Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 358th weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the seven most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (-, 2013), together with a hand-picked quintet, normally courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox — just click here — ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.

As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:

1. Liberal Democrats gain seat in Lincolnshire by-election by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England.
Good news from the East Midlands. Congratulations to Lesley Rollings and her team.

2. Who will succeed Simon Hughes as Lib Dem Deputy Leader? by Rich Clare on A Brief History of Liberty.
I’m slightly mystified that Rich couldn’t think of a single female candidate when we had two in our post and a lively discussion on their suitability for the role, too.

3. The slow, inexorable decline of Tesco by David Boyle on The Real Blog.
The supermarket has had its day as we all head to the discount stores..

4. Lib Dem MPs did what? by Maelo Manning on libdemchild,aged 14.
Great to see Maelo back after a break and she has no kind words for MPs who voted against looking into food bank use and the manner in which they debated it.

5. Bumper by-elections night 19 by Dan Falchikov on Living on words alone.
Dan’s preview of Thursday’s by-elections.

6. Why London has become a bit vampiric by David Boyle on The Real Blog.
Vince gives voice to an old liberal viewpoint, says David.

7. Day 4735: if the economy is getting stronger, why are queues at food banks getting longer?  by Richard Flowers on The Very Fluffy Diary of Millennium Dome, Elephant.
Richard argues that rather than take a statistic, we need to look deeper at what that tells us. We should investigate rise in food ban use but there are other reasons for the increase than a mean government.

And now to the five blog-posts that come highly recommended, regardless of the number of Aggregator click-throughs they attracted. These are normally chosen using the LibDig bookmarking website for party members, the site where you can highlight blog-posts you want to share with your fellow Lib Dems. Remember, though, you’re still more than welcome to nominate for the Golden Dozen a Lib Dem blog article published in the past seven days – your own, or someone else’s – using the steam-powered method of e-mail … all you have to do is drop a line to [email protected].

8. PSA: My views on positive discrimination by Jennie Rigg on Give me liberty or give me death (preferably liberty).
Jennie gives the case for equality but against positive discrimination. (Submitted by Carl via Twitter)

9. Is Mark Pack predicting a Tim Farron leadership?  by Dan Falchikov on Living on words alone.
Dan gets his wooden spoon out for a bit of Christmas stirring…

10. Oh dear, it appears I am guilty of the crime of #everydaysexism by Richard Morris on A View from Ham Common.
I’d let him off with this one, although I wouldn’t be quite so kind to the headline writer at the New Statesman

11. Harville Hendrix may be a liberal by Louise Shaw on From one of the jilted generation.
Who? I hear you ask. But if we took his advice, politics might be conducted in a more civilised manner.

12. On claiming the centre ground: warning, this post gets sweary from the start by Jennie Rigg on Give me liberty or give me death, (preferably liberty) .
I think Jennie is trying to say that she doesn’t care much for this “governing from the centre ground” malarkey. I wish she wouldn’t hold back when she’s writing, though. She’s being awfully subtle.  (Submitted by Jennie via Twitter.)

Oh, and in the most outrageous act of stone throwing while living in a glass house I’ve seen in a while, Jennie, who is capable of filling your entire Twitter timeline with smut and innuendo on a regular basis, has the audacity to run a poll so people can choose the smuttiest of our headlines. And she’s corrupted Mark Valladares. Utterly disgraceful, I say. Enjoy.

And that’s it for another week. Happy blogging ‘n’ reading ‘n’ nominating.

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* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings