• Liberal Democrat MPs (34 currently)
• Liberal Democrat peers (10 currently)
• Liberal Democrat London Assembly members/candidates and Mayor candidate (20 currently)

As ever, if you spot any errors or omissions do let me know.

So what to make of his initial description of his role in charge at the Department of Environment and Climate Change? He said,

Greening the economy isn’t just good for the planet – it’s good for the wallets, purses and pockets.

In choosing to present issues in that way, he’s very much following in the footsteps of Chris Huhne. It is not so much a deep green message that is against economic growth, as a lighter shade of green, saying environmental action is good for economic growth.

It’s a broad tent approach – pitching green measures not just at those deeply concerned about the environment but also at those who are much more concerned about other issues – such as jobs and income.

That’s a wise approach, because long-term policies with long-term objectives require a broad consensus not only amongst politicians but also amongst the public. That requires pitching to the wider audience in just the way he is doing.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: Your mystery shopper survey of local parties criticises local parties for not treating possible new members better. We’re a small, struggling local party and it’s hard enough to run the basic operation. How can we be better without exhausting overselves?

You’re right to identify the difference between working harder and working smarter. Working both hard and smart is often required, but it is usually possible to do things in a way that gets more out of your time rather than simply needing always to spend more time on party matters. So here are three tips for how to treat possible new members or helpers well:

1. Get them on your mailing lists: Some local parties reserve their newsletter mailing list for paid-up members and send occasional email updates to an even smaller group (such as just the local party executive). What a waste of the effort that goes into producing such communications! If someone is new and interested, get them on your newsletter and email lists straight away and do the same for helpers who aren’t members. Keeping in regular contact with such people secures more help from them in the long-run.
2. Make use of other people’s mailing lists: Don’t think you have to do all the communication yourself. Most MEPs run a good email list for members and supporters in their region, as do holders of many other elected posts, such as the London Assembly team. If you get a new person on some of these (e-)mailing lists, then other Lib Dems will do part of the work of keeping in touch and informing people for you.
3. Make use of events held by neighbouring local parties: Similarly, your own local party does not have to be the only possible place where new people can come to event. Many regions and party bodies organise good events and, in all but the most geographically sparse parts of the country, events held by neighbouring local parties are often as easy or easier for people to get to as your own. I live right on the border of my local party, so there is not only the neighbouring local party but also the local party that covers my place of work whose events I can get to as easily (in fact, often more easily) than my own local party. Get on the mailing lists for your neighbouring local parties and pass on news about their events.

Got any other tips? Please do share them in the comment thread below.

Want to know more about local campaigning? Campaigning In Your Community by myself and Shaun Roberts should be right up your street. It’s available for only £4 from ALDC and you can read an extract for free here.

Previous Campaign Corners have included:

• How do we get more leaflet deliverers?
• What to do on the doorstep
• How to make Focus leaflets looks better

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Technology played a key inspirational and mobilising role in both. In 2011 it was rolling TV, especially Al Jazeera, and the internet. In 1919 it was the telegram, distributing widely around the world US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech which inspired claims to national self-determination. The pace of technology may have been slower but the spreading of hope from events outside Egypt was the same.

Being newer, Facebook got more of the limelight than Al Jazeera, perhaps thankfully so given the politics of Al Jazeera’s enthusiasm for reporting the Arab Spring’s Tunisian origins, a country whose government had a hostile approach to the station. How much was its coverage motivated by impartial journalism or commercial grudges? The answer in this case matters little, save as a reminder that questions of media power and agenda setting apply just as much when being exercised on behalf of the unquestionably virtuous as when in more questionable circumstances.

Aside from inspiration, would-be protests also need a reassuring answer to the question “if I turn out to protest tomorrow, will I be picked on for repression?” As Clay Shirky has pointed out this can become a chicken and egg trap – if only you turn up, then the changes of being the victim of a crackdown are much higher than if a million turn up, but the one million will only turn up if they know that they won’t be the only one.

