"We have agreed to none of this". Lib Dems on Tory welfare proposals

I said earlier that I wanted senior Liberal Democrats to come out and reassure us that we were having nothing to do with these ridiculous welfare cuts that the Tories would dearly love to impose on young people and families.

Two things have happened since then. Mark Pack posted a link to this blog post of his on my Facebook wall saying "It's almost as if Nick Clegg read your blogpost and decided to do something." It's a transcript of a news interview Nick gave in which he says:

 Nothing in detail has been agreed on further cuts or savings to, to welfare. The Conservatives, of course, entirely entitled to set out their stall about what we do as a country is we have to tighten our belts further as we, indeed, were at our party conference. My attitude has always been very simple, very straightforward – which is that as we have to make more savings as a country, as we do, you start at the top and work your way down not, not the other way round.

While I might have preferred that he used the words "batshit crazy" in there to describe the Tory proposals, I can't really complain.

The next thing was seeing the BBC's Norman Smith saying that the message from Liberal Democrats on the Tory proposals is:

We have agreed to none of this.

It is reassuring to hear this - and let's hope the strength of feeling that's been expressed within the party on this will give our ministers strength as the discussions within government continue.

What have the Liberal Democrats ever done for you?

It's just dawned on me that this time next week, I'll actually be in Brighton for Federal Conference. It'll be the first one I've attended in full since Brighton in 1998. On that occasion, I'd found out I was pregnant just four days before and had to go through Conference neither smoking nor drinking.

Anyway, it is very good to see that the party has produced, ahead of Conference, a handy little pocket guide containing all the good things we've done in Government, impeccably illustrated. There are sections on everything from Fair Tax to Jobs to the Environment to crime, health and housing. There are things in there I didn't know about - like how MRSA infection has plummeted and how we've reduced mixed sex wards by 98%. 

It's very clear that we have slashed taxes for the poorest, where the Tories would have cut them for the richest. In fact, the richest are paying £4 BILLION more than they were under Labour. There's no way the Tories would have done that on their own.

I was pleased to see that the language on equal marriage is completely unequivocal "the Liberal Democrats are introducing equal marriage for lesbian and gay couples". 

There's a back page summary from Danny Alexander:

We’re delivering on the promises we made on the front page of our manifesto and we are making a positive difference to the lives of millions of people right across the country.

And we’re achieving all this with just 10% of MPs and in the most difficult of economic circumstances. Despite these challenges, we are on track to implement three quarters of our manifesto policies over the course of this parliament, and at this half way point there is already huge progress to report.

Thanks to Mark Pack, who understands technology more than I ever will and is generous enough to not mind us helping ourselves to his work as long as we credit him, I can let you look at the whole thing here. Enjoy.

 What Have the Lib Dems Done?

Forget Paxman - which Liberal Democrat Voice editor featured at Leveson yesterday?

Everybody's talking about Jeremy Paxman's evidence at Leveson yesterday, where he described how Piers Morgan explained to him at a lunch how to hack somebody's phone and how people would be very stupid not to set a code. He wasn't telling us anything that wasn't already in the public domain, though. Piers Morgan talked about that himself in the first instalment of his own memoirs, The Insider, as far back as 2004.

The really interesting stuff from a Liberal Democrat Voice point of view happened when Andrew Marr gave his evidence. He was talking about the authority and credibility of the political blogosphere. Top left on page 83 if you don't want to read the whole thing.

"You look around and a lot of the most influential highly respected political commentators aren't newspaper journalists, actually, they are bloggers. I'm thinking of people like Tim Montgomery on Conservativehome or Mr Pack on the Liberal website."

Well, actually, Mr Marr, it's Dr Pack, but we'll let that one pass seeing as you were so nice.

It got me wondering what our Mark has said about Andrew Marr over the years.

In January this year, when Marr interviewed Nick Clegg, Mark commented t hat he must have been bidding for the highest number of topics in one interview.

Marr's comments yesterday were a big change from Autumn 2010 when he described bloggers as "inadequate, male, pimpled and single." Mark reminded him at the time that most bloggers are in fact female.  Now that Marr's  admiring the genre, he might want to diversify his reading list. He can start with Jennie. 

