LibDem Blogs - Archived!

I have just been reading Geoffrey Wheatcroft's book The Strange Death of Tory England . It is a history of the party's triumph and collapse in the years since Alec Douglas-Home became leaders. If you want a history of the Conservatives in the decades before that, incidentally, I recommend Simon Ball's The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World They Made . You can find a summary of Wheatcroft's arguments in an article he wrote for The Wall Street Journal on the eve of the Tories' third successive election defeat. His conclusion is not a bad summary ...

... but some are more equal than others. by Jabez Clegg Over at Inner West Central, Simon Mollan has been discussing the tension between liberty and equality. We think it's worth plugging again.

A Sunday of mixed emotions in Southend... United go top of League One after beating Nottingham Forest 1-0 and setting a club record of eight consecutive wins. ... and the pier - the longest pleasure pier in the world ... was seriously damaged by fire. Leader of Southend's Lib Dems , Graham Longley, was quoted by our local paper as saying "Southend Pier is in the middle of my heart and it looks

Oh dear, I seem to be having one of those right-wing moments. But I am really the only Lib Dem who doesn't want to give prisoners the vote? Mark Oaten says: "The Liberal Democrats have a longstanding commitment to lift the ban on prisoners voting. Today's ruling is not just about rights. It is about ensuring that prisoners return to their communities as responsible citizens. Telling offenders

The Treasury Macroeconomic Modelling team have finally decided that they won't give me a copy of the assumptions file for the 2005 budget. Hence I am taking Gordon Brown to the Information Commissioner. Press release is as follows: John Hemming MP has reported the Chancellor to the Secrets Watchdog for his failure to reveal budget calculations. John Hemming MP, a computer specialist, has hacked

It's interesting how we can overlook this sort of thing if it means we can get cheap T-shirts and consumer electronics. The sad thing is that it's not as if people don't know about the Chinese authorities stamping on democratic movements. If they sell us cheap stuff then hey, they can have our money (even [...]

The Western Mail reports this morning that Assembly officials in Cardiff Bay have been put on alert to repel Welsh language protestors armed with paint brushes and a collection of pithy slogans. Once more the source of the story is a leaked e-mail:The e-mail says, "We have received information from South Wales Police instructing the Welsh Assembly Government of a substantial threat from Welsh language protesters."They have already daubed graffiti at Cathays Park."They have issued a statement of intent to enter Welsh Assembly Government buildings and daub paint once inside."You need to make staff aware of this and the ...

From today’s Guardian Corrections & Clarifications: A caption with the page 13 photograph of Lucy Mangan, which accompanied the G2 feature, A month in Tescoland, October 7, stated in error that she had used concentrated fabric conditioner on her hair. She had used hair conditioner. I always use 2-in-1 myself. [...]

Having finally got around to reading the conference edition of Liberator, I was struck by Simon Titley’s article, dissecting the party into distinct factions, which he has dubbed as Lib Dem “Maoists” and the “Trotskyites”. The “Maoists” are the ultra-localists who offer up their lives to pavement pounding and never-ending campaigning as an ends in itself. The “Trotskyites” are the hard-nosed economic liberals who see the consumer empowerment of market choice as the solution to all of our woes. The zeal with which both factions conduct themselves doesn’t really do themselves or the party a great many favours. It’s certainly ...

Fire hits Wallace and Gromit sets Company spokesman: “Everything has gone, from as far back as Morph and all the way through to Chicken Run, including all the Wallace and Gromit films, Creature Comforts, it’s all there. Everyone is devastated.” Nick Park said: “Even though its precious stuff and nostalgic - and its dreadful news for [...]

Friday saw me failing to be shortlisted for the Dream Job I was after. Education Manager at Bletchley Park, what a pearler of job. So the emotions crash. However Conference is coming and I try to sort out the Training Schedule but I'm having severe problems with the lack of information from the organiser. Saturday was a great conference despite the problems. Managed to sort out the Training Schedule on the fly as I has given more snippets of information from other people. It always feels good when you complete something as all the odds :-) So the emotions soar. ...

I want one! Does anyone have a spare 400 lying around so I can get it in the new year or for my birthday (hint, hint, hint)? Best features: 3G, Wi-Fi, 2 mega-pixel camera. (hint)

That is today, October 10th 2005. To find out more, look at this link to the World Coalition Against The Death Penalty. Emphasis is on the Death Penalty in Africa, where it is still rather common... The declaration to the African Heads of State says this: Following the example of values espoused by Nelson Mandela, of the Statute ofthe International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Statute of the SpecialCourt for Sierra Leone which exclude capital punishment for perpetrators of themost serious crimes and remembering that several African countries have neverapplied the death penalty, we believe that ...

So Taishi explodes into the world headlines – something you would expect given the account in my previous post here about Community Politics in a Chinese village. May our thoughts be with the ordinary people doing extraordinary things.. The probable murder of Lu Banglie (see today’s Guardian, 10 Oct) raises many stakes, what price for example the relationship with the Rover plant at Longbridge, Birmingham? How much will our response in the UK to this violence be modulated by the growing economic power of China within Britain?

These blog entries seem in danger of becoming weekly at the moment, rather than the more frequent updates which I used to do.  Must try to find time to add to this blog more often in future. Last Tuesday, I attended my first meeting as a governor of Hither Green Primary School.  Not for me to reveal the details of what when on here, but it's clear that the school needs to attract more pupils.  As one of my fellow governors pointed out, there a lot of interesting things going on in the school, such as after-school clubs, which need ...