LibDem Blogs - Archived!

The latest challenge thrown up by the ever-fascinating game Perplex City requires players to take...

Rob Fenwick, together with Mark Pack and yours truly, has just put up a petition calling for Charles Clarke’s resignation on the front page of the federal site. Rob did the design and graphics. I did the ‘petition engine’ (of which more at a later date) and most of the buttons. Mark drove the [...]

At their request, I quickly put together a new home page for libdems.org.uk tonight which is, in design terms, an adaptation of the General Election post-polling day thank you page. Once you’ve signed the petition (using Martin Tod’s excellent petition engine) there’s a nice bit of joint up thinking from Mark Pack and Martin Tod - [...]

The many names of Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for the Home Office: The Safety Elephant: Presumbly on account of his big ears and his obsessive need to restrict rights in the name of "safety", read this for more.Sweaty Baboon: Now that's just a mean Googlebomb... Funny though!The Lion: I'm the only one that uses this. It's meant to indicate he has an inferiority complex, like a school bully,

www.biogs.com quotes Tony Benn's diary for 23 November 1978: At 9.45 Charles Clarke, the son of my former Permanent Secretary, Otto Clarke, came to see me and we had a pleasant talk. He had just returned from Cuba, where he was British representative on the Preparatory Committee of the World Youth Congress. He said Cuba was most impressive ... Fidel Castro was very much an authoritarian but a most impressive man ... Clarke was critical of the British Labour Party, which he thought was inactive and without influence. When he applied to work in the International Department at Transport ...

The execrable Frank Luntz’s meretricious contributions to BBC’s Newsnight has prompted a flurry of comment... Liberal Review has been investigating Mr Luntz’s checkered/chequered past, as well as observing the similarities between Mr Luntz’s advice to US Republicans and the public profferings of Mr Cameron. This has prompted LR’s editor, Rob Knight, to fire off an e-mail to Newsnight’s editor,

The Liberal Review is doing a great job at bringing to light the worrying links between Cameron and Luntz - and Newsnight's naivety (I hope) in giving Luntz a platform. Chrisco' original article starts ‘Dave’ Cameron probably owes his leadership to the ubiquitous Frank Luntz, the U.S. Republican strategist and pollster who has been hired by Newsnight to conduct focus groups for their programme. Without that exuberant programme in which Luntz demonstrated that Cameron had an appeal to the electorate that no other candidate offered, Cameron would never have got past Davis. In the comments ...

Someone has just posted rumoured postal voting figures on politicalbetting . This is the wildest sort of rumour - so take it as such.

As has been mentioned in most of the papers today, Arsenal are the first London club to make it to the European Cup final which is one of those strange bits of football trivia, whereby the largest city in Europe has had to go fifty years before being represented in the continent’s biggest club match [...]

The saga with the released prisoners shows another example of a government which is in office, but not in power. Charles Clark's use of the passive voice today when he referred to IND has improved implies that he did not expect to be able to have any impact on whether or not IND would improve. There are also a number of areas (health cuts) where the government deny all responsibility.

The debate raging over anti-semitism is confusing at the best of times. Generally speaking I have quite a lot of time for the argument that it is creeping back into fashion by the back door and that we should be less tolerant of lazy rhetoric that blurs the lines between judaism, zionism and the [...]

I'm torn between falling about laughing and feeling genuinely sorry for Pauline Prescott and Tracey Temples' fiance. But how does The Scum know he's only had two shags? Surely this is the perfect opportunity for other ladies who have worked under the Deputy PM to crawl out. Ms Temple's fiance was quoted as saying: “I feel sick. I can’t believe the woman I wanted to marry has slept with John

One day to go and still the salvos of point and counter point fly in the normally sleepy constituency of Moray. Based on what I’ve read, heard and seen with my own eyes, in addition to the yesterday’s fantastic ICM poll that has us on 24% UK wide, I now offer the following by way of a [...]

The latest MORI Poll puts the Liberal Democrats on 25% and Labour and the Conservatives on 30% each. However Bob Worcester was on the ITV lunchtime news saying the Liberal Democrats were actually on 28% in areas where elections where being fought - he did not say what that meant to the Labour and Conservative figures.

Well it appears Charles Clarke appears to have lost around 1,000 prisoners. Many of these were supposed to have been deported after serving their sentences but he appears to have lost them. Amazingly he is still the Home Secretary!

