I see that the incumbents have scored 100% in the euro selections. Can we now have the tearing up of selection rules for the Euro and GLA lists to allow people to campaign properly for selection? And in the process effectively remove the huge advantage incumbents have. (note I will not be applying for any Euro or GLA list in the future). Good to see Ed Maxfield, Jonathan Fryer, Catherine 
The party's website has posted the results of the ballots for the party's European candidates in England. One regional list is missing. The results in the North West are being recounted because of a close contest for third and fourth place. Liberal Revolution says: The provisional results are in - Chris Davies had 1760 first preferences with Saj Karim on 706 first preferences. They were 59% and 23% respectively.The third person to be on the list is provisionally Helen Foster-Grime just about 2 votes ahead of Flo Clucas. Whether Flo will cause a storm (seeing that her family of four ...
{Blair} One of the most well-known lessons of the Bible is the lesson "let he who is without sin, cast the first stone". For those who don't know the lesson. A woman, caught in the act of adultery was brought to Jesus Christ by the Scribes and Pharisees as a test to see if the Messiah was a liberal in matters of the Law of God. In response to their deceitful query, Jesus didn't condemn the woman. Not because he was a liberal, not because he condoned her sin, but because the men who brought the woman to him ...
The Truth is often irrelevant in local politics. It's about perception. The leader of our County Council has got herself in trouble. Whether she did wrong or not; I'm not going to comment. But in Cambridgeshire you don't need the opposition (us) to do the dirty deed. The Tories, with the deft practice which doubtless comes from a life of pursuing blood sports have been sharpening their knives. It's only a matter of time. You feel sorry for David Cameron. As fast as he tries to re-build his party in an image that can appeal to a broader church, the ...
The party’s just published the results of the selections for our European Parliament election candidates in England. More details over on the main Liberal Democrat website.
There is a problem having your website hosted on a shared server, which is that you really need to trust your webhost. So I was rather shocked today when installing phpMyAdmin that without configuring the config.inc.php file I was able to login to the mySQL database. Not only that but I could see the names of every table on my server. Now this has happened before, but any attempts to view these tables resulted in errors, but this time I was able to view any table, read all the content and even edit a random persons blog post (don’t worry, ...
Steve Webb MP has been campaigning to get proper state pension payments for women whose computer records had been lost, so that they weren't receiving credit for periods when they were at home raising children. Steve was contacted by more than a thousand women who have been affected. Steve and his team identified a dozen key cases and took them to the Department of Work and Pensions, who agreed that they had lost out. One woman has received more than £10,000 in back pension and interest. The Government has now agreed to trawl through millions of National Insurance Contribution records ...
Not for you, but for those who need it most, just by playing a simple (but addictive) vocabulary game. According to the BBC, enough rice has already been donated to feed 50,000 people, so appease your guilty Western conscience and give a little.
Orange By Name favourite Julia Goldsworthy has this evening (inadvertently) drawn my attention to a Facebook group entitled “Liberal Democrats in support of the 'Orange Book', i.e economic liberals.” Not the punchiest title one has seen; in fact, barely worthy of appearing on the same blog as “I Sought The Laws and the Laws Didn’t Run”. Nevertheless, as I tell my girlfriend when presenting her with a £10 WH Smiths Gift Voucher by way of a birthday present – it’s the thought that counts. What a splendid thought it is too. On the subject of splendid thoughts, the attached photograph ...
Since Lynne Featherstone has identified her best blog on the leadership elections, I got to wondering what was the worst? Of course, I lay myself open to be included in the latter category..............but............any ideas?
A gigantic lorry was seen going up Nibley Lane this week, despite the weight limit. It only just made it over the narrow curved bridge. Maybe the driver was blindly following a satnav? We were reminded of this photo from www.funny.co.uk (warning - there's a very irritating flashing advert on that site), pointed out by the Hit By A Thought blog.
I wonder if any of my US firends can help us out over here. President Geaorge W Bush has just said of his discussion with Pakistan President General Musharraf: "My message was that we believe strongly...
