LibDem Blogs - Archived!

Richard Carter rightly draws attention to the Mayor of London's speech on the day when bombers killed 54: "…Finally, I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life. I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others—that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free

One other thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently is the England team ahead of the Ashes, and in particular the selection of Kevin Pietersen ahead of Graham Thorpe. I must admit, I'm sceptical about this. Pietersen obviously has the big-match temperament - his baptism of fire, by making his international debut in South Africa, the country he left to play for England, was a test that most cricketers will never have to go through, and he rose to the challenge superbly. Yet his technique leaves much to be desired, and his method of scoring runs is to ...

It's a rabbit that bites people. The good news is that it doesn't appear to eat letters. What's that? A rabbit that doesn't eat lettuce? No, letters. Oh, sorry.

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. Pause for Thought It has been the week after the week before. On Monday the Commons heard prime ministerial statements on the G8 summit and the London bombings. Then his opponents were unusually complimentary. Michael Howard paid tribute to the “calm, resolute and statesmanlike” way the government had responded to the bombings. Charles Kennedy said Tony Blair was “to be congratulated on what was, for the best and happiest of reasons as well as for the most dreadful, an extraordinary week”. Blair was certainly doing his best to sound statesmanlike. ...

Lothian Buses - or, rather, their drivers - are on strike next Monday as part of ongoing industrial action. There is no service on strike days and a Saturday service the rest of the week. Given that I use these buses to get to work, this is Bad News. As I have a bus pass, I [...]

We’ve got a system upgrade in process at work so most of this week I’ve been at a different campus, passing the downtime by reclassifying pamphlets with National Library of Medicine shelfmarks to the Dewey Decimal System. In my lunch hour yesterday, I went for a walk up the road and stumbled upon a gate marked [...]

One of the problems that I think faces the Muslim community in Britain is that when it comes to, for example, suicide bombing in Israel, they are indeed equivocal. I missed the precise question last night on Newsnight, but the head of the Muslim Association of Britain said "what is not acceptable in London and Madrid is acceptable in Palestine"; the young guy on the panel who had previously been criticising imams and communities for losing the Muslim youth agreed wholeheartedly with him. However, when I read this report on the BBC today, I was much happier. I know that ...

The government seem to wish to avoid answering the question about the forecasts for government spending, income and deficit. They have referred me to a source for the information. This is another of today's answers. "Information from the 2001 Criminality Survey notes that 27 per cent. of prisoners had spent time in care as a child. This is closely in line with the equivalent figure of 26 per

Friday 15th july 2005 - Mark Hunter - the new MP for Cheadle - and myself thanking party workers for their help during the election.

Because Technorati indexes my categories as tags, I’ve renamed them to more standard terms - less interesting, but more useful taxonomically.

Friday 15th July 2005 - All the hard work has paid off and the people of Cheadle have given a big thumbs down to the negative Tory campaign when Mark Hunter was elected as the new MP for Cheadle in yesterday's by-election! Oh and Labour even managed to loose their deposit!!

BBC: Lib Dems win Cheadle by-election - Mark Hunter won the Cheadle by-election for the LibDems with a 3,657 majority. Former Tory MP Stephen Day lost - again. Labour lost their deposit.

Congratulations are due to Mark Hunter and his team, who retained Cheadle for the Liberal Democrats with a 3,657 majority and an increased share of the vote. I spent a day up there and discovered that one of the problems of campaigning in leafy suburbs is the excessive amount of pollen. I was astonished by the sheer nastiness of the Tory campaign, not because I think Tories are nice and cuddly (they are not), but because it was obviously counter-productive. The vicious smears that they sought to spread about Mark Hunter combined with their clumsy attempts at a tactical voting ...

There are so many genuinely new ways of doing things that are now starting to happen because of the network effects of the internet. The site werenotafraid.com has been receiving massive traffic both of viewers and people wanting to post up their pictures expressing their refusal to be cowed by the London bombers. It is [...]

BBC NEWS | Technology | Time to switch off and slow down

Not seen anything on the news yet but just heard we've won the Cheadle by-election and Mark Hunter with 52.15% of the votes cast is now our new MP. Emails are flooding in from members all over the country - shows I'm not the only one whose been waiting up anxiously. Can't take in all the figures at this unearthly hour but who cares at the moment - we won, we won, we won and that's all that matters. All the number crunchers and political analysts will have their say later ...

I've spent most of the last two days setting up a home wireless network. If anyone else is doing this:- Don't buy the Speed Touch 580/120g kit. It's rubbish. Do use the Windows XP wireless network wizard. It's brilliant. My 580 still has a red light saying that my network is not encrypted but everything else says otherwise, so I'm hoping that the red light is wrong. Everything else is A o.k.

Congratulations to Mark Hunter, who has successfully defended Cheadle for the Liberal Democrats in the first by-election of this parliament. Mark will make an excellent MP. I have known him since the late 1970s when we were both in the Young Liberals. It struck me seeing tonight's result how few of that promising YL generation ultimately made it into parliament. The leading Young Liberals and

I happened to be at Buckingham Palace today when the two minutes silence was held. It was a very moving moment as everybody and everything stopped and many heads were bowed. I thought about those who had died a week ago and their relatives who have lost them, I also thought about the many thousands who have lost thier lives and loved ones in Iraq, Afghanistan and so many other places because of mindless violence. I thought about the people I have met and worked with in East Africa, the Balkans and the Baltic and the courage they have shown ...

Just heard the excellent result from Cheadle. Well done to Mark Hunter and the brilliant Lib Dem by-election team. The Tories ran a very nasty campaign, even by their usual standards, and it is a very good thing that the electors of Cheadle saw right through it.