I put together this video about why I oppose proposals to build 210 houses to the south of Sunniside.
We are all ready for tomorrow! Gateshead Lib Dems have another action day, this time in the Whickham area. We will be delivering a survey which I printed yesterday - see photo above where the leaflets are coming off the folding machine at high speed.
Welcome to my summary of the latest national voting intention polls for the next general election, along with the latest MRP projections and party leadership ratings. If you'd like to find out more about how polls work, how reliable they are and how to make sense of them, check out my book, Polling UnPacked: the History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls, or sign up for my weekly email, The Week in Polls: General election voting intention polls PollsterConLabLDGrnRefLab leadFieldwork Find Out Now 20% (+3) 25% (-2) 9% (nc) 11% (-1) 23% (nc) 2% (vs Ref) 7/10 GB YouGov ...
Embed from Getty ImagesIt sometimes seems the judges never sleep, but you have to hand it to them. In making our Headline of the Day Award to the Independent, they have alerted us to a whole new way for Reform to lose a councillor.
Embed from Getty ImagesNow here's a story: Kish Modasia from London, out for a walk at Rutland Water, got more of an adventure than she bargained for when, with very little warning, she got stuck in mud almost up to her waist and needed to call emergency services. You can hear Kish telling BBC Leicester's Andy Dayman all about the drama that unfolded on BBC Sounds. h/t Rutland Ned.
Fri 9th
16:16
Charlie Maynard resigns from Lib Dem front bench and calls for no confidence vote in Ed Davey
So the gossip about disaffection with the party leadership at Westminster was accurate. Earlier this afternoon, the Financial Times broke the story that Charlie Maynard, Liberal Democrat MP for Witney. has resigned as the party's shadow chief secretary to the Treasury and asked other Lib Dem MPs to join him in a vote no confidence in Ed Davey's leadership/ The FT website can be hard to access, but Traders Union now has the story too. While Traders Union concentrates on the party's poll ratings, the FT, I think rightly, sees more significance in our continuing inability to gain press or ...
Those were the days, eh? Way back in 2024, we were a Party on the up with a record number of MPs. The Tories were banished and in disarray. We talked, in all seriousness, about how we would be the Official Opposition after the next General Election. We looked admiringly at the Canadian Liberals who went from third place with a rump of MPs to an overall majority and thought "that could be us". Now? Not so much. We languish, flatlining at 4th in the polls (or occasionally 5th if the Greens are doing well). Our performance in recent parliamentary ...
Embed from Getty ImagesPeter Kellner sets last night's result in the Holborn & St Pancras by-election in its historical context: Only three times in the party's history has a Labour government been able to cheer a by-election night as a boost to its prospects of remaining in office. The first was retaining Kingston-upon-Hull North in January 1966, ahead of its big national victory two months later. The second was four months ago, when Andy Burnham won Makerfield (though some ministers were happier than others). Sagal Abdi-Wali has not just defeated the Greens in a local by-election. She has defied history. ...
Last week, a Labour Prime Minister said he would fight the next election on replacing first past the post with a form of proportional representation. He staked his legacy on a National Care Service, with social care free at the point of use and the cost spread across the population. Electoral reform has been owned by the Liberal Democrat party since its inception, and Ed Davey is renowned for his campaign for better social care. In a single speech, Labour committed to both. Not content with eating the Lib Dem's lunch, he sized up their pudding by opening the door ...
A recent report compiled following a Freedom of Information request by 'every can counts', shows just how bad Liverpool is at trying to send waste to be recycled but which is refused because it is heavily contaminated. Coincidentally, it has one of the worst rates in England for all recycling which cost taxpayers millions each year. When the Liberal Democrats controlled the council up to 2010 Labour would complain just how bad we were at recycling. At that point we were below the national average because places like cities always have extra hurdles to overcome when it comes to waste ...
Four principal authority council by-elections this week along with a Parliamentary one too. In the council contests, we saw Labour's recovery against Reform continuing: Town (Newcastle-under-Lyme) Council By-Election Result: [IMG: 🌹] LAB: 46.2% (+18.0) [IMG: ➡] RFM: 26.7% (-0.4) [IMG: 🌍] GRN: 12.3% (-9.2) [IMG: 🌳] CON: 11.8% (-4.3) [IMG: 🔶] LDM: 2.9% (-4.0)Labour GAIN from Reform UK.Changes w/ 2026. — Election Maps UK (@electionmaps.uk) 2026-10-08T22:43:48.830Z Big thanks to Patrick Stillman for waving the flag for us in this by-election, and to everyone who supported him. If my canvassing was anything to go by, there were a lot of people ...
