2 Big Stories
Chancellor-on-way-out promises freeze in public managers’ pay:
The freeze in effect represents a pay cut. And by targeting the richest public-sector figures, it will be seen as a sign that the broadest shoulders must carry the heaviest burden.
Chancellor-in-waiting proposes raising retirement age:
Shadow chancellor George Osborne would raise the state pension age from 65 to 66 from 2016 if the Tories win the next election to help tackle the UK’s debts.
2 Must-read Posts
Cllr Daisy Benson gave her readers a story about the human stories behind the unemployment statistics:
This morning, on my way to work I bumped
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Last month at conference, in two of our conference fringes, speakers highlighted useful online services set to revolutionise politics.
At our first fringe, “Campaigning after Rennard,” James Graham thought that TheStraightChoice (reviewed by LDV here), a website that allows members of the public to upload the leaflets they have received through their letterbox, had the potential to revolutionise politics. No more would politicos be able to put out close-to-the-knuckle material in relative obscurity. From now on, James argued, we’d all have to assume that at least one blogger would read our leaflet, and at least one journalist …
The decision of The Sun to switch its political allegiance from Labour to the Tories generated a fair few headlines last week, and a vigorous discussion here on LDV. It prompted me to undertake a quick calculation to find out approximately how many Sun readers are Lib Dem voters. And thanks to today’s Media Guardian, which publishes the voting intentions of newspapers’ readers at each of the last four general elections, I’m returning to the fray to give you two tables.
The first, below, shows the voting intentions of readers of the main national dailies, sorted in descending order of likelihood to vote Lib Dem at the 2005 general election. No real surprises here: the Indy and Grauniad top the table, the Sun and Star (despite Lembit’s best efforts) prop it up.
David Cameron’s paper, the Witney Gazette, has the story:
THE Liberal Democrat candidate to take on Witney MP David Cameron in the next General Election has been announced. Dawn Barnes will stand for Witney against the Conservative leader in May or June next year. …
Miss Barnes, 32, said: “I was really happy, and a little surprised, to be confirmed as the Liberal Democrat candidate to stand against a man who is widely-tipped to be the next Prime Minister.
“However, it’s a real honour, and I’ll be working hard with the local party and friends and family in West Oxfordshire to
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By
Mark Pack
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Published
5th October 2009 - 3:20 pm
Some people like regularly visiting a site to see if there’s new stories of interest. Some people like subscribing to its news feed (RSS) and checking that way. But if you prefer email, you can instead sign up to get a daily early morning email with a summary of the previous day’s posts from Lib Dem Voice, complete with convenient links to click on if any take your fancy and you want to take a read.
Just go to our email sign up page to start getting these emails. You can also sign up for a special once-a-week email, bringing …
September is the transition month from the quiet of the summer recess to the hustle and bustle of Regional and State Party Conferences, although the past month was still pretty busy.
The month started with a weekend series of visits in the West Midlands, first up being an early evening members’ meeting in Stratford-upon-Avon on the Friday, hosted by local PPC and Chair of the Parliamentary Candidates Association, Martin Turner. The next morning, stopping only for coffee with Martin to discuss some issues related to candidate recruitment, selection and retention, I was off to West Worcestershire to meet the victor of the District by-election that week, before heading to Malvern for a dinner with members.
Richard Burt is our PPC there, and is optimistic about his chances of pulling off a victory against the Conservatives. Sunday saw us head to Hereford to meet Sarah Carr, who is fighting hard to retain Paul Keetch’s seat, although boundary changes have been less than kind.
The next week saw me in Bedford, where the unexpected death of the independent mayor has given us an opportunity to gain only our second directly elected Mayor. David Hodgson, a long-time stalwart of the Party
2 Big Stories
Tory conference opens, and it’s time to party like it’s 1994
A few thousand Tories are converging on Manchester today, with two issues dominating discussion: Europe and welfare cuts. Ah, and there we were thinking The Major Years were but a distant memory.
On a more positive note, the Tories will be singing today from the localism song-book, with Caroline Spelman championing the party’s conversion to local control of local services – an interesting about-turn for an MP who opposed Scottish and Welsh devolution, and believes central government should impose council tax freezes from Whitehall.
Ministerial …
Three more gains
There were eleven principal council by-elections held on 1st October. Labour held four seats, the Tories two and the Lib Dems one. The Lib Dems took one seat off the Tories and two off independents. Labour gained one seat off an Independent in Scotland. There were no Parish and Town council elections reported to ALDC.
The Independent last Friday quoted the Press Association:
The post-conference “Brown bounce” failed to show in the latest council by-elections, although the Tories were hit by a huge surge to the Liberal Democrats.
This may be true looking at their narrow analysis …
At the start of his party’s conference in Manchester, Tory leader David Cameron has announced plans “to get Britain working again” – but his comments have drawn a sharp response from the Lib Dems’ shadow work and pensions secretary Steve Webb:
This is yet more Tory posturing. Much of what David Cameron is proposing – such as reviewing people on incapacity benefit – is happening already.
