The last poll of 2008 here on LDV was a bit of a throwback for us liberals, with the question of church disestablishment rearing its head amid reports that Labour is considering reforming the 1701 Act of Settlement barring Catholics from ascending to the throne. LDV asked: Do you think the time has now come for the Church of England to be disestablished?

Here’s what you told us:

>> 47% (147) - Yes, the link between state and church should be immediately ended
>> 35% (107) - Yes, in principle, but it is a minor issue
>> 17% (52) - No, it is important to retain the link between church and state
>> 2% (5) - Don’t know / Other
Total Votes: 308. Poll ran: 22 Dec 2008 - 3 Jan 2009

So a massive 82% of you are in favour of ending the link between Church and state, with a plurality of you believing it should end immediately. A significant minority - more than one-third of LDV-reading voters (including me) - reckon the principle of disestablishment is right, but question whether it should be seen as a priority.
but are less concerned about it happening immediately

Anyone from any political persuasion can list things this Government has done that annoy them.

Personally, I was annoyed enough to join millions of others on the march against the war in Iraq - now it’s time to hold them to account.

I’m not so sure how I will react if and when I get the orders from the Government to present myself at the interrogation centre in nearby Derby and hand over more personal information than is currently demanded from sex offenders.  I’m not certain I’m ready to join Simon Hughes in jail for refusing an ID card.

I’ve never yet been arrested, so my DNA is not amongst the millions of samples wrongly held by the Police.

I have to queue for longer than ever in my surviving local Post Office or the one in the city centre since many so others have been shut.

Now I’m no longer even safe in my own home.  

If I become a debtor - or if my local council again wrongly summonses me for Council Tax non-payment, and sends the summons to an address I have told them I no longer live at - bailiffs have been given new powers to break into my house, use violence against me and physically restrain me.

And if somone accuses me of some nefarious internet or computer crime, the police don’t even need to knock on my door or get a warrant, before remotely accessing my computer and reading my files.  And this is on top of other mad Government plans to track my every move on the internet and every phone call and text I send.

In a long posting last week, James Graham examined the state of play with the current government and civil liberties.  His conclusion - it’s terrifying, and all right thinking people need to inform themselves about what’s going on and then get angry.  Specifically, he said, take these steps:

1. Bookmark the Convention for Modern Liberty website and sign up to their news alerts.
2. Attend a Convention event, either the one in London, one of the regional and national events happening on the same day or a local event. If there is no event happening in your area, start organising one!
3. Join a pro-democracy and human rights organisation. Whichever tickles your fancy (although, obviously, joining Unlock Democracy helps pay my wages!) and get involved.
4. Join or set up a local group. It doesn’t have to be affiliated to anything, and it needn’t be anything more than you and a couple of your mates to start off with.
5. Write to your MP and ask them their starter for ten: “what do you think about the dillution of civil liberties over the past couple of decades and what do you intend to do about it in 2009.” And keep writing to them.
6. Go to the Taking Liberties exhibition at the British Library if you can, before it closes at the beginning of March.
7. Tell everyone you know to do the same.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

The US Air Force may not seem the obvious place to go for advice on this, but they do seem to take online communication seriously and are an organisation whose activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, are frequently talked about online.

Being also rather a large bureaucracy, they’ve created a flowchart to help decide how to respond to online comments. Some parts are, er…, very American management speak (”proactively share your story”) but there’s also a lot of good sense in it, particularly in its five headings about responding to blog postings:

Transparency (make clear who you are)
Sourcing (give sources for your claims)
Timeliness (respond quickly)
Tone (the tone you use reflects on yourself and your organisation)
Influence (put your efforts into the sites that matter most)

Anyway, here is the full flowchart for your delectation.

UPDATE: Here is the updated version.

Certainly the US Air Force seems to get the Web 2.0 world rather better than the US Army, with its odd description of Twitter.

Hat-tip: David Meerman Scott

With apologies to those of you with real jobs that in some way involve, y’know, actual graft - nurses, retailers, premiership footballers - but for many of us with cushy office jobs, this Monday morning marks the return to our desks after over a fortnight’s holiday. And, boy, does it hurt.

Politicians, though, are a different breed it seems. Labour politicians especially appear hyperactive in their frantic eagerness to interfere in everyone’s lives I mean, save the world erm, sorry, help us ungrateful citizens. Far from dreading the alarm clock’s fascist sirens, they’re up with the larks, with a spring in their step. Here are just a few random examples…

Tony Blair: “What gets me up in the morning, and still gets me up in the morning, are the improvements in the basic issues that affect people’s lives.” (Sept. 2004)

David Miliband: “Social justice is what gets me up in the morning.” (March 2007)

Gordon Brown: (April 2008)

“I get up in the morning saying this is the best job in the world.”