Successful protests often beat this trap by using a cover which makes initial crackdowns hard or unlikely, gaining breathing space to grow.  In Here Comes Everybody, Shirky gave the example of the East German protestors who ended Communist rule. They initially used the cover of events such as music festivals, forcing on the dictatorship a choice between the high political cost of cracking down on popular, highly attended events or letting a small number of protestors protest. It was a lose-lose choice: either you increase unrest or you give space for it to grow. (The Communists chose the latter, and lost.)

Social media is particularly good at providing the virtual equivalent of space for protest that the music festivals gave. Ethan Zuckerman calls it the ‘cute cat theory of censorship’.  It is relatively low cost for a dictatorship to crack down on a small number of dissidents. But there is a much higher cost to restricting popular social networks. So if political dissent and cute cat photos are both featuring on the same technology platforms, it pushes dictators towards that same lose-lose choice.

Of course, protests predate not only social media but the internet itself, so the technology is not itself the full story. There are some cases where social media almost certainly was the determining factor, as in the fall of Philippines President Joseph Estrada in 2001 in the face of mass protests organised via text messaging.

But predictions and counter-factuals are an uncertain business. Tunisia was not an obvious pick ahead of neighbouring countries before its revolution happened. It is therefore both wiser to stick to broad tendencies, saying that social media makes the successful toppling of dictatorships more likely, even if only rarely on its own.

Nor is it a certain process, as the cases of Iran, Belarus and (so far at least) Syria tragically demonstrate. Moreover, as Evgeny Mozorov has pointed out, technology can be used not only by dissidents but also by governments. Mozorov has particularly highlighted the case of Russia, a flawed democracy where the state deals with the cute cat problem in the main not by trying to block but instead by trying to flood the online world with astroturfed loyalist content.

What matters too is not only how the government uses social media, but how united it is. One crucial difference between Egypt and Syria, for example, has been the respective roles of the military – in the former deciding its future lay in backing change (as they did with Estrada’s ousting too), in the latter in deciding its future lies with the status quo. The views of the generals matter more than Twitter.

So too with foreign governments, where the difference between examples such as Libya and the Ivory Coast compared to Darfur and Rwanda lies in the willingness of foreign governments to support meaningful military intervention. The views of China and its ability to veto UN Security Council resolutions matters more than Flickr.

Yet social media can play an important role in helping pose those questions to generals and foreign governments to which they then have to choose their answers.

And of course context matters too: what mattered most in the year running up to the Arab Spring was not the growth of social media usage but the one third increase in food prices across the Middle East.

That mixed picture is epitomised by the brave, inventive and smart Tunisian activist Astrubal. He made wonderful use of social media to crowdsource, document and map the extravagant use of an official government jet to take Tunisia’s First Lady on expensive shopping trips around Europe. Shared photos from plane spotters in many different companies were added to Google Earth to produce an effective and plausible video that turned abstract complaints about indulgent waste at the top into specific evidence.

And yet … this was done in 2007. Ben Ali did not fall until 2011. Did the work of Astrubal and others make Ben Ali more vulnerable? Almost certainly. Was it enough on its own? Certainly not.

This piece first appeared in the February edition of Total Politics magazine.

It is always good to see more people campaigning and more people offering up solutions and yet… I’m distinctly unmoved by it. Why? Three reasons.

First, the site is heavy on education and light on getting people actually to move their account. Just count the number of clicks it takes you to get to the point where you are about to ask for a new account to be opened. (Go on, give it a try – but do remember to come back afterwards.) You see what I mean? The site doesn’t just not make it easy, it makes it bloody hard to get to the point where you are about to move your money.

Second, the site is playing to the niche rather than to the mass audience. Offering up credit unions as the first option (rather than, say, a building society account), talking positively about how one bank account helps fund trade unions in the UK, taking a pop at the arms trade and so on.

