Susanne Lamido e-mails me to say that she had hoped her posting on Surjit Athwal, who was murdered by her husband and his mother in an "honour killing", would make the last BritBlog Roundup. For one reason or another the nomination did not reach me, but I am happy to draw your attention to it here. It is a good posting with some useful links. 
About a year ago I posted about the launch of the Royal Families charity. The Wives and Girlfriends of the Reading Footballers got together under the banner of the Royal Families charity, which was set up by Amanda Hahnemann and Karen Murty (wives of goalkeeper Marcus Hahnemann and captain Graeme Murty). They aimed to raise sixty thousand pounds throughout the season for local charities. At the time this seemed like an extremely ambitious target but they smashed that target with some to spare. Tonight they brought the 2006/07 season to a close and launched the fundraising for 2007/08. In doing ...
Once again it's all knives, knives, knives when the Prime Minister talks about cracking down on crime. What about spoon crime, that's what I say.
I asked several people today, including some members of the profession, to suggest a collective noun for judges - a bench of judges? (that's only three of them, I think), a sentence of judges? (not bad), a purple of judges? Any improvements on my title? These windswept upholders of the law were attending the Annual Crown Court Service in Kingston today....
I watched part of Gordon Brown's speech, and read the rest on the BBC website. I couldn't find anything much to disagree with. It was a good speech, delivered with much humility and some passion. Lots of positive stuff about families, education, raising aspriations for young people and for people disengaged from democracy, he suggests the remedy is 'renewing democracy'. I would have liked more detail on what this involved. We're told that this was a speech designed for us to get to know Gordon better, and find out what matters to him. Thing is for the majority of us, ...
When listening to Gordon Brown's speech earlier, you might as a foreigner or an alien who had just come to this planet find it very difficult to disagree with much of what he said. But for those of us who have lived through the New Labour project, the constant voice I heard in my own head was "But why didn't you do this ten years ago ?" It is all well and good for Gordon to speak about his childhood and smile his way through praise of the NHS and its staff, but why weren't funds given by the treasury ...
Liberator 321 was on sale at the Lib Dem Conference and many subscribers will have picked up their copy from the magazine's stall. Those who were not in Brighton will receive theirs in the post in a few days. It is therefore time to begin passing on his lordship's thoughts and adventures to readers of this blog. Monday One of the finest sights I have ever seen upon the athletic track is the young Menzies Campbell. Like a Greek god, albeit one clad in singlet, shorts and plimsolls, he bestrode the cinders of the White City. His continued victories there ...
Was delighted to be invited to the launch of Fest n' Furious, Dundee's Festival of Traditional Music - the launch is this Friday (28th) with events running through to next Monday. Unfortunately I can't attend the launch as I'll be in Inverness (with the "day job") but can I wish Fest 'n Furious every success. You can read more about Fest 'n Furious by clicking on the headline above.
In the 1950's Ian Fleming wrote a series of novels starring intrepid British spy James Bond. Many of these books featured rather outlandish tales of daring and cunning from the British super spy as he out did a series of evil baddies with hoards of henchmen fabulous wealth, private islands, enormous super yachts and enormous power and influence. Rather oddly, his tales of spying have turned out, more than fifity years later, to be the least accurate of the elements of his stories whilst the rise of super rich people who virtually control countries, have friends in high places who ...
For the Media Guardian, Peter Wilby offers his analysis of the Biased BBC brigade (not just the website, but The Telegraph, The Mail, The Sun, et al). 
Well, the inclusion of this humble blog on Iain Dale's list was good news today - especially as bloggers voted this time. Thanks if you took the trouble to mention me. Of course, whilst coming 55th (unfortunately dropping 8 places from last year) is hardly winning an esteemed Lib Dem blog award, but I do feel it worth noting in a small way! So as a reward I've given my blog a makeover ... a facial always does me good - so why not my internet face I thought! I am also going to try and focus the blog a ...
