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?

Jonathan Calder last night broke the news (well to me, anyway) that Irfan Ahmed has had to pull his blog permanently following further outrageous comments.

The final para of the Pendle local newspaper story is apposite:

The comments are not the opinion of the LibDems and neither has anything on my blog ever had anything to do with the view of the LibDems in Pendle or across the UK.

Well, quite.

Good morning, and welcome to Daily View. Today, in 1990, Milli Vanilli were stripped of their Grammy. It’s the birthday of American President and pizza-loving cat James Garfield.

Today is also both International Men’s Day and International Toilet Day.

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:

• How much food can be grown on a balcony?
  Cllr Alexis Rowell gives the answer: quite a lot, actually
• Time to stop calling them “honour” killings
  Meral Ece takes on a difficult subject.

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

Ashcroft’s bank lent millions to disgraced premier

The Independent tells us:

Companies linked to Lord Ashcroft, the billionaire deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, helped finance the lavish lifestyle of the disgraced prime minister of Turks and Caicos islands, an Independent investigation has found.

Labour peers savage Brown’s free care plan

See the Times for more:

A key plank of Gordon Brown’s re-election strategy was condemned by members of his own party yesterday as irresponsible, unaffordable and based on a myth.

The Prime Minister’s plan to offer free care at home to the elderly, outlined yesterday in the last Queen’s Speech before the general election, was compared to “an admiral firing an Exocet into his own flagship”.

Welcome to part six of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via this page. The series will then be revised and collated into an e-book, so please do post up your comments as the series progresses. Today it’s the turn of Alex Foster.

When writing for a blog, perhaps the default view I have of my reader is someone who is familiar with my entire body of work, someone who started at the first thing I wrote, and read it through in order. That person would have a pretty good understanding of what I meant whenever I made a reference to something I have previously written.

Life’s not like that, however. Most of my readers have no clue what I was thinking this time last year. Most of your readers too will come to your blog posts from a variety of sources, and may not regularly read your work. If you’re on Lib Dem Blogs, a particularly eye-catching title may draw in readers that haven’t seen your output before. And the more you write, the longer you are around, and the better you work with search engines, the more people will find your blog from bizarre search terms that have nothing whatsoever to do with what you are actually writing about. (Fully three quarters of my traffic is from search engine referrals, and of those, the majority have landed on me from a search about “number one when I was born” which links to a post I wrote three years ago. Either that or pear crumble.)

So given that most of your readers come to your site without much of a clue what you write about, it’s really important to give them a clue often. You can’t ever say things, “as I said yesterday” because your casual visitors won’t know what you said yesterday. Even if yesterday’s post was the last thing you wrote, if your visitor has followed a link to the blog post in full and not to your blog as a whole, they won’t easily be able to find the post.

What you need to do is to refer them to what they’re looking for using a hyperlink. What I wrote the month before last, with a handy link to what it is you referred to, means that anyone who’s landed on your blog and is interested in your topic can follow your train of thought.

Referring back to your old stock of writing is also excellent for keeping your best pieces fresh in people’s minds; and the more links you use, the better search engines will be able to see how your thoughts are structured. That context is all the more important if what you are referring to was written on someone else’s blog or a newspaper article.

Finally, if you notice from your logs, or a third party tool like Google Analytics or MyBlogLog, that people are frequently landing on the same posts from years back, it’s worth going back and editing them a little to help direct your new readers at your new material. I’ve made sure I have Google ads on the pages that are most often read, and have sometimes gone back to add in bulletted lists at the end of pieces to signpost people at other posts.

Here’s a handful of videos doing the rounds from American politics.

First up “There’s a rep for that!” – riffing on the iPhone’s ad showing how there’s an application to do the most ridiculous things, here’s a video with a light-hearted but deadly serious look at some of the disgraceful campaigns American Republicans have run:

Second, a similarly light-hearted but deadly serious song about gay marriage in the States, following voters striking down judicial efforts to get marriage for homos on the statute books: Stupid Callous Homophobic Hateful Legislation. Can you guess the tune before you hit play?

Thirdly, via Liberal Conspiracy, here is the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart highlighting some dodgy Fox camera work:

Good morning. Today in 1990, Tim Berners Lee published a formal proposal for the world wide web. Today nearly twenty years later, here we all are. And isn’t it frightening that 1990 is nearly twenty years ago?!

2 Big Stories

Labour’s plan for ‘John Lewis’ public services

The Guardian is reporting that the Labour party are proposing mutualising public bodies – and the Guardian thinks the concept of mutualisation will be so alien to its readers that the only way of explaining it is by analogy to John Lewis.

