Hearing the news over the last few days, the tale narrated in Book IV of the City of God by St Augustine came to mind. You might know it: That was an apt reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate he had captured. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he replied boldly: And what do you mean by seizing the whole earth? Because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet ...
The other day, I made a joking comparison between what seems to have become known as Smeargate and Watergate. But this rather more serious comparison of Gordon Brown and Richard Nixon by Dominic Sandbrook in the Evening Standard is well worth reading.
It was disheartening to read another story about pensioners being targeted by conmen and fake officials. This story, from BBC News Online, recounts the latest such attack. It seems, last week, three men called on elderly residents (aged between 73 and 90) in the Salford area and asked to check their victims water supply - stealing cash from one of them as a result. It's worth repeating the excellent advice from Greater Manchester Police that residents should never allow anyone into their home without first asking for identification - a genuine official will be more than happy to provide their ...
Liberal Democrat MEP for the South East, Sharon Bowles, has joined forces with local fishermen to get the Government to honour a recent change in quota percentages, which would have given a fairer deal to fishermen in the under-10 metre sector. Speaking after meetings on Thursday with representatives from the Rye Fishermen's Association, and Hastings Fishermen's [...]
Early this evening Channel 4 mentioned in passing that there had been a previous serous incident at the Leppings Lane End at Hillsborough in 1981. This was the first I had heard of it, but Pseuds' Corner and Home of the Frustrated Hack has an account of it. The incident took place before the FA Cup semi final between Spurs and Wolves: in 1981 Spurs played Wolves in an FA Cup Semi Final at Hillsborough, and Spurs fans, like Liverpool fans eight years later, were allocated the now notorious Leppings Lane end.Spurs fans, like Liverpool fans that went after them, ...
Cesspit? strong words or do they strike a chord,is this the party that came into power with the country delighted to see the changes it promised, what went wrong how low in the gutter as this once great party of the people sunk.What concerns me is the alternative. A clone or disciple of Blair as [...]
A third of the migrant workers in the UK are unregistered but they are not taking jobs from British people, according to research published by the University of Salford. Government statistics show that there are 760,935 migrant workers registered in the UK but the academics estimate that there are at least another 253,645 not officially [...]
The Disgruntled Radical and the Birkdale blog (plus some of their offspring) and Toby the dog are away on a canal boat gently making our way along the Oxford Canal to Banbury so I doubt either of us will be posting this week
Looking at the picture in the Guardian, it is quite noticeable that the officer involved (in the alleged fracas with the woman in the Bank of England protests about Ian Tomlinson) is not displaying his number while several of his colleagues are. It is quite frightening to see that the alleged officer looks about two feet taller that the lady concerned.Apparently the alleged officer works in the
Like it or not, there's no doubting that the political story of the past few days has been Damian McBride's leaked emails touting various smear stories targeting Tories. Yet visit the Lib Dem website and you will find no mention; tune into the news, you will hear no comments from party spokespersons; read the papers you will find no quotes. The party has blanked the story. I do not believe for a moment that this is an oversight - doubtless it was a deliberate decision by the Lib Dem leadership and the new director of communications Chris Fox to steer ...
We're just back from two weeks holiday in Ireland. We had three stop offs: Dublin, Killyleagh on Strangford Lough and Portstewart on the Antrim coast.We went over on the ferry from Holyhead. We were informed on the PA system that the ferry was being steered by "me, Alan Jones, assisted by my colleague, Olwyn Jones". It was all very Welsh and almost like something out of Ivor the Engine.I took
34) Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food (London: Portobello, 2008, ISBN 9781846270833). For those who don't know her, Alibhai-Brown is a British journalist (originally print, but these days mostly TV, I think). In this book, she records her memories of her childhood in Uganda's Asian community, the flight of most of that community from Idi Amin's regime - an aspect of history of which I know shamefully little - and her family's subsequent struggle to make a life in Britain. It's an uncompromising account both of the racism of the white British establishment (and white individuals) in ...
