Offered Rate) is the rate at which banks in London lend money to each other for the short-term. It’s used as a proxy measure of market confidence in individual banks, as well as a benchmark for setting mortgage interest rates.

Barclays has admitted filing misleading …

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Mark Pack

How leaflets used to look: a Tory attack on Labour’s economic policies, 1931

By Mark Pack | Wed 4th July 2012 - 10:25 am

Today’s leaflet in my series on old election leaflets is a centrally produced Conservative Party leaflet from October 1931. Ramsay MacDonald had led a Labour administration under August 1931 when it split over a Budget and economic crisis. MacDonald earned his place in Labour’s hall of infamy by then forming a National Government with Conservatives and Liberals. Only two Labour colleagues joined MacDonald in this government, so the attacks in this leaflet on “Arthur Henderson and other Socialist ex-Ministers” are, nominally at least, directed at Labour rather than MacDonald and co. in the coalition.

Swap references such as the Empire Marketing Board for current ones and the basic arguments being made in the leaflet are remarkably similar to contemporary politics:

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Helen Duffett

Paddy Ashdown meets his younger self

By Helen Duffett | Mon 2nd July 2012 - 4:23 pm

Broadcast on Saturday, a Radio 4 interview with Lord Ashdown, featuring clips from the BBC archive from throughout his career:

From rookie MP to Liberal Democrats leader, from the Royal Marines to high office in Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown relives his life from the archives in a frank and sometimes emotional conversation with John Wilson.

From his early days in the army to his leadership of the Liberal

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged | 2 Comments
Stephen Tall

The state of Britain: cause for some optimistic pessimism

By Stephen Tall | Sun 1st July 2012 - 9:10 am

David Rennie has been the pen behind the pseudonymous Bagehot column, which appears weekly in The Economist, since 2010. During that time he has been deservedly recognised as the most acute commentator, bar none, writing on British politics. Not that I’ve always agreed with him, not least his indulgence of hoary old cliches with which to whack the Lib Dems.

He has now transferred to the US to personate another Economist pseudonym, Lexington. However, his final missive is a must-read ‘state of the nation’ take on the Britain …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 9 Comments
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