Hospitals and schools would be transformed into John Lewis-style partnerships under radical plans that could form a central plank of Labour’s general election manifesto.

Public sector bodies, which would also include leisure centres, housing organisations and social care providers, would be allowed to take control of their own affairs if staff and users voted in favour.

Quite an amazing change of fortune from the party that has spent the last dozen years increasing Whitehall control over – well, pretty much everything.

Valerie Singleton launches six-button computer to get elderly online

The Telegraph has the story.

The screens of new PCs have just six buttons, allowing technology-shy users to surf the internet, send emails and watch videos without having to navigate around cluttered desktops.

My immediate facetious flippant thought is that receiving email from elderly people who have keyboards with only six buttons might well be a frustrating experience for all concerned. Which 20 letters will they omit?

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:

• Scrutinising Scrutiny

John Ault has news of a Tory council about to disappear up its own fundament:

Conservative controlled Wealden District Council, has ‘set up a scrutiny panel to scrutinise its scrutiny panels.’

• Is this available in English?

Alex Folkes highlights an unreadable high level strategic document from new Cornwall Council. Not in Cornish, but in management jargon.

At Cabinet today, member queued up to complain about it and wrung an admission from the Leader that it needed to be ‘in plain English and fit for purpose’. Cabinet Member Carolyn Rule agreed to go away and proof-read it. I hope that she goes further and gets it re-written in English.

Don’t miss p23!

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.

On Monday, Helen brought you news from the Guardian of the dispute between Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris and Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

Over the last two days, Dr Harris’s blog has been unmissable as he has been posting details of the correspondence on his blog, along with the consequences.

A fisking of Alan Johnson’s speech in Parliament

I was amazed to hear what the Home Secretary said, under privilege, in parliament about a distinguished scientist and sent Alan Johnson the letter below demanding a retraction and apology.

A fisking of Alan Johnson’s reply

The Home Secretary has now responded to my letter. It is set out below, interwoven with my original letter, and accompanied by comments from me, after consultation with Professor Nutt and Richard Garside

Three more resignations from AMCD

The latest resignations represent a deepening in the crisis of confidence of scientists in the Government – in particular, in the Home Secretary. That they come after Alan Johnson met the ACMD demonstrates that he just doesn’t get it when it comes to the importance of respecting the academic freedom and integrity of independent, unpaid, science advisers.

Good morning and welcome to the Voice’s early morning roundup of news and views. It’s 5th November, an anniversary we can all remember, when Guy Fawkes didn’t quite manage to get his suggestions for MPs’ expense reform through Parliament. It’s also Art Garfunkel’s birthday – he’s 68 today.

2 Big Stories

Bloody betrayal raises fresh doubts about Britain’s campaign in Afghanistan

The Times carries the story most papers are leading with this morning.

The killing of five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman raised fresh doubts yesterday about Britain’s mission in Helmand.

Senior political, diplomatic and military figures warned that public support for the British presence was in danger of collapse without a clear and freshly defined strategy.

Meanwhile, the Guardian has one of the more startling headlines I’ve read recently:

France: ‘Autistic Tories have castrated UK in Europe’

Sacré bleu!

Speaking to the Guardian, Pierre Lellouche, France’s Europe minister, described as “pathetic” the Tories’ EU plans announced today, warning they would not succeed “for a minute”.

Giving vent to frustration across the EU, which has so far only been expressed in private, Lellouche – who said he was reflecting Nicolas Sarkozy’s “sadness and regret” – accused William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, of a “bizarre autism” in their discussions.

Quel horreur! Mind you, I see Charlotte Gore’s point when she tweets: “a French Minister slagging off the Tories? Guardian Reader’s letters to Bush voters springs to mind.” Still – there’s a solution, since the Independent is currently running a story that says cannabis cures autism.

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:

• Caron’s Musings: Jenny Willott lives on state pension for a week

An interesting social experiment being carried out by a Lib Dem MP – and if it hadn’t been for Caron, I’d not have realised it was going on.

I guess the other thing to think about is that Jenny is getting the full State Pension whereas many women don’t qualify for even that paltry amount because they either worked part time, took time out to have children or look after elderly relatives. Some may have been badly advised decades ago and made decisions that it is now impossible to rectify because nobody will take responsiblity for the mistake.

