LibDem Blogs - Archived!

By serendipity Samizdata has posted exactly what I was going to, only obviously infinitely better. The pernicious nature of Ken’s Oyster cards was first brought to my attention at the Lib Dem Lawyer's fringe in Blackpool, and I've steered well clear since. Transport for London’s new wave of extremely aggressive advertising basically explains in simple words and pictures, that if you don’t have an Oyster card, you are self-evidently suffering some sort of synaptic lapse and/or you are a moron. Well no actually Ken, some of us just don’t think you have the right to track our movements around the ...

In recent days Liberal England has enjoyed a lot of visits from journalists in search of Lib Dem gossip and scandal. Today they included two of those nice people at News International. One had searched on Google for "huhne & oxford & radical" and arrived at this posting, which does no more than refer you to a photograph everyone has already seen. The other charmingly searched for "elephant castle toilets simon hughes" and arrived at my archive for December 2005. That was largely because of this sentence: The hero is a millionaire who exercises one-elephant rule over a ...

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. It was written before Simon Hughes hit the headlines, so it has turned out to be even more topical than I intended. This reminds me of a Liberator cover we chose late in August 2001. As Charles Kennedy had been largely invisible since the general election in June, we had a picture of him with a speech bubble saying "Did anything happen while I was away?" While that issue was at the printers 9/11 happened, making it a very satirical cover indeed. Anyway, here is the column. And also... ...

The lastest numbers of supporters listed on the various Lib Dem leadership candidates web sites are: 679 Sir Menzies Campbell 660 Simon Hughes 424 Chris Huhne

A couple of days after launching our list of supporters (showing that we have more MPs, MEPs, Council Group leaders and ordinary party members backing Ming than have publicly supported any other candidate), We’ve just finished posting up the first of what is intended to be a regular series of postings explaining why… Find out more [...]

Liberal England suffered a huge setback with several analysts urging their clients to ditch the stock as it suffered a public relations disaster. The exact nature of customer dissatisfaction was not known but Steve Guy was rumoured to have had a hand in it. Industry insiders suspect a Stud (artefact) was involved. Liberal England share price dropped from B$634.35 to B$272.77

My friend and co-blogger Ken has a characteristically thoughtful (while not uncritical) article responding to having seen Chris speak to Lib Dem members in Oxford last night. (My "official" account of the evening is here). A new section of the campaign website provides Chris's vision on how he would act as the party's leader. The Guardian Online have a really, really cool interview from Ollie King, which is available in mp3 audio as well as the less exciting html

I've read two books in the last month which I will try (albeit inadequately) to review here. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives Was recommended by someone at a christmas party and piqued my interest after I read the excellent Mao by Jung Chang. It's an interlaced biography of, well, Hitler and Stalin. Hitler was born 10 years after Stalin and the chapters are arranged by life periods - early

For me, the most interesting thing about today's dismal poll figures in the Telegraph is the way they bear out the analysis offered at the Meeting the Challenge conference by a psephologist whose name, alas, escapes me.Although the...

Oxford is a fantastic place! I've been here fourteen years now with one short gap, by far the longest I have settled in a place in my life. It long ago became home, physically and spiritually, and for a while I more or less gave my life to it when I was previously a city councillor from 1999 till 2002 (it seemed longer than that, I can tell you!). We have one of the most beautiful city centres

So Jo Swinson the youngest Lib Dem MP at present supports the oldest of the three candidates http://www.colin-ross.org.uk/news/566.html I still cannot make up my mind on Ming. He clearly has gravitas and experience. Having him as leader will allow time for a younger generation of Lib Dem MPs to develop. He clearly comes across as a credible politician. I just wonder about his age. Not because I believe that his age will prevent him from doing a job but because I worry that the public at large will be concerned about it come the next general election. On ...

Chris Huhne MP has today launched his first detailed set of commitments for how he would lead the Party as the new Leader.

See my old sparring partner Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, has a pop at the LibDems on the Assembly and at me in particular in his new column in the Ham & High today! I love it when Ken gets his knickers in a twist about me. Reading the politics of this - for Ken is always about votes - he is bigging up the Greens on the Assembly (who sold out to him long ago) and worried about the success of

I was wondering earlier this week whether to blog about the cancellation of The West Wing, to my mind the finest drama series ever screened. Then, once again, Lib Demmery rather took over. And now Media Guardian's Organ Grinder has saved me the trouble, as Wing-nuts from the UK have shared their favourite moments here. Two Cathedrals gets my vote, closely followed by In The Shadow of Two Gunmen.

Jo Swinson the Liberal Democrat MP for East Dunbartonshire and the UK's youngest MP at just 25 has come out in favour of Sir. Menzies Campbell to be the next leader of the Liberal Democrats. Below, are Jo's reasons why she is supporting Sir. Menzies, there are now nearly 700 people registered as Campbell supporters on his website.

From Make My Vote Count comes this story. It's amusing that the government can find time to micro-manage what's going on in schools, but doesn't seem to know what's going on in the government itself.

