LibDem Blogs - Archived!

Charlotte Street has a good posting on rhetoric. In particular, the use of the label "middle class" to put down opposing arguments, and the bizarre construction "Islamofascism", deployed increasingly by the pro-war left in debates on Iraq.

Sometimes I'm quite surprised by the emails I receive. Didn't think anybody would be really interested in my bathroom saga but seems somebody is. Yes, my bathroom has finally been renovated after all these years - it's just great. What a difference it's made. With new floorboards it's so wonderful to have fittings that don't keep wobbling. It's the first time I can actually praise the councils sub-contractors. Mindgrade's carpenter and plumber were an amazing team. They are from the old school - taking pride in their work. I can't ...

Two significant events today. Firstly, I got a call out of the blue from CPRE head office offering money for a mailing to keep the M6 Expressway issue alive. Calloo Callay! I just need to recruit some volunteer envelope stuffers. Secondly, it was the last day for nominations for the vacant post on Cheddleton Parish Council. I'd filed my nomination last week. There is one other candidate - a local businessman, so I may be starting my first public election campaign. I won't know until the middle of next week. I'd better ...

Remember the 1950s? Remember the era when people drove their brand new Ford Anglias along empty concrete roads, and when everybody on TV either smoked a pipe or wore a party frock and was called Muriel? Remember the time when they said nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter"? Well it may have seemed cheap at the time but now the bill has landed on the doormat.

by Peter I think it was the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland who announced that she could believe three impossible things before breakfast. She probably practiced by reading the comment columns of our daily newspapers and listening to the Today programme. Yesterday we were asked to believe two impossible things. First Michael Howard blames terrorism on the way judges interpret the Human Rights Act. An interesting point of view: terrible crimes are committed by people who had never come to the notice of the security agencies, and the judges are to blame. (Yes, this is an oversimplification, but somehow ...

by Paul LloydThere has been much discussion in the media in the wake of the London bombings as to whether the Blair Government’s decision to invade Iraq with the US has made Britain a more likely terror target. There is no doubt in many people’s minds, including many within the security services’, that this is fundamentally true. Blair’s intransigence in the face of international resistance to the US at the time of the build up ensured that Britain’s ‘head’ was well and truly over the parapet. But in order to move forward from the situation, we have to understand why ...

The reason for visiting Tipperary was to find out whether I could trace my ancestor Ellen Fogarty (which I find is pronounced Fōgarty not Fŏgarty [long o rather than short o]) who was born in Tipperary County in 1846 (which was the second year of the potato famine). The famine and its consequential diseases killed around a million of the then 8 million population of Ireland. The older records

The Beeb has responded to the complaints I and others submitted earlier in the week. BBC Three: on-screen identifier: We are sorry to viewers who found the new BBC Three identifier distracting - it was changed to make it the same as the channel’s logo, which made it slightly bigger. However, viewers’ feedback is important to us and [...]

In my posting on John Buchan's Greenmantle I suggested that the model for Sandy Arbuthnot was T. E. Lawrence. It turns out that the character owes more to Aubrey Herbert who, amongst many other things, was Tory MP for Yeovil and (posthumously) Evelyn Waugh's father-in-law. You can read the Wikipedia article about Herbert, and there is a fuller portrait of him in Desmond MacCarthy's introduction to his Mons, ANZAC and Kut: No one understood better the internal and external problems of the Albanians. And if it is asked what Aubrey Herbert most notably achieved during his public career, ...