Welcome to Broxtowe Enews, brought to you by the Liberal Democrats and edited by David Watts, the leader of the Lib-Dems on Broxtowe Borough Council. May I give a special welcome to the new readers that we have this week. 1. Police Stop and SearchOne very worrying statistic that was announced this week is that in Nottinghamshire black people are nine times as likely to be the subject of a stop and search by the police as white people are. Asian people are twice as likely to be searched as white people. The police have admitted that this is a ...
Sat 7th
21:32
Jonny Marray is the first British man to win a Wimbledon title without the help of a woman since 193...
It's sounds prevocative. Have I just made that up? No. I've done my research. Several British men have won Wimbledon mixed doubles titles – most recently Jamie Murray in 2007. British Women have won titles, such as Virginia Wade in 1977. But no British man has won a Wimbledon title since 1936 without the aid of a woman (i.e without being in a mixed doubles pair). Am I right? Or am I right? In 1936, Fred Perry won the Wimbledon Men's singles title, the last British man to do so. In 1936 also, Pat Hughes and Raymond Tuckey won the ...
Ward: Odd DownParish: App Ref:Registered: 12/02497/FULLocation: N/AGrid Ref: 26th June 2012Proposal: Expiry Date: 21st August 2012Officer: 35 Upper Bloomfield Road Odd Down Bath Bath And North East Somerset BA2 2RYApplicant: (E)373552 - (N)162085Change of use from hairdressers (A1) to tattoo studio (Sui Generis). Heather FaulknerPoint Blank TattoosBrooksideFosse LaneBatheastonBathBA1 7NJ
This is a very sad story, but one which highlights an inspiring story. Josephine "Ann" Harris died an hour or two after Barack Obama visited her restaurant, for breakfast, in West Akron, Ohio. Very sad. But the tragedy brings forward the story of a wonderful woman who had (what we would call) a mixed race family, rather like Obama, whose grandmother (as he pointed out to Ann Harris) was also called "Ann". She built up a legendary restaurant and was a great Obama fan. Her hero hugged her just a few hours before she was taken ill and passed away. ...
This is Marlborough House, which stands next to Leicester City Council's offices at the New Walk Centre. Those offices are to be demolished and - what do you know? - Marlborough house is too. A few days ago the Leicester Mercury said: Work to demolish a council office block is almost ready to go ahead. Leicester City Council announced a year ago that Marlborough House, in Welford Road, had failed a surveyor's inspection. The 125 children's services officers based in the 1970s block were moved out in November. The city council put up a concrete barrier outside due to fears ...
I hosted the closing reception for the 'Double Jeopardy' international conference for workers on LGBTI asylum issues. Lindsay and I met delegates from Uganda, South Africa, Kenya, British Colombia. Conference was a huge success, they all told us [IMG: Posted by Picasa]
Last year I contrasted two news stories to ask if you are more likely to be saved by volunteers than professionals. If you are a cat stuck up a tree in the Scottish Borders, the answer is yes. Over to The Berwick Advertiser: Lothian and Borders Fire Brigade has refuted [sic] claims that it didn't come to the rescue of a cat stranded 60ft up a tree due to healthy and safety reasons, insisting it is against policy to rescue small animals.Eighteen-month-old Diesel was stuck up a tree near to his owner's house in Foulden for five days. After the ...
Lord Bonkers writes exclusively for Liberal England: In recent weeks my guide to tea making Fifty Shades of Earl Grey has been selling gratifyingly well. This morning I gave orders for it to be reprinted.
This should be a big day for Liberals. For generation we have promoted a vision of an an economy where businesses are owned by those who work in them, where as Richard Wainwright used to say 'labour hires capital'. Today we made a big stride in that direction, so why is it that Lib dem bloggers tell so little about the Nuttall report? In his new role Norman Lamb commissioned Graeme Nuttall to produce a review of employee ownership. Today Nick Clegg and Norman Lamb launched the report. Clegg's speech can be found in full here he told his audience ...
Now that I am able to sleep like a normal human being again (that is not to say that I will, but I could if I wanted to), there is a little time to reflect.In the past three list selections, I have been the Returning Officer, dealing with the influx of requests for application packs and the like, and so have had a pretty good idea what is happening. As Chair of the Shortlisting Committee, all I know is what our Returning Officer is willing to tell me, so I'm not as well-informed as I might otherwise wish. All I ...
[IMG: Posted by Picasa]
You may have seen in the news recently the quote from Isobel Cohen who, successfully, took a university finals exam only 28 hours after giving birth, attached to a catheter and dosed up on painkillers: At the time it seemed like a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but now I think it's slightly insane. An excellent epitaph for the exertions involved in many an election campaign too I think!
On Thursday I was delighted to be able to attend the a ceremony in Central Library (half way through refurbishment!) to announce the winners of the Time Capsule Competition for Manchester School Children. Children were asked to suggest an object that would give children in 2092 an idea of what it was like to be a child in 2012. There were eleven winners from schools across the City and they each got the opportunity to place their suggested item in the capsule and receive a cash prize for them and their school from the sponsors. The Time capsule will be ...
[IMG: Woodstock Road bins] I've had a surge of complaints about missed bin collections from local residents – with wheelie bins not emptied on the scheduled day. I first contacted the Labour councillor in charge of waste on 22 June asking for an urgent explanation of what was happening – and whether the Council's contractor Veolia was struggling with the new bin system. Despite the obvious urgency it took almost 2 weeks to get a response saying that some collections in Stroud Green are being delayed and that the Council are having to monitor Veolia very closely. I've been assured ...
This is my end of week round up of Liberal Democrat EU news - particularly what our MEPs, who sit in the influential ALDE group, are getting up to in the European Parliament. All stories are courtesy of Angelika Schneider at libdemmeps.com Monday Sir Graham Watson, Lib Dem MEP for the South West, responded to the speech by Liam Fox, in which he called for an immediate renegotiation of Britain's relationship with the EU, by calling on tories to come clean on the alternatives to EU membership saying: "This is a desperate move by a discredited Tory to bang the ...
This article appeared in today's Manchester Evening News. In May I was appointed