One of the benefits of online meetings is that you can bring together people who are geographically distant and who otherwise might not meet. So someone in the Scottish and Welsh Lib Dems had the imaginative idea of joining forces for the Saturday of their Conferences last weekend. To add to the diversity they invited as a guest speaker Naomi Long MLA, Leader of the Alliance Party, which is our sister party in Northern Ireland. You can watch her terrific speech here.
Here are my thoughts on this year's Hugo finalists in the Best Novella category. All of them are from Tor.com, a clean sweep previously achieved by Asimov's in 1996 and 1991 - though in those days there were usually only five on the final ballot, not six. 6) The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo. Second paragraph of third chapter:Five cubed dice. Bone and gold. The figures inscribed in silver on each side include the moon, a woman, a fish, a cat, a ship, and a needle.One has to start pruning somewhere. This is a sweeping fantasy narrative ...
BBC Radio 4's Day of the Scientist (12 Oct.) was timely in a world where science is serving us so well. Sir Patrick Vallance called for science to be as highly regarded as economics by politicians. To that I would add the need for interdisciplinarity. Science and society belong together. Scotland, to its great discredit, was without a Chief Scientific Adviser for a lengthy period around 2016. Cynics might even have suspected the SNP preferred not to have scientific advice. During 13 years as an Edinburgh city councillor there seemed little understanding of Science among the majority of councillors and ...
This league table is taken from a graphic in the Guardian on 12th October 2021. It show the "case rate per million people , past fortnight , compiled by Johns Hopkins University, USA (European countries only) Lithuania 9 289 Romania 8 155 UK 6 667 Turkey 4 480 Croatia 4 324 Ireland 3 351 Ukraine 3 521 Greece 2 754 Austria 2 667 Belgium 1 962 Germany 1 305 Norway 1 101 France 862 Sweden 833 Portugal 798 Italy 632 Poland 485 Spain 470 There's nothing much "world beating" about the UK's position. I wonder why? We are after all ...
The autumn party conferences traditionally mark the start of the new political season. They are a time to reflect on the past year and set out plans to succeed in the coming year. Both politics and coronavirus have made it a tough time since the last round of conferences. But we can look forward to this new political season with confidence that if we continue to raise our game, we can prosper. We've seen signs of that already, including with Sarah Green's fantastic win in Chesham and Amersham and also with the latest net favourability leadership polling from Savanta ComRes: ...
Wed, 12:56: RT @JulianBKing: @pmdfoster @theresa_may @BorisJohnson Frost speech: my favourite bit, 'no one here is expert in NI, and we're not asking y... Wed, 15:30: Watch me on @AlJazeera_World now! Wed, 16:05: RT @fianxu: the deepest cave in the world has 4 base camps, and it takes more than 4 days to reach the bottom, where you find a "turquoise... Wed, 16:26: I've just been on Al-Jazeera's @AJInsideStory, talking about Brexit with @owenreidy and G Gudgin. (A manel, alas.) On air tonight at 1930 CET/1.30pm Eastern, 0230 CET/8.30pm Eastern, and tomorrow at 0930 CET/3.30 am Eastern and 1330 CET/0730 ...
I'm hearing genuine concern about the increasing authoritarianism of the Johnson government and more complicated concerns about civil liberties and Covid regulations — particularly around the idea of Covid passports. But these are profoundly different. Joining them together is a bad idea, and plays into the government's hands. Creeping authoritarianism The Tories thought nothing of illegally proroguing parliament. They responded to losing in the Supreme Court with a threat to stop "leftie lawyers" challenging the government. Proposals for compulsory voter identification and redrawing constituency boundaries are likely to help them at the next election, and they are alarmingly-happy to use ...
I recently raised at the City Council's Neighbourhood Services Committee the need to upgrade the windows in council housing in a number of parts of the West End, including the Corso/Abbotsford area and Logie. I asked for an update from housing management on this and have now been advised as follows - from the council's Head of Housing and Communities : "The Housing Asset Management Unit team firstly establish when the windows in a development were last replaced. This data is given a 30% weighting in terms of the decision on when they will require to be replaced, with the ...
As the Tory government desperately tries to renegotiate the Northern Ireland protocol, the big question on the lips of most European leaders must be whether they can trust anything that UK Ministers say. It does not help of course that since the agreement was signed by Boris Johnson, after a personal negotiating session with the Irish taoiseach, he and other ministers have spent every possible opportunity bad-mouthing it, and pretending it was imposed on them by the EU. That is a complete lie. Unfortunately for Johnson and his cronies, there are some who are prepared to put a spoke in ...
"Nearly three in four children's homes and two in five fostering households are now provided by independent organisations, from both the private and charitable sector. For the largest private providers, income levels increased by 7.3% when comparing data between February and December 2020. Among the top 10 of children's homes providers, seven are now owned by private equity firms." Katharine Quarmby and Sian Norris show how children in public care have become an opportunity for private investors. Andrew Brown reviews Bleeding for Jesus, Andrew Graystone's exposé of John Smyth's beating of boys and young men and the cover up that ...
