LibDem Blogs - Archived!

This was presented to the Primary Care Trust by Desmond Swayne and I (Julian Lewis was in the USA and couldn't make it) and we were delighted, when everything was totted up, to find that there were over 40,000 signatures. Final day for comments is tomorrow and it seems that a decision will be made before the end of October. My gut reaction is to prepare for the long haul.

Allegedly there was a taxi driver who said to one delegate "If we are going to get the Casino - and if we are going to rival places like Vegas and Monte Carlo - then we have got to sort out the parking!" Delegates had other suggestions for how Blackpool could become a rival but parking was not necessarily the top contender.

It was probably a good job that I couldn't blog from Blackpool as my first impressions were far from favourable. Leave aside for one moment the fact that the town is badly signed, conference venues are miles from each other, the IT provision in the WInter Gardens is antiquated and bits of the town look like a war zone. The whole place is run down and was not the family venue I had anticipated. It

Glad to see people have been amusing themselves whilst I have been absent from blogging. Have a new resolve not to comment on the third party postings even if they wildly misrepresent Lib Dem policy - as many do. Had fully intended to blog from conference but a combination of trying to overcome IT problems and limited time meant that everything conspired against me. Hopefully normal service will now be resumed.

by Jabez CleggOh dear. It seems that some correspondents to the Independent can't distinguish between the means and the ends. Luckily Johann Hari is there to put them right. It is possible to have a Health Service free at the point of use that delivers better patient outcomes by using diversity of provision.Johann Hari coming over all liberal? Now that's not something you see every day ...

Lord Bonkers latest diary has now been posted on his website: I had dinner with Oaten the other evening and he insisted on drinking mineral water throughout the meal. The wine waiter came up to ask “Still or sparkling?” I gave Oaten an appraising look and replied: “Still, I am afraid.” There is an honourable tradition of politicians funding candidates from opposing parties, if they are strapped for cash themselves, to ensure a fair, democratic contest. I myself had a lot of innocent fun in the 1920s by putting up the deposit for a number of Socialist candidates in ...

Martin Bright, the New Statesman's political editor, has an article on that magazine's Labour Conference blog. He provides a useful link to the David Blunkett is an Arse site, and discusses delegates' reaction to his recent NS column on Blunkett's "idiosyncratic" attitude to the truth. He is right to defend himself, complaining that: Sometimes Labour activists seem to believe the job of a left-wing journalist is to bolster the Labour Party and protect it from itself.But he overeggs it when he writes: In truth, though, Labour politicians have to be able to bear a greater degree of scrutiny because ...

Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Hain, has been at it again. He used a press conference at the Labour Party Conference to announce that next year's Government of Wales Bill will be changed to force the Assembly to draw up a new Code of Conduct to prevent the 20 regional members claiming to represent individual constituencies. He also wants to see a crackdown on the expenses paid to regional AMs.This must be the most blatant example yet of a Government legislating to interfere in the democratic process for purely party political reasons. These are the actions of a third ...

The Freedom of Information Act has done a great deal to expose previously hidden information about the process of government. It has also revealed the lengths that some Ministers and civil servants will go to avoid revealing things that they would prefer to keep secret, though to be fair in many cases they do have a legitimate reason. Jenny Randerson yesterday uncovered a real gem. It is best described in her own words: Jenny Randerson: I raise a point of order under Standing Order No. 6.36. I submitted a question under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 ...

Being a Lib Dem, one of the things one has to put up with is constant slurs from the other parties that we are 'soft on drugs'. This is a blatant misrepresentation of Lib Dem policy but one which sometimes sticks in the minds of some voters who don't bother to check out the facts behind it. Cue todays Evening Standard front page. Undercover reporters have discovered traces of cocaine in the toilets at several Labour Conference hotels. Bearing in mind that security is tight, it does take some explaining doesn't it? Perhaps the police and security personnel would be ...

By Peter "One more heave" was the Liberal slogan in October 1974. Now the Tories are being warned against adopting it in 2009. Writing in Public Finance Philip Johnston points out that In 2005, Labour lost a number of seats that it had taken from the Tories in the 1990s, but they went to the LibDems. After 2001, the Conservatives were in second place in 356 seats, but after May this year, they are second in only 269 constituencies. In other words, should Labour falter at the next election, the LibDems are as well placed as the Tories to ...

