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Tag Archives: featured

In defence of Tim Farron: 3 liberal reasons to stick up for him

By Stephen Tall | Tue 27th March 2012 - 11:50 am

Lib Dem party president Tim Farron has caused something of a storm within the party by co-signing a letter in his capacity as Vice Chair of the ‘Christians in Parliament’ group urging the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw their ruling “that the Healing On The Streets ministry in Bath are no longer able to claim, in their advertising, that God can heal people from medical conditions.” The controversy is easy to understand, as it pits two tenets of liberalism against each other: free speech and rational scepticism.

Personally, I am very happy to defend Tim Farron’s stance. Here’s three …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged advertising standards authority and tim farron | 85 Comments

Campaign Corner: How can we talk more policy?

By Mark Pack | Mon 26th March 2012 - 4:24 pm

The Campaign Corner series looks to give three tips about commonly asked campaign issues. Do get in touch if you have any questions you would like to suggest.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: A strange question perhaps, but we seem to spend all the time in my local party talking about campaigning and never about policy. Maybe that didn’t matter in opposition, but it certainly matters in government! How can we get a better balance?

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Posted in Campaign Corner | Also tagged dawn barnes | 2 Comments

6 essential steps to help clean up the reputation of British politics

By Stephen Tall | Mon 26th March 2012 - 9:15 am

We’ve been here before: many times, under many different governments. The latest addition to the lexicon of big money politics scandals is Peter Cruddas’s crude cash-for-access fundraising, with influence on government policy touted for £250,000 a pop. Under Labour, we witnessed the Bernie Ecclestone affair, as well as the cash-for-honours scandal.

To date this shared complicity — the “all parties are as bad as each other” mentality — has served only the interests of senior politicians in justifying the continuing scandal of how big money talks …

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Posted in News | Also tagged christopher kelly, party funding and peter cruddas | 31 Comments

Budget 2012 verdict: my pick of the top 9 stand-out issues

By Stephen Tall | Thu 22nd March 2012 - 3:55 pm

Here are my personal pick of the top 9 points from this year’s Budget…

1. A definite Lib Dem win on raising the income tax threshold

Raising the income tax threshold — indeed, the biggest ever uplift, to £9,205 — is undoubtedly a big win for the Lib Dems. It’s two months since Nick Clegg made the unusual move of publicly calling on the Coalition to move “further and faster” on taking more of the lowest-paid out of tax, the number one Lib Dem manifesto priority at the last general election. Evidence from the first ‘snap’ budget poll shows 92% …

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Posted in Op-eds | 28 Comments

What are Britain’s millionaires actually like? Or why we should get them umbrellas

By Mark Pack | Tue 20th March 2012 - 11:25 am

With questions of taxing the richest in the news in the run-up to the Budget, some of the findings from Skandia’s latest survey of millionaires (carried out for the wealth management industry) are of much wider interest.

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Posted in News | 4 Comments

Campaign Corner: How can we run our committee meetings better?

By Mark Pack | Mon 19th March 2012 - 3:50 pm

The Campaign Corner series looks to give three tips about commonly asked campaign issues. Do get in touch if you have any questions you would like to suggest.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Why yes, I’ve just come out of a local party campaign team meeting. Many hours, no decisions. Please help!

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Posted in Campaign Corner | 3 Comments

Time for the Lib Dems to blow the final whistle on national wage settlements

By Stephen Tall | Sun 18th March 2012 - 2:25 pm

It’s over 50 years since the campaign by Jimmy Hill, then chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, successfully scrapped the maximum wage which operated throughout the football league until 1961. Some probably lament the commercialisation of the game which it set in motion. But the idea that individuals should have a ceiling placed on their wage-earning potential by the authorities seems quaintly absurd today.

Except in the public sector. If you’re paid by the government — if, for example, you work in schools, colleges and universities, or the civil service and local government — then your wages are defined by national pay rates determined by Whitehall and trade union negotiations. It doesn’t matter which part of the country you work, you operate within that centrally-set national pay framework. It is as quaint and as absurd as the wage rules of football were half a century ago.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged alison wold, centreforum, gordon brown, jimmy hill, nick clegg and regional pay | 97 Comments

Pauline Pearce – the ‘Hackney Heroine’ – standing as Lib Dem candidate in May’s elections

By Stephen Tall | Fri 16th March 2012 - 9:55 am

Pauline Pearce’s outspoken and down-to-earth condemnation of the London rioters at the height of the violence last summer gained the attention of the nation, and she was dubbed the ‘Heroine of Hackney’. Now she is standing for the Liberal Democrats in this May’s local elections.

