LibDem Blogs - Archived!

We were talking in the committee room in Harborough on polling day. Someone remarked how little of an issue fox hunting had been in the campaign. It was not mentioned at the hustings: it was hardly mentioned on the doorstep. This was in Harborough, the constituency which, along with Rutland and Melton, can claim to be the spiritual home of the sport. (Melton Mowbray was the social centre for hunting in the nineteenth century, but it became too expensive and too scandal ridden. So in Edwardian days the best people came to Market Harborough instead.) A lot of people writing ...

We have been promised a policy review. And Ming the Merciless says: "What Charles Kennedy wants is a policy review which begins without any precondition or presupposition."You can take that as a sign that the Liberal Democrat leadership was disappointed with the election result. If they had been pleased with it they would be boasting that our policies had been vindicated rather than seeking to bury them. Anyway, let's have some new thinking on education. Our policy in the election, if I understood it right, was that by some modest reordering of government spending we could guarantee that every school ...

Patricia Hewitt on Jonathan Dimbleby's programme today: "We were elected on a manifesto. It includes identity cards and yes we will go ahead with that." Fact: Patricia Hewitt was General Secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties between 1974 and 1983.

I just have one question about the decision of the Bluewater Shopping Centre to ban young people wearing hooded tops. Will the shops in that centre now stop selling them?

According to the Wales on Sunday the reponse of Plaid Cymru's President to his party's electoral disaster on 5th May is to "walk down the streets of Wales with banners". Apparently, that is what resonates with the public. Whether Plaid's expensive consultants will agree with this has yet to be seen. It certainly does not appear to be the direction being taken by a new lobby group within the nationalist movement. They believe that Plaid Cymru should embrace policies which would make it more credible and electable. That rules out independence then, so what is left as a reason ...

On Tuesday 10th May at about 3pm two youths snatched an I-pod off a 15-year old lad on the Coventry Road near the Swan Shopping Centre. He contacted his mother who then drove after the bus towards Sheaf Lane in Sheldon where she confronted the theives. She then chased them down the Coventry Road towards Topps Tiles whilst taking to the police. Three police cars were involved and the two youths

Has anyone noticed that the Labour government seem to have a real uniform/fashion thing going here. They've obviously decided that why they don't like yobs wearing hoodies is because they'd look far better in orange. Has anyone ever considered that maybe a load of youths wandering about in bright orange jumpsuits hanging floral baskets might be intimidatory? In fact, more intimidatory than youths in hoodies on the grounds that they're not just suspected yobs - they've been tried and judged to be yobbish already. I can almost understand the 'evading CCTV' thing at Bluewater. After all, people are discouraged wearing ...