Interesting to see that nearly all of the comments on the BBC blog article about Google's decision to withdraw premium music videos from YouTube in the UK are firmly on the side of Google and highly critical of both PRS's fees and the complexity of the system.
And so, the Conference reached its climax, the Leader's speech. Naturally, the great and the good were positioned on the front row, and a camera panning it would have spotted senior frontbenchers, the Leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, leading MEP's and the Party President. Oh yes, and someone in a lightly pinstriped suit with a dark tie with flowers. Must be a big donor, because the media would have no idea who he was. Perhaps he just found a spare seat and occupied it when nobody was looking? But anyway, the Leader comes on, and delivers the speech that ...
I am going to write no more than agree with Sarah Teather on the Government finally giving money to local Councils, but to reduce rents. What Sarah said is reproduced below, but I would add that if we had not had the unfair "tenants tax" then Stockton would have had around £100 million over the last 15 years - and that would have paid for the doors and windows so badly needed, to say nothing of...
We really need to invite some Young People to the People's Republic to change our jaundiced minds about stuff. For we are grown old and crabby, and here followeth the evidence. I was never into student politics, of any stripe, largely because all those that were seemed like such unconscionable wankers. Liberal Democrats have, on the [...]
I found Nick's speech on the Party's website. What can I say? An A for delivery and approaching that for content. What a meaty speech it was - full of really useful stuff and at last really taking the fight to the other two parties.
Dear resident, The first duty of any councillor is to provide a service to all the people in his or her Ward. I'm not yet a Councillor, but since I became the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for Maryfield Ward, I have tried to show what this concept of service should mean. I have talked with many residents to discover and act on the problems which need attention, and I have kept you in touch with what's going on through regular FOCUS newsletters. If you elect me as your Councillor on 12th March, I promise to carry on these services. I will ...
This story has just gone up on the Sun website: A baby's genetic profile is on the national police DNA database, ministers admitted last night.Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the youngest person on the database was aged less than one.There was no explanation of why the baby was there.Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne blasted keeping kids' profiles as "illegal, immoral and ineffective".Ministers have pledged to remove under-tens from the database.It is great to see the Sun defening our liberties. I wish I believed it would be so keen to do so under a Conservative government.
I missed new Welsh Lib Dem leader Kirsty Williams' speech to the conference at Harrogate. But I'd heard it was pretty good, and so I sought it out on the party website just now. And the reports were right. Kirsty has the makings of a real political star, as she's passionate, intelligent and an excellent speaker. I'm confident that under her leadership, the Welsh Lib Dems will face a bright future. If, like me, you missed her speech at Harrogate, here it is: Kirsty Williams AM speaks to spring federal conference 2009 Uploaded by libdem
The Liverpool Post reports that Vince Cable has backed Richard Kemp's call for the Liberal Democrat run city council to use its financial muscle to set up new credit unions, region-wide building societies and other financial institutions: Cllr Kemp said Liverpool used to have a regional bank - Martins - based near the Town Hall.And he said it boasted two regional building societies in Liverpool and Merseyside. He said the Merseyside councils had gained valuable experience in channelling grants and investments to small and medium-sized companies by overseeing the EU's Objective One scheme.Cllr Kemp said: "I think Liverpool should be ...
Howard Dean spoke to a full house at the Lib Dem Spring Conference in Harrogate on Saturday. Afterwards I was very excited to be given a chance to meet him and ask questions along with a handful of other people interested in Internet issues. This renowned Democrat was elected six times as Governor of Vermont, and has just completed a five year term as Chairman of the...
I was rather amused to get an email from a pal today saying he was sending me a copy of a pic he took of me on the podium at conference - think he was trying to tell me something?!
In the wake of the death of two British soldiers in Northern Ireland, am I the only person who finds the answers coming from the British army in Northern Ireland to be totally lacking in an awareness of the shocking way base security has been treated. The head of the British Army failed to properly answer questions about why base security guards failed to fire a single shot in return and instead asked the press if they expected security guards to fire in to a group of people that included British soldiers. Quite clearly the press did not want security ...