“I wake up in the morning thinking what we can do to help homeowners.”

“I wake up in the morning thinking what we can do to help… people who have got small businesses.”

“I wake up in the morning thinking what we can do to help… people looking for jobs.”

“I wake up in the morning thinking what we can do to help… people wanting opportunities so they can have better jobs for the future.”

Jacqui Smith: “What matters to me when I get up in the morning is thinking what am I going to do today to help the British people feel safer on the streets.” (Sept. 2008)

Their devotion to getting up in the morning for all our sakes does them proud. And prompts me, this Monday morning, to ask the question which headlines this post - what gets you up in the mornings? And why? Please tell me.

Please

…The Daily Mail doesn’t!

Today’s Observer brings us the story of how the NHS is spending money on getting celebrities to take part in health information campaigns but insisting on keeping the details secret in case it puts people off:

The Department of Health, which increasingly uses actors, singers, television stars and sports personalities to convince the nation to adopt healthier habits, refuses to admit how much it spends on celebrity campaigns. Now critics have accused the government of “unacceptable secrecy” following speculation that stars are being paid up to £10,000 a day for their appearances.

The DoH has rejected a bid by the Observer under the Freedom of Information Act to find out how much money Alesha Dixon received for backing the Condom Essential Wear campaign, or the fee paid to model turned television presenter Melinda Messenger for helping to promote the 5-A-Day healthy eating scheme, or the amount paid to singer Jenny Frost for supporting its Breast Buddy breastfeeding initiative…

“It’s good to work with people who are of a high profile. But given that it’s a national health service, we do have a right to know how much celebrities are paid,” said Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of GPs. “It’s just a shame that celebrities don’t give up their time for free to help improve the health of the nation. That would be a brilliant, public-spirited thing to do.”

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrats’ spokesman on health, said: “In many ways the use of celebrities makes a lot of sense, but there’s no justification at all for secrecy over these fees. It’s unacceptable and ludicrous that the DoH refuses to release the amounts paid. It’s public money and we have a right to know.”

I think Norman Lamb has got the balance just right. Using celebrities can be an effective way of reaching out to different audiences, but secrecy stops accountability and protects waste. Without the safety net of public scrutiny, it is far too easy for bad and wasteful decisions to be made.

You can read the full Observer story here.

It’s been a busy few weeks since we last delved into the Archives at LDV Towers, so here’s a little snapshot of what’s been happening here since we last rounded up.

You can’t have failed to miss our 12 Op-Eds of Christmas, a round-up of all your favourite writing from the blog throughout 2008. You can find all twelve at this tag link.  There are still a few more to come, taking us up to when we at LDV towers take the tree out for recyling, take our Christmas cards to Smiths or Marks, and carefully wrap up the baubles and trinkets with their memories for next year.

Before Christmas, we were still desperately hawking our year-end anthology as an additional way to help ends meet. Slightly after last posting date, news fluttered in of two broadly favourable reviews from fellow bloggers Matt Wardman and Alex Wilcock. And it’s still not too late to buy a copy for yourself.  Go on, buy it - we need the money!

Events at Christmas certainly coloured our postings considerably. Firstly, there were those warm words of tolerance and acceptance from the leader of the Catholic Church, forthrightly condemned for LDV by Colin Lloyd.  Then those paragons of humility and gentleness, the Israeli Defense Force stepped up with a much-needed and proportionate response to amateur rocketeering, and Darrell Goodliffe stepped up to the LDV plate, closely followed by our Shadow Foreign Secretary Ed Davey MP.

On a lighter note, Alix compiled a list of people she really, really wanted as LD voters, Lord Tyler responded to complaints of taking things a little seriously when it comes to Strictly Come Dancing and Parliamentary reform, Mark proved William Gladstone wrong, John Thurso won Parliamentary Beard of the Year, Stephen made some startling suggestions for the next Doctor Who and Helen linked to some really off-the-wall political billboard pitches.

You’ll have seen our end-of-year awards coverage - we asked you to nominate your favourite people in numerous categories, then we asked you to vote on them, and finally we told you what you said.  After serious number crunching, Stephen wrestled the STV numbers to the ground and posted results in three four tension-mounting posts: Lib Dem Politician of the Year and By-election of the year; Political Journalist/Broadcaster and Political Programme of the Year; Campaigner of the Year and Most Desperate Press Release; and finally Liberal Voice and Defining Moment of the Year.  Thanks to the hundreds of you who voted, and congratulations to all the winners.

