From the YouTube blurb: Our walk today takes us once again back into the past, where the landscape reveals the deep history of this area and tells us its stories. We start by exploring two Possible Prehistoric ditches on Wanstead Flats near Centre Road/north of the Jubilee Pond and running Southeast to Centre Road. And then we pass through the uncanny suburb of Aldersbrook to pick up the River Roding. We follow the Roding as it runs beside Ilford Golf Club and find the mysterious little Alders Brook, a mysterious rivulet that for some of the year is little more ...
Today's FT headline reads "China offers role as peacemaker". The article says more carefully "China signalled it was ready to play a role in finding a ceasefire in Ukraine..." But would it be a trusted impartial negotiator? At the Olympic Games last month, Presidents Putin and Xi said that friendship between their countries had "no limits" and no "forbidden" areas of cooperation. Beijing has joined Moscow in opposing further NATO expansion. Since then, even if Beijing has refused to term President Putin's assault on Ukraine as an "invasion", it has been profoundly uneasy about Russian recklessness. Clearly this is because ...
One of the charity shops had a copy of Mike Brearley's book On Form, so I have another good index to celebrate. As I said when looking at an earlier index of his, Brearley's willingness to bring wider intellectual interests into his cricket writing leads to some wonderful juxtapositions. And On Form does not disappoint, its index offering: Bowlby, John Boycott, Geoff Burke, Edmund Burns, Neil Carter, Angela Cartwright, Tom Gower, David Gramsci, Antonio Hutton, Richard Huxley, Aldous Lillee, Dennis Lincoln, Abraham Thomson, Jeff Thorndike, Sybil Titmus, Fred Tolstoy, Leo
Jackie Weaver has said that she wants online Council meetings to continue. Although I am sure she knows the difference, this article from the BBC does rather muddy the waters by not distinguishing between streaming Council meetings and remote participation in them (although it does give us another chance to watch the meeting that introduced us to Jackie Weaver's authority). Nearly 20 years ago I was asked to chair the National Project for Local e-Democracy, with the remit to explore digital means to improve democratic participation in Council decision-making. At that time some Councils did not even have a website, ...
Second paragraph of third chapter:To be alone in a balloon at a height of fourteen or fifteen thousand feet — and to that height Bert Smallways presently rose — is like nothing else in human experience. It is one of the supreme things possible to man. No flying machine can ever better it. It is to pass extraordinarily out of human things. It is to be still and alone to an unprecedented degree. It is solitude without the suggestion of intervention; it is calm without a single irrelevant murmur. It is to see the sky. No sound reaches one of ...
Legislation is in the pipeline to restore voting rights to around a million British nationals who have been disenfranchised by living overseas for over 15 years. See James Churchill's article of 9th February in LDV for more aspects on the subject. Reaction to previous articles has brought to light a number of misconceptions about this significant group, many of whom are potential Lib Dem voters and even members. As representatives of Lib Dems Overseas we would like to allay any concerns or disinformation by addressing some of the most frequent points that have been raised in the past. Why should ...
"Budgets are very dry reports setting out what the council will need to spend next year and how it proposes to make up the funding gap with savings and council tax increases. We can be proud that every year this council has been run by Liberal Democrats, the auditors have stated that our budget demonstrates [...]
At this evening's council meeting (Wednesday 2nd March) I will call for the increased removal of services from the private sector for children's and adult care and replacing them with in-house provision provided directly by the Council. In an addendum ... Continue reading →
The Liberal Democrats and Labour have entered into an informal electoral agreement to prevent anti-Conservative opposition being split at the next election. Giving Labour a free hand to rebuilding their Red Wall, they will give us equal freedom to dismantle the Blue Wall. With major trade union opposition to Proportional Representation having been removed, it might be possible that the replacement of First Past The Post with PR will be adopted by Labour as party policy and enacted by the next government. Change to the electoral system will inevitably result in behavioural changes amongst those operating within the political system. ...
There's so much talk these days about the influence that Russia and its Oliagarks have on our country, our democracy and our financial system but don't we have what are in effect our own home-grown oligarchs as well? Aren't they running our country having burrowed deeply into our party political system? Oligarch meaning – (especially in Russia) a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence. Just look at the definition above and tell me we don't have UK-bred very rich business leaders with a huge amount of political influence which like their Russian counterparts has been ...
Welcome to the latest in my occasional series highlighting interesting findings from academic research. Today – the impact of political donations on the ideological stances of political parties. Here's what new research says: Using ... data that cover 45 parties in 9 countries from 1996 to 2013, I show that the more private money parties receive, the more likely are they to take extreme positions. I further show that this effect is especially strong in the case of the more ideological, principled issues, and absent in the case of the less ideological, pragmatic ones. The heart of the argument is ...
Ed Davey has penned a piece for the Yorkshire Post: End to free Covid tests is like a tax on carers. Boris Johnson's determination to remove all Covid precautions and his insistence that the public will have to take personal responsibility whilst removing their ability to assess the level of risk around them is absurd. How on earth are people supposed to take responsibility for themselves when they may be forced to pay up to £600 a year for lateral flow tests at a time when the cost of living is skyrocketing? Although Covid is not the threat it once ...
This post first appeared on the radixuk.org blog. It was September 1983. Three weeks before, the Soviet air force had shot down a Korean airliner and Cold War tensions were running high. Stanislav Petrov, the hero of this story, was duty officer in the Soviet missile early warning centre at Oko, when the computers reported that a ballistic missile had been fired from the USA, closely followed by five more. Within seconds, the system had gone through thirty stages of confirmation. The attack was real. What was he to do? His training and military protocol demanded that he should report ...
Tue, 12:56: RT @Justin_Br0nk: The Mysterious Case of the Missing Russian Air Force. My analysis for RUSI on the surprisingly minimal Russian fast jet s... Tue, 14:23: RT @JeremyCliffe: Gerhard Schröder's *entire* office staff has resigned over his refusal to give up his commercial ties to the Kremlin, rep... Tue, 15:39: Well, this is giving me flashbacks... https://t.co/goAxeloKTn Tue, 16:05: RT @JBugajskiUSA: Another Kremlin debacle - the information war - my piece today in The Hill https://t.co/3EbYB3rlWT https://t.co/BaptZKReTz Tue, 17:11: Long, worth reading. https://t.co/scRpX32gOM Tue, 18:11: Indigo, by Clemens J. Setz https://t.co/0bEzOSKJd1 Tue, 18:25: RT @nick_kapur: Astonishing. This all seems ...
Ukraine is a country which has emerged from Russian domination to become a peaceful, liberal and democratic nation. What can we say? What can we do that will have any impact at all on the unfolding horror, as Russia once again is threatening its autonomy? Tom Arms has some practical suggestions here. * Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
There isn't one crisis, there are several, including a war in Europe that has the potential to spread, the suffering of thousands of Ukrainians and those seeking refuge from war, and of course the continuing pandemic, and Brexit. The Independent reports that the impact of Brexit on our economy has led to UK food and drink exports to the EU plunging by almost a quarter in the nine months after Boris Johnson's deal took effect, compared to pre-pandemic levels, with a loss of £2.4bn in sales. The paper says that exports to big European markets were hit hard, with sales ...
After the Community Cafe at the Friary in Tullideph Road tomorrow, there's an Afternoon Tea Dance! All invited to come along for some tea and some dancing.
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