I am just back from town..........I went to Lidls and forgot I was on foot so a little exhausted having carted two heavy bags. But, in town I got a call to tell me I was number 2 in the East. To say that I was gobsmacked is an understatement! So, since all this started in the summer when as friends will know I was dealing with a very poorly sister and had little time to prepare my campaign, I took the advice of my dear pal Colin Ross. "You can't win Linda" says he "so you may as well ...
till it's due in, 3000 to go!!!If any one wants to employ someone who can understand the depravity of war and how Bosnia decended into violence give me a call!
The Liberal Democrats have selected Anood Al-Samerai as our candidate for the Riverside by-election in Southwark. Anood is an excellent campaigner who achieved one of the largest swings against Labour at the 2006 local elections. Her work for Simon Hughes solving many hundreds of problems for concerned residents in respect of social housing, crime and residency gives her great experience for the job of Councillor. She is also an all-round good egg, hard-working, and fully paid up member of the human race. We need more people like Anood in our Councils. Riverside is the Southwark ward that contains the GLA ... 
When I heard yesterday morning that the Government consultation on genetically modified crops had closed, and that the issue was therefore back in the news, I knew that the Lib Dems were about to shoot from the hip again. And Chris Huhne has duly delivered: “Ministers should not give any go-ahead for commercial planting until they can state confidently that GM varieties would not contaminate non-GM foods and that they are safe.” This seems a strange inversion of liberal philosophy. The first principle of a free society should surely be that everything is permitted unless it is explicitly banned: we ...
One of the most interesting speakers at the recent Chatham House conference which I mentioned here, was a guy I hadn’t heard of before called Philip Wilkinson. Wilkinson had a long background in the army, including the commandos, paras, and special forces, before specialising particularly in counter-insurgency and supporting the development of peace in post-conflict situations, including in Afghanistan, advising the UN, and he is now an associate fellow at Chatham House itself. He said a number of things of interest to me, but what really grabbed my attention was what was I think his central theme, that in the ...
One of the biggest decisions any parent makes is choosing a secondary school for their child. We've just been through that particular mill. It was a process which lasted well over a year, involved over a dozen visits to four schools and three hours of one-on-three time with three separate headteachers. At several points in this nerve-jangling process, I had to remind myself and my loved ones
Rodney Marsh - downhill all the wayAdded to playlist: Wombats/Hoosiers/One Night Only/Scouting for girlsPUBLIC WARNING: Janice Dickinson is on her wayGreat digital cinema innovation at Newbury's Corn Exchange
It is now all over, and a result is available as follows; 1. Sharon Bowles 2. Catherine Bearder 3. Ben Abbotts 4. Jim Barnard 5. Antony Hook 6. Murari Kaushik 7. Simon Green 8. Zoe Vincent 9. Gary Lawson 10. David Grace It is expected that the full data will be available on the internet very soon. I will review the results further later, probably tomorrow...
{White poppies} Here's another thing about the Conservative party and their tenuous claimed link with the Co-operative Movement. It is no coincidence that the international rainbow flag for peace is also the international co-operative movement's flag. Nor that it was the Co-operative Womens' Guild that instituted the idea of wearing white poppies to promote peace instead of red ones that commemorated the "glorious dead". It is axiomatic that the Co-operative Movement strives for peace - the very phrase "Peace and Co-operation" encapsulates the ethos. So, will Dave be wearing red, for the more traditionally Conservative Remembrance of War, or white ...
When I left the Welsh hustings last time round I was fairly convinced Ming would win but didn't really look forward to his leadership so two years on and 5 days after the event where has this years version left me. First up it has still left me to make up my mind and that is in many ways the most positive thing I can think of for our party. Neither candidate scored a knock out blow in terms of
Attended Logie Residents' Association on Wednesday evening. The group is looking to organise a survey of residents in the Logie area early in the New Year to get their views on local issues and gauge support for continuing Association activity. Arising out of the meeting, I have spoken with a representative of Virgin Media about residents' concerns about graffiti on the cable TV boxes in the Logie area. On Thursday, I met with the Managing Director of Travel Dundee to discuss public transport issues in the City and had a guided tour of their Dock Street operations (see above right) ...
{Martin Tod, Sandra Gidley MP and Cllr Eleanor Bell campaigning to save the Romsey-Winchester bus service} Up bright and early yesterday to join the campaign to save the Romsey-Winchester rail-link bus. This entailed getting the 7.04 a.m. bus to Romsey, putting on a Santa hat, and travelling back at 7.35 a.m. with Sandra Gidley and a bus full of protesters from the Save Our Bus campaign - before collecting signatures on the concourse from local travellers. Eleanor Bell joined us as the bus came back through Hursley. It seems hard to believe that, so soon after all the County Council’s ...
