It’s Saturday morning, so here are eight thought-provoking articles to stimulate your thinking juices…
5 Years On: The Election That Never Was – Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s former spinner-in-chief whose must-read blog is essentially a memoir-by-instalments, recalls the week in 2007 that turned the new Prime Minister from hero to zero.
Over at CentreForum’s blog, Stephen Tall has proposed the Lib Dem conference as the think-tank’s latest ‘Liberal Hero of the Week’ for its stance in opposing the Coalition’s plans for secret courts. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s not the fact that David Cameron doesn’t know the translation of ‘Magna Carta’ that worries me. It’s that he doesn’t appear to understand its central tenet:
No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of
Over at the Huffington Post, LibDemVoice co-editor Stephen Tall assesses the party conference. His verdict? What’s significant is what hasn’t happened. Here’s how his piece starts:
On the face of it this has been a pretty tepid, even dull, Lib Dem conference. No rows, cock-ups or defeats. But it’s probably been the most important party gathering since the special conference in May 2010 when the party dipped its hand in blood to sign the Coalition Agreement.
Why do I say that? Because of what didn’t happen. Political commentators, especially of the left (yes, I’m looking at you, Polly) – the folk whose
It’s Liberal Democrat conference, so it’s time for the latest Iain Dale / Daily Telegraph list of the 50 most influential Liberal Democrats. Of course our interest in covering the story on Lib Dem Voice is in no way related to two of the team appearing in the list…
In less than shocking news, Nick Clegg still tops the list at #1. Up to #2 is Vince Cable, followed by Tim Farron, Danny Alexander and then Nick Clegg’s Chief of Staff (and former double winning general election agent) Jonathan Oates.
Going further down the rankings finds the double blogger appearances:
By Helen Duffett
| Sat 22nd September 2012 - 7:33 pm
Nominations for the Liberal Democrats’ Blog of the Year Awards 2012 closed on 14 September. Since then, the judges, Kirsty Williams (Assembly Member for Brecon and Radnorshire and Leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats), Nick Thornsby (Lib Dem Blogger of the Year 2011), Tim Gatt (ITV News Digital Output Editor), Stephen Tall (Co-Editor, Lib Dem Voice), Alan Muhammed (Lib Dem Voice’s social media manager), & Helen Duffett (that’s me – Co-Editor (Associate) Lib Dem Voice) have been poring over the entries for the five categories.
It’s been a big task, and a fun one, to distil so many excellent examples of Lib Dem blogging and e-campaigning into lists of the best.
Congratulations if you’ve been shortlisted, but if you haven’t: remember that the shortlists are based on the judges’ subjective opinions. The awards are intended to be a fun way to celebrate the talent in the Lib Dem blogosphere, whilst introducing you to some blogs you might not have read before.
Next, a plug for the awards ceremony itself. If you’re at party conference in Brighton, do come along to the Pavilion Room, Grand Hotel, Brighton, from 9.45pm tonight, Saturday 22nd September.
Now, without further ado, here are the shortlists: (Drumroll, please)
It’s almost two weeks since Helen Duffett invited us to submit our nominations for the prestigious Liberal Democrat Voice Blog of the Year. Nominations close at 5pm tomorrow so if you haven’t done yours yet, you had better get your finger out. You are allowed to nominate your own blog – and nobody will ever know that you did. All the relevant details and the categories are reproduced below. If you are at Conference, the winners will be unveiled at an every expense spared ceremony at Conference. Better get that tux dry cleaned….
By Caron Lindsay
| Wed 5th September 2012 - 12:55 pm
Our own Stephen Tall has been analysing the Reshuffle over at Endeavour Public Affairs.
He says that an opportunity to pursue a more radical economic agenda has been missed:
The Government should be building on this with a radical and popular agenda to create a more competitive and much, much fairer economy, as I argued here on LibDemVoice. This would mean further banking reform than currently proposed, for example by separating completely retail and investment banking, and parcelling up and selling on the currently state-owned banks into a number of smaller ones to create greater plurality in the system. More than this, it
By Stephen Tall
| Mon 3rd September 2012 - 10:02 pm
It’s not often that polling companies ask how alternative Lib Dem leaders would impact the party’s popularity — in fact, I’m struggling to recall a single example — but ComRes has asked what difference Vince Cable leading the party would have on its fortunes. Here’s the result:
The Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year Awards, run by Lib Dem Voice, are back for their seventh year. As usual, they’ll be awarded in a budget lavish ceremony at the party’s autumn conference in Brighton.
Click on the following links to see last year’s Shortlist and the Winners.
Over at his essential UK Polling Report blog, the best online guide to British polling, Anthony Wells has taken a closer look at this survey — and at the validity of LibDemVoice surveys in general — and here’s an excerpt of what he says:
Strangely, that Liberal Democrat Voice poll which showed that members were split 47%-46% on whether Nick Clegg should still be Liberal Democrat leader at the next election has attracted a bit of coverage in the press.