{3rd Birthday Cake} Some time before Conference, LibDemBlogs had it’s 3rd Birthday. I’m not sure exactly when it was as the archives only go as far back as 5th December 2004 and archive.org only has posts from the 4th October 2004, yet I remember having the site live before Bournemouth 2004 conference. But looking back at those early pages it’s amazing to see that we only had 16 bloggers and were average around 6 posts a day between us. Since then only half remain active/live (Adam Nazir Ahmed Teladia, Gavin Whenman, Lynne Featherstone, Neil Fawcett, Richard Allan, Ryan Cullen, Sandra ...
If you’re a party member you can register to use the members’ forum - our place to say whatever’s on your mind without the danger of it being misquoted (or quoted out of context or quoted all too bloody accurately) on opposition leaflets. Topics currently being discussed include: Will there be a snap election? Sharia law [ Poll [...]
I have written for the first time on LibDem Voice. 'Commissioned', indeed, to write 500 words on the new Liberal book, Reinventing the State. I'll wait for the cheque. As the book's nearing 400 pages, that means I had to write the equivalent of no more than 1.25 words per page. And, of course, I had far too much to say. In fact, I found it stimulating to the extent that I came up with various different reviews, plus my own reflections on some of the ideas in the book. What I post here are not the 'out-takes', but my ...
Yesterday Andrew and I visited a food and drink festival- a sort of small farmers market with stalls from the local allotments, butchers, cheese makers, olives, face painting, snacks and a stall to advertise the new cycling strategy for their area. All good ideas to take away with me for Prestwich! Local councillors had worked on the sub-group of their area committee to organise it - and they
I’ll be honest with you - I don’t really listen to the sort of radio shows or watch the sort of television programmes expected of somebody ‘into’ politics and specifically the British political system. For the most part I’m bored silly by the News, and yes that includes Channel 4 News and the Today programme and I have every intention of watching Newsnight but never get beyond ten minutes before my finger gets restless and press the channel up button. I sometimes watch a few minutes of Question Time before I’m drawn away by a mindless sitcom on BBC THREE ...
Via LDV, I notice that Iain Dale has released his latest list of the top 100 Liberal Democrat blogs. Now, I know I was jokingly suggesting at the Blog of the Year awards that I deserved some kind of lifetime achievement award (the kind the Oscars give out to people just to make sure they’ve got a statue before they die) but somehow I’ve managed to rise from number 27 to number 20 in a year when I’ve been far too busy to blog. I’m almost tempted to stop writing entirely to see if that gets me into the top ...
I'm not a fan of Hazel Blears. I've always found her smug, patronising, and packed full of nauseating doublethink. She's so irritatingly on-message that I even backed her for the deputy-leadership, as the candidate most likely to damage Labour's standing in the country. Well, she's excelled herself today. Speaking at the Labour Party conference earlier on, she called Boris Johnson a "fogeyish, bigoted and upper-class twit". A conference hall full of New Labour muppets laughed, and gave her a round of applause. I'm sure Labour and Lib Dem supporters (and a fair few Tories, I'll bet!) would be horrified to ...
I’ve been tagged by John The Teacher for my first political memory. I remember taking a mild interest in the 1990 Conservative Party leadership election, at the age of 9. Before all the “aha, so you’re a Tory really!” comments start flowing, let me explain. I grew up in the Daventry constituency, which has been Tory since time began. My parents at the time voted Conservative, so it was the talk of the household. However, what prompted me to get involved in politics was the abolition of student maintenance grants in 1998. My parents were always very supportive of me ...
If my blogging is a bit erratic over the next few days, please be patient. I am switching to Vista and guess there are bound to be problems. Wish me luck. Update : Now working - Everything is fine and dandy. Aren't Microsoft a wonderful organisation ? (note that was sarcasm)
Whilst by all accounts South Africa have done a nice job of hosting the Cricket Twenty 20 World Cup, the one aspect that they failed on was the broadcasting. Time and again this afternoon when watching the end of the final, sound was lost, vision was lost (with apologies having to be shown on screen) and just seconds before the final ball of the match vision was lost for a few seconds. There have already been warnings that South Africa's broadcasting technology is not up to the job. If they can't handle a a small scale event like the Twenty ...