Today is Commonwealth Day, though people in Britain might be forgiven for not knowing, as it has received scant coverage in the national media, despite the fact that this is the organisation's Diamond Jubilee or 60th anniversary. The Commonwealth Secretary General, Kamalesh Sharma, insisted in his Commonwealth Day message that this is a moment for [...]
Back from Harrogate and almost recovered. Two characters were all over the conference - Howard Dean and Vince Cable. Nick Clegg (not completely sold on the haircut) made a brilliant speech yesterday lunchtime and will have gained a lot from the event, but he was overshadowed by his deputy and the man with the scream. Dean was with the conference for 24 hours during which he packed in meetings with bloggers, with candidates, with donors, with campaigns staff, with Clegg, with Lib Dem News a nd with the conference floor. I seem to have taken more pics of him than ...
Neilsen Online have just released their latest round of web usage statistics, with this eye-catching finding: Now visited by over two-thirds (67 percent) of the global* online population, "Member Communities," which includes both social networks and blogs, has become the fourth most popular online category - ahead of personal email... Mobile is playing an increasingly important role in social networking. Nielsen found UK mobile Web users have the greatest propensity to visit a social network through their handset, with 23 percent (2 million people) doing so. These findings once again demonstrate the importance of social networking for those elected to ...
I spent a happy time this weekend in Yorkshire, at the Liberal Democrat spring conference in Harrogate. Party conferences are so often dominated by rows, real or imagined, combined with other frustrations ranging from the purely logistical to policy ones, that it was good to have a conference focussed around a strong theme. We concentrated this weekend on the liberating power of education, backed up by three strong policy papers covering different aspects of this (early years, schooling, and college and university). (Mainstream journalists have written that the the conference focussed on the economy, but they are talking about the ...
One thing which I often wonder about and which frequently comes up in discussions with my wife is how much of the observed differences between the genders are due to societal expectation and learned behaviour and how much are due to differences between the sexes. Some things are pretty obvious - men tend to be physically [...]
From PR Week:The Liberal Democrats are planning to mobilise an 'army of bloggers' in a bid to fight Labour and the Conservatives over the web.Up to 100 Lib Dem bloggers are set to convene at the end of this month to thrash out ways in which the party can improve its internet communications.The assembled bloggers will discuss ways to use the web to mobilise supporters. They will also look in to the possibility of unleashing a 'star blogger' to rival Labour's Derek Draper or the Tory-leaning blogger Iain Dale.The meeting on March 28 will be chaired by Lib Dem MP ...
Leeds Liberal Youth response to the events of the Lib Dem conference rally: Dear Sara, Given the events of the rally in Harrogate on Friday we, Leeds Liberal Youth, feel we should share our views on your behaviour. We condemn in the strongest possible terms your decision to heckle Elaine Bagshaw during her speech. Not only was your outburst rude but it drew the reputation of Liberal Youth into disrepute in front of the rest of the party. We do not know the history of your and Elaine's relationship, which has clearly deteriorated and we are not interested in knowing ...
Lib Dem MPs Chris Huhne and Tom Brake have tabled some concerns regarding Google's new 'Latitude' service to track the locations of mobile phones registered with their website. You can read more here.
From the Shropshire Star: Shropshire huntmaster Otis Ferry heard today that charges of "witness nobbling" - that saw him locked up for four months - are likely be dropped.Ferry, 26, son of Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry, was due to stand trial on charges of robbing a hunt monitor, assault and interfering with a witness.But today Ferry, joint master of the South Shropshire Hunt, learned that the charge of perverting the course of justice was set to be abandoned due to "inconsistencies".Gloucester Crown Court judge Martin Picton described the situation as "nonsense" and told prosecutor Stephen Dent that he wanted ...
How it got into his underpants, the BBC does not reveal.
