LibDem Blogs - Archived!

Here is today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. Last farewells The adjournment debate before the Commons rose for Easter saw several MPs make their farewell speeches. With everyone expecting the election to be called early next week, last Thursday offered the final chance for most backbenchers to be heard in this parliament. Sir Teddy Taylor, standing down in Southend East, has been an elder statesman for as long as anyone can recall. You have to be venerable to remember Tory MPs in Glasgow. He is so venerable he used to be one. Such speeches are often ...

Is it just me or is tonight's endless TV coverage of the Pope's final hours unnecessarily ghoulish? On Boxing Day, I posted in despair at the treatment of the tsunami by the 24-hour news channels. Now, once again, these channels are filling the air with fatuous comment in the absence of any hard news. The Vatican is publishing health bulletins at two-hourly intervals. The cardinals are forbidden

I've been having a crisis of faith recently. I've just started trying to pursue a social friendship with someone who I've predominantly known in a professional capacity and they're such a fascinatingly well-informed polymath that I feel the fact we seemed to have pretty much only ever discussed politics and thinking styles seems such a waste of a mine of potential conversational topics. I'm just concerned that some of my alternatives are found to be rather dull but I have the problem of finding extremely strange things really, really interesting (like whether you could produce a galaxy-wise computer network using ...

The successful launch of the Axe the Tax campaign across London with a double decker bus attracting pan-wide London media coverage. Yours truly followed the bus from the party HQ to Islington, Haringey, Brent and Southwark. The response everywhere was quite amazing. People were actually waving to us. There were plenty of photo shots at all the stops. Apart from ducking and diving the low

On the 15th anniversary of the poll tax, the Lib Dems sent a battlebus around London promoting our idea to scrap the council tax. Council tax is regressive, a ticking time bomb and set to explode- particularly here in Enfield- with revaluation. They are revaluing tax bands now, with houses up in value from 1991 likely to see their residents paying council tax bills for higher bands. In Wales,

If you think the Daily Mail is bad now, you should see what its proprietor was saying in the 1930s. Today's Guardian reports on Lord Rothermere's correspondence with Hitler (see also this Daily Telegraph report on 1st March). The original documents were intercepted by MI6 and have been released today by the Foreign Office. Rothermere to Hitler in June 1939: "My Dear Führer, I have watched with

An interesting website that deserves support.

My favourite of today's April Fools Day news stories comes from The Scotsman, not least for the headline, the two anagrams, and the final line (although I'm not sure how amused the Isle of Man will be at being placed in England).Black day as EU fools with place names PAUL DRURY AND JIM MCBETH EUROPEAN bureaucrats [...]

... for councillors. See 'Local Democracy - What's in it for me' on Local e-Democracy website

Chuffed this morning as, after several weeks of trying (of which my previous best clue, and the vilest, was "She enjoys lurid finger without you (10)"*), I've merited a mention on Sandy Balfour's competition page. Each Friday, in the Guardian G2 supplement, Sandy sets readers a word to be clued. Last week, he asked for crossword [...]

The Tory's faltering General Election campaign blundered into another controversy last night when senior police chiefs condemned their campaign advertisement on crime for its "misleading statistics", and the Archbishop of Canterbury warned against populist campaign language. The fact is that the current Conservative Party poster campaign is playing on people's fears by distorting facts and appealing to the lowest common denominator. They are selectively using statistics to create a picture of Britain that no rational person would recognise whilst the tone of their campaign on asylum and immigration is, as the Archbishop of Canterbury implied, racist. They may ...

The Western Mail this morning (I will hotlink it when they deign to post the article) report that seven out of 10 Welsh children have rotten teeth. Inevitably the British Dental Association immediately leapt to the wrong conclusion and argued that this means that fluoride must be poured into the water supply "to get Welsh children's teeth as healthy as England." If this sounds too easy then that is because it is. We are all fond of instant solutions these days and often we will embrace a particular course of action because it seems painless, easy to achieve and ...

April 1st 2005 is the date at which every property in England is to be revalued. This is to enable a Council Tax rebanding. This sounds relatively anodyne given that in theory it is a "nil sum" operation. However, the experience from Wales is that there have been increases in the amount of tax people have to pay of up to 22% on top of inflation. The only fair option is to "Axe the Tax" and

Oh dear. It looks like 'Chatshow Charlie' has done it again. Just after the polls close on 5th May, BBC1 will be screening an 'election special' version of the popular comedy series Little Britain. The show's stars, Matt Lucas and David Walliams, have persuaded Charles Kennedy to make a guest appearance in a sketch (which, thankfully, can't be shown until after voting ends, for reasons of