I've heard too many leaders' speeches, whether Tory, Labour or Lib Dem, than I care to remember, and I have to say today's, from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was the dullest and most boring I have eve...
The figures for up to 31st March 2007 have now been relased. The number of adoptions from care have dropped from 3,700 to 3,300, but the number of special guardianships have gone up from 60 to 740. The two figures are lumped together for the target BV163 or PAF C23. I cannot sensibly comment on these figures until I see the details of various profiles (age, gender etc).
The tradition of destroying people’s lives that is. Chavez’s brand of socialism* is destroying people’s lives by putting private business out of business. Price controls are stifling the market, huge subsidies to worker’s cooperatives** are adding to the pressure. This is not the usual healthy competition of the market place in which some may get hurt but [...]
Hello boys and girls - yes I am still alive and yes I still have all my fingers, an internet connection and just about enough of a brain to type the odd word or two. So I guess you’re wondering, or in fact probably not, why I haven’t been around much - no reason other than a loss of inspiration and drive for political blogging and a supreme lack of time. Basically my last ‘real’ post was an odd one about old people sitting on benches and that was more than three months ago - I’ve had a couple of ... 
No, it's not the disease which has afflicted Gordon Brown, but a disease which afflicts cattle and, particularly, sheep. It is carried by a midge. Until recently, it was restricted to the continent of Africa. However, with global warming, the vector (carrier) is now able to survive in more northern latitudes and the disease is endemic in Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. The disease has now been detected on a rare breeds farm near Ipswich. It can only be a matter of time before it spreads across southern Britain. Since a vaccine is more than a year away, we must pray ...
sloanerf1’s comments on the Gay World Cup are valid, but I would like to put across the other side of the argument. It is widely accepted that homophobia is rife within football. So much so that this season the FA has launched an anti-homophobia campaign, running under their Football for All banner. Similarities have been drawn with the “Let’s kick racism out of football” campaign, but there is one important difference: visibility. You cannot identify a gay man or woman simply by looking at them. Therefore, gay people can (and do) remain hidden within football. This environment can make homophobic ...
Yesterday afternoon I attended the launch of Leamington SPAce a new organisation to campaign against the growing threat of developers building on our green open spaces. In recent years we have seen fine old buildings and back gardens torn down to make way for high density flats. Now our Cricket ground and allotments are under threat. Now clearly there is a housing problem across our region, yet I feel we need to look at other ways of addressing this than simply packing more homes into our towns. If we do not protect our green spaces then towns such as Leamington ...
The BBC has done an interesting straw-poll at the Labour Party conference, asking delegates whether they think the Prime Minister should or should not call a general election this autumn. Interestingly, the majority opinion is ‘no’ (though many people loyally comment that it is up to him). Ming Campbell, meanwhile, is taunting from the sidelines, daring Gordon to do it, rather than prolong this period of uncertainty, though I have to say that the mood I picked up at the LibDem conference in Brighton last week is that there is no appetite for an early poll among LibDem activists. The real ...
A lot of objective one money was wasted trying to set up a film studio in St Agnes. Who was to know that such a depth of cinematic talent existed up there at Duchywood.
I don't like to rain on parades very often, but I do wonder if tournaments like this one are somewhat self-defeating. Maybe it's just a bit of fun, but I think it highlights two important issues: The first could apply to any minority group in many contexts. Do events like this acknowledge and enforce differences even when they are not particularly relevant? Does it really matter whether a footballer is gay or not? Perhaps in the current climate we have to accept that it does, especially given the recently publicised experiences of Graham Le Saux (who is not gay in ...
I notice that Iain Dale, as part of the tease for his latest "collaboratively" written book, "Iain Dale's Guide to Political Blogging 2007" [that's enough plugs- Ed] has marked out this blog for particular praise: "If I were to pick out one Lib Dem blogger who had the potential to make the big time it’s James Oates from Cicero’s Songs. He’s a consistently brilliant writer, who provides insight with every blogpost. If he posted more often and updated his blog design he would be in the top three next year. As a Conservative I probably read more Lib Dem blogs ...
