Good news from the courts today:

A group of retired Gurkhas fighting for the right to settle in Britain have won their immigration test case at London’s High Court.

They were challenging immigration rules which said that those who retired from the British Army before 1997 did not have an automatic right to stay.

Prominent supporter actress Joanna Lumley said it was a “chance to right a great wrong”.

The government said it would now review all Gurkhas’ cases. (BBC)

Meanwhile, Joanna Lumley has today launched a new online petition to press for justice for Gurkhas - getting a promise of a review from the government is not the same as securing success for the campaign. The petition, which is also being backed by Nick Clegg, is at www.gurkhajustice.org.uk

Nick Clegg said:

This ruling rightly condemns the Government’s shameful decision to deny these veterans the right to live here and gain British citizenship after years of service and distinguished conduct.

The Government must now allow all Gurkhas who risked their lives serving in our armed forces to become British citizens.

If someone is prepared to die for our country they should have the right to live in our country. (www.nickclegg.com)

It’s rare for an internal Lib Dem party contest (other than for leader) to start making headlines on the BBC website, but the presence of Lembit Opik as a candidate for party president has achieved just that, with this report on his Facebook campaign page.

That is of course the Catch-22 of Lembit’s campaign for the presidency: many of his supporters point to his knack for generating widespread publicity that gets the Lib Dems noticed. His opponents point to exactly the same talent.

There are, of course, three candidates for the party presidency, and each of them has a web presence. Of most interest (we hope) to party members looking to choose the candidate on the basis of what they offer, rather than your view of their personalities, below are the links to the their manifestos:

Chandila Fernando
Lembit Opik MP
Baroness Ros Scott

Lib Dem Voice has offered to run up to three ‘Presidential Platforms’ on behalf of each of the candidates during the contest. How they choose to use these is entirely up to them, and we hope will help inform party members in making their choice for party president.

Good if very succinct analysis over at MyDD: overwhelmingly those in close races for their re-election voted against the bail out.

Society - broken or not? Looks like someone can’t make up their minds:

• Cameron retreats from his claim that Britain has a ‘broken’ society (Independent)
• BBC must help to heal the broken society, say Tories (Telegraph)

On 27th September the latest “Inspiration Day” was held in London by the Campaign for Gender Balance. These are friendly and informal events, designed to give female members the opportunity to learn more about becoming more active in the Liberal Democrats.

More than fifty women attended Saturday’s session, which included advice on becoming an MP, a Councillor, or a member of one of the Party’s committees. Training on key skills was given and everyone had a chance to contribute and to ask questions.

Commenting afterwards, Layla from Acton said, “I hope we’ll be able to keep in touch and create a support network for one another as we embark on whatever paths we decide to choose.”

Anjeliki from Chingford, said, “Saturday’s meeting was truly inspiring and extremely rewarding. Meeting such dynamic people was a complete surprise.”

Only a quarter of Liberal Democrat approved candidates are women, and just 1 in 7 Lib Dem MPs. The Campaign for Gender Balance was created to seek out, train, mentor and provide practical support to women candidates.

The next Inspiration Day is for the Yorkshire and Humber region, and takes place in Leeds on 18th October 2008, between 10am and 5.30pm.

If you are interested in attending, please contact the Campaign Organiser, Vicky Booth, on or phone 020 7340 4992.

From The Independent:

All the building societies that transformed themselves into banks quoted on the stock exchange between 1989, starting with the old Abbey National, and 2000, when Bradford & Bingley took the plunge, have either failed or had to be rescued. Following Bradford & Bingley’s demise, there is not one left.

Meanwhile the building societies which resisted the temptation, such as Nationwide, Britannia, Yorkshire and 56 others, have gone on doing their core job of providing home loans for ordinary people. They have been virtually untouched by the financial crisis.

You can read the full story here.

In addition to the gain off the Conservatives in Hampstead Town (Hampstead and Kilburn constituency), there were three other excellent Liberal Democrat results last night in key Parliamentary constituencies: on Truro City Council, the Liberal Democrats took a seat off Mebyon Kernow (Truro and Falmouth constituency), in Alfriston ward, Wealden District Council, the Liberal Democrats took a seat off the Conservatives with a 24% swing (Lewes constituency) and in Colden Common & Twyford ward (Winchester constituency) we held a seat with an increased majority and swing from the Conservatives.

Sadly, not all in the same story, but here are three worth a look:

Labour plans online rapid rebuttal unit - Liberal England has the story.