All reasonable views to express in themselves, but they are ones that appeal to a niche on the political left, not to the mass mainstream audience. To really make a difference to the UK financial system, a mass audience needs to be won over to moving their bank accounts. There are arguments that appeal to mass audiences – arguments that appeal to readers of the Daily Mail as much as The Guardian – but these aren’t what the site is built around.

Third, for both these reasons it means the site therefore is really not very different from much that has been said and done in the past – without much of an impact. What is still needed is a campaign that goes for simplicity and a mass audience.

So whilst it is good to see people offering up their own practical responses to the financial crash, Move Your Money is much more opportunity missed than opportunity taken.

As The Observer reports:

Fresh revelations have raised a series of questions about the links between the former Conservative deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft and a company responsible for luxury projects across a string of islands…

Who controlled Johnston International, which won building contracts across the Caribbean worth tens of millions of pounds, has triggered awkward questions for the Tories, and above all for their major donor, Lord Ashcroft.

The Tory peer, who has given the party more than £10m, is spending a small fortune on lawyers and spin doctors to deal with inquiries about his relationship with Johnston, whose interests before it collapsed with debts of $30m stretched across Belize, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago.

The company, and its relationship with politicians in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British overseas territory, plays a central role in a libel action being brought by Ashcroft against the Independent newspaper.

A BBC Panorama investigation, broadcast last Monday, suggested that the Tories’ former deputy chairman had misled the stock market about his links to the firm.

And now an investigation by a court-appointed liquidator into the relationship between Johnston’s parent company, a plethora of interlinked companies and Ashcroft’s British Caribbean Bank (BCB), is raising as many questions as it answers.

You can read about those questions in the full article.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

The Lib Dem Voice survey results I mention are covered in the piece Which four Liberal Democrat ministers have most improved their standings in 2011? and for more on why I rate Ed Davey’s record see Community Buying: a welcome move from Ed Davey (an approach very relevant to his new post) and Ed Davey: someone getting the messaging right.

Helped by having known for a long time that Friday’s events might occur, Nick Clegg and the media team handled events very calmly and efficiently in the circumstances I thought, with the reshuffle and surrounding media coverage looked after well.

The reshuffle also throws some light on how far Nick Clegg is willing to take his commitment to greater diversity in Liberal Democrat ranks. Both the new entrants to government are women (Jo Swinson and Jenny Willott), but once again the Liberal Democrat Cabinet ranks are solidly male. How much you view that as glass part full or glass mostly empty depends mostly on your expectations I suspect.

It is likely that in addition to joining the government, Jo Swinson will take over as chair of the Federal Policy Committee – the first time a woman has chaired the body. This is a very influential role in the party, particularly when it comes to general election manifestos, and given that the majority of the electorate is female it is perhaps about time that the party had a talented woman in the post. Jo has also got a very good track record at turning potentially dry, abstract policy into effective campaigns which generate media coverage. Assuming she does take up the post, her influence on the policy process will be fascinating to watch – and very positive.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Roger Crouch and his team did a great job holding on to third place and the deposit in the by-election. Now the election is over, the area is not being forgotten – particularly as parts of it may move into Vince Cable’s constituency at the next general election. There are several similar moves around London where chunks of a borough in which the party is weak are being added in to the seat of an incumbent Liberal Democrat MP (Tom Brake and Lynne Featherstone are two other examples). This provides a great opportunity to use the benefits of an MP’s campaigning experience and profile to help establish strong local government footholds across several new boroughs.

Wisely much of the campaigning today saw people such as Roger and Vince Cable out on the doorsteps recruiting new leaflet deliverers to build up the organisation in the area. They had plenty of success, while I went for the warmer option of moving swiftly delivering leaflets in an area just inside Hounslow but containing council housing built for Richmond Council.

I felt duly honoured about the delivery rounds I was given as I discovered this sign:

So there I was, treading in the footsteps of royalty. History does not record if King Gustav and Queen Louise also left a Focus newsletter with the resident.

If they did, I trust they also used the sideway lattice technique to get it safely and fully through the letterbox.