LibDem Blogs - Archived!

Anyone who calls themselves a liberal should have been appalled by the government's proposal to introduce house arrest. It is a further demonstration that New Labour has few qualms about bringing about a police state, fewer even than most Tories. Giving the government powers of administrative detention is not only an affront to our civil liberties but also counter-productive, as the experience

Several reports in the papers about Labours plans to scrap happy hour, but what I want to know is how far do they plan to go with banning drinks promotions. Personally I believe in a free market for both Tobacco and Alcohol sales, I would allow both manufactures and retailers to price the product and promote it according to the market (although banning any advertisements to those under the

Just found on my Livejournal friends list. This is a book written by some sci-fi and fantasy writers to prove a particular American publisher was actually a vanity publisher and would accept any old trash... So they attempted to write the worst book ever written. This is it. It's definitely worth a read; it's great fun. In fact, it reminds me an awful lot of Jilly Cooper's Riders. The same sex-starved characters who sh*g anything that moves, with the plot (in this case, absent) being merely a substrate to carry the excruciatingly described bonking. The same awful cliches, poor ...

I have now got my new PA (1kW) and keyboard so should be able to go on the road (at least in Birmingham) with my jazz playing friends. My children are having some fun with the PA which has an onboard effects processor (in the mixer) which gives the standard digital mixes including pitch change - a really entertaining thing for a 4 year old. If they will give me a visa to visit Bearwood (ask

A few days ago we reported the sad state of the little Shropshire town on Cleobury Mortimer. It is "strife torn" and has been "plunged into chaos", according to the Shropshire Star. But the inhabitants are not down-hearted. They are doing what English people always do when they want to cheer themselves up: dressing up as nuns, French waitresses and SS officers. The Star says: Today Mavis Cartwright, director of the Cleobury Players, said she hoped people would turn out in big numbers to see the local performance of Allo Allo. She said people in the town ...

...opened at 8 Artillery Row, London SW1, in October last year. It's the same premises that Politicos occupied before it went virtual. Now the Westminster Bookshop has a website where you can browse and order political books to your heart's content.

Spiked has a pleasing dissection of those annoying Teacher Training Agency advertisements, written by Dolan Cummings: It's bad enough that TV should be dominated by a cult of youth and the celebration of banality. Is it too much to ask that schools should encourage pupils to aspire to something more?

The Guardian reports on part of the story about Electoral Fraud. Electoral Fraud has gone on for many years and there are voters you can find who were happy to give parties their voting card with the assumption that the party will get an informal proxy (aka Personation, which is a criminal offence) for them. The big stress in Northern Ireland arose when one party started voting for the other

The Guardian reports this morning that the Electoral Commission is pressing senior Police Officers to take the issue of electoral fraud more seriously. Given the increased potential for such abuse, due to the widespread availablity of postal votes and the experiments in all-postal ballots, it is about time that this was done. There are already several cases of alleged vote-rigging and fraud under investigation and there are fears that many more are going undetected. It seems that the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) is writing guidelines, with the help of the commission, to send to every force ...

A positive outcome from Friday was a meeting which established Broadband Brum which is a collaboration between the private sector (eg BT), and the City Council to establish cost effective Broadband services in the City. This will be a unique thing for Birmingham. The conclusion was that Content is a key part of this. A couple of hours later the Strategic partnership agreed to cooperate on

Friday's meeting of the BSP (erstwhile CSP) was the first meeting that I have been to that seemed to take anything further forward. We are still having a certain amount of Omphaloscopy, but we did manage to move on to a wider consideration. Where the Strategic Partnership can achieve a lot is by ensuring there is effective communication between different communities of interest in Birmingham