LibDem Blogs - Archived!

The Grand Slam winning Welsh team are already becoming legends. A £300 figure, being made by Pontypridd's World of Groggs, will show both of Wales' captains this season - Gareth Thomas and Michael Owen - proudly holding the Six Nations trophy aloft. This is a traditional way of commemorating a victory of this nature. The rest of the media of course, is more interested in Gavin Henson and Charlotte Church. Maybe, they should become a Grogg couple as well.

Martin Kettle writes movingly in today's Guardian about the memorial service for Anthony Sampson: This was unmistakably a gathering of English men and women of a particular kind. They seemed to me to be the stubbornly principled, occasionally self-righteous bearers of the English imagination of which Peter Ackroyd writes so movingly - people haunted by the landscape and above all by the language, people permanently aware of the past, but people adaptive and comfortable in diversity, practical and pragmatic carriers of a mixed culture. Call them the recusant establishment of literate and liberal England.I find this a good description of ...

The lessons of the weekend are that if we want to boost the Welsh economy the best way to do so is to win the Grand Slam every year. The Western Mail reports today that 'Rugby fans keen to party spent a whopping £15m on food and booze during a weekend of celebrations. About two million pints were downed in a day as the party stretched into the early hours with 200,000 fans inundating the city centre. And over a million takeaways or sit-down meals were sold to starving supporters over the weekend.' The feelgood ...

Thanks to Wayback Machine, the web's equivalent of the Tardis, I can give a shameless plug for the column I wrote for Susan Kramer's website during the first London Mayoral campaign. Click here for the thoughts of her cat Whittington on Maurice Norris, Dobbo and the Übernewt.

Now reconnected to the telephone network at home thanks to a nice engineer from BT. Should now be able to blog a little more regularly. In my home life, we have a new addition - we've inherited my sister's cat Tiger, a (neutered) ginger-white tom cat.

Tonight I just popped into Langtrys to hand over something to a friend of mine as I was on my way to another meeting. His wife said something which has made me wonder whether I'm becoming a sad person! Her complaint was there's no gossip on this blog. She logged on today and only found stories of meetings and yet more meetings! Well, I have to say that my life at the moment seems to be just that. I'm desperately trying to 'do' all my meetings commitments and, at the same time, clear my desk and diary for the onslaught ...

Taken from Mel Atkinson's political section in the Mercury:  My site now has critical accalim! "...All that is a mere warm-up act for the modern miracle that is Mark Farmer's weblog.Leicester's youngest councillor has become cyberspace's Adrian Mole, with an internet diary.It contains gems such as "Watched the films Ice Age and Love Boat this weekend - not the best-quality films in the world, but both were funny." Another note says: "Went bowling and came last, hurrah!! I am too limp-wristed..."Do not expect this to replace the works of Tony Benn or Alan Clark just yet."       Story at:   ...

On Friday went and saw my uncle in the show "Anything Goes", he was the lead.  He was great-  he is a really good singer.  I will now reveal a secret-  I used to be in musical shows!  My first show was "Fiddler on The Roof", with my gran, grandad and uncle all taking leading roles and my mum was the prompt-  she loves gossip so this allowed her to be in the thick of it all..!!   I then went onto to being invovled in the following shows, "Desert Song", "CalamityJane" , "Quaker Girl and "Bless the ...

One day last week teams from the two universities in Leicester met in many different sports. I am told that at the basketball game the supporters of Leicester University could be heard chanting "You'll always be a poly" at their rivals from De Montfort University. There is absolutely nothing amusing about this. Such attitudes have no place in modern Britain. Jonathan CalderBA (York) MA (Leicester)

I noticed today a press release from Brian Cotter about the 118 service. Personally I believe that deregulation was needed. If I phoned 192 on my landline I spoke to BT, if I phoned 192 on my Orange Mobile, I spoke to Orange, if I called from a NTL line, I spoke to NTL. These were three companies offering the same service, but only available via one route, and if you only had one phone you could

Simon Pegg's Stalker is hoping to have seen all of the IMDb's Top 100 films by the end of the year. With 25% to go, that's a reasonable but achievable task. I'm shocked to discover that I've not seen 56 of these films. Looking through the list, though, there are a number which I've taken a conscious decision in the past not to watch. The Shawshank Redemption has never appealed to me. Nor have Casablanca or The Matrix (does the latter make me a faux geek?). Still, there are a handful I'd like to watch so I'll aim to have ...

Just surfing around and found this. It's Virgin Radio via GPRS/3G. I was expecting poor quality sound, with it cutting out every 30 seconds as per streaming over dial-up, however I'm pleasantly surprised to find that the quality is great, and that it hasn't stopped once. The only problem is that an hours listening equals about 7.2mb of data, which isn't cheap. Hopefully we'll see more stations

Michael Howard makes another pitch for the Dail Mail vote. This time the target is the travellers. Nice plan! Let's face it - I don't suppose there were too many of the travelling community who were thinking "I must register to vote so I can vote Tory". But it does seem frankly unnecessary as most Daily Mail readers would vote Tory whoever they put in charge!Tories love to portray Lib Dems as soft. They like to show the face of toughness. Labour, under Blunkett seemed to find it necessary to try and compete on the same turf. But toughness ...

This time last week, spotting number plates seemed simple, getting at least one a day, everything was going fine. On the way to work trying to find a 136, I saw two sets of consecutive 137 & 138, and driving a 139, I was sure that I would be looking for a 140 in no time. Still no luck at lunch time, and then on the way home, I saw another 137 driving past me. Then, 20 seconds later a 136! This was

This is, of course, a live issue. I am currently trying to get the City Council to give me a list of postal votes across the city. This will enable some work to be done to minimise fraud. They are currently ignoring me.

The United States is now routinely using torture against terrorist suspects. It circumvents its own laws, due process and the Geneva Convention by sending suspects to countries such as Egypt and Syria, which carry out torture on the USA's behalf under a policy called 'extraordinary rendition'. Read this astonishing article by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker (and this interview with the author). Read