You just couldn't make it up could you? First, veteran Labour Party member Walter Wolfgang, a memember for 57 years, is ejected forcibly for heckling on Iraq. The MP Austin Mitchell has his camera seized and his snaps deleted. Free speech and personal liberty trampled on in the name of security. Isn't this just what Labour want to do to the rest of us? Is their Conference a microcosm of the jack-booted Britain their leadership wants for the rest of us?

What really surprises me about Silent Calls is how little media attention the issue gets. Hundreds of thousands of people complain about Silent Calls. The issue, however, hardly ever pops above a low level response. When it appears in the media they get a massive response. I am not quite sure why that is. It may be that the issue is slightly more complex. The reality is that in the USA they have been banned (this does not involve banning predictive diallers). In the UK Ofcom could ban them. The reason why those people who ...

Seems Australia is picking up its security themes from Britain. The Howard Government is proposing pre-emptive detention without charge of course, but also banning orders which could include house arrest for up to a year. These orders would be issued in secret proceedings which cannot be contested by those under accusation, burden of proof on a civic cases 'ballance of probailities' basis, and with the option to exclude the accused's own chosen legal representatives. Dont tell Charlie Clarke -it might give him ideas... more victories for Osama without his franchised terrists having to lift a finger.

On Wednesday 28th September 2005 Walter Wolfgang, 82, was ejected from the Labour Party conference. He had shouted "nonsense" at Jack Straw. Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was defending the Government's decision to invade Iraq. Wolfgang has been a Labour Party member for 57 years. When Wolfgang attempted to re-enter the hall he was stopped. Reports say that the Terrorism Act was used to

A particularly good episode of Lost (”Raised by Another”) on E4 last night. Lot’s of spooky an exciting bits. (Spoilers ahead…) Tags: lost © Will on No geek is an island, 2005. ¦ Permalink ¦ 1 [...]

Signal fault brings train chaos Rail services into and out of Edinburgh have been slowly resuming following an early morning signalling failure which hit rush hour trains. The fault near Haymarket station in the capital brought trains to a standstill with thousands of commuters affected. I resorted to a bus journey in the end, which took [...]

by Steve Travis First Andrew Rawnsley, then The Daily Telegraph; now George Trefgarne gets in on the act. And what's that? Why, following the lead that The Apollo Project has set, of course! Trefgarne's article looks at the pehnomenon of hedge-fund managers, and why, despite what one might think, they aren't all Tories. One prevalent manager, Paul Marshall, is a big supporter of the Lib Dems and, with David Laws, a co-editor of and contributor to the (in)famous Orange Book. Laws and Marshall are well known Lib Dem "modernisers"; but they also have links to prominent ...

Ex-MP arrested over unpaid taxes A former Labour MP [Jane Gwho failed to appear at court accused of failing to pay her debts has been arrested in London. Jane Griffiths was due to appear before Reading County Court on 19 September. It’s a shame the old Guardian Diary has gone. They’d've loved this. [...]

Over the past week, a number of articles in this newspaper have made reference to the Labour party conference in Brighton. This was an error. We have since discovered that the Labour party conference was held in Harare. Apologies. Tags: labour+party+conference, walter+wolfgang, labour © Will [...]

Why on earth do we have anti-terror laws other than to bundle octogenarians out of conference halls and then prevent them from re-entering? It is quite evident that this elderly refugee from Nazi Germany is in fact a raving islamofascist, bent on murdering the foreign secretary. He must be stopped at all costs. In any decent society he would be shot without trial! Seriously though, kudos to Ian "slug" McCarthy for fitting onto my television screen. It was a struggle, but you made it!

Speculative only: Polly Toynbee, a Brownie, reports here that well known Brownite mouthpiece Patricia Hewitt is floating electoral reform balloons. In his conference speech Brown talked of 'building a progressive consensus'. Toynbee tells us he is realistic about the First past the post system: They know Labour will one day lose to the Tories under this electoral system, while Swedish social democracy was built by staying in power for 80 years (bar a brief interlude) with coalitions on the centre-left, where the British majority also lies. In this letter Ken Ritchie of the Electoral Reform Society argues ...

"Nations aren't built by dreamers. They rise by the patient courage of the change-maker. That's what we have been in New Labour: the change-makers". (Mr Tony Blair, 27th September, 2005). It used to be joked that New Labour was a piece of fluffy marketing gimmickry; that the party might as well be called Labour-lite or Diet Labour. Today that joke was shown to be startlingly prophetic. The