LibDem Blogs - Archived!

The South Shropshire Journal reports that Matthew Green wants to fight Ludlow for the Lib Dems at the next election and believes he can win it back. He gained the seat in 2001 but lost it in the general election earlier this year. He says: “One of the reasons I lost the election was that a lot of people voted to get rid of Tony Blair. They didn’t get rid of Tony Blair, because it doesn’t work like that – instead they got rid of their local MP. “People have said to me they want a full-time MP again, ...

Blogger has launched a new feature: Backlinks. This harnesses their blog search engine to provide a "Links to this post" section for every posting on your blog. It shows links to that post that have been made from blogs across the web, including your own. I have now turned Bloglinks on for Liberal England. For an example of how it looks, see my posting on the Davis camp's belief that there is an Oxford conspiracy in support of David Cameron. There is a short article about Backlinks on the Blogger Buzz blog, and more detailed information on the Blogger help ...

House Points returns to Liberal Democrat News for its 94th season. Here is today's column. Conservative Conspiracies There’s nothing so much fun as a Tory leadership contest. In recent years the Conservative Party has shown a reliable instinct for choosing the wrong candidate. And these elections are one of the few places where you still come across open class warfare. In 1990 the victim was Douglas Hurd. His Eton and Trinity background was used against him by John Major’s campaign team. Hurd was mystified: “I was brought up on a farm. I don’t know how we got into ...

Well I've just been to my induction for my new gym. This is the third gym of which I am a menber and this one gives me access to all of West Lothian sports facilities across the county which is good. The equipment is on a technokey so there is no skiving, not that I as an ex-athlete would attempt to try that. I'm now sure how I'll be able to hours of delivering leaflets but I'm sure I'll soon

Along with other members of the Warwick Liberal Democrat team I attended a Quiz Night in aid of Macmillan Nurses Cancer Relief they provide excellent support for people with Cancer. www.macmillan.org.uk The Quiz was sponsored by Iain Jermond who is currently the Mayor of Royal Leamington Spa. Excellent night, very well organised although the questions were a bit tough and obscure. We scored 93 using a skillful strategy of educated guesses. Some teams scored well over 200, I mean what sort of people know things like that !! Well I am off to engineer at a gig ...

I have added an icon in the right hand column of this blog for BlogCymru, a blog aggregator set up by Aran Jones to collect English language blogs about Wales. He also runs blogiadur.com, which aggregates Welsh-language blogs. Lots of interesting blogs on there though mine does not appear to feature as yet.

I try to make sure that my political office is about as efficient as possible. The objective is that everything that comes in on a day goes out the same day. The complications of trying to deal with the City Council Computer Systems and the Parliamentary Communications Department and get everything to work do cause some stress. I have now moved the casework server for the third time. It

British politics this autumn is dominated by the fifth leadership contest of the Conservative party in the past decade. Major-Hague-Duncan Smith- Howard, all have come and gone without appealing too much to the British people. Now we see yet another leadership contest to succeed Mr. Howard as the Leader of the "official opposition". As a Liberal Democrat, I would usually let the internal affairs of the Conservative Party be a matter for private grief.However, the four surviving candidates have become a metaphor for the decline of the modern Conservative Party, and it is irresistible to point out why the Conservatives ...

By Peter To atone for the descent to the Mirror (see below), here is a something from the London Review of Books (link above - but you may need to subscribe). Gilmour makes a good start by reminding us of John Stuart Mill's description of the Conservative Party, and goes on to ask whether the Tories are any longer a serious party. He is not sure they are, singling out for blame: "The rebels against the Maastricht Treaty (who) didn't care how much damage their activities did to the party and government". And then he paints a fairly woeful picture ...

by PeterGentle reader, away from the pastures of the FT, Telegraph and Guardian there are other smaller papers, with fewer words and larger headlines.Among these is one known as the Mirror. Today it reports on the close relationship between the Parliamentary representatives of New Labour and the Mod Cons under the headline TORY MP WALLOPS LABOUR MP.The cause of all this was an e-mail, sent by the office of Philip Davies MP (Con, Shipley), which read"Tomorrow Philip will be on Talksport from 12-1 with Steven (sic) Pound and Simon Hughes. Please let members know so they can call ...

It is always dangerous to rely on a newspaper interview as source material when commenting. Often reasons of space will mean that coherent and well-argued views are edited and the end product becomes something it is not. Even when the journalist and his sub-editor gets it right the politician in question will react to the slightest criticism with the age-old cry that he or she was "quoted out of context."My caveat in commenting on this Western Mail interview with Lembit Opik therefore is that I am referring to what appeared in print, I was not present when he said it. ...

Please let me have any comments on the following aplications submitted this week. - DaveWard: Walcot App.Ref: 05/02511/FULRegistered: 4 October 2005 Expiry Date: 29 November 2005Location: Ground Floor 7 Walcot Buildings Walcot Bath BA1 ...

My first tax commission response post proved to be a modest success resulting in quite a few useful comments. This post deals with the next section. The third chapter of the consultation paper (pdf) deals with personal taxation, leaving aside local taxation which is dealt with in the following chapter. Here we deal with [...]