Today has been Helen Morgan's day. First she was sworn in and then she questioned the Prime Minister about the state of North Shropshire's ambulance services. But we could not let this day go by without mentioning Ed's question to the Prime Minister, which was not without amusing incident. Poor Ed has been misidentified twice this week. On the New Year's Day edition of The Weakest LInk (and isn't Romesh Ranganathan an inspired choice for that?) Jenni Falconer was asked which Ed was the leader of the Liberal Democrats. "Milliband?" she asked, without much confidence. Today Speaker Lindsay Hoyle had ...
Within a couple of hours of being sworn in, North Shropshire's new Lib Dem MP (never going to get tired of writing that) Helen Morgan was challenging the Prime Minister over the state of ambulance services in her constituency. Helen tried to get Boris Johnson to commit to a "full and proper review of ambulance services by the care quality commission." The Prime Minister refused, showing pretty callous disregard for the residents who had endured some horrifying waits for ambulances in recent weeks. The closure of four local ambulance stations has only added to current pressures. The exchange in full ...
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. We started the month in Northern Ireland, where among many pleasant experiences we were visited by H and also my cousin ...
Wed 5th
17:27
The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To, by Dean Burnett
Second paragraph of third chapter:Have you got everything you need for your child's upcoming birthday party? Is the big work project going as well as it could be? Will your gas hill be more than you can afford? When did your mother last call, is she OK? That ache in your hip hasn't gone away; are you sure it's not arthritis? That left-over mince has been in the fridge for a week; what if someone eats it and gets food poisoning? Why is my foot itching? Remember when your pants fell down in school when you were nine; what if ...
Christine Jardine has called for British Sign Language to be taught in schools. Writing in the Scotsman, she said: Surely we could and should have BSL as part of the curriculum in our schools? How much would it cost to simply teach it along with the alphabet when our children are at their most receptive? Many years ago, I remember a friend teaching her toddler sign language as he was learning to speak. She explained that it is the point in our lives when we are a blank canvass and learn most easily. I was embarrassed that I had not ...
Sheer desire! Fine denier and silk enticement;brown eyes, smooth skin and such a slender frame;a quixotic lady of the western horizons... Long legs that stretch to heaven – or at least your groin:your opening lips and rising pink, your peachy cheeksand secret musky shaft, aching to be filled... What would it take to reach you?To [...]
Helen Morgan has arrived in Westminster to take her seat after her stunning by-election win in North Shropshire. Here she is with some of her new parliamentary colleagues: Welcoming @helenhalcrow to Westminster [IMG: 🙌🏻] pic.twitter.com/tHAnGUlvKB — Callum James Littlemore [IMG: 🌈] [IMG: ✨] (@CJLittlemore) January 5, 2022
James MacCleary is currently deputy leader of Lewes District Council and an East Sussex county councillor.
The Party was throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, at the North Shropshire by-election. And, with the gratefully received co-operation of the Conservatives – Non-local candidate? Check. Hapless campaign? Check. – the bookies were suggesting that we were marginal favourites to achieve the 26.4% swing required to snatch the seat. Our campaign team were taking no chances, with "private briefings" somehow reaching the media. And the wheels were really falling off the Conservative wagon, with defections, endorsement by the Guardian and a visit from the Prime Minister in which he failed to remember his candidate's name. Those of us who've ...
Tue, 15:52: Belgian health ministers have agreed that starting 10 January people who are fully vaccinated will no longer need to quarantine when they have had a high-risk contact for coronavirus. https://t.co/yDiE2p4qp0 Tue, 18:51: Seven Deadly Sins, by various writers and artists https://t.co/tenjy9UxjG Tue, 18:54: An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen King https://t.co/Zab2FQDhjR Tue, 20:27: RT @DenisMacShane: My grandson will live in 22nd century. Meanwhile tonight Soho newsagent tells me all deliveries of papers from Europe su... Wed, 10:45: This, for me, is the weirdest lie of all. I occasionally lunch with EU celebrities in the brasseries near PLux or ...
Wed 5th
10:30
Sally Hamwee writes...Lib Dem Lords will do our best to fight Nationality and Borders Bill
Ministers quite often urge "professional curiosity", a probing, analytical approach, not a careless, unthoughtful, knee-jerk response. They haven't applied it to the Nationality and Borders Bill - that's the Bill that creates deserving and undeserving asylum-seekers, allows the Home Secretary to make people stateless, and provides for pushing back small boats at sea. And more. Professional (political) curiosity should also prompt questions from us all about how a Bill (whose 100 plus pages I would like to throw out almost wholesale) can have any appeal. Have people had bad encounters with individual refugees? Unlikely. Is it fear of the "other"? ...
Sign up here to get a free chapter from my book, Bad News. It's the one all about how the media repeatedly gets its coverage wrong at campaign time.
It is another day, and another Brexit promise has seemingly fallen under the bus. The Mirror reports that a flustered Boris Johnson has been confronted over his own dodgy Brexit pledge on scrapping the 5% VAT rate on energy bills: The Prime Minister vowed before the 2016 EU referendum that "when we Vote Leave, we will be able to scrap this unfair and damaging tax". He added at the time: "It isn't right that unelected bureaucrats in Brussels impose taxes on the poorest and elected British politicians can do nothing." But Mr Johnson has now been in power for two ...
Powys Liberal Democrats have accused the Powys Conservative council group of descending into chaos over its school closure programme. The accusation comes after the Conservative group lost both cabinet member and councillor Iain McIntosh; and Cllr (also MS) James Evans in shock resignations over the Administration's rural school closures. The events have left the Conservative group on 13 councillors, meaning the Welsh Liberal Democrats are now the largest political party in the council with 14 councillors. The Powys Conservative Group has now lost four members in the last year, with Cllr Gwilym Williams and Cllr Les Skilton defecting over the ...
This week it is only Westminster that is back in business after the Christmas holidays. Holyrood and the Senedd don't return till next week. There will, however, be a brief virtual Covid-19 statement from Nicola Sturgeon this afternoon. You do have to wonder why they bothered dragging MPs back to London for just two days of business when Covid case levels are so high. Today However, the exciting thing for Liberal Democrats is that Helen Morgan, our new MP for North Shropshire, will be taking her seat in the Commons, and that will be a joy to behold. She'll be ...
A resident recently contacted me to highlight that : "After the upgrade of pavements in Ninewells Avenue, dog bins have been removed and not replaced. We had one foot of Ninewells and one at Perth Road before the roundabout, both are no longer there." I have therefore asked the City Council to replace these.