There are several lesser known facts about JM Keynes, one of which is that at one point he was a protectionist of the most severe kind (although he also appears to have recanted that). Another, even uglier side is his long-standing support for eugenics and population control. In 1911 Keynes was the treasurer of the Cambridge University [...]
I recently visited Turkey on a fact finding visit with my colleague, Cllr John Oakes. The visit took in civil society organisations, key AK Party members, Members of Parliament within Turkey, newspapers like Zamaan and religious leaders who are creating and shaping the landscape of Turkey. What I have found is a country of such vibrancy and new thinking that I am shocked at the level of mis-understanding that is promoted against this country. For example, the charitable work that is being undertaken by organisations has seen support being sent to countries around the globe, with Turkish charities being allowed ...
Hilarious - the council's latest Life magazine has a big section on (I kid you not) how to cut back on spending and make savings so as to avoid getting into debt. A council that is well over £600,000,000 in debt and who fritter money away like there's no tomorrow are providing the citizens it [...]
The rumour on the streets is that the Liberal Democrats are going to work with Labour after the next general election and allow Labour to have a Fourth term, and I think that this would be a great idea but Mike Smithson argues differently. Mike Smithson argues that this would give the Tories something to use against the Lib Dems in campaigns and could lead to the Lib Dems losing seats to the Tories. Personally I think Mike has got the wrong end of the stick with this whole issue, the Liberal Democrats are better of working with Labour then ...
A few days ago I commented on revelations by the Guardian that Police are targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database. I concluded by asking how long now before this database is found on an unencrypted memory stick on a commuter train into London? Clearly, I spoke too soon. BBC Scotland report today that an unencrypted memory stick containing information on hundreds of police investigations has gone missing in Edinburgh. The USB memory stick contains 750 entries on vehicles "of interest" to police, along with other intelligence. That will teach me!
The IMF have predicted that in 2009 the global economy will shrink for the first year since WW2 and so the recession becomes truly global. As with many things it's going to be the poorest most vulnerable people of the world that get hit. They've been hit already France has cut it's peacekeeping missions and the west will ignore the Tibet problem as it seeks to engage China, and will ignore human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and other oil rich nations as they have such high reserves of money. Poor countries will be hit hard in many different ways. ...
Nick Clegg's leader's speech to the party's Harrogate spring conference contained a section where he gave the top-end bankers a good metaphorical kicking. Personally I no sympathy for them. We will never live in an ideal world but, if we did, people would get paid according to what they contribute to society rather than the crude mechanism of what the market dictates. By that criterion, I have always believed that bankers are paid too much. The only thing you can realistically do to mitigate that is to tax them disproportionately so that at least that money can be spent on ...
Neighbouring countries used to enter the Democratic Republic of Congo to exploit it's people and land that is so rich in resources. It's why the second Congo War is also known as the African World War, neighbouring countries were sucked in. This threatened to happen again when Zimbabwean and Angolan troops were felt collaborating with the Congolese Army and the Hutu militia in Kivu. However things have changed for the better. The Congolese Army invited Rwandan troops in to tackle the Hutu militia, who have been committing ethnic cleansing. And the Tutsi rebellion has fallen with General Nkunda being caught. ...
I attended Conference on the Saturday. It really was an incredible experience. I didn't try to take the oppertunity to speak. But it was good just to experience and watch the debates and speeches. The speech from Howard Dean had a huge effect on the Conference and he really provided us with insight and inspiration. Vince gave a speech that didn't disappoint. The general atmosphere was all very exciting. I will make sure I attend Bournemouth.
Nick Clegg is quite a sweety. (What did I say, I thought I was a serious person!) He drew the tickets for the raffle that we at Keighley and Ilkley held jointly with the Liberal Democrat Disability Association at the Harrogate Conference. It was fun and we all had a good laugh. I asked him to sign the vouchers so the winners could flog them off on ebay.
