South Glos Council has announced a major resurfacing project for the section of Badminton Road in the middle of Old Sodbury, and the length round the long bend and running up to the A46. The works will involve the planing off of the existing surface of the carriageway and the laying of a new surface. The work will start at 8.00 pm each night and remain in place until approximately 6.00 am. The road will be closed overnight except for access.
Well what a day it was in Liverpool yesterday for the Labour Party. All seemed normal (for Liverpool Labour that is!) when the Council meeting started at 5 p.m. The first thing that was instantly noticeable was that more than ... Continue reading →
Thu 17th
13:30
SNP spend more in Shetland by-election than across whole of Scotland for EU referendum
So the election spending returns from the Shetland by-election are out. We spent £64k and won. The SNP were right up against the limit, spending £99k. But they only spent £90k in 2016, across the whole of Scotland on the EU Referendum. As a Remain campaigner in West Lothian, I found it deeply frustrating that SNP activists kept saying that they were too tired from the Holyrood elections to fight the EU referendum. If something is important, it doesn't matter how tired you are. You get to sleep in a few weeks. I don't, to be honest, think that David ...
Yesterday a second online hustings took place between party Presidential candidates Christine Jardine and Mark Pack. You can watch the whole thing here. This weekend, there are in person hustings in Plymouth, London, Lancaster and Bedford. You can find details here. And if you can't get to a hustings, you can question both candidates in the official Lib Dem Internal Election Discussion Group on Facebook here. You can watch the first online hustings which took place last Monday here.
So Boris Johnson has struck an eleventh hour deal which he intends to put to Parliament as hundreds of thousands of marchers take to the street demanding a People's Vote. The Lib Dems will be meeting at the Duke of Wellington Arch in Hyde Park at 11 am. Jo's reaction was pretty clear. We continue to fight to stop Brexit: The fight to stop Brexit is far from over. Boris Johnson's deal would be bad for our economy, bad for our public services, and bad for our environment. The next few days will set the direction of our country for ...
Wed, 12:56: "if our quest for greater profits leaves our world worse off than before, all we will have taught our children is t... https://t.co/mElUb4N7ba Wed, 13:58: RT @davidallengreen: Large cow near, small cow far away https://t.co/EFNTsXKjED Wed, 14:22: RT @tconnellyRTE: BREAKING: two senior EU sources say the main stumbling block to a deal has been removed with the DUP accepting the latest... Wed, 15:26: Fascinating stuff from the @apcoworldwide boss, @MargeryKraus. https://t.co/HoFLwTTiMX Wed, 15:27: RT @SpainJoanne: I created and co-wrote a TV show in Ireland. It was commissioned by a woman & produced by a woman. All the lead ...
Last night, ITV cameras caught Extinction Rebellion protesters standing on top of tube trains on the Jubilee line at Canning Town. Judging by the footage, the protest was not a success. Prospective passengers on the platform got so angry with the protestors, one of the XR chaps got physically dragged off the top of the train. A lot of people I respect in the bubble tell me that Extinction Rebellion is "winning"; they fall back on the "any news is good news' axiom to support this theory most of the time. I think any news is good news if you're ...
A couple of weeks ago, Luciana Berger announced that she was leaving Liverpool to contest Finchley and Golders Green for the Liberal Democrats. A Survation poll has put her way ahead of the Conservatives. Finchley & Golders Green Westminster voting intention: LDEM: 41% (+34) CON: 29% (-18) LAB: 25% (-19) GRN: 3% (+1) BREX: 2% (+2) via @Survation, 02 Oct Chgs. w/ 2017 result. — Britain Elects (@britainelects) October 16, 2019 It's only one poll, but definitely promising.
As it's the North West Presidential hustings on Saturday, I won't be able to make the People's Vote march this time around. So here instead...
