LibDem Blogs - Archived!

The top spending 14 LSPs were summonsed to Whitehall to be told about the "Respect Agenda". There are reasonable ideas behind the "respect agenda", but merely writing a "Respect Action Plan" is not one of them. We were told (having made the point that the government have demands for a large number of plans - Community Strategy, Local Area Agreement, Robust Improvement Plans - all covering the

emptied the dehumidifier. Wondered what the water extracted from the air in a 360 year old house tastes like. Fucking awful, should you be interested. Poured 11 litres of clean, undiseased, but foul tasting water down the sink and half way though thought, how many people in the world are dying for want of this much clean water? Speaking of diseased water Simon Mayo interviewed Professor Steve

On the plus side one can welcome the environment commission set up by Cameron. Certainly Gummer and Goldsmith are two figures well worth listening to and their deliberations - and the Tory reaction to them - should prove interesting. One caveat is are the Tories picking up the mantle of green issues as a clumsy attempt to [as they probably see it] connect with younger voters ? After all the Tory record has been dismal since Gummer departed. Likewise, the social justice commission was unthinkable under recent Tory leaders. And, whilst he was an atrocious leader, since then Iain ...

Today's Guardian lists Britain's most hated buildings, as nominated in a poll for a forthcoming Channel 4 programme called Demolition. Amongst them is Northampton bus station, which the paper describes as a "1974 behemoth that dominates an otherwise small-scale historic town". Maybe that is a little kind to Northampton, but the building is awful. Despite its size, it still manages to house the bus stops in a fume filled chasm somewhere in the basement. Before it opened there was an older bus station squeezed into a narrow street in the town centre. To get the buses in and out required ...

When I started writing for Liberal Democrat News I pointed out that all new columnists are obliged by law to sign an undertaking not to use the phrase "political correctness gone mad". The same duty applies to bloggers.This can make some stories difficult to cover. One such is today's withdrawal of official advice on how to organise school Christmas parties. As the Daily Telegraph said this morning:Children should be protected from "terrifying" Father Christmas, shielded from "alarming" pantomimes and encouraged not to send wasteful Christmas cards, a Government website has advised teachers. Meanwhile, congratulations to Lib Dem shadow education secretary ...

There is so much to write about today and no time to do it in. I will just have to catch up tomorrow. Although this is recess I spent this morning in a meeting in Swansea discussing homelessness and the Assembly Government's legislation restricting the use of bed and breakfast. Then it was onto a train to London for some individual meetings with MPs about education policy and the Government's white paper on choice, which will largely apply to England but has ramifications for Wales nevertheless. My arrival in London coincided with newspaper headlines about a poison gas cloud descending ...

The new road scheme has been in for over a year now and councillors are still working with officers and with residents to alleviate some of the problems that this has brought with it. A meeting will be held on site with councillors, residents and officers to discuss some of the issues on Monday 12th December. Councillor David Dixon has said, "The road scheme has so far been very much traffic orientated and somewhere along the line pedestrians have sadly been forgotten about. To cross from the Bathwick Estate to get to Great Pulteney Street, you have to use ...

Audley Harrison tells the Guardian: Sometimes you have to take two steps back to take one forward.How true. I think that tells you a lot about life - and certainly about Harrison's approach to boxing. An honourable mention also goes to David Lacey, for this piece of blatant racism in his report on the Chelsea vs Wigan game: Yet Mourinho does seem to like seeking mountains behind molehills. He said he had told William Gallas not to give the ball back to Wigan because he felt McCulloch was feigning injury. This from a native of Portugal, the country which has ...

Is this what happens when you elect a government that makes a big deal out of asylum seekers and immigration? I somehow suspect that it is. Not having followed the Australian election closely, I can't comment for sure. But if John Howard's election campaign, masterminded by Lynton Crosby, was anything like Michael Howard's, then it wouldn't surprise me to find links between that and the events on the streets of Sydney today. The thing that struck me most about the news pictures was that it didn't seem the typical rioting crowd, or the deprived areas that are normally associated with ...

A good friend of mine from the right of the political spectrum as written an interesting piece on acceptable and unacceptable political images. He begins by asking a basic question: why is it okay to wear Che Guevara T-shirts, or put up posters of Chairman Mao or Stalin? Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was a vile man. He urged his followers to become ‘effective and selective violent cold killing machines.’ He founded a system of concentration camps in Cuba in which dissidents, aids victims and homosexuals were imprisoned until death. He frequently personally carried out executions of those ...