On Tuesday night, the various equalities organisations are running their annual Absolutely Equal shindig at Labour conference. Clashing with this is the Fawcett Society’s own party which is by strict invitation only. A case of Absolutely Equal, but some are more Absolutely Equal than others? Share This
As Mark Pack notes below, Tory uber-blogger Iain Dale has taken a bit of a swipe at Lib Dem Voice in his run-down of the top 100 Lib Dem blogs. Here’s what he says: One of the sadder developments in the LibDem blogosphere this year has been the decline of LibDem Voice. At one stage it [...]
Iain Dale’s Guide to Political Blogging in the UK (snappy title there, Iain) is out today, so Iain has posted up on his blog the top 100 Liberal Democrat blogs as voted for by a panel of LibDem bloggers - including this one. (Last year’s list was drawn up by Iain himself.) No geek is an island is down one from 2006, at 13 - not bad given the relative sparsity of posts this year. Millennium Dome, Elephant leaps 70 places up to number 7, and Jonathan Calder, perennial runner-up in the party’s Blog of the Year Awards, takes a ...
Believe it or not, that’s what some Conservative candidates in marginal seats have asked of their ‘leader’ David Cameron, according to the Telegraph. “Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich West (East! Cracking research there Telegraph…), said: “When I knock on doors I talk to working class Tories and all of them tell me David Cameron is not for them. They think he’s a London PR man. Gordon Brown by contrast is seen as an industrious figure and they admire that.” and… “Mr Cameron’s standing in some marginal seats is so bad that some Tory candidates have requested that their ...
As the reverberations from the Northern Rock debacle continue to echo, and as the evidence grows for a major fallout from the growing US Dollar crisis- one major casualty emerges: the credibility of the independence of the British Central Bank. The first act of Brown as Chancellor was to grant the Bank of England independence. one of the first acts of Brown as Prime Minister is to demonstrate that the Bank is in fact not independent at all. The political fallout of Northern Rock placed the Governor, Mervyn King under some pressure to resign, but even more pressure to change ...
Could somebody explain to me how it is Gordon Brown is currently asking us to accept the following three propositions simultaneously? 1. He has licensed his ‘aides’ to spend almost the whole summer putting it about that he is considering calling an autumn election (and as I have argued, this strategy has delivered for him in spades, in stitching up Cameron). The fact that an early election on the agenda at all is entirely down to him – and every time speculation has looked like tailing off, his team has stoked it up again. 2. Gordon Brown is a serious ...
Says Iain Dale of Liberal Democrat Voice: “Mark Pack, a senior LibDem employee writing the majority of the posts”. So at a guess, what proportion of, let’s say, the last hundred posts have I written? Oh, that would be 10%. Not even the most enthusiastic bar chart drawer could claim 10% is a majority UPDATE: Iain [...]
Leader of the Liberal Democrats Ming Campbell today called on Gordon Brown to end the damaging speculation over when he will call a general election. He said: “It’s time to stop dithering, Mr Brown, and call an election now. “The continuous speculation is bad for the economy, bad for the political process and bad for public confidence in the Government. “This unnecessary and destabilising guessing game is the most powerful argument yet for fixed-term four year Parliaments, an idea which the Labour party enthusiastically backed in 1992. “The Liberal Democrats are ready and waiting for a general election as soon ...
The past few days have been very busy, hence no blogging I’m afraid. On Friday I attended the Transport Network committee of the passenger Transport Authority, where I raised a number of points about the state of Radcliffe Bus Station, and the fact that a shocking 66% of Metrolink trams have the wrong destination blind showing! I am hoping for comments and improvements soon. Over the weekend there was lots of leafleting, as the new St Mary’s Focus hit the streets. If you live in the ward and haven’t got your’s yet, you will soon. We have also started a ...
