Tag Archives: lynne featherstone

Alix Mortimer

The 12 Op-Eds of Xmas (Day 11)

By Alix Mortimer | Sun 4th January 2009 - 3:20 pm

Throughout the festive season, LDV is offering our readers a load of repeats another chance to read the 12 most popular opinion articles which appeared on the blog during 2008. The second most popular opinion article was by Alix Mortimer, and appeared on LDV on 16th November…

After Baby P: what can be done?

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Mark Pack

The five blogs nicest to the Lib Dems in 2008

By Mark Pack | Sun 4th January 2009 - 8:50 am

Based on the amount of traffic they’ve passed on to www.libdems.org.uk during 2008, the top five blogs were (with changes in brackets from last year’s top five):

  1. Liberal Democrat Voice (no change)
  2. Iain Dale (no change)
  3. Lynne Featherstone (+1)
  4. Liberal England (+1)
  5. Jo Christie-Smith (NEW)

Iain will, I’m sure, be flattered as ever to know he is so nice to the Liberal Democrats 🙂

(For the list of the top five local sites, see yesterday’s post.)

No great surprise that Ming Campbell’s site dropped out of the top five after he stepped down from being leader. Nick Clegg’s new national site, …

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Opinion: January Reshuffle – Big Surprises and the Liberal ‘Big Beasts’ (Part II)

By Letterman | Thu 1st January 2009 - 12:20 pm

Part Two – Beyond the Big Beasts (To read Part I – Two Big Surprises – published yesterday, please click here).

Lynne Featherstone has clearly earned a promotion to shadow Ed Balls at the Department of Communities and Local Government, with her work around the ‘Baby P’ case. And David Laws would better suit a move to Energy and Climate Change, where he could make a good case for the economics of our green policies and be an effective opponent of Ed Miliband, thought by many to be the more talented Miliband brother and certainly someone to be …

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Stephen Tall

LDV Awards 2008: Lib Dem Politician of the Year & By-election Performance of the Year

By Stephen Tall | Tue 30th December 2008 - 6:20 pm

Many thanks to the 200+ LDV readers who took part in our end-of-year awards, which ran between 23rd and 28th December. Voting was conducted via Liberty Research using the alternative vote method of ranking the nominees for each of the eight categories. We’ll be revealing the eight winners over the next four days. (Not that we’re tying to pad things out over the holiday season; no, of course not).

First, let’s unveil the winner of LDV’s first ever Politician of the Year award. Let’s face it, though, there’s zero sense of anticipation as we all knew full darn well …

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Stephen Tall

LDV tops Iain Dale’s list of Lib Dem blogs

By Stephen Tall | Tue 30th December 2008 - 2:04 pm

Modesty (or should that be embarrassment?) almost forbids us from mentioning that Lib Dem Voice has topped Iain Dale’s list for top Lib Dem Blog of the Year. The results of a poll of 1,380 of his blog’s readers were as follows:

LibDem Blog of the Year

1. LibDem Voice 29%
2. Norfolk Blogger 23%
3. Lynne Featherstone 22%

Thanks to Iain and his readers; and congratulations from us to Nich Starling and Lynne.

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Stephen Tall

Which Lib Dem MP would you want to be the next Dr Who?

By Stephen Tall | Wed 24th December 2008 - 9:20 am

The news that David Tennant is quitting his role as The Doctor in the BBC series Dr Who has prompted a flurry of speculation in recent months about who might succeed him: David Morrissey, James Nesbitt, David Walliams, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Catherine Zeta Jones have all been suggested.

To date – and perhaps not so very unsurprisingly – no Lib Dem MPs are yet in the frame for the job. But that didn’t seem any reason for Lib Dem Voice not to set our readers a different kind of Christmas quiz while we eagerly anticipate tomorrow’s special (BBC1, 6.00 pm): …

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Mark Pack

What should political bloggers be trying to achieve?

By Mark Pack | Tue 23rd December 2008 - 9:39 am

Interesting discussion over at Liberal Conspiracy, started off by an account of a recent Labour meeting but also spawning a thoughtful discussion in the comments. It’s a topic Lynne Featherstone covered earlier this year in a piece on this site, where she said:

Liberal Democrat bloggers tend to be either fairly inward or local looking. There are many blogs that really talk just about what is happening in the party, along with a smaller number of – often excellent – blogs which are clearly aimed at a particular local audience (including some particularly good councillor blogs aimed as residents in those wards – understandably

…

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Stephen Tall

Top of the Blogs: The Golden Dozen #96

By Stephen Tall | Sun 21st December 2008 - 5:50 pm

Welcome to the 95th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (14th-20th December), together with a hand-picked quintet, mostly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

‘Tis the season of tradition, so let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down.