It appears to me that seeing as Mark has been cited as one of the most respected political commentators in the country, it wouldn't be a bad idea for him to head along to Leveson himself, especially as he has his own, liberal, perspective on how the media should be reformed post Leveson.

In the meantime, I guess it's chocolate milk shakes all round....

What have the Lib Dems done for you? A pretty picture

My Lib Dem Voice colleague Mark Pack has produced this rather lovely infographic of Liberal Democrat achievements in Government and it's reproduced here with his permission. Some of this doesn't work in Scotland, where you need to add in things like the Scotland Bill, Mike Moore's intervention to secure a decisive, legal and fair referendum and his work on the Crown Estate. You could also look back to the Holyrood coalitions for a Scottish one where we got rid of Labour's tuition fees, insisted on free personal care for the elderly and introducing STV for local Government.

Mark produces a lot of useful stuff, so it would be worth your while, if you haven't already, signing up for his monthly e-mail newsletter. 

Ian Liddell-Grainger shames the fluffy blogosphere

Animal bloggers are not that unusual. We have the eclectic Pink Dog and the ever wise Elephant for example, who bring joy, randomness and good sense to the internet.

However, Ian Liddell-Grainger, Conservative MP for Bridgewater in Somerset, allows an extremely ill-mannered cat to write a blog on his website, as Mark Pack showed us over at Lib Dem Voice yesterday. General rudeness aside, publishing a correspondent's home address without permission and in fact against their express wishes is way out of order. 

Liberal England points out what a lucky escape we have had - Liddell-Granger could be our King and Mogg would have the same status as the current royal corgis. Perish the thought.

But Mogg  really is letting the side down. 

Just out of interest, though, I wonder if this cat is in any way related to another reasonably local Mogg.

If Labour can't hold a seat in opposition, what hope is there for Miliband?

I went to bed last night not really believing rumours on Twitter that George Galloway had eased out Labour in the Bradford West by-election in a closely fought contest.

I wondered allowed if this was Labour talking his chances up in order to look good when they won the seat.

Actually not. When the result came through it wasn't close at all. The showman, probably best known for his cringe inducing portrayal of a cat on Celebrity Big Brother, gave Ed Miliband's Labour a bit of a spanking, winning by over 10,000 votes and 56% of the poll  Anyone who's been to a count will understand that that result would have been glaringly obvious to observers within half an hour of the polls closing.

In a week when the Government has really had some challenges on pensioners' tax allowance, pasty tax and the self inflicted own goal on petrol, Labour should have walked this by-election without even bothering. They didn't though. That might have been something to do with the fact that, despite making a  whole load of noise about George Osborne cutting the top rate of tax from 50 to 45p, Labour failed to vote against it this week, as Mark Pack showed.

This result will shine an even bigger spotlight on Ed Miliband's leadership. More activists will likely be Losing Faith as Alex Hilton powerfully wrote on Labour List recently.

There's no point in pretending that this was a great result for the Liberal Democrats, but it's consistent with the sorts of results we've been getting in seats like Bradford West before the Coalition was a twinkle in anyone's eye. I'm disappointed that we couldn't just have squeaked another 0.41% to retain our deposit, though but it's still a higher vote share than we got in 2008 in Glenrothes. I'm more encouraged by the weekly reports of Liberal Democrat wins in local government by-elections across the country including a victory in Burbage Parish Council in Hinckley and Bosworth, Leicestershire last night. That sort of steady progress tells you more about what is really going on.

One thing that absolutely disgusted me, though, was Galloway's reference to his victory today as the Bradford Spring. To equate it with the atrocities perpetrated by regimes across the Arab worlds surely shows a lack of, for want of a better word, Respect.

There is a certain irony in that Galloway's victory comes in the week of the 30th anniversary of the Glasgow Hillhead by-election which saw the SDP's Roy Jenkins returned to the Commons. Galloway wasn't a candidate then, but he won the seat back for Labour at the 1987 General Election.

Is Lib Dem HQ doing secret experiments on party members?

Bear with me. I know the headline comes out in green ink, but this is seriously not as irrational a question as it might sound.

I base my theory on a conversation with a friend of mine who was complaining bitterly about the over-long subject line on Tim Farron's e-mail yesterday. You know, the one about the tax cuts Nick Clegg wants for the lowest earners. (BTW, if you haven't signed the petition on this, please do so here).