• James Graham: Cameron’s Lisbon pledge is “grammar streaming” all over again

I think Cameron will be a disastrous Prime Minister if he gets the chance: another Tony Blair but without the steel. His photo in the Guardian yesterday summed it up perfectly, something which Alastair Campbell has been mercilessly taking the mickey out of. It really is the most excrutiating photo of Cameron since That Bullingdon group shot. Here is a man who clearly puts more thought into his image than into his policies. The result is that both end up pretty laughable.

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.

I listened to BBC reports of David Cameron’s speech on Europe with increasing bafflement as it appeared that the Conservatives set out a complicated set of policies that to my mind addressed all the wrong problems.

Granted, by many standards, and certainly by Tory standards, I’m a rabid pro-European. But here are two obvious flaws in the Conservative position.

No more treaties without referendums

So for each new treaty, the Tories will make sure there’s a referendum. Awuga, wrong question alert. Ask people if they wanted the Lisbon treaty, and most often what you get in answer is why they don’t like the EU – not a specific Lisbon based answer. And if they do say no to Treaty A, then what? It doesn’t give you any specific idea why Treaty A shouldn’t be ratified, but neither does it give you any other action to take. Result? Institutional paralysis.

On this point, I think the Lib Dem line that there should be another referendum on continuing membership of the EU is probably the best way forward. It does allow for a proper debate on broad principles, and there are clear paths to follow whichever way the vote goes. It does also allow the few of us on the “pro” side of the fence the opportunity to make the case for the EU and to spell out the consequences of turning our backs on our nearest neighbours. But referendums on each and every treaty is a big, pointless commitment.

A sovereignty act

Hmm, this one is a special example of wrong headed thinking. The Conservatives appear to have noticed that some countries with written constitutions have defined institutions whose job it is to manage constitutional change. Does a supranational treaty change how Ireland or Germany is governed? Then the Irish and German constitutions show a way to check whether that change is significant.

Britain has an “unwritten constitution” which means that when change is demanded, the process to manage it is also unwritten. So the Tory plan to fix this is what? A bit of tinkering around the edge, that’s what! And lo, those wrong problem sirens sound again.

What is needed to correct the problem of an unwritten constitution is… wait for it… a written constitution! And if, as part of that, you wanted to set up a process by which the constitution could be changed if necessary, or to test whether demands made of the nation or indeed new legislation were unconstitutional, then you could do that. But a bit more tinkering to rewrite small parts of our unwritten constitution is not the answer.

Well, that’s my view anyway – what did you think about the new Conservative line on Europe?

Good morning and welcome to October 29th. Today is the anniversary of the first performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the birthday of Boswell, the biographer of Samuel L Jackson, and the anniversary of the death of Sir Walter Raleigh (he was executed – I didn’t know that.)

It’s also the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which first set up a Constitution for Europe.

2 Big Stories

The postal strike is on
Read all about it on the Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian:

Both sides blamed each other after three days of talks mediated by the TUC collapsed without a deal being reached. As late as evening there had still been some hope that this week’s strike action could be called off to relieve the pressure on Royal Mail.

Tony Blair set to stand for EU presidency ‘if job is big enough’

The Times “has learnt” from “friends” of Mr Blair… oh, read it yourself:

Tony Blair will stand for the presidency of the European Union if its leaders agree that the role is a substantial one requiring clout on the world stage, The Times has learnt. The former Prime Minister would give up his lucrative commercial interests for a job that would allow him to “make a difference” for Europe, friends say.

Our poll on the issue is currently running – and is not looking good for Mr Blair’s interests in the role of president of the Council of Ministers.

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:

• Alex Wilcock: Ex-Liberal Democrats in the News (including two you may not have spotted)

Eagle-eyed Alex reminds us of the Liberal Democrat histories of two people in the public eye, including maligned Conservative PPC Elizabeth Truss:

[…]in around 1993, she was a self-styled radical Liberal Democrat who kept attacking me when I was Chair of the Liberal Democrat Youth and Students because I wasn’t left-wing enough, and whom I once held a meeting with to try and get her to work with anyone else in the organisation because she was a complete and utter egomaniac pain in the backside incapable of working in a team [. …] I hope she’s as well-loved and effective a teambuilder for the Tories as she was in the Liberal Democrats.

Ouch.

• One Governator, three links

Mark Reckons, Jonathan Calder and Paul Walters are all considering a particularly fine bit of writing when California Governor Schwarzenegger refused to sign a bill sent to him by the state assembly. His refusal is couched in what first looks like unoffensive text. A closer inspection reveals a profane acrostic.

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