Technology, right? It gets cheaper. You get more for your money every single year. Ferocious competition to meet voracious customer demand makes things cheap. And that's good. But housing? With housing, the expectation is that they're going to get more expensive over time. In fact, your house is supposed to get more valuable. That's the deal, right? You [...]
I've written before about the care for people with Alzheimer's at Amy Woodgate House, the Council-run home where my mother is a resident. But it is not often that such an all-embracing philosophy can be given physical expression in a new building. Last week - while I was away, sadly - the new Amy Woodgate House was officially opened in Merritt Gardens, Chessington. The residents...
Three guesses as to which man is an arse in my opinion: 1. Gormless Gordon Broon? Nope. 2. Con man Cameron? Nope. 3. Fishy Eck Salmond? Nope. I'll have to tell you then - drum roll - Donald "hairspray" Trump. Why? Not content with issuing an "open letter", which was filled with spite and malice, attacking my friend Councillor Debra Storr, over her justified complaints that his lackeys had blocked public access to the Menie sand dunes (I've seen the photos and boy was access blocked!), his latest bout of petulance is to lodge a complaint with the Standards Commission, ...
No sooner had Labour interweb guru David Taylor set a trend with a controversial Twitter post than others start to follow suit. This time it is Conservative Cardiff North AM, Jonathan Morgan, who used Twitter to link to scenes of drunken revellers in Cardiff. Labour Cardiff South and Penarth AM, Lorraine Barrett thinks it is a disgrace. She believes that Jonathan is running the City down. Jonathan Morgan has no intention of apologising. He says that it is important that we should not ignore these social problems. He argues that Lorraine and her Labour colleagues should be doing more to ...
If only everybody could be as forthright when they got things wrong.
Now we've all heard of stories where a candidate has bounded on stage at a campaign rally and cheerfully shouted, "Good evening, Dogs Breath, Idaho (or whatever)!", only to discover that he's in Armpit, Nebraska (or wherever). In the midst of a hectic campaign, it can happen. However, V S Acharya, from the Bharatiya Janata Party, India's leading opposition party, has probably trumped all of them. In Udupi, he was forced to cut short a fiery campaign speech when he received a volley of abuse from the assembled throng. It seems that he was addressing a rally of Congress Party ...
Wed 15th
20:05
Opinion: We will continue to reward failure in our banks, until we reform severance pay
Large potential severance payments continue to be built into the executive pay packages of directors of the newly nationalized UK banks. If the banking system is to be reformed, we must make make executives truly responsible for the decisions they take. Bankers used to justify their disproportionately large paychecks and bonuses by arguing that they took on exceptional amounts of risk in their pay. Bankers were paid a large proportion of their income in shares, which reflected the value of the bank. If they did not perform, neither would their companies and neither would their shares. In short, bankers took ...
Forgive me for a flight of political fantasy. Imagine over the summer during the parliamentary recess that Gordon Brown sits down with his electoral calculator. He visits politicalbetting.com and surveys the odds on the spread betting indices. He sees that the best he can hope for is a hung parliament, but then he looks at the voting sympathies of the Lib Dems and sees that they are split 50-50 Labour-Conservative. He sighs an expansive sigh and the his eye catches something beside him. Beside him is all the research papers he commissioned on constitutional reform, which was to be the ...
No, not a video about Downing St as someone suggested to me on Facebook the other day! This is me with my historian's hat on, wandering around the derelict sewage works that up to 60 years ago served one of the villages near to where I live. The plant is long forgotten but I rediscovered it again 3 weeks ago. I returned over Easter to filmed and photograph it.
Due to what I might describe as an ethically sound, and clearly thought-out decision on the part of Ben Mathis (you will note that I do not comment on whether or not it is right), there are two vacancies which require urgent action. Firstly, Liberal Youth require a Vice Chair Campaigns to fulfil the remainder of the 2008-2009 term (until 30 June). This will be filled by co-option. Secondly, they require a Vice Chair Campaigns to fulfil the 2009-2010 term until a proper by-election can be held at their next conference. This will also be handled by means of a ...
