LibDem Blogs - Archived!

Roy Taylor (Kingston's Director of Cimmunity Services) and I have today welcomed two visitors from Minnesota to Kingston. Scott Neal is the City Manager (ie Chief Executive) of Eden Prairie, a suburb of Minneapolis, and Griff Wigley is an web consultant from Northfield some 40 miles away. Both are key people in the Civic Leadership Weblog Project. Scott is a keen blogger and his Blog from City hall is, as far as he knows the only one by a City Chief in the States. He has been acting as a role model for all of us. ...

It was always going to be a close run thing. I was number 2 on the list for Health Questions (starts 11:30) and had been asked to be at Millbank for 11.30. Tried the pragmatic approach first and asked the Speaker if I could swop the order of questions with Tom Brake who was number 4 on the list. This is simply not done as it does not appear to be the natural order of things. Next approach was to talk nicely to ITN. They invited me in for 11:15 instead. This sounds good but I was kept waiting until ...

All went smoothly and there was rather more interest than I had anticipated - particularly as the subject of the day was House Arrest and terrorist threat. It will be interesting to see what press coverage there is tomorrow but I did a couple of interviews for ITN today, plus some local media and there was an interview lined up for The World Tonight but this had to be dropped to make way for a story on Iraq - such is life.

Really good weekend away in Leeds, running LibDem Youth & Students spring conference, which seemed to go well.Speakers included Richard Allan MP, who talked on identity cards. Having sat on the committee scrutinising the ID cards bill, Richard is particularly well informed on this issue and detailed numerous reasons why they are a terrible - and potentially problematic - waste of money. He even drew on Little Britain, suggesting that the fallibility of the biometric identity systems could, in the future, result in trying to access health services only to be told, "Computer says no." Richard proved once again that ...

So farewell to the great gonzo journalist

Simon Titley at Liberal Dissenter praises a forgotten Liberal hero - Clarence Willcock. In 1950 he refused to show his identity card to the police when asked. He won the resultant court case, which led to the abolition of the cards.

A team of European scientists have discovered a huge, frozen sea just below the surface of Mars. Speculation now is that this is the most likely place to find life. Rumours that George W. Bush will be sending an expeditionary force to impose democracy on the Martians are so far unfounded.

The BBC reports that residents of Cumbernauld have voted to demolish their own town. It seems that Cumbernauld town centre was, in its day, an internationally recognised example of best practice in architecture and planning and the world's first multi-level covered town centre. However, it is now viewed by some as a poor example of sixties architecture and a nightmare to live in.I cannot comment as I have not been there, however the premise behind the Channel 4 series,"Demolition", is intriquing. It seems that the idea is to identify Britain's worst eyesore and then to actually pull it down.The ...

From the Sunday Times comes this heartwarming tale of everyday life in an Iraqi suburb. One particular American soldier had an unfortunate habit of urinating into the street from the top of his Bradley armoured vehicle. This practice angered and offended local Sunni Muslim inhabitants, not because of the urinating as such, rather the way the soldier exposed himself regardless of whether any women

If you were asked to name the most influential Liberals of the post-war era, Clarence Willcock would be unlikely to feature on your list. Yet it is thanks to Willcock that wartime ID cards were abolished. Today's edition of BBC Radio 4's The Long View recalled the occasion in 1950 when Clarence Willcock, who happened to be a member of the Liberal Party, was stopped by a policeman for speeding

Apart from police evidence as to who did what (and other allegations), there are two key areas of dispute in the Bordesley Election Petition. These relates to the ballot papers that were counted. One relates to a particular group of three ballot boxes that contained lots of Envelope "A"s. Each of the Envelope "A"s contained both a ballot paper and a Declaration of Identity. The

There is an interesting piece by George Monbiot in the Guardian today about how the government is taking away the right to protest. Nobody seems to be doing anything about this. Traditionally I would have expected to Tories to be happy about it, but surely there is now some conflict with their support of hunting? I doubt the Countryside Alliance would be happy about not being able to protest against the hunting ban on the whim of the government. I'm disappointed that I haven't heard about this through any Lib Dem channels either. There needs to be more of a ...