LibDem Blogs - Archived!

How does the producer of a tragically flawed range of operating systems and office software turn problems into opportunities? The solution is simple if you are a monopoly with complete control over the sales channel: You make it so that people have to pay again to fix the problems you created first time around. This week [...]

This is what I call good news. From the Telegraph : The short film pulls no punches. It opens with the Smurfs dancing, hand-in-hand, around a campfire and singing the Smurf song. Bluebirds flutter past and rabbits gambol around their familiar village of mushroom- shaped houses until, without warning, bombs begin to rain from the sky. Tiny Smurfs scatter and run in vain from the whistling bombs, before being felled by blast waves and fiery explosions. The final scene shows a scorched and tattered Baby Smurf sobbing inconsolably, surrounded by prone Smurfs. Found via After School Snack.

Clarke: "I've never touched cocaine" Kenneth Clarke has brought the issue of hard drug use into the Conservative leadership race, by declaring he had never taken cocaine. The denial came at a hustings in Westminster, where the former Chancellor was grilled by a group of right-wing Tory MPs and asked if he had ever taken class A drugs. The same question was not put to current bookies' favourite David Cameron, the 39-year-old "young pretender" who shot into the lead in the polls following his well-received party conference speech last week. Mr Cameron has previously come under the spotlight for ...

Further congestion is all that Linlithgow residents can look forward to for the foreseeable future. The Scottish Executive has announced a blanket presumption against new motorway junctions as part of its Scottish Planning Policy. The means that the must hoped for all way-junction on the M9 at Burghmuir, to the East of the town, appears dead and buried. Neither West Lothian Council nor the

Well here we go. I am sitting in the chamber with my new Blackberry, Edwina Hart is answering questions on alcohol and drug abuse and there is barely a handful of Labour AMs here. I am down to ask a supplementary on question seven on social housing for older people. I am starting to get used to this device.

A profile of new MPs in the Guardian earlier this week was almost too kind to one new MP. Amid generally fawning it described him thus: Already there is something self-consciously statesmanlike in the way he taps the table with the side of his hand for emphasis, and looks into the distance, his strong jaw raised a little, when he is expressing a big thought. Tapping the table like a statesman? That well known leadership quality. David Davis may be crap at public speaking, but he's bloody good at tapping the table, y'know? David Blunkett, bit of an ...

I’ve added a “Best of…” link to the left-hand sidebar. The new page is designed to group together some of the better posts from this blog to separate them out from all the random dross about what I had for dinner, etc. (By the way, Delia and I made a smashing roast pork with apple and [...]

Somebody asked me the other day when I thought that campaigning would start in earnest for the 2007 Assembly elections. I gave some non-committal answer to the effect that there is a long way to go yet. I was wrong. Things are now getting so heated in the chamber that one would think that we are already in the middle of the election. The problem of course is that the Government has lost its majority and the opposition is using every opportunity to take advantage of that fact to get through measures that it believes are both popular and necessary. ...

As the Western Mail reports this morning, all AMs are to be given the use of a blackberry to aid their work. The downside for many members is that they might have to start reading their own e-mails. I have always done this and responded in person as well. Just as I operate a clear desk policy I very rarely have more than a handful of e-mails in my in-box at any one time. How a blackberry will help me improve on that I do not know, though at least I will be able to blog remotely. When ...

by Peter No apologies for this link to a year-old article in the Times. The interest lies in what has happened in the meantime. Tony Travers (for it is he) " highlighted Manchester Withington, a parliamentary seat held by Fred Silvester, the former Tory MP, between 1974 and 1987 under the headline of “not Conservative territory?” He said that the party’s share of the vote had declined from 36 per cent when the seat was lost to Labour in 1987 to less than 8 per cent in this year’s local elections. "Significantly, the Liberal Democrats had moved to ...

I think the government are responding more quickly to disasters now. It struck me as odd that during the aftermath of the Tsunami the media had managed to get on the ground, but the government and many agencies had not. Birmingham has responded well, not just because there are many people with links to the area, but because Birmingham does tend to respond well.

By Chrisco It's a sobering thought, but let's face up to it: the American economy, and by extension all our fates, are in the hands of the Chinese government, and the politicians and voters of Taiwan. China could, should it desire to for its own reasons, bring the American house of cards crashing down. Admittedly, it is a risky proposition for Beijing, as the ensuing global downturn will naturally badly hurt Chinese exports. The counter to this is the possibility that Beijing reckons that its own domestic consumption will survive the squeeze and continue the Chinese economic miracle, as ...

Ahh, after Vaz, Robinson, Mandelson (twice), and Blunkett we can now add Hewitt to the list. Too much power, too little sense. Corrupt? Venal? Or just stupid? They are beginning to get that decrepid fin de siecle air the Tories had from the Poll Tax onwards.

by Peter Here is Mark Salisbury with an analysis of trends in BlairBritain. "I just can't help feeling that we are doing the terrorist's bidding with all this destruction of civil liberties," he concludes.

One of the reasons I decided to resume blogging was that the Lib Dems have a number of major policy consultations going on at the moment and I thought this would be a good place to develop my personal responses. Rather than write it all in one go however, I thought it might be [...]