LibDem Blogs - Archived!

The Pet Shop Boys had a new single out last week. Richard’s always been a big PSB fan, we knew they’d turned against Mr Blair over ID cards, and we knew it was going to be about the special relationship between Mr Bush and Mr Blair. we finally got to watch the DVD single tonight. It’s unexpected, and fab. More unexpected, and still more fab, is the extra track The Resurrectionist. I knew what that sounded like; I couldn’t believe it, but it was. Come on and get the driving synth riff of ‘Burke and Hare: The Upbeat Dance Mix’. ...

Big Brother house collapses - no survivors. In other news, the nation’s average IQ doubles. Tags: big+brother

If the DVLA know exactly where any untaxed car is located among the millions of cars in Britain..... but we haven't got a clue as to where the terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the DVLA in charge of MI5....... "Sensible Policies for a Better Britain!"

The Council has withdrawn the Woodhouse Moor Car Park proposal. It won't be comming back in a watered down form either. I think this has to be good news. The community has other things it needs to use its campaigning effort on and it would have been an enviromental disaster had it gone ahead. Having argued against it privately for several weeks and publically for the last week I'm satisfied. However credit must entirely go to the residents led campaign which to be blunt is what has stopped it in its tracks. The silver lining , if there is ...

I was somewhat disappointed with the social commentary and political element of The Line of Beauty. It was as political as any episode of Miss Marple - numerous boring, ghastly old f**ts having dinner in improbably big rooms containing ornate furniture. If it weren't for the disco lights and the cursory mention of missile defence, Hercule Poirot wouldn't have seemed at all amiss - 'period' could

This elegant volume, written by Britain's bloggers (including the undersigned), is about to go on sale in all good bookshops. You can also order it from Politico's or Amazon. I can write stuff with footnotes and references too, honest. See my chapter in Making and Breaking Children's Lives .

There are some lovely parodies on public.interest.co.uk as our leading political commentators look ahead to the World Cup. Examples include: Polly Toynbee: Ignore the tabloids. They can drape themselves in the flag of Saint George and fantasise like adolescent boys about a resurgent England, but the fact is there is only one team from Group B who have any chance of winning: Sweden. Sir William Rees-Mogg: I fully expect England to win the World Cup, with or without Wayne Rooney. All the indicators suggest that they will beat Argentina 3-1. Steven Gerrard will score a hotly-disputed penalty ...

Another profile of the redoubtable Elspeth Campbell, this time from the Scottish edition of the Sunday Times: Elspeth became Lady Elspeth for the second time in her life when Menzies was knighted in 2004. It also repeats an anecdote I have read elsewhere: Campbell’s former career as a sprinter is one of which his wife is conspicuously proud. She is fond of boasting that he was once “the fastest white man in the world”. To which her husband often adds: “For about three weeks in 1967.” At their wedding the best man had teased them about the swiftness of ...

Royal Mail hails £3bn package I know postal charges have gone up recently, but this is ridiculous.

Well the Pre-Action Protocol on the letter of last week has now been served. This gives another couple of weeks for the government to respond before a claim form is issued. In the mean time Standing Committee A has continued to dig into the guts of the government's new bill. The amount of additional regulation and record keeping needs to be seen to be believed. Systems are getting more and

From the people that bought you London Underground and the Dave the Chameleon piss take, The Roses of Success!

Redcar and Cleveland Council is set to receive the final plans which could turn Redcar seafront into 1940s Dunkirk as the setting for a £36 million blockbuster movie. The production company, Working Title Films, has drawn up a draft timetable for the war time movie which could see set building starting from early July and closure of the Esplanade from the Regent Cinema to the boating lake at the end of August for filming to start. The Regional Screen Agency for the North East, Northern Film and Media, has started a recruitment drive for up to 1,000 local ...

Chris Huhne has put the flesh (pdf) on his eco-tax bones. I discussed this at the time here and here. 1. An increase In Green Taxes As A Share Of National Income. Green taxes have fallen from 3.6 per cent of GDP in 1999 to just 3 per cent of GDP, and we are committed to reversing this trend. Revenue would be used to cut taxes elsewhere so that this is a green tax switch, not a rise in

Following on from yesterday’s post largely about the impact of the Green Party on local elections, today I’m looking at how the Liberal Democrats might take them on nationally, along with the newly minted green pretensions of Mr Cameron (blimey, that’s good timing, I thought, as news broke this morning of our latest climate change policy launch). The Labour Party’s record on green policies and, it seems, inclination to attract greener voters is so insubstantial and irregular – I might say chameleonic, if that didn’t suggest some purpose as opposed to occasional spasms of interest – that they’re pretty irrelevant. ...

