LibDem Blogs - Archived!

I've spent the last week with my elderly mum, doing some decorating for her. She did the cooking. Unfortunately, she has acquired a device for squeezing all the flavour out of meat and giving it the texture of wet cardboard. It is called a 'lean mean grilling machine'. While I was away I missed the Department for Transport's response to the Transport Committee's 'Road Charging, The Next Steps'. It has important implications for Staffordshire because it announces that the Highway Agency is going to do a feasibility study, comparing widening the M6 with the M6 Expressway ...

Worth a visit is Nat Watch, which bills itself as "Exposing the failure, mendacity and xenophobia of nationalists in Scotland and Wales". It is more interested in Wales than Scotland, and Peter Black warns us that its vendetta against Plaid's Leanne Wood is part of a Labour campaign against Regional AMs in general and, by implication, proportional representation. You may recall that Wood was once ordered out of the chamber at Cardiff for referring to the Queen as "Mrs Windsor". Thanks to an intervention by Radical Liberal turned New Labour suit Leighton Andrews, that is.

Dafydd Iwan continued with his sure-footed leadership of Plaid Cymru today by provoking a major row within Plaid Cymru. The Western Mail reports that the Assembly Presiding Officer was said to be furious after Mr. Iwan wrote to him suggesting he should opt to be Plaid's candidate in the new seat of Aberconwy.Plaid faces a serious dilemma in North-West Wales, the only part of the country where major boundary changes come into effect in time for the Assembly elections in 2007. The party currently holds the seats of Caernarfon and Meirionnydd at both Westminster and Cardiff Bay. In 1999 ...

The Council Mouse in Birmingham has been the scene of a "Noughties" version of "The Birds" the film of Alfred Hitchcock about birds attacking people. In Birmingham .... surprise surprise .... it is Seagulls. We have three Seagull Chicks (quite large ones), looking for somewhere to park in the Council Mouse Car park sometimes they pick a parking place where there already is a car such as that of

I'm quite surprised I managed to prepare for my candidate development day yesterday and read the lastest Harry Potter book all in the spave of about 9 hectic days. Fear not I will not spoil the plot I'm just looking forward to the next and final installment. Anyone know of a good reliable time machine I could borrow? So I can grab the new one now!

I have returned from my brief trip to London in one piece. I travelled on one bus and made four Tue journeys without being shot by the police blown up by The Terrorists. I got some new clobber while I was there and also picked up this anecdote about a friend’s housemate who showed less [...]

The shooting of Charles de Menezes is never far from my mind as I currently live close to Stockwell station in an area with a large number of Portugese and Brazilian nationals. It has provoked many questions about the detail of what went wrong that day. These questions will only be fully [...]

Charles Clarke has postponed his holiday plans following pressure from Cabinet colleagues, reports politics.co.uk. According to press reports last week, the home secretary had been planning to go on holiday with his family despite the terror crisis in London. Now he will join them later. A rather flimsy story. Yes, but I wanted to use that headline.

The Future Dictionary of Great Britain: Centrist 1. n. A person sharing the opinions of the word’s user. Antonym: Fascist (Via.)

The SFPN (Science Fiction Podcast Network) provides a number of ‘casts loosely related to the science-fiction and fantasy genres. Freed from the constraints of having to fill a whole radio-schedule or half-hour time-slots, podcasts allow science fiction to break out of the constraints of radio scheduling. In addition to ‘Escape Pod’, a truly excellent series [...]