"Over long subject line?" I said, "Are you having a laugh?" Because, you see, mine said "Sneak Preview." I discovered that hers had said "An extra £60 in your wages each month - preview our Party Political Broadcast". You kind of run out of breath before you get to the end of that.

Why would they do that unless it was some weird experiment as to how many people opened and clicked through on each different subject line? I'd be willing to bet my secret stash of chocolate and my new Paul McCartney album that it would be the short and snappy line that was more effective.

It would be rudimentary if they weren't keeping tabs on which style of e-mail worked. Mark Pack and I had a small difference of opinion on Simon Hughes' e-mail last week.  This week's from Tim rightly attracted a whole load of praise from Mark - and his seems to have had a third variation, "Sneak Peak". I wonder if he and I were just being geeky and obsessing too much, though, because the increases in signatures for the petition each week were pretty much identical.

I think we would all agree that there has been a huge improvement in the information sent to members since the dire early days of the Coalition. Helen Duffett has worked wonders in the year she's been Internal Communications Manager. I am fairly certain that nobody who works for a political party thinks they'll ever  reach the summit. Things are constantly changing and we are always having to think of new ways to up our game.

For me, the thing I want to see most is more effective rebuttal. I'm sick of untruths about the Coalition's actions becoming established truth because we haven't quickly enough got our side of the story out there. We've taken lots of hits on welfare reform and not all of them are deserved, for example. We need to give our members more effective material to use on the doorstep. It helps in confidence if you feel that you have something positive to say. They'll get there, I'm sure, but I just wish it was a bit quicker.

It all makes you wonder, though, what other experiments are HQ running on us?

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.

Lunchtime Fun: Inside the mind of Mark Pack......

Yesterday, the Great Chocoholic wrote a blog post about shoe grips which help you to walk on the ice - a very helpful seeing as it's supposed to be very Wintry this weekend. But I think there's more to it than that.

What he said:

This winter I’ve finally got round to trying out slip-on snow grips for my shoes, and these work a wonder. They are rather fiddly to put on (and I would certainly recommend erring on the order of buying a larger rather than smaller size), but once on my trainers they turned slipping and sliding into easy walking.

Given the very impressive amounts of grip added by these I highly recommend them if you are wearing shoes or trainers.

What he meant:

So you don't have any excuses any more to get out of your Focus delivery because its slippery. Get on with it. 

You can take the boy out of Campaigns Department......

There are rumours that he's co-writing a book on campaigning. I will be very disappointed if he does not advise purchasing a pair in it.

I actually bought some, cos my life just comes to a halt when it's icy, after two horrid Winters when I've hardly been able to leave the house in weeks. So far, though, I've not had to use them this year. Let's hope it stays like that.

In which Mark Pack cheers me up with news of Liberal Democrat achievements

I think you should be aware, before I start that no chocolate has been sent my way as an enticement to write this article. Unfortunately.

I have been a bit maudlin' today after the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill with all its nasties still intact so I kind of needed something to cheer  me up.

And so I stumbled across the Chocoholic's Facebook page in which he's highlighting a Lib Dem achievement in Government every day. Today, he's talking about a huge increase in the number of new apprenticeships, 440,000 in 2010/11, initiated by Lib Dem ministers.

It strikes me that this could build up to be a useful reference guide in the future. I hope he doesn't forget all the things we did in Scotland, like free personal care, the smoking ban, stopping Labour introducing tuition fees and STV for local government.

Mark also produces a monthly e-mail newsletter which has all sorts of useful facts about what's going on in the Liberal Democrats. This month's came out yesterday and has information on Nick Clegg's campaign to cut taxes for the poorest,  key facts on university applications and  advice on taking a good campaign photo. If you want to sign up for it you can do so here.

Nick Clegg, Mark Pack and Chocolate - all in 5 minutes on the Today Programme

There are lots of ways for Party members to communicate with our leader. We can send him an e-mail. We can ask him questions at Conference or at his meetings with members around the country. Our Mark Pack, though, chose a novel approach. The points he made in an interview just before 7 this morning were put to Nick Clegg at 8:10.