“But the central assumption – that unemployment is simply about the workshy not applying for jobs – is ridiculous in the middle of a global recession. There are parts of the country now where there are already 100 people applying for every vacancy. So forcing more single parents and people with health problems to apply for the same jobs is far more about posturing than about tackling unemployment.”
Mr Cameron is having a tough 24 hours. First, he is having to defend his party’s precarious position on Europe, refusing to say what the party’s policy will be when the Lisbon treaty is ratified (other than he “will not let matters rest”, whatever that means).
Cancer Research UK welcomes the emphasis placed on public health and disease prevention in ‘A Fresh Start For Britain‘ recently backed by the Liberal Democrat conference – through mention of the need to tackle obesity, alcohol abuse, and smoking. We know that around half of all cancers are potentially preventable, so we welcome this focus. However, we believe there is one important omission – the need to better regulate the sunbed industry.
Earlier this year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer re-classified UV radiation (and therefore sunbeds) – elevating it to it’s highest risk category for cancer, the same as tobacco. Easy access to unregulated sunbed salons, particularly by young people, continues to be a problem across the UK.
If you were in Bournemouth, you may have already picked up a copy of the latest edition of Liberator magazine (issue no.335 – September 2009). It’s a bumper 40-page conference edition, packed with comment from many leading Liberal Democrats.
Here’s a summary of the contents:
• The editorial column Commentary identifies the four key elements of ‘Cleggism’.
• The insider gossip column Radical Bulletin analyses the dispute in the Federal Policy Committee over ‘commitments’ and ‘aspirations’.
• Our lead article ‘Stop, search, listen’ is written by Duwayne Brooks (a Liberal Democrat councillor in Lewisham and author of Steve and Me: My Friendship with Stephen Lawrence and the Search for Justice). He favours stop and search powers, but asks why policing still targets black people.
Posted in News
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Tagged liberator magazine
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During the debate on MPs’ expenses at the Lib Dem conference recently, one of the speakers, Michael Meadowcroft, suggested that instead of having open primaries as a way of restoring trust in the political process, why not use the Single Transferable Vote (STV) instead?
STV has been the preferred voting system of the Liberal party and Liberal Democrats for many decades, and was championed by the greatest liberal of all, John Stuart Mill, in the nineteenth century. This week Gordon Brown announced that Labour, if re-elected, would propose a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) system, in which instead of marking your ballot paper with an X, you write down your preferences by rank, 1, 2, 3, etc …
The problem with AV is that you are still only electing one person per constituency.
By
Mark Pack
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Published
4th October 2009 - 7:00 am
It’s Sunday. It’s 7am. It’s time for the Daily View, today with an election night special.
2 Big Stories
David Cameron stalls on Europe
David Cameron bravely stuck his neck out by, er…, insisting that the Tories “could only have one policy at once”. Not multitaskers then:
David Cameron has refused to give an unequivocal commitment to a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, after Irish voters delivered a 67% “Yes” vote.
The Tory leader promised a vote on the treaty should his party win the election – but only if it had not been ratified by all EU member states.
He said the Tories
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Welcome to the 135th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (13-19th September 2009), together with a hand-picked quintet, partly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed. (And, yes, the Golden Dozen has kinda got a bit out-of-synch as a result of the party conference – #136 is here. Sorry about that.)
Don’t forget, by the way, you can now 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:
Those lovely people at Wikio have emailed The Voice with their list^ of the top blogs in the UK in June 2009.
(Lib Dem blogger Jennie Rigg has already published the list of top 30 politics blogs: below is the full list for all blogs, though there’s considerable overlap between the two owing to the dominance of politics blogs in Wikio’s weightings.)
It would be nice to think that the 18th century British parliament saw the light and abolished slavery when the matter was first put to them. But we all know that isn’t what happened. William Wilberforce and his colleagues lost the vote on their first attempt. And their second. And their third.
So Nigel Farage’s suggestion, made on RTE, that the Irish referendum score on the Lisbon Treaty is now 1-1 and we should have a decider is very strange. Would we ever have abolished slavery if Farage had been in charge of the voting? …
As the Tories gather for their conference, it is very tempting to suspect that, despite the Cameron makeover of the party, they are still unreconstructed hateful fire-breathers underneath.
Just look at a couple straws in the wind which have re-emerged in the last few days.
It is tempting to think that the old “posh” Tories still exist. That basically the Conservative party is the party of the rich. Does the bumbling Eric Pickles flat-cap schmooze-over mean anything? No, it would seem if you look at what the Tory party regards as a “typical family”. Extrapolations on Liberal Conspiracy reveal that the …
Ireland’s yes to the Lisbon Treaty was emphatic (albeit at the second time of asking): 67% voted to approve it, with just two of the 43 constituencies rejecting it, on an icnreased turnout of 58%.
Nick Clegg was quick to welcome the result – and to note the awkward situation David Cameron now finds himself in:
This result finally puts to rest years of wrangling over Europe’s future and paves the way for a stronger and more democratic European Union.
“The worst thing would be to re-open this self-indulgent debate. David Cameron should now finally accept the treaty as a fact of life instead of plotting with Eastern European nations to have it blocked. The Conservatives are already embarrassing themselves and Britain with their petulant impotence on Europe.