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, and we can now give you full information on our confirmed speakers. The 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?
  Speakers: Chair: Mark Pack, Lynne Featherstone MP, James Graham, Neil Fawcett
• 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.
• 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?
  Speakers: Chair: Alex Foster, Jo Swinson MP, Mark Pack, MySociety’s Richard Pope

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.

In addition, LDV’s editor Stephen Tall will be joining a panel of four – alongside Vince, Shirley and Charles Clarke – for the IPPR’s fringe event, The end of politics as we know it?, on Tuesday 22nd September at 1pm. Full event details here.

UPDATE: Mark Pack has let me know that he is speaking at the Public Services Trust fringe on public data on Tuesday 19 September, 18:15 – 19:30, BIC, Bournemouth:
Surveillance State or Empowered Citizens: who controls data in Public Services?

Good morning – what an auspicious date today, eh? 9/9/9. Today would be a good day to start War and Peace, because it’s Leo Tolstoy’s birthday. It’s also the anniversary of the admission of California to the union of United States in 1850.

2 big stories

An end to recession

The Guardian and the Telegraph both lead with a declaration of an end of recession. So that’s OK then. From the Telegraph:

The National Institute for Economic and Social Research, one of the foremost independent economic forecasters, estimated that Britain had seen economic growth in the three months to August.

Its announcement coincided with figures showing that the manufacturing sector was enjoying its strongest growth for 18 months, that consumer confidence was recovering and that the jobs market was improving for the first time in almost a year and a half. The stock market has bounced back, with shares in London hitting their highest level of the year yesterday. Estate agents reported that house sales and inquiries were up by more than 50 per cent in August on the same month last year.

New tax on air travel

The Times runs with the story that the Committee on Climate Change – another of those quangos, I wonder who wants to scrap this one? – has advised the Government that a much steeper air travel tax is needed to offset the damage of growing air travel.

Tens of billions of pounds will have to be raised through flight taxes to compensate developing countries for the damage air travel does to the environment, according to the Government’s advisory body on climate change.

Ticket prices should rise steadily over time to deter air travel and ensure that carbon dioxide emissions from aviation fall back to 2005 levels, the Committee on Climate Change says. It believes that airlines should be forced to share the burden of meeting Britain’s commitment to an 80 per cent cut in emissions by 2050.

2 must read blog posts

Stuart Bonar tells Cameron he’s a long way to go

David Cameron has a problem. In a keynote speech today he spelt out today a simple message – that public spending needs to be cut and it needs to be cut now. And he set out some really specific savings, totalling £120 million.

His problem is that this year alone the Government estimates that it will need to borrow £175 billion (billion, not million). The £120m he’s identified would help pay back 0.07 per cent of what the Government will borrow this year alone. So, £120,000,000 saved, £174,880,000,000 to go.

Rob Blackie: ten email tips

Tip #1 – keep it really short.

I think I’ll wrap it up there, then.

David Cameron is talking this lunchtime, the news tells us, of his plans to reform Parliament by removing subsidised meals and shaving 5% off the pay of ministers.

Danny Alexander MP, Chief of Staff to the Leader of the Liberal Democrats is a) unimpressed and b) unfamiliar with the concept of run-on sentences:

There is a good argument to be made for cutting the cost of politics, the Liberal Democrats have proposed reducing the number of MPs by 150, but if the Conservatives seriously hope to convince people they are fit to govern it is time they stopped dodging the tough questions.

The Liberal Democrats have proposed not renewing Trident, David Cameron wants to increase the price of salads. While it’s nice to finally have some concrete proposals from the Conservatives, at this rate it would take them several centuries to balance the books.

David Cameron claims to want to cut spending but refuses to tell anyone how he hopes to achieve it. The Conservatives need to stop insulting our intelligence and set out what they really believe.

While we’re on the topic, let us not forget a post by Will Howells, formally of this parish, but writing on his own blog in January. He lines up the ducks to show that David Cameron’s proposal is significantly less ambitious than Tory policy under Michael Howard in 2004. And yet still less ambitious than the Lib Dem policy which would remove two-and-a-half more MPs from the books than the Conservatives.

