Well here's something I didn't know, even though I've seen the episode on YouTube before and even remember watching it when it was broadcast in 1974. Kingsley Amis wrote for Softly Softly: Task Force. If you click on the picture it will take you to the whole episode. Many thanks to Mark S Yorks for posting it, with many other episodes of this series. That picture, incidentally, doesn't show Kingsley's son Martin Amis, though it looks uncannily like him. It's actually Simon Fisher-Turner, who we've come across before in Tom Brown's Schooldays. But if you read this 2006 Daily Mail ...
Brownlow Square was a little forgotten corner of London. It wasn't really a square because two of the sides were longer than the other two. Three narrow streets ran up hill into it and people who saw it for the first time were always surprised by its shabby gentility and promise of peace and quiet. All the houses were tall and narrow, with steps leading down to a dark basement. Some of them had coloured front doors. No. 7 was scarlet - like a fire station, Dickie said - and some of the fronts were nicely painted in cream or ...
Thames Water refused to hand over data despite saying publicly they do measure the volume of sewage discharged Scottish Water make public how much sewage is discharged into rivers and seas England's water firms accused of "scandalous cover up" Liberal Democrats demand water firms measure how much sewage they are discharging into waterways Water firms are failing to disclose how much sewage is being discharged into rivers, lakes and coastlines, Environmental Information Requests by the Liberal Democrats have revealed. The staggering admission follows public outrage at water companies destroying the environment with sewage discharges. Currently, water firms only provide the ...
More than 100 chemical leaks in hospitals last year, including in children's wards, A&Es and delivery units. Other hospitals suffering from broken fire alarms despite 1,159 fires recorded last year Liberal Democrats demand urgent plan to fix England's hospitals as repair bill tops £10bn A Freedom of Information investigation by the Liberal Democrats has found that England's hospitals are crumbling, with chemicals leaking in patient areas and others with multiple broken fire alarms. The frightening new revelations follow record repair costs, as the cost of eradicating the repair backlog at NHS hospitals and equipment hit £10bn for the first time ...
An interesting article on Politics Home highlights how our campaign team is now targeting more seats based on the new boundaries. PoliticsHome understands that there are a number of areas across the country where Lib Dem activists are confident that the new make-up of seats could play in their favour, generally in areas where Lib Dem council wards are merging into areas that currently have Conservative MPs or have leaned Conservative in the past, and campaigners are now specifically targeting their canvassingin patches. They talk to Victoria Collins, our candidate in the newly formed seat of Harpenden and Berkhamstead, who ...
The Electoral Commission has suffered a big cybersecurity attack as the BBC reports: The Electoral Commission said unspecified "hostile actors" had managed to gain access to copies of the electoral registers, from August 2021. Hackers also broke into its emails and "control systems" but the attack was not discovered until October last year... The watchdog said the information it held at the time of the attack included the names and addresses of people in the UK who registered to vote between 2014 and 2022. This includes those who opted to keep their details off the open register – which is ...
The Guardian reports that the public could receive hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation in the first class action against water companies which are alleged to have failed to reveal the true scale of raw sewage discharges, and abused their position as privatised monopolies. They say that a collective case against six water companies alleges they have failed to properly report sewage spills and pollution of rivers and seas to the Environment Agency and Ofwat, the regulator for England and Wales: The first of six parallel claims is against Severn Trent Water on behalf of its 8 million customers. ...
Some time ago we were promised by the City Council some signage around 'cyclists to be respectful of pedestrians/use your bell' along the river front at Riverside Drive, but that appears not to have materialised. We took this up with the council's Active Travel Project Officer who has helpfully advised as follows : "Thank you for passing on the comments ... about issues on the shared path at this location. We will instruct Tayside Contracts to manufacture and install signage as shown below at this location and will let you know when this work is scheduled."
