LibDem Blogs - Archived!

Before any of you think I am going slightly mad or have stepped out of a TARDIS by accident I'm not refering to King Kenny but to his son Paul. This season I must have entered an elite groups of people who have cheered on both Kenny and Paul from the terraces/stands while they play for my team. Being Northern Irish I feel that I am allowed to indulge my football support not just for home team

Hampshire : A nursery school has been threatened with a noise abatement order after a neighbour complained that children playing in the garden were too noisy. The Jigsaw Nursery on Locks Heath Park Road, Hampshire, must reduce its noise. Fareham Borough Council has suggested to the school the children should play outside in the garden - landscaped with parents' money - for one hour per day. Leicestershire : Youngsters in part of a Leicestershire town are being stopped from buying ice creams - because the local van has been banned from the streets. Wesley Wilkinson can no longer ...

Greetings one and all, and welcome to the very first SportBlog roundup. The idea here is to showcase the very best of sportsblogging from right across the world, so whether your football is oval or round, your rugby is played with 13 men or 15, or if your hockey is played on astroturf or ice, there should be something for everyone. The idea is to get more people aware of the sports bloggers out there, so feel free to nominate anything that caught your eye, by emailing me at sportblog at googlemail dot com First up is Eric McErlain at ...

Lord Winston’s appearance in adverts for “clever milk” (”fishy milk” would be more accurate, but clearly St. Ivel’s marketing consultants felt it didn’t quite project the image they wished to convey) has convinced me further that we are sliding into the Judge Dredd universe. In Get Smart, entrepreneur Otto Sump markets a new brand [...]

This is a picture of Graham Stuart MP for Beverley and Holderness. As with me he uses email a lot and as such needs to use an external mail server (that is external to the House of Commons systems). He, however, cannot get a good enough phone signal in his office so he has to either wander around the garden or sit on this bench at the entrance to the cloakroom to download his emails. The EDM

But you'd hardly notice it. The Royal Society is promoting a shoot out between two of the greatest physicists/mathematicians that have ever existed (Newton/Einstein), but no mention of any of our great chemists (eg Faraday after whom nearly every University chemistry block is named, although Birmingham has gone one better and has a statue...)For what its worth my vote goes to Newton, having spent most of my PhD using newtonian mechanics to model the movements and interactions of atoms in molecules.

StereoPCwithPrinterScannerSpeakers/ampQuite an old 21" CRT monitorVarious chargers Will from now on unplug my rechargers when not charging, as well as ensuring that the PC speakers/amp are turned off when not in use.I ought to look to replace the CRT monitor (for which I need to reset the power save options anyway), as its getting on a bit, and its got some colour issues. (A nice and big Dell TFT will probably replace it).The stereo acts as a radio alarm clock, so has to be on standby.

Have had a busy couple of weeks with most evenings and weekends being engaged in Council duties, or Lib Dem things.Colin Ross turned 30 on 29 Oct, so spent the evening in Wolverhampton (after spending the day training in Worcester).Last weekend was Mike & Max's 10th aniversary, so was in Manchester for the celebration. Mike is about the only person I see regularly from my University days. And I only met him during my third year (I was in hall in his old room, I he was in my old room. A bit like Eastenders, but the first conversation was, ...

by Peter Will Howells last week asked a question that has been on my mind in recent days: has Blunkett finally moved out of his bachelor pad in Eaton Square? The Guardian last Friday reported that "The Cabinet Office yesterday said that Mr Blunkett had been asked to vacate his grace and favour residence in Belgravia "within a short time", giving him some space to find alternative accommodation in London." If anyone sees a white transit van in the neighbourhood, please let us know. The comments here remind me that a leadership contest between Brown and Blunkett would ...

According to the New Scientist: Women get more of a buzz out of cartoons, a brain-imaging study has found, with their brains feeling more rewarded by a funny joke than those of men.

The list of new life Peers to be appointed was released today, and includes my old boss Brian Cotter. Anyone who has ever met Brian will know what a top bloke he is, and I’m sure a lot of people will be heartened to have him back in the Palace of Westminster, not least the numerous parliamentary researchers who consider him a bit of a legend. Congrats Lord Cotter!

I knew that no good would come of Ludlow School's decision to reduce the lunch hour to 50 minutes. The Shropshire Star reports that dinner ladies, parents and councillors are all up in arms.

Now and again people ask for pictures of me that they wish to use. I have just uploaded some to flickr so that they are generally available. If you want a higher resolution version please click on the photo to get to the flickr account.

