LibDem Blogs - Archived!

Adult Learners' Week is the UK's largest learning campaign, motivating adults to participate in learning opportunities and celebrating the achievements of learners through regional and national awards. Throughout the week there will be celebrations, activities and taster sessions at centres across the City. "An audience with Germaine Greer" at 3pm in the Library Theatre will launch the event

MICE stands for Members Improvements in the Community. Councillors in Leeds get an annual budget of £3000 to spend in there wards on.... well just about anything really. And that is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Any non profit making project in Leeds could get a cheque from "me" within a few weeks should I so decide. In theory these are checked by officers but i have never had a request turned down. I have gone through stages with this. The first thing I did when I was elected was to start refusing applications for "photocopying" from ...

Today did not begin well. I enjoyed my thursday lie in pushing the snooze button once to often and set off on my commute a few minutes late. My mood was up as I realised I was going to catch the train to work. And then it happened. I was pulsing down platform 16a of Leeds train station making my way towards 17 when I saw him. I shall not name him. However 6 years ago I had a brief (about 10 months ) but intense platonic friendship with said boy after meeting by chance. I fell in entirely ...

I saw my ward collegue James last night for a catch up/way ahead meeting for the new municipal year. Good to have a gossip and a bit of a bitch but I did feel slightly down afterwoods. It would seem that the year ahead for Headingley ward is all about consolidation. And so it should be. We have loads of good projects half way through, incomplete, in need of reinforcing etc Local government is like a tread mill and if you stop running then you fly off the other end. Defending and representing communities needs patients and continuity. and so ...

For a relatively young institution the Assembly has certainly accumulated a lot of assets: Mick Bates: Will the Minister make a statement on the Welsh Assembly Government's property assets? OAQ0515(FIN) Sue Essex: As at 31 March 2005, the net book value of the Assembly's tangible fixed assets, excluding information technology, plant and equipment, amounted to £9.7 billion. In addition, at that date, the net book value of comparable assets of Assembly sponsored public bodies that merged with the Assembly in April 2006, amounted to £262 million. It is a shame that most of it is ...

Are Labour trying to con the Welsh electorate over the Government of Wales Bill? Up until now they have told us that the proposals currently going through the House of Lords are a compromise. As they need powers the Assembly will bid for them to the Secretary of State for Wales and Parliament. Eventually, there will come a stage whereby the logical step will be to ask for the full monty through a referendum, if such a proposal can get a two thirds majority in the Assembly and Parliament. At that point the people of Wales get their say. Many ...

Harriet Harman has rightly angered a lot of people by suggesting that the National Identity Register could be used to draw up the electoral roll. Here is Phil Booth from No2ID.net quoted in the Guardian: "To take an identity register which you've said is purely for a very specific set of purposes, and then to turn it into this general purpose register that you use for everything, is a complete and utter betrayal of everything they've said in parliament."But her idea should not come as a surprise if you read this blog. On 22 June last year I described an ...

Blogging may be light here for a while: The Shropshire Star site has been down all day.

Following Robert Harris, another commentator has taken aim at Gordon Brown. Here is Brendan O'Neill on the Guardian's Comment is Free blog: there is one thing I will find more pleasurable than seeing the look on Tony Blair's face when he is finally booted out of Downing Street - and that is seeing the look on the Brownites' faces when they eventually twig that the man they've been bigging up these past few years is, if anything, even worse than Blair.

it's off to the count we go. Byelections for the compost heap that is Scarborough Borough Council, two seats up and there having been no locals hereabouts the contestants have been throwing quite a lot into it. I would live blog by wi-fi but last time I asked if there was wireless on SBC premises the security guard showed me his transistor radio.

Strangley contradictory stories in the press about Liverpool MP Jane Kennedy - who used to be a health minister in the government. first they said she was sacked... then she said she actually resigned.. although didn't get round to sending a leetter.. then Tony blair said she was sacked.. then she (or someone else) said it was all about her not agreeing with some government health decisions... but mainly about the appointment of a particular person to chair part of the NHS. All a bit wierd. If she doesn't agree with what Labour is doing on health ...

Some time ago had a meeting with a group of people from the Vineyard Street area of Garston about a whole load of possible improvements. Had just set up a campaign, through the council, called Pride in Our Area, and we wanted to see what could be achieved with a bit of focus on a particular patch. The first bit happened last yeear - with the improvements to the green and the award from Britain in Bloom (north west bit). The next bit has just happened now. One of the problems was a footpath - also ...