Rogers, who died yesterday aged 95, produced all 30 Carry On films between 1958 and 1978. From his Daily Telegraph obituary:Most of the films were made in or near Pinewood Studios. "A tree is a tree anywhere," explained Rogers, "And it's only funny if someone falls out of it. It doesn't matter where it is. We went to Chobham for Carry On Cowboy, and sometimes as far as Windsor or Maidenhead."
Nick Clegg rightly observed a two minute silence for the victims of the Hillsborough tragedy today. However, other silences from our leadership are less dignified. The blogsphere has been awash with comment and criticism for the government over the antics of messers McBride and Draper. It is not hard to see what the whole episode tells us about the actual state of the government; a) it tells us it is bereft of ideas and visibly decomposing in office b) it tells us that there are indeed people at it's very core who have decided enough is enough. Gordon Brown's reported ...
Over at Society Today, Lib Dem blogger and London candidate for the European Parliament Jonathan Fryer examines the prospects for peace in the troubled region. Here's an excerpt: ... the prognosis for the future need not necessarily be as grim as the pessimists fear. First and foremost, the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House should provide a whole new dynamic to the Washington-Tel Aviv axis. In the past, US administrations - including that of George W Bush - have allowed Israel to get away with murder, literally and figuratively. That has included the ongoing expansion of Jewish settlements ...
I was in the office, opening the post, as I do most mornings, when I came across a letter from the Royal Mail. It was a rather belated reply to a letter that Andrew had written to Adam Crozier protesting the closure of the Hazel Grove Delivery Office. They gave the usual fluff about the decision not having been taken yet, and they were consulting with people etc. What I soon noticed, however, was there was also an answer to Andrew's other question on the future of the Stockport Postmark. In the letter, Royal Mail's External Relations Manager in the ...
Catching up on things after ten days away takes a bit of time, although once I'd exorcised the acres of coverage given to special advisers and their antics, and the debut of the Obama hound, the current preoccupation seems to be the existence of spurious educational establishments, and - you can almost hear the glee in the tone of the right wing press - their potential link with immigrants and terrorism. I was struck by a throw away comment in yesterday's Times, that Government had announced a crackdown in 2003, produced primary legislation, but had failed to produce the secondary ...
In the run-up to the G20 protests, Times columnist Danny Finkelstein wrote a piece expressing surprise that a number of Lib Dem MPs were acting as official monitors of police behaviour at the demos, describing it as an insult to the police. Well, Danny is now man enough to admit that he got that wrong and he's to be applauded for doing so. There aren't too many journalists who do that. It's to his credit that he was able to do that.
The death of Ian Tomlinson at last week's G20 protests was a tragedy that has shocked many people. It raises worrying questions about police accountability. Liberal Democrat MPs were in attendance to observe both sides of the protest. David Howarth MP has called the incident 'sickening', and is demanding a full-scale criminal investigation into Mr [...]
It's twenty years since the Hillsborough disaster today. It's been crossing people's minds lately anyway. The Sun reported in the immediate aftermath about fans stealing from the dead and urinating on ambulancemen trying to treat the victims - stories designed to obscure the crowd control failures of the attending police force, and which turned out to be completely and utterly untrue. We've seen something similar happen again in the past couple of weeks with the "hail of bottles" stories put about by the police who treated Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests - it even ended up as a hail ...
Saturday 15th April 1989 seemed like it would be a very good day. In Folkestone, where I was at the time, the sun was shining and it was a lovely spring day. In the morning, I was going to the launch of the local Democrats' (as we still were then) campaign for the county council elections, the first major set of elections I'd be taking part in since joining the party the year before. And then in the afternoon I had the prospect of a couple of FA Cup semi-finals to enjoy. The election campaign launch was an enjoyable occasion. ...
