LibDem Blogs - Archived!

Speaking at one of their conferences today and there were a couple of interesting points raised during questions. One Care Home owner asked when hospitals would have to comply with standards as high as those in care homes and cited the number of pressure sores in hospital. There was a lot of agreement with her in the room so I have just tabled a couple of parliamentary questions to see if I can

This weekend I looked through Alan Bennett's collection Writing Home again and posted a short diary extract about the auditions for his play Forty Years On to my other blog, the anthology Serendib ("Much loved, little visited.") Now, via The Virtual Stoa and Charlotte Street, I find that someone else has been doing more of the same. Click here for further quotations from the great man.

The best left-wing journalists writing in Britain at the moment is Nick Cohen - you can find an archive of his columns in the Observer here. He is consistently original and entertaining, and the best thing in any Sunday's papers, even when you disagree with the line he is taking. When he supported the war in Iraq, you felt he did so because he really believed what he was saying. With other pro-war journalists (it would be invidious to mention David Aaronovitch or Johann Hari in this context), it was hard to dismiss the suspicion that they were merely

How often have you been told that politicians are a bunch of crooks that should be replaced by 'ordinary people'? Last week's ITV political talent show Vote for Me, intended to counter popular alienation from politics, has ironically left this argument in tatters. Sandra Gidley was quite right in her blog last Saturday to point out the apparent contradictory attitudes of the public. Vote for Me

This site has been intermittently inaccessible over the last few days, as has my email (o joy! no incoming mail said everyone in the office...) because of some domain name problems. For the political rather than the technical reader, the following is an attempt to explain what it means ...

Another week has almost gone by and more work gets done. Several meetings in the latter part of last week including North Somerset's Finance & Resources Panel to debate the budget, West Area Planning Committee, a branch meeting, a North Somerset Lib Dem Group meeting and - for a change - Weston Lib Dems Executive. Spent some time delivering leaflets in Portishead and Clevedon last week and over

I argued on Thursday that Prince Harry's gaffe in wearing Nazi regalia to a fancy dress party was part of a wider malaise in which the vast majority of young people know little or nothing about the Nazis and the evil they perpetrated. Even fewer understand the significance of the swastika, whilst most have never heard of the concentration camps and what occurred there. Leighton Andrews took up this theme arguing that "The only explanation for this can be the decline of history teaching in schools - or rather the absence of compulsory history teaching after 14. History