I have seen some consternation amongst Lib Dems today, both in real life and online, about Nick Clegg's remarks about an EU referendum not being a red line for us. Many party members feel very strongly that we should not agree to something which could be very unsettling and destabilising. Having come through three years of the Scottish referendum, I am more in that camp than in the other group of activists who think we should agree to it or we'll be seen as anti-democratic. Before we rush to judgment, let's have a look at what Nick actually said. From ...
Lib Dems Believe Wordle 45 Freedom - Opportunity
So here we are: the final straight of the General Election campaign in Hastings & Rye. And from all of the hustings meetings undertaken over these past few weeks, one question above all has stuck with me. Towards the end of the Rye Church Together hustings on Thursday night a lady asked us (and I paraphrase) 'Do [...]
Nick Barlow stands up for localism against Eric Pickles. Jackson Lears stands up for liberal education against neoliberalism. More than 50,000 families have been silently shipped out of London boroughs in the past three years, says Daniel Douglas, Ragged University argues that modern housing developments have been made little else but a stage for isolated family living "The 25 men who participated in the incident swore one another to secrecy, and their names were never reported. In higher circles around Marietta, though, their identities were generally well known, for they had nothing to fear." Steve Oney on America's only anti-Semitic ...
A couple of weeks ago, we featured the Labour candidate in Leeds North West who had a bit of a problem with the, you know, facts. Greg Mulholland rightly called him out for it. Now Lynne Featherstone's Labour opponent has told a pretty outrageous untruth about her. They will now have to print and distribute a retraction. From Lynne's blog: The letter to residents contained the false statement: "Lynne Featherstone...was even a minister in the Home Office when the disgraceful "Go Home" vans were sent out." At the time the vans went out (July 2013), Lynne Featherstone was in the ...
The Liberal purpose - let it be said again - is the creation of opportunity for men and women to become self-directing, responsible persons. The Liberal aim is the widespread diffusion of personal ownership so that all citizens have complete control over something they can truly call their own. George Elliott Dodds was a leading Liberal Party thinker in the mid-Twentieth Century, particularly known for promoting co-ownership in industry, as Liberal Party President, and for the Unservile State Group, from whose work Liberty and Welfare the first quote is taken.
As the General Election gets nearer, people are losing sight of there being local elections as well. This is the first of a series of posts looking at the Liberal Democrat manifesto for South Gloucestershire, and what it means in our area. First of all, what are the issues for local communities? Despite reduced funding from central government, the local Lib Dems have consistently worked to protect those in greatest need to help create a fairer society. Localism is at the heart of everything we do. We will continue to ensure that important decisions are not simply left to council ...
Watch and find out: All aboard the #libdems Battle Bus! #GE2015 https://t.co/d9rFv8gvN1 — Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) May 3, 2015
You might find this hard to believe. I was a little bit shocked by it myself. You have to understand the situation I am in. I live in a seat which is, to all intents and purposes, a battle between the SNP and Labour. With a poll this week suggesting that the SNP could win every single seat in Scotland, the unthinkable had to be thought. Should I, could I vote Labour tactically to try to stop that happening? A large group of SNP MPs primarily motivated by narrow nationalist interests is not something that I think would be healthy ...
In the Sunday Times (£ – Phwah!), Peter Kellner predicts 32 seats for the Lib Dems, which is in line with Stephen Tall's long-standing projection. But the overall seat projection from Kellner puts us in rather different waters than other projections. The Guardian's projection, for example, has pointed almost constantly to a Labour minority government with SNP support. However, Kellner's projection opens up a new can of worms. He predicts 283 for the Tories, 2 for UKIP. Add in 8 (or will it be 9?) for the DUP and you have a Tory bloc of 293 which could just about ...
The first promise on Ed Miliband's eight foot limestone slab is: 1. A strong economic foundation Note that he doesn't promise an actual "strong economy". That would be going too far. After all, Miliband and Labour have not yet apologised for the last economic disaster which put at least a net 600,000 people out of work in the UK. Their excuse was that it was all caused by global forces. So they can't promise a strong economy because global forces might come in and mess it all up again. So they just promise a "strong economic foundation". Fairly lame, I ...
Never let it be said that I am unwilling to help, and I have always been happy to go to meetings so that you, gentle reader (yes, Jennie, I know that you don't see yourself as gentle but...), don't have to. And so, today I am off to Brussels, as I have a meeting of the ALDE Party's Financial Advisory Committee to attend tomorrow morning. I have served on some very obscure bodies in my time, but the Financial Advisory Committee is probably up the most obscure. It isn't mentioned in the statutes of ALDE, its membership is decided upon ...
