New name, new look. Taken from the Justin Currie song "no surrender", which I urge you to hunt down. Actual content will come later. Maybe :P (Attribution: background picture from flickr, by Abduraman)
...and back from the beaches of north Wales. I will resume putting the world to rights as soon as I get round to it, etc. Actually I did pop in to the David Lloyd George museum in Llanystumdwy. I learned that Lloyd George was the greatest statesman of the 20th century; the man from whom Churchill learned everything he knew (except, presumably, disastrous naval tactics); a man without flaws, at
Friday saw - after my advice surgery - a meeting met with our new Borough Commander - David Grant. He served in Haringey when Highgate Police Station was still open (oh - those were the days) and at Hornsey Police Station - so is familiar with the terrain! We ranged over the ills of the world, policing, where resources should be put and so on and so forth. This was our first meeting - so think we were trying to sus each other out. Seemed to have heart and head in right place. {Lynne Featherstone getting a donor card from ...
The new bus timetables that come into action tomorrow (3rd August 2008) can be seen on the South Glos website. Make sure you click on the new rather than the old timetables where both are listed. Local residents will be particularly interested in the changes to these services: X27 South Yate - Yate - Bristol X42 Chipping Sodbury - Yate - Bristol 327 & 329 Yate - Bristol 342 Chipping Sodbury - Yate - Bristol But don't forget that the above are only the services run by First Bus - there are also the services run by other operators, and ...
If there has been a little bit of entertainment going on in West Wales it has been the little attacks two Party Political Candidates have been giving each other. It has given myself much amusement. I'm a little bit of a historian. One of my numerous subjects is the history of the bare fist fighters in America before Queensbury Rules took off. In many cases one fighter would put a public notice of a challenge to his opponent in the local newspaper! Simon Hart, the Tory candidate for Carmarthen West/South Pembrokeshire put a letter in the newspaper proclaiming himself and ...
Many thanks to all those people who voted for me in the Witanagemot Club annual awards. My blog was voted best Liberal Democrat Supporting Blog for 2008. Awards don't really matter, and they shouldn't matter because it does rather encourage people to pander to the audience that is voting, but I am really pleased to have won this award and await the cheque and trophy in the post (yes, I am joking). Perhaps the only disappointment was that I was not in the top three "most shaggable bloggers". Yes, now I really REALLY am joking)
A while ago I was tagged by Millennium Elephant to take part in the seven songs meme, the rules of which are: "List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to." Spring had already passed by the time Millennium named me amongst his seven, so these are rather more summery than ...
A number of residents have commented to me that recently www.dundeewestend.com has been taking quite a long time to load up. It is hosted by Blogger and it now has a rather huge amount of content. I have made a few changes to the widgets and front page content to speed things up, but I have now also set up a very fast to load mirror site hosted by WordPress at www.westendblog.org.uk with identical content. The only drawback with this new mirror site is that some of the imported video clips, etc, won't work on it, but the bulk of ...
I wrote earlier on the unhappy phenomenon of many favourite websites crashing as soon as I looked at them. As I don't possess the Hereditary Gaze of the Bishop of Zilbor, I mistakenly thought it to be a calamitous cock-up from Microsoft (I know - imagine!), but many helpful comments and Googling have revealed the culprit as Sitemeter. They changed their code yesterday, which for Internet Explorer users has torpedoed every Sitemeter-equipped blog (on any platform). So if you want to read a page, try hitting Stop as it visibly loads; and if you employ Sitemeter, please consider removing it. ...
It is curious that the life of a Christian (i.e. Iris Robinson) can bedefined by anger towards other, generally hard done-by, groups. First,Catholics, then gays. What's eating her? And has she not read Jesus'smessages of love, peace and forgiveness? / A state funeral forThatcher? Thrice no. The last PM who had one was Churchill. He unitedthe nation. Thatcher divided it. / . I have conceded to
Thornaby held its Yorkshire Day celebrations with a community event on Thornaby Green, which started with a service at the ancient St Peter's Church. There was a wide variety of stalls and entertainment for all the family. Chris was invited to open the proceedings with a reading of the Yorkshire Declaration of Integrity. The Yorkshire Ridings Society stall raised £40 from the sales of Yorkshire products and over £60 for the Thornaby Town Mayor's Charity. Local residents were invited to have their photograph taken in front of the Yorkshire flag for display in Thornaby Library. Chris had his taken with ...