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Helen Duffett

‘Tis the season for predictions…

By Helen Duffett | Sun 21st December 2008 - 2:25 pm

Total Politics asks “What’s in store for us in 2009?” and in the absence of a crystal ball, offers a few lists:
(if you’d rather it were a surprise, look away now)

The view from the village – politicians and pundits’ predictions, including Chris Huhne’s:

The recession will be deeper and longer than most people think because big booms are always followed by big busts, and the UK housing market was the most overvalued and over-borrowed in the developed world. We will be doubly hit because of our reliance on financial services.

The Political Faces of 2009, with Lynne Featherstone right at the top:

Lynne

…

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Mark Pack

Islington Council wins appeal over registrar who refused to carry out same-sex marriages

By Mark Pack | Sat 20th December 2008 - 7:50 am

The BBC reports:

A council has won its appeal against a ruling it discriminated against a Christian registrar who refused to conduct same-sex civil partnerships.

Lillian Ladele said she could not carry out same-sex ceremonies “as a matter of religious conscience”.

An Employment Tribunal found in July that Islington Council, in north London, had unlawfully discriminated against her.

But an Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has now upheld the authority’s appeal…

Islington councillor John Gilbert said: “The council is extremely pleased with this decision which it believes to be the right one.”

You can read the full story here. Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrats equalities spokesperson, …

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Stephen Tall

Top of the Blogs: The Golden Dozen #95

By Stephen Tall | Tue 16th December 2008 - 9:27 pm

Welcome to the 95th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (7th-13th December), together with a hand-picked quintet, mostly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

‘Tis the season of tradition, so let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down.

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Mark Pack

Fire Brigade Union: Brian Coleman was wrong

By Mark Pack | Sun 14th December 2008 - 1:01 pm

A footnote to yesterday’s post about Brian Coleman, who seems to think he knows better than the Fire Brigade about when people should call them – here is an extract from an email sent by the Fire Brigade Union to their London branches:

The FBU’s regional secretary for London, Joe MacVeigh, said, “Councillor Coleman needs to decide whether he wants to be a serious political figure or whether he wants to continue playing the role of complete buffoon. He holds a position of enormous responsibility, and he should be dignified and statesmanlike in everything he does. Instead, he blunders around, whipping

…

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Mark Pack

Brian Coleman and his taxi bills

By Mark Pack | Sat 13th December 2008 - 7:45 pm

Conservative GLA member Brian Coleman has been in the news a bit today, criticising Lynne Featherstone for calling out the Fire Brigade when she feared that her boiler might be about to explode after it started making loud noises and shaking the house. Personally, that’s exactly what I’d do in the same circumstances, and indeed that’s what the Fire Brigade has said people should do.

But what really intrigues me about Brian Coleman’s attempt to score a political point (and he really should know better than rubbishing the Fire Brigade’s own advice, what with being chairman of the Fire Authority) is …

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Posted in Conference and News | Also tagged and | 19 Comments
Mark Pack

Old habits linger on at Haringey Council as Labour block Baby P debate

By Mark Pack | Sat 6th December 2008 - 8:42 pm

This morning’s newspapers brought the news that the head of Ofsted is accusing Haringey Council of misleading her inspectors:

Ofsted’s assessment of local authorities’ children’s services last year consisted of a checklist of the information managers had to provide to demonstrate, among other things, that they had adequate social workers and were assessing children promptly. Managers in Haringey misled Ofsted by providing inaccurate data, the chief inspector said.

Tactics used by the council included claims that managers had assessed children promptly when the files revealed that those assessments were in fact incomplete. The same files showed that such assessments of children

…

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Mark Pack

David Lammy’s record under the spotlight

By Mark Pack | Wed 3rd December 2008 - 3:55 pm

The attitude of David Lammy (MP for Tottenham, one of the two constituency in Haringey) towards evidence of problems with Haringey’s children’s services has been coming under increasing scrutiny and it doesn’t look good.

David Lammy was warned by a whistle blower of severe problems in Haringey six months before Baby P’s death. Yet as Paul Waugh pointed out in the Evening Standard, David Lammy was happy to defend Sharon Shoesmith and Haringey Council even after this warning and after Baby P’s death (a defence that was prominent on both his website and in the links on his

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Mark Pack

David Lammy: then and now

By Mark Pack | Tue 2nd December 2008 - 10:30 pm

Paul Waugh’s blog has a post contrasting what David Lammy used to say about Baby P’s death with what he’s now saying:

November 19, BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme:

“Over the course of the weekend, 61 headteachers that have more experience than you or I, or Lynne Featherstone, have offered their reassurance that they feel Haringey has been protecting children.”

