LibDem Blogs - Archived!

Issue 302 of Liberator is being mailed to subscribers tonight, and the magazine's website has been updated to include some articles from it. See also this story in today's Guardian, which quotes extensively from the issue.

Welcome to Jane Leaper's Mira, which comes to you from the beautiful Churnet valley in Staffordshire. I shall be having a revamp of my links shortly, and will also allow people to add comments. (The worry when you launch a new blog is that no one will bother to leave any.)

Spare a thought for the MPs defeated at the recent general election. Joe Ashton does, reports the Guardian. The former MP for Bassetlaw, latterly famous for discovering the hitherto overlooked Thai quarter of Northampton, was: especially struck by the plight of some of the Tories defeated in 1997, when 160 lost their seats in the New Labour landslide. "One drank himself to death, two or three more suffered from alcohol problems and depression, another was so broke he had to take his kids out of school," he says. His response was to form an association of ex-MPs, a support ...

The name, because one afternoonOf heat the express-train drew up thereUnwontedly. It was late June. The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.No one left and no one cameOn the bare platform. What I sawWas Adlestrop—only the name And willows, willow-herb, and grass,And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,No whit less still and lonely fairThan the high cloudlets in the sky. And for that minute a blackbird sangClose by, and round him, mistier,Farther and farther, all the birdsOf Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. (Edward Thomas) Well, it's the first of June and pissing down here. Summer 2005 needs to buck its ...

Kingston resident, Jacqueline Wilson, has been made the new Children's Laureate. Jackie is a bit of a local hero. She is always ready to take part in events around here; anything that encourages children and adults to read. Did you know that the girls' magazine 'Jackie' was named after her? She started working as a teenager for D C Thomson in Dundee, and they named their new magazine after their youngest employee. (Photo by Brian Creese)

Spent the morning helping on the CPRE stall. It is traditional for the weather to be foul for the County Show; it was pelting with rain when I arrived and since I have no sense of direction I was soaked by the time I found our stall which was with the other environmental groups: Agenda 21, Sustainable Staffordshire etc. There was a lot to talk about to the punters: the latest campaign to preserve the green belt, the M6 Expressway campaign, windfarms........ By lunchtime I was only slightly drier, but I had a quick gander round the show-ground before ...

Just finished reading it, motivated by several of the contributors being promoted post election. The newspapers have commented on the Lib-Dem move to 'the right' that it will alienate the ex-Labour supporters who voted LD because of Iraq. I am not quite in that category because although I'm an ex Labour Party member, I've not voted Labour in the last 4 general elections, and in 3 of them I voted LD. However, I think the papers might be getting it wrong. The axis is not right/left but authoritarian/libertarian. Since 9/11 civil liberty has become an ...

I don't know how long this link will last. Selecting part of the original article: "Het opkomstpercentage voor het referendum over de Europese grondwet is woensdag aanzienlijk groter dan vorig jaar tijdens de verkiezingen voor het Europese Parlement. In Den Haag had tot 14:00 uur 23,67 procent gestemd tegen 14,74 procent bij de Europese verkiezingen." A rough translation is that the turnout for

Liberator 302 - out now! The post-election edition of Liberator is published and mailed to subscribers today. And the magazine's controversial assessment of the recent general election has been reported in today's Guardian. Highlights in this issue include: Commentary and Radical Bulletin taking apart the post-election spinning.David Boyle and Jeremy Hargreaves on the need for the Liberal

GM foods are unnecessary at best, and just plain harmful at worst. However you feel about them, few would suggest that people shouldn't have a choice whether to eat them or not. However, thanks to the nature of these cropsit is getting harder to choose not to eat them anyway, thanks to cross-pollination with other [...]

Having come home from another meeting of University Council I have come across a story about the earnings gap between graduates and non-graduates narrowing. Spectacularly the extra earning life-time potential for an average arts degree (over A-Levels) is now just £22,458 - less than some students will spend on fees and maintenance at university! Given much of this premium will be concentrated in certain graduate jobs, and are the most prestigious universities this is a worry figure to base acceptance of top-up fees on. The extra earning potential is much higher for science graduates, but the real costs ...

Here's the deal: eight of the world's most powerful men meet in Scotland for the G8 summit. One or two people plan to turn up at Gleneagles and exercise their right to peaceful demonstration. All right, a few hundred thousand. Possibly because a few hundred thousand of us feel sufficiently uncomfortable with living our cosy, comfy lifestyles knowing that 50,000 people will die today from poverty. Meanwhile, the EU is wedded to an agricultural policy which ensures western farmers get paid to produce food we don't need, which we then dump outside the EU at knock-down prices which Third World ...

Government Before I go any further I should warn you that the following entry will be unnecessarily cynical and sarcastic. I can't help it, it's in my nature. If its any consolation to you, I do take the business of government very seriously. But I also think we shouldn't take it too seriously. Two Weston Town Council events today. First was the opening of the newly refurbished box office at the

It has been pointed out to me by a fellow councillor that I have been very remiss in not blogging on here for a while. I am pleading guilty as charged, but offer as mitigating circumstances the fact that I have been busy and haven't had time. What, I hear you ask, could he have been doing to keep him so busy then? Well, dear reader, I shall compose a new post shortly on the events of yesterday, a

Leighton Andrews has already referred to the article on blogging in Wales in the latest issue of Agenda, the house magazine of the Institute of Welsh Affairs. Having now read it I must confess to being a tad disappointed with its content. Well over half of the article is actually about the impact of the Internet on the Welsh Language. We learn that Wikipedia for example, has the first Welsh language encyclopedia to be published in over a hundred years. We also learn that the internet is building and sustaining Welsh communities by facilitating communication for those Welsh people living ...

The Liberal Democrats have, rightly, been strong opponents of the government's plan to introduce ID cards. However, it appears that no-one has informed the party's own conference staff. The booking forms for passes for the party conference have been redesigned to be more invasive, to a degree that would make Charles Clarke proud. I have just downloaded from the party's website the registration