Labour ministers are refusing to assist the Americans’ investigation into alleged corruption by BAE, the Guardian reports. The newspaper claims that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith hasn’t approved a request for assistance made by the US authorities two months ago. The formal request for assistance came from the US department of justice earlier in the summer, but Ms Smith has refused to pass it on to the Serious Fraud Office for processing in the normal way. This is unusual behaviour towards a major ally, with whom legal cooperation is normally automatic. Last night, the Home Office said its failure to pass ...
On Monday Iain Dale is publishing his Guide to Political Blogging in the UK for 2007. It includes a list of the 100 top Liberal Democrat blogs, as chosen by a panel of Lib Dem bloggers. And Liberal England is number one in the list. Iain writes: Jonathan writes the Lord Bonkers column in Liberal Democrat News, but he is anything but bonkers himself! His blog carries a mixture of Lib Dem commentary, general political comment and a few personal observations thrown in for good measure. He deserves his pole position.In fact, Lord Bonkers' Diary appears in Liberator and my ...
Several Prime Ministers have been reported as avid listeners to Today. It's a fair bet that our early rising current Prime Minister gets up even earlier to listen to Farming Today on a regular basis. It's bizarre I know, but any assessment of the likelihood of an October election must come down, in great part, to what's happening in the farming world. There's this new Blue Tongue outbreak. In
Three constituencies have recently advertised for their Parliamentary Candidates ahead of the upcoming General Election. They were Stone, Stoke North and Stoke South, details follow:
Just about to head off to the conference centre for Gordo's speech. This is my first Labour Party conference and I was amused to note just how keen they are on promoting democracy within their party, perhaps this gives a clue to their approach to governing in general! The Conference guide (glossy and red) is full of fringes (tho to be honest I think we have a wider and richer selection), adverts, rallying calls to the troops..........and two pages, yes TWO pages devoted to the main business of conference! And of course, no opportunity for the troops to participate in ...
I really need to sort out some aspects of this blog. I really should spend some time with its theme. It is a bit blue… (although in keeping with my workplace where blue is a definite theme, I think its our MD’s favourite colour or something - its not very LibDem though, then again it was [...]
If I had a pound for every time I had been asked why I had hitched my particular waggon to the Lib Dems.............the latest but one enquiry was Saturday night from my son who has just started his A level politics. "Mum, why do you want to be in a party that is never, well not in your life time, going to be in power?" "Son, you just joined that party!" "Oh yes!" Actually said son has just joined said party following an interrogation similar to that endured by the faithful wanting to be baptised............do you believe..........are you willing to ...
Stand by for a snap general election. That is the key message from the Labour conference. Brown could have killed off the speculation with a few words saying there will be no election. He has chosen not to, knowing the consequences will be that the Labour conference will be dominated by the pending election. In other words, the conference is a huge, week long election rally that dominates the
So, here it is. The volume which will be written up as the liberal riposte to The Orange Book. It’s going to tell us how we can regain the fervour and the achievement of our New Liberal forefathers – how, in the new millennium, we can protect the inheritance of the welfare state which our [...]
The Register are reporting that Virgin Media are shutting down their music download service, which theoretically was once a competitor to Apple’s iTunes, but failed to capture a significant market. Unfortunately this has the unintended consequence of rendering every download from the Virgin site unplayable. This is because every single file ever sold by Virgin Media contains “DRM”, a technology designed to limit how files can be played. In this case every time a media-player wishes to play a download the player-software must first contact an authorizing server for ‘permission’ to play. If the server is switched-off then there is ...
The media frenzy on the (fairly remote) possibility of a snap election in the UK has continued, despite some pretty clear non-denial denials. After a while this begins to make the media look somewhat over-excitable and also pretty dumb. It is hard to respect journalists who keep coming out with unsubstantiated rumour and treating it as fact. I saw a good deal of it last week at the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton. The conference was cheerful and good natured, with well mannered and informed debates. There supposed splits between Economic and Social Liberals were not evident to me- indeed ...
