LibDem Blogs - Archived! - Saturday 23rd September 2006

Back to Old School: The Ribos Operation

We’re back from an exciting week at the seaside, and naturally feel we’d rather still be there. But this time, like when we were boys rather than in ‘youthful middle age’, the BBC has something exciting almost ready for us when we get back. Scary Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood is, appropriately, due to launch near Halloween, but in just a fortnight from today the new Robin Hood series begins. So this morning I watched a terribly entertaining Doctor Who with a malicious twist on an element of the Robin Hood story (as yet it’s only available on an American DVD). ...

Day 2088: Ming, the Motionless Picture

Thursday: Well, Conference is over and my fluffy feet have almost recovered from all the CLAPPING. But it wouldn’t be the end of Conference without the big speech from the leader. This year opened with a series of slides: Sir Mr the Merciless STREAKING down the racetrack. And if that wasn’t enough to put you off your sticky buns, there was always the TOP GUN moment: Sir M in the role of TOM CRUISER. And Chucky Kennedy valiantly trying to look like Val Kilmer! It is not often that I get to compare Sir Ming to JACKIE TYLER. ...

Gordon: Quangos are not "devolution"

The BBC and Times at least have picked up on this from "Hurricane" Gordon: Brown in pledge to devolve power: Mr Brown will seek to devolve power away from Whitehall Gordon Brown will seek to devolve power away from central government if he becomes prime minister, he has told the BBC in an interview. The "Bank of England independence" model, devolving policy from ministers, would let those "better able to manage, just get on with it", he said. Earlier, it was revealed Mr Brown would consider giving day-to-day control of the NHS to an independent board. ...

Robin Young's day to shine

Up early today today to help at the Holborn Group art sale. It's the first of it's kind I've been involved with as a Lib Dem fundraising event. All very impressive - quite surprised at the amount of paintings and quite valuable pieces of china/ pottery people gave away as donations. Very impressive pieces - Some by well known artists. With limited edition prints, bone china of assessable worth and so on. We had a few Americian tourists who paid full wack for the paintings and one lady bought a very quaint old fashioned china tea pot. ...

The Queen

I have just come back from watching the film 'The Queen'. It was a fairly insightful recap of the tragic event of Diana's death in 1997 and its aftermath. I thought that the analogy with the stag was a bit laboured, Diana the Huntress becoming the hunted etc, but otherwise it seemed to be spot on. Helen Mirren was remarkable as the Queen, whilst Michael Sheen once more, produced a fairly accurate portrayal of the younger Tony Blair. My favourite line, which was clearly put in with a subsequent knowledge of events, came about three quarters of the way through ...

"For richer or poorer...till death do us part" - 21st-century style

The controversy over ancillary relief rages on. Here are some questions that must be resolved: Does length matter? I say yes.What is a marital asset? This is a difficult one, but I'm leaning to the side of limiting them to assets earned during the marriage in most cases.Are contributions relevant? In my view, the contribution of each party are key factors. If this were resolved, the "marital assets" question would be less important. Although difficult to define, relevant "contributions" should include housework and child-bearing and rearing (particularly where a career is given up) as well ...

Forced conversion

Tomorrow is a red letter day. After 15 years I am set to abandon the ranks of Apple Mac users and install a PC at home. This is not a decision I have taken willingly. It is a kind of forced conversion. My working life has been in publishing (not quite as grand as it sounds) and has always involved working on Macs. So it seemed sensible to have a Mac at home as well. And over time, part of my indentity has become entwined with being a Mac user – a sense of belonging to a select band, creative ...

Calling the tooth fairy

My son Jimmy, 8, found a long lost tooth two days ago and, being a fast-thinking young thing, put it straight under his pillow. Sadly, in an uncharacteristic fit of shabbiness, the Tooth Fairy has not turned up. Jimmy has therefore asked me to put a post on here so that if the Tooth Fairy reads my blog she will see this and come and replace his tooth with a shiny one pound coin. So before he went to bed I promised him I would put up a post asking the Tooth fairy to pop round. Now that he's ...

