You don't expect press releases to become obsolete quite so quickly but the past forty-eight hours have been historic (or hysterical, depending upon your perspective), so these, published in chronological order, perhaps sum up the events of the day... Trevelyan refuses to back Truss: Conservatives way past their sell by date NHS waiting list in Wales hits three-quarters of a million as health service "brought to its knees" Truss resigns: Conservatives must do patriotic duty and back election Welsh Lib Dems – Conservatives must do patriotic duty and back election Conservative MPs must block Boris Johnson's return Deny Truss the ...
Name: Kemi Badenoch Age: 42 What would she bring? Novelty, a fair bit of noise and a political ideology that is hard to distinguish from the likes of Suella Braverman (see below). Relatively inexperienced politically, having been first elected as an MP in 2019, Badenoch is seen by many as the future of the Conservative Party. Popular with right wingers and those who self-identify as "anti-woke", she is a self-appointed warrior against "identity politics". During the last leadership election she targetted the government's Net Zero strategy as "ill-considered", arguing that it was disadvantaging industry Should we be worried? Yes. Unless, ...
Thu 20th
19:46
Welsh government moves to end the handcuffing of children in care when they are moved between placem...
Embed from Getty ImagesThere was a bit of encouraging news today in the shape of a story in Social Work News: Wales has become the first UK nation to protect children in care from being handcuffed or restrained when being transported between care settings, under landmark new regulations introduced by the Welsh Government. The Senedd has published the Reducing Restrictive Practices Framework (RRPF), its latest framework to protect vulnerable children from harmful handcuffing and restraint practice. The RRPF turns out to have been published two weeks ago and the relevant section reads: There are circumstances where it may be necessary ...
"I have just publicly congratulated a lettuce." Now there's a sentence I never thought I would write. But after six weeks in which the Government had descended into a destructive and self-destructive parody, it seemed appropriate. The Daily Star's "Can Liz Truss outlast a lettuce" livestream was childish, but appealed to our sense of the ridiculous as our politics became more absurd. My plan for yesterday evening was to watch the Doctor Who Easter special. I knew it would shred my emotions, so I'd been putting it off, but the thirteenth Doctor's tenure ends on Sunday so I'd better get ...
Peter Geoghegan shows how the European Research Group became a tightly organised "party within a party" that set the UK on course for a no-deal Brexit. "People are not stupid. They can laugh at all kinds of things without taking it home and into reality. I perform in front of generally intelligent audiences, and they get the stuff. They don't go home and smash things up, do they?" Jerry Sadowitz talks to the Guardian about being the experience of being cancelled by his Edinburgh fringe venue. "Homer, a high-school graduate whose union job at the nuclear-power plant required little technical ...
For most people who have occupied the highest political office in the UK, their time as Prime Minister represents the high point of their careers. Not so Liz Truss. Her resignation today comes after just 44 days in 10 Downing Street, and was the inevitable result of an unmitigated and unprecedented failure of leadership.. To ask where it went wrong for Liz Truss would be to fail to do justice to the enormity of that failure. There was nothing that went right for Liz Truss, and there was a singular reason for that: Liz Truss. The fantastical promises made in ...
Well, she's gone. Liz Truss will go down in history as the shortest ruling PM. 44 days will be be difficult to beat. Though I expected her to go in my blog this morning, I was expecting her to cling on for a few weeks more. I just hope Liz Truss hadn't ordered the new wallpaper!
Jeepers. We needed this. But we didn't need the continued instability. Liz Truss has rightly resigned this afternoon. She had no credibility when elected. She had no credibility in her few days in office. The procedures for replacing Truss are uncertain. The Tories after a summer that saw potential candidates for the Tory leadership tearing each other and the Tory's ability to govern the nation, govern anything was trashed. In a statement outside No 10 today, Liz Truss resigned. She boasted of her low tax, high growth economy. She has submitted her resignation to King Charles. The new Tory leader ...
Embed from Getty ImagesThe final report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has come out in favour of the mandatory reporting of allegations of sexual abuse in institutions for children. BBC News quotes the chair of the inquiry, Professor Alexis Jay: "We heard time and time again how allegations of abuse were ignored, victims were blamed and institutions prioritised their reputations over the protection of children.. "We cannot simply file it away and consider it a historical aberration when so much of what we learned suggests it is an ever growing problem exacerbated by current and future threat ...
Autumn edition of Focus on Whickham South and Sunniside has arrived from the printers. Delivery is already underway. I'm about to head out to do another patch.
It feels like deja vu. A prime minister that the country wants removed from power and who is clinging on by their finger tips. It was the same in 2007-10 when Gordon Brown was appointed unopposed by Labour MPs to the post of PM. No matter how many resignations, Brown clung on for 3 years. Similarly Theresa May clung on but at least had the decency to realise the game was up when her Brexit
A new party political broadcast from the Liberal Democrats debuted this week. It sets out the Liberal Democrat vision for our country - giving people a fair deal:
Wed, 16:35: RT @acallan87: @nwbrux We just unveiled a plaque to him in Portrush Town Hall. https://t.co/Tgnl1vAHYd Wed, 17:23: RT @guardian: Suella Braverman departs as UK home secretary https://t.co/ySWYHZfRdd Wed, 18:17: RT @timfarron: Honestly, when we sent her in undercover, we never thought it would work this well. As we celebrate/mourn today 100 years s... Wed, 18:32: The D�mons, by Matt Barber (and Barry�Letts) https://t.co/UzLpmPXUsv Wed, 19:30: @NMBS Why don't you provide WiFi in your stations that actually works? It was much better when you worked with Telenet. Wed, 21:37: RT @SpillerOfTea: I did not have 'Krishnan Guru-Murthy issues public ...
And here it is: More and more people are turning to the Liberal Democrats because we work hard for your community and never take you for granted. Join the Liberal Democrats today and help us win the fair deal the British people deserve. pic.twitter.com/1qnvHamxjm — Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) October 19, 2022
When we were children, we played games of fantasy. Believing we were nurses, fire fighters, astronauts. As adults we still play games, not always acting like we are grown up. The Conservative Party has become adept at this. It previously appointed a prime minister who fanaticised that rules didn't apply to him. Its current fantasy prime minister claims she is running the country. And too many the party fanaticises that no matter what it does, people will still vote it into power. Yesterday, the Conservative fantasy turned into farce. A pantomime. Party managers' attempted to whip Tory MPs into voting ...
What can you say about yesterday? It was a day in which the Home Secretary was sacked for a breach of the ministerial code, a politician who had earlier accused the opposition of being part of a coalition of chaos. A day in which the government enforced a three line whip on MPs to vote against an anti-fracking motion in defiance of their own manifesto. A day in which the Chief Whip and her deputy resigned and then unresigned; and in which MPs were allegedly physically forced into the voting lobby by government ministers, many emerging weeping at having been ...
This month's free talk at the Roseangle Gallery home of the Dundee Art Society is by the very talented artist Hilke MacIntyre. It takes place tomorrow - Friday 21st October - from 7pm to 9pm. Hilke specialises in ceramic reliefs, linocuts and paintings preferring colour, pattern, simplified shapes and abstracted spaces. She enjoys developing new ideas to combine these elements in pictures of life around her and inspiration from the 'primitive' art, contemporary design and nature of early 20th century art.
