It’s Friday. It’s five o’clock. Here’s a fistful of lists that sum up the LDV week:

5 most-read stories on LDV this week

1. Time for the Lib Dems to blow the final whistle on national wage settlements (95 comments) by Stephen Tall
2. Baroness Judith Jolly writes: Why Lib Dem peers have supported an amended Health and Social Care Bill (63 comments) by Judith Jolly
3. Opinion: Lib Dems must replace Labour as the party of the Left (101 comments) by Jonathan Hunt
4. ‘How can Lib Dems avoid oblivion?’ asks PoliticsHome (37 comments) by Stephen Tall
5. Opinion: What message would scrapping the 50p rate send? (45 comments) by Joe Jordan

5 sample LDV Members’ Forum threads

1. “Granny tax” question
2. Do you too get these fatuous missives?
3. Delivery or Canvass?
4. Marriage Proposals
5. How many councillors does it take to change a lightbulb?

5 from the LDV archive

(March 23rd, 2007-11)

1. The Budget: the Liberal Democrat influence (23 comments) by Mark Pack, from 2011
2. Cameron filmed confused and clueless in gay equality TV interview (10 comments) by Stephen Tall, from 2010
3. The right noises on expenses (1 comment) by Alix Mortimer, from 2009
4. How ten years has changed them (3 comments) by Alex Foster, from 2008
5. Telegraph gets its own poll wrong? (7 comments) by Mark Pack, from 2007

5 top reader search returns to get to LDV

(excluding Liberal Democrat Voice or its variants)

1. purdah
2. brendan jameson
3. slf conference
4. chris rennard
5. youth contract

5 news quotes about the Lib Dem influence on Budget 2012

Financial Times:

Mr Osborne said that from midnight on Wednesday a new stamp duty of 7 per cent on residential properties worth more than £2m would come into effect, going some way towards the “mansion tax” the Liberal Democrats have lobbied for.

Guardian:

“Battling” Bob Russell, as the Liberal Democrat MP for Colchester is known fondly by his colleagues, was a happy man when George Osborne delivered his final announcement of the budget.

As the chancellor declared that the personal allowance would rise to £9,205 from next year – the largest ever increase – Russell waved his copy of the Liberal Democrat manifesto for the last general election.

In the first line of the manifesto the Lib Dems committed themselves to raising the personal allowance to £10,000 to remove low-income workers from paying tax. This is now on course to be delivered a year before the next general election in 2015.

The Lib Dems will be hoping that the personal allowance announcement will be the defining issue of the budget and will help change perceptions of the party as the junior member of the coalition, forced into difficult U-turns by the larger Tories.

Telegraph:

George Osborne is going to steal from the Liberal Democrats, and he’s going to steal policies.

Liberal Democrats will point out that the basic planks of his argument – a higher threshold, a new tax on expensive homes, a crackdown on avoidance – could all be found in their manifesto from 2010. They will argue furiously that this is really their Budget, a “Robin Hood” package that shows the Lib Dem presence in the Coalition is making a real difference for working families.

Express:

The basic-rate hike will hand low and middle income earners a tax cut worth around £125 and is expected to cost around £3billion. The measure – seeking to take millions of low earners out of income tax altogether – was a key Lib Dem pledge at the last election that has been enthusiastically taken up by Mr Osborne.

Guardian:

The move on the personal allowance will mean that the Lib Dems will go into the next election saying they have delivered the first pledge of their 2010 general election manifesto.

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That’s it from the LDV Friday Five. Let the weekend commence in 5-4-3-2-1…