He who pays the piper: saying no to the nationalisation of political parties

The political parties of this country have discovered a problem. Not only is turnout down, but membership rolls are falling - left, right and centre. People are down on the political class. The demise of deferential voting, the rise of political consumerism, the race to the now crowded centre ground and a cynical, knowing electorate have combined to make life difficult for parties. The fact is simple: ordinary people don't want to associate with hacks. I find this both understandable and reassuring. Democracy ultimately relies on the good sense of the electorate more than it does on an increasingly moribund ...

Charles Kennedy - my part in his downfall

Like Iain Dale, I was struck by the lack of a mea culpa moment from Charles Kennedy on Tuesday. Indeed in all the comments I have heard from Charles since he stood down, there has been no sense at all that he thinks he did anything wrong and one senses he still has 'issues'. I'm no moralistic teetotaller myself, but I tend to harrumph a bit at this modern insistence that alcoholism is an illness. It seems to deny any sense of personal responsibility and imply that suffering from it is simply a piece of bad luck – like a ...

Thank you, Simon

Thanks to Jonathan Calder for pointing out the following from Simon Hughes on the leader's speech. I guess it was a seven or eight out of ten speech, in terms of speech, but it did the necessary for the party. How thoughtful of him to remind us all why we didn't vote for him as leader.

Too early to tell…

I'm a history student rather than a political pundit, so I think it wise to allow time to elapse before making any judgement about the success or otherwise of Ming's speech and the Lib Dem conference as a whole. That's the reason why all my fellow bloggers have beaten me to an instant opinion on the subject (see Lib Dem Blogs aggregated) etc. It's not just that I couldn't be bothered and can't get it together. Absolutely not. Not in the least. Not at all. No!

Leaflets and Mosaic in Tay Square!

Spent the morning helping the LibDem Team in Kirkton - they were delivering a newsletter from Cllr Helen Dick (colleague & sister in law!) - absolutely beautiful morning. Good news on getting the damaged mosaic in Tay Square repaired. The Planning Officer (Public Art) tells me that the artist should be on site next week. The final completion date is the end of September. He also says -

In cider country

Yes, I am still alive, even if I’ve been quiet for a while - I’ve been walking through Gloucestershire, and I’m not sure they’ve got new-fangled things like the Internet there. Anyway, I’ve now made it as far as Bath and the end of the Cotswold Way, and finally get to switch from heading mainly south [...]

Tackling crime: be effective, not vindictive

The last of my speeches from conference is now up on my website - the last one is about how to be effective in tackling crime and the choices that have to be made between being effective and being vindictive.

Full Council: Wednesday 20 September

It was the big night at Lewisham Council's full meeting on Wednesday 20 September. It was my job to speak for the Liberal Democrats on a motion put forward by the Mayor praising Lewisham Hospital for its excellent marking in children's emergency care. But first we had to deal with a curate's egg of a motion put forward by the Socialists and Greens. It slammed the waste of money in the national health service on PFI and management consultants, and told the Government to stop all such immediately. The Liberal Democrats agreed with the first part ...

Time for Worthington to go

I've never been a reactionary sort, and have always thought loyalty in football is something that is in very short supply, but Delia's loyalty to Nigel Worthington as manager of Norwich City really has gone too far now. Delia claimed about 12 months ago that a good manager does not turn bad overnight. I wrote, in response, to the EDP and had a letter printed which argued that as a cook, she should know that even the finest ingredients go off, and in this case, it really is the case that something is very "off" at Carrow Road. I took ...

Anyone but us...

I see that Health care professionals are a bit sceptical about Gordon Brown's plans to set up an independent NHS Board. Quite right- how could it be held accountable? The problem about the Conservative reforms was the same- the independent trusts could not be quizzed by local MPs about how they spent the tax payers money that they received. How could a national board be brought to account? Ministers would/do* say- "not my responsibility, it was that nasty independent board/trust* that made this happen". * delete where applicable. If tax payer's money is involved then Parliament must supervise and make ...

nagging does work!