Now, I am moderately rubbish in that I wasn't up early enough to listen to Mark and I was trying to tweet something else when Nick was being asked about what Mark said, so I'm really only giving you half a story. I vaguely heard something about his comments on a poll which showed only a quarter of Lib Dem voters in 2010 had stuck with the party, something he tackles in his latest e-mail to party members (sign up to get this direct here) combined with his repeated calls for the party to see its members and supporters as active participants in the political process. In response, Nick acknowledged that we needed to do more to explain what we were achieving in Government, highlighting things like taxing bankers' bonuses and dealing with high executive pay.

I thought it was quite ironic that Mark's name was brought up in conversation not long after Nick had mentioned chocolate. He talked about not being a starry eyed supporter of the EU who thought it could do no wrong. He cited the example of it taking 15 years to define chocolate as one of the things which meant reform of the EU was vital.

All in all, I thought Nick did very well this morning. He got his points across well when challenged, even though the interviewer went out of her way to interrupt him and not give him space to answer the question. He was asked about the IFS figures which showed the Government's reforms affecting the poorest most and he tackled this on two fronts. First of all, he pointed out that the IFS analysis didn't include the effect of things like the Pupil Premium (which is, actually quite hard to put a cash value on because the effects won't come through for a very long time), and the extension of free childcare for the poorest families. Then he talked about how people who play by the rules feel really angry to see big companies getting away with avoiding their taxes and how he wants an anti avoidance rule written into the tax system. He also made it clear that he wants to shift away from taxing effort and enterprise and more on to taxing wealth.

Anyway, I have, as has become my custom, accumulated my tweets via the magic of Storify for you. My tweets clearly upset some, but I don't really care. I suspect they weren't supporters anyway, somehow.

Michael Moore - handy with a hoover, a pie and a cello

I can't let the Festive Season go by with out posting this hilarious cartoon Christmas card, featuring Michael Moore, Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander, Vince Cable and Chris Huhne as elves. It makes me howl with laughter every single time.....



Thanks to the Lovely Mr Dr Chocaholic for sharing.

A memo to Liberal England on the subject of Mr Farron

In recent weeks, both Liberal England's Jonathan Calder and Mark Pack have criticised Party President Tim Farron for doing too much crowd pleasing stuff and not enough side taking, not being willing to upset people by sticking his neck on the line.

First of all, if there ever was a year when we needed Farron's gobby, barnstorming, feel-good stuff, always delivered with a good kick up the backside at some point in the proceedings, it's now. This year has been pretty crap all round and part of the President's job is to be there for us when things are bad. Tim's done that part of it all with a bit more sensitivity than I ever gave him credit for to be honest. I also appreciate the many times he's paid tribute to Andrew Reeves over the past few months. And his humour and method of delivery actually gives people ideas about how they can sell the coalition on the doorsteps. We actually do need to start doing that. We tried to divorce it from our Scottish Election campaign and look what happened to us. We need to be talking up the Liberal Democrat achievements in the coalition even if we feel that more should have been done.

But let's look at the charge sheet. I have to say that I do tend to agree with Jonathan that I would have liked to see Tim take a stronger line on the appalling accreditation system for the Birmingham conference. Having said that,  I do believe he was in there trying to sort things out behind the scenes.  I wonder what his appearance in the debate at Conference, on either side, would have done to the final result. Having said that, given the heatedness of the debate, it was a bit of a risk cracking jokes about it hours later. There aren't many who could have got away with that.

It's almost exactly a year since I decided to back Tim Farron for President. I said that we needed someone with a bit of stardust, a bit of edge to him. I had been, if not hostile, at best unconvinced by him up to that point. Having done phone canvassing on his patch during the Council elections, I knew how popular he was as a local MP and how hard he worked. But President?

Then he came up to our Scottish Conference last year and put a lot of effort into securing my vote. One of the deciding factors, though, was how he used the option given to both candidates, of making a speech anytime, on anything they wanted during the day.

Susan Kramer made a good speech, playing it safe, though. Farron, on the other hand, found the biggest, most controversial item on the agenda and waded right on in there. It was as a debate on an amendment tabled by the highly persuasive Sophie Bridger calling for a graduate contribution to replace our free university tuition policy.

