LibDem Blogs - Archived!

The First Post publishes a useful digest of the day's newspapers each Sunday. Today you can read: Prescott was a "serial groper";A woman who was dragged from the street and raped at knifepoint by a foreign criminal freed from jail has called on Charles Clarke to resign;A biography of Lloyd George to be published next month claims that his long-term mistress, Frances Stephenson, cheated on him for four years with an associate;Wayne Rooney's metatarsal;The Tunbridge Wells suitcase murder;A teaching assistant at a Catholic primary school is revealed as a £150 hooker who specialises in discipline;and much else besides.

Another day of delivering, this time our blue envelopes. The organisation is so good now that the ward can be delivered in one day and today, I had the pleasure of a guest deliverer. We've had visits from the Party Leader, from the Chair of the Parliamentary Party, from the Party President and from our Home Affairs spokesperson but, better than all of those, was the visit from my cousin Kim, all

isn't blowing its self out. I notice that buried some where todays BPIX poll has national voting intentions at Con 35% Lab 32% LD 19% which is near identical to the YOUGOV today. Of course the winners are "others" rather than the two traditional opposition parties. 15% for green/respect/BNP/UKIP is an anti politics vote. On thursday a lack of such candidates and the bigger party machines will hoover up much of this in the end. However some where like leeds where most places have a green/BNP candidate could see some very odd results. Lots of collegues are enjoying the implosion ...

Today we had the "Great Student Run" through Headingley. This was a nationally organised "students only" event from the same stable as the great North Run. Its been promoted by Leeds Met Uni and Marketing Leeds and has doubtless done wonders in marketing terms for both and a few bar and club owners. However as (a) local councillors and residents found out about in in the YEP (b) the complete lack of consultation (c) the sensitivity around student issues in the area (d) the road closures This has proved to be as popular as small pox locally and of course ...

This is the sort of assurence I feel is needed from any public figure when mentioning religion in the current climate. There aren't many defences of the modern Church of England but as a general rule Evensong doesn't make you want to blow people up. I was feeling rather depressed after my afternoon in Headingley so I sought solace with a crafty pint of Erdinger in arcardia ale and wine bar followed by Evensong at St Michaels. Beautiful service as ever. As its still technically Easter I admired the Easter garden and enjoyed the anthem. However the problem began with ...

On Thursday morning I had a site visit with senior officers at Alexandra park in hyde park. Anyone who has ever asked "why is it so hard to get anything done?" would have been well advised to observe. Let me say before I am set upon that all the officers who attended were very professional and helpful. I doubt anyone really goes into local government for the money (though perhaps the job security) and they certainly knew there stuff from a technical point of view. However as is often the case on these occasions the ground rules were set out ...

I learn from Liberal England that the economist and liberal thinker John Kenneth Galbraith has died at the age of 97. He was certainly an influence on me in the late 1960s early 1970s. I found a copy

Your health secretary gets booed by the Sarah Gamps in conference assembled, your deputy is caught bending one into someone he shouldn’t wot of and your home secretary mislays a thousand rogues of foriegn provenance. Listen hard and you can hear the distant bong (defence secretary!) of the government’s death knell: the Blair government is suffering from the effects of entropy. Face it: the

I hear that a Conservative Councillor in Brentwood, Essex has been arrested under the Public Order Act following an incident involving a 22 year old Lib Dem canvasser who was apparently surrounded by a group of Conservatives.... I don't want to name any names until I see some independent confirmation..

Reading finished off the season with a 2-1 win over QPR. Their football was not quite the flowing stuff we have been used to and they failed to get the third goal which would have made them the first team ever to get 100 goals and 100 points in the same season. They did however break Sunderlands record for the highest number of points in a league season finishing on 106. The last goal of the season was a penalty scored 7 minutes from full time by Graeme Murty readings Captain and right back and the only first choice outfield ...

The latest BritBlog Roundup is in place.

The BBC reports that the economist J. K. Galbraith has died, aged 97. It also has an obituary for him. Galbraith was hugely influential in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact he was just about the only economist that those on the left read.