Perhaps it's a sign of the level of nannyism we've reached that an advert has been banned, not for misleading the public, but for making a claim that pretty much everyone would agree is completely true. According to the BBC report, A poster showing a nervous man alongside the slogan "Take Courage my friend" has been banned for suggesting the beer could boost confidence.Outrageous. The lie that drinking alcohol can boost confidence. But isn't that true? Has the entire world just been mistaken about the whole dutch courage business for the whole of history? This is about a rule that ...
They may be full of tough rhetoric now but the last Conservative government made a pig's ear of Home Affairs, especially when David Cameron was an adviser at the Home Office between 1992 and 1994. Between 1979 and 1997, crime doubled, increasing faster than in any other major Western country; violent crime rose by 168%; and the number of [...]
A recent visit to Hexham estate has led to some more positive results for the local environment and local people in Redlands. I received this email from an officer in Housing today: "Thank you for your recent enquiry regarding the bin areas on Hadrian Walk East and West. As part of the ongoing bin project, this area together with others on the Hexham estate have been identified for possible improvement/upgrades. Plans have recently been drawn up and sent to us in Housing from our Property Services department with our proposals. We are now in receipt of these plans and in the process of ...
Back at the start of the year Conservative Home started compiling a list of people who Tory members thought should be in the House of Lords.Initially they announced new suggestions most days, then that trickled off and now there hasn't been one for over three weeks.If you'd been waiting for someone to be nominated for their strong links to Wales and understanding of Welsh identity, you would be
I was looking at the Liberty Web site earlier today and came across this fascinating booklet that they have produced about ID cards that spells out why they are a bad idea. Liberty for those who do not know is an organisation that campaigns for Civil rights for all of us. Please have a look at the booklet and see if you feel the same as I do by following the link...
When you walkThrough a storm Hold your head, up high And don't be afraid, of the dark 'Coz at the end of the storm Is a golden sky And the sweet silver song Of the lark Walk on, through the wind Walk on, through the rain Though your dreams be tossed And blown Walk on, walk on With hope, in your heart And you'll never walk alone You'll never walk alone Alone Walk on, walk on With hope in your hearts You'll never walk, alone John Alfred Anderson (62) Thomas Howard (39) Colin Mark Ashcroft (19) Thomas Anthony Howard (14) ...
Some pictures of police medics I received today. I remember medics getting a bit carried away at uni but I'm sure they were never this rowdy.
It would be wrong to let today go by without a mention of two very poignant and sad events which are taking place as I write this: the memorial service for the victims of the North Sea helicopter crash two weeks ago in Aberdeen and the 20th anniversary service for the 96 victims of the Hillsborough disaster. We will all have heard members of their families recount their experiences and memories over the last few days. I listened to one mother on This Morning yesterday tell how she had lost both her daughters on that day. My thoughts are with ...
A colleague (who shall remain nameless like me) just inspired this thought. The No.10 smears scandal has been in the headlines since last weekend began but there is still a gaping black hole in the story: How did Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) come by the email to Derrick Draper from McPoison? There have been unconfirmed reports of who might have been CCd and most of the journalists seem to have swallowed the idea that people in Government were 'queuing up' to destroy Damien McBride. But something today didn't fit and that was Derrick Draper's claim in his (pretty synthetic) defence ...
Straightforward public apologies are an almost extinct species. Such mea culpas are nearly always hedged-about, heavily-caveatted, explained-away with mealy-mouthed phrases ('the general point remains', 'based on information available at the time', 'written in good faith'). So I'm going simply to say well done, and thank you, to The Times's Daniel Finkelstein for penning a simple and graceful apology to the Liberal Democrats for criticising the party's monitoring of the policing of the G20 protests. You can read my articles taking Danny's original postings to task here, here, here and here. Today, Danny has posted the following retraction to his Comment ...
I was always a fan of the VAT cut - compared to most liberals, anyway. Even before I read the IFS Green Budget (which largely praised it), I thought the complaints from the likes of Sir John Major - that it was as bad as 'burning money' - were melodramatic, overwrought and plain wrong. Everyone had a favourite other use for the money, even people resolutely in favour of giving cash back to the poor. But the logic of saying that a VAT cut is wasted and that spending on favourite ideas is better would also point to raising VAT ...