For those who don’t remember or have never seen Pauline’s most famous moment, here’s the video footage. (Please note there is strong language throughout.)

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Posted in News | Also tagged #ukriots, hackney, pauline pearce and Simon De Deney | 8 Comments

Who’s up, who’s down? How party members rate the performances of leading Lib Dems

By Stephen Tall | Fri 16th March 2012 - 7:45 am

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

Today we focus on the performances of the leading lights of the Liberal Democrats — those of our MPs in the cabinet, those occupying ministerial positions, and other leading Lib Dems.

LDV asked: How would you rate the performances of the following leading Liberal Democrats and government ministers?

Full results are published below, but here’s three key lists for those who want to cut to the chase… (with comparison to February 2012 ratings in brackets)

Top 5 Lib Dem performers in the Government:

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Posted in LDV Members poll | 5 Comments

Paddy Ashdown: A Fortunate Life

By Mark Pack | Thu 15th March 2012 - 4:50 pm

It is a tribute to Paddy Ashdown’s varied and fascinating careers that even hardened politicos reading his autobiography, A Fortunate Life, do not express regret at how relatively briefly his British political career features in it.

Around two-thirds of the book document his times as a Royal Marine, in the Special Boat Service, then as a spy and finally, after time as an MP and leader of the Liberal Democrats, international peacemaker in the former Yugoslavia. Even if his time as leader of the Liberal Democrats had ended quickly in ignominious failure, Ashdown would have multiple impressive legacies to outweigh it. That in fact his time as leader saw remarkable success in rescuing the party from death’s door makes all but the most hardened reader end up feeling their life is just rather tame, straight-forward and under-performing compared to Ashdown’s.

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Posted in Books | Also tagged paddy ashdown | Leave a comment

Plan C: The Social Liberal Forum’s economic prognosis

By Mark Pack | Tue 13th March 2012 - 10:50 am

There has been a very welcome recent revival of policy thinking in the Liberal Democrats, despite the large cuts to the party’s official policy research staff. This has included a new think tank (Liberal Insight) and good work by Richard Kemp and the local government sector in encouraging imaginative plans for making use of the new legal powers going to local government.

Added to this is the Social Liberal Forum’s further foray into economic policy-making, following up on some of their successful events with their first policy pamphlet. Prateek Buch’s “Plan C – social liberal approaches to a fair, …

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Posted in Books | Also tagged compass, economy, george osborne, prateek buch, richard kemp, social liberal forum and will hutton | 7 Comments

Campaign Corner: How do we get more people phoning?

By Mark Pack | Mon 12th March 2012 - 2:25 pm

The Campaign Corner series looks to give three tips about commonly asked campaign issues. Do get in touch if you have any questions you would like to suggest.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: You’ve talked before about how to get more leaflet deliverers and how to doorstep canvass, but what about the telephone? How do I get more people in my branch doing phone canvassing?

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Posted in Campaign Corner | Leave a comment

What Lib Dem members think about the NHS Bill: 57% opposed, but majority might back it if significantly amended

By Stephen Tall | Thu 8th March 2012 - 11:15 pm

We’ve been surveying the views of current Lib Dem members this week on your views on the NHS Bill. Over 500 responded, and here’s what you told us…

A majority of Lib Dem members – and a majority of Lib Dem members who will be voting delegates at the party’s spring conference at NewcastleGateshead this weekend – oppose the Coalition Government’s NHS reforms as they currently stand. By 57% to 32%, Lib Dem members reject the Health & Social Care Bill.

However, that does not automatically mean the Lib Dem conference will vote to ‘Kill the Bill’ if

…

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Posted in LDV Members poll | Also tagged #ldconf, health, john pugh, judith jolly, NHS, nick clegg, paul burstow and shirley williams | 18 Comments

I don’t want you to read 160 tips for local councillors and campaigners

By Mark Pack | Thu 8th March 2012 - 10:25 am

ALDC has just published a new collection I’ve edited: Top Tips for Local Campaigners, packed with 160 tips.

Here is how my introduction starts:

I don’t want you to read this book.

That may seem an odd request for an editor to make at the start of a book. But if you just sit down, read it, think a quick thought afterwards about what you made of it and then leave it at that, the book will have been a failure.