Jonathan Calder has written about my decision to split into two blogs. I am most grateful for his plugs. He says that he is not going to follow suit because: ...if Liberalism is to remain a vital political philosophy then it must have something to say about wider culture as well as what goes on at Westminster. A hundred years ago, when the Liberal Party was a party of government, there were
The London Assembly have voted for him to resign. He is effectively a political captive of Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown. His senior officers are preoccupied with defending him at the cost of absenting themselves from their work of catching criminals. It's not often that the small volume that is the "John Major book of Wit and Wisdom" gets a dusting off. But on this occasion, this quote from the
With the news that Cameron’s been mistaken for a plumber by the sickeningly chic Kate Moss, this inevitable mash up of Nintendo’s famous Italian plumber Mario and the Tory leader is how I’m going to leave this blog for a well earned weekend doing something else. {Image Hosted by ImageShack.us}
Sir Ronald Cohen is a long-term supporter of Gordon Brown and has given £1.8 million to the Labour party since 2001. He says there is "no longer much difference between the two (Tory and Labour) parties". Well, he said it. It also speaks volumes that someone who has given so much money to the Labour party should be so relaxed about the prospect of David Cameron as Prime Minister - he knows there
There is more trouble for the One Wales Government this morning as Plaid Cymru stepped up the pressure on Labour to deliver on the 217 promises in the coalition document and in particular the commitment to a referendum on full law-making powers by 2011. Former Plaid Cymru president, Dafydd Wigley, has warned that the days of the Labour-Plaid coalition could be numbered because of concerns over both constitutional issues and the funding of the National Assembly. “When the coalition government was established, there were misgivings about the adequacy of the funding of public services in Wales. “So a central commitment ... 
The provisional results are in - Chris Davies had 1760 first preferences with Saj Karim on 706 first preferences. They were 59% and 23% respectively. The third person to be on the list is provisionally Helen Foster-Grime just about 2 votes ahead of Flo Clucas. Whether Flo will cause a storm (seeing that her family of [...]
Liberal Democrat AM, Jenny Randerson, has obviously hit a sore point in her criticism of the huge increase in the Wales Office budget. Not only did she provoke Peter Hain to come onto Radio Wales yesterday and make some very personal and insulting comments about her, but now his junior Minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, has stepped into the row. The Minister accused his department's critics of being “poorly-informed” and of attacking the work of civil servants: Mr. Irranca-Davies said the department was taking on extra work to ensure the new Orders in Council process – the gradual, and novel, transfer of ...
We have a Lord Mayor's procession in Norwich, although the BBC do not come and film it. I guess dozens of other towns have similar events too. again with no TV coverage. Yet in London, a Mayor with virtually no power who is actually only mayor of one square mile, not the whole of London, gets his procession screened on National TV. I can understand 20 years ago it was a good excuse for the BBC's outside broadcast unit to justify its existence, but is anyone at all inside London, let alone outside London really interested in the Lord mayor's ...
Ever missed seeing a Liberal Democrat on Question Time, or a party political broadcast, or some other media appearance because you didn’t know about it in advance? [I think I can write the comments now - Ed] Courtesy of Flock Together, you can put those days behind you. It includes a service to advertise in advance [...]
The day when I wrote “Huhne Crosses a line” turned out to be the best day this blog has ever had with 300 unique visitors, effectively 100 more than normal. The next day, “Doubts about Clegg” got me my more normal 200. I wonder what it means?
You know, I actually like this as a description of Clegg. Think about what it is that stunt doubles actually do.
Politicians must demonstrate their beliefs. It’s not enough to simply tell people what you believe. So for opposition parties, this causes a problem: How do you demonstrate your beliefs without being able to enact policies? Luckily there’s a option for party leaders. They can demonstrate their beliefs - and in many regards their character and leadership style - by the way they run their parties. So, with this in mind I am proposing the development of an internal Ethical Campaigning Unit, as part of a wider strategy of cleaning up politics and put pressure on other political parties to drop ...