It seems that humans and chimps may have diverged as species more recently than previously thought. 5.4 million years ago rather than the 7-ish previously thought AND it was not an abrupt cleaving, leading to the possibility that for tens possibly hundreds of thousands of years chimps and proto humans still fancied one another and maybe got it on. As King Louis in the Jungle Book sang...

It’s the semi-final tonight (on BBC Three or watch the webcast), so time for my summary of this year’s entries. I apologise in advance for my inevitable overuse of the word “Europop”: there is a glut of blonde young ladies singing slightly dancy numbers and they all merge together eventually (the songs, not the young [...]

Just discovered the Radio 4 series "What is Left? What is Right?". Unfortunately I missed the first programme "What is Left?" but "What is Right?" is still on listen again. What really struck me about this is that the arguments being made were basically liberal. Smaller state because the individual knows how to spend their money best being central, and even a nod towards localism. Even Norman

Cheer up! The Government (read: Tony Blair) may be increasingly psychotic, America may fancy nuking I-ran and Big Brother 7 may start tonight, but I have some more positive miscellanies to share - in addition to the aforementioned Sudoku thing (which is on June 7th, by the way). • I have started learning Mandarin: 我是 Will (nod, and [...]

Colourful MP, in many ways, Eric Forth has sadly become the fifth MP since last May's election to pass away, the fourth of whom has succoumb to cancer. Before entering Parliament in 1983 as MP for Mid-Worcestershire he was MEP for Birmingham North. He later became the MP for Bromley and Chislehurst. He served as a Trade and Education minister under John Major. Although the substance of what he

Continuing from yestersday's start to delve into the backgroud of Chameleon Dave's A-Team. Here are the next 10 in alphabetical order from the hot 100, take care pop pickers. Karen Bradley: Former CCHQ policy officer and Manchester Withington PPC 2005. She was one of the carefully named candidates that the Tories put up against Labour members and although she did not win some say she may have

I was surprised and saddened this morning to hear the news that Tory MP Eric Forth had died. He was a curious character who could make you incredibly angry but was somehow hard to dislike personally. A typical Forth experience…. I was trying to get a Private Member’s Bill through the Commons. This [...]

Alex has left a comment about my Get Your Tanks Off Our Roads article. I am a little taken aback by the robustness of the comments but it raises several important points about my views that need clarifying, to the extent that they deserve a blog article or two rather than a comment back. I'll have to do this in two parts because I don't have the time to answer all Alex's points in one go: 1) I

John Prescott's question time yesterday sounds like it was a real hoot. Tomos Livingstone in today's Western Mail reports that the Deputy Prime Minister described the opposition as resembling a public school sixth form and it certainly sounded as if that might be an accurate representation. Still, even politicians like to have fun occasionally and ridicule can be a very effective debating tactic if used properly. If only the attempts by the Labour backbenchers to help him had been a little more competent: In his first Commons question time in the new role and since his affair with his ...

Blair wants nuclear although his statements appear to prejudge the governments own energy review due out in July. Elliott Morley the former environment minister wants renewables and I tend to agree with him. Meanwhile perhaps the best news of all is that Yvette Cooper minister of state at the new Department for Communities and Local Government is to announce plans to revamp designs for a new town of 10,000 near Cambridge and according to this article in the Guardian "among the ministerial demands for the buildings are good insulation, solar energy devices such as roof-mounted collectors for hot water, large ...

After seven years, the final episode of The West Wing was shown in the USA last weekend. We’ve had its third and fourth seasons on DVD for ages, and this has prompted us finally to start watching them. I remember when we first caught it, part-way through the second season; it was so arrestingly brilliant that we dashed out to buy the DVD of the first season straight away. We watched it faster than anything else we’ve seen; usually we’ll only watch one episode of any one show in a day, but we galloped through all eleven in a weekend. ...

Yesterday, at Annual Council, I was elected and installed as the Mayor of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. The picture shows me with the retiring Mayor, Cllr Yogan Yoganathan. The election for the new Mayor is normally held at the Council meeting before Annual Council, which gives the Mayor Elect a few weeks to prepare for the role. This year the whole...

It has been brought to my attention that what I took to be a mildly amusing reference to one of my Conservative opponents has in fact really upset her. Now given my apparent reputation for being quite a gentleman at heart (I'm kind to animals, try to see the best in people and am loyal to my friends), I am disappointed that my frog-related postings have had such an impact. Accordingly, it is

Got a bit of a dialogue going with Matt Sellwood here Lets take his points a little out of order... Renewables can go *some* of the way towards solving climate change, but not all of it - what is needed (and what Blair cannot, under any circumstances mention - hence nuclear) is a reduction in demand. Which, under capitalism, leads to a recession. You would be against a recession Matt? OK. Anyway,