Parliamentary democracy returning to Bangladesh after it being controlled for so long under the military was an incredible thing. There seemed to be plenty to be hopeful about. Now they've done what every dictatorship and authoritarian Government does: Ban Youtube
Well, Vince Cable got a standing ovation at the conference on Saturday, and well desrved. He was very, very cross ~ not with us, with the Labour government for sleep walking into a financial crisis, rewarding failed bankers but not saying how they ...
At the launch of the Social Liberal Forum in Harrogate, there was considerable enthusiasm among those attending for talking to people outside the Liberal Democrats where there is scope for developing policy ideas together. One organisation specifically suggested was Compass. Coincidentally, an article appeared in the New Statesman just a few days ago which suggests just how much common ground there is for such discussions with Compass. In 'No Turning Back', the Compass Chair, Neal Lawson, and journalist John Harris, put forward perspectives which I think many Liberal Democrats share, and which I believe we should engage with constructively. The ...
A pot of green slime was being scooped up tonight after it was covered in Peter Mandelson. A spokesman for the slime said that, although naturally shaken by being forced to come into contact with something so unpleasant, the slime was determined to return to normal as quickly as possible. "It all happened so quickly" said the slime, 55. "One minute I was gently fermenting and bubbling methane, the next I was having to deal with the unpleasant aftershave of the notorious Mandelson. I mean, it's not as if you know where he has been- it could have been very ...
The president of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Poettering, takes his place to open the session. He rises to condemn in English the "utterly despicable" murders in Northern Ireland, "an attack on the basis of a free and democratic society." What ludicrous logic motivates the killers? What real difference could it possibly make if a largely self-governing Northern Ireland were to be within the Republic of Ireland rather than the UK? We are both partners within the EU for heaven's sake. We are in many respects bound by the same laws and united by the same principles.
The telegraph thing turned out to be nothing. You can type whatever you want after the number, it still works - probably many sites work like this. So, Telegraph absolutely haven't called Gordon Brown a c**t. At least, not to his face. Update: Of course, this does now mean that linking to Telegraph stories will never be quite the same. Turns out the Independent is the same: The Times, sadly, is immune, as is the Guardian.
I've often thought that the esteem and dignity conferred on the Eurovision Song Contest (or how it regarded itself) was similar to the same processes going on in the Liberal Democrats. Like the Lib Dems it was seen by the mainstream as `a joke` - it too has had to suffer the privations of a peculiarly [...]
Plaid Cymru launched their very professional looking website calling for Welsh Independence today to a fanfare of indifference from the public. Frankly, most have other things on their minds other than a minority pursuit that could well lead to the country being declared bankrupt.Of particular interest is the section entitled 'busting the myths' which lists comparably sized countries who have all
Back in January I blogged about the debate in Council about setting next year's council house rent, including the Lib Dem campaign to end the hated 'tenant tax' whereby millions of pound council tenants' rent are sucked back to Whitehall. Less three months since then the Labour government hasexecuted an embarrassing U-turn on housing policy: halving the guideline rent increase the government expected councils to collect from council tenants from a massive 6.2% to 3.1% (with the help of government cash). Next year's council house rent in Reading has been set at inflation busting 4.9%. I made the point at the January council meeting where this was discussed that this rise would be particularly ...
I hadn't intended to speak in the higher education debate at Harrogate as I rather expected others would say the sort of things I wanted to. But listening to Linda Jack's points on women not being called to speak, and the reply that this was partly because not enough women put in speakers' cards in the first place, I thought I had better do my bit. So I bunged in a card and got called towards the end of the debate. Its a weird thing waiting to be called. If you are not moving the motion or amendment (and so ...
I had lunch with Paul Gambacini today. Well, kind of. I was eating lunch. He was on BBC R4, compering the first in the new season of Counterpoint the classical-ish music quiz. One of the questions was: Who composed the Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (the answer BTW was Grace Williams. No, me neither). [...]
Mon 9th
15:03
How the authorities left someone at the mercy of a highly dangerous man who had already beaten and t...