This amendment was what everyone was talking about, and the outcome was by no means certain. Farron got up there and implored us to keep our free tuition policy. This was the week before the Browne Report was published, although we all had a pretty good idea what it was going to say. The amendment fell, but not before we'd had a really high quality debate. He made his case passionately, but without rancour and there was much more light than heat in the room, if you get my drift.

And then there was this year's conference last Saturday. Tim returned as President and gave us the zingy pep talk you expect from him.  He said some nice things about us - but then pretty much told us that we'd better get our arses out on the streets campaigning for the Council elections cos Willie Rennie deserved it.

That was in the morning. I was a bit surprised to see him still there at 5:30 pm, long after Conference should have closed. The reason for it over-running was, you guessed it, the most controversial item on the agenda - a  motion on diversity which would have extended the Leadership Programme to Scottish Parliament seats and instructed the Scottish Party to introduce a constitutional amendment introducing quotas for committees. I personally think it was a bit of a blunder by the proposers of the motion to put both of these in the same motion. I think that some people thought that the Leadership Programme was in the same vein as quotas, which of course it isn't - and that might have influenced their vote. Liberal Youth Scotland had proposed an amendment deleting all the bits about the Leadership Programme and the quotas, and adding in some practical stuff (which I may have had a wee hand in helping to draft) on selection committee and diversity training.

Again, Farron wades in with a speech in favour of the Leadership Programme, which did upset LYS a bit, mainly because he talked  about how, when he was their age he agreed with the sort of arguments they were making but, 20 years on with little progress had made him realise we needed to do more.

The Leadership Programme bit of the motion was eventually lost by 5 votes. The quotas were thrown out by considerably more. So, having seen him in action twice on controversial issues, I don't think our President can be accused of not being willing to take a stand.

Maybe he needs to do something south of the border. I actually wonder if he's the right guy to make things happen to tackle the sort of behaviour experienced by Ruth Bright. He'd ruffle some feathers in the process, but it's the right thing to do.

I said when I agreed to support him (for which I received a pile of telephone canvassing within minutes) that he'd better not let me down. He hasn't - and in fact if this was a Harry Potter exam he'd get an E for Exceeds Expectations as far as I'm concerned.

Follow the Phil Woolas Election Court at Nick Thornsby's blog

Remember Phil Woolas? He's the former Labour immigration minister who shamefully refused to grant the Gurkhas the right to live here and who was eventually forced to back down by a Commons defeat on a Liberal Democrat motion and the impressive efforts of Joanna Lumley.

Well, this week, an election court in Oldham is considering a complaint from the Liberal Democrat candidate in this year's general election this year, Elwyn Watkins. Mr Watkins is unhappy at the content of literature issued by the Woolas campaign and has made a complaint under Section 106 of the 1983 Representation of the People Act which deals with potentially defamatory statements by candidates.

Woolas retained the seat by a wafer thin 103 votes.

The reason for mentioning it here is to let you know that Liberal Democrat blogger Nick Thornsby (who I tipped for best new Liberal Democrat blog of the year)  has been given media accreditation for the case and to invite you to look for his updates here. His Twitter feed is here. Mr Lovely Doctor Chocaholic has written about all the various legal bits and pieces here.

It will be very interesting to see how it all works out.

Luciana Berger, Liverpool and a series of political errors

What a happy band of campers the Liverpool Labour Party are - not! Have a look at this spat between a senior councillor and Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle over the selection of Luciana Berger as Labour candidate for the marginal seat of Liverpool Wavertree, where Liberal Democrat Colin Eldridge came a close second in 2005 and has been working tirelessly for local people since.

It might be easy to dismiss Kilfoyle's attack as just another sexist old Labour dinosaur having a go at a young woman - except that it's not so much inexperience that Luciana Berger shows, it's blatant insensitivity and even discourtesy.

The Liverpool Echo set Luciana a test to see if she knew some basic facts about the city, a reasonable expectation for a parliamentary candidate. She barely scraped a pass. It is with great smugness that I can say that not only did I get double Luciana's score (ie 100%), but I also beat Mark and Andrew. This is a special moment I will treasure! I'm not a great football fan but you can't think of Liverpool without its amazing football heritage. Bill Shankly is every bit as much of a Liverpool legend as the Beatles.