Conservative MP Richard Benyon confirms he pulled his blog due to the rules over what his MP allowances can be spent on - Liberal Burblings has the story.

Car lobby loses fight to water down pollution rules - The Guardian has the story.

This post was brought to you without the aid of the Daily Mail

I joined the party in 1991. But I only really got involved at grassroots level after I started working in the party in 2000. And like many other enthusiastic people who start helping at local level I rapidly found myself as chair of my local party.

And like many other people in my position I had strengths and weaknesses. I was pretty good at raising money, and we shortly had a RISO and a lot of cash in the bank. But I didn’t have much of a plan for how we were going to turn supporters into members and activists without the support of our councillors (who were understandably preoccupied with running a council that had been left in a mess by Labour).

And that’s where the Leadership Academy comes in. Existing training at regional conferences is often excellent, but is limited to a fairly small number of topics and very specific times.

The proposed Leadership Academy is a massive opportunity for the party to create a much larger group of activist Liberals who will help us win seats at every level for years to come, by broadening the subjects which are trained, broadening the base of people who are trained and making training more accessible.

But this will only happen if we offer training on the basis of enthusiasm and not where you live.

The party at the moment quite rightly targets money on seats that are winnable at the next election. Wrongly though, outside Conference, we don’t give much moral or training support to seats that are currently unwinnable.

Fundamentally we can’t double our seats over the next two elections without winning in some places that aren’t far off black holes at the moment.

We also can’t double our seats unless we retain almost all the new enthusiastic people who start helping us - regardless of where they live. Lack of support (mainly advice and training) drives people out of the party and out of activism.

Conversely, as seats like Hornsey & Wood Green have shown, it only really needs a small number of activists to start the virtuous circle that ends in us winning the Parliamentary seat.

The Leadership Academy is a great opportunity to take Conference style training to activists all year round if we do two things:

Firstly we should train anyone enthusiastic. At worst they’ll grow to love the party more and deliver more leaflets and donate more money in years to come. At best they’ll be the next generation of MPs like Lynne Featherstone who have turned black holes into Liberal Democrat strongholds.

Secondly nobody should be too important or too unimportant to deserve training. None of us are perfect at all the skills we need, and all of us can learn.

Neither of these are expensive. For instance we can probably fill as many media training slots as we need to fill with volunteers from party groups like Lib Dems in PR. But if we don’t make this one of our top priorities for the Academy then we’re missing a great opportunity.

Continuing the party’s excellent run of by-election results in Camden (and more generally in North London), Linda Chung is the new councillor for Hampstead Town ward:

Liberal Democrat 1,242 (44.1%, +11.5%)
Conservative 1,114 (39.6%, -6.9%)
Labour 289 (10.3%, -1.0%)
Green 140 (5.0%, -3.3%)
BNP 29 (1.0%, +1.0%)

Majority: 128 (4.5%)
Swing: 9.2% Conservative to Liberal Democrat

Congratulations Linda, and a good sign for Ed Fordham and his team as this ward is in the Hampstead & Kilburn seat at the next general election (2005 notional result: Labour 36%, Liberal Democrat 35%, Conservative 23%, Others 5%).

Compare and contrast two stories, bottom one published 16 minutes after the top one:

BBC1, 10.35pm

David Dimbleby is in Manchester tonight, asking the questions of Our Glorious Vince Cable with supporting cast of political midgets. Oh, all right, Community Sec’y of State Hazel Blears, Shadow Commons leader Theresa May, general secretary of Unite Derek Simpson and Spectator political editor Fraser Nelson.

Dunno about the audience’s questions (do they matter in this weekly battle of the egos?), but we can expect DD’s focus to be on who said what about who in the bar at the Tory and Labour conferences, and those yawning - or is it narrowing? - gaps in the polls. Simpson will be the key used to crank open this particular can of sardines, I think. A Labour man, he dismissed David Milliband as “smug and arrogant” when speculation over the Prime Minister’s position was at its height, er, a week and a half ago, and declared that we might just as well get Cameron in since his policies were so similar. A very public disillusioned lefty.

My prediction: our Vince will rise serenely above all this nausea. As ever, feel free to sound off in the comments thread.

BBC1, 10.35pm.

As speculated here on LDV last night, the Information Commissioner has now officially ruled that the Lib Dems must stop attempts to contact up to 250,000 voters in 50 marginal constituencies with an automated phone call featuring leader Nick Clegg. The BBC website has the full story here.

