Thursday, February 16, 2012

Simon Hughes urges Lib Dem members to sign petition calling for tax cuts for lowest paid

Simon Hughes has sent out an e-mail to Liberal Democrat members asking them to sign thi petition, started by Liberal Democrat activist Tracy Connell, calling for the Government to raise the tax threshold faster along the lines suggested by the Liberal Democrats.

It says:

Please sign this to persuade George Osborne to fast track the Lib Dem policy to increase the income tax threshold to £10,000 in the next budget, and hence take thousands more people out of tax and put £700 back in people's pockets.There are measures that can be taken to pay for this including the clamp down on tax avoidance and a mansion tax.Please support this and help the Lib Dems to help the lowest paid and middle income workers in this country.

Last year I had a major strop about another Simon e-mail sent in the wake of the disastrous Holyrood election and less than positive local election results in England which began "it's a good month to be a Liberal Democrat."

Since then, he's redeemed himself many times. He apologised incredibly sincerely at the time and, anyway, it's simply not possible to stay angry with Simon for long.

It's been very clear that lessons have been learned in internal party communications in the last while. There are clear signs that it's possible to get people talking in plain English as opposed to Bubble Speak. I think Mark Pack is being a bit hard when he criticises Simon's e-mail.  When I read posts or blogs, I always read them to the end before clicking on links. My head would be fried if I did anything else. Then I go back and click on the links I choose. On this one, I didn't sign the petition because I'd signed it already and I'd seen the relevant website, but if I hadn't, I'd have done it. The fact that signatures have more than doubled in 24 hours are encouraging. I'm hoping that as members share that e-mail, these numbers will continue to rise. We need 100,000 signatures to get this debated in Parliament and we're a long way short of that.

I did, however, smile with approval when I saw that the e-mail also included encouragement for people to sign up for Conference with the relevant link. It's really important that we advertise these events at every opportunity.

So, if you clicked on the first link in this e-mail, you will not have read this, but if you've persevered this far, you might like to sign the petition and encourage everyone you know to do the same.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Mark Pack posted this comment but my fat fingers meant that I accidentally deleted it instead of publishing it.

Thank heavens for notification e-mails: I still have Mark's comment in full:

As I said over on Facebook - you're right that there are some good points about the email, hence the "good" part of the title of my blog post :)

However, if you work backwards from the boost to the number of petition signatures to the number of people the email roughly went to, the click through rate for such a campaign email looks to have been pretty low.

That is the real test for an email like this: did it get a good number of petition sign-ups? The evidence both from its design and from what can be judged from the outcome is that it didn't.

Or in other words - yes, you are unusual! (It's rather how the way in which political activists read leaflets is very different from the way the public does, e.g. by giving them much more attention.)

So good the email happened, but there's still a lot of progress to make.

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