Category Archives: First appeared on LDV

Second day for #welovetheNHS

Yesterday we brought you news about the bizarre battle between American rightwingers spreading misinformation about the NHS, and British users of the NHS who were actually quite proud of it.

24 hours later and Tweetminster (which monitors the twitter updates of MPs and PPCs and provides a service where you can search them) reports

65 #welovethenhs tweets from MPs & PPCS. 8 from @UKLabour MPs & 4 PPCs, 3 from @LibDems MPs & 3 PPCs, 1 from @Conservatives PPC

Our own Nick_Clegg was amongst them, as was Prime Minister Brown (whose tweet looks like it’s had help from a speechwriter):

NHS often makes the difference between pain and comfort, despair and hope, life and death. Thanks for always being there.

Judged by how fast these memes gather pace, both Clegg and Brown responded pretty late actually. Taking part was a no-brainer, almost everyone on Twitter was doing it, and it took a day for them to get into it.

On google, Lib Dems have dominated the search for the last day: google #welovetheNHS and LDV’s post from yesterday still comes fairly near the top – we were second after Twitter itself for quite a while. Put in the spaces and the top blog is Charlotte Gore’s acid response to the campaign. Charlotte raises a very valid point of course, that if it hadn’t been for completely overblown, factually wrong criticisms of the NHS from America, it’s hard to imagine that the entire UK twitter-base would have spontaneously exploded into unequivocal support for the institution.

Our own Mark Pack reports that the origin of the storm of support was sitcom writer Graham Linehan, although we’re a little a baffled at his assertion that Pack doesn’t look a character from the IT Crowd. Whatever can he mean? [/deadpan]

Comedy songwriter Mitch Benn pointed out in the middle of the night that a US guy seemed to think that all of the tweets were coming from the army of bureaucrats who run the NHS. And as I type he’s heading into the Now Show recording studio to sing a song about – we’ll find out on Friday night at 6.30pm and Saturday at 12.30pm whether it makes the final cut.

And a few Lib Dem bloggers have weighed in too:

Clegg impresses MoneySavingExpert.com

MoneySavingExpert is reporting that Nick Clegg answered an open letter to David Cameron before the Tories managed to get their boots on:

It came about in an unusual way. Clegg (pictured, right) is one of the 3.5 million recipients of the MoneySavingExpert.com (MSE) weekly money tips email. In it, three weeks ago, he spotted an open letter to David Cameron where MSE asked the Tory leader to back the campaign for automatic refunds.

While Cameron has not replied, Clegg, and his Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable, in a letter to MSE this week (see full text below), have promised to table a Parliamentary motion after the summer recess.

Nick also uses his letter to the financial expert blogger to plug the forthcoming consumer protection policy paper at Bournemouth conference next month.

(With thanks to MSE subscriber Hywel Morgan for the link)

Here at LDV, #welovetheNHS

One of Obama’s key pledges in the US Presidential elections was major healthcare reforms.  The US is a deeply divided nation on health as in many other policy areas – it is simultaneously home to some of the planet’s best hospitals, the best research in medical advances and the best healthcare practioners – and also home to some of the worst poverty and barriers to healthcare, the worst developed-world child mortality rates.

Without being facetious, almost all of my knowledge of the American healthcare system comes from my knowledge of US TV.  And whilst House has access to an amazing battery of diagnostic tests, and Grey’s Anatomy shows how competitive training programmes for surgery are, Chicago’s ER is full of hobos having their toes cut off with nail clippers after losing them to frostbite in the snow.

46 million Americans are without healthcare insurance, and so have no access to the top-notch hospitals and treatment, resorting instead to the nailclippers at ER.  By no stretch of the imagination are they all tramps.

By trying to address these problems, Obama is picking battles with some very resistant establishments, including highly profitable insurance companies with an essentially closed market. And in doing so, he has stirred up some hornets nests of misinformation claims.

