Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #419

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 14th June 2015 - 7:00 pm

Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 419th 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 (7 – 13 June, 2015), together with a hand-picked quintet, 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. Brian Wilson on the SNP’s campaign against Charles Kennedy by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England.
Isn’t “civil nationalism” wonderful, observes Jonathan.

2. Tim Farron: too bad, too good by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England.
Jonathan analyses a couple of recent Farron performances.

3. Wallington South by-election result by Cllr Jayne McCoy on Diary of a Sutton Councillor.
An interesting observation about her new colleague’s future workload, too.

4. The Daily Mail has a go at Nick Clegg over Lords appointments by Nick Tyrone on NickTyrone.com .
Nick observes that if we waited for something to be perfect before we participated in it, we’d never stand in Commons elections.

5. Three election petitions against constituency results filed after the general election by Mark Pack on Mark Pack.
The one by the Magna Carta party seems strange.

6. Some data on seats won by the Liberal Democrats since 1992 by Nick Barlow on What you can get away with.
Nick turns geeky as he researches his dissertation – and, he’s right, it is interesting.

7. A merger between Labour and the Lib Dems would be bad for British Democracy by Jae Kay on A Liberal in deepest and darkest Kent.
Replacing diversity with conformity? No thanks, says Jae.

And now to the five blog-posts that come highly recommended, regardless of the number of Aggregator click-throughs they attracted. To nominate a Lib Dem blog article published in the past seven days – your own, or someone else’s, all you have to do is drop a line to [email protected]. You can also contact us via Twitter, where we’re @libdemvoice

8. How liberalism meant 12000 more Namibian elephants by Rob Blackie on Rob Blackie.
Absolutely fascinating report of Rob’s community work in Namibia – trust the people is the very clear message. (Submitted by Simon McGrath via Facebook.)

9. Welsh Government abandon evidence based policy on e-cigs by Peter Black on Peter Black.
Peter says the ban will be strongly opposed by the Liberal Democrats. (Submitted by Peter Black via Facebook.)

10. Andy Burnham and the myth of competence by Tom King on Never Cruel or Cowardly.
Tom argues that Burnham has fallen into a Tory trap.

11. “True liberals” are anything but true by Energlyn Churchill on Towards the Sound of Gunfire.
Energlyn likes this “true liberal’ phrase that’s appearing way too often much as I do.

12. I agree with Kirsty by Jenni Hollis on Jenni Hollis .
Jenni’s 3 ideas for the rebuild.

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

3 Comments

Cllr Steve Radford 14th Jun '15 - 10:22pm

Over the weekend The Liberal Party NEC meeting in London welcomed the prospect of the Referendum on EU membership
However we are concerned at the increasing inconsistency of voting entitlements at various elections in the UK, which at best may cause confusion and more alarming prospect of abuse.
In the referendum on Independence for Scotland 16 and 17 year olds were entitled to vote.
There is a logic of consistency they should equally be able to vote in the forthcoming EU Referendum
In our view the ability to vote would encourage positive efforts to involve young people in the political process
If commonwealth citizens are entitled to vote in UK elections then surely there is no rational reason for non-UK EU Citizens not to vote if they have been paying UK taxes for a reasonable qualifying period
We need rules that enshrine the British Democratic foundation “no taxation without representation” and consistent voting qualifications
Changing the rules for each ballot smacks of little more than gerrymandering
David Evans 15th Jun '15 - 12:02am

Steve, It is gerrymandering.
Hugh p 15th Jun '15 - 8:27am

Might I ask that the party membership figure on the official party site, which has stood at 61, 456 for some time now, be updated on some sort of regular basis. I can understand that there may be no compelling reason to update it on a daily basis, as was done in the immediate post-election period, but it must e.g. have passed 61,500 by now, and it would surely be good for our morale to update the membership figure, if not at the 61,500 level, at least when it reaches 62,000.