The first promise on Ed Miliband's eight foot limestone slab is: 1. A strong economic foundation Note that he doesn't promise an actual "strong economy". That would be going too far. After all, Miliband and Labour have not yet apologised for the last economic disaster which put at least a net 600,000 people out of work in the UK. Their excuse was that it was all caused by global forces. So they can't promise a strong economy because global forces might come in and mess it all up again. So they just promise a "strong economic foundation". Fairly lame, I ...
[IMG: milibandstone] And lo, it didst come to pass that someone in Labour HQ took the words 'my pledges are carved in stone' far too literally. I've been involved in enough election campaigns to know that at this point – five weeks in! – everyone's starting to get quite frayed at the edges, and ideas that seemed poor a few weeks ago will suddenly look like utter genius because they're new, fresh and different. You've been looking at the same leaflets in the same design for weeks, and so naturally the idea of carving your pledges into a massive block ...
[IMG: Lib Dem achievements in government - 8. Civil liberties] For more, see the full infographic: What have the Liberal Democrats achieved in government? [IMG: Share on Facebook] [IMG: Share on Twitter] Show support for Lib Dems on social media The Liberal Democrats have achieved so much in the last five years. Now help the party achieve even more in the next five years: Sign up to this Thunderclap to share a message on the eve of poll about voting Liberal Democrat Sign up to this Facebook event to show that you're voting Liberal Democrat
Forget David Starkey. The best guide to the importance of Magna Carta to us 900 years on is Marriott Edgar.
Sunday Times, Sunday May 3, 2105:"Even when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was formed, many pundits gave it little chance of surviving a few months, let alone five years. But it did survive and this has been a period of political stability that would have been the envy of many majority governments of the past...Mr Clegg deserves to survive and so do his closest Lib Dem colleagues in government. Tory supporters in Labour/Lib Dem marginals may wish to vote for the Lib Dem candidate."Labour supporters in Conservative/Lib Dem marginals may also wish to vote for their LibDem candidate. Take Montgomeryshire, for ...
Campaigning for @vincecable and #LibDems today. Luckily this chap not on electoral register pic.twitter.com/MxCxYsB4mX — Mark Pack (@markpack) May 3, 2015
[IMG: picklesbiscuits] Over the past few years Eric Pickles and his strange contradictory definition of localism – where councils get to locally decide whether they agree with him totally or wholeheartedly – have provided many posts for this blog and I may feel momentarily sad on Friday if he's no longer around to provide me with such easy pickings in the future. However, being a generous man he's given me one last thing to have a shot at it before he (hopefully) goes and it's yet again him failing to understand anything about localism while showing that his time at ...
Here are the latest national voting intention figures from each of the main pollsters. Five put Tories ahead. Six put Labour ahead. Otherwise known as close. To put the numbers into longer context, take a look at my database of polling figures going back to 1945, which is updated quarterly and remember the warning about individual polls. Polling company Con Lab LibDem UKIP Green Con lead Fieldwork Method ComRes 33% 35% 7% 16% 4% -2% 11-13/3 Online ComRes 33% 33% 8% 13% 7% 0% 28-30/4 Phone ICM 35% 32% 9% 13% 5% 3% 24-26/4 Phone Ashcroft 36% 30% 9% 11% ...
Ops. Radio 5 Live asking a postal voter which party they voted for and broadcasting the answer. Bit early in day to be breaking law! — Mark Pack (@markpack) May 3, 2015 The law in question is Section 66a of the Representation of the People Act 1983.
People say that the election in Scotland is pretty hostile. They are right a lot of the time, but in Edinburgh West, where Mike Crockart's campaign HQ is next door to the SNP base, things are much more civilised, as this Twitter exchange between Mike's campaign manager and the SNP candidate Michelle Thompson shows: @MichelleThomson running a campaign based entirely around one photo! Bold. Yet strikingly coordinated. #libdemhold pic.twitter.com/sJnhydaJ8c — Alex Cole-Hamilton (@agcolehamilton) May 1, 2015 It's freezing cold and pouring with rain this morning, so all the plucky activists in West will need to wrap up warm. But clearly ...
There's a new app about which purports to be able to guess your age from a photo. Journalists with nothing better to do have been putting politicians' photos through it. Buzzfeed has the UK leaders. Nick Clegg and David Cameron were born weeks apart, yet this app has Cameron at 56 and Clegg at 52. They are both 48. Whoops. 45 year old Ed Miliband will be happy that he was determined to be 38. The Scottish leaders were assessed by the Scotsman. Ruth Davidson, the Tory leader, will be delighted to have lost 9 years and to be judged ...
[IMG: Gruen Planet - shot of the panel] I've always thought that the Gruen Transfer (the name of the first four series) / Gruen Planet format, with its mix of humour and explanation of how advertising works, would work really well in countries other than its home base of Australia. [IMG: Gruen Planet Series 1 - DVD box] Although other TV series formats have been widely exported and remade for specific countries, Gruen's format of host, panel of four, questions about advertising or stories in the news and plenty of jokes in amongst the serious answers remains an Australian-only option. ...
