LibDem Blogs - Archived!

The same story in the post This story appeared on the blog a while ago. The problem arises when youths become aware that all they will get is a caution which then facilitates a substantial amount of crime. There is a role for cautions, but this is not it. At the same time we need to link to communities to handle probation and community service issues. I have been working with people within

Stop me if you've heard this one before, but introducing ID cards will save £1.3 billion. Laugh? I nearly had my iris scanned. Since no-one has been convinced by any of the government's other arguments, New Labour's latest wheeze is to claim that the cost of ID cards will be offset by the prevention of identity theft, currently running at £1.3 billion a year. Nice try, but it is a fraudulent

A couple of weeks ago I reported that a Lib Dem/Tory administration had ousted Labour and taken control of Leicester City Council. Political passions continue to run high in the city, as this BBC report shows: A Leicester man who gathered a 2,000 name petition calling for free toilets in the city is worried a new council administration could reintroduce fees.

It comes from Graham Eccles, the chairman and managing director of South West Trains. Speaking of the slam-door rolling stock his company is in the process of withdrawing, he says: "Although they have passed their sell-by date, they don't owe anybody a living." Can any reader make sense of it? Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: It's sure as hell got me beat.

It is hard to resist a story that begins: Shropshire fish and chip shop magnate Balwinder Singh Chatha...

Emigration has gone up substantially under Labour. It is clear that people are less happy living in Tony Blair's Britain. The link is the first response to one of my Written Questions from last Friday. It shows an increase from just under 240,000 people a year in the mid 1990s to over 350,000 a year in 2002 and 2003. I suppose from Labour's point of view many of these are not Labour

Good to see Charles Kennedy has taken up my mantle. For anyone who missed it, he's written an open letter to Tony Blair enquiring as to where he now stands on electoral reform (published on the front page of today's Independent). I hope that he has more luck getting an answer than I did - but I won't hold my breath. Word is that Tony Blair is going to be gunning hard for the Lib Dems from now on

I have never understood the obsession with Star Wars and find the hype surrounding the latest 'prequel' thoroughly tedious. Perhaps it is the knowledge that something so blatantly commercial is fooling large numbers of fans into believing that it is somehow counter-cultural. If you share my cynicism, you will find your position vindicated in this story: Two Star Wars fans are in a critical

It has been obvious for almost a year that the nascent ideological dispute within the Liberal Democrats would finally burst out as soon as the general election campaign was over. What is odd is that this dispute should manifest itself in an argument about local income tax (see my earlier postings on 23 May, 24 May and 26 May). The election was scarcely over before the right-wing ginger group

Whether or not France or the Netherlands or both end up voting against the European Union Constitutional Treaty, the question of Reform is rising rapidly up the European agenda. Obviously Liberal Democrats are in the vanguard of the campaign for reform in the United Kingdom, but we are equally serious about reform of the European Union too. Firstly let us make a clear point about European Union

I got home last night just in time to see Liverpool's third goal hit the back of the net. The remaining spectacle was both absorbing and very satisfying but somehow I felt as if I had missed all the real drama. This was entertainment par excellence and credit must go to the Liverpool team for the character they showed in fighting back like that. Congratulations too! I now find myself in the Assembly a few minutes before chairing an Education and Lifelong Learning Committee, after which I am dashing off to Cardiff Wales Airport to catch a flight to ...

The Western Mail this morning reports that the expected cost of the Government's flagship ID cards has risen by 9% in six months. They are now expected to cost £93 with speculation that the anticipated price of an individual card will break the £100 barrier very soon and that is before they have got the technology to work.It is a fact that opinion polls indicating support for ID cards are based on a very simplistic set of assumptions. People are not told for example that they will have to pay for them, never mind how much. It is not explained ...

Now that all the excitement (ironic face) of the election has died down, we have the dispatches programme on labour's victory An undercover reporter was part of the machine that convinced the country to vote labour, and exposed their tactics. It clearly showed how, in the era of manufactured consent, democracy is a loose term in modern britain. Then I started to reflect. Some of the tricks that labour pulled I had seen with the LibDems. Such as the letters. There was a critism of labour, Party HQ would write letters indicating the party's ...

I am a fan of the BBC but not an uncritical one. So I was horrified to read in Wednesday's Guardian a report that the venerable BBC World Service is to be turned into a "24-hour rolling news service". I cannot claim to be a regular listener but do occasionally hear it in the middle of the night, when the Radio 4 frequency broadcasts the World Service. I find the surreal mix of programmes