A woman called Sabina Akhtar came from Bangladesh to this country in 2003. She and her husband had an arranged marriage in Bangladesh and Sabina joined her husband in the UK two years later, when she was pregnant with their son, who is now three. On Friday, her husband was sentenced to 17 years in jail for killing her. He had attacked her 25 times and made repeated threats to kill her. In July he told his wife, Sabina, to prepare for death by reading passages from the Qur'an before warning: "I am going to get a knife and when ...
Home Office Watch highlights the story of a Manchester man who was arrested under suspicion of photographing a sewer cover. He was held for two days, had his DNA taken and stored, and then released without charge. And now secret footage has been discovered of our very own Mark Pack displaying some very suspicious behaviour indeed. If you don't see him posting for a while, you'll know why...
I switched on the television earlier to watch something over lunch to find the start of Loose Women on ITV. Now I don't suppose I'm in the target audience for the programme, but with all the various stories around International Women's Day, you would have thought there would be a decent story to lead on. [...]
One of my constituents, Ralph Crisp, was done by the Barclay's Bank ATM in Crouch End Broadway the week before last. It's been all over the local papers but I want to post it here to shame Barclays for their performance in all of this. It was the sort of scam we are warned about. Some villain has inserted something into the slot where you put your card so that when you put your card in it doesn't come out. You go home and ring the bank when it opens - but the villains have meanwhile got your card and ...
My voice has deserted me. After coughing and spluttering my way through the last seven days, my vocal chords have finally had enough, packed their bags and shuffled off somewhere. I am left squawking. Which is most amusing to everyone in my life except me. I can no longer pretend to be truly ill though, having been caught red handed on the Metrolink into town on Saturday night by a fellow Councillor. My cover is blown. It was interesting to read in the news today that the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) has commissioned a report which recommends more ...
I have today entered the wacky world of unemployment as my charming employer made me redundant on Friday. I'm not on the breadline but I am facing the prospect of ekeing out a fixed pot of money over coming weeks, which will be interesting. I've always been clerical, stuck in an office generally staring at a computer screen for far too much of the day. In that respect redudancy is an absolute blessing. My time is my own for the first time in many years. However, I will obviously have to find some gainful employment in due course and it ...
{Matthew Sowemimo helping launch Social Liberal Forum (@soclib... on TwitPic} The launch of the Social Liberal Forum in Harrogate was a truly excellent meeting - I don't think I have ever come across so much enthusiasm at such an event. Kicking off the discussions, Matthew Sowemimo spoke with great conviction about the importance of tackling child poverty in a far more ambitious way than Labour have done. The main speaker at the event, Steve Webb told his personal story about why he joined the Liberal Democrats. He argued that we all join the party with specific enthusiasms and causes for ...
War is peace, 1984 reads. An overquoted phrase, but it serves as a major example of doublespeak. Unfortunately, we have ignored the warnings in that book. We now accept and legitimise doublespeak in every walk of life. Hopefully, the recent doublespeak by Plaid will be scornfully and absolutely rejected with all the ridicule it deserves: According to WalesOnline, the Plaid National Executive Committee has "backed Mr Jones' line of allowing them to be introduced in practice while opposing them in principle." WHAT?! WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?! You may be thinking: look at this immature student with silly, naive ideas of ...
There was further embarrassment for the party this morning as it emerged that a vast majority of grassroots attendees had taken seriously the "evidence" of this picture of Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet in the conference brochure: {Kate Winslet} Over seven of the nine people quizzed by Lib Dem Voice's roving reporters on Saturday morning in the exhibition hall at the Harrogate Conference Centre had taken the picture at face value, and assumed that Winslet had attended the Lib Dem Council Awards event held by the party every year. "I must say I was tickled pink to learn from this picture ...
I will do a proper post about Lib Dem Spring Conference later today (unfortunately I never had an opportunity to get any internet access to post anything over the weekend), but first this is a quick post on the story being run by The Independent over an accusation of the party using Kate Winslet for [...]
