Mark Pack

The current fuss over whether Parliamentary Privilege will prevent three Labour MPs and one Conservative peer from conviction on charges of fiddling their expenses makes this comment from Jack Straw, made as recently as December 2008, look rather complacent: The interaction between the judicial system and parliamentary privilege is well settled. Not quite.  »

Start with this pair of sentences: Policing isn’t about communicating with people. It’s about communicating with people. That would be a pretty daft instant contradiction, wouldn’t it? But wait. Let’s say “PR” instead of “communicating”. Because PR = boo! bad! nothing to do with communicating! Policing isn’t about PR. It’s about communicating with people. Doesn’t quite work, does it? So [...] »

Four blogs have recently joined Ryan’s Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator: Alistair Carmichael - http://alistaircarmichael.wordpress.com – the MP for Orkney and Shetland is a very welcome addition to the ranks of blogging Lib Dem Parliamentarians. Daisy Benson - http://daisyscampaigndiary.blogspot.com – our Reading West candidate gets stuck into local issues. Dave Page - http://davepage.focusteam.org.uk – good to see a new local blog using the [...] »

So says Norman Lamb, who has campaigned for corruption charges to be brought against BAE since 2001, in response to the news that BAE admits guilt over corrupt arms deals … firm pays out £300m: It is a damning indictment of the political interference by the British Government that the Americans have secured admissions by BAE [...] »

Picking up the baton passed on by Jonathan Calder, here are the Liberal Democrat entries in the top 100 political blogs as ranked by Wikio: 1 (5) Liberal Democrat Voice Falls 1 2 (21) Mark Reckons Falls 6 3 (44) Liberal England Falls 5 4 (48) Stephen's Linlithgow Journal Climbs 2 5 (51) Liberal Vision Falls 3 6 (57) Peter Black Non mover 7 (58) Caron's Musings Falls 12 8 (65) Quaequam Blog! Falls 9 9 (70) Mark Pack Falls 3 10 (76) Miss [...] »

As I blogged last month, The Voice is going to start rating the quality of the media’s coverage of opinion polls, which is often far from perfect: There is progress, helped no doubt by the criticism from Anthony Wells and Mike Smithson, both of whom are respected by many of the relevant journalists. However, there is still [...] »

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 [...] »

Simple question, simple answer. But do you know it? The Swedish election of 1956 saw a political first. What was it? Post your guesses below and check back same time tomorrow to find out the answer.  »

Welcome to the concluding part of a two-part series about the real impact social media (or social networking) is having on politics in Britain. Last week I looked at the groups which face extinction; today it’s why pundits searching for the impact of social media on politics in 2010 are looking in the wrong place. For [...] »

The infighting, missing money and resignations in Southport Conservative Party have been regularly reported over the last few years on The Voice, though our reports have only covered part (!) of the myriad events. So to keep you updated with the latest round as reported by The Champion: The row over a letter showing infighting within [...] »