There's a story on BBC News about the Trent Rivers Trust receiving a £834,000 grant from the Environment Agency to protect homes and businesses in the eastern side of the city. Proposed natural flood defences the trust will install include creating new ponds, wetlands and tree planting. Dr Jon Lewis from the trust says: "We know that flooding can have a major impact on homes and businesses. "We work to create natural features such as ponds upstream of where problems can occur - this is called natural flood management. "The natural features we create can temporarily store water upstream of ...
There's news of a possible replacement candidate for the Liberal Democrats in the South Shropshire constituency. Matthew Green, who was Lib Dem for the largely identical Ludlow seat between 2001 and 2005, has tweeted saying he is being asked to stand and asking what people think. The response so far seems enthusiastic. The unexpected vacancy has been caused by Chris Naylor's decision to stand down from the role for health reasons. Anyway, it's an excuse for me to post another of my many pictures of the constituency.
Two things striking about this new Ipsos polling: how few people are familiar with Lee Anderson and (thankfully) how few people blagged it (or are drunk, trolling or wrong) by claiming they are familiar with imaginary politician Stewart Lewis.
Did you know the UK's built environment is responsible for 42% of carbon emissions, 62% of waste and 50% of material use? These shocking statistics highlight why buildings, infrastructure and land use must be central to our approach to addressing the climate and biodiversity emergency. Last night I attended the launch of Building Blocks, a manifesto to transform the Built Environment and turn a climate catastrophe into a climate opportunity. The climate emergency can often feel daunting and insurmountable. But it was truly uplifting to join experts focused on practical, implementable, and positive responses. Adopting optimistic, radical alternative approaches can ...
Looking forward to this year's craft fairs, with a couple this month: Sunday 17th March 10am - 4pm Assembly Rooms, Glastonbury and Saturday 30th March 10am - 4pm Town Hall, Glastonbury with a range of my handmade crochet, gifts, cards and art
What's the point of a Motion bemoaning a crisis but failing to suggest a solution? Liberal Democrats have conferences to decide Party policy, not indulge in hand-wringing! Declaring that local government has a funding crisis without stating what we'd do about wastes our time and money as conference-goers. That's why I'm asking for a reference back to FPC for F23 at York. The Party last seriously debated local government and its funding in 1998 - the year I co-founded ALTER. We've progressed since then but in 2019 we funked the big one: reform of Council Tax. In the 1998 policy ...
Having touched upon the subject of the Jewish community in Ipswich yesterday, and given that I've been studying the history of Ipswich at the Ipswich Institute for the past ten weeks or so, I thought that I ought to find out a bit more about the history of Judaism in the town, given the prominence of Ipswich as a trading hub in medieval times. And sure enough, Ipswich has had a Jewish community at various points in the past, dating back to at least the twelfth century, during the reign of Henry II (1154-1189). But the initial community didn't last ...
Dr Who fanously toppled a prime minister by asking the six word question, 'Don't you think she looks tired?', but a far more damning question to ask of a politician's colleagues would be 'do you think he's accident prone?' Accident prone in politics is not just tripping over your own feet, though that's involved as well, it's attracting the sort of bad publicity that embarrasses you and your party. It's when the level of embarrassment becomes too much that the knives start to come out and plots and cabals start to form. First Ministerial candidate, Vaughan Gething must be approaching ...
Wed 13th
07:00
Getting things done - postal deliveries in the Ancrum Drive area - an update #dundeewestend
Residents will recall that we recently highlighted concerns from residents about irregular/no delivery of post in Ancrum Drive and concerns that there may be no regular postal delivery worker for this round. We raised this with the Public Affairs Team at Royal Mail HQ and have now received feedback from its Senior Public Affairs Manager as follows : "I have spoken with the Customer Operations Lead who is responsible for the DD2 postcode area. They confirmed that mail deliveries to addresses on Ancrum Drive are taking place six days a week when there is mail to delivery - this has ...
Conference Extra, the booklet containing all the amendments, emergency motions and questions to Committees, has now been published ahead of our Spring Conference in York this weekend. You can read it here. The prize for the most direct question must surely go to Abrial Jerram, who asked Federal Conference Committee: Please explain your selection of F23, Tackling the Funding Crisis in Local Government, given its lack of substance. Tony Vickers will be writing more about that later today. There is one thing missing, though. There won't be the traditional emergency motions ballot, because only two emergency motions appear on the ...