Less than 100 hours until the polling stations open, and thoughts are naturally turning more and more to just what the result of this election will be. Like everyone else, I've been pondering the various post-election deals that are possible and it feels to me that the key number of MPs either Labour or the Conservatives need to win to have a chance at forming a stable Government is around 290. My thinking's based on the current numbers for MPs from the other parties being suggested by the various forecasts: an SNP total of 40-50+, Liberal Democrats winning somewhere between ...
If elected as your Dulwich & West Norwood I will always: Hear the people: I will use e-polls to proactively listen to constituents' opinions on parliamentary votes. Respect the people: Provide 100% transparency on all resources (financial or other) received and spent. Trust the people: Poll constituents on key parliamentary decisions - and vote accordingly. Hold 150 advice surgeries a year, spread across our local area. Have a constituency office in the constituency. Not have a second job. Working for you will be enough.
The first person that this series will be remembering is the second cousin of my step-great grandmother, the attached chart shows how we are related. Although at the time of Private T.A. Mills death she was a widow who was yet to marry my recently widowed great grandfather. Thomas Mills was the son of a military man, his father Alexander had fought during the Boer War with the 1st Inniskillings being awarded the King's Medal with two clasp, Queen's Medal with five clasps and Distinguished Service Medal. Unlike many of the young men who will be featured in this series ...
A little while back, like many candidates, I responded to an email from simplepolitics.co.uk and made a 30 second video to encourage people to vote for me as a Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate. It mentioned a few policy headlines, not least that we were the only party committing to provide the additional £8Bn the NHS is predicted to need by the end of the next parliament. In seemingly no time at all, the Tories made the same promise (I am spinning this as a Liberal Democrat policy victory even before the vote). Then The Economist ran a provocative article about ...
The Liberal Democrats will make pay increases for public sector workers a priority in any coalition talks. After five years of pay restraint, teachers, nurses, police officers and all those who work in the public sector should no longer face pay cuts and will be offered light at the end of the tunnel. The contribution of our public sector workers is the cornerstone of a fair and decent society. Public sector workers have played an important role in helping get the economy on track and Liberal Democrats want to give them the pay guarantee they need. We would introduce a ...
[IMG: Poll piechart] As a pre-election bonus, I've done an extra update to my mega database of opinion polls since 1943 rather than waiting for my usual end of the quarter update. You can get the newly updated dataset from http://www.markpack.org.uk/opinion-polls/. You can also sign up on that page to get email notifications about future updates. Enjoy!
Lots of gifs of Jason Momoa. Climbing. With no top on. I'll be in my bunk. (tags: ) Jonathan Trott, I salute you (tags: ) Red Dwarf Series XI and XII Announced! (tags: ) Scotland is sending a curveball down Westminster way - and it's not just Labour that will get hit (tags: ) Politician who voted against gay rights is a Grindr user & his name is Randy Bohning (tags: ) Srsly, top trolling, Green Party *applause* (tags: ) ICYMI: @guardiannews really excelled themselves with amount of WRONG in 1 paragraph here (tags: ) Jonathan Calder on Ed Miliband's ...
We understand that some residents have had people knocking at the door, claiming to have cleared the gutters unsolicited and asking for money. Please warn vulnerable friends and family members not to fall for this, and just to shut the door. You may wish to inform the police if this happens to you.
In the last Labour government over 250,000 schools places were removed from the system. They must have thought this a sensible plan. But it has contributed to the massive shortage of school places building up since 2009/10. Locally I have initiated and led new free school campaign that bring an extra 3,100 school places to Dulwich & West Norwood. Not a free school in the area has not had lots of local Lib Dem involvement. Some of these have been directly opposed by Labour councils. But we still have a looming shortage of secondary school places in West Norwood/Gipsy Hill ...
In the Sunday Times (£ – Phwah!), Peter Kellner predicts 32 seats for the Lib Dems, which is in line with Stephen Tall's long-standing projection. But the overall seat projection from Kellner puts us in rather different waters than other projections. The Guardian's projection, for example, has pointed almost constantly to a Labour minority government with SNP support. However, Kellner's projection opens up a new can of worms. He predicts 283 for the Tories, 2 for UKIP. Add in 8 (or will it be 9?) for the DUP and you have a Tory bloc of 293 which could just about ...
The Observer reports (or mischievous hackers have made The Observer look like it reports): Ed Miliband has commissioned a giant stone inscription bearing Labour's six election pledges that is set to be installed in the Downing Street Rose Garden if he becomes prime minister. The 8ft 6in-high limestone structure is intended to underline his commitment to keep his promises by having them literally "carved in stone" and visible from the offices inside No 10.
