And so, I was elected to the Regional Candidates Committee for the East of England Liberal Democrats - fairly comfortably as it turned out. And that wasn't a given. I've been far from active in Regional Party politics since my two year stint as Regional Secretary more than a decade ago, and many of our current members weren't around then. So, in that sense, apart from my friends and colleagues that I've kept up with, I don't have an obvious support base in such elections and rather relied on a manifesto rich in experience and high on relevance to get ...
Ambulance delays crisis: Streeting must make a statement to Parliament Syria: Assad must now face justice for his crimes Ambulance delays crisis: Streeting must make a statement to Parliament Responding to reports that heart attack patients are being advised to make their own way to hospital while six of England's ten ambulance trusts are at risk of service failure, Liberal Democrat Health and Social Care spokesperson Helen Morgan said: The shocking reports on the state of ambulance services are extremely concerning, and show the dire situation in which the Conservative government has left so many of our vital NHS services. ...
The latest edition of my weekly political polling round-up, The Week in Polls, is out. As it says: In the run-up to the general election, I regularly covered why the polls and focus groups gave reason to doubt the electoral wisdom of the Conservative Party's focus on immigration. Why repeatedly draw the public's attention to a topic on which people mostly either thought the government was failing to deliver or disagreed with what it was trying to do anyway? But now Labour is in government, and immigration is near the top (though only occasionally the top) of the issues the ...
Syria is free. Despite the odds, despite the indifference, despite the efforts of the 'Global community' to 'freeze the conflict' and bring 'stability' to a problem they wished would go away... Syrians have freed themselves. The Assad regime, rotten to the core, competent solely at oppressing Syrians, is finished. Across the country, Syrians from all religions, sects and ethnicities have been pulling down statues of their oppressor, but the images that probably matter most are those of people walking or being carried free from the regime's prison network. Families being reunited with relatives they'd been told had died in captivity ...
France and Germany Europe is in political turmoil. The governments of the EU's ideological and economic engines – France and Germany respectively – have collapsed. Meanwhile Russia is advancing in the East and in the West Trump is retreating with a tariff-infested isolationist America First policy. To complicate matters further, Trump himself is unlikely to keep quiet when he visits France this weekend for the all-star reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral. At the heart of France's problem is a three-way polarisation of French politics and a long-standing government tendency to pay more than it has. The centre-right guru of compromise, ...
Kate Carr, a London-based sound artist, says her album A Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds includes "all the birds I never recorded, and some I did". Antonio Poscic describes it as: a phantasmagoric set of artificial field recordings created with bird callers, electronics, and manipulated birdsong. Despite its occasionally familiar sonic artefacts - a bird's undulating chirrup, a frog's nocturnal croak - the music feels alien, as if documented on an exoplanet. And he says that the final section Shy, Typically Alone or in Pairs: finds a sliver of optimism hidden somewhere deep, and dresses it around faint arps, concentric ...
The Guardian reports that the row over the government's decision to slash winter fuel payments is set to be reignited after new evidence revealed that more than one million older people are skipping meals because of financial concerns. The paper says that the fresh study also suggests that millions are already cutting down on their heating, with warnings about the impact on the NHS. Meanwhile, a spike in applications for pension credit, currently running at 10,000 new claims a week, which enables people to receive the winter fuel payments, also means that even some of those who qualify are having ...
We have it on very good authority that there were some exceptionally sore heads in Lib Dem offices at Westminster and in constituency offices on Friday morning. Thursday night saw the biggest Lib Dem staff Christmas party in a decade as Party HQ and staff from many of the 72 parliamentary offices gathered in a nightclub called "The Big Chill" in Kings Cross. Politico has some more details: Also spotted ... eating humus and deep-fried Oreos at the Lib Dems' Christmas party at Big Chill bar in Kings Cross: Equalities spokesperson Christine Jardine doing Cher's "Believe" in the karaoke, and ...
A superb photograph with thanks to Mila White Photography :