Thanks to Peter Black who is in Britney Spears mode today for this one. Apparently this week's polls in the same week as the death of Blaenau Gwent MP and MSP Peter Laws have made Labour whips lose all sence of decency. The day after Mr Laws died they are already talking about moving the writ for the by election next week in order to hold the by elections on 25 May. Because Mr Laws was an

The following is an e-mail which I sent earlier today to the Editor of BBC Newsnight, following the discussions here and here. I encourage anyone else who agrees that the biases of presenters and guest pundits should be disclosed to contact the BBC expressing this opinion. You can contact the BBC's complaints department here, or e-mail the Editor of Newsnight here. Letter to the Editor of BBC Newsnight Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 11:48:03 +0100 To: peter.barron@bbc.co.uk Subject: Frank Luntz Dear Sir, Regarding your use of pollster Frank Luntz: Mr. Luntz is presented on Newsnight as a ...

Judging by reports in today's Western Mail, Labour seem determined to lose the Blaenau Gwent by-election before it has even been called. Their crassness in seeking to have the writ moved before Peter Law's funeral has upset a lot of people and will reinforce the view in that area that they are still being taken for granted by the Government party. Labour may have abandoned the all-women shortlist that led to the loss of the seat in the first place but it was not just that which led to Peter Law's spectacular victory last year. It was a ...

Not long to go now until local election day on 4th May. It's been fun getting out onto the doorsteps again and meeting people, but it doesn't seem five minutes since the by-election last September! Brian Collin is up again this year, I'm really glad not to have to stand myself until 2008. We're working hard and people have been friendly when we talk to them. It's hard to detect much change in

They are up to their necks in sleaze. The best slogan he could think up for their conference next week is Life’s better under the Tories. Sounds to me like one of Steven Norris’s chat up lines. Can you believe that this lot is in charge? Not for long, eh? Then after 17 years of [...]

Millennium Dome Q:To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport what the cost has been of the Millennium Dome to public funds in each year since its inception. (John Hemming) A:The information is as follows. (1) Grants from National Lottery funds were made by the Millennium Commission to the New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC) as follows. Grant (£) 1997–98 449 1998–99 nil 1999–2000 60 2000–01 119 2001–02 nil 2002–03 nil 2003–04 nil 2004–05 (23)nil 2005–06 (24)nil (23)£24 million (unrequired funds decommitted ...

On Good Friday I got bitten by a dog for the first time in 14 years delivering Liberal Democrat leaflets. Last night I got bitten again! This time the bite was on the other hand (but still the middle finger), it was also deeper and hurt more. What am I doing wrong, have I forgotten how to deliver? Are there more dogs? Will I lose a finger before the end of the Local Election campaign?

This morning's Sun carries the latest Mori Poll. It makes interesting reading: Labour 30% -9 on March Conservatives 30% -4 Lib Dems 25% +6 Which follows yesterdays latest ICM Poll: Conservatives 34% -1 on March Labour 32% -5 Lib Dems 24% +3 So it looks good news on both counts for us Liberal Democrats. The Tories may have cause for concern today after edging past Labour on a slight slide in

How can John Prescott manage to get two women, when after five years of I end up with my fiancée giving me up for the sake of my political career? Life just isn't fair, but then if it were we'd have a PR for Westminster, no ID cards coming in and wouldn't be at war in Iraq.

This article written by Chrisco We return today to the topic of Frank Luntz, and Newsnight’s decision to employ him as their focus group pollster. On the face of it Dr. Luntz has an impeccable pedigree: PhD in Political Science, winner of the 1992 Washington Post “Crystal Ball” award for most accurate pundit in the ’92 elections, 2001 Emmy winner for his MSNBC/CNBC segments ‘100 Days/1000 Voices’ and pioneer of the ‘instant response’ focus group technique (as seen on Newsnight) which was profiled on the pre-eminent American news programme, 60 Minutes, in 1998. So, on paper at least Luntz ...

It now appears that the judges will not await the outcome of the run off on Saturday. Instead they will meet on Friday at the request of the King who has asked them to resolve the constitutional crisis

…now Two Shags. He’s just a tabloid headline writer’s gift, isn’t he?

On Monday the Grauniad published extracts from Chew on This: Everything you don't want to know about fast food by Eric Schlosser in an article guaranteed to have soggy socialists across Britain sobbing into their cereal. You can buy the book here but I don't know why you'd want to - the article has more holes than a bag of french fries after a drive-by-shooting. Here are the top 6 ways the

Most people imagine that the risk of being struck by lightning is somewhat similar to the risk of winning the National Lottery, or perhaps that of “close-encounters” style alien abduction. Anybody who has spent some time in a hospital burns unit will know that this blatantly untrue: In the UK, lightning strikes are frequent incidents [...]