The Guardian reports that yet another female Jewish MP has left the Labour party, having apparently been bullied out of the movement she has worked in for decades. In a tweet posted last night, Louise Ellman, the MP for Liverpool Riverside, said that she said: "I have made the truly agonising decision to leave the Labour party after 55 years. I can no longer advocate voting Labour when it risks Corbyn becoming PM. I will continue to serve the people of Liverpool Riverside as I have had the honour to do since 1997.' The paper adds that in a longer ...
The Asset-Based Health Inquiry launched last week, investigating how best to develop social prescribing, which NHS England is finally now rolling out. It is designed mainly to shed light on the amazing work that is already happening. At the heart of supporting people to live good and healthy lives are the need for friends and family, creativity, learning, meaningful activity (hobbies, volunteering), getting out of poverty, navigating the system to get access to services (finances, care, education, health), eating well and being physically and mentally active. No GP appointment can meet this need. While there is a place for professionals, ...
Hate crime is inexcusable. It attacks an individual's identity and can have an appalling and devastating impact on victims. The issue is one that has always been close to my heart. My mother is from Poland and as a result I have in the past experienced racial discrimination due to my family's overseas heritage. Though my experiences of hate crime were rare and isolated I know for many other people this can be a very real and immediate concern, especially given the toxic post-Brexit atmosphere we now live in and an increase in Islamophobic incidents following the terrorist atrocities in ...
Lib Dems: Brexit will limit the horizons of college students The Association of Colleges has today published a survey revealing that 94% of colleges would be unable to fund student and staff mobility programmes outside of the EU's Erasmus+ programme. Responding to the figures, Liberal Democrat Shadow Education Secretary Layla Moran MP said: Brexit shuts the door on students and staff studying, training and working across Europe. This survey shows that colleges simply can't afford their student exchange programmes without the funding that the EU provides through Erasmus+. Colleges are wary about replacing Erasmus+ with a British-led alternative because they ...
Dundee has an exceptional collection of over 500 sculptures, murals, mosaics and other forms of public art. Taking place tomorrow, Friday 18th October at 2.30pm, this free informal walking tour by university museum curator Matthew Jarron is part of the University's Festival of the Future, and will explore the role of public art in the cultural regeneration of Dundee, focusing on the pioneering Blackness Public Art Programme of the 1980s and the inclusion of artworks in the creation of play parks and other social amenities. Please meet in the Lamb Gallery at the University of Dundee. Participants take part in ...
MP launches "Save Our Rural Banks" Campaign Jane Dodds MP has launched a new campaign aimed at protecting existing rural banking services and restoring banking services to communities across Brecon & Radnorshire. Over the past few years, many communities across Brecon and Radnorshire have seen bank branches in their towns close. Recent announcements by Barclays also reveal plans to reduce banking services available through the Post Office. At present towns like Knighton, Crickhowell and Hay-on-Wye both do not have any bank branches in the towns, while towns like Ystradgynlais are reliant upon a single branch. Jane Dodds, Liberal Democrat MP ...
A small thought. The thing about "LGBT+" as a term is that it needs a counterpart. Specifically "LGBT-", for where you say LGBT on the tin but you really mean a slightly smaller list. (I want to carry on to other maths operators here but the next obvious one is multiplication, and the * has been appropriated for other purposes already, and the one after that is division and if you haven't already heard about divisions within LGBT you're never gonna learn and frankly it's our own private set of internal battles!)
Liberal England from 2012: Leicester Chronicler says: very little survives of the medieval friary; just an archway in the basement of private property and some stones incorporated into the wall of an open air municipal car park. I suspect that is the car park behind the social services building in Greyfriars, which was securely locked when I was there this afternoon. But I did find this plaque across the road on the side of the old Nat West bank. And, somewhere under the paving stones, the body of Richard III may well be close by.When I posted this I did ...