The announcement that Hartlepool is one of the possible sites for a future nuclear power station is bound to generate a fair bit of heat locally before it comes anywhere near to generating electricity. It's not unexpected of course - any site which already has a nuclear station must have been in the running because the issues of geography and so on have already been resolved to the satisfaction
Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
Conference kicks off this Friday with a Q and A with Kirsty Williams and Nick Clegg, and runs until Sunday. In case you missed the who range of reminders, or still want to register information is availiable of the Welsh Lib Dem site.Some bits of information for techies and wannabe techies1, Internet access should be availiable in the hotel.2. If you use twitter then the hashtag for conference is
When Guido moved his blog to Wordpress I warned him that it would be damaging for him and he would realise after being on the platform for a couple of months, so today when I was over at his blog guess what? It was down! Result, Guido should have listened when I told him that Wordpress was bad news and he should have stayed with Blogger.
Nick Clegg first I don't know about you but I nodded along to Nick's piece in Comment is Free this morning with mounting spluttery agreement before finding myself rather let down. Yes, expense abuses amongst MPs are appalling. Yes, they are symptomatic of a wider malaise in politics, a point drawn out very skilfully. Yes, ordinary people do want to give politicians "a kicking" and that in many ways was the most powerful line of the whole piece. Politics is indeed broken, and the rise of the far right is indeed a clear danger. (Is he going to talk about ...
My personal religious journey is by no means unusual. Attending a Church of England primary school, where Christianity was presented as fact, left me pretty much non-religious by my teenage years. I caught religion again, briefly, before swinging back to a more militant atheism. Like the heavy smoker who quits, I was intolerant and combative with those of my former faith. Although I've mellowed a fair bit in the last few years, I have a good deal of sympathy for Laurence Boyce, the Lib Dem's blogosphere's atheist attack dog. Laurence knows the truth and won't rest until everyone else knows ...
This morning I are been mostly wondering whose bright idea it was to commission an extremely unfunny sitcom about arms dealing...
You are becoming a little irritating with your whole letter writing to me and all the blog posts that you write directly at me, so I am writing to you for the last and final time to put an end to this whole spat. First of all personally I don't like you even thought I have never met you from your tone of blogging you sound like a guy who I should stay away from and that's exactly what I am going to do. To me you sound like a guy who is so self centered to get your kicks ...
The lib Dems on Leeds City Council are tackling the serious issue of dog fouling in our area. It's a really important issue and one that often gets ridiculed. When I walk through Woodhouse Moor and come across dog mess on the pavement yards away from special bins put in place by the Council I find it really annoying and very selfish of the people who allow their dogs to do this. Woodhouse Moor is by no means the worst area for this mess either. The Council has plans to support and encourage sensible dog owners whilst punishing those who ...
Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg today called on Gordon Brown to waste no more time in organising a meeting of the three main party leaders to tackle the problem of MPs' expenses. Copies of Nick Clegg's own proposals for reforming the system were published on his website last week and have been sent to both of the other party leaders. The plan would see the end of...
Changes to the way benefits are paid will leave millions without social security benefit for a week, the Liberal Democrats have warned. The move to fortnightly payments will affect loan parents, widows, disabled and unemployed people. Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Steve Webb said: "The Department for Work and Pensions should have better things to do with its...
Last night, before attending the West End Community Council meeting, I had the pleasure of judging the Easter Bonnet Competition at the Paton's Lane Sheltered Housing Easter Party. The participants put an awful lot of hard work into their bonnets, making choosing the winner and runner-up a very difficult task! Here's a couple of photos from the event above, including me with the winners.
I see that Iain MacWhirter has decided to blog in response to his article. He opens by saying: "Bullseye. I decided it was time to enter the ranks of the bloggers, so I penned an article in the Herald which I hoped would elicit some comment. I said that "bloggers don't write, they ejaculate" amongst other highly uncomplementary things, and added that "the blogosphere has been hijacked by sociopathic egos with extreme views who spend most of their time attacking each other". You can read the piece below this post. "As expected, I was soundly bitch-slapped by the blogging fraternity. ...