Our new Party President Baroness Ros Scott shared her New Year message with us, as did Nick Clegg. “Letterman” (pseudonymised for good reason) made some predictions about reshuffles. The Liberator Collective told us about their latest edition. Hywel Morgan critiqued Labour’s volte face on the Social Fund. John Ward had another word about stimulation and welfare.

And the Tories came in for special criticism this Christmas: with shadow cabinet members who refused to focus on politics; £1m wasted on unproductive online activity; accusations of sexism; strange spats about executive pay and a peer breaking his tax promise.

Mark dished the dirt on why MPs use Facebook.  Helen let us know what Whitehall got us for Christmas.   And Stephen reviewed last year’s predictions and posed ten vital questions for this 2009.

Finally, if you’ve not yet made your New Year’s Resolutions, we’ve some excellent suggestions here.

Rupert Jones reports for the Guardian:

… government ministers’ pension pots are defying the stock market slump and are up by 10% in a year, it emerged this week. Research by the Liberal Democrats revealed that high-profile ministers have pension pots worth more than 10 times the average in the private sector. Gordon Brown has a personal ministerial pension pot of £274,000. Justice secretary Jack Straw’s is £294,000 and chancellor Alistair Darling’s is £235,000. Lib Dem work and pensions spokesman Lord Oakeshott says: “Ministers and mandarins live in a pensions time warp. They look like the first world war general in Blackadder, sipping fine wines in a chateau well behind the front line while privates in the trenches get their pensions shot to pieces.”

Based on the amount of traffic they’ve passed on to www.libdems.org.uk during 2008, the top five blogs were (with changes in brackets from last year’s top five):

1. Liberal Democrat Voice (no change)
2. Iain Dale (no change)
3. Lynne Featherstone (+1)
4. Liberal England (+1)
5. Jo Christie-Smith (NEW)

Iain will, I’m sure, be flattered as ever to know he is so nice to the Liberal Democrats

(For the list of the top five local sites, see yesterday’s post.)

No great surprise that Ming Campbell’s site dropped out of the top five after he stepped down from being leader. Nick Clegg’s new national site, www.nickclegg.com, came too late in the year to get in the top five, but based on its performance in the few months since it was launched, it looks a strong runner to top the list in 2008 - depending on whether or not the judges (viz, me) decide to count it as a blog (it runs on Wordpress) or not (it isn’t in the first person).

Jonathan Calder’s presence in the top five is a tribute once again to the popularity of his blog. He by no means is a slavish linker to party stories; his presence in the top five rather I think shows the number of readers he attracts and the interest they show in links he provides (a good sign of trust in a site’s author’s judgement!).

Congratulations to Jo Christie-Smith for her appearance in the top five too - beating Guido Fawkes for the last slot.

The top five in 2007 were:

1. Liberal Democrat Voice
2. Iain Dale
3. Ming Campbell
4. Lynne Featherstone
5. Liberal England

Chaos nearly occurred to the BBC News schedules on Radio 4 when an 8 minute interview with Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg went missing at short notice.

Without it, political balance would mean that the World at One would not have been able to broadcast similar interviews with other party leaders, resulting in a knock-on effect throughout the Christmas news schedule.

Shaun Ley has the rest of the story.

The right-wing blogosphere is fairly wetting itself today, picking up on the ‘exclusive revelations’ of the Daily Mail’s Peter Oborne that Labour is allegedly cosying up to the Lib Dems in anticipation of a pact which would see Ming Campbell elected as Commons Speaker and Vince Cable installed as Chancellor:

Although the PM recognises that it would be inconceivable to elect another Labour Speaker, soundings have been taken among the Liberal Democrats. The Whips’ Office has already launched a campaign to get Labour MPs to back former LibDem leader Sir Menzies Campbell to become the new Speaker. This arrangement would mean that Sir Menzies (who, incidentally, possesses the personal distinction and authority to make a very good Speaker) is highly likely to get the job. Indeed, he would be the first Liberal Speaker of the Commons since William Court Gulley at the end of the 19th century. …

and all the signs are that Gordon Brown is warming to the idea of Vince Cable as Chancellor of the Exchequer in a government of national unity.

Personally, I think Mr Oborne’s story is worth much less than the sum of its parts; and, as so often, he’s parcelling up a number of events and some fevered speculation into a far-fetched package.

For a start, that the idea of ‘Lib/Lab cooperation’ is being broken by Mr Oborne himself is grounds for suspicion – if either parties wanted to prepare the ground, they could scarcely have chosen a less sympathetic journalist. And Mr Oborne is hardly plugged into the close counsels of either Nick Clegg or Gordon Brown.