I worked with Iain Blair for five years when I was a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority. He was Deputy Commissioner to John Stevens when I arrived. It was clear throughout the years he was deputy - that he was more than focused on succeeding to the top job when Sir John retired. And that's what happened. It is awful really to have watched him make errors of judgement - virtually since day one. He clearly set out to do things differently and to be the best-ever top cop - and it has all gone so horribly wrong. And ...
Oh, oh, is it too much to hope this might be about me? There's still scope for us to be the first political party to have a Shadow Cabinet with an average of more than two legs per member you know, hint hint. (And I get on quite well with cats these days, just to reassure you).
{The Women's Company lunch in Crouch End} I went to The Women's Company Crouch End lunch recently. Forgot to blog about it - but don't want it to go unblogged as it is a really important network for local women who have their own business (be that a one woman band or big enterprise) to get together and see what the issues are, network and be mutually supportive. The group is organised very ably by Veronica Peck (pictured standing behind me). It was a lively meeting - comprising all sorts of businesses and services including a funding specialist, a specialist ...
A lot of political campaigning seems to be about delivering leaflets, running petitions, speaking at meetings, issuing press releases etc., but at the end of it you sometimes need to remember that this is not the only way to get things done. My experience of running a successful campaign to get pensions justice for thousands of women (see today's Daily Mail) shows that a different approach can often reap rewards. The background to this story is that I was contacted some months ago by the Times newspaper about the cases of women who were not getting the full amount of ...
I really find the damp, cold, dark mornings a struggle when my duvet is so very warm and cosy. As always, the busy world beckons and I find myself in my car heading towards another busy day. This week was a little different, my husband was away on a training course so my son and I were able to chart our own way through the week without having to fit in with Andrew’s schedule too. It was also an
Wikipedia vision is a website that allows you to watch what edits are being made by anonymous non registered users of Wikipedia, as they are made. It serves no real purpose, but is slightly interesting at the same time. Hat tip to Dodgeblogium for this.
The Red Seas is back - sort of. And the final showdowns begin in Button Man and Judge Dredd. {Prog 1562} Cover: Frazer Irving draws Harry Ex. Effective but quite dark, meaning it doesn’t exactly leap off the shelf at you. Spoilers ahoy! (more…) Share This
{HuhneandClegg} The background behind the supposed animosity between Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg is hard to untangle, but it seems to go something like this: Clegg and the Cleggites are former Mingers, who hold a grudge against Huhne because he supposedly broke a pledge to the ex-leader that he wouldn't stand against him when Charles Kennedy resigned. From that, all else follows: Huhnistas have come to mistrust Cleggites on account of their strident ambition and silky media skills, whereas Cleggites think Huhnistas are too intellectual for their own good, and untrustworthy to boot. Come on boys - grow up!
David Cameron's announcement that the Conservatives are to set up their own co-operatives seems to me to be a complete contradiction in terms. The Co-operative movement was set up with the intention of people working together in a pre-cursor in many ways to the socialist ideals of communities working and groups working together for the common good. Co-operative movements worked sometimes against the prevailing economic mood, supporting ans sustaining people in times of need and recession whilst setting up further co-operative groups in areas where the economics suggested that it was not a good place to do business. This is ...
The link is to a story in the Newcastle Journal about Fran Lyon moving to Warwickshire to get away from Northumberland County Council and certain doctors in the North East. Hopefully Warwickshire Childrens Services will be more rational than Northumberland.
Of all the risks that keep me awake at night about my children, I can’t say I have ever felt the fear clutch my throat and say: “Oh my God, perhaps they’ve got chicken pox!” I’m not claiming that chicken pox can never have complications, just that – if taxpayers are going to spend millions tackling childhood risk – they might look elsewhere first. Let’s not set out in too much detail exactly who profits by the suggestion, in a report 48 hours ago, that chicken pox vaccine should be added to the controversial MMR. But no doubt we will ...