The Parking Restrictions at the top of Newbiggin (the new traffic lights)

The BBC is reporting: Sharper CCTV images are needed so shots of suspected criminals can be matched to the proposed identity card database, a Home Office minister has said. Baroness Scotland told the Lords poor quality CCTV currently runs the risk of innocent people being wrongly arrested. "Digital pictures... will enable us, particularly when ID cards come in, to identify those who are responsible for very serious crime," she added. And so it would seem I was seriously misled by Roberta Blackman-Woods, Labour MP for Durham who verbally assured me (and about two hundred other people who were ...

Pick up phone. Brr-brr. “Hello, do you have any bullet-proof vests?” Blimey, says J — where are you going canvassing? Of course the answer is, fancy-dress party at the weekend.  I’d been hoping that the foam man was at Chesterfield market today, but he wasn’t so I shall have to rely on the Victoria market at the weekend, [...]

There is rumour that I may be the youngest Lib Dem group leader. I am 25 1/2. The other half of the group is a whole 8 weeks younger than me. Does that make us the youngest council group too? If you know of any younger please let me know.

Mike Smithson today asks “How will the Lib Dems cope when the Blair era ends?” His reason for this is that whenever pollsters ask how people would vote if Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, there is a consistent shift from Lib Dem to Labour. He goes on to say: Yet judging by the [...]

Peter Pigeon asks whether LibDems have "the balls" to create: "policies to attract well educated urban people (a key part of our emerging constituency)... people who used to work in industry (or perhaps still do) and vote Labour."And I don't think we do - not without a serious change in culture. I didn't spend much of this year's election campaigning, ditto with pretty much every other campaign

Instead of shouting it from the rooftops with pride Conservative Central Office are keeping quiet about who exactly is on their A-list of 100 candidates being primed for their most winnable seats. However, news of this nature never takes long to seep out. Iain Dale, who's not on the list, has rather nicely provided a link to Tim Mongomerie at Conservative Home who is keeping tabs on people as and

A number of changes are being driven through the NHS which could be considered like the "Perfect Storm". One most talked about the PbR or Payment by Activity. This has been accompanied by the removal or moreso phasing out of the purchaser protection adjustment. The DH was well aware of what hospitals faced difficulties, but nothing was done until too late. The financial impact of the new

What are we to make of the fact that Frank Luntz took the time to email a fluffy toy elephant a response at 5.30am? As with his response to the Liberal Review, he appears to be blissfully unaware that he didn’t make any quantifiable predictions at all, or that, in the case of the Tory leadership [...]

If you were planning to elope this weekend it is probably best not to. Even the BBC have cottoned on to the news that the small border town is liable to be diserted this weekend. A BBC Scotland trailer is basically showing a couple turning up in the town but finding the Old Smitty and various Churches in the area closed for business. There's even a glimpse of Brooks Mileson's greying ponytailed head running off away from the couple. The tag line is 'Gretna the only town in Scotland that can break Hearts'. The reason that Gretna will appear to ...

One of the most surprising announcements in Tony Blair's recent reshuffle was the departure of the long-serving Jack Straw from the Foreign Office, with the appointment of Margaret Beckett as his replacement. This is even more surprising when you consider the disastrous record Mrs. Beckett had in her previous role at the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). As highlighted by Ming Campbell in PMQs yesterday, she oversaw the implementation of the new Single Farm Payment scheme, a reorganisation of the way farming subsidies were paid. This scheme has been an unqualified disaster in its implementation, with ...

Meanwhile chaos at Elland Road yesterday. The website said that the queue for tickets would close at 7pm. I hot footed it up the motorway to get tickets for myself and a colleague who is a Season Ticket holder. I arrived at 3.45pm to be told that the queue was closed. Near riot and after two hours about 200 of us were told to join another queue. Ten minutes later and we were told that we should not have joined this queue as it too was closed. Queue second riot and arrival of Radio Leeds who got the Chief Executive ...

The imminent Blaenau Gwent by-election is set to deliver a substantial cash injection into South Wales it seems. The spending limit for each by-election has been set at £100,000. It is likely that Labour will splash out the entire £200,000 in an effort to win back its former heartland, whilst the other serious candidates will certainly spend in five figures each. No doubt printers are preparing their prospectuses to post out to the political parties even as I write.

[Disclaimer: This is a parody based on the linked BBC article about Mr Cameron's content-filled remarks about BHS thongs for children. He didn't actually say this stuff. This should be obvious but just covering myself... Incidently, is it just Blair who uses 'hard-working families' all the time - Jamie Whyte claims this is now common to all parties]. Some of Britain's best-known businessmen has

I work for HM Revenue Anglia Region. I look forward to discussing my promotion potential with someone seventy miles away who meets me once a month, if I'm actually at my desk. Increasingly, my colleagues are wondering just who is in charge and why, not a situation which inspires confidence and raises the question, "What happens when the train wreck occurs?". Of course, how silly of me, they'll