LibDem Blogs - Archived!

On Tuesday evening, I took part in a meeting of the Lewisham Sector Working Party Group.This was one of a series of meetings in which the local beat police discuss policing issues with community groups and ward councillors. The area covered is police beats PL51 (basically, the area of Lewisham Central ward, minus the area around the Mercator Estate) and PL52, the area of Rushey Green ward.The police gave a presentation to set the scene. Local community had ben cut back since the terrorist incidents in July, and the subsequent Operation Theseus, in which local police resources were ...

Tomorrow BBC1 shows the first episode of The Green Green Grass , a situation comedy spun-off from Only Fools and Horses. Give or take the occasional Frasier, these spin-off shows don't have a great track record. Nor was I a great fan of Only Fools, though I did like Grandad's comment on Sidney Poitier: That Sydney Potter's a good actor, ain't he Rodney? ... always plays the black fella.The reason I am mentioning the new show is that it was filmed in south Shropshire. So even if it is not funny, the scenery will be beautiful Look out in ...

Hot Ginger and Dynamite has a button taking you to the Liberal and Lib Dem Treat Store at Cafepress. Here you can find such treasures as a Paddy Ashdown indie fit T-Shirt, a David Lloyd George drinking stein and a Violet Bonham-Carter tote bag. Lord Bonkers writes: Surely they mean Violent Bonham-Carter, the notorious East End gangster? Browse and enjoy.

On Monday evening, I sat in on the meeting of the Overview & Scrutiny panel sub-committee which is reviewing the decision making process leading to the daft idea of putting a new secondary school. Like all Council committees, it has a built-in Labour majority reflecting the preponderance of that Faction in terms of seats, but not the popular vote, on the London Borough of Lewisham. The opposition parties were represented by Cllr Julia Fletcher (Liberal Democrat), Cllr Helen LeFevre (LEAP) and its Chair, Cllr Barrie Anderson (Conservative). So far, the committee seems to be operating on a reasonably ...

Last year the Assembly Government pushed through a new system under which responsibility for merging and closing sixth forms was transferred from local authorities to Elwa. The change was justified on the basis that Elwa was responsible for all post-16 education in Wales apart from universities and their equivalents. At the time, I and other Education Spokespersons opposed the proposal as we believed that it would create a democratic deficit, in which an unelected quango would be able to overrule the wishes of a local Council on the future of schools under its control.When the proposal to abolish ELWa was ...

It’s nearly six months since the switch to Wordpress and a springautumn clean and tidy is due. Any preferences as to what stays and goes? The current reading/listening images take up a fair bit of sidebar space. Should I drop those sections, make them text-only, or keep them as they are? Does anyone use the calendar [...]

Rumour: the parish council election is costing £10,000. Fact: The parish clerk quoted me the figure of £1,800, but since the council has saved costs by not sending out polling cards it may be less. That's about 25p for every voter. Fact: democracy is priceless. Perhaps the people who resent the cost of this election would prefer to live in a country that does not have any, such as North Korea.

So, ex-Minister Frank Field has written to the Dear Leader to inform him that the Child Support Agency is in "meltdown". This will not exactly be news to anybody who has had any contact at all with the CSA in recent years. In my experience, the CSA is by far and away the most badly managed Government agency. Were it a private company it would have gone bankrupt many times over. I recall at one point being told by a CSA drone that for a constituent's case to be able to "go clerical" (a process taking around two months, where ...

So, votes counted and one vote each for Stewart Lee, Simon Munnery, Richard Herring, David Benson, Jay Aston, and Kiki & Herb. Bad luck to Bella, Pam and Ursula. Lee and Herring were both funny, although their styles held no surprises: very much stand-up done technically well (especially Stew) with humour familiar to anyone who’s seen [...]

Given the tendency of British parliamentary media coverage to focus on Westminster and neglect other places, you may be unaware of a significant achievement this week by a British Liberal Democrat MEP. Chris Davies, leader of the British Lib Dem group in the European Parliament, has succeeded in getting all five British group leaders to put their signatures on a call for greater transparency in

According to Ruth Kelly on the radio earlier this week, her department is "responsible for parenting". Oddly though, I took my son out on a train-trip to Cheltennam yesterday and most of the parents we saw were busy being responsible themselves. Even in Ruth's absence.

by Jabez CleggWe know they don´t work. Now the PAC wonder if they could ever work. Perhaps this is the point. Perhaps clunky tax credits are so difficult to claim to give every recipient ample opportunity to thank St Gordon.

Last night I came in to be told the Northern Ireland had beaten England 1-0. I'm still coming to terms with this, that is up there with beating Spain by a similar scoreline in the World Cup of 1982. Or Ireland beating the West Indies at Cricket in in the 1950's at Sion Mills. Now all I need with the campaign kicking off is to win a Lib Dem MP as well. That would make my month.

When a press release proclaiming 'Victory For Bare-Chested Workers - Lynne' popped into my in-box, I naturally went out of my way to read it. Well, you would, wouldn't you? It is clearly the most bizarre press release of the month, much more off the wall than the one issued previously from Lembit Opik's office in which the MP reaffirmed 'his commitment to community dialogue over by-pass without interference from outside.' This last release contained the news that Lembit had taken his neighbouring MP over a by-pass site in his light aircraft, not a tool available to most campaigners. ...

I have now managed to hack into the Treasury Model programs and get the two key programs to work. The programs are not, however, the whole story. There are also a list of assumptions for external (exogenous) variables and the residual values. The Treasury generate these to produce the budget predictions. They have never provided these to anyone previously, but I have made a formal request

It's funny how fashions in economic dogma change.Not long ago, we were taught to look up to the German economic system as a model. Now, to read some commentators, you'd think that this very same system is a basket case (despite the fact that, last year, Germany overtook the USA as the world's largest exporter).Next, it was the so-called 'tiger economies' of the Far East that we were expected to worship. Then a big recession hit Japan, from which it has still not recovered, and no-one talks about the 'tiger economies' any more.The current economic mode du jour is the ...

Immigration is one of those political topics that always seem to generate more heat than light. So it was interesting to see some data rather than bigotry for a change. This Wednesday, the BBC published a report it had commissioned from the IPPR, based on data from the 2001 census, which examined the foreign-born population (whether naturalised or not) resident in the UK.One's attitudes to immigration tend to be governed by whether one is a drawbridge up or drawbridge down person. If you prefer not to see some cherished myths demolished, look away now.Among the findings in the BBC's Born ...