December 1, BBC News 24:

“Clearly lessons have not been learned.  I think it is right that there is new leadership in Haringey.  This is a very dark and sad day for the people

…

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Mark Pack

Haringey Chief Executive Ita O’Donovan was in charge at Stoke just before its children services were condemned

By Mark Pack | Mon 1st December 2008 - 8:55 pm

Haringey Council Chief Executive, Ita O’Donovan was previously city manager at Stoke-on-Trent Council (the top staff person in their then directly elected Mayor system). Her departure to become Haringey Chief Executive was announced in November 2005, and Ita O’Donovan took up post in Haringey in March 2006.

And in that same month, March 2006, the then Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes wrote that council failings were putting children in Stoke at risk:

In one letter, dated 15 March 2006, the minister wrote to Mr Meredith saying a report into care provided by Stoke City Council showed there were “critical weaknesses”

…

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Stephen Tall

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Lynne Featherstone – ‘Put Haringey on probation now’

By Stephen Tall | Mon 1st December 2008 - 6:47 pm

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog, Lynne Featherstone MP writes about the devastating Baby P report into Haringey Council. Read it in full here, but here’s Lynne’s trenchant critique:

I have never seen such a damning and devastating criticism of an authority as this litany of failure – both systemic and personal, and at every level and, more or less, in every agency. But particularly singled out for special damnation: Haringey council. So, given all that, what an earth is Ed Balls doing commissioning more reports and waiting until next June before removing Haringey children’s services from council

…

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Mark Pack

Lack of men in childcare denies young children role models – Clegg

By Mark Pack | Wed 26th November 2008 - 12:30 pm

Interesting speech yesterday from Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg to the Daycare Trust about the importance of male role models for children:

I remember well when I first arrived at Westminster the strange looks I would get when I would miss a drink in the Commons bar so that I could put the kids to bed.

For men wanting to actually work in the field, the social disapproval, even hostility, that they often feel is a huge deterrent … Of those who have done it, some say the only way they were accepted was by being seen as ‘honorary women’, rather than

…

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Alix Mortimer

After Baby P: what can be done?

By Alix Mortimer | Sun 16th November 2008 - 10:56 am

Recently, Lib Dem Voice has been snowed under with hits and comments from new readers, all expressing their anger in the face of the Baby P tragedy. (If you’re a regular, you won’t find anything in this post you don’t already know – fear not, normal LDV service will soon be resumed, but this does seem something of a special case).

If you’re one of those new readers, I’d like to suggest ways you can put your anger to good use. We can all talk endlessly about who’s to blame, what should be

…

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Stephen Tall

Sky: Credit to Lynne over Baby P case

By Stephen Tall | Fri 14th November 2008 - 11:35 am

Here’s Jon Craig on Sky’s Boulton & Co blog:

Only one person emerges from the Baby P tragedy with credit: the Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone. Throughout this tawdry affair, in which the conduct of Haringey Council – Labour-run since 1971 – has been scandalous and the Government’s response sluggish until after the Brown-Cameron clash, she has campaigned with dignity and determination.

Just moments after that ill-tempered Commons bust-up between David Cameron and Gordon Brown, the Hornsey and Wood Green MP asked the Prime Minister a question in a measured but forthright tone.

As she pointed out, she was leader of the

…

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Mark Pack

Baby P

By Mark Pack | Thu 13th November 2008 - 12:41 am

After the horrific story of Baby P came out, where each detail seems to add yet another awful question (how can you get away with hiding injuries with chocolate smears? how can a doctor fail to notice that a baby’s back is broken?), and then the desperately unseemly sight of MPs bawling at each other across the House of Commons (what a collective failure of decency by those sitting behind Brown and Cameron who somehow thought that was an appropriate way to behave when the death of baby was being discussed), we now have this:

The Times has also learnt that

…

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Posted in News and Parliament | Also tagged and | 485 Comments
Mark Pack

Lynne Featherstone vs Hazel Blears

By Mark Pack | Tue 11th November 2008 - 3:45 pm

The Liberal Democrat MP for Hornsey & Wood Green has an article today on the New Statesman website about Hazel Blears and her speech last week to the Hansard society on political engagement.

