Updated to include autumn conference plans. Excellent news: alongside the virtual spring federal conference in March, there will be a Conference Live campaign training weekend piloted by ALDC: Working with partners like the Green Liberal Democrats, the LGA, and the Young Liberals, ALDC's Spring Conference Live will include a series of training and workshop discussions - all centred around the theme of winning in May 2022 and beyond. Registration for Conference Live will automatically include registration for the virtual conference, so people attending the training and workshops will also be able to take part in our internal democracy, hear keynote ...
Billed as the first meaningful opportunity for European liberals to meet in person since the pandemic started, approximately one hundred delegates and senior figures gathered at the Westin Excelsior hotel in Rome to scrutinise the work of the Bureau and to make decisions about the running and finances of the ALDE parry, along with half as many again online. The British delegation was split fifty-fifty, with five delegates in Rome, and five scattered around England and Wales, including me. The event started with a speech from Sandro Gozi, the Secretary General of the European Democratic Party, who sit alongside ALDE ...
Second paragraph of third chapter:At one o'clock she told her colleagues she was going to lunch, and they smiled and waved at her from behind their monitors. Pulling on a jacket, she walked to a café near the office and sat at a table by the window, holding a sandwich in one hand and a copy of The Karamazov Brothers in the other. At twenty to two, she looked up to observe a tall, fair-haired man entering the café. He was wearing a suit and tie, with a plastic lanyard around his neck, and was speaking into his phone. Yeah, ...
Second paragraph of third chapter:The fox, his tail quivering and his eyes brilliant, tilted his head at an angle precisely calculated to charm.Steampunk is not always my thing, but this is a good mashup of an alternate technological Victorian England, with also uneasy coexistence with the fey and the Otherworld, while also engaged in colonial oppression in China, all told from the point of view of an orphan girl who goes to spy school. Fun stuff. You can get it here. This was the SF book that had lingered longest on my unread shelf. Next on that pile is Jani ...
Interviewed by Joanne Gallagher, BBC Radio Shropshire's political reporter earlier yesterday in Wem at the heart of the North Shropshire constituency, Ed Davey said: It's a two horse race. I think everyone knows that now. It's really exciting. It's really close. Too close to call. The Lib Dem campaign has been really positive. Helen Morgan has gone down really well. She is a local candidate and that matters to a lot of people. She is taking up issues that people are really caring about. Ambulances. Access to GPs. I think people are thinking at long last someone is going to ...
Responding to the Department of Health rowing back on the Prime Minister's promise for everyone to 'get their booster before the New Year', Liberal Democrat Health Spokesperson Daisy Cooper MP said: Boris Johnson's panicked announcement has once again caused chaos and confusion. Last night he promised people they could get a booster before the New Year, now ministers are moving the goalposts and saying people will only be offered one by then. Their failure to prepare properly now means that NHS websites have crashed, lateral flow tests are running out, and everyone working to get people vaccinated have been left ...
In recent weeks, the UK government has been quite "busy" dealing with a number of national scandals. It is possible that many of us might have forgotten that at the moment, MPs are debating the Borders and Nationality Bill, which has previously received a lot of media and political attention. In the last few days, I found a very interesting report produced by the Refugee Council. The latest official statistics show that in the year ending June 2021, 37,235 people applied for asylum in the UK, 4% decrease on the previous year. What has changed significantly is the method of ...
Sun, 16:55: April 2014 books https://t.co/f7MSQ8ag0p Sun, 17:59: Boundary Commission 2021 input https://t.co/krwayktmO9 Sun, 21:49: RT @andrewteale: @nwbrux Oswestry 1918-1983 has exactly the same boundaries as the current N Shropshire seat, but Oswestry 1885-1918 was a... Mon, 10:45: 'They were a bit abrasive': how kids' TV Clangers secretly swore https://t.co/xZIzOq4Mv9 Glorious.
Mon 13th
10:48
Covid Watch 170: Boosters boosted as Boris Johnson declares "Omicron Tidal Wave" but don't panic say...
Spare a thought for our GPs, pharmacists and health professionals. They will be falling asleep as they tuck into their Christmas turkeys and nut roasts as they work flat out to meet the unprecedented vaccination drive announced by Boris Johnson last night. Unprecedented that is, since the last unprecedented vaccination drive earlier in the year. Unprecedented the since recent weekends and evenings when our health teams have been working flat out at vaccination clinics. Now GPs are being asked to do even more. Our GPs in Ludlow are urging people not to panic or to flood their surgeries with calls ...
Ukraine matters to Russia, and Russia – or Putin if you will as both are currently inseparable – means it. This is in substance the message carried by the deployment of about 100.000 soldiers along the Ukrainian border. To make his message clearer Mr. Putin not only deployed some of its best trained units or nuclear, biological, and chemical reconnaissance vehicles but also its latest and very dangerous Iskander ballistic missile launchers – as Janes reports. The alleged 'historico-philosophical' basis for this deployment is to be found in the long article entitled 'On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians' ...
There was not much new in the report by the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee regarding proposals to force voters to present photo ID caeds at polling stations. As the Guardian reports, essentially the committee concluded that plans to introduce voter identification risk upsetting the balance of the UK's electoral system, making it more difficult for people to vote and removing an element of the trust inherent in the system. The committee noted that when a requirement to produce photographic identification at polling stations was introduced in Northern Ireland in 2003, "the turnout at the 2004 Northern Ireland ...
Gosh, is it Monday already? Apparently so, although the weekend seems to have passed me by. Here in Creeting St Peter, the Christmas social calendar has fallen foul of people's not entirely unreasonable preference that Christmas isn't put at risk, with Saturday's coffee morning cancelled and Friday's pub night likewise. Once again, you get a definite sense that the Government is several steps behind public opinion but then, given that they're currently struggling with the definition of a party, or truth for that matter, and with Liz Truss evidently on manoeuvres for a potential leadership contest, it would be impressive ...
DUNDEE CITY COUNCIL - WEEKLY ROAD REPORT REPORT FOR WEST END WARD - WEEK COMMENCING MONDAY 13 DECEMBER 2021 Strawberrybank - closed at Perth Road (for a distance of 40 metres) for 4 weeks for chimney repairs. Greenmarket - temporary traffic lights from Tuesday 14 to Sunday 19 December for BT work.
The Police Bill is not just about curtailing the right to protest, writes Brian Paddick: "The new legislation allows the Home Secretary to force local authorities and other public bodies to hand over sensitive, personal information to the police." Henry Redhead Yorke, who was MP for York between 1841 and 1848, was the son of a West Indian creole of African/British descent, whose mother was a manumitted slave from Barbuda. Amanda Goodrich discovers a previously unidentified non-white MP. David Perkins reveals the surprising radicalism of Lawrence du Garde Peach, who wrote most of the books in Ladybird's Adventures from History ...