Here’s a handy hint if you live near the conference centre in Bournemouth: you do not need to be a registered delegate to attend many of the fringe and training events.

The “Access” rules as set out in the Conference Directory (available for download here) say:

Access to all areas of the Bournemouth International Centre (BIC) is possible only with a valid, visible conference photo pass worn with the official lanyard. You will be asked to show your pass when you enter the BIC and you are required to wear the pass with the lanyard visible at all times within the building.

If you are attending a training or fringe session in the Highcliff Marriott, Premier Inn Bournemouth Central, Royal Exeter, Royal Bath, Connaught or Wessex hotels, you may be asked to show a valid conference photo pass or party membership card.

This means that members of the Lib Dems interested in attending fringe or training events outside the main conference hall are free to do so – and don’t need to register as conference delegates.

This year that’s of interest and note to party members living in the extreme south of the country. But in the coming years, when conference moves north to Birmingham and Liverpool this enfranchises a whole new set of Lib Dem members. It’s worth us old conference lags making sure our friends in the North know what they’re entitled to.

Do you have any top tips about conference you’d like to share with LDV? Drop us a line at <!–
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Just a quick reminder that all the main documents relating to Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth – now less than fortnight away – are now available directly from the party’s website.

These include the main hall agenda, the policy papers to be debated and fringe and training guides.

Find them all at this handy link.

It’s also worth noting and commending that the information is available in a variety of formats, from the printed books, the PDFs of those, and also simply as plain text – which is good and accessible for those with disabilities and also very handy for PDAs, phones and quick searching when you need to find something fast.

LDV at conference

LDV have four conference events, and I will bringing you the full details tomorrow along with our finalised speaker list. We’ll also have a questionnaire for members of our forum on behalf of think-tank IPPR – the answers you give will serve as the fifth panelist at their fringe on Tuesday lunchtime.

We are always very keen to attract guest writers for Lib Dem Voice, but never more so than at Conference and in the run up to it.

Before conference

We’re keen to get the debate started long before delegates take their seats in the conference hall, so if you have a view about the policy we’ll be debating, write us an article. If you need support for an amendment – or are drafting a speech – why not reuse and rehearse your material in the form of article here?

One paper in particular, the party’s Real Women policy paper, has already been subject to a deal of debate in an article – followed by your comments – from Jo Swinson MP; and fifty comments following this introductory piece from Helen Duffett.

At conference

At least five of the regular LDV staff are signed up for all or part of conference, and we will be providing audio, video and text coverage of the events as they happen, as we have done now for a number of years. But we are still interested in hearing a variety of voices and opening our platform out to other writers.

Five of us can’t get to every fringe event so if you would like to review those for us we are particularly keen to hear from you. We are usually in the position of being able to trade a half hour’s worth of internet access for your copy, if you find that tempting! It helps our planning if you can let us know in advance if you would like to write for us, but we do understand it doesn’t always work like that, so feel free to speak to us at conference.

A few years ago, a group of us decided to organise a Liberal Drinks at federal conference in Brighton. We were building on James Graham’s simple but successful model: nominate a pub, decide a date, publicise it; then have convivial chats with whoever turns up. In Brighton, we followed the same model, deciding on that nice-but-tiny real-ale place near the station. We arrived, a small but respectable number of people turned up, chatted the night away, and at some point moved on to a Chinese restaurant in the vicinity before winding up back at the conference bar. A good time was had by all.

At the end of the night, a general view was expressed that it might be nice to do something similar outwith conference time, and maybe outwith London.

Wind forward a few years, and Jonathan Calder asks as part of a blog post

[is there] scope for a different event at Conference? One idea that attracts me is a blogging clinic where people can come along and ask advice or share ideas in person.

It is obviously too late to do anything for this year, but perhaps another year?

