LibDem Blogs - Archived!

This is the junction of Redchurch Street with the Bethnal Green Road. As you can see, it's quite dangerous and the site of several fatalities, yet can we get the Council to do anything about road safety here? At the moment, the Traffic & Transportation Department are advising us to try for funding from the Local Area Partnerships, but I think their plans have already been set for this...

The BBC is trailing its new series The Lost World of Friese-Greene heavily. It is based around a colour documentary about a journey through Britain which was filmed by Claude Friese-Greene in the 1920s. And it does look ravishing, even if a little Dan Cruickshank can go a long way sometimes. You can see the first part of the series on Tuesday on BBC at 9 p.m. In the mean time, Simon Garfield has written about it in today's Observer, and you will soon be able to buy the DVD from the BBC. The name Friese-Greene is well known to ...

According to the Independent a report later this month will "question the ability of the Probation Service to protect the public from dangerous criminals" In a sense this shows the way in which many issues cause a mass of column inches, but little is actually done to resolve the problems that are highlighted. The criminal justice system has so many errors in it that we should not be surprised

I’ve started uploading some of the photos that used to be on this site to Flickr.

Tinfoil hats are no good at protecting you from Government mind-controlling radio waves, according to four very clever people from Massachusetts Institue of Technology. The three types of tinfoil helmet tested (the classical, the fez and centurion) were found to increase the degree to which your head gets soaked with thought-controlling waves. Good news for all that stuff Fidel Castro

After finally working out how to make the maps in Flock Together clickable, I’ve now also added the functionality to put Flock Together events automatically into Google’s newly launched Calendar. [For an example, check out the button at the bottom of this page or try the button below]. Unfortunately, Google don’t appear to support the RSS/xCal [...]

Damn Interesting - doing exactly what it says on the tin.

The Easter Sunday prize for stating the bleedin' obvious goes to a Boca Raton resident. The Ratonese seem to have offended the gods, because they have a plague of Iguanas of truly Old Testament proportions. 10 of the reptiles (which eat flowers, defecate prodigiously and transmit salmonella, so we're told) for every local. Imagine getting that as a problem in one of your surveys.

The power of the blog knows no ends. Not only do I now have several Lewisham Mobile numbers but I also have several emails telling me off for being on holiday and not helping in Leeds. I'll keep my mouth shut next time!

The power of the blog knows no ends. Not only do I now have several Lewisham Mobile numbers but I also have several emails telling me off for being on holiday and not helping in Leeds. I'll keep my mouth shut next time!

The British National Party is set to field over 600 candidates in the upcoming local elections, twice as many as the last time those councils seats were contested. Following Nick Griffin's acquittal on racial hatred charges, many see the BNP as being stronger than it has ever been. Now Employment Minister Margaret Hodge has admitted that Labour neglect of white working-class voters may have increased sympathy for the BNP. The Independent: Many families were, she said, angry at the lack of housing since immigrants began arriving in the area and because asylum seekers had been housed there. "They ...

In the Liberal Democrat News this week there's a brilliant story. 16 year old Benjamin Goldenburg, the son of well known party activist and Woking councillor Philip Goldenburg, was confronted, in his mock GCSE exams, with a question asking for a proposal to help the environment After some thought he came up with the idea of "train miles" as being environmentally much better than "air miles". Philip listened to this and thought it was seriously bright. "It's one of those ideas," he said, "which is so obvious that you ask why nobody ever thought of it before." ...

I either invented or just discovered a rather lovely new drink last night - Absolut Raspberri mixed with apple juice, which has the taste of rather nice fruity drink with a vague hint of alcohol in the background.

Rather like the day on which we start earning money for ourselves as opposed to for the tax man today is the day on which the UK stops living off its own resources and starts depending on imports from elsewhere. This is according to a report from the New Economics Foundation showing how dependent we are on resources from elsewhere in the world. Fairly stunning if not totally surprising and fairly indicative of the sorts of things we as a nation need to do if we are to change this. Growing and selling more of our own food and supplying ...

The loans for peerages row is continuing to spin out of the control of Downing Street with further allegations in today's papers and with the police announcing that they are widening their enquiry next week. In today's Observer Downing Street sources have admitted that two donors to Tony Blair's flagship education policy project were nominated for peerages because of their support for academy schools. One such source "insisted the Prime Minister was entitled to select as political working peers those he wanted on Labour's side in such votes. Aides insist the row is based on suggestions Number 10 was trying ...

I'm emigrating. Ian has got a job at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, Alberta. He starts on 1st July, so we have just over two months to get over there, which is a very tight timetable. I spent yesterday evening downloading and starting to fill in the Canadian emigration forms which are a nightmare. Inter alia they want to know my first husband's date of birth. They want to know my father's marital status; I know my mother's marital status - she is a widow, but my father's? They also want to know every organisation I've ever belonged to from ...

I found a pamphlet from an organisation called [the] “Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights“, an group that I was surprised to learn was an offshoot of that notorious fruity cult, The Church of Scientology. You can click the link below to see a full-sized version of the scan hosted elsewhere: According to the L. Ron Hubbard’s unauthorised [...]