Clegg is vulnerable because he is seen as one of the few people at the top of the party who is ideologically sympathetic to the Conservatives.
Well, that’s maybe because Polly Toynbee and the Guardian are always trying to paint him that way. David Cameron, on the other hand, who is probably in a better position to judge, is
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.
Oakeshott, Ashdown and Pack top your list
LDV asked: Which prominent Lib Dems who are NOT MPs (eg, peers, campaigners) are doing an effective job of promoting the party to the public? Please write-in.
Lord (Matthew) Oakeshott
Lord (Paddy) Ashdown
Mark Pack
Evan Harris
Baroness (Shirley) Williams
Lord (Chris) Rennard
Caroline Pidgeon AM
Willie Rennie MSP
Baroness (Susan) Kramer
Stephen Tall
Kirsty Williams AM
Lord (Tom) McNally
Baroness (Ros) Scott
Brian
Nick Clegg’s statement dropping Lords Reform in this Parliament should come as no surprise following David Cameron’s failure to persuade barely half of his backbench MPs to support the Government’s Bill on this.
Two years ago, Conservative MPs were supporting a Queen’s Speech that made explicit the Coalition agreement to elect members of the House of Lords through Proportional Representation.
The Coalition Agreement is the contract that underwrites this government. In its name many Liberal Democrats have voted for compromises in legislation that we would not on our own have put forward.
So, the question is what to do when one side fails to honour its side of the contract?
You act swiftly and decisively, even ruthlessly, as Nick Clegg has done, to redress the balance. Hence, the boundary changes are no more.
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, …
There were tears, laughter and wide-eyed wonderment at Liberal Democrat Voice Towers on Friday night as we marvelled at Danny Boyle’s innovative Olympic opening ceremony. While some of us will remember Boyle as the guy who persuaded the Queen to “jump” out of a helicopter, our own Stephen Tall has looked a little deeper.
Over at CentreForum’s blog, he’s awarded Danny Boyle the accolade of Liberal Hero of the Week. While Labour supporting Boyle may smart at this, Stephen talks about what the Ceremony conveyed to him:
First, the human potentiality which has formed Britain, made her what she is today: from music
Stephen Tall, co-editor of Lib Dem Voice, has been blogging away at Huffington Post.
Lots of politicians have 20:20 hindsight. Foresight, however, is generally in shorter supply, which explains why Vince Cable is being acclaimed once again, tipped at the age of 69 both as a potential successor to either the 40-something George Osborne as Chancellor and/or the 40-something Nick Clegg as Lib Dem leader. The ‘Septuagenarian Sage of Twickenham’ is enjoying a Second Coming-of-age. Age does not weary him, nor the years condemn. What’s his secret?
Over at CentreForum’s blog, LibDemVoice Co-Editor Stephen Tall has named columnist Matthew Parris the inaugural winner of the think-tank’s ‘Liberal of the Week’ for ‘his attack on the charitable status of private schools that are bastions of privilege.’ Here’s an excerpt from Stephen’s reasons:
The fact that private schools are directly equated with charities such as Cancer Research UK and Oxfam – and can therefore benefit from rates relief and exemption from tax on investment income – is breathtaking. It means that the low-paid in society – including those earning less than the minimum wage – are helping to subsidise through
You will forgive, I hope, a bit of collective pride from the Liberal Democrat Voice team. It’s not every day one of our co-editors is mentioned, in glowing terms, at a judicial enquiry, as Stephen has already written.
To recap, Andrew Marr was talking about the authority and credibility of the political blogosphere. Top left on page 83 if you don’t want to read the whole thing.
“You look around and a lot of the most influential highly respected political commentators aren’t newspaper journalists, actually, they are bloggers. I’m thinking of people like Tim Montgomery on Conservativehome or Mr Pack
I was wondering how I could amuse readers on my own blog yesterday and I came up with this amazing idea of going back and finding out what I was writing about around this time in previous years. It was only later that I realised that Helen Duffett does this for Liberal Democrat Voice every Friday in the Friday Five . I hope she doesn’t mind me borrowing her idea and adding in a little extra spot.
What was good about my post yesterday is that a few other Liberal Democrat bloggers got in on the act and I spent …
Over at the Politics.co.uk website, LibDemVoice Co-Editor Stephen Tall looks at the party’s prospects in Thursday’s elections. Here’s an excerpt:
With the Lib Dems’ national poll ratings flat-lining at around 10-12%, the party faces the uncomfortable prospect of a classic pincer-movement: losing to Labour our hard-won gains in the urban north, and losing to the Tories the no-less-hard-won gains in the suburban south. How the party fares against Labour in Sheffield, Manchester and Cambridge – where there are sitting Lib Dem MPs, including Nick Clegg – and against the Tories in Eastleigh, Three Rivers and Cheltenham will be a crucial test
Lib Dem Voice co-editor Stephen Tall has produced his 3 liberal reasons to stick up for Tim Farron. Now Stephen is a man I respect and who writes a lot of sense, but on this occasion I beg leave to disagree.