One of the things I am doing is campaigning to improve the accountability of government (the executive). I have done quite a bit of studying of Constitutional Law recently and concluded that there is a mechanism to force ministers to answer some of the questions they refuse to answer. A good example of failing to answer questions was the situation with the prisoners that should have been

Last Monday was very busy with constituent issues, including a few issues raised at my surgery - graffiti complaints in the West End in particular, which I have raised with both the Waste Management Department of the City Council and with our local liaison policeman. Monday night's Development Quality committee had a very full agenda, including applications for smoking canopies outside a number

I once read a novel by Kingsley Amis in which he speculated that the rich stay that way by using whatever means they can to avoid spending their own money. It now transpires that Labour MP, Shaun Woodward, is a big fan of this method. Today's Observer reports that Mr. Woodward is a multi-millionaire by marriage, and owns a 'Wren-style pile in rural Oxfordshire, complete with organic farm', a home in the Hamptons, summer playground of New York's wealthiest families as well as a £55,000 modest redbrick terrace, bought without a mortgage in his St. Helen's constituency. Despite ...

Just in case anybody reading this blog might think that the BNP are an acceptable protest vote then perhaps today's article in the Wales on Sunday might put them right. It is reported that British National Party chief, Nick Griffin, has been accused of making a joke out of the Holocaust by naming two pet pigs Anne and Frank. When confronted with this news the BNP spokeperson reacted with all the sophistication and tact we have come to expect of them: A BNP spokesman said the pigs, which had since been slaughtered and eaten by Mr Griffin, ...

So Emma Grundy thinks she can find a legal aid solicitor in Borsetshire to help her in her custody suit baby George's father, William. Good luck with that. I suspect the Ambridge area, like so much of rural England is a “justice desert” where none exist, an issue investigvated extensively by my old lecturer, Prof Economides . Good thing that the Access to Justice Alliance are lobbying our elected representatives to tackle this enormously under-reported crisis.

David Cameron did a brief walkabout in Kingston this week, but I've only just caught up with the Sky News report on the event. It begins badly (for Dave) with this comment about Kingston: Kingston upon Thames is the sort of Council that should be right in the Tories' sight, but it now looks like it will stay out of reach. The interview then goes further downhill...

The Indy on Sunday today reports that when, last November, the Home Office’s accounts were audited although the books balanced, when the auditors added up the figures they totalled £26 trillion. This, the report notes dryly, is "almost 2,000 times higher than the Home Office's gross expenditure for 2004-05 and approximately one and a half times higher than the estimated GDP of the entire planet.

A mentioned by Andrew Marr this morning from his tempoary base in Edinburgh from the front page of Scotland on Sunday the rebels now have a new goal in sight. Apparently as many as 40 Labour rebels are preparing to give Tony Blair an ultimatum if things don't go well on Thursday. Their fingers are on the trigger if Labour lose 350 council seats this week and if their vote share dips below a third

Short-tempered, famous, Lexus driver? It can only be Alan Partridge. Can't it?

First I recommend you read Stephen Tall's piece When Chameleons Attack!. Then, watch the video. It seems Dave's rumoured short temper is more than a rumour ...

The man from Pickfords came this week to do what they call a 'survey' - making an inventory of everything we are taking. Grant MacEwan College has given Ian a very generous relocation allowance, so we can take even take my Victorian repro' cast-iron garden furniture. That and our desks are the only classy bits of furniture that we possess. It all gets sent off on a six week voyage to Vancouver before going overland to Edmonton. I think our stuff goes via the North-West Passage through the Arctic - I'm sure I saw a documentary saying that it is ...

Leader: Blair needs a reshuffle It is my experience and possibly the best argument against immortality going that anything that goes on for too long goes bad. Into this category comes the first series of 24 (derailed completely around 8:00 pm by the increasingly lunatic behaviour of Senator Palmer's wife and the ludicrous decision to make Nina a CTU mole)... and governments. How did Japan manage,

So says Rachel from North London. I have been reading her blog on and off for a while now and she is linked from my blog as well. She was caught up in the 7/7 bombings when a bomb went off in her tube train very close to where she was. She has been blogging about all sorts of 7/7 related stuff ever since and I take my hat off to her. She has met Mr Clarke and appears to have finally reached the end of her tether with him.

Young people feel stigmatised by Asbos and think they can be Asbo-ed easily for minor matters. When I heard this view expressed by a local young man, I wanted to tell him how hard it is to get an Asbo. But that wasn't the point. It was clear that he felt criminalised for being young and hanging around with his friends. How he was fed up of being viewed with suspicion, which felt to him like...