In Speke early this morning for some delivery and some pre-arranged visits. My route included All Hallows Drive, a small estate of private houses off one of the long East-West roads in Speke. We've had all sorts of problems here.. from the development company, and other people to be fair, dumping on the corner of the road .. to the failure of developers to get the road surfaced. I felt at one time that I was getting to know the staff at the developers Manchester office very well. Anyway.. it was heartening this morning to see ...

nagging does work!

In Speke early this morning for some delivery and some pre-arranged visits. My route included All Hallows Drive, a small estate of private houses off one of the long East-West roads in Speke. We've had all sorts of problems here.. from the development company, and other people to be fair, dumping on the corner of the road .. to the failure of developers to get the road surfaced. I felt at one time that I was getting to know the staff at the developers Manchester office very well. Anyway.. it was heartening this morning to see that the open space ...

Mountsfield Park

A date for your diary as a result of the meeting of the Mountsfield Park User Group on Tuesday 19 September: Sunday 29 October: community bulb planting event in the park. All welcome to help plant bluebells and snowdrops to bloom in the Spring. I shall do my best to be there, if I survive the cleanup of the Ravensbourne River tomorrow (Sunday). We also got an update on progress on the Heritage Lottery Funding bid for the park. The cost of redeveloping the park would be £3m, of which £2m would be met ...

Gordon Brown: the quiz

thegrauniad asks nine questions to test how much any of us really know about our current Chancellor, and next Prime Minister. I didn’t do too badly - 8/9 - though whether knowing where Gordon Brown holidays is something I’m that proud of I’m not too sure. (The one I slipped up on: which of Mr Brown’s five tests for British entry into the Eurozone was met in 2003? Me neither.)

If it could go wrong, it did go wrong

After the peace and serenity of a well oiled conference machine that ensured everything worked well (conveniently overlooking the reference back on local government policy paper) I have been hit by the blizzard of things going wrong. I left London on the 9pm train last night to head back the the North East. As usual, David arrived at Newcastle Central Station to drive me over to Sunniside, our

Shooting Star

This is the garden of the Shooting Star Children's Hospice in Hampton Hill, on my first visit since it opened last year. It is a truly wonderful place - and it must have been so exciting to be able to create such a high quality building which reflects all the current thinking about palliative care for children and for their families. Every detail is thought through - from...

Now featuring videos

OK - so I'm not quite at the vidcasting stage just yet. But I have managed to add a clever bit of code from Martin Tod's site which means that you can watch and listen to people far more interesting than me while reading my blog. You can find the code here. You can watch Lib Dem Blogger of the Year and Oxford City Finance Chief Cllr Stephen Tall's latest video here. They even let him out into the community this time!

The Rules of the Game Have Changed

Rachel from North London, one of the 7/7 survivors, sings us through the changing rules of the game. This is her profile picture In other news, I'm reading J.S. Mills On Liberty at the moment. Having just finished Chapter II, Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion, I can't help thinking about the stupid way I tried to block the changes to Spark, the newspaper I used to edit. I can't help

The Limits of Judicial Review

A nurse has spoken of her "hollow victory" over ward closures at her hospital. A high court judge ruled yesterday that the decision was unlawful because it was taken without public consultation. However, he refused to rule that the wards should be kept open. However cheated the applicant may feel, the judge's decision is an illustration of the biggest, and most possibly most important, limitation of judicial review. To most people, it might seem logical that if a decision is flawed, it should be reversed and the replaced with the opposite decision. However, there ...

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

I have been using Bloglines to link together my main news sources. Those are the BBC website and various blogs. I particularly like the NHS Blog Doc, Coppers Blog and Frank Chalk for a perspective on public service. As far as Politics goes I look at Recess Monkey, Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale. Locally I look at Labour Councillor Bob Piper andPolitical Hack UK an anonymous Labour activist who

Who had a good conference?

Stephen Tall has a poll on who had the best conference. It is a bit hard to answer this - no one saw all of it. But here are a few winners and losers. First of all the three C's: Campbell, Clegg, and Cable all came out looking in very good shape. Cable has persuaded the party that the party is over for extra public spending. for the rest of this parliament we are going to have to identify a saving or an efficiency gain for every extra penny we spend. Making the shortlist for the bloggers award meant ...

