Yesterday saw the conclusion of ALDC’s annual training event Kickstart, designed for councillors and campaigners who are defending and targetting council seats at next year’s local elections.

Next year is a special year indeed, because in all probability the General Election will happen on the same day as local elections. Whilst this is nothing new, the councils that are facing election this time are not the councils that usually combine with a general election. Indeed, it’s likely to be the first time since 1979 that London Boroughs have held their elections at the same time as a General Election. We still don’t know for sure the two elections will be on the same day, but we do know for definite that there must be both local elections and a general election next year. For a list of councils facing election, see Keith Edkin’s Local Elections Trailer 2010.

In many ways I shouldn’t have been there as our council, in common with all but six East Midlands local authorities, doesn’t have local elections next year. But we had a tougher time in 2007 than we expected, faced with a local Labour party that had finally learned to campaign, and we know that that next time we do face elections we’re going to have an uphill battle. So we thought we’d take the opportunity to take a team to learn and hone their skills with 18 months to practice before we’ll need them for real.

We took large team, with a mix of elected and non-elected campaigners, and an even greater mix of history with the party, from over twenty years to barely two. And for over half the team, this was their first experience of a national-level Lib Dem event of any kind. During the weekend, several of them told me that they had been dreading the weekend as a completely new and scary experience, but by the end of the three days, all of us were, without exception, impressed by the training we’d received and how welcome we’d all been made to feel.

That training was a mix of formal, classroom learning with experienced tutors from around the country who have been at the sharp edge of Liberal Democrat campaigns; and private, group-specific mentoring with one person who was able to give very detailed feedback about the plans we already had, and areas where we might consider changing what we needed to do. And around all those were ample coffee and meal breaks that got us all talking to Lib Dems from other parts of the country. Those informal networking opportunities are almost as valuable as the planned training. I had a very interesting time talking to an Oldham councillor about their “Pothole Mole” scheme…

The training happened in bunches of five, with over 20 individual sessions running. And for us, one of the best bits was sending the team to the four corners of the hotel to undertake very different sessions – and then bringing them all back again afterwards to compare notes and make plans for how we can use what we learned in our own wards. We’ve come home with a very long list of good ideas that should really help how we work.

Amongst those training sessions were two top notch e-campaigning seminars led by very familiar faces: m’colleagues Mark Pack and Helen Duffett had beetled up the motorway to brief dozens of eager e-wannabes (photo here!). And that included me, because for all the time I spend on the internet, I have still never sent a campaign email to member of the public. I am now much better briefed on that, and any day soon my new skills will be unleashed.

After two days of seminars the weekend culminated in a full plenary session bringing together nearly 200 attendees in one room for a final set of rousing contributions. We firstly heard from several different delegates who fed back what they had learned, and just what they’d be doing when they got back to their constituencies. Two contributions particularly stick in my mind: firstly the team from Woking, who have some good successes to trumpet, including an amazing set of recent recruitment stats from a lively character who, when he wasn’t doorknocking was cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groats. And secondly, new PPC Daisy Cooper, who was selected only weeks ago and is facing a battle with John Gummer. Daisy really struck me as “one to watch” – she will go far I am sure.

After presentations from delegates, the weekend wound up with two closing speeches, the first from the party’s Campaigns Director Hilary Stephenson, with a healthy dose of realism about the Sisyphean tasks ahead of us – but also a clear message: we can win, but it will only happen with hard work and good planning. After Hilary, her Hazel Grove colleague Andrew Stunnell MP closed the conference with a speech that combined good advice with good humour and sent us all away buzzing.

The proof of the pudding will of course be in the eating next year. ALDC’s tracking data shows that ALDC members are much more likely to win elections than non-members – and that Kickstart attendees still more likely than that. My team is already considering who we’ll send to next year’s event, and there is no question in our mind we got value for our money. If you’re a Lib Dem councillor – or you want to become one – join ALDC today, and I look forward to seeing you at Kickstart 2010!

Last Saturday at the Bloggers’ Unconference, our final interview of the day was with Jo Swinson MP – which was particularly kind of her, since she’d flown back from New York the day before, and must have been jet-lagged.

Falling at the end of the day, the discussion we had with Jo was one of the most informal of the day, but was all the better for that. Her enthusiasm for finding new ways of communicating really shone through, and she talked to us about creating the video below. In particular, she was really keen to show us her new Flip video camera, which is extremely portable and can be used by just the one person, without needing fancy lights, an off-camera microphone or an extra person working as camera operator.

Jo used her Flip to make a series of mini videos about the work she was doing at the UN, and quite simply to give some basic impressions of what visiting the UN buildings in New York are like. The buildings are iconic, but not particularly fancy. Working in the main office block is like working in any slightly old fashioned tower block. She also takes time out of her schedule to show us a moving statue rescued from the rubble of Hiroshima – on the face, undamaged and intact; on the rear, scraped raw by the heat and debris of the nuclear explosion.