Simon Hughes after a rough couple of days has launched his Leadership campaign today in Manchester. Simon has also relaunched his website with a different address, it is linked below and on the navigation menu.

Certain sections of the press love a whiff of a sex scandal concerning a politician. It certainly goes with the territory in public life. We are all guilty of fuelling this: when the sex scandal breaks out in a rival party, we throw a party. We love to see the ritual humiliation when it happens to an Archer or a Blunkett. But when it's our own party in the firing line, we see the cynicism of it all. The Mark Oaten affair didn't take place recently, in fact it's nearly a year since it ended (when the rent boy recognised ...

Passports Q: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department pursuant to the answer of 9 January 2006, Official Report, column 378W, on passports, whether the notice added to the UK Passport Service website on photograph standards was published on 22 November 2005 as referred to in the answer or on 21 December as referred to on the UKPS website. (John Hemming) A:The UKPS website was updated

This afternoon the City of Manchester Stadium Simon Hughes officially launched his bid for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats. In the home venue of the highly sucessful 2002 Commonwealth Games Simon alluded to the comparison between athletics and politics. He said: It is the Commonwealth Games stadium where I, with tens of thousands of others, saw dreams become reality – but only after years of preparation and effort. Just as in the world of athletics, so in the world of politics, you get nowhere without commitment and ambition. Over the last twenty five years I ...

Mr Dale’s blog invites Lib Dems to have a sense of humour at their own expense, before printing a puerile rewriting of the Twelve Days of Christmas mocking the Lib Dems. It’s the sort of thing that passed for humour among Members of the Federation of Conservative Students in the 1980s. One conservative who really did know how to make fun of liberals and lefties was Michael Wharton, author for many years of the Way of the World column in the Daily Telegraph, who has died aged 92. Wharton, who wrote under the alias Peter Simple, created a vast ...

I notice the posting on Tory candidate/publisher/blogger Iain Dale’s site about Bermondsey, which unintentionally amounts to praising us with faint damnation. If the most damning evidence is a single leaflet which is not anti-gay or and does not attack Tatchell, but which is capable of a double meaning, then this is pretty thin stuff indeed. I also can’t help but be amused at the way Peter Tatchell is cited as an almost impartial source in all this as though he was a mere disinterested bystander rather than the one most likely to have an axe to grind. The problem is ...

The Campaign launch today kicks off with a sparkling new campaign website - Simon Hughes for Leader . There's a link from the site to - Simon's Campaign Blog which is also been linked into the Lib Dem bloggers aggregated list. Great stuff is expected. People who may have the old link Simon4leader bookmarked or in their favourites list, will by Monday find themselves automatically directed to the new site. The star behind the new site is IT whiz Rob Fenwick so we can expect some cool state of ...

Liberal Democrat leadership contender Chris Huhne returned to Oxford, his former University, on Thursday evening where he addressed the Oxford University Liberal Democrats in a packed room at the Oxford Union.

About six months ago - yes it's that long - people in the local Lib Dems began talking about manifestos for May's elections. At the time I had been thinking of standing for a couple of months (Community Land Trusts takes up a lot of my non-work time and so it was potentially a difficult decision - could I achieve more of what's important to me by better remaining out of politics and pushing CLTs

There has been much talk in the blogosphere about a certain election leaflet used by the Simon Hughes campaign team in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election. Iain Dale gives the typical anti-Hughes slant, particularly highlighting the used of the term "a straight choice". The implication is that this was a coded message attacking Hughes' then-opponent, well-known gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, the Labour candidate. It was not Hughes himself being described as "the straight choice" - that really would be homophobic. Iain Sharpe goes into more depth on the history of the Bermondsey by-election. This is nonsense. ...

were another of those open secrets when I worked in the mother of Parliaments some time time in the last millennium. Stephen from A LIberal Goes A Long Way was cock on, Hughes should have told The Sun to fuck a long way off and the nation would have cheered. The party should headline its next manifesto with the News International Journalists And Proprietors Staking Out Over An Anthill Bill. Up

I managed to catch 'Question Time' last night and was surprised to see Simon Hughes there. I know that he was scheduled to take part but I had expected him to withdraw given the sort of day he had experienced, an act which most people would have understood and accepted. So I was impressed to see him attend and speak cogently on his own situation, especially given the presence of John Redwood,

when the Gulf Stream packs up and the pan-middle eastern Caliphate we are doing so much to create cuts off our oil. It’s going to be bloody freezing. For the last two days I’ve lived on an unheated aluminium boat in Carlingford Lough, between Northern Ireland and Eire. There is a mains generator (posessed, according to one ex-skipper) but it leaks diesel, cooling water and, more important,

Text of the speech from the campaign launch in Manchester today.

Page 4 of the Scottish Edition of the Times today has a wonderful picture of Willie Rennie, the Liberal Democrat candidate for the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election, half way up a climbing way. He looks like he is effortlessly scaling the heights which may well be a metaphor for what Catherine Stihler, Labour’s candidate, is worried he is doing in the polls. Hopefully Willie will reach the peak first on 9 February. Seven other candidates have declared for this contest after nominations closed yesterday. They are Ian Borland (UKIP), Douglas Chapman (SNP), George Hargreaves (Scottish Christian Party), John MCAllison, ...