Lib Dem chief executive Lord Rennard told the BBC last week the aim of the calls in the wake of Mr Clegg’s party conference speech was to “guide” the party to the issues worrying voters in 50 key seats. An automated 30 second voice message from Mr Clegg was played out during the early evening calls, with recipients tapping numbers on their handsets to respond to questions about education, health, tax, crime, environmental and economic policies.

The Information Commissioner’s Office has now ruled that the Lib Dem calls constituted “direct marketing”, which are not allowed unless someone has given prior consent.

I understand from party sources that of the 250,000 calls attempted, some 159,000 people in those 50 constituencies will have heard Nick Clegg inviting them to give him their opinions on the Lib Dems’ key messages and hear what they are. Out of those 159,000 the Information Commissioner has received six complaints, or 0.0038% if you prefer.

The Comissioner’s enforcement notice gives the party 30 days to stop using the calls (any breach would be a criminal offence). The party has confirmed to LDV that it has already done so.

A couple of people have commented to me about how I moderately frequently make blog postings based on a Daily Mail story and linking through to their site for the full story (such as this one about Vince Cable calling for an investigation into Keith Vaz) - and querying why attention should be given to what the Daily Mail writes.

Why indeed? Well, my reasons are:

1. The Daily Mail is read (on the 2005 figures I have to hand) by 5.7 million people, making it by some margin the most read daily national newspaper. You can’t be interested in what the media is saying and ignore it.

2. Very large numbers of Liberal Democrat voters read it: around 980,000 Daily Mail readers voted Liberal Democrat in 2005, a number only topped by the 1.1 million Sun readers who voted Liberal Democrat.* In comparison, there were only 250,000 Independent reading Liberal Democrat voters and 400,000 Guardian reading Liberal Democrat voters. So if you’re interested in politics, and in particular from a Liberal Democrat angle, all the more reason not to ignore the Mail.

3. The Daily Mail invests heavily in its journalistic resources. Whatever you may think of how they write-up their stories, the Mail’s journalists frequently break stories due to having the time to do the old-fashioned legwork. Its record in breaking stories about dodgy Labour donations is a classic example: the Mail unearthed the story because it sent journalists door-to-door calling on Labour donors until they found something.

4. And then there’s the question of how the stories are written up… In my view, all manner of stories end up being written up in a distorted manner, but you can usually do a reasonable job of extracting the truth from a Mail political story by:

• Ignore the headline: it often exaggerates so much for effect that it doesn’t really match the story.
• Read the first line to get what the story is about, and then read the story from the end upwards: there is often a defence included in the story towards the end which undermines what goes before. Although I’ve read plenty of Mail stories on political topics which I know about and thought the headline and first-half of the story was distorted, I’ve not (yet) come across one of these where the second-half didn’t provide the explanation as to why the story was wrong.
• Watch out carefully for who is quoted to support the story. The usual structure of the political scandal story is to have a quote from an opposition politician, often calling for an inquiry. There are some, from all parties - such as Vince Cable in the example linked to above - who have a track record of only calling for an inquiry or condemning someone when they have very good grounds to. Then there are others seemingly will happily condemn something based on the merest prod of encouragement from a journalist.

Apply these three tests and you can do pretty well at getting to the truth of a Daily Mail political story. I’ve seen plenty of devastating demolitions of Mail political stories, but those have all been ones where these three tests had warned me already. Of course, one day there’ll be a story that breaks all these rules, and all this leaves aside the question of what stories to chose to run in the first place or stories about immigration…

* These figures are compiled from Kavanagh & Butler’s The British General Election of 2005 using the tables on p.120-1 and p.139. As they are based in part on polling data and also on matching up data from slightly different time periods, don’t place too much weight on them beyond the second significant figure but you can have confidence in the overall picture they paint.

Today was Gordon Brown’s day; and the common media consensus appears to be that he did enough to ward off the immediate threat to his leadership from Labour rebels.

All of which took me back a year to the high praise which greeted Ming Campbell’s speech to the 2007 Lib Dem conference – here at LDV, in an uncharacteristic display of brazen loyalism, we collated some of the most positive quotes from the top pundits. All were agreed that Ming was a cert to stay as leader. Within a few weeks he had decided to resign for the good of the party (and his own dignity).

Today changed nothing for Labour, nor for Gordon Brown. The party, with him at its helm, is doomed to a crushing defeat. Unfortunately for Labour, though, it’s hard to imagine Gordon ‘doing a Ming’, and departing the stage quietly. The next few weeks are going to be messy.