According to Recess Monkey, Davey Cameron’s a trouserleg lifter. In fact, I spotted this article on their newsfeed back on Friday, but it disappeared. Clearly the Monkey has been having a couple of quiet words with chaps in white wigs before deciding to publish, so I presume it is accurate. Personally, I have personal [...]

Living near the fuel storage depot and refinery of Grangemouth I was wondering what would the equivalent impact of been if Buncefield had happened here. This map was taken from Encarta and modified. The map above has the extent of the smoke cloud from Buncefield yesterday superimposed on a map of the same scale of central Scotland. As you can see the cloud would have stretched from Glasgow to

The following is the coresponadce between myself and Sainsburys From: Ryan CullenTo: customerservice@sainsburys.co.uk Sent: 8 Dec 2005 20:40 It was recently noted that 10-20 people have managed to get Jerry Springer the Opera banned from your stores. As a regular shopper and a former staff member, could I therefor ask that you should remove the Daily Mail immediately as it offends my beliefs. From: customerservice@sainsburys.co.uk To: Ryan CullenSent: 9 Dec 2005 08:33 Dear Mr Cullen, Thank you for taking the time to contact us. I am very sorry that you are unhappy with our decision to stop selling ...

by Peter The dispute between Clarke and Cameron over the future of Conservatives and the EPP is the perfect excuse to revive stories about the Tory coalition falling apart. But let's look at it from another angle: does it mean that Cameron is going to lead the tories into a position of being ultra-nationalist on Europe (thus keeping the "bastards" happy) centrist on the economy, and social issues? Such a position - communicated to the electorate by a fragrancy of Tory ladies - might prove a potent mix. Pure opportunism, of course, but popular. Except, perhaps, with ...

A quick post whilst at work.Last night I was joking with Heather that the front pages of all the newspapers would be covering Hemel except the Daily Express, which would of course be coving another Diana story. Am I really suprised that I got it right?

The Meeting the Challenge website has suddenly had a rush of articles posted on it. Thus far I’ve only had a chance to read Lembit Opik’s piece. Pretty much everything I’ve ever read by Lembit has been on these lines, which can basically be summed up as “feel the fear and do it anyway”. [...]

Heathrow was a circus on Friday night. The mist in London during the day meant that several flights were cancelled or delayed. And so it was that we actually took off 2 hours 25 minutes later than we were supposed to, which on a 45 minute flight time was quite impressive. Heathrow was also full of beery businessmen. A fact I remember from when I used to meet my Dad there on a Friday night when he was returning from business and I was going home for the weekend. The delays had made them even worse for wear and because ...

Although David Cameron was only elected last Tuesday, there are signs that his honeymoon could soon be over. Disappointing Polls, a threaten resignation from an MEP and a euro-split rearing it head again could mark the fastest end to the beginning or beginning to the end for the boy David.

Welcome to my new look blog! ReadMyDay has been migrating to a new platform, hence the enforced silence for a while. There are still a few things that need tweaking, but it has many more features than the old one. This time I'm being joined by a number of fellow councillors from Kingston, from all three party groups. I'll introduce them when they have got their blogs...

Almost a year after the Tsunami and Tony Blair has failed to meet his promise to more than match public donations from the public purse. £300 million were donated by the British public yet of the £275 million committed by government only £75 million has gone to direct humanitarian aid. This is becoming a year of broken promises by Tony Blair as similarly he failed to meet expectations of his

More wisdom on the Doonesbury site than in a forestload of broadsheet op-ed thinkpieces, such as this provocative strip, suggesting that 9/11 is not the excuse for everything. Skippy McScapegoat is a great creation, I hope we see more of him. Donnesbury's current mudline quotes His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman on the Chronicles of Narnia: "One of the most ugly, poisonous thngs I have

The most memorable part of this outburst by arch-Tory Europhile, Ken Clarke, is its complete lack of impact on his party. Some might say that the reason for this is that Ken is a busted flush and no longer taken seriously by the membership. More likely however is that the charge of Euroscepticism Ken levels against the new Tory leader is now the mainstream view of both the Party's membership and their Parliamentary Party and that there is nobody left to rally to the pro-European banner. The splits that characterised the collapse of the Conservatives as a party of Government ...