Among these are a number of claims about just how awful the NHS is – as a model of “socialised healthcare” that some Americans want to avoid.  They include the bizarre claim that Stephen Hawking would be dead if he had to suffer with NHS level care – all the more bizarre to anyone who knows that Dr Hawking is not, in fact, American and is very happy with the life saving treatment he receives on the NHS.

The strange claims for UK healthcare have prompted an online campaign on Twitter of people talking about the excellent care they have received and marking their words with the tag #welovetheNHS.

It’s one of the great shibboleths of UK politics. Everyone knows there are still improvements to be made in the NHS, but when some upstart colony starts critising it on the basis of misunderstood facts, we should all leap to its defence.

A few other posts on blogs I have read in the last few days make interesting reading:  on the ObamaLondon blog, LDV’s friend Karin Robinson is doing her bit to debunk some myths.  And Jonathan Calder’s Liberal England provides an historical perspective of the UK’s own battles to introduce “socialised healthcare” in the 1910s:

“If the Insurance Bill becomes law it will be advisable for us to leave England.”

Meanwhile the Evening News is warning that “we shall never boast of freedom again if we let this measure past,” and writing feelingly of “these days of highly paid servants”.

The cost of employer insurance for domestic staff is uppermost in many minds.

Some things never change.

Conference starts here on Lib Dem Voice

The party’s Federal Conference in Bournemouth is now just a few weeks away – and the key policy papers including the Agenda are now available from the party website.

Conference is such a huge topic, and will be covered so extensively here on the Voice that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Here are just a few interesting things to highlight:

  • The timings are a little different this year. Conference kicks off on Saturday morning with consultative sessions, and is formally opened Saturday afternoon. It continues through until Wednesday afternoon when the Leader’s Speech will be after lunch. Conference ends around 4pm
  • There will be an official Party Conference twitter feed at www.twitter.com/LibDemConf – with official news from the auditorium including the speakers being called.
  • There are five major policy papers, including A Fresh Start – which could well be the last  pre-manifesto paper before the general election; Are we being Served? a policy paper on consumers; Our Natural Heritage, Real Women – covered here already a little – and Thriving in a Globalised World. All five papers are available in a variety of electronic formats.
  • The consultative sessions – informal policy discussions that set the direction of major policy papers at future conferences – will be Disability, Quality of Life, and Localism

Lib Dem Voice at Conference

As ever the LDV team will be providing as full coverage as we can from the conference, including reportage, podcasts and as much as possible to make conference accessible and participatory for those not able to join us in Bournemouth.

We will also be hosting four fringe events, all of which will be recorded and podcast as mini-radio shows here on LDV.  The rooms are booked and topics selected, but some of the details and speakers are still to be finalised.  The basic details are as follows:

  • Campaigning after Rennard
    Saturday 19th September, 8pm Premier Inn, Bournemouth, Connect 2
    Our panel looks at the ramifications for the party of Lord Rennard’s departure.  How will we campaign in the future?
  • Blog of the Year Awards, 2009
    Sunday 20th September, 10pm Marriott Highcliffe, Old Harry’s Bar
    Lib Dem Voice Editor at Large Stephen Tall is your compère for this bejewelled event now well established in the party calendar.  Nominations and judging for the event take place in August – see the website for more information.
  • Liberal Drinks
    We will once again be having an informal night drinking beer at a pub one night of Federal Conference. We will be returning to the Goat and Tricycle – and this year, we’ve even warned the bar staff to expect us! It’ll be the Monday evening of conference from 7.30pm
  • Beyond Twitter – e-engagement in local and national politics
    Wednesday 23rd September, 1pm Marriott Highcliffe, Shaftesbury Suite
    How can people in politics at both a local and national level engage meaningfully with the people they represent?

If you’d like a taster of LDV fringes, the recording of our excellent meeting “Learning the Lessons from the Obama Campaign” is still available.