Didn't really blog from Lib Dem conference over the weekend - reckoning that the world wouldn't end - I just carried out my duties and enjoyed the debates. I did tweet! But not a lot. Ironic really - that one of the highlights was Howard Dean's speech to Conference - and even more - his private session with me and my burgeoning army of coders et al - who will develop (I hope) into a problem busting, tool improving, development force for the Lib Dems. What was so interesting about Howard Dean's description of the birth of real political net ...
Back from the Lib Dems spring conference in Harrogate, the greatest revelation for me was the use of twitter to comment on live proceedings. The 'back-channel' is the technical term for this kind of electronic muttering at the back of the room instead of paying attention to teacher. It has long been said about conferences that the main point is getting to meet people and talk to them, rather than
Jock Coats has experience with politics at local level in Oxford and knows the impact of defection on politics and the people who have voted the defectors into office. So he left a comment on my blog yesterday that I think really needs to be identified and looked closely at. The Comment can be seen below: And the link between the ablution habit and the political nick-name is that defectors are other peoples' "arse wipes". We had a couple of our Pakistani councillors here in Oxford defect to Labour a while back and some of the other local Pakistani community ...
I can't help wondering whether the awful Emily Thornberry MP (Islington South and Finsbury) was seperated at birth from a similar sounding female MP in the North West. One wonders whether they know what each other's going to say and complete their sentences. One thing's for sure - career-wise I wonder whether they have similar [...]
Wiping your bottom does more damage to the environment than driving a Hummer. That's the claim Greenpeace are making and they've a nice big campaign attacking evil Kimberly-Clark, owner of such brands as Kleenex and Andrex. Noble Greenpeace trying to save the planet up against an evil multinational happy to destroy it in the name of making a quick profit. What could be more clear-cut? Except I'm not convinced Greenpeace is calling this one right. When is a virgin not a virgin? I first read about this in the Guardian. It says Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a ...
On the coach from Frankfurt airport to Strasbourg, a 2.5 hour section of a 7 hour journey from home to the European Parliament's second building - or is it our first one? This will, I think, be my 113th journey to Strasbourg since my election nearly 10 years ago. My heart sinks at the thought that we are due to have 4 sessions in the city over the next 8 weeks. Normally we are here for a 4-day period only once per month but the EU treaty requires the Parliament to meet in Strasbourg 12 times a year. The dissolution ...
Liberal Democrats met for their spring weekend conference over the weekend. There were a few new faces to be seen, together with the familiar ones who have attended each such event since my own first experience in 1976. Lib Dem conferences do sometimes feel like the gathering of an extended family. I was pleased that a motion calling for suspension of the EU-Israel association agreement was passed by an overwhelming majority. "Enough is enough," I said in my speech. "The European Commission claims that our close partnership with Israel gives us influence over policy. In fact Israel ignores every word ...
I think loads of people have spoken about Harrogate from a general point of view. But I'd like to share the experiences of our three attendees to conference: Friday, March 6th For some reason, we had to travel to Harrogate via Aberdare. Because we (I) made a silly mistake, we ended up taking 8 hours to travel to Harrogate. When we got there, I was shattered, and hungry, so I went for food. Leanne and Emma (President and Vice-President of CSLD) went to watch the rally, with Nick Clegg. Their reports were that it was amazing. Energising. I must admit, ...
As many of you will not know today is the 12th of Rabi Ul Awal in the Muslim Calender and is also the day on which the Holy Prophet Muhammed Peace Be Upon Him was born and the day of Birth is celebrated across the world by Muslim's of the Sunni Sect. If they is anyone reading this who is a follower of the Sect of Ahle Sunnat then I would like to wish them a Happy Eid Milaad un Nabi.
For the past year, Duncan Brack and Ed Randall, authors of the Dictionary of Liberal Thought, have kindly agreed to let us publish extracts on Lib Dem Voice. Last month's instalment was Keynesianism, following on John Maynard Keynes; this month, the Liberal Summer School. You can read previous chapters on LDV here. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop. Liberal Summer School (now Keynes Forum) Founded in 1921 as an annual week-long residential school to develop innovative Liberal policies, domestic and international, for the post-war world, the Liberal Summer Schools ...