Radio Wales is reporting this morning that Rhodri Morgan and Peter Hain are using the Labour Party Conference to emphasis the role of Wales within the UK so as to reassure jittery Labour MPs. There is no doubt in my mind that there are clear benefits for Wales in remaining within a increasingly devolved United Kingdom. However, such a settlement needs to involve the creation of a full-law-making Parliament here and elsewhere so that those decisions that are best taken at a local level remain there. The premise of the second Government of Wales Act is that the National Assembly ...
It's a big day for local government this morning. Hazel Blears is due to address the Labour conference with her ambitions within her government portfolio of Communities & Local Governance. New Local Area Agreements are being re-re-launched again. It's the third time that we have had a launch, so I am counting on Gordon keeping Hazel in place long enough to deliver. The Best Value Performance Indicator measurements are being dumped and replaced with 200 broad targets supplied by Whitehall for all local authorities to measure, with up to 35 of these targets selected to stretch our ambitions. Along with ...
Oh just great! A bridge has collapsed onto the main East Coast line near York. So here I am stuck at Newcastle. Many services have been cancelled. I was told that this is because GNER want to avoid lots of train delays. How best to avoid a delay? - cancel the train!I've spent the last half hour making urgent calls and emails to various people. Rumour has it the collapsed bridge was called the
Well, here’s a turn-up for the books. According to an Ipsos-Mori poll in today’s Sun, the country is split about whether they would vote to back or reject the EU reform treaty: The result of a referendum would be a nail-biter with 46 per cent saying they would reject the Treaty and 44 per cent backing [...]
Plaid Cymru Assembly Member, Dai Lloyd has a letter in this morning's Western Mail in which he attempts to defend his party against my claim that it ditched its principles in voting against an inquiry into Local Income Tax last week. He repeats Plaid Cymru policy in favour of such a reform, claims that they are already implementing it by adopting Conservative proposals to give Council tax relief to pensioners in the One Wales agreement and argues that he and his fellow AMs voted against our motion to Plenary because they want the review to be carried out by the ...
This is a moveable feast as heard on the Today programme. What exactly is `Punishment & Prevention` Rightly he said one solution to binge-drinking is to stop shops selling alcohol to underage people - fine but this legislation is there anyway enforced by local councils. As for not answering whether or not he’s uneasy that Adam Applegarth had a salary of £1.4m for being a failure - well people will make up your own minds.
Having been closely involved with the excellent work that PCSO's do in my town (Bodmin) the tragic story of the young boy who drowned saving his sister really gave me food for thought. The question that keeps bothering me is that, if the individuals involved were not PCSO's and had simply been passing by, would they have jumped in? Was it their training and uniform that prevented them from doing so. Human nature's adrenalin obviously didn't kick in and supercede all else and so it makes me think that maybe they wouldn't have done so under any circumstance. Therefore, I ...
I was going to write about fixed-term Parliaments, but I’m short of time and Lynne Featherstone has said much of what I would have said. However, I have managed to find a petition on the Number 10 site calling for a fixed four-year term, so you can tell Gordon Brown - or whichever junior members of his staff looks at the petitions - yourself what you think.
Division of Labour points out that this New York Times article includes a small snippet at the end: Sea ice around Antarctica has seen unusual winter expansions recently, and this week is near a record high. So, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the high levels of retreating ice is due to the unusually high level [...]
A few minutes makes all the difference between getting straight through to Newcastle and getting stuck in congestion. We are in the latter at the moment, stuck between Sunniside and Lobley Hill. Fortunately my train is not til 9am. And of course it is raining. A good start to the week!---Sent via BlackBerry
I joined the Liberal Party during the 1987 general election having been signed up by local Lib Dem councillor Stan Wilson. This led to my first canvassing experience on behalf of Glyn Nightingale in the ward held by Lib Dem blogger Chris Abbot and, after the election, much encouragement that I should go to conference. So, [...]
Sometime ago (back in August) Colin Ross sent me an article How to ...volunteer by Guy Browning from The Guardian Weekend on Saturday August 18, 2007. | < | September 2007 | > | ||||
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