Kemi Badenoch may well have ruled out a coalition with Reform, but that doesn't appear to have convinced everybody in her party. The Indepndent reports that the Tory leader denounced the race-based nationalism of some of Reform's members saying: "Suella Braverman, a former Conservative government minister who defected to Reform, has suggested that only white people can be English. Badenoch said that she didn't want to live in a country run by people who "debate whether my mixed-race children are English." "We must not let these people take us backwards. That is not the country we are," she said. "For ...
Here's the tally of seats changing hands in principal authority council by-elections held between the May 2026 and the May 2027 local elections: Con Lab Lib Dem Green Reform SNP Plaid Ind/ Other Net Con [15] +1 (+1/0) +1 (+3/-2) -2 (+2/-4) -6 (+3/-9) -1 (0/-1) – +2 (+3/-1) -5 Lab -1 (0/-1) [14] -1 (0/-1) -1 (+3/-4) -1 (+7/-8) +1 (+1/0) – 0 (+1/-1) -3 Lib Dem -1 (+2/-3) +1 (+1/0) [17] +1 (+1/0) +2 (+2/0) -1 (0/-1) – +3 (+3/0) +5 Grn +2 (+4/-2) +1 (+4/-3) -1 (0/-1) [7] – +1 (+1/0) – – +3 Ref +6 (+9/-3) ...
The 64th New York Film Festival, which closes on Sunday, saw the world premiere of a new restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1950 film Gone to Earth. This is one of their less celebrated films, but as it was shot in the Stiperstones in Technicolor, it is a favourite of mine. Because of my Shropshire obsession, I have made two people watch it with me and both enjoyed it. Here Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker discuss the film and its restoration. One thing I didn't know before watching this is that both Powell's parents came from the Welsh ...
Many have spent the day unsure whether to be outraged by BBC senior management or point at it and roar with laugher. Here's director general Matt Brittin, quoted by Deadline: "I love the BBC. It's full of words and discussion and slide decks and framing and reframing and reconstituting, and going around the houses, and actually, I'd like us to celebrate activity less, and outcomes more. And getting faster to outcomes that make a difference to an audience. "Not [just], 'We did this great marketing campaign,' but actually, 'It drove up watch time usage and active accounts,' right? Or, 'We ...
Well done everyone involved with Planting Up Whickham. Flower beds and tubs look fantastic. I will be along on Sunday when the volunteers will be stripping the beds. My job is to take the vegetation to my farm and turn it into compost.
One of the values that attracted me and so many of us to the Liberal Democrats is our fundamental belief in personal freedom: that everyone should be free to live their life how they choose, as long as they don't hurt anybody else. That principle is why I'm writing this today. On the very same week as the one-year anniversary of the horrific attack on worshippers at Heaton Park Synagogue, the Green Party conference chose to pass a motion telling people they are wrong for how they choose to live their lives. Worse still, they voted against an amendment that ...
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Rob Blackie (@rblackie) * Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
AI is not one thing. Neither is its environmental impact. We need to keep our eyes, our debates, and our policymaking focused on the problems we're trying to solve. On the outcomes we're trying to achieve and the society we want to build. AI can be machine learning, Grok, or basic (mislabelled) data analytics and simple process automation software. Its impact on sustainability can of course be environmental - its emissions, energy use, water consumption, effect on the local environment, or through the physical materials and supply chains that build datacentres and all manner of other infrastructure. AI's impact can ...
Metro wins Headline of the Day and may just have identified a phenomenon that explains some of my own school experiences.
"Tony Blair once observed that the first step from opposition to government is an honest analysis of why you are in opposition. Kemi Badenoch and the people around her don't seem to have done that - or if they have, they've come up with the wrong answer."Andrew Cooper goes to the Conservative Party conference. Samantha Asumadu reports that Times Higher Education has given no coverage to the allegations against James Orr, the Cambridge academic and former Reform UK policy chief whose foundation receives Hungary-linked funding. By coincidence, THE signed a partnership with Viktor Orbán's government. Achim Hildebrandt et al. examine ...
Famously, it was a pledge by Shadow Chancellor George Osborne in autumn 2007, to lift the inheritance tax threshold significantly higher than the standard £325,000 baseline that caused Gordon Brown to wobble on an early general election and decide to see out a full terms, with disastrous consequences for the Labour Party. If Kemi Badenoch hopes to make a similar impact with her conference speech yesterday, then she may well be waiting some time. The Guardian reports that the Tory leader has announced that her party would abolish inheritance tax on family homes if elected, prompting criticism that she is ...