Finally have time to write up my thoughts about the Any Questions leadership debate, from the perspective of being in the audience.The comically long queue outside the hall, which wound along corridors and through doors and almost to the Surrey...

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few weeks, it can't have escaped your attention that the Liberal Democrats have been the focus of more than the usual amounts of media coverage. A series of stories have appeared in the press; first the stories about Charles Kennedy, then Mark Oaten and now Simon Hughes. However, it has not just been the traditional media that have been involved. The rumours about Oaten were circulated around the internet before they made it into the News of the World, and rumours about Simon Hughes likewise. ...

OK so there is now an internet poll (pah!) suggesting an actual slippage in Lib Dem support. It would be nice to put this down to the press hyping up a crisis out of normal politics. Nice, but self-indulgent. While I agree with these reasons to be cheerful and I find a leadership contest great fun, it might not pay to carry on regardless. Charles Kennedy had massive personal popular support. It

{Wales on Sunday} My T-Shirt shop has been in the news over the last few weeks. First there was LibDem News in the People section. Then the Guardian Backbencher (twice). The Wales on Sunday were giving them away as a prize on the politics page a few weekends ago. And yesterday I was in Popbitch, leading to over 6000 hits! I'm also republishing the graph below, as it's now fallen off the main page. {LibDem Bar Chart}

This week Hamas won a shock victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. Fatah had previous had a 40-year monopoly of power. Hamas now has to reject the route of violence and commit itself fully to be a democratic political organisation.

Ugh.It's 2am and I just woke from a bizarre nightmare in which Beloved Other Half, myself and dozens of others climbed up the wire fence that used to run alongside the access road to our flats in order to escape the floodwater surges from a...

I work at funny hours. I think Radio 2 is best between midnight and 6 am and that Up All Night on Five Live is pretty decent as well. And I'm annoyed with Radio 4 for wanting to scrap the UK Theme at 5.30 a.m. to allow a "pacy news briefing". So I've signed the petition to keep it. Baffled? Always asleep at 5.30 am? See the campaign website here. See the Wikipedia entry here See the BBC

I am going to apologise in advance for using this phrase but I cannot think of a better one, this Western Mail columnist is a complete airhead. She has written a piece for today's paper that argues that gay men do not make good party leaders or Prime Ministers because their lifestyles are "divorced from the norm". According to Lowri Turner, the only person who should be PM is a white middle class man or women with 2.4 kids and a mortgage. What nonsense. Even if a there was such a thing as a 'normal lifestyle' anymore, it is ...

Wednesday evening I went to the Kings Head to see 'Diamond', written by local resident Linda Wilkinson. Not only was the show very funny and moving, it took place mostly in the Royal Oak on Columbia Road and has a lot of local history thrown in as incidental. The last 3 days are probably sold out, but we hope it will transfer so that more of the world can see it. As Linda says: "I...

In answer to The Guardian: Is someone who has chosen to live most of a life in shame and shrilly defended "privacy" really a safe person to put in charge of a political party? I'm supporting Chris Huhne, but I was supporting Chris before this news broke. A right to privacy is a principle and should be shrilly defended - the media have no automatic 'right' to know about the sex life of public

Simon Hughes has emerged as the candidate best-placed to restore Liberal Democrat fortunes in a Guardian/ICM survey.

I just wanted to say a quick word of thanks to those people who signed my nomination papers, and to those who spent time collecting signatures from other members...

According to the BBC Lib Dem leadership contender Simon Hughes has said the way he has handled media pressure after admitting gay relationships is a mark of his courage. He said it showed "he was not afraid of dealing with things" - a quality "which might be a leadership criterion". Sorry Simon, I'm sure it's been a stressful time for you, but the way that you've handled this , especially that

After the embarrassment of CK's downfall and the further embarrassment of Mark Oaten, Simon Hughes' little display of hypocrisy is making me feel murderous thoughts about the Liberal Democrats' Parliamentary party. The purpose of this election was to heal, and if Simon truly believes that he is a healing figure then he is frankly deluded. His stupefying ineptness with the media marks him out as one to avoid- after what has happened in recent weeks, he still chose to bluff his way though- that is to lie, even when he must have been aware that a tabloid expose could not ...

The other night I went for a jog around Westminster on the coldest night of the year, in a wet rugby shirt. Sounds like quite a stupid idea, but it was actually quite a good idea, because after the hot bath when I got back to the flat, I felt really good. That said, I have been sneezing a lot since. Looks like the party is going to have dipped to 13% in an opinion poll in the Telegraph tommorow. Still, as Tough Ted always says, "worse things happen at sea"!

I’ve just uploaded the second campaign podcast onto the Campbell website. This one features David Walter interviewing Nick Clegg MP about Ming and the campaign to date. Somewhat to my surprise, since this is all a bit of an experiment, I’m getting to be quite a fan of this podcast format.