One final thing to throw into the pot before starting to ask the questions is the idea of an “unconference“: a sort of anarchic conference where what happens is decided by the participants. I went to one of these in Nottingham recently, which looked at the Digital Britain report. They provided a venue with a number of rooms, and people planning to come volunteered to run sessions on their areas of expertise. One of the rooms was designated a “blogger’s creche” – and the venue supplied the wifi, the participants brought a variety of their own gadgets. Indeed, by the time you read this I will be up in Bradford at Photocamp 09 – a very similar idea, it seems.

Munge all three of these ideas together, and I think you have the nub of a good idea that we as Lib Dem bloggers and netty people could do. We could meet, for a day, exchange ideas, share our skills with each other, end up in the pub or other hostelry.

So far, so good. But there are a lot of questions to answer first, so I thought I would throw it open for discussion.

Where should we hold it? London or {not-London}? There are lots of people in London, and it’s easy to get to from everywhere, but us provincial types resent da capital a bit. If we had it out in the sticks somewhere, would people come? Would people come, anyway?

What venue? Ideally we need the use of a place with several large rooms, all with free wifi. A coffee urn never goes amiss. LDV could probably spring for a couple of hundred pounds, but that doesn’t usually buy a nice place or one with an internet connection, or one in London – at least not the easily accessible bits. Is there maybe an MP’s office somewhere that might fit the bill? Perhaps we could combine it with a meatspace activity day quid pro quo?

When? Initial suggestions seem to be – have an informal chat at conference, and try to arrange something for October or November. Is a Saturday OK? Anything we should avoid?

What content? Is there something you want to discuss, or a session you want to lead? (I’ve half a mind on a session called The Birth of Lib Dem Radio)

Further details, my friends, are up to you. What do you think?

Today I went to Wikipedia to see what happened today in history, and saw that it’s the birthday of the composer Edvard Grieg. Quick as a flash, the Kit and the Widow song “hundreds of Norwegians on the London Underground” to the tune of the Hall of the Mountain King rises unbidden in my mind – and with it, memories of the Brent East by-election, and Ed Fordham’s uncanny rendition of “Can you tell me please – where can Dollis Hill be found?” For many of you, this will mean nothing, but I’m hoping a significant number of you will be humming the Hall of the Mountain King all day in sympathy.

Two big stories

There’s only one big story today; it broke on the blogs last night and dominates the headlines this morning. Aide quits. Blow to Brown. Afghanistan policy in tatters. Humiliated defence secretary. Read all about it in the Guardian, the Times and the Telegraph.

Read, too, Eric Joyce’s tweet about the whole thing – 140 characters allow him to say “In lounge at Euston, waiting for train after speech to UKNDA. Big ugly mug on giant screens. Everything seems pretty shit, actually.”

My second pick of the stories is the glum news that Britain will be the last to leave the recession behind:

The UK economy will shrink in the third quarter and register zero growth in the fourth quarter, while America’s economy will grow by 2.4 per cent in the fourth quarter and the euro Area’s will increase by 2 per cent.

The forecast will come as a blow to Alistair Darling, who in an newspaper interview on Thursday reiterated that he believed the economy would return to growth by the end of the year with Britain experiencing a V-shaped recession.

Two must-read blog posts

Mark Reckons meets A Man with a Plan. It’s a good interview, and eminently readable even for those of us who aren’t familiar with Tory MP Dougless Carswell or his work. It does just leave me a little champing at the bit for questions unasked. How will he pay for open primaries? How does he avoid the tyranny of the majority amongst all the sheriffs, recalls and referendums?

Costigan Quist talks… erm… spherical barcharts.

Take your opinion polls and draw a graph. But instead of making it a bar chart, use the height of each line as the diameter of a circle. Looking at a circle, we see the area of course. Think back to your GCSE maths. The Conservatives have about 2.5 times the support of the Lib Dems, but the Tory circle is six times bigger that the yellow one.

Coming up on Lib Dem Voice later today: Is Mandelson losing the battle with the pirates? And just how do councillors spend their time? Mark Pack reports.

So runs the rather foolish quote from the Taxpayers’ Alliance in a story from the Daily Express expressing outrage at a job ad for a Director of Digital Engagement.

