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And goodness, what a fortnight it’s been for politics and the party. Since we at Weekly (hem hem) Catchup left your screens a fortnight (hem hem) ago we’ve seen a lot of movement on the political front led by the Telegraph’s sensational coverage of the “Cash for Cushions” constitutional crisis that John Stewart’s chromakey team dubbed “Scamalot“.
We kicked off our coverage with a triple bill of Norman Baker’s contributions on the matter, but it was to be a gift that keeps on giving. Stephen ranted, then questioned; you answered in spades. Clegg weighed in. Alix assumed the position. And queried the value of cushions. But ultimately in those heady days of early-to-mid-May-2009, we still thought we’d got off lightly. We defended Andrew George; we castigated the Telegraph for its descent into the gutter; we summarized. We told the Telegraph to say sorry.
But there were flies in the ointment. There will always be Teignbridge. And the Rennard situation began to deepen. Party president Ros Scott intervened.
Stuff got heavy for speaker Michael Martin. Clegg called for him to go. Dozens of PPCs put their name to an open letter. And then, he resigned. We had the first reactions. An historical view. Hardly surprising he should go when 85% of our readers thought he should. Lets hope our subsequent poll on replacement speaker is similarly influential.
In all this expenses muck, lets not forget there were saints too, at least twice.
And there were tributes too for Chris Rennard, who announced his plans to retire later this year, in uncertain circumstances addressed head on by our Editor at Large in this cracking post.
Our snap members’ poll also considered expenses. You’ll find our questions and your responses all under this link. (Unless you’re reading this long after I wrote it by which time something else will be at the top of the page)
Enough of expenses. In case you’d forgotten, we have council and Euro elections in mere weeks. We did cover those too, with Anders Hanson urging us not to forget the locals. Stephen considered Euro-polls. Helen had news of social networks on a European level. Merlene Emerson told us of VoteMatch. We discovered to our horror we’d actually be talking about Europe in our European campaign this year. And on a more general note, Tony Greaves urged us to abolish postal votes on demand.
We’ve also been taking on the BNP head-on in the last few weeks. Mark showed their election address is a tissue of lies; they have difficulty with numbers; and they used a photo of one of our servicemen without permission. It would be a tragedy if the expenses scandal put them into the European Parliament. After all, there’s Nothing British about them, no matter how hard they gatecrash the Queen.
On other topics from our guest-contributors this week: Nonsense on stilts from our Chancellor, says Ed Randall. Daniel Russell is pushing for electoral reform and so is Layla Moran. Luke Burford is almost on board whilst Mark Thompson has been with us for a while. Benjamin Mathis gunned for the man in tights; Ed Fordham gave us a sneak preview of his Newsnight appearance. Kalvis Jansons explained his thinking behind the “PM Resign” petition. And Hywel Morgan wondered just how much money MPs should spend on food.
On a completely different note, Caron Lindsay told us of a struggle within the Scottish church over the fate of a gay minister in Aberdeen. (Earlier this evening, the result of the vote was announced.)
A post about a non-partisan repository of leaflets became a reliving of the Bermondsey byelection in the comments. I highlighted some opportunities to work for the party. We brought you the two new party election broadcasts, #1 and #2.
We launched a new strand of content called Daily View which we brought to you on the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 17th, 18th, 21st, 22nd and 24th. After all that, we’ve nearly got the rota straight and almost decided what to call it.
In CommentIsLinked@LDV:
Clegg – restore trust in democracy
Cable Arthur, Delia, rotten bubble
Norman Baker on expenses
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An interesting photo is doing the rounds at the moment – I saw it on JoeMyGod but Andrew Sullivan explains best what the photo is:
Image via SUNY Stonybrook Department of Geosciences (h/t: Ian Swain, Martin Prosperity Institute). This poster, courtesy of the city of Muenster, Germany, illustrates the different amounts of space taken up by different kinds of transit.
- Bicycle – 90 sq. m for 71 people to park their bikes.
- Car – 1000 sq. m for 72 people to park their care (avg. occupancy of 1.2 people per car).
- Bus – 30 sq m for the bus.
BBC’s Question Time is on tonight at the earlier time of 9pm. As I write this, the BBC’s QT website says
Question Time, the BBC’s premier political debate programme chaired by David Dimbleby, will be in Salisbury on Thursday 21 May, for a special edition going out at 2100 BST on BBC One.
The panel will include Health Minister Ben Bradshaw, Conservative shadow foreign secretary William Hague, treasurer of UKIP Marta Andreasen, former independent MP Martin Bell and one other guest to be confirmed.
Here’s hoping the “one other guest” will be a Lib Dem.
If you’re tuning in, you can join the simultanous online Twitter debate here at #bbcqt, or the LDV debate in the thread below. Meanwhile Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson will be liveblogging events via CoverItLive at his own blog.
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What’s up in blogs and news.
In the media
The expenses row continues to rumble with the MP for my ancestral home of Leominster getting scalped by the Telegraph alongside Ruth Kelly and a duck, if the pictures are to be believed.
Meanwhile over the Daily Mail has been working hard to bring you this extreme comparison with Cornish MP Andrew George – they’ve found one of his constituents who commutes to LB Barking & Dagenham, but whose weekday residence is a £30 tent. There’s some grass left in Parliament Square, isn’t there? We could have a tent city for MPs right in front of the House.
In the blogs
Normally at this point an LDV staffer would pop over to LibDemBlogs and pick up some highlights of the Lib Dem blogworld from the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, the last 24 hours saw LDB hit a funding crisis and the service has been temporarily withdrawn as programming whiz Ryan Cullen first raises the necessary cash to continue, and then migrates to a host more able to cope with the server load necessary to herd Lib Dem bloggers. Bloggers themselves have rallied to the cause with posts by Jennie Rigg, Charlotte Gore, Mark Reckons, Jonathan Calder amongst others.
In barely 12 hours, Ryan has raised almost all of the £300 he needs to continue the project, which is a testament both to the usefulness of the service he runs, and the community spirit his aggregator website has fostered in the Lib Dem blogosphere.
In other blog news, Charlotte Gore has worked fast to set up a Lib Dem Blogs Yahoo Pipe thingie. The link is here – it needs to be plugged into a feed reader rather than being human-read. (And if that means nothing to you, wait a few days for the aggregator to be back online!)
Coming up later today
It’s Thursday, so later today comes BBC’s Question Time and our related Open Thread – at the earlier time of 9pm. We’ll have more answers to our members’ survey and news of Mark Reckons’ correlation analysis showing up on one of my favourite current BBC podcasts / radio programmes, More or Less.
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Niles's Blog 
