It's less than five weeks to York Spring Conference. Many of us will be looking forward to returning to the beautiful city to debate, be trained and to learn from exhibitors and discuss issues at fringe meetings. The agenda has now been published. This is your chance to go through it now and work out what motions you might like to amend, to plan out your diary for the weekend and not to just leave it till you're actually on the train to York. You can go to debates on access to driving lessons, preserving trial by jury, revitalising town ...
Bat for Lashes is the stage name of Natasha Khan, who wrote this beautiful song with Justin Parker. To prove that there's no justice in this world, it reached only number 144 in the UK singles chart in the summer of 2012. I didn't know there was a number 144. But cheer up, because Natasha Khan also provides us with out Trivial Fact of the Day. In the Seventies, when there was an upsurge of interest in the game of squash, we heard a great deal about the "Khan squash dynasty" from Pakistan, and it turns out that Natasha is ...
The combined agenda and directory for the forthcoming Lib Dem Spring Conference 2026 in York are now out. Taking a look through, I was glad to see that a change I introduced as President has stuck. We used to do Party Awards only every other conference, and I changed that to having awards at every one instead. That is continuing in York. Good news – and good luck to everyone who gets nominated for one. You can download the agenda and directory booklet here. Sign up to get the latest news and analysis
The website Democracy for Sales reports that the organisation Labour Together paid a controversial PR firm at least £30,000 to investigate journalists that were digging into how its undeclared funding bankrolled Keir Starmer's successful Labour leadership campaign. They say that according to documents they have seen, the influential Starmerite think tank, once run by Morgan McSweeney and then by Josh Simons, now a minister in Starmer's government, hired APCO Worldwide to investigate journalists from the Sunday Times, the Guardian and other outlets and to identify their sources: ACPO was hired in 2023, when Simons ran Labour Together. Sources close to ...
It's Charles Dickens' birthday. He was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth - you can visit the house where he was born. To celebrate the day, here is his description of the effect the building of the London to Birmingham railway had on Camden: The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that ...
Welcome to my summary of the latest national voting intention polls for the next general election, along with the latest MRP projections and party leadership ratings. If you'd like to find out more about how polls work, how reliable they are and how to make sense of them, check out my book, Polling UnPacked: the History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls, or sign up for my weekly email, The Week in Polls: General election voting intention polls PollsterConLabLDGrnRefLab leadFieldwork Opinium 16% (-1) 23% (+1) 10% (-3) 13% (+2) 31% (nc) -8% (vs Ref) 4-6/2 GB Find Out Now ...
Welcome to Manu Singh, previously a Green councillor on Runnymede Council and now a Liberal Democrat: We're delighted to welcome Councillor Manu Singh who has joined the Liberal Democrats from the Green Party in Surrey! [IMG: 🔶] — Liberal Democrats (@libdems.org.uk) 2026-02-07T11:32:55.350Z
The short answer is yes a national set of rules and controls does need to be put in place. but not in such a way that they will not guarantee fairness within the system and a fair vote for all. The United Kingdom does not have identical election systems across the whole of our Country. However, we do have a system in which the UK Government as a whole has taken an in-principle decision about the number of Members of Parliament and the type of voting system that will be used. I do not like the voting system that we ...
[IMG: Jackie Pearcey surrounded by orange diamonds] However much I love Vince Cable, I can't let his comments urging people to vote tactically for Labour in the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election pass without comment. He told the I Paper: He pointed out that in previous by-elections and at the last general election, the Lib Dems had benefited from tactical voting by presenting themselves as the main anti-Conservative force in certain areas. Cable - who was business secretary in the coalition government before leading his party from 2017 to 2019 - said: "First of all, the Lib Dems are not ...
"The fallout from the latest revelations has again put survivors secondary to the actions of powerful men. Mandelson, who maintained a friendship with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, initially declined to apologise to Epstein's victims and distance himself from any knowledge of the financier's sex crimes." Victims have told us the worst of Epstein's crimes for decades - and but they are still being ignored, says Lindsey Blumell. Stephanie Burt on the organised opposition to ICE in Minnesota: "In January a horde of masked thugs arrived in the Twin Cities as part of Donald Trump's Operation Metro Surge to brutalise, ...
The Patti Pavilion is situated on Swansea's seafront having started life as winter garden conservatory at Craig-y-Nos in the lower Swansea valley. It was constructed along with a clock tower by Spanish opera singer, Adelina Patti who, after the failure of her first marriage, and in search of privacy and good trout-fishing for her lover, married French tenor Ernest Nicolini, bought a Welsh country house overlooking the River Tawe near Penwyllt, on the edge of the Brecon Beacons. The conservatory and clock tower cost £100,000, which she was able to pay for by doing just one tour of the USA ...