Looking back it's pretty crazy that a highly religious and highly aggressive corporate raider would ever get involved with the Lib Dems. For many years, however, Paul Marshall played a vital role bankrolling the party and he tried to construct an entirely new narrative for us based on a low tax, small state agenda you'd normally associate with Republicans. That's Matthew Pennell commenting on an article on Marshall and his media ambitions in Saturday's Guardian. The article reminds us how well connected was Marshall in Liberal and Liberal Democrat circles as a researcher, parliamentary candidate. funder of The Orange Book ...
I may be old-fashioned but you would think that someone who used to be at the heart of decision making would dress properly for a public enquiry. Cummings looks more like Guy Fawkes than a leading member of society. As ... Continue reading →
When a Government has been suspected of putting short term politics ahead of proper governance, we've often made functions independent. Suspicions that irresponsible monetary policy was being used to provide a short term boost to the economy ahead of an election led to us campaigning for the Bank of England being made independent. George Osborne's distrust of the Labour Government's own economic forecasting led him to create the Office of Budgetary Responsibility, to provide economic forecasts that were guaranteed to be free from political interference. Following Boris Johnson's assault on our political norms and institutions, and the rest of the ...
Shirley Williams was the subject of a fringe meeting organised by the Liberal Democrat History Group at the party's spring conference this year. You can watch the proceedings in the video above What comes over is that it was Williams's personal qualities as much as her political beliefs that attracted people to her, and that a certain diffidence held her back in her political career. I think being a woman in politics in her era is enough to explain the latter point. I was a little surprised by the fringe meeting's title - 'Shirley Williams: Liberal Lion and Trailblazer' - ...
Emerging in the 1990s, one of the most vacuous phrases used by politicians is "hardworking families." The brain-numbing emptiness of such clichés can usually be exposed by considering what the opposite might be. Is it lazy families? People who can't get work? Millionaires cushioned by their wealth or tax avoidance/evasion? Or is it about making an effort to avoid being vaguely feckless? The phrase is the Japanese knotwood of political press releases and it will take some eradication. I want to suggest a variation and highlight "hardworking customers." The IT revolution offered us liberation from all sorts of drudgery, often ...
The Guardian reports that the UK, US, EU, Australia and China have all agreed that artificial intelligence poses a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity, in the first international declaration to deal with the fast-emerging technology. The paper says that twenty-eight governments signed up to the so-called Bletchley declaration on the first day of the AI safety summit, hosted by the British government, with the countries agreeing to work together on AI safety research, even amid signs that the US and UK are competing to take the lead over developing new regulations: Michelle Donelan, the UK technology secretary, told reporters: "For ...
Michael's surgeries take place today and every Thursday during school term time. They are as follows : Thursdays at 5.45pm prompt - West End Campus (come to reception area of St Joseph's RC and Victoria Park Primary Schools) Thursdays at 6.30pm prompt - Harris Academy reception area All welcome - no appointment necessary!
Time for some Shropshire hill porn. This is the ridge of the Stiperstones, where the stony surface makes for hard walking - it's like North Cornwall without the sea. The Long Mynd, a hill that runs parallel to the Stiperstones a few miles to the east, is grassy and altogether easier to negotiate. The video picks out the various outcrops along the ridge. It's hard to avoid the disappointment one character feels in Mystery at Witchend, the first of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine stories, when viewing them from the Mynd: Dickie couldn't admit that the black rocks crowning the highest ...
