LibDem Blogs - Archived!

I have been away in Aberdeenshire over Easter - hence the lack of posts over the holiday. Here is Good Friday's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. Do crows vote Labour? Last Thursday Margaret Beckett was holed up in Breadsall Priory near Derby with the other G8 environment ministers. She was surrounded by a thousand police officers from 23 different forces, an eight-foot double fence and an exclusion zone for the public and protestors. All this at a cost of £2m. Meanwhile at Westminster, Ben Bradshaw had taken her place. This former BBC radio reporter and hyperloyal ...

I recall a few years ago the feminist writer Bea Campbell taking part in a discussion on BBC2's Newsnight and casually referring to women as "the radical sex".Despite this claim, at each general election, a higher proportion of women than men vote Conservative.An ICM survey of women aged over 55, commissioned by Age Concern and the Fawcett Society and published last week, produced vote shares of Conservative 42%, Labour 29% and Lib Dem 21%. This 13% Tory lead has been attributed to concerns about pensions and, more generally, the political neglect and alienation that older women feel.Yet a rush to ...

It seems that the old maxim of "vote early, vote often" may be making a comeback if fears aroused by today's Guardian's report are realised. The paper records that a 'survey of 55 councils covering 135 constituencies reveals applications to vote by post have risen in all cases, tripling in some places, particularly in inner cities. The increase comes as demand grows for urgent changes in the postal-voting system, last week labelled by a judge as "an open invitation to fraud". There is an ongoing court case, and police are investigating fraud in six areas of the country.' ...

For those of us who are cat lovers the news that scientists are a 'whisker away from a cat allergy cure' is welcome. Even cat enthusiasts can suffer from this malady. Worse, if you own a cat, you can be limited in who you welcome back to your home. My one doubt is over the methods used to achieve this breakthrough. The Guardian reports that: 'Andrew Saxon, of the University of California in Los Angeles, injected mice - genetically engineered to be allergic to cats - with a newly developed part-cat, part-human protein. Within a month, the mice were ...

You wonder if this is the one which is "the boomerang strikes back". The tories have brought in an Australian political advisor to run their campaign. He may have said "sack the MP as an MP". Clearly this decision was taken in haste and may be repented at leisure. I still haven't seen the full quotations that he was sacked for. However, most of them have only been what one would expect tories to say. At an absolute minimum an argument that they would exclude from proposals politically unacceptable ideas is only reasonable. The ...