The Shetland by-election was won by Beatrice Wishart in the face of a full-on campaign by the SNP. They were, of course, within their rights to throw everything at the contest. What was remarkable, though, was how that compared with the European referendum. Here's what Alistair Carmichael has to say: Orkney and Shetland MP Alistair Carmichael has reacted with concern to reports that the SNP spent more on the recent Shetland by-election than in the entire EU referendum campaign. The party spent £99,000 on the Shetland by-election (of a spending limit of £100,000), compared to just over £90,000 in the ...
A constituency poll commissioned by the Liberal Democrats shows Luciana Berger in with an excellent chance of winning the Finchley & Golders Green seat she has chosen to contest: We conducted a telephone method constituency poll (f/w) Oct 2nd) on behalf of the Liberal Democrats in Finchley & Golders Green. Headline GE voting intention with named candidate prompt was: Conservative – 29% Liberal Democrat – 41% Labour – 25% Green – 3% Brexit Party – 2% — Survation. (@Survation) October 16, 2019
If we have the chance to reduce harm, we should take it. That idea - harm reduction - lies behind much of what any government seeks to do. It is an uncontroversial principle. Yet there is a key area of government policy which does not abide by it: drugs. Our government's approach is to pursue a misguided and ineffective War on Drugs, which does not reduce use, but instead makes things worse for individuals and for society.... continue to full article on CityAM View Norman Lamb's paper "Protecting Children and Young People from Harm: The public health case for legal ...
'The government is considering whether the management of the North of England's largest rail commuter service should be taken into public hands' – BBC website The BBC has the article on its website – see link below:- www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50067806 Northern Rail Class 319 electric unit at Liverpool Lime Street Station
During the recent online hustings, the chair Lorely Burt produced a horribly complicated diagram from a few years back showing how the Liberal Democrats are structured.
The James Tiptree Jr Award, "encouraging the exploration & expansion of gender", has announced that it is changing its name to the Otherwise Award, based on feedback received after the similar decision of Dell Magazines to change the John W. Campbell Award to the Astounding Award (also in the context of the 2015 decision a couple of years ago to redesign the World Fantasy Award so that it no longer looked like H.P. Lovecraft). It's their decision, of course; I think it is regrettable. I understand the hurt and discomfort felt by disabled people who felt that it was wrong ...
Our democracy in this country is pretty much broken. On one hand we have a government that constantly bangs on about the will of the people, whilst simultaneously doing its damnedest to undermining it. The irony of that is not lost on me. A Government that actually did care about the will of the people would make sure that the people got the parliament they asked for, for a start, by introducing a proportional system of voting. This is not boring constitutional stuff – we should be doing more to frame it as a fundamental issue of trust. In recent ...
The story of the Woodford Equity Income fund should give investors great pause for thought concerning how many eggs to put in one particular basket. The Guardian reports: The high profile career of investment manager Neil Woodford appears to be over after the one-time star stockpicker was fired from his flagship fund and quit as manager of his remaining two funds. Woodford was sacked on Tuesday morning from his £3.1bn Equity Income fund, which will be wound up in an effort to return cash to investors more than four months after its shock suspension. The move was a major embarrassment ...
As we approach the crucial votes on Saturday over our future with Europe, I have tried to sum up for myself where the main English Parties stand on the issue. I omit Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland not because of ... Continue reading →
'Lawn signs' are being banged into front gardens across Canada with the 2019 Federal Election taking place on Monday (21st). With the polls close between the incumbent Liberals and the opposition Conservatives, and with neither looking likely to pull away, 'The Hill' could be a hung parliament. This would be truly historic as Canada has never previously had a formal coalition in Ottawa. In recent weeks, the Liberals have pulled themselves level with the Conservatives after falling far behind the Tories in February. The polls suggest that the Liberals could win more seats than the Conservatives, but not enough to ...
