LibDem Blogs - Archived!

It's hello to Rob Knight's A Blog from Under the Floorboards. Funny place to keep it.

Many of us are waiting with abated breath to read some of Simon Hughes's proposals which are expected to be debated at conference in September. Simon's no nonsense radical ideas and actions since he was elected the party president are filtering through via various committee and certainly making waves. What's interesting is that following Simon's announcement at the Spring conference that he intends to have three (specialty) V P's, we already have a member jumping the gun by advertising himself in the media and on his business card as a vice president. The issue ...

Simon Titley is sound on Simon Hughes' outburst in the Guardian today: Anyone who thought the Liberal Democrats' president Simon Hughes was slightly barmy would have had their prejudices confirmed... You can find the original report here.

Silent Calls are particularly worrying. One option is that instead of silence a record message tells people what is going on so that they don't worry. This still should be kept to an absolute minimum, but it is interesting that the government are considering this option as well.

Anyone who thought the Liberal Democrats' president Simon Hughes was slightly barmy would have had their prejudices confirmed by a report in today's Guardian. Let's leave aside Hughes's interesting suggestion for selecting parliamentary candidates, which I predict will be quietly forgotten once nurse has given him his medicine. What interests me is that Hughes has chosen to repeat the lies about

Following the verdict of Judge Richard Mawrey that elections in two Birmingham wards should be re-run, a date has been set and the campaigns have now got underway. In determining the case the judge described the evidence of electoral fraud that was presented to him as sufficient to "disgrace a banana republic". Both the pro-Kashmir People's Justice Party (PJP) and the Liberal Democrats claimed local Labour activists used forgery and deception to collect votes - something the candidates denied. The Guardian reported on 5 April that 'early on a June morning last year, four police officers drew up outside ...

Husband who chopped up wife gets 5 years - apparently that was “two years for manslaughter and three years for preventing the burial”. Is manslaughter really a lesser crime than leaving a corpse in a freezer?

Tuesday 26th July 2005 - I have been spending a lot of time looking around my ward and the Halewood area in general in recent weeks and am very disappointed with the amount of litter on the streets and fly tipping going on. The Knowsley Pride campaign was designed to address these problems but so far I am yet to be convinced that the extra investment has made any real impact, something I will

The figures for Birmingham's NRF for the next two years have been announced. The first year is going up from £22,043,488 to £32,266,410 next year which is an increase of £10,222,922 and 46% and then to £37,624,119 in 7-8 an increase on this year of £15,580,631. I am expecting the usual attempt by the bureaucrats to remove the democratic accountability from the spending decisions.

Minneapolis is a typical mid-American city - a dominant down town skyline surrounded by miles of green residential roads. I'll post some photos when I get home, but I am updating this through the very limited Internet access on my hotel room's TV. The city also boasts the Mall of America, supposedly the biggest mall in the world. It has an entire theme park at the centre with several white-knuckle rides and a substantial Lego section. Isobel and I spent a happy few hours exploring it this morning. I discovered Victoria's Secrets whch ...

The ever-excellent Spiked draws attention to Charles Clarke's latest effort to curb liberty in this article. What is so terrifying is not simply the EU security regime which is being advocated, but the cavalier attitude with which this is being undertaken. Only weeks after France and Holland threw the EU constitution into crisis, the assembled interior ministers seem intent on centralising ever more power. No longer able to make an economic case for this centralisation due to weak Eurozone growth, they have seized on security as the pretext on which they "must" act, regardless of whether the ...

Some peoples lives are so well organized, mine seems to be nothing but one crazy unplanned situation after another. Makes life interesting but it can be annoying at times. Early Saturday morning - at long last my table and chairs were returned from the GE campaign office - bit peeved that one chair is missing. They are a set and I like everything to match. I can't be annoyed with Monica, she's a darling making the effort to deliver them - just have to wait for the key figures to come back from their hols to sort it all out. ...

That nice man Tim Worstall has kindly linked to me in amongst a whole host of other good posts from the British blogging world this week. If you're reading this for the first time because of that - welcome, please stick around. If not, go and check it out!