This is not a book to sit and

…

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Posted in Local government | 4 Comments

Local council by-elections: the recovery continues, again

By Mark Pack | Wed 7th March 2012 - 10:55 am

Two months on, it’s time to update my post about the trends in local government by-elections.

Week by week local by-election results can fluctuate greatly as the luck of the draw over which seats are up adds to the variations in local circumstances to produce a large spread of results. However, aggregated over longer periods the pattern of local by-elections does say something about the state of the parties, which is why I’ve been looking at the trend in Liberal Democrat performances since May 2011.

This following graphs show the change in the Liberal Democrat vote share in by-elections, measured since …

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Posted in Local government and News | 27 Comments

Campaign Corner: How can I best use Facebook?

By Mark Pack | Mon 5th March 2012 - 3:50 pm

The Campaign Corner series looks to give three tips about commonly asked campaign issues. Do get in touch if you have any questions you would like to suggest.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: How can I get the best out of Facebook for my ward branch?

Around half the UK’s population is on Facebook, so if you’re wondering what to spend time on campaigning online, then Facebook is a very good choice (perhaps these days it is second only to email). Three pieces of advice then, as is traditional:

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Posted in Campaign Corner and Online politics | Also tagged facebook | 4 Comments

ToryBoy: John Walsh portrays life on the campaign trail as it really is

By Mark Pack | Thu 1st March 2012 - 10:25 am

Southwark Liberal Democrats have started a great series of slightly different local party events, as a result of which I was in the Shortwave Cinema earlier this week for a screening of ToryBoy. It is a documentary by John Walsh of his experiences getting selected as a Conservative Parliamentary candidate and then fighting Middlesbrough against the controversial Labour MP Sir Stuart Bell at the 2010 general election.

It is a hugely enjoyable documentary, which mixes humour, drama and education. Humour such as John Walsh’s attempt to explain flash-mobbing to the massed ranks of Middlesbrough Conservatives (viz 6 people, mostly aged over 60 by the looks of it).

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Posted in News | Also tagged graham neale and john walsh | 4 Comments

Why Conservatives should back Lords reform

By Nick T | Thu 1st March 2012 - 7:56 am

There’s a certain irony to the fact that it seems to regularly escape the memory of Conservatives that they failed to win the general election in 2010. Despite Tory MPs having to negotiate on a daily basis with a rival political party just to keep their leader in Number 10, no substantive discussion seems to happen among Conservatives about why, in such conducive conditions, they failed to win a majority.

One reason for that is perhaps that would involve some rather uncomfortable truths.

It’s a fairly uncontroversial statement to say that more Britons share the fundamental beliefs of the Conservative party than …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged david cameron and lords reform | 8 Comments

Campaign Corner: How can I make my direct mail better?

By Mark Pack | Mon 27th February 2012 - 3:25 pm

The Campaign Corner series looks to give three tips about commonly asked campaign issues. Do get in touch if you have any questions you would like to suggest.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: We’ve started doing a lot more direct mail in my local party, partly because there are so many shared houses and blocks with one letterbox. How can we make our letters better?

Direct mail is a very important and powerful tool, as long as you remember it’s about quality as well as quantity:

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Posted in Campaign Corner | Also tagged direct mail | 1 Comment

‘Workfare’: the depressingly sterile ‘left/right’ debate is a challenge to liberals to sharpen our thinking

By Stephen Tall | Sun 26th February 2012 - 8:50 am

Deborah Orr has a must-read article in the Guardian highlighting the inverted absurdity of this week’s row about the Coalition’s workfare programme, The slanging match over workfare is getting us nowhere.

She points out that the very essence of workfare is government intervention in the workings of the free market, the state urging private companies to offer work experience placements to the unemployed:

For the right, such hapless, inefficient intervention by the state is anathema. When the private sector is left to make its own arrangements, neo-liberals never tire of pointing out, it functions better, to the advantage of all.

…

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged benefits, deborah orr, unemployment and workfare | 24 Comments

10 things you might not have known about party political funding over the last decade

By Stephen Tall | Sat 25th February 2012 - 6:55 pm

The Electoral Commission website is a data-mine of information for those interested in all aspects of party political funding.

For those who’d rather not get their hands dirty doing the mining themselves, below you’ll find 10 interesting (in my opinion) facts I discovered there.