On LDV before Conference begins

We hope to use the blog to bring you news and debate long before the conference begins.  If you’re proposing a motion or an amendment, feel free to submit an op-ed piece on why delegates should support your views.  If you’re hosting a killer fringe – tell us about it!  And if you’re a non-party organisation bringing a stall to conference, you can write an opinion piece in our Independent View section – remember our blog reaches many thousands more Lib Dems than conference does. Our ad service at Message Space is also available if you’d like to explore paid-for advertising with us

Revamp for Prater Raines sites

An email arrives from web guru and Lib Dem county councillor Tim Prater, who is the public-facing half of Prater Raines, the hugely successful company that now supply local websites to a large proportion of the nation’s Liberal Democrat local parties, council groups and MPs. (The full, awesome list, from Aberconwy to Yorkshire and the Humber is here). It’s no small boast that they probably run more political websites than anyone else in the country.

They have a good track record of innovating and keeping content going online. But things have changed in the seven years since they first started to provide their content management system to the party, and they are now proposing a major upgrade to the service they offer.

On the cards is new, better control over layout and appearance, a greater ability to change the front page, and more contemporary “reveal” and top-down menus. Web 2.0 aspects and integration with a vast array of social networks will work better; on the management side, the user interface will also improve so that managing these websites gets better, easier and faster.

Crucially, they’ve promised to make sure that any changes they make don’t clash with the general election, as and when it comes. The initial plan is to launch “Foci2″ around Christmas.

But before they do that, in true Liberal Democrat style, they are launching a consultation to ask users what it is they would want from a new, improved system:

We want your ideas. What would you do to improve your site? And would you be prepared to do some “beta testing” of the new site as we develop it before release so that you can tell us what you like, and what needs improving?

To send us your views and ideas, please email us at <!–
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//–>foci2 – foci2.hat.praterraines.co.uk.spam.com (this is spam bot hidden email address, replace .hat. with @ and remove .spam.com for the real one) – we’ll take them all on board, but will prioritise. Some will be ideas to include for a site relaunch, some to be added later, and some we may want to talk about – and we’ll do so. If you have views on what currently works well for you, what doesn’t, and what you wish it could do, please tell us!

And if you could help with user testing – either from home or by meeting us in person and working through the beta site – then we’d also like to hear from you. We’ll be at Federal Conference and hope to see you then, but will also set up meetings across the country in the next few months to fully test the new site with real people before we go live.

Do remember some of the problems with some Prater Raines sites are “horse-to-water” problems. One of the key strengths – and weaknesses – of the system they sell is that beyond providing a platform, it’s up to the client local party what they put on their website. So if your criticisms relate to updating, or to content, of a specific site, then those things are probably not something that Prater Raines can help with.

Oldham’s violent bars on Panorama

Tonight’s Panorama – at 8.30pm on BBC1 – features reports on a huge increase in violent attacks in bars in Oldham – and what the Lib Dem council there is doing about it.

Yorkshire Street is the main drinking area in Oldham which had a 200% increase in serious violent incidents in the first four months of this year.

That’s a stabbing or an assault with intention to kill on average every Friday and Saturday night.

But the Greater Manchester town has come up with a unique way of fighting back the recent spike in alcohol-related disorder.

The council believes promotions such as 2-4-1s, drink as much as you can for £5.99, and free shots, have fuelled an atmosphere of violence.

So it decided to review the licences of each of the 22 bars and clubs that sell cut-price drinks.

They have been told that if they want to sell alcohol at less than 75p a unit – about £1.88 for a strong pint of lager – they will have to change the way they operate.

The specific plans make interesting reading:

Oldham council has come up with a model of how its bars could be forced to work if the minimum price is not adopted.

Under the new conditions, drinkers will not be allowed to approach the bar and must wait in a post office style queuing system instead.

Customers would also only be allowed to buy just two drinks at a time and outlets could be made to provide extra door staff as well as paying for police officers to watch over the bar.