Although most of the coverage of the Blears speech has been about her comments on bloggers, Lynne takes her to task over other parts of the speech as you can read here. The New Statesman also has a response from Hazel Blears here. Well, I say “response” but if I tell you that she repeatedly talks about “Liberals” it gives you an idea of the tone …

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Lynne Featherstone

The brittleness of British politics

By Lynne Featherstone | Mon 22nd September 2008 - 2:20 pm

Although on the surface, British politics appears to have settled down a little in the last few months (Conservatives ahead, Gordon Brown in Michael Foot territory), underneath it all there is still a huge brittleness about it all.

You see it many weeks in council by-election results, where the Liberal Democrats often notch up dramatic swings from the Conservatives in by-elections in the southern-half of England.

You see it in research such as Newsnight’s focus group comparing Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg. At the start – few very had heard of Nick – but by the end – he …

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Lynne Featherstone

Lessons from May’s elections

By Lynne Featherstone | Mon 26th May 2008 - 2:13 pm

To start, three pieces of promising news: in six of the last seven annual rounds of local elections, the number of Liberal Democrat councillors has gone up. Secondly, the change in our vote in Crewe & Nantwich was pretty much the same as in Dudley West, South East Staffordshire and Wirral South – the three big Labour gains from the Conservatives in the run-up to 1997 – a general election at which we then made huge gains in the numbers of MPs we had.

Add in to that the steady but very clear improvement in our poll ratings since Nick Clegg became leader, and there’s plenty of cause for quiet optimism about our electoral prospects – provded we put in the hard work necessary.

But we shouldn’t be complacent that just any sort of hard work will deliver the right results, and there are two signs in that news that we need, in particular, to broaden our strength across the country.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 44 Comments
Lynne Featherstone

Are we making the most of blogging?

By Lynne Featherstone | Fri 28th March 2008 - 9:55 am

My recent blog posting about Twitter (it’s a text message blogging service, which I’ve just started using) was unusual -in that in triggered off a sequence of other blogs posts, both on Liberal Democrat sites (e.g. on this site and on Alex Foster’s blog) and also on others (e.g. Puffbox).

I say unusual – because it’s rare to see a story start on one Liberal Democrat blog and then be picked up and spread across the Liberal Democrat blogosphere, let alone beyond the confines of the party.

The contrast with the American political blogosphere – and even right-wing blogs in the UK – is, to me, striking. …

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Posted in Online politics | 25 Comments
Alex Foster

Lynne the twitterer

By Alex Foster | Sat 22nd March 2008 - 5:54 pm

Congratulations to Lynne Featherstone, who has become, she believes, the first British MP to use the Twitter instant messaging system, just slightly less than one year after I first suggested on my blog, and in the forums here (party members only).

Those of you unable or unwilling to read the forums will be unaware that the idea was initially dismissed out of hand by influential party bosses, before they went on to embrace it wholeheartedly.  Now the entire Innovations Department is happily twittering away.

Barely a month afterwards, the party used Twitter for a highly successful if under-used

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged and | 21 Comments
Mark Pack

The five blogs nicest to the Lib Dems in 2007

By Mark Pack | Fri 4th January 2008 - 2:55 pm

Based on the amount of traffic they’ve passed on to www.libdems.org.uk during 2007, the top five blogs were:

  1. Liberal Democrat Voice
  2. Iain Dale
  3. Ming Campbell
  4. Lynne Featherstone
  5. Liberal England

Although LDV and Ming’s site regularly had links through to the party’s site, none of the others did. Iain Dale’s presence at number two isn’t though simply a reflection of his traffic levels: something I’ve noticed on other sites too is that links from Iain Dale often drive far more traffic relative to Iain’s readership than links from other people. Not sure though what it is about readers of that site that …

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Mark Pack

Vince Cable tops poll for best performing MP

By Mark Pack | Tue 4th December 2007 - 1:32 pm

Iain Dale, that paragon of impartial and erudite words of wisdom on UK politics (occasionally, when he’s not being an unthinking Tory loyalist obviously), has published the results of his poll on which MPs have performed best in the last month.

The poll was open to readers of his website who (as Iain acknowledges) are a rather Conservative leaning bunch overall. All of which makes Vince Cable’s result in topping the poll all the more impressive – beating David Cameron into second place.

Overall this is how the Liberal Democrat MPs performed (the scores are average marks):

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The Voice

General election news: what the Lib Dem bloggers say

By The Voice | Sat 6th October 2007 - 5:15 pm

…

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