If you want to represent somewhere in Parliament, I don't think you have to come from there, or even necessarily live within the constituency boundaries. I do, however, think that you should have some sort of affinity with the place, and you should know a fair bit about it. It's not actually that difficult in these days of Google. Did she even read the Wikipedia page which is a good start and would at least have told her who Bill Shankly was.

Andrew criticises her for following the Sun on Twitter. Now, we all follow people we don't support. I follow Nadine Dorries, for goodness sake, and Christine Hamilton, the Labourlost, sorry, list, blog. The first two at least make the experience of Twitter amusing. I follow all the teams in Formula One, although my heart lies wherever Michael Schumacher and Ross Brawn are.

That's all quite reasonable. The Sun, however, has a unique and ignominious history as far as Liverpool is concerned. Even almost 21 years later, feelings run high about its disgraceful coverage of the tragedy. Look at some of the terrible lies it told, as reported by the Guardian some years later. In Luciana Berger's position, I would have thought twice about even a tenuous online association with a publication that was responsible for so much outrage.

So in this febrile atmosphere for Liverpool Labour, and after one selection which was criticised, they now have to go through the process again in Kilfoyle's seat. Yet another reason why the election will not be before 6th May.

In Liverpool Wavertree, the choice will be between a new Labour candidate who seems to care even less than she knows about the area and Colin Eldridge, who has served the area well for years. Colin came close last time round and what's happened in the local Labour party surely can't do his chances any harm.

The Fabulousness of General Election Night

Any political activist will wax lyrical about the various joys of Election Night. Nothing beats being with the friends and colleagues you've been slogging your guts out with as the results come in overnight. The excitement of victory, the disappointemnt of defeat, all enhanced by the surreality of total exhaustion.

Most activists at an election count, which starts at 10pm when the polls closed, will have been up delivering leaflets at the crack of dawn. They will have been on the go all day, stopping only briefly for refreshment. Despite every part of their body aching, the adrenaline keeps them going until the polls close and then through the count. If they're not at the count, they are generally congregating in some place consuming alcohol and watching Dimbleby and others fill in time before the first results come in after midnight.

Now it appears that more and more Councils are going to move towards counting on the day after the election and Liberal Democrat Voice reports on a Tory inspired campaign to Save General Election Night, reported on Liberal Democrat Voice.

The wonderful, wise and usually but not always right Dr Pack thinks that keeping the counts on a Thursday night is a good idea because:

"The drama of election night is one of the rare occasions when a mass public audience gets interested in the details of politics and hears news and information at more than nano-soundbite length."

As not much else happens overnight, the election results get more and better media coverage than they do during the day, when there are more interruptions from other stories.

Switching counts to Friday risks having the immediate news dominated by exit polls – i.e. largely about the UK-wide picture, whilst squeezing out the stories about the huge variations taking place all round the country. (A more partisan point is that it also means reports are likely to be pretty much all about the Labour/Conservative battle as the overall Lib Dem share of the vote in exit polls – unless very dramatic – is likely only to be a very rough indictator of the party’s performance in terms of seats. Saying “… and we don’t know about the Lib Dems” is likely to pale very quickly.)

Particularly in the internet age, speculation and wild gossip quickly fills a news vacuum. Better to be providing hard information sooner rather than later.

Quick counts provide more security against problems with ballot boxes being tampered with or lost. Serious allegations of this only happen rarely, but it is certainly not unknown."

Most normal people I know spend the late-night-results-coming in bit tucked up in their beds and find out what's happened in the morning before they go out for the day, but what would be so wrong about them finding out when they come in at tea time? If they're really interested, there are enough sources of information as to what's going on and if they like they can watch the drama unfold while they're awake.

Dr Pack also knows as well as I do that Simon Hughes has been wrongly predicted by one or other election programme to have lost his seat in every election since 1983, so it's wrong to suggest that somehow the late night programme is a guardian against wild rumours spreading.

He also mentions the security issue if the counts are delayed. In a Euro election, we manage to keep our ballot boxes secure for 3 days before the Count, but for this proposal, we are talking about 12-16 hours. I hope as well that we'll be moving to some sort of fair voting system within the next few years and then I think it would be better if the counts were held during the day, particularly if they are manual.

