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Welcome to the 133rd of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (30th August – 5th September 2009), together with a hand-picked quintet, partly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed. Don’t forget, by the way, you can now sign up [...]

2 Big Stories Government’s Libya policy: confusion reigns The mounting government confusion over its policy towards Libya continues today. First we had the Prime Minister’s refusal to make a comment on the release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi; then it emerged that Gordon Brown had let it be known he agreed with the [...]

Martin Kettle’s article in The Guardian – suggesting that the week beginning 12th October is make-or-break week for those Labour MPs who’d like to oust Gordon Brown – has sparked a fresh bout of Labour leadership speculation. The Economist’s Bagehot is having none of it: Labour MPs have had their chance. And it wasn’t in [...]

The Guardian has the story: The 10:10 campaign to encourage Britons – and Britain – to cut carbon emissions reached the seat of governmenttoday, with a public call on the Palace of Westminster to sign up. Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat energy and climate change spokesman, wrote to John Bercow, the Speaker of the House [...]

There’s been plenty of interesting Lib Dem internet chatter asking whether – now Ukip’s soon-to-be-ex-leader Nigel Farage is breaching normal convention and standing against the incumbent Speaker, Tory MP John Bercow, in Buckingham – the Lib Dems should follow suit. Opinion is divided. Some say we absolutely shouldn’t – here, for instance, is Stephen Glenn: [...]

It’s been a busy day for Nick… speaking out on the Prime Minister’s contortions over the release of Mr Al Megrahi, confirming his intention to accept Sky News’s invitation to a televised leaders’ debate, as well as launching a new Lib Dem campaign, this one aimed at increasing the pay of the lowest-paid troops by [...]

As LDV noted this morning Sky News has decided to lay down the gauntlet, and formally invite the major party leaders to particpate in a televised debate during the general election campaign. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has formally accepted his invitation, issuing the following statement on his website: Many thanks for your letter of [...]

… We’d say a big thank you to the 19,655 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in August. This is our lowest readership figure of the year to date, down a notch on last month’s 22,000 – not surprising in a holiday month and when genuinely exciting political news is scarce. For the [...]

Stephen Tall rounds up all the polls from August, and assesses what it means for the political parties… We tend not to be too poll-obsessed here at LDV – of course we look at them, as do all other politico-geeks, but viewed in isolation no one poll will tell you very much beyond what you want to read into it. Looked at over a reasonable time-span and, if there are enough polls, you can see some trends. …. August polling tends to be light for a very obvious reason: so many people are away it’s difficult to get a reliable data-set. What’s most notable about this month’s polls is the extent to which the different polling companies’ figures agree; often we will find at least one ‘outlier’, perhaps with ICM being most generous to the Lib Dems and YouGov most miserly. But this month, all published polls place the Tories in the range 41-43%, Labour at 24-28% and the Lib Dems between 17-19%. Perhaps this isn’t so very surprising in a month when political news has been pretty thin.

The south-west’s Western Morning News has the report: A WESTCOUNTRY MP has told an official inquiry into the Parliamentary expenses scandal that politicians should be able to profit from their taxpayer-funded second homes. North Devon Lib-Dem MP Nick Harvey made the case in a six-page letter to the Committee on Standards in Public Life which [...]