The Daily Telegraph's main story is ... Middle classes abandon state schools. Phew. Let's look at the figures they quote: Figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families showed that on average, 7.1 per cent of 11- to 15-year-olds were taught in independent schools in 2004. But by this year the proportion had risen to 7.3 per cent - a total of 232,620 pupils. There was also a
Thursday: Well, the OBVIOUS answer is that STUPID got into the White House and the economy got chucked straight out the window. Normally, I do not worry about money, because my Daddies give me enough pocket money to buy all the DVDs that I want. But the price of sticky buns seems to be going up and up right now, so I am wondering it there isn't something big going on! In fact, there seem to be FOUR big things going on in the world of MONEY at the moment: oil and wheat, mortgages and dollars. Droughts in Australia and ...
This is a response I posted to James Graham's post On Equality. I'm replicating it here, partly because it ended up as something of an essay, but also because the thoughts came out a lot more developed than I thought they would. James wrote: Ultimately, a commitment to true equality means moving outside the narrow confines of concepts like “meritocracy”, “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcome” and instead appreciating the bigger picture. Ideally, equality of opportunity ought to produce equality of outcome. In the real world we are never going to achieve that ideal but the creative tension between ...
It's not been a good week for Boris Johnson. Conservative HQ warn of "worrying drift" in his mayoral campaign, he talks utter nonsense on the de Menezes case and, now, Ken Livingstone piles on the misery with this mischief: I've sent the police out looking for Boris, because I can't find him anywhere - where is he? I'm worried that he's been abducted or kidnapped.
The Apple iphone was launched yesterday to a cavalcade of press publicity and the usual Apple junkies queueing all night in order to be the first to get one, but aside from a touch screen, what does the apple I phone offer that is new ? I have had an MP3 player on my mobile phone for about three years now, so I am at a loss as to why Apple think they are the first people who have eliminated the need to carry both. As far as I can tell Sony Ericsson's Walkman phones have been around for years. ...
In an interesting preview of tonight's Parky from Owen Gibson it transpires that David Cameron's name recognition in his constituency may not be that good. One of his constituents, Kate Moss, thought he was a plumber when they met: Appearing on tonight's Parkinson show, the Old Etonian Conservative leader explains how the Croydon-born model thought he was "something to do with drainage" when they
Another day, another Liberal Democrat MP in the Daily Mail. Following Jo Swinson’s appearance on the issue of (un)equal pay for women, this time it is Steve Webb: Tens of thousands of women who gave up work to raise children are in line for a pension windfall of around £3,000. The Government has caved in to demands to [...]
After yesterday's annoyance about the Informer's reporting of the library review, I am pleased to say that it did represent another issue accurately. I've written already about the campaign to save Springboard, the local supported workshop for people with mental health problems : We must not lose Springboard and Springboard update. Our MP Edward Davey is working with councillors and...
Discussing Clegg’s interview with David Mills of GMTV Sunday earlier, it occurred to us that the following quote has potentially enormous implications: Nick Clegg: Er, yes, but I mean there are other ideas. For instance there are other ideas, I mean for instance I’ve also this week been floating ideas for how I think we should introduce a 10% tax on the non-domestic earnings of so-called ‘non-doms’. In that particular case that raises about £1 billion. I would like that to go to alleviate the burden of Council Tax on those in Band A and band B properties, those on ...
Last week I got some flak for stating that I support “equality” as a guiding principle. Indeed, in Andy Mayer’s case it turned into a full scale onslaught. Church of Leftology? Where did all that come from? Never has so much been read into the use of one little word. I’ve been meaning to return to the subject all week and have struggled to fit it in with, among other things, blogging about the Huhne interview, but it looks as if I finally have a chance. What I aim to spell out in this article is that support for the ...
More Blue Peter Babylon. The Daily Telegraph reports: Blue Peter is at the centre of another fakery row after it admitted that two competition winners who appeared on the show were in fact child actors.The BBC’s long-running children’s programme used the actors from a local drama group in an effort to make the show more lively and entertaining.Things could get even more interesting. As Metro says: Legendary Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton is apparently set to spill the beans in a long-awaited autobiography.The 70-year-old former presenter - whose book will mark the 50th anniversary of the children's TV show - ...
Been out tonight for a quiet bite in Pizza Express Cardiff. Interested to see on the way back to the hotel that the method that a doorman uses to tell someone not to come back to the Reflex Bar is to hold them on the pavement round their throat while shouting in their face. Meanwhile the other bouncers there, and at neighbouring premises, just looked on. | < | November 2007 | > | ||||
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |
