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I was absolutely flabbergasted watching BBC One's - Real Story with Fiona Bruce on Monday night: How green is your wheelie bin? to learn that recycled household waste from Islington has been found in a 500 tonnes shipment of unsorted waste in Indonesia destined for landfill. By the end of the programme I was furious that this could have happened. Must say I am deeply concerned after all the effort the council has put into promoting recycling in the borough. It's made a mockery of the whole programme and demeaned the efforts of local residents who are diligently sorting ...

Look at today's front pages, and there's only one story in town: the virginal David Cameron's deflowering of Tony Blair leads almost every front page. 'You were the future once' gibes The Daily Telegraph, picking up on Mr Cameron's slighting of the Prime Minister. It's a measure of our low and falling expectations of the British political media that its obsession with yesterday's theatrical

I have just found a website dedicated to the great man.

There are those who see Dennis Skinner as a lovable parliamentary character, but I have never bought it. His act has always seemed cheap and nasty to me, in line with the inherent thuggishness of much of the traditional Labour Party. And nowadays, more than anything, it seems terribly undignified. Does Skinner really have nothing better to do at his age? Besides, as Quaequam Blog! shows, his charges against George Osborne were pretty silly. Perhaps it is worth adding that the allegations he referred to were not published in the News of the World, as he thought. As the Guardian ...

...or just more Davids in his shadow cabinet? For the women: Theresa May (Shadow Commons leader); Theresa Villiers (Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury); Cheryl Gillan (Shadow Wales secretary) and Caroline Spelman (Shadow secretary for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister) and for the Davids: David Davis (Shadow home secretary); David Willetts (Shadow education secretary); David Lidington

There's a headline you don't see every day. Midland Mainline has sacked a driver for taking a nude photograph of himself in his own cab. According to the Sun : Maniac train drivers have been stripping off at 125mph in a crazy game of “dare”. Furious bosses called in police after one idiot used his mobile to take a naked photo of himself as his express sped between Sheffield and London’s St Pancras. He sent the snap to a stunned office girl at rail company Midland Mainline — where shocked staff alerted chiefs. The driver was ...

The exclusion zone of protest outside our nations Parliament at Westminster has resulted in a most illiberal conviction. Yesterday under Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act a 25 year old woman was found guilty for reading out the names of the Iraq War dead at, wait for it, central London's Cenotaph. You probably know it, it is just down the road from Tony Blair's central

Well the BBC have noticed blogsphere's widespread uproar to the Jerry Springer: The Opera DVD being removed by Sainsburys and Woolworths. I appear to be getting what is appearing to be the standard reponse from Woolworths which did not even address my specifific questions. There are tell tale signs in the response. My Email To: customer.relations@woolworths.co.uk Subject: Jerry Springer: The

We have been hit by a classic Urban Panic Whisper in MK. Versions of this go back a century or more through several wars and other troubles, featuring Germans, various Irish and people with sinister east European accents. Our outbreak centers on an alleged incident where a shop assistant helps an arabic (or in some versions undefinably 'islamic') looking man by running after him to give him the wallet he left behind. By way of thanks he tells her 'for your safety stay away from Central Milton Keynes on the 11th'. Of course nobody can now locate ...

I have asked a few questions about this. They relate to someone who moved from Acocks Green to Thailand on retirement. He had worked as a bus driver for about 35-40 years and retired to Thailand. He would like to return, but his pension is not enough to live on. He cannot however, get any support from the government regardless of the fact that he has paid uk tax for decades.

The Tory Shadow Secretary of State for Wales, Bill Wiggin, has jumped ship before he is pushed. He announced today that he was standing down from this post, presumably to allow David Cameron to install a more sympathetic alternative. In his press release Bill takes all the credit for the Tory revival in Wales: "I found the Conservative party in Wales in need of support and commitment, which I was delighted to give, and I am grateful to the excellent team of volunteers who worked with me. I leave this job, and the Conservative party in ...

