Archive for News
Lib Dem achievements, communicating peers and election timetables
A trio of resources for your weekend’s delectation: Electoral timetable for May’s elections: I’ve recently updated my May 2012 election timetable post with extra details Liberal Democrat peers on Twitter: having commented adversely in the past on the lack of communications from many of them, I’ve been hunting out how many are using Twitter. You [...]
Paddy Ashdown’s eight steps to winning a Parliamentary constituency
In December 1976 Paddy Ashdown put to the local party in Yeovil a plan for winning the constituency for which he had been recently selected and where the party was third at almost every election. Thirty-five and a bit years on, it still reads as a pretty good plan. 1. We should adopt a three-election strategy [...]
Understanding the university application figures
Ahead of the preliminary university application figures late last year, I posted five questions by which to judge them when they were published. The gist of all the questions was, “what do the figures really mean if you scratch beneath the surface?”. In particular, the big spike in applications in the last year before the [...]
Nick Clegg returns to income tax
Later this morning, Nick Clegg will be giving a speech to the Resolution Foundation in which, after recent talk about wealth taxes, he is returning to the topic of income tax cuts. More specifically, speeding up the progress towards a basic income tax allowance of £10,000 whilst keeping the 50p rate. This is of course closely [...]
Official rebukes Iain Duncan Smith over immigration figures (mis)use
The BBC reports: The UK’s statistics watchdog has rebuked a minister over his handling of controversial figures on benefits claimed by immigrants. Sir Michael Scholar, head of the UK Statistics Authority, has written to Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, questioning the way he released the figures almost week ago. He highlighted that the [...]
Ashdown, Glover and Williams on the party’s history
The latest edition of the Journal of Liberal History caries this account from me of the conference meeting which launched the new history of the party, Peace, Reform and Liberation. You can watch the meeting in full here. It would be a brave person who walked up to Paddy Ashdown or Shirley Williams and told them to [...]
Andrew Marr bids for record-breaking number of different topics in one interview
I wonder if somewhere deep in the BBC there is a target for how many different topics must be asked about in political interviews each month and someone woke up this morning to realise that January’s quota is about to be missed. Or perhaps there was a typo in Andrew Marr’s contract and his BBC [...]
Nick Clegg unites with Lords in battle to alter benefit cuts
So reports tomorrow’s Observer: David Cameron has been lobbied by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, on the need to rewrite the government’s flagship benefit reform to help children suffering as a result. Clegg proposed a series of changes to the £500-a-week cap, including exempting current claimants, in an attempt to ameliorate some of the [...]
LabourList readers: scrap personal privacy over your income
LabourList has been running a series of posts based on a good idea – asking people to propose policy ideas that don’t cost money, under the banner ‘What’s Labour about when there’s no money left?’. I was, ahem, a bit underwhelmed then to read one of the ideas – to strip away personal privacy from [...]
Ed Balls: My starting point is we are going to have keep all the cuts
Saturday’s Guardian has an interview with Ed Balls: Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, has moved to challenge accusations that Labour is not credible on the economy by telling the public sector unions that he endorses George Osborne’s public sector pay freeze until the end of the parliament, and that he accepts every spending cut… “My [...]