The Government should have better things to spend money on than a pointless deputy Twittercrat. The public sector as a whole should be tightening its belt during times of economic hardship, and this job would be a scandalous waste even during good economic times.

Taxpayers don’t want more Web2.0. They want an end to wasteful spending.

Neither the TPA nor the Conservative Party can see the point, instead frothing at the mouth and making the dim conflation that Web 2.0 is the same as Twitter. But both need to realise failing to understand something is not a reason to condemn it out of hand. If you too are not clear on Web 2.0 – try Wikipedia. It really refers to cumulative changes that have happened slowly on the internet over the last five years or so. Many web users may not be aware that things have changed. But almost everything you do on the internet these days includes Web 2.0 technology. If you’ve bought books from Amazon, watched something on Youtube, written a blog post or used web-based email you’ll almost certainly have used the technology.

Web 2.0 is vital to the future of meaningful use of the internet, and it’s important that Government plays ball. Government and local government both process a huge amount of data and have poor records in making that available for other people to use – one of the key things that Web 2.0 is about. Like it or not, communication on the internet is a big part of life for many people now, in business and in personal lives, and it behooves government to catch up and use the internet in the best way possible.

Here are two examples of Web 2.0 demands from tax payers. The first is My Society’s “Free our Bills” campaign – intended to get Parliament to reform how they make information about the lawmaking process available so that the layperson can better understand what’s proposed. Not a waste of anyone’s money, surely?

The second is from taxpayer David Cameron. His part has a policy of “Google Government” as reported in his speech to the Local Government Association earlier this year. They want councils to make available details of all their transactions, so that opposition councillors and members of the public can scrutinise their accounts and make suggestions on savings. But that too can be made much easier and more meaningful with the application of Web 2.0 technology. Clearly that wasn’t in Francis Maude’s mind when he was condemning it.

If the person appointed in the job ad can get both of those things done, there is real possibility of value for money engagement with real people. And that’s worth at least some of the salary this person will be paid.

On the whole, it’s been a stupid few days for the Taxpayers’ Alliance – see also yesterday’s shock revelation of Portsmouth Council’s employees’ 11 seconds per day on Facebook.

Good morning, on this fine morning – Charlie Sheen’s birthday, and one of Nottingham Lib Dem’s “delivery days.” Here’s hoping for no rain for me and for Charlie.

Top stories

Unbeknownst to the rest of us, the Tories have carried out a coup:

Tories claim: we have seized control of Scotland Yard

The Conservatives have wrested control of Scotland Yard from the Home Office and now have its top officers working to their agenda, a senior aide to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has told the Guardian.

Kit Malthouse, the deputy mayor for policing, has declared that he and Johnson “have our hands on the tiller” of the Metropolitan police and have an electoral mandate to influence what it does.

He asserted that the Johnson regime had “elbowed the Home Office out of the picture” and would no longer act as a rubber stamp to whatever the force proposed, insisting: “We do not want to be a passenger on the Met cruise.”

What to link to in the Telegraph? Wogan thinks newsreading is easy? Bikini Godesses? Batman beats Spiderman?

Or Sentenced to death on the NHS?

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.
Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

Two must-read blog posts

Liberal England: Televised debates will be bad for Liberal Democrats

Yesterday we brought you news that Nick Clegg has agreed to take part in Sky’s debate of party leaders. Jonathan Calder thinks this might not be the best of ideas:

The arrangements under which the party gets close to equal treatment with the two main parties during election campaigns were hard won. If Sky TV is allowed to tear them up (if there is more than one debate, will Nick Clegg be invited to all of them?) we are unlikely to gain from it. As far as the media are concerned, the story is Labour vs Tory, Brown vs Cameron. The Lib Dems and Nick Clegg are a distraction to this and if they can sideline us they will.

Caron’s Musings: A Morning at the Pantomime – Holyrood Megrahi Debate misses the mark

Caron gives a blow-by-blow account of the Scottish Parliament’s debate about the release of Megrahi.

