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Today's column from Liberal Democrat News. Incidentally, Kurmanbek Bakiyev sounds a nasty piece of work when you learn more about him. Fit for office House Points has spent years complaining about culture, media and sport questions. All those MPs getting up to demand more school sport when the real reason children are less fit is that they don’t play out any more. Blame a noxious combination of panic about strangers and the dominance of the car. With ASBOs, curfews and now Kelly hours, it’s a wonder they can walk at all. But we have a new hero. On ...

For a few weeks I tried to follow best practise by turning off pilot lights on electrical appliances to save the electricity, but I've almost given up now because of the problems. Mostly, it means turning off the appliance at the mains and the plug is either difficult to get at or more than one appliance is plugged in to a multiplug. The effort of getting down on my hands and knees to unplug a socket reminds me that I am getting older. Then when the appliance is turned on again there is an irritating flashing light until the clock ...

One of the benefits of being in a political party that isn’t the Tories is getting to vote in leadership elections. Following the announcement from Jim Wallace MSP, Scotland’s Deputy First Minister, that he’s to retire, there is an election for the new leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and this is the first time I’ve [...]

Just when you think there is some progress being made in the world, something like this happens. Again the Americans (or the Bush administration, to be more accurate) are doing their level best to kill us all for the sake of making themselves that little bit richer. Bush isn't going to change, and I think the [...]

Avian flu - what we need to know is one to watch. The subject matter may be dry, but it is reporting on things of great importance. Microbes and parasites have always exerted massive pressures on we clumsy multicellular types, and there is enormous fear that avian flu is even now incubating the world's next great disease pandemic. The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19 is cited as the last great

In questions to the Business Minister on her responsibilities for equality issues on Wednesday, Tory AM David Melding underlined the agony of political failure, whilst at the same time making a very serious point about access to polling stations. Accessibility is not just about ramps and wider doors. Voters have to be able to open the doors in the first place: David Melding: Minister, in a vain attempt to defeat your friend John Smith and replace him with my colleague, Alun Cairns, I did a bit of telling in the Vale of Glamorgan. One polling station that ...

In my Boom Town review, I complained that: Are we to assume half the politicians in Cardiff have been bumped off? And a Lord Mayor doesn’t run the council, they chair council meetings and cut ribbons. If Margaret is a directly-elected mayor, her achievement is all the greater. While my other comments about Margaret Slitheen’s rapid promotion [...]

Identity cards: nothing to hide, nothing to fear? (Via.)

The headline of the week has to be this in the Independent yesterday - Fired: a human cannonball who would not fly. Alas, the story did not live up to its billing:He is accustomed to hurtling through the air at 60mph in a daily death-defying act as a human cannonball. But the circus stuntman Todd Christian was without a job yesterday because of his fear of flying.Christian, 26, said he fell out with his employers, Cottle & Austen circus, when they tried to send him to a special training camp in Brazil after he injured himself several times during ...

...Or so the Conservatives seem to think anyway. Yes, Tory MPs have finally admitted that the majority of their party - the people that fund the Conservatives through their membership subscriptions, the people that spend their own spare time walking through the streets of their constituency canvassing on behalf of the party - are not fit to pick the person who may lead them into government. And so the conflict-infested innards of the Conservative party are exposed: 1. The membership. Hard right-wing traditionalists that aren't stupid enough to vote BNP but not clever enough to not vote for ...

New Labour needs this reminder (not that they would understand). "Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire." - W.B. Yeats.