LibDem Blogs - Archived!

Do you remember Tony Blair's extraordinary lies about his own childhood? How he once stowed away on a flight to the Bahamas and how he used to watch Jackie Milburn play for Newcastle? I have come across an article by Francis Wheen which gives the details and posted a couple of paragraphs to my other blog Serendib.

Not Charles and Camilla, you booby. The Shropshire Star has details of Lembit and Sian's plans. They will marry at Powis Castle in October.

It seems that the only thing some people care about is a comfy sofa. We have had road rage for some time, now we have sofa rage.

Plaid Cymru got themselves in a bit of trouble yesterday when they tabled an amendment to a motion on child poverty stating their belief that New Labour has abandoned the socialist principle of redistributing wealth. Their Deputy Leader, Rhodri Glyn Thomas, was in full flow, when he was interrupted by Neath AM, Gwenda Thomas: The Minister tells us that the UK Government is successful in its actions to eradicate child poverty. Can she therefore explain why one of Tony Blair’s closest advisers, Lord Gidden, the architect of the third way, says that Labour has not done enough for ...

Putting aside the Western Mail's obsession with Monty Python, their article today on Council Tax - "So, what has your Council ever done for you?" - threw up some interesting political points. They quote the Assembly's Economic Development Minister as saying that re-banding should not be used as "an excuse" for higher bills. This has been the mantra of a number of Ministers for some months now. However, for various reasons, the statement itself is financially illiterate, deliberately so. Firstly, the fact of revaluation will lead to higher bills for approximately one third of Welsh Council Taxpayers anyway, regardless ...

I have unashamedly stolen this reworked Labour poster from the Labour Watch website as it is so funny!

The government pride themselves on funding school rebuilding through PFI. The only problem is that they are not giving all the money. Par for the course really. They are only giving about 80% of the cash. It looks like "building schools for the future" is going to be similarly partially funded. I am also worried about planned NHS bed cuts in Birmingham. The details on this are not clear

I was pleased to hear that Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles are to marry. However, for some reason this seems to require some sort of public debate and judgement. It is depressing how many people in the linked article say something along the lines of Charles having to abdicate if the marriage occurs. Why is this exactly? Do we really think in this day and age that our monarch shouldn't be allowed to marry divorcees? Should we really expect someone who is so obviously perfectly matched with their chosen partner to deny themselves a future together? Let's face it, ...

There's a discussion on the LDYS open forums here about whether Ellen MacArthur deserved front page news, even temporarily, for her solo circumnavigation of the world given the Israel/Palestine ceasefire occurring on the same day. The topic has now navigated onto the priority of sport in the news. I personally think that Ellen MacArthur's achievement was somewhat rarer and of a different magnitude of significance from the World Series. However, it does raise an interesting issue of what is 'important' and worthy of news attention. Radio Humberside, being a local radio station, evidently has a remit that anything ...

Good article here about the Tories 'Voter Vault' campaign software and Liam Fox's role in a new Tory training video. It strikes me that the approach being taken by the Tories - targeting people by their household spending habits, their home type or their salary - is twenty years out of date. There might have been a time when voting intentions could have been predicted on these factors, but

Prince Charles to Marry Camilla Press Association 10/02/2005 Clarence House have announced that the jug-earred prince is to marry a horse called Camilla. It will not be the first time that a member of the Royal Family, or even Prince Charles, has married a farm-yard animal. In the early Eighties the Prince of Wales married a manipulative cow that went by the name of "Diana" (formerly

How strongly do you feel about self-assembly furniture? Strong enough to go to a midnight store opening? Strong enough to queue for six hours to get in? Strong enough to stab another customer? Last night's riot at IKEA in Edmonton, north London, is one of those news stories that makes you wonder what sort of society we now live in. No-one I know views a trip to IKEA with any enthusiasm and

BBC2's dramatisation of Jonathan Coe's novel The Rotters' Club ended last night but the mysteries were not confined to the plot. The series was sympathetically written and acted, and it made poignant viewing for anyone like me belonging to more or less the same generation as the schoolboy protagonists. To make it believable, however, the main challenge for the producers was to get the 1970s

I have now worked out how to use the pastels (I think). I carried out an abortive attempt the day before yesterday to draw a mountain landscape. The distant mountains, a patch of sky and the water had real promise but I left the front of the picture covered in brown squiggles (mud) for later work with some gorse bushes. My brown was somewhat terracotta so I bought a few green and brown Unison (nothing to do with the trade union) and Sennelier pastels yesterday. Last night I came back and drew a really crummy tree. I ...