Tue, 12:36: RT @EndPolioNow: On 23 November, @Rotary staff will join @JohnHewko & Rotary members from around the world as cycle up to 100 miles to rais... Tue, 12:38: RT @MichelBarnier: I have just debriefed EU27 Ministers in Luxembourg. 🇪🇺 unity remains strong. We want an agreement that works for everybo... Tue, 12:52: RT @Mij_Europe: So I hate to be a #Brexit downer. But signals I am getting this morning from very well placed EU sources is much, much more... Tue, 12:56: RT @adamparsons: This, from @thetimes, is horrible. Not least because, special needs students are, er, pupils. Actually, the ...
Following Layla Moran's support, here's the second Member of Parliament backing me in the race to be Lib Dem President.
There was a good article in the Spectator by Nick Cohen yesterday about the People's Vote campaign and how while they have done well to advance the cause of getting a second referendum seriously considered, they haven't done a lot of thinking about what to do if a referendum actually happens. What ideas will the Remain campaign be based on? Who will lead it? The scary thing to me about the People's Vote campaign is that they are already sounding a little like Yes to AV, which if you need reminding, lost their referendum campaign by 36 points in 2011. ...
In my first post, I introduced the idea of carbon and fee and dividend. Now I want to look at how it would work in the UK. Fees steadily rise and are economy-wide, paid by companies that sell fossil fuels in the UK. The tax would steadily rise at a rate set by an independent body such as the Climate Change Committee to give the policy institutional certainty and bankability. This would mean that the price of burning fossil fuels account for their true social and environmental costs. Fees are structured around border carbon adjustments, to create a level playing ...
After cabinet yesterday morning I headed to the Lib Dem office in Consett to print our next leaflet for Deckham ward. It will be going into circulation shortly.
[IMG: Folkestone Triennial 2017 exhit [house]] Creative Folkestone is pleased to announce that the fifth edition of Folkestone Triennial will be taking place from Saturday 5 September - Sunday 8 November 2020. Curated for the third time by Lewis Biggs, the Triennial in 2020 will take the title The Plot. The Plot invites visitors to consider urban myths and their relation to verifiable realities, the gap between the story and the actuality and presents around 20 newly commissioned artworks by internationally acclaimed artists. It will use three historic Folkestone narratives as a point of departure: St Eanswythe's Watercourse; the physician ...
Sir Ivan Rogers, former UK ambassador to the EU, had to have an uncomfortable conversation with the then Prime Minister, Theresa May in 2016. He told her: ...you have made three commitments in good faith to different audiences, but they are not really compatible with each other. You have said to the Irish, under no circumstances will a hard border be erected across the island of Ireland. You have said to the Democratic Unionist community under no circumstances will there be divergence from the rest of Great Britain. And you have said to the right of your own party that ...
While the Conservative UK Government propose to pursue legislation to suppress the votes of those most likely to support their rivals by introducing stringent ID checks at polling stations, the real threat to our democracy remains ignored. The Guardian points out that a new study has concluded that Britain needs to take concerted action to reduce the risk of malicious actors in the UK and abroad from contaminating the results of a looming general election: A group of experts say government, political parties and social media companies all need to take immediate action, at a time when there is rising ...
Having been given the green light the day before by President Trump, the Turkish army's invasion of northern Syria began on October 8. The invasion is not simply an additional military episode in a Middle East that has become totally disrupted since the catastrophic American invasion of Iraq in 2003. This is not an incident with purely regional consequences. It is a crucial event that reveals two major trends in contemporary geopolitics. On the surface, one might think that the issue is limited to the Turkish President's desire to destroy Rojava, the region in almost autonomous rule by the anti-Islamist ...
Responding to the reports that one in three car firms are cutting jobs, Liberal Democrat shadow Brexit Secretary Tom Brake said:"It is time Boris Johnson woke up to the fact that the manufacturing sector, and the automotive industries in particular, are suffering badly from Brexit-related uncertainty. Jobs are being lost, investment is down sharply, and confidence is low."Brexit will be disastrous for British business, but the Conservative Government know this. They simply don't care. We know Boris Johnson's disregard for business, but we must be clear that this will mean people right across the country losing their livelihoods. Liberal Democrats ...