What a load of Balls

So Gordon Brown thinks the solution to to the problems in the NHS might be ... more reorganisation! According to Brown fanboy Ed Balls this is because: "The track record so far has been about devolution in important areas of policy - on monetary policy, on financial services policy, on local government and regional policy too," he told the BBC. Well call me old fashioned but I prefer to judge people on the basis of what they have actually done, rather than what they say they might do in the future. The Brown/Blair Government could have devolved power ...

My conference speeches

I've put on my website my main speeches from conference. These include the one I gave at the conference launch of Britain after Blair and the one from the Meeting the Challenge policy debate - in which I talked about the importance of the built environment and stopping developers from building-in anti-social behaviour.

V for Very Good Indeed

I didn't get to see V for Vendetta when it was in the cinemas but read a few reviews that made it sound like the kind of film i would like. Seeing it while shopping for dinner yesterday I picked it up on DVD yesterday and we watched it last night. It is absolutely excellent. Based on a brilliant graphic novel by the mighty Alan Moore illustrated by David Lloyd and brought to the screen by the people that did The Matrix, the film combines action thriller with politics set in a 1984 like future UK. As the synopsis ...

What is the President of the Lib Dems for?

Simon Hughes is quoted in the Scotsman as telling the BBC: "I guess it was a seven or eight out of ten speech, in terms of speech, but it did the necessary for the party." This seems a fair verdict to me. But should we be pleased by his candour or outraged at his disloyalty? Does the President exist to tell the party's leadership uncomfortable truths on behalf of the wider membership? Or is he meant to be the public face of the party, telling everyone how well it is doing. And if it is the latter role, why ...

Elvis returns to Porthcawl

Elvis Preseli sings the Scissor Sisters For those who are into the King, the 2006 Porthcawl Elvis Festival starts next weekend. It is on from 29th September to 1st October. Full details can be found here. In the meantime here is the legendary Elvis Preseli singing at a previous festival.

On learning from reality and from compassion

Here is a bit of self-discipline to make us politicians pause: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are theeasiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you'venot fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to behonest in a conventional way after that."That was Richard Feynman commenting on his approach to science, and I came across it again this week while pondering two important events – our Party Conference and my son going up to University today to study theoretical physics. ...

The Emporer Has No Clothes

Therer's little I like more than seeing people point out that The Emporer Has No Clothes. Congratulations then to Harriet Yeo for doing nothing more than pointing out the truth to Mr Blair. It is difficult to bring up children, particularly teenagers, and wise politicians will bear this in mind before pronouncing on the subject. Labour Minister John Hutton was also mouthing off recently about single parents. The gist of his comments were that, on average, children living with two parents are lijkely to do better than those brought up by one. In particular they are a lot less ...

Battles in Time

Son Jimmy, 8, has been suffering with a rather nasty insect bite which got infected. As a result he has been on anti-biotics all week and I had to take him to the doctors yesterday to have it lanced. (Imagine his disapointment when this didn't involve a man on a horse charging at him!). I was therefore obliged to buy him a copy of the first edition on the latest Doctor Who merchandise - Battle in Time - for being such a brave little soldier. This is a series of trading cards which arrive each fortnight with ...

DNA database

I've added to my website an article about what's wrong with the national DNA database Labour are building - tackling in particular the question, "but what does an innocent person have to fear?" The answer - a lot! Read it and see ...

NuLabour, NuTory

First, they elected a Blair-lite leader, David Cameron. Then they disowned (sort of) their previous extremist manifestos. Now they’re about to move into Millbank. Is there nothing the Tories won’t do to emulate New Labour?

There are worse things we could do

I'm listening to What does Gordon really think?, a programme presented by Nick Robinson about Gordon Brown. It seems that many of Brown's true views are unknown. He may be more left-wing and want to help the poor through redistribution. He is reportedly uncomfortable with public money in the NHS. He has never made a speech enthusiastically in favour of the war in Iraq. Of course, this is all uncertain, and perhaps he is unlikely to undo most of what Blair has done. But if we must have a New Labour government, ...