To be honest, I never really expected this to go any other way, but I'm glad to see that the FIA has now ruled that the diffusers used on the Brawn, Toyota and Williams F1 cars are in fact legal. This will no doubt have the complainers, Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren and Renault crying into their beer as they ponder how to make their cars competitive for the Chinese Grand Prix at the weekend. The sad thing is that, given the huge amount of evidence given to the FIA by highly paid barristers, we will have no more comedy scenes ...
Dr Pack of this parish has been tracking the IPCC through various dimensions of reality with the assiduity of a timelord over the past few days. First they said there were no public CCTV cameras in the Cornhill area, then they said there were cameras but they weren't turned on, then they said the chap who said there were no cameras thought he was right but wasn't, etc etc. Well, at least they seem to be getting their act together with regard to private CCTV footage in the area. They claimed yesterday: "From the outset it has been a main ...
In 1947, my 46 year old grandmother gave birth to my mother at home, safely and without any fuss, as was the norm at that time. These days, the very thought of such an elderly mother giving birth anywhere other than in hospital under strict medical supervision and direction would make most obstetricians produce a litter of kittens. More than 60 years later, most women in the UK give birth in hospital, many after medical intervention that simply may not have occurred had nature been allowed to take its course at home. Now a large study has shown that it ...
A survey of local council websites I have carried out finds that none of them manage to get two basic things right. There are 1,001 different ways of judging the quality of your local council's website, but increasingly I find there are just two, very simple, questions to ask which not only reveal an awful lot about the overall quality of the site (because I've yet to see a bad site which scores two 'yes' answers) but also in themselves are a key part of what a council should be doing online. Does the website ask for your email address ...
Under cover of the greasy cloud that is Smeargate, worryingly unBritish things are happening (again). Around midnight on Easter Monday, 114 people were arrested in Nottinghamshire. Their crime? They had not committed one. They were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage, if you can follow that. They were apparently arrested while meeting at a school in the middle of the night. A number of homes were raided and "specialist equipment" recovered. The following day, yesterday, all were released on bail without charge. From the Guardian: Scores of officers raided a school in Sneinton, Nottingham, ...
Over the past 10 days, as the details surrounding the death of Ian Tomlinson have become clear, I have been drawn to comparisons between the G20 demonstration and the Hillsborough tragedy. With the 20th anniversary of Hillsborough today, I feel an immense sense that little has been learned by the police as to how they manage [...]
Over at The Guardian, Nick Clegg highlights that expense abuses are just one symptom of a bankrupt political culture, and argues that Britain deserves real change. Here's an excerpt: Britain's MPs are facing a summer of reckoning. All 700,000 pages of their expense claims are going to be published in July. It's an investigative journalist's dream - reams of fodder to mock and hound the political establishment. Many of the revelations will be relatively minor, but taken together they are significant. Last year I began publishing my expense claims voluntarily. People wrote to me asking questions about individual domestic items. ...
What we've seen this weekend is a damning exposure of the modus operandi of Gordon Brown and his inner circle. One can only hope that this now means that when the General Election comes, Labour will be forced to fight a clean and open campaign about the future direction of the country, rather than the descent [...]
One of the consequences of the Smeargate saga is that politicians and journalists are now feeling emboldened to speak out about Gordon Brown's back-room operations. Alice Miles has written a piece for The Times today in which she talks about the character assassination plots run by Brown's close advisers. Leaving aside the question of whether or not journalists are complicit in spreading this sort of poison (I think they are and Iain Dale has posted on this too), for me this raises an even more important question. Here is an excerpt from Miles' piece: The poisoning was at its worst ...