Moreover, I find it hard to believe that Vince – a serious, grown-up politician – really believes that becoming Chancellor in Prime Minister Brown’s Labour cabinet would give him real power over economic policy. The evidence that Mr Oborne produces – a paragraph from Vince’s recent article for the Mail on Sunday emphasising the need for unity politics in times of economic crisis – seems very thin to me.

What I think is conceivable is that Mr Brown is laying some groundwork for warmer relations with the Lib Dems. Ming is a political friend of Gordon’s, respected on all sides of the Commons chamber. It’s easy to see why the Prime Minister might prefer Ming to the political storm that would greet attempts by Labour MPs to install a third successive Labour Speaker.

Similarly, the Prime Minister’s decision to allow Lib Dem shadow cabinet members to meet Whitehall’s permanent secretaries to discuss the party’s manifesto – traditionally a preserve only of HM’s Official Opposition – is pretty canny politics, simultaneously making nice to Nick, while cocking a snook at Dave.

Anyway, over to you, LDV’s readers – what do you reckon: if offered the job by Gordon Brown, should Vince Cable accept the post of Chancellor? Eyes right for the poll; use the comments thread below to give your reasoning…

Last month, as you may recall, Jacqui Smith was in trouble for trumpeting apparently positive knife crime statistics, in a release of information described by the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Michael Scholar, as “premature, irregular and selective”.

Sir Michael has now called for all statistics to be released simultaneously to “all sides of the political debate”. Currently ministers have a 24-hour headstart to prepare a response, and this is damaging public trust in statistics. The politics should start, he told the World at One, after the full release, and not while the final figures were still being prepared.

As a move towards transparency and openness in government this is, of course, hard to argue with. In a country with freedom of information legislation, it seems no more than a logical next step. The government’s reluctance to take up Sir Michael’s suggestion will publicly be put down to “national security” issues, but will in fact flow from the communications side, where there will be anxiety about losing control of the media narrative. And the Tories, as heirs presumptive, will share vicariously in this anxiety. Simultaneous release of statistics will mean the debate is shaped by the first party to make a compelling analysis that the media want to run with, rather than the party in charge.

All parties have clever eggs and dunces in their communications departments. Even if it did become possible for all sides to shape a media narrative from the off, there’s still no reason to think the Lib Dems could pull it off more than the law of averages would dictate. The effect from a party politics point of view would probably be negligable. But as an overall move towards fairness in politics and away from ancient deferential systems, this has to be a cause we should be publicly backing.

Nick Clegg on Radio 4’s Today this morning:

Mr Clegg said that his party would “rebalance” the tax system so that the country comes out of the recession “in a fairer state than we went into it” … Later Mr Clegg said that the EU should reconsider its trade arrangements with Israel over the bombing attacks on Gaza. “The western reaction, the reaction from the international community has either been wrong in the case of George Bush who seems to be giving more or less a green light to carry on bombing no questions asked, or weak in the case of Gordon Brown or the European Union.” (Source: PoliticsHome)

Jo Swinson profiled on the BBC yesterday:

With some honourable members in their eighties and plenty in their sixties and seventies, the Commons is not the most youthful working environment.

Ms Swinson, sitting in the cramped Westminster office she shares with her researcher, said: “Sometimes I think I’m pigeoholed. It still amazes me what excuses people use to bring up my age.” (Source: BBC)

Andy Strange, over on his Process Guy blog,  takes issue with one of the questions:

In it she complains about being pigeon-holed because of her age to a journalist who…er…pigeon-holes her because of her age.

The Conservative peer Lord Laidlaw was criticised by the Lords Appointments Commission last year for failing to keep his promise to stop being a tax exile if he was appointed to the House of Lords:

The commission said it had informed the prime minister of Lord Laidlaw’s situation and said it would not have approved his peerage if it had known that he would not honour his promise.

And how have the Conservatives reacted to this broken promise and public criticism? By continuing to take money from him, as today’s Daily Telegraph reports:

In March, June and September last year, the married peer made three donations of £27,000 each, through the Glasgow-based company Abbey Business Centres.

He also gave £25,000 to Boris Johnson’s London mayoral campaign.

The disclosure is likely to re-ignite the row over how the Tories are funded.

Questions have already been raised over donations from deputy party chairman Lord Ashcroft, who has failed to say if he is now officially resident in the UK.

Lord Laidlaw has donated almost £4million to the Tories since 2005.

You can read their full Lord Laidlaw report here.