Small Parish Council, not much of a budget, nice bunch of fellow councillors, able Clerk, how difficult could that be, eh? Perhaps they'll write that on my tombstone when I'm gone. And, indeed, most of the time, it's been pretty straightforward, keeping things ticking along, cleaning the odd road sign, signing the odd cheque. However, the arrival of a series of increasingly complex planning applications has caused me to find out more about local government than I had ever had a desperate urge to know. Today saw me take part in a virtual meeting with the District Council and the ...
[IMG: When my daughter contracted Coronavirus (and recovered)] It is a question that I had wondered about since early 2020 when the seriousness of the Coronavirus became apparent. What would I do if... The post When my daughter contracted Coronavirus (and recovered) appeared first on Ambitiousmamas.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia. After the previous month's exciting travels, I went nowhere more exotic than Geneva, where the most exciting thing that happened was ...
Over 30 Liberal Democrat Council Leaders in England have written to the government calling for the £20 increase in Universal Credit, introduced in March 2020, to be made permanent. The letter follows a vote in Parliament held on Monday 18th January 2021 and in which the government abstained, with all Liberal Democrat MPs attending and voting in favour. The motion to increase Universal Credit was carried by 278 votes to nil. Cllr Howard Sykes MBE, Leader of the Liberal Democrat Group at the Local Government Association, said: Millions of people are suffering in this country as a result of the ...
The Trade Bill is ping ponging its way back to the House of Commons today for MPs to consider the latest set of Lords amendments. One of these is Lord Lansley's new scrutiny amendment that combines many of the elements of Liberal Democrat Peer, Lord Purvis's scrutiny amendment, which was previously voted down in the Commons. The scrutiny amendment proposes that governments will have to publish their negotiating objectives for future trade treaties in advance and have them voted on in both houses of Parliament. This amendment is crucial because the existing process for parliamentary scrutiny of trade deals is ...
Mon, 17:08: Really interesting (and mercifully brief) paper. https://t.co/d6Bf8wSnZb Mon, 18:24: Kaamelott: Het Raadsel Van de Kluis, by Alexandre Astier and Steven Dupre https://t.co/TVxZ3D7BgK Mon, 18:44: RT @davidallengreen: One highlight of this unintentionally telling letter from @michaelgove to EU is his complaint that UK was not formally... Mon, 18:48: RT @davidallengreen: Another letter from a UK minister complaining about being left out of EU law and policy making And again: the very po... Tue, 09:30: Whoniversaries 9 February https://t.co/Bq3z229Zvh Tue, 10:45: RT @Mij_Europe: Find it desperately sad that UK & EU are defaulting into a horribly predictable, acrimonious dynamic, characterised ...
I have just come across the Guardian editorial about the meeting of Handforth parish council which went viral last week because of the appalling behaviour of some of its members in a zoom meeting. They make some interesting and valuable points about politics at this level. It is worth though, taking in the stats. As the Guardian says parish councils in England collected £596m in local taxes in 2020-21. For around 20 million people, and 100,000 councillors, they are a part of our democratic fabric and civil society (arrangements in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales vary). As well as small ...
I think it fair to say that the public sector is generally poor at genuine consultation (partly because proper consultation costs too much) and it often is simply engaged in what is no more than information sharing (telling folks what is going to be done) and box ticking. So telling folk what is going to be done to their community, neighbourhood etc. is often dressed up as 'consultation' when in reality the comments made may well be (politely) ignored/rejected. I recall a 'consultation' event being held at Maghull Town Hall a few years back about the then proposed building of ...
i) births and deaths 9 February 1918: birth of Morris Barry, who directed The Moonbase (Second Doctor, 1966), Tomb of the Cybermen (also Second Doctor, 1966) and The Dominators (Second Doctor, 1967), and then appeared as Tollund in The Creature from the Pit (Fourth Doctor, 1980). 9 February 1935: birth of Michael Imison, director of the story we now call The Ark (First Doctor, 1966). 9 February 1936: birth of Clive Swift, who played Mr Jobel in Revelation of the Daleks (Sixth Doctor, 1985) and Mr Copper in Voyage of the Damned (Tenth Doctor, 2007). 9 February 1969: birth of ...
I have welcomed recently released research from the universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh, East Anglia and Cambridge that has revealed that the introduction of 20mph speed limits in Edinburgh in 2016 has had a positive effect on road safety, changing the trend of crashes from "slow decreasing" to "fast decreasing". The research covering Edinburgh's 20mph residential areas shows that there was a monthly average of 95 crashes per month in 2016, the year the change was introduced, with that figure down to 64 a month by 2018. These research findings clearly show that the 20mph rollout in Edinburgh - which ...