Labour party tries to shoot the Elephant in the room

Picture the scene. It’s Britain, in the year 2006. The Prime Minister of the day announces he will preside over one more major party conference, then step down before the next one. You’d think then, that that the governing party’s conference would be a natural place to discuss his sucession - perhaps even a place for [...]

I'm not bitter ...

But *I* wouldn't have dropped the blog of the year award if I'd been given it ...

I'm becoming a film star, I am

The National Bastards' Society

likes this story on Peter Black AM. In brief, a 'single' mother gave Tony Blair a comprehensive monstering for his pronouncements on single mothers. Fathers, she said, whose 16 year old sons are found comatose and vomit-caked in central London should not cast aspersions. Blair was reduced a gibbering wreck by Ms Yeo's onslaught, a political happy slapping many would pay good money to see. As

Arrest in Labour loan scandal

In the continuing investigation in to the Labour loans scandal Sir Christopher Evans, who lent Labour £1m, has been arrested and interviewed by the police. Scotland Yard has revealed that a number of people had been interviewed under caution and another number of people had been interviewed as potential witnesses.

Cash for access

Apparently undaunted by the row still going on around loans for peerages, Labour are using their Conference to try and plug their £20 million overdraft by offering companies and special interest groups the opportunity "to engage first hand" with ministers and policy advisers who work in areas relevant to their business for £1,500 a head during the conference. The Guardian also reports that the PR company Bell Pottinger Public Affairs is offering clients a package of dinners and meetings with ministers. BPPA, set up by Lord Bell, who was behind successive Conservative party election campaigns, is offering clients dinner ...

Single parents

Like John Redwood before him the Prime Minister has learnt that it does not do to mess with single parents. The Independent reports that an astonishing attack on Tony Blair as a father was made at a private meeting of Labour's ruling body by a trade union official who is a single mother: Members of the party's national executive committee watched in amazement as Harriet Yeo launched a broadside over Mr Blair's remarks about teenage mothers in a speech on social exclusion earlier this month. She hit back by referring to the incident in which his ...

Monty mania

Cicero tends to regard golf as "a good walk, spoiled" Even still, Colin Montgomerie's putt in the Ryder cup was pretty impressive! This is one of those events where even the Europhobe saloon bar bores can cheer on Europe. Go the Europeans!

Stop and search law in Lewisham this weekend

The police have just authorised the use of a Section 60 Order. The police are acting on information of potential youth disorder over this weekend. When a section 60 order is in place for a particular locality, any police constable in uniform may: - stop any pedestrian in that locality and search him or anything carried by him for offensive weapons or dangerous instruments - stop any vehicle in that locality and search the vehicle, its driver and any passenger for offensive weapons or dangerous instruments - seize any such offensive weapons ...

Area Committee

Its not quite defeating 90 day detention or the glorification of terrorism but I led of disturbing out break of liberalism at Thursday nights area committee. Although no one seemed keen to actually admit to being in favour of it a report had turned up on the agenda proposing a Designated Public Place Order (DPPO) or "public drinking ban" across a vast area of North West Leeds. Not they had actually bothered with a map or anything but it seemed to cover about 30000 people and would also criminalise drinking in all but one of the areas parks. Of ...

New poll: who had the best conference?

Right, now we’ve all had 24 hours to catch up on lost sleep, and gain some perspective, it’s time to choose which Lib Dem MP you think emerged with most credit from this year’s party conference. The new poll is open now at my other gaff, and the six runners and riders are (in alphabetical order): Vince Cable - steered through the Lib Dems’ new tax plans, and delivered an economics masterclass

King gives formal backing to coup

According to the BBC here the leaders of the military coup in Thailand have been given formal backing by King Bhumibol Adulyadej via a formal decree of assent. This confirms what was already apparent in that the coup leaders have at least the tacit consent of the King. Interesting that there were a couple of limited pro democracy protests in Bangkok which I would not have expected given the

Saturday 23rd September 2006

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