LibDem Blogs - Aggregated!

In case you missed it, here is a BBC report from New Year's Eve: There is "no hard evidence" government files have been shredded ahead of new openness laws, a watchdog has said.Well there wouldn't be, would there?

Watching Remember the Secret Policeman's Ball? over Christmas I came to two conclusions. The first was that, on the whole, the older the performers were, the funnier they were. The Beyond the Fringe sketches had lasted better than Monty Python, and Python was infinitely better than the French and Saunderses and Lenny Henrys who came after. Even Alexei Sayle, of whose comedy and writing I am a great admirer, came over as simply ranting. Of course, this is a reflection of my own tastes and experience, though the comedy that most formed my sense of humour

By far the saddest tale to emerge from the documents released today under the Freedom of Information Act is that of the Home Office cat, Peter. On 3 June 1929 a Treasury Official authorised the office keeper at the Home Office "to spend 1d a day from his petty cash towards the maintenance of an efficient office cat." In April 1932 the allowance was upped to 1s 6d a week. By 1946, the official Home Office cat, now named Peter, had reached the age of 17 and memos were flying around questioning whether he could still catch mice and

At least one person is reading this blog. After my piece on Owen John Thomas and the Welsh Language Board yesterday the BBC got in touch. Their Welsh language current affairs programme Maniffesto is doing a piece on Sunday on the issue and wanted an interview. The theme was something along the line of "should Owen John be trusted to do any more interview panels?" Fortunately, for me they were prepared to take my contribution in English.

The race to become the second AM blogger has been won by David Davies, the Tory Assembly Member for Monmouthshire and possible future MP for that area. In his first post on Wednesday 22 December he says that "I was inspired by Peter Black the affable Liberal Democrat Assembly Member who I have the pleasure of sitting next to in the Assembly debating chamber. Peter regularly uses his column to denounce my speeches and suggested that this might be a useful way of getting my own back!" This can only be good for the democratic process.

William Heath asks in an earlier comment why John McWilliam MP is assiduous in saying the election will not be held in May. I will ask when I see him, but I suspect he is just "playing the game" where we all pretend the election date is a mystery. My ...

Due to a mobile phone/alcohol coincidence (i.e., they coincided) shortly before Christmas, I've had very limited internet access. I'm currently in an internet café in Edinburgh catching up with emails, etc. Be forewarned: I have a number of posts saved up to splurge onto these pages once my replacement phone arrives. In the mean time, I've added a sidebar link to the DEC donation page so you