David Cameron used part of his first speech as Tory leader to moan about the fact his party was still represented in the Commons by a cohort that was 90% male. My first hope from this is that his desire to see it changed will not lead to all-women shortlists. They are anti-democratic and discriminatory, and it was one of the most pleasing moments of the 2005 election night to see Peter Law elected by a massive margin in Blaenau Gwent against the Labour Party's parachuted-in female hack. The problem in the short term, though, is that it will probably ...

BBC: Labour MP Dennis Skinner has been banned from the Commons for the rest of Thursday for accusing shadow chancellor George Osborne of snorting cocaine. Referring to the 1980s, Mr Skinner said: “The only thing that was growing then was the lines of coke in front of Boy George and the rest of the Tories.” Two thoughts: George [...]

Charles Kennedy has said that the election of David Cameron will not affect the identity or ambition of the Liberal Democrats. Critics have said that David Cameron would turn into a clone of Charles Kennedy's image with voters as a young family man. However, on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme the Lib Dem Leader said: "You will see very clear differences of policy and of substance between ourselves

Ethiopia/Eritrea Q: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what steps the Government are planning to take to respond to the tension between Ethiopia and Eritrea; and what action it plans to take to support the United Nations Security Council resolution imposing economic sanctions on the two nations if they do not return to the conditions of the peace plan signed in

Whilst the new Tory leader grabbed the headlines trying to out-do Blair on selection for schools, an under-reported exchange took place between Charles Kennedy and the Prime Minister at PMQs yesterday (video feed - go to about 8 minutes in to see this bit) : "Mr. Charles Kennedy: .....to what extent, therefore, have the Government co-operated in the transport of terrorist suspects to Afghanistan

So the Tories have elected an opportunist Blair clone as leader. Typically the Tories went for the Eton and Oxford boy whose never had a proper job over David Davis and his council house upbringing. One can hope that the Tory membership have got it badly wrong again. PMQ's yesterday was like watching Blair versus Blair. Plenty of smooth oratory but not a great deal of substance. To be fair, there is a difference, the Tories would not have introduced a minimum wage (which has made a difference to many in Devon), invested in public services, supported the New ...

Hurrah for the Guardian's daily science page, a beacon of rationality amid the slough of arts reviews and critics. Today's comments on a piece of heartwarming news: a new carnivorous mammal has been found in Borneo. (And appropriately enough photographed by a man called Wulffraat.) Sadly, it lives in the kind of rainforest which George Monbiot, writing on Dec 6th, tells us is exactly the kind

Leah - The first post. Both totally cream crackered at the moment, counting the days to Christmas and our first wedding anniversary (2 weeks today!) when we get to escape on a little adventure back to our wedding hotel then off to the States - New York, where we're staying in Robin's Aunt and Uncle's apartment for Christmas and Boston, where I am witness to my best friend Gina's wedding on 27th. Last night was supposed to be a quiet night but in the Darbyshire household they never are so we went for our usual swim- during which Robin made ...

Interesting article in the Western Mail this morning looking at a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research on devolution. The IPPR is a New Labour think tank and at first glance the report appears to have been written from a very English perspective. They argue for instance that the Assembly Government will have to abandon the Welsh Baccalaureate in favour of whatever equivalent qualification is introduced in England. They also fail to recognise the distinctive education agenda being pursued in Wales.The press however concentrate on the comparative spending figures in the report. They state that since 1999 - ...

Although I would still describe myself as a Cameron sceptic, I thought that his performance at PMQs today - at least in the first exchange - was masterful. Starting off by making the Chief Whip a laughing stock was excellent (and not before time someone made that point!), but the key moment, for me, was that Cameron showed he had learned the key lesson of Blairism. It was no surprise Labour won the election in 1997. It would have taken a sheer disaster, an appalling leader, and a huge slice of bad luck for the result to have gone any ...