Any bars or clubs that refuse to follow the council’s new blueprint, could lose their licences.

I’m a little surprised that the Licencing Act is flexible enough to lawfully let one council make changes like that in how pubs and bars operate. All my own limited experience of sitting as a sub on licencing panels suggests that councils don’t have a great amount of discretion when it comes to what and what isn’t allowed.

But what do you think? Are the measures from the Council a sensible and pragmatic response to a real problem, or an over-zealous bureaucrat’s approach to a statistical blip? And will Panorama make a balanced argument or a one-sided polemic? Tune in to find out – and post your thoughts to our comments thread.

(hat-tip to Costigan Quist for tweeting about this this afternoon.)

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Vince Cable doesn’t know when the economy will recover

Our Vince penned a piece for the Daily Mail yesterday with the  delicious title “The economy is now sitting up and showing signs of recovery”

In it, Vince made the startling admission that he is not, in fact, an all-seeing mage with black powers over the future of the economy:

I am often asked to play the part of Nostradamus. Since I had been a reasonably successful prophet of doom, I am now assumed to know when the economy will turn round. I don’t. No one knows.

It does seem likely, however, that a major disaster has been averted. We are no longer in a downward spiral of falling production, falling wages, falling prices and Thirties-style dole queues. Armageddon didn’t happen.

Extraordinary stats about snooping

Kudos to Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem Shadow Home Secretary, for garnering excellent coverage for the awful statistics about state sponsored snooping.

The Daily Mail’s ire is justified:

The number of Big Brother snooping missions by police, town halls and other public bodies has soared by 44 per cent in two years.

Last year there were 504,073 new cases – an average of 1,381 a day. It is the equivalent of one adult in 78 coming under state-sanctioned surveillance.

One adult in 78? I wonder who it is on my street. Which member of the Lib Dem Group in the House of Lords is it?

Obligatory Chris quote:

It cannot be a justified response to the problems we face in this country that the state is spying on half a million people a year.

The Government forgets that George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not a blueprint. We are still a long way from living under the Stasi – but it beggars belief that it is necessary to spy on one in every 78 adults.

LDV has been blogging about issues like this for some time – you can find a list here.

See also:

Interview with Bristol Councillors

Earlier this month, LDV took a road trip to Bristol to see Banksy – which, if you can stand the two hour queue, is definitely worth seeing.

While we were there we met up with Stephen Williams MP and councillors and campaigners working for Bristol. Yesterday we brought you the interview with Stephen Williams; today’s podcast is a discussion with three councillors from the authority: Cllr Jon Rogers, transport and sustainability supremo with a twitter and e-campaigning twist; Cllr Anthony Negus, now enjoying his second month as a councillor, but many more years as a Lib Dem campaigner, and Cllr Dr Mark Wright, PPC for Bristol South, councillor for Cabot ward and the cabinet member for housing, ICT and service improvement.

You can listen to the sound file right here on the web, or you can download it for use with your MP3 player. Why not listen to the conference next time you’re out delivering leaflets? If you use iTunes you can search the podcast directory for Lib Dem Voice; for other podcast software, you can use this RSS feed of LDV’s audio content.

Interview with Stephen Williams MP

A few weeks ago LDV had a mini-break in Bristol to go and see the Banksy exhibition.

While we were in town we met up with Bristol West MP Stephen Williams and Cllrs Jon Rogers, Anthony Negus and Mark Wright as they held a street stall to gather signatures against the expansion of the local airport.

We taped a couple of interviews – the first was with Stephen Williams, sitting over enormous slices of cake in the Lovely Tart café on the Gloucester Road.

Look out for the councillor interview here on the Voice at the same time tomorrow.

You can listen to the sound file right here on the web, or you can download it for use with your MP3 player. Why not listen to the conference next time you’re out delivering leaflets? If you use iTunes you can search the podcast directory for Lib Dem Voice; for other podcast software, you can use this RSS feed of LDV’s audio content.