Just popping in to say I’m quiet at the moment because my spare time is directed towards a project I’ve found for myself. It’s not a blog ting so you probably won’t get to see anything of it here, but it’s led to me spending much time poring over books in the National Library of [...]

Sita, our recycling contractors, have just left behind a whole box of paper I put out for recycling, plus a bag of plastic bottles. I am just about to phone the Council - not because I expect any special treatment as a councillor, but because if they are not carrying out their work properly for my home then they are probably being inefficient elsewhere as well. Door-to-door recycling has been one of the success stories of the past few years, but we do have to keep an eye on the collections - things do go wrong sometimes! ...

by Steve TravisIn a week and a half I will be heading out of suburban Brisbane for a week's R&R in the Sunshine Coast resort of Coolum Beach. Whilst checking out the location of our appartemnt on the map, I noticed that the road that skirts the coast between Coolum Beach and Noosa is called David Low Way. One of my favourite cartoons is the excellent Rendezvous, and I recalled that the cartoonist David Low had antipodean connections. Alas a google search showed that he was a New Zealander by birth, but it would be nice to ...

Kaiser Chiefs - I predict a riotFortunately the tensions in Lozells and Handsworth seem to have subsided. The city came through the weekend of 5/6 November largely unscathed. With so many festivals (involving explosives) reaching a peak over the last weekend, it could quite easily have gone tits up very quickly.As for the events in France, I'd be making sure that if I owned a car that the third party, fire and theft insurance was up to date...I'll leave it to my academic colleagues to discuss this more fully, but I suspect that my friend Craig will have to rewrite ...

This morning's Times has an authoritative leak of the forthcoming list of new peers: Two ex-Lib Dem MPs are to become peers, John Burnett and Brian Cotter, plus former MEP Robin Teverson, and John Lee, a one-time Tory minister who defected to the Lib Dems four years ago.Given the number of major donors to the Conservative and Labour Parties who are getting a peerage this time, it was a little churlish of us to leave Michael Brown out.

I believe that I have read comment elsewhere on the so-called proposal to put houses in England with a good view into a higher council tax band, but I cannot recall where at the moment. Nevertheless the reaction of the Tories here contains all the hallmark of the opportunism and inconsistency for which they are becoming known.They are now claiming that this is a modern day window tax but what did they expect when they introduced Council Tax in the first place? Any property tax has to relate to the value of the land or building that it is ...

I listeneed to an alarming interview on radio 4 this morning with british defence lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith who is involved in helping to defend some of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. Aparantly another batch of detainees have been charged, including a british refugee who has been charged with 'conspiracy to commit war crimes'. The US Government: Kidnapped a british resident, incarcerated them without charge, plans to put them on trail before a military tribunal of judges handpicked by the US government, is allowing evidence gained after torture, will not allow the accused or his lawyers even see all the evidence ...

I have been thinking about why my reaction against the Government's plans for 90 day detention without charge is so instinctive. Apart from all the arguments about how devastatingly life-wrecking such detention would be to the individual concerned (usually an 'innocent victim' that Blair and co are supposed to be concerned about), I think it comes down to the fact that they are simply not putting forward a case. Blair's argument simply seems to come down to 'there are nasty terrorists about and the security services assure me that they need these measures to fight them'. But there is no ...

According the International Energy Agency in 25 years time demand for energy will surpass the supply available from the world's fossil fuel reserves. This is due to the advancement of developing economies in Africa, the Middle East and China. To meet these demands Carbon Dioxide emissions will rise by 52%. Hardly surprisingly then the IEA say this trend is: Not sustainable from an energy,

by Peter A couple of weeks ago Simon Mollan slapped me down on a Lib Dem messageboard for raising the issue of excessive assessed coursework. His argument - a good one - was that these issues should be left to educationalists. So I will just note that Johann Hari has written an article that I find persuasive, and two educationalists have provided responses that I found enlightening (scroll down the page).

Writing about architecture made me remember the photos I took when I was 17. I was trying to illustrate some of the alienation I felt at the place where I was going to college and the buildings in the town around me. This may explain my reaction to the museum in Berlin below. With the benefit of hindsight I can see how fragmented this made me feel, yet then I wasn't good at voicing the strength of these feelings. I guess I am trying to bridge the gap between our young people growing up in ...

I managed to catch the last 45 minutes of the Beeb’s new retelling of Much Ado About Nothing. It was better than I expected it to be, although I still can’t see the point of doing Shakespeare without the language (he isn’t particularly remembered for his great plots). Perversely though, it reminded me of one [...]