So what to make of the Whickham South and Sunniside by-eleciton in Gateshead? Well, we achieved all our campaign objectives: we won, we increased our share of the vote, and we squeezed the Tories back into third place. Winning was not in any great doubt. This is after all one of the strongest Lib Dem council wards in the country, though we never take it for granted. Meanwhile, getting an
Scottish politics used to be predictable: Labour was the largest party, the SNP was bitter about it, the Tories were resented for existing and the Liberal Democrats were a voice of reason. But the results of the Holyrood election and last week's Glasgow East by-election remind us that times have changed. Political parties are having [...]
I couldn't resist putting together this video. Polling day in the Whickham South and Sunniside by-election in Gateshead on Thursday 31st July. I started filming at 5am and finished after the declaration. In case you don't know the result, we held the seat, added nearly 5% to our total, took almost 3 out of every 4 votes cast and crushed the Tories back into 3rd place. Here's the link: http://
This blog has been voted the third-best Liberal Democrat supporting blog in the 2008 Witanagemot Club Awards. It won't change my life.
We were in Yastradgylis today for one of our summer surgery programmes, and fortunately the surgery coincided with the opening of the town's new, improved library. We were there for over and an hour and a half and I only heard one complaint about it - that the books were the same as before. Sometimes I don't understand why people complain. Yes we all have the right to freedom of speech, but is complaining for complaining sake worth the while in the first place? Yes there are problems in the world, and problems in each of our communities, but there ...
My blog was silent yesterday for the odd reason that it was locked by the Blogger "robot" on the grounds that it had "exhibited characteristics of a spam blog". I had to request that is be unblocked, and once this was made, a real person at Blogger had to check it. Seems as though this has now been done. My blog about local Labour hypocrisy, rants about National Express and taking jam to Cowley
Monday 28th/ Tuesday 29th - AKA The days of contrasting weather So on Monday we were in Knighton delivering leaflets for Kirsty Williams - the weather sunny and hot and easily a nice 25 degrees And then the rain came, and that started the bad weather we've all pretty much seen over the last 24 hours. Fortunately I've missed the main rain showers as I've been inside. Yesterday I got to my gran's house earlier than normal which meant I was able to watch the monsoon style rain from my bedroom, whereas if id been coming back form the office ...
There is a general fault on a number of blogger blogs today. Apparently the fault is that anyone with Sitemeter recording their statistics cannot open their blog on internet explorer. If you are having such problem, remove sitemeter and everything should be okay.
Friday: Well, it's not EVERY day that you get to see the Government's energy policy AND environment policy both implode before breakfast. We ARE going to need extra generating capacity if we're to avoid the lights going out; we'll need it NOT to be more fossil-fuel-based plants if we are to meet our Kyoto targets. But really, the whole idea that we could flog off British (Radioactive) Energy to the French and get them to build us the infrastructure on the cheap is just TYPICAL of this Government, particularly Mr Frown and his ENRON-ACCOUNTING PPP (or Pay Pounds Perpetually) schemes. ...
Iain Dale's doing his annual best blog competition, so here are my top ten political blogs which I'm sending in. First there are the regular 'must reads': 1. Liberal Democrat Voice 2. Iain Dale 3. Guido Fawkes (Love Iain and Guido, or hate them, or love and hate them both - they are a pretty much essential read, frequently breaking stories that are then ones we all pay attention to.) 4. Liberal Conspiracy (The content isn't as much of a 'must read' for me as the previous three, but Liberal Conspiracy has the best discussion in the comments. It's the ...
If any of my readers have seen the BBC's rather excellent House of Cards series then they will know that it features in the final installment, The Final Cut, a state funeral for Margaret Thatcher. Is this fiction about to become an unpleasant reality?? Apparently Harriet Harmen is undecided, maybe she is distracted by the ongoing state funeral for the Labour government but in the spirit of fraternity let this blog make the decision for her; NOOOOOO, never ever. As a republican I feel it is bad enough we have to endure the rigmarole for an unelected head of state ...
This year has seen important anniversaries of two key items of social legislation - the National Health Service and Old Age Pensions. The National Health Service began on July 5th, 1948 under Nye Bevan as Labour Minister of Health, despite opposition by the Conservative Party and the British Medical Association. Who can imagine these bodies opposing it now? How times have changed. Read this excellent BBC article on the birth of the NHS. My own family must have been very grateful for the new NHS as I was born within its first year - one of the first generation of ...