Today's report in The Guardian about the Lib Dems preparing for a coalition must mean the paper's existing in some sort of alternative universe from me. At conference in Harrogate, nobody I know was talking about coalitions or deals with other parties. It just wasn't an issue. It may well be the case that senior people in the party are thinking about how we would react in different scenarios, but planning for how we would react in a given situation is certainly not the same as wanting to achieve that situation. It sounds like prudential planning to me, not coalition-mongering. ...
I am absolutely shattered today and not sure if it is more my poor voice that is tired from talking to people all weekend, or my wrist which has just recovered from RSI and spent 45 minutes clapping Nick Clegg's fantastic speech. I crawled in to bed at 9pm last night and slept the soundest I have in a long time! My highlight of the weekend, other than Nick's closing speech? Seeing Vince Cable speak in person on both the economy and, rather surprisingly, education! He is a wonderfully informed man and it's hard to put your finger on exactly ...
Jog's comment on the last post is the best thing in the history of ever. That is all.
As today's Times reveals, yet another Government computer bungle has meant that thousands of pensioners have been short-changed. Shortly before Christmas, Vince Cable revealed that thousands of public sector pensioners had been overpaid because part of their pension had been uprated twice - once by the company that administers their occupational pension and once as part of their state pension. But what was not revealed at the time was that thousands more had been underpaid because of other problems with getting information from one computer to another. For the people who have been underpaid there has been no Commons statement, ...
The one everyone's going on about - Nick's speech. Are we really serious about campaigning? Shouldn't someone have automatically have thought - ah, let's film it and get it out there telling everyone where it is and posting a link on the front page of our website? So, where is it? [...]
'Quality, not quantity' - that was a regular theme in predictions made for what would happen to social networks during 2009 (for example, here). In other words, attention would shift from 'how many friends/followers/fans have I got?' to 'who can I drop so that I'm not drowning in information?' So far, those predictions aren't looking that good, because not only has much of the buzz about social networks been around Twitter and the huge growth in the number of friends and followers, but also there hasn't been a growth in applications and hacks to help with culling - usually a ...
Some decent coverage is floating around, most of it surprisingly kind and/or noncommital about Clegg's hair (the cut is fine, but Glorious Leader, step away from the Brylcreem). The BBC emphasises the outreach aspect of the leader's speech under the headline Turn to us in crisis, says Clegg. And despite the foregrounding in that article of his quote "Liberal values must prevail" they still manages to slip that puzzling old canard "What are the Lib Dems for?" into an accompanying piece (don't tempt us, Auntie, you know what the standard comeback is). More interestingly, they were buzzing around the exhibition ...
Just goes to show the paranoia of the BNP - their sort of politics seems to attract that type of personality - when you consider their post mortem of the Carlisle Castle by-election. The reality was just SO different. The reason our literature worked in the last week was that people even when they were really [...]
I'm very fond of Harrogate. My first conference was there - the last full Liberal Assembly in September 1987 that agreed to go ahead with merger. It is a lovely town, it is in Yorkshire and the Conference Centre is ideal for our Spring Conference. Overall I found the experince slightly odd, as it is the first conference for sixteen years that I have attended as an ordinary representative rather than having a packed diary of training and meetings. This did mean I had plenty of time to simply sit around and chat to folk. Children & Education And it ...
Am lounging on a very comfy chair in fracindy's very nice flat in Battersea. Have discovered, by dint of actually checking, just how many people have been replying to my tweets etc. It's possibly worth mentioning that although I tweet relentlessly from my phone, I don't tend to actually check twitter until I get to the computer... Although really, I ought to do something about that, didn't I? Ought to set up twitpics too... Oh well, maybe when I get home. I got the tourist guide to Ealing last night, which was amusing, and would have been more amusing if ...
