Rob Fenwick, who has run the Lib Dem Voice activists’ blog for the last year or so has decided that it is time to pull the plug:

Over the last couple of months I’ve been advertising for someone to take over the running of Lib Dem Voice, as unfortunately I’m unable to continue for various reasons - not least of which the amount of time running a site of this nature takes up (Iain Dale may well pop up now and tell me he warned me… and he did!).  

I had discussions with a couple of people, and after some investigation it’s been decided that the Lib Dem Voice blog will close to new contributions and comments on June 19th, and the forum will close on the same day. The blog will continue to be available as an archive for some time thereafter, forum posts will not - please ensure you take a copy of any posts that are valuable to you (maybe someone could create a private wiki ‘campaign manual’ out of the useful stuff?).

As a domain, libdemvoice.org has 1300 backlinks on Google - quite a lot. It would take somebody around 4-6 months to rebuild that sort of profile, even with a fair wind.

If nothing comes of it, the party nationally could take the domain on for its newspaper or speech archives.

Hmmm. A thought.

Lib Dem MPS are about to cop half a million (£10k each) under the new communications allowance (via Matt Dean). Can they not find a way to spend 5% of that on a grassroots blog - a far better way of communicating with many constituents than a propaganda sheet.

Tags: libdemvoice, liberal democrat, politics, rob fenwick, lib dem voice