There are two competing narratives about what's going to happen on May 7th. One, which was dominant for a while but is becoming less so, is that Labour will form the next government. It will be a minority one, but Miliband has more options in this regard, with the SNP saying they would never back the Tories. The other is that the UKIP vote will continue going down until polling day, taking a sharp decline on the day itself with most of those voters indeed "coming home" to the Conservative Party as Cameron implored them to. If this happened in ...
Following my receiving residents' complaints about the unkempt state of the pathway that runs from Lower Pleasance to Polepark Road, just south of the Polepark play area (see below), I have asked the City Council's Environment Department to tidy it up:I have also received an assurance from the Environment Department that the grass in the play park will be tidied regularly over the summer months, following a recent complaint about it being overgrown.
[IMG: sundaypaps] On the last Sunday before the election, here's a quick selection of the must-reads from the Sunday papers. Five years ago on this Sunday, we woke up to favourable comments in the Observer and Scotland on Sunday. Would anyone recommend voting for us today or would the papers revert tot type? The Observer, presumably for its own reasons, has a very unbalanced look at coalition options after the election for the Liberal Democrats. The article barely even looks at a deal with Labour and has a number of sitting MPs, including David Ward, saying that the coalition with ...
UK election spells the end for the biggest 'law' in political science – Patrick Dunleavy on the end of the two-party system (partly saved as it'll be useful for my dissertation) Economics for politicians – Chris Dillow on seven principles of economics that aren't grasped by politicians. Game of Fear – The real story behind 'Gamergate': one man's obsession with ruining his ex-girlfriend's life. "Serious" politics – Chris Dillow again, this time on how politics insists certain ideas are sensible and others aren't, regardless of whether it's justified. A letter from the hearse chasers – A personal tale from Jamie ...
The area around Bootle Town Hall has always interested me particularly because of the grand buildings that are close to the Town Hall. First let's have a look at Bootle's Listed Buildings via Wikipedia:- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listed_buildings_in_Bootle Next to Bootle Town Hall and along Oriel Road & Balliol Road where there are some splendid buildings that have sadly not been well maintained and some have fallen into disuse. You will have noticed from the link above how many of them are in this small part of Bootle. The former Bootle Swimming Pool, Police Station, Library & Museum, Post Office and School Board ...
Just when we thought this election could not get any more bizarre the Observer reports that Ed Miliband has commissioned a giant stone inscription bearing Labour's six election pledges that is set to be installed in the Downing Street Rose Garden if he becomes prime minister. They say that the 8ft 6in-high limestone structure is intended to underline his commitment to keep his promises by having them literally "carved in stone" and visible from the offices inside No 10. The stone will be unveiled on Sunday with Labour sources saying it will either be placed in the Rose Garden or ...
Figures published by the Welsh Liberal Democrats show how three political parties intend to use the Severn Bridge tolls as a 'cash-cow' once they come back into public ownership. The Welsh Lib Dems have calculated the average cost to a commuter of each party's plans for the tolls. The Liberal Democrats are the only party to pledge to scrap the tolls once they come back into public ownership. This would save the average motorist commuting each day over £1560 per year. The tolls are expected to come back into public ownership in 2018. When this happens, parties will charge commuters: ...
Sometimes the obvious choice is the right one. Ben. E. King, who composed (with Leiber and Stoller) and sang Stand By Me died this week. Today the song is seen as an outright classic, but when it was first released in 1961 it got no higher than 27 in the UK singles chart. It reached no. 1 in 1987 when it was re-released after being used in a Levi jeans television commercial. This is not the only case of that brand rewriting musical history. In 1973 Johnnie Walker (then by far the coolest of the daytime Radio One DJs) played ...
This is, by some distance, the most ridiculous action by a British party leader I have ever come across (and I have not forgotten that unfortunate business with Rinka). From the Guardian website (and presumably today's Observer, though the website no longer tells you useful things like that): Ed Miliband has commissioned a giant stone inscription bearing Labour's six election pledges that is set to be installed in the Downing Street Rose Garden if he becomes prime minister. The 8ft 6in-high limestone structure is intended to underline his commitment to keep his promises by having them literally "carved in stone" ...
The guardian website/tomorrow's print observer has a somewhat hysterical article about how we could face long coalition negotiations after the election. I'm not going to pick holes in their prediction for the most likely outcome of the election, although it doesn't chime with mine*, I'm just going to pick out one paragraph to pick holes in:While the Lib Dem rule book gives the party's MPs the main say on whether to approve a new coalition, there will be a special conference of senior party officials that will vote on the deal. Although the decision of the conference is not binding, ...