The major UK pollsters consistently record a variance in support for the Liberal Democrats. There are two possible reasons for this - what question is asked and what weighting is made on the results. Some pollsters offer a party list, some rotate the order, some add in 'Don't know' all offer others. It is well established that the Lib Dem vote usually rises in the last few days of an election campaign as the Party gains the pledges of a higher proportion of 'floating' voters than it does of hard core "I always vote X and always will" voters. It ...
Reading Policy Paper 85 'Fast Track Britain - Building a Transport System for the 21st Century' to be debated at Autumn Conference, I found myself in a bit of a quandary. Whilst very wise in its outlook for the most part, there are just a few points that could do to be amended. Yes, it's true that building more roads does not solve the problem - it simply gives more choice to a motorist of which way to drive to work. Road traffic has risen by 12% since Labour came to power. This is probably due to the fact that ...
Is The Sun (owner: Rupert Murdoch) indulging in a campaign of partisan reporting designed to damage Facebook, one of the main rivals to MySpace (owner: Rupert Murdoch)? That's a question that has been raised a few times on blogs (such as towards the end of this posting), so I thought I would take a look at [...]
I have spoke recently to the lady who runs Celf o Gwmpas. This is an arts charity based in Powys who give adults with learning difficulties the opportunity to access the arts throughout Mid-Wales. An inspired idea and one you would think the Welsh Labour Assembly would endorse. The ten year old charity has helped disabled people come together to perform dances, shows, sculpture and painting among other arts activities. The Welsh liberal Democrats provided more funding for the Arts council of Wales under Jenny Randerson's tenure as Culture Minister. Since Mrs. Randersons departure the Arts council has seemingly gone ...
I was reading Charlotte Gore's latest musings on another week of Labour back-biting and a thought occurred to me. Charlotte asked if it was wrong to be enjoying this spectacle and I suppose from a partisan point of view the distress of the opposing team is always a cause for semi-secret joy. Speaking personally there is a slight tinge of sadness/bitterness as well because as many of you know I was actually a Labour activist in 97. I suppose then the writing was already on the wall; we should have known things could only get worse when Blair started slyly ...
Talk of the ill-fated tenure of Rhodri Glyn Thomas as Heritage Minister continues to rumble on, irrespective of the fact that he resigned two weeks ago and that his successor is busily getting his feet under the table, with a letter from author Tom Bullough in this morning's Western Mail. Those with an interest in Welsh politics may recall that Rhodri Glyn boobed in announcing the winner of the Wales Book of the Year Prize. He mistakenly read out the name of Tom Bullough, whose excellent novel, The Claude Glass was narrowly pipped for first prize by Danny Abse's moving ...
I predicted last month that the Liberal Democrat poll share would slip slightly over the summer and pick up again in the autumn with the conference season and the July figures bear this out. It should also be noted that 3 of the 9 polls were from Yougov, traditionally the worst for the Lib Dems, though the lowest poll actually came from IpsosMori. It can be argued that in order to compare 'apples with apples' a comparison should be made of a specific pollsters figures over time. For these figures in recent months I have provided a handy table in ...
The speculation that Brown is going to have a reshuffle following Milliband starting a Leadership Election Campaign have not been commented on by Downing Street. With the Prime Minister on Holiday he has asked Cabinet Ministers to arrive one month earlier from Summer recess. Well i think that he needs to have a reshuffle and needs to get rid of people like Miliband if the party allow him to stay Leader and if they don't he might as well back away and go. Its actually a decision the Labour Party needs to make first which is if they want to ...
In the past we've warned about commercial door-to-door clothing collections that pretend to be charities. Our advice is usually that unless you recognise a collection by a "big name" charity, you should take usable items to your local charity shop. We've just received another leaflet. We've checked it out, and this one appears to be OK. It's a commercial company called E&C Export Ltd, who export the items collected for resale in Eastern Europe. They say that they make donations of £2000 per month to the Children's Heart Surgery Fund. The CHSF is based at the Yorkshire Heart Centre in ...
I went to see Mamma Mia as a birthday treat from my friend Siobhan. If you are in need of something to make you smile this Summer, go and see this film. You come out feeling like you've been bathed in Greek sunshine. Whether it's the beauty of the island location, the outrageous moments of high camp, the nostalgia that Abba songs awaken, or you just want to gaze at Colin Firth, you'll love it. I have to be honest and say that my expectations for the soundtrack, and particularly Pierce Brosnan's contribution to it, were not that high. It ...