To that end I thought I’d give 3 liberal reasons to criticise Stephen Tall’s defence of our party president Tim Farron. We are of course talking about the storm Tim Farron created by co-signing a letter to the Advertising Standards Agency urging the ASA to overturn a ban on a Christian group claiming prayer could cure medical conditions.
Ahead of the preliminary university application figures late last year, I posted five questions by which to judge them when they were published. The gist of all the questions was, “what do the figures really mean if you scratch beneath the surface?”. In particular, the big spike in applications in the last year before the new fee arrangements, coupled with the declining teenage population, means that crude headline number comparisons can be very misleading. As it turned out, the five questions were a pretty good guide to what the university application figures really meant.
Even if you were not one person but a superhuman army of fifty you would not be able to do all the things party members and staff are saying they want from the new Chief Executive. As you are but one person (I hold out hope on the superhuman front) you will inevitably have to pass up on many of these demands.
Picking the right priorities will be central to being a successful Chief Executive and so here are the four priorities I think you should pick.
In his latest blog, Stephen Tall argues that byseeing Jeremy Clarkson as un-beneficial to a modern society makes me somehow a right-wing *insert your own adjective for the Daily Mail here*.
Not in the slightest. I’m left-wing (so David Cameron doesn’t like me either, boo-hoo) and totally a liberal. I’ve never ever claimed Clarkson should not be allowed to speak, as that would be illiberal. I simply say that he is a loud-mouth oxygen thief (I use the same freedom of speech against him, that he should rightly be granted).
He’s claimed to be attention-seeking, I agree. And before you …
What presents are you looking forward to giving or receiving this year? That’s the question LDV posed to a group of Lib Dem bloggers. All this week we’re revealing what they told us, with link-throughs to Amazon for your shopping convenience (and ‘cos the referral fees help support LibDemVoice: so get clicking and ordering). Part I is available here; Part II here; Part III here; and Part IV here. In part five, our final duo of bloggers – Alex Wilcock and, erm, me – give us the low-down on their Xmas faves…
In the week of the Chancellor’s autumn statement, LibDemVoice co-editors Mark Pack and Stephen Tall debate what it all means for the Lib Dems…
Stephen Tall: So we now all know the painful financial reality. With growth forecasts revised down by the Chancellor in his autumn statement, austerity is here to stay.
Both Lib Dems and Tories had hoped and expected that three years of painful cutbacks would be followed by a year or two of pre-election giveaways — the Lib Dems would press for a balanced mix of increased public spending …
Between us, Stephen Tall (he of the Oxford Comma cartoon) and myself (purveyor of news about commas in election law and academic research), appear to be carving out a niche in political punctuation coverage.
I fear it is all going to end in tears when someone puts our own punctuation habits under the microscope, but before it does I have exciting, related news to report.
I have blogged before about the fall-out amongst Cotswold Conservatives following their big losses to the Liberal Democrats in May’s local elections, including their fear that they are seen as “toffs legislating for …
The Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year Awards, run by Lib Dem Voice, are back for their sixth year. As usual, they’ll be awarded in a budget lavish ceremony at the party’s autumn conference in Birmingham.
Click on the following links to see last year’s Shortlist and the Winners.
However, there is one recommendation in ‘The Hughes Report’ with which I take issue:
It is my firm view that interviews which are conducted by an academic who will end up teaching that particular student are too subjective. … interviews should be conducted by trained admissions personnel who will not have face to face teaching responsibilities for the interviewee. (p.33)
Margaret It's a few years ago now, but I remember having a problem with a car we had hired in Alaska, and having a long argument with a call-handler somewhere in the 'lo...
Caracatus The thing is we can have lower taxes (for most) and better public services. The madness of the lost war on drugs which cost billions. Sorting social care, th...
paul barker Can London build its way out of this crisis ?
Londons population has gone up by more than half since the 90s & all the "Plans" are for it to go up more. Lo...
Steve Nash I agree with KP that the International Aid and diplomatic Budget should increased, to challenge both Immigration and the need for Defence. It may not be the ch...
Tom Arms @ John Kelly: I certainly didn't mean to imply that Gaza is peaceful. Sadly, civilians continue to die, humanitarian conditions remain appalling and Israel cont...
Stephen Tall: So we now all know the painful financial reality. With growth forecasts revised down by the Chancellor in his autumn statement, austerity is here to stay.
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Don't mention the Isle of Wight Separatists' 1950s terror campaign
Brexit: The Uncivil War - the TV drama with Benedict Cumberbatch
A power vacuum?
Margaret 
Caracatus 
paul barker 
Steve Nash 
Tom Arms 