While I love the drama of Election Night, and I do agree that there's nothing quite like it, and it would be really hard to get to sleep not knowing whether all our hard work had paid off, I'm not so motivated to fight for it and I certainly won't be signing up to any Tory driven knee jerk reaction campaign on the issue. To a certain extent I see it as our responsibility to try to engage the public during the campaign so that they feel they have an interest in the outcome. If they're genuinely on tenterhooks about the result, it won't really matter when they are announced because they'll make a point of finding out what's happened.

There are plenty sensible reasons why the counts should take place on the day after an election, too. It just makes it easier and cheaper for Councils to organise.

I suppose what really cured me of my love of overnight counts was a couple of hours spent in a layby on the A92, a few miles south of Glenrothes, in the middle of the night in the freezing pouring rain, when I broke down on the way back from the by-election count last November.

I suppose one reason that Dr Pack didn't mention as a good reason to have the count overnight is that it enables the new Goverment to start doing things on the Friday after they were elected. Remember how Labour hit the ground running by announcing that they were giving control of interest rates to the Bank of England? If they leave the results until late Friday, there will be no point in announcing much before the Monday news cycles. Is that such a bad thing, though?

Moving the counts to the Friday would be the end of an era. I'm not convinced that it would be such a bad thing, though.

A gripping tale of what might have been

Some of you may not know that former Lib Dem Director Of Innovations, Mark Pack, is not only a campaigns guru, he's also an elections geek and his particularly speciality is the elections and politics of the 19th century.

He's written this counter factual report of what might have happened if a crucial knife edge vote on the Great Reform Act had led to its defeat rather than its passing.

Ok, so it's about a period in history I find absolutely fascinating anyway, but his account is quite gripping and is definitely worth spending some time on a Summer sunday morning on.

LibDig This!

Get new Facebook URL this weekend

That lovely Dr Pack, who is always ahead of the game on interwebby things, has noticed that we can all register for a unique Facebook URL from 6.01 am on Saturday morning, so we can have one with our names rather than a collection of random numbers that mean nothing.

I don't know what we are going to do when he leaves Lib Dem HQ at the end of this month. He's been brilliant at making sure that non geeks know, in simple terms, how to make the best use of new technologies for all sorts of things.

We will really miss him and the lovely Pink Dog. I hope he's still going to be around to talk chocolate with.

UPDATE: Can't believe I've let the said lovely Dr Pack inspire me to get out of bed at stupid o'clock, but I've done it and can be found at www.facebook.com/caronlindsay. It's so easy - you just log into Facebook and then go to www.facebook.com/username and the process is completely painless even for a non geek like me.

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A Political Geek Abroad

Imagine going away on a much needed holiday - and spending your time taking photos of election posters. How completely sad is that? Surely nobody would do that....

Unless of course, they are Mark Pack, who has decided that the delights of British Columbia include the election posters and he has posted some very useful observations for us all to read.

You may scoff, but I can't. Some of my Scottish colleagues will remember my return from Mallorca in May 2003 just after their elections to the Balearic Parliament. I had a whole wallet of photographs taken of the posters there, how effective they were with their eye catching colours and designs - primary colours and pretty flowers were the ones I liked best. Unfortunately, these weren't the posters of the winners - the right wing Partido Popular got a surprise overall majority after the Socialists had done their best to put tourists off by refusing to let them park anywhere and making them pay an Eco Tax.

The classiest poster I can remember ever seeing was on the then home of the incoming Mayor of Calvia, Carlos Delgado. When I say home, I mean castle which had a whole wall devoted to telling us to vote for him. He won. And the reason I know he won? Yes, I sat up and watched the election results, in Spanish, on the last night of my holiday.

Anyway, I remember how my colleagues' eyes glazed over as I enthusiastically took them through The Election Posters of Mallorca..........

And I have the nerve to complain about living with a health and safety adviser...

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How to solve a problem with Maria and Mark Pack

I was quite amused to see a tweet on Twitter from our own Mark Pack intimating that he was a voice of reason in Nigeria and linking to this posting

What Mark didn't mention is that the article begins with a quote from Fraulein Maria in the Sound of Music!

Two of my favourite people in one random blog posting from the other side of the World. Brillant!

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