The Government is going to push plans to limit campaigning spending as they believe it needs to be limited to tackle the Tory's. Herein Pendle it is believed that the conservatives spend an enormous amount of money at the May 2008 Local Election gaining them a few seats from the Liberal Democrats. Now the Government want to put a limit onto the amount the conservatives spend and i believe rules like that are needed as the Conservatives have so much of Lord Ashcroft's money that they have better campaign's then a lot of Political Parties and despite their candidates not ...
Every time İ come to İstanbul, İ try to make time to spend a morning ambling down İstiklal Caddesi, the pedestrianised main street of Beyoğlu, where one can spend hours browsing in the bookshops or just sitting in one of the elegant cafes, watching the little red trams and the people go by. There are [...]
Imagine what it's like to be a Liberal Democrat prospective parliamentary candidate - tasked with leading and motivating a group of diverse volunteers against all the odds, and organising foot-slogging campaigns on a shoe-string budget that will get you and the party noticed. Lib Dem Voice contacted a dozen PPCs to find out what they [...]
Thursday One thing the aforementioned Dromgoogle was particularly keen on was wind power. I showed him the windmill on the Estate - it sits atop the highest hill, next to the Triumphal Arch celebrating Wallace Lawler's victory in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election of 1969 - but he was not satisfied; wind turbines, he insisted, were the latest thing. Well I had them installed and a fat lot of use they turned out to be. They cost a fortune to run - I hate to think what my electricity bill would have been if it were not for my treadmill and ...
I'm one of the signatories on a letter organised by the New Statesman as part of their campaign over the future of the Rape Crisis centres in England and Wales: The prevalence of sexual violence is, unfortunately, extremely high, with a conservative estimate of at least 80,000 women being raped every year ... The impact of sexual violence is significant and long-term, affecting physical and mental health, ability to work or study, and disruption in intimate relationships. The cost to the state of sexual violence was £8.5 billion in 2003-04, with much of this cost being lost outputs due to ...
Yesterday evening I logged into Blogger to be greeted with a message saying that Liberal England had been identified as a spam blog and would be deleted in 20 days if I did not request a review. In the mean time I could not post anything. Surfing the net, it soon became clear that this was a widespread problem. The general theory was that Blogger's spambot had run amok and returned numerous false positives. Blogger Buzz admits to the problem as follows: While we wish that every post on this blog could be about cool features or other Blogger news, ...
The Spiritual Civilisation Construction Commission has the job of curbing anti-social behaviour in Beijing whilst cultivating courtesy and civility instead. It has issued booklets and launched campaigns to minimise littering and China's problem with public spitting, it has issued edicts on sartorial and social matters from handshaking to the length of one's skirt. It has also been accompanied by a zero tolerance, broken windows approach to minor infractions such as spitting. This is interesting for one major reason: it sounds very much like an extreme version of policies suggested by David Cameron, a whole suite of policies that might be ...
I've had some news about the plans for a big anti-knife march in London. There's been a couple of changes of date while it's been developing, simply because so many people want to attend. Now the 'Lose the knife.... not a life' march is confirmed for 20 September. The plan is for two groups to [...]
Trying to read some of my regular blog fixes last night and this morning, I'm wondering if Internet Explorer has downloaded one of its brilliant new updates that's trashed its functionality (which is usually fine for me, to be fair). Clicking on - for example - my links at the side of this blog to Simon Guerrier, James Graham or Unity, the page visibly loads, then suddenly aborts, and I have no way to get it back. It looks like they use different blogging software, so it's not a Blogger problem. Anyone else in the same boat, or any suggestions? ...
Nick's been in the media a lot in the last few days, including talking about housing (interview with 24dash.com), a more general interview with Building magazine, writing about the fight against corruption (with an article in the Yorkshire Post) and the prospects for getting Liberal Democrat MPs in Hull and Derby.
{Bath University} Bath University estates department have recvised their bridge replacement timetable, taking into account the Youth Games on campus this month. The bridge has now been built by the contactors and is being painted this week. In a few weeks it will be driven down from Huddersfield with a police escort to Quarry Road. Quarry Road will be partially for fully closed from midnight 31st August until 6:30am on 4th September; although the contractors may be able to complete faster.
Posted by Chris: A big thank you to leading Conservative blogger, Iain Dale, for allowing me a guest spot on his blog to promote Yorksire Day and the campaign for real counties.
Yorkshire Cricket legend Brian Stott was guest of honour at the annual Cloughton Yorkshire Day Garden Party. The Yorkshire Declaration of Integrity is read.