We were saddened last year when Kaye's bakery on the corner of Wilcox Road and Hartington Road closed down. But it is good to see that this is now to continue in the same line of business and is to re-open as The Old Bakery. We're not too sure of the date yet but look forward to the new business opening soon.
After Saturday's raucous debate on faith schools, Sunday morning saw a worrying outbreak of general agreement as policy was passed with barely a murmur of dissent. Anyone hoping the delegates were saving up their anger for the leader's speech was to be sadly disappointed. After Ros had done her bit and we'd chucked money into buckets (the MP's pension fund was getting low, apparently), we were treated to a short film showing some of the highlights of Nick's activities over the last few months. We saw Nick with fishermen. Nick with firemen. Nick with school children (lots and lots of ...
Holocaust Memorial Day Commemoration The theme of this year's Holocaust Memorial Day was 'Stand up to Hatred'. The sports hall at the Phoenix Centre was full and we were treated to traditional Jewish music from the Klezmer Klub band. This was a treat for me as I had never experienced a live performance of this type [...]
1pm Tender Opening 1.15pm Interviewed for evidence in Stage 2 Complaint against the Council
In this morning's Western Mail the former Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Hain argues that his outspoken attack at the weekend on the Prime Minister's leadership of the Labour Party was not an attack on Gordon Brown at all. Instead he is outlining his thoughts on how the Labour party can improve its popularity. There is no attempt to launch a personal comeback at all. Still, Gordon Brown must surely be thinking that it is safer to keep friends like Peter inside the tent rather than outside it. Can he afford to allow Peter Hain to twiddle his thumbs ...
The decision of Plaid Cymru's National Executive to back their leader and their Assembly Group in introducing top-up fees in Wales signals an ignominous capitulation for that party. The Liberal Democrats are now the only party who continue to resist this additional taxation on educational achievement. Rather bizarrely this u-turn appears to be based on a belief that being in Government requires compromises. Plaid even argue that it is normal in coalition for a party to hold one position whilst its ministers implement another. What utter nonsense. Having been in government I am prepared to accept that compromises have to ...
Yes, inbetween my frequent conversations with Kate Winslet, who apparently joined the Liberal Democrats recently, I have been keeping myself up to date with the news. Shocked, I was, to read in The Mail, that laughing at someone's beard is now a crime. Has it really come to this, I thought? Sidenote: Because a shockingly high quantity of people don't appear to get this, Kate Winslet has not joined the Lib Dems. You'd have thought people would have inferred that she probably has better things to do with her time, but no...
Speeches at political conferences often fall flat, and the irritating hullabaloo that usually surrounds the speech of a party leader on these occasions usually makes me feel somehow cheated. Who really cares if there were eight standing ovations from a party for its leader, or even twelve? It always strikes me as false anyway. I remember Paddy Ashdown coming off stage at a rally which had ended with fireworks and balloons and much razzmatazz and wryly muttering that it only needed elephants to make it into a circus. Yet sometimes a leader's speech can indeed be significant. David Cameron's speech ...
It had been a dozen years since the last murder of a British soldier in Northern Ireland. That was until Saturday night. A lot has changed in that time. Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) now head up the power sharing executive of the Northern Irish Assembly and the squaddies now see Northern Ireland as a welcome break from 24 hour worries in Iraq or Afghanistan. Indeed the two who were shot dead, either from across the road or point blank as they lay wounded, were hours from disembarkation to Helmand Province. However, has that much changed behind ...
A brief window of opportunity arises in between arriving home and quality time spent with the family before a day spent on the budget at Council tomorrow and another conference (Are you going to the LGA Fire Conference in Bristol? See you there!). The window of opportunity is apparently called Larkrise to Candleford. So, if you were terribly busy during conference, (because, eg, you were at conference) here's what you missed. 12 second videos Kudos to Helen Duffett this weekend. She not only trained hundreds of delegates, organised formal and informal meetups of bloggers, tweeted, twitpicked and worked like a ...
