A little seen part of the work of a full council meeting is our ability to put questions to Cabinet Members for a written reply. Unfortunately, we cannot then ask a further question based on this reply as happens in ... Continue reading →
If we can get away with it, it's OK. Our leaders don't follow the rules, so neither will we. It's every man and woman for themselves. We are all Thatcher's children. Grab what you can before anyone else does. I put it that such is starting to characterise what is happening to our UK society which was once thought to be very stable and law-abiding. A process that has probably been well in train and developing for many years seems to have accelerated since lockdown, indeed you could say it's been driven with the foot very much down to the ...
Second paragraph of third section:We heard all about you, the old man said, the stuff you can do. Is it true?I picked this up as a recommendation from one of the lists of novellas that should have been on the 2015 Hugo ballot, though in fact this didn't make the top 15. I don't think I was aware at the time that K.J. Parker is a pseudonym for Tom Holt, best known for his comic fantasy. This is not comic at all. It's a grimly convincing story of a man who is able to extract and delete specific memories from ...
Second paragraph of third section:His voice was like bubbles rising in a swamp. "Kicktoad no more, Little Tommy! I am called Bufotenine the Great now, yes I am. Apprentice no more, but Master! Yes!"This ended up on my unread list as part of the 2015 Hugo packet. It was a story that was slated onto the Best Novella ballot, which I refrained from reading at the time, as I was always going to vote No Award in a category where all five finalists had been put there through an organised campaign by a racist misogynist whose declared aim was to ...
18 weeks. That's the target waiting time, often missed, from referral to being seen. From now in deepest darkest December to Mid April, what an age that is. It's hard on adults. Arguably harder when that's how long some of our most distressed young people have to wait for support. 18 weeks or 4 months is a very long time if you are 13. If you are being bullied, if life is becoming more complex and you feel ill equipped to cope. It's more than a school term, it\s too long and that's the best on offer. Too often, currently ...
In the 1997 general election campaign, boundary changes had forced the unpopular* former Conservative Chancellor, Norman Lamont, to seek election elsewhere. Harrogate, to be precise, which is where I was working on the Liberal Democrat campaign. All through the campaign, Lamont avoided the national media. Hence my experience** of chatting with a journalist at one point, them pausing, looking over my shoulder at a passing vehicle, and running off at high speed after it shouting, back at me, 'Sorry, that's Norman Lamont. I've got to go chase him!' Lamont's desire to avoid the media for fear of negative coverage itself ...
Stand back and applaud this press release about COVID-19 vaccinations from Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, Jamie Stone: Best press release headline of the day from @Jamie4North's media team pic.twitter.com/ifuCJUcH9X — Alexander Brown (@AlexofBrown) December 9, 2021
On Tuesday 7th December I chaired "The Social Housing Tenants Engagement Event 2021" for Government Events. That entailed making some preliminary remarks and some closing reflections. I have amalgamated these comments into this blogpost. How best to engage social housing residents in the management and governance of their housing is a longstanding issue. The debate has waxed and waned but has been ongoing for fifty years. It has recently been given new impetus by revelations following the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Broadly speaking we can think of engagement processes as springing from two different understandings of the role of residents. First, ...
It is only occasionally that articles about the English Council appear in Lib Dem Voice. I am not a member of the English Council but an ordinary member of the party in Bromley. Liz Leffman who was the Chair of the English Council wrote about proposals for reform of the English Party organisation in December 2017. There was also an article by Rob Davidson in May 2020 and Simon McGrath wrote an article in December 2020. As mentioned, efforts have been made to make the English Council more democratic and accountable to members of the party in England. The final ...
Paula Surridge is co-author of a new book on the 2019 general election and explains why Boris Johnson won. The reasons are not all good news for the Conservatives...
As the media remains saturated with stories of Christmas parties past, one party is unexpectedly struggling in North Shropshire with just seven days to go. That party is the Conservatives who have gone from being strong favourites to neck and neck with the Lib Dem's Helen Morgan. There has always been a sense that North Shropshire has been in the peripheral view of the Conservatives. If they thought about the constituency at all, they thought it was a safe out of way place. Rather than choosing a local person for the by-election, they selected a candidate from Birmingham with little ...
Wed, 12:56: Blood donation - Service du Sang - Belgian Red Cross https://t.co/4opYmkohQF Unfortunately I can't give blood in most European countries because my blood is too British. But if you can, you should think about it. Wed, 19:01: RT @AyoCaesar: Nowhere in this article does it mention that Allegra Stratton's husband, James Forsyth, is the political editor of The Spect... Wed, 19:12: Not Before Sundown, Sinisalo; Camouflage, Haldeman; River of Gods, McDonald; Iron Council, Mi�ville https://t.co/Uu6pSsXrlC
I was reminded of a post that I wrote for Lib Dem Voice 12 years ago entitled "Do social networking sites support democracy and the Open Society?", and thought it was worth revisiting in the light of current concerns about Facebook and others. I wrote then: The obvious answer is, yes. But do they? Let's track this idea back. In 1979 Christopher Evans published "The Mighty Micro". His bold and prophetic book looked at the impact of the microchip on society over the next 10-15 years. In the same year, 1979, I wrote my first computer program on a teletype ...
The bad news keeps on coming for Boris Johnson with the Electoral Commission handing out a fine for law-breaking over the infamous Downing Street flat refurbishment: BREAKING: Conservative Party fined £17,800 after Electoral Commission finds it broke the rules over donations to fund the refurbishment of the Downing Street flat pic.twitter.com/k8xpuU6eK8 — Henry Zeffman (@hzeffman) December 9, 2021
Although there is undoubtedly unease and some serious concern on the Tory backbenches about the double standards and hypocrisy of their own government in holding parties while the rest of us were locked down for public health reasons, the biggest revolt appears to centred on a much more fundamental disagreement. The Times reports that Boris Johnson faced a furious backlash from Conservative MPs, with William Wragg, chairman of the public administration committee, accusing him of imposing new restrictions as a tactic to divert attention from a furore over last year's Downing Street Christmas party: Mark Harper, head of the lockdown-sceptic ...
Jasper Rees's authorised biography of Victoria Wood tells her story wonderfully well, though it is inevitably a sad book. Even as she is riding high in her career, you know an abrupt ending is coming. You could argue that she worked too narrow a canvass or that there was something a little snobbish about some of her work, but who cares? She was three rare things in a television comedian: she was a woman, she had not been a member of the Cambridge Footlights and she was funny. Rees incidentally repeats a sad fact that I recently read in a ...