So, our Parliament gathers to scrutinise one of the biggest decisions ever taken by a Scottish Minister. Yes, the mood is going to be tense, but you would expect an air of industry, of gravity. You expect the contributions to be full of detailed analysis and careful consideration. You would think that everyone would absolutely be on their best behaviour, knowing that the rest of the UK and potentially America is watching. […]

Unfortunately, our MSPs can occasionally be relied upon to behave with all the decorum of a roomful of 2 year olds fighting over a single bag of sweeties and today was one of these occasions. It was as if the nation had dressed its parliamentarians up in their best clothes for the big occasion and crossed its fingers and hoped for the best that they would be on their best behaviour.

And finally, an honourable mention to Mark Reckons’ Fisking Mike Ion on LabourList regarding voting against Labour.

Well, that’s it. August is over, nights are drawing in, it’s downhill to Christmas, and LDV’s daily 2×2 slot that’s more-or-less been on hold over the summer returns to its more-or-less 8am schedule to bring you two top news stories and two must-read blog posts from the world of Lib Demmery.

With just 120 days till the end of the year, 2nd September is the day the Great Fire of London broke out in 1666, the day Thomas Telford died in 1834, and Salma Hayek’s birthday. Happy birthday, Miss Hayek!

Two top stories

PM’s role in release of Megrahi

Gordon Brown and David Miliband were last night drawn directly into the furore over the release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing when it emerged that Britain told Tripoli that the prime minister and foreign secretary did not want to see him die in prison.

In a major setback for Downing Street, which has insisted the release was entirely a matter for Edinburgh, it emerged that a Foreign Office minister intervened last February to make clear to Libya that Brown and Miliband hoped Abdelbaset al-Megrahi would not “pass away” in prison.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve had enough of this story now. The decision has been made, the man is imminently going to die; moreover, there is no way of reversing the decision and returning him to his Scottish prison. Why are we still all talking about it?

See also

• Anders Hanson: Megrahi
• Andrew Reeves: Megrahi row continues
• Darrell Goodliffe: Al-Megrahi: international power politics at its worse

Police arrogant over crime victims warns chief constable

Bernard Hogan-Howe, the outgoing head of Merseyside Police, said it was “intolerable” if officers do not appear to care or listen to what victims need.

In a public attack on the tactic of “screening out” certain crimes, the chief constable said it is the duty of officers to do the “right thing” by those who pay their wages.

Instead of selecting which offences are worthy of attendance, Mr Hogan-Howe said every victim should be offered a visit, no matter how minor the crime.

The story carries a quote from Chesterfield’s Lib Dem MP Paul Holmes:

[Hogan-Howe’s] comments are “indicative of how detached much of the public, including many victims, feel from their local police force”.

“Years of centralised control and Whitehall bureaucracy under Labour has created a system of targets and numbers that has distorted police priorities.”

Two must-read blogposts

It’s not every day I agree with Ann Widdecombe

Rational Liberal takes issue with Europe’s edict that all-woman shortlists are the only way to fix the problem of a lack of representation of women in politics, and along the way discovers Ann Widdecombe agrees with him:

Ann Widdecombe put it rather succinctly recently:

I believe, as a woman, that every woman in Parliament should be able to look every man from the prime minister downwards in the eye and to think she got there on exactly the same basis that he got there.

It’s not often that we’re in agreement, but Widdecombe is talking sense here. Judge candidates by the content of their character, not their sex. The problems of opportunity for women in politics need to be addressed at their core, not at the final point when the candidate is actually selected.

It’s like that Lib Dem conference discussion all over again.

A fall in personal debt is not a bad thing!

Jane Watkinson tackles yesterday’s news that we the public decided last month to start paying off our debts rather than going out to spend more, undermining the Government’s plans to restart the economy by getting us out there buying stuff.

This […] response to a reduction of consumer debt actually shows that we are far from moving on from the type of consumer driven attitudes and culture that lead to the economic crisis. I personally, would want people to see the reduction as a good thing for the economy, and good news for the hope that we may move away from the “what I buy is what I am” attitude.

That’s it from 2×2 for today. If my bleary eyes have understood the rota correctly, it’ll be me back here at 8am tomorrow, so I will see you all then. Have a nice day!