The speed of commercial change isn't just the market - some of it is also the consequence of something directly highly political and so we're back in South End Green seeing the emergence of a new salon and hairdressers. Nothing against the company or the trade (genuinely) but it is in the site of ye olde South End Road Post Office The flicker of commercial life in that the store isn't laying empty for month after month means that this development is welcome and indeed a warm welcome to ENZ. [And with that warm welcome goes a small plea ...
Wed 15th
08:40
Do you think Salford Labour Run Council Have Handled The Problems At Swinton Precinct In The Right W...
Write to me on the blog and offer a view, i think they have dug there heads in the sand, perhaps the people of this city fancy a say on the matter. What ever it's terminal, and so are the jobs perhaps we could take one view and do what as happened around most of the [...]
Last night i sat at one of our local community meetings. The usual stuff part one allways starts off with Police matters. I of course raised my concerns over the problems which we have and recived my assurancies on what the police where doing to combat the issues. What shocked me was one question at [...]
Nationally or locally are we failing. What is leadership what makes someone that different,someone willing to stand up and be counted,someone not afraid to come out of the box and say something that is not politicly correct. I sit every month in council watch all the main party leaders and there is always that feeling [...]
This week, the Lib Dems in the European Parliament have released a hard hitting campaign video in the run up to the elections on June 4th. The film really brings home the importance of living as part of a community and standing up for one another. In the end, if we don't stand up for others who will stand up for us? -
Bank Holiday Monday, no campaigning for once, so a chance for a bit of shopping. We got the bus nearly to Victoria, then a stroll through Belgravia. Islington has some very rich people, but the borough feels real. Belgravia feels unreal. Perfect window boxes and improbably symmetrical shrubs flanking immaculate doors; and nobody on the [...]
Channel Television has the lastest news and - rather impressively - three video reports.
Here's my latest mini-video, this time about Alexandra Palace, and the huge sums of money wasted by Haringey Labour's bungling: This film is hosted on YouTube. For more about the Alexandra Palace issue, see Neil Williams's recent blog post.
The BBC reported yesterday that we could soon be seeing more "green wave" sets of traffic lights. This, apparently, is where cars driving along a road at on or just under the speed limit trigger lights to turn green in turn so they don't get held up. Seems sensible. Faster journeys, less fuel used and lower emissions. What really got me was not the new initiative, but the reason it hasn't happened before. According to the BBC report Previously the Department for Transport (DfT) had discouraged the systems which reduce fuel use, resulting in less tax being paid to the ...
That's according to the Evening Standard. The headline is more dramatic than the story; it's not all red lights that Boris is talking about, but turning left on a red light. If the red light is for traffic going one-way, say east-west, then the cyclist will be joining the north-south flow, and should not conflict [...]
I do not know why the Welsh Government needs to spend £1.2 million on its press office in addition to the £500,000 it is spending on Special Advisors, some of whom are journalists. However, in spending this money they are very much following a public sector trend. The Taxpayer's Alliance, who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing, believe that the best PR is free and that it is found by giving a good service to the public. They may be right, but in an age where we have a 24 hour rolling news service and continuous ...
A brief scan of the Welsh Assembly's on-line petition site has thrown up a curiosity that is bound to cause more problems for Ieuan Wyn Jones and his u-turning Assembly Members.A petition has been lodged by the Plaid Cymru youth wing, Cymru X calling 'upon the National Assembly for Wales to urge the Welsh Assembly Government to abolish tuition fees for Welsh domiciled students studying at Welsh
Unable to get out of the house due to my son's midmorning chocolate overdose wearing off. # To bed I must go - a long overdue haircut awaits tomorrow #
LiveJournal is turning 10 and we're feeling nostalgic. What was your first LJ post about? View other answers I shall copy and paste the text of my first ever LJ entry, for those who don't have access to it. It's entitled So I finally made an LJ..., and is dated the 19th of April 2004:* fiddle fiddle fiddle * Can't resist poking about to see how things work LOL I think I got the colour scheme sorted anyway :D Now I just have to think of a use for this LJ thing... I mean, I pretty much use my website ...