If you follow LDV’s twitter feed, you may also have seen this message promoting a short audio interview with Helen Duffett asking Jo the questions.

Good morning, and Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers. 26th November is also the anniversary of the opening of the terrifying Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. Today also sees a significant birthday for Tina Turner and a rather less significant one for Hilary Benn.

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here’s are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator. I’ve taken two environmental picks today:

• Why are Reading’s Christmas lights on during the day?

Do these lights have to be blazing all day? This simply does not make finanical or environmental sense. Christmas lights in the Town Centre are very visible. Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas lights. But what message does leaving them on all day send out about environmental responsibility?

(Cllr Daisy Benson)

• ‘Consultation’ Who are you kidding National Grid?

The beauty of an underground superconductor cable system would be that it would not only remain hidden, but the transmission of power from future expansion of energy in the South West (from renewable resources such as the Severn and new as yet to be built wind farms and tidal stream generators)
could with ease be accommodated in a super conducting cable. Super
conducting cables are also massively more efficient with losses of just 3%
compared to around 30% in the current national grid, something that is of
massive importance when we think of global warming and the need to conserve
and use energy wisely.

(Brian Matthew)

Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.

2 Big Stories

Today’s main story is a rare sighting of a positive pro-Lib Dem story on the front page of the Daily Mail. Riffing on the combined facts of the terms of reference of the Chilcot Enquiry, unearthed and highlighted by Nick Clegg at yesterday’s PMQs, and the shock discovery on the enquiry’s first day that the government in fact had information that Saddam was not equipped with WMDs after all.

What an insult to the dead: Brown accused of new Iraq cover-up as he ‘blocks’ release of incriminating evidence

Gordon Brown was accused of engineering a new Iraq cover-up yesterday by handing Whitehall departments the right to block the release of secret documents about the war. Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg ambushed the Prime Minister in the Commons, angrily accusing him of trying to ’suffocate’ the Chilcot Inquiry.

Tory Election Warchest gets £5m boost

The Independent are checking to see how much cash the Tories have.

The conservatives raised more than £5m for their election war chest in just three months – far more than all the other political parties put together. A series of wealthy donors, including one of Britain’s richest men, gave lavish donations, while Lord Ashcroft, the Tory deputy chairman, spent a further £90,000 on the drive to capture crucial marginal seats.

Isn’t it strange how sometimes two pieces of information arrive simultaneously that just go together to confirm a prejudice?

This afternoon, Guido’s post on Tory fundraising came to the top of my feedreader. The pithy title contains all you really need to know – Tories Raise More Cash than All Other Parties Combined – but if you’re a fan of pie charts, you might want to give Guido the clickthrough.

Guido’s story is that of all the reportable donations given to all the parties in the Electoral Commission’s third quarter, 55% of the moolah went to the Blues.

This report from Guido came hot on the heels of a couple of bits of information about Conservative fundraising efforts in Ealing, which has caused a bit of a stir in the local papers. An email arrived with a copy of a Tory letter, and a letter in the Ealing Gazette, which I reproduce below:

It’s that key phrase in the fundraising letter that’s caused the concern: “Unlike other political parties, we rely heavily on the generosity and goodwill of local people.”

When the Lib Dems write a fundraising letter, we frequently include a para that says “The Tories can rely on big business for donations, and the Labour party gets regular cash from the unions. The Liberal Democrats rely on local people like you to keep us campaigning.” At one point in the last electoral cycle, some wag added “and Formula 1 bosses” into the spiel to represent a controversial donation, but it’s still broadly true. Both Labour and the Conservative parties receive substantial donations systematically from groups of people with cash to spare; the Lib Dems and the smaller parties not represented in Parliament have to fight harder to earn donations, and by and large they come from individuals not organisations.

We’re long since used to the other parties stealing our clothes when it comes to learning from the campaign strategies we spent decades developing. But it is offensive to see the Tories trying to plead poverty and mislead voters about how much money they are pumping into campaigning.

It’s just so easy to catch them out, too: pop over to registers.electoralcommission.org.uk and choose “Register of Donations to Political Parties” From there, just enter “Acton” into the accounting unit and see how the flow of cash goes in the Ealing Central and Acton. Of the £177,461.25 donated to political parties over the last few years, £167,595 was donated to the Conservatives. And whilst some of the names of individuals can easily be linked to local Tory luminaries – Barbara Yerolemou is the current Mayor of Ealing, for example – the local connection of many of the rest of the generous donors is difficult to find. Anthony “Deep Pockets” Shlesinger, for example, doesn’t apparently feature on the local electoral register and his company, Spudulike, is not represented within the constituency.

So, just a word to active Lib Dems – in almost all cases, the other parties are raising more money than us locally. If you’re planning a mailing to members, perhaps a bar-chart might help with the fundraising effort?