But for those of you interested in excavating further, I’ve uploaded Google spreadsheets of the three main parties’ donations received between 2001 and 2011 (incl.):

Liberal Democrat donations, 2001-11;

Labour party donations, 2001-11;

Conservative party donations, 2001-11.

And here are those 10 interesting facts I promised you…

1) In total, the Lib Dems raised £33,742,984 in donations from 2001-11. This compares with £173,742,956 for the Labour Party, and £182,418,146 for the Conservatives.

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Posted in News | Also tagged conservative party, donations, donations (Lib Dem), fundraising and labour party | 15 Comments

Labour’s new approach to education: ‘Evidence, evidence, evidence’. What can the Lib Dems learn from this?

By Stephen Tall | Thu 23rd February 2012 - 9:15 am

I’m going to do something now I haven’t had cause to do in a good few months: praise a Labour policy. Here’s why.

On Tuesday night, I went along to listen to Stephen Twigg, Labour’s shadow education secretary, deliver a speech to a ProgressOnline debate on raising standards in education. (The event was in parliament’s Grimond Room, so I felt reasonably at home.) The theme was ‘Evidence, not dogma’, and Mr Twigg stayed true to the spirit of it, announcing a heavily-trailed proposal that Labour will establish an Office for Educational Improvement. You can read his speech here, and …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged education, labour party, pupil premium, sarah teather, schools and stephen twigg | 20 Comments

Campaign Corner: What should I measure?

By Mark Pack | Mon 20th February 2012 - 3:50 pm

The Campaign Corner series looks to give three tips about commonly asked campaign issues. Do get in touch if you have any questions you would like to suggest.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: I work in marketing for the day job, where measuring impact and altering our plans as a result is the norm. In the evenings when I become a Lib Dem campaigner however, measuring seems to go out the window and we just do what we always did. Surely we can do better than that?

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Posted in Campaign Corner | 3 Comments

“A shitty time to be a liberal”: The Economist’s must-read piece on the Clegg paradox (and 2 reasons why it’s wrong)

By Stephen Tall | Sun 19th February 2012 - 9:55 am

There’s a must-read column by The Economist’s Bagehot this week focusing on the Lib Dems’ dilemmas, titled The Clegg paradox. It’s a serious and weighty analysis, which asks some uncomfortable questions of the party’s strategy. Here’s it’s conclusion:

At a recent meeting of the Lib Dem parliamentary party, Tim Farron, an ambitious left-winger and party president, reportedly cheered this anti-Tory success, but bemoaned the fact that unelected peers had led the charge against the NHS reforms and got the credit for it, rather than Lib Dem MPs who need votes. That drew a rebuke from Jeremy Browne, a foreign office

…

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged bagehot, nick clegg and the economist | 18 Comments

Chris Davies MEP writes… To tithe or not to tithe?

By Chris Davies | Fri 17th February 2012 - 4:26 pm

Money is tight. The party is far from being flush with cash and there is not enough in the coffers to fund the level of campaigning we need. We rely heavily on voluntary donations, and equity demands that we dust off a recommendation of the 2008 Bones Report – the one calling for Lib Dems at every level of government to give a proportion of their income to support activities that can enhance the effectiveness of the party.

Most councillors already do this, donating 5-10% of their allowances. ALDC even provides model standing orders that require each voting member of a …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged aldc, chris davies and party funding | 19 Comments

The original text of today’s speech from David Cameron

By Mark Pack | Thu 16th February 2012 - 1:54 pm

Due to an unfortunate computer virus prank, David Cameron was forced to give a speech today using the wrong text. The virus had swapped the words “United Kingdom” for “Scotland” and “Europe” for “United Kingdom” along with a couple of other small edits to muddy the waters. Here is the original text of the speech he meant to give.

I am convinced that for both the United Kingdom, and Europe, our best days lie ahead of us.

And that even though it may be a great historical construct, Europe is actually even more of an inspiring model for the future.

Think of the …

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Posted in Europe / International and Humour | Also tagged david cameron | 15 Comments

EXCLUSIVE: What Lib Dem members say about the party’s direction and Nick Clegg’s leadership

By Stephen Tall | Wed 15th February 2012 - 7:50 am

Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. Some 570 party members responded, and we’re publishing the full results.

70% say Lib Dems on right course, highest figure since July 2010

LDV asked: Do you think, as a whole, the Liberal Democrats are on the right course or on the wrong track? (Comparison with December’s figures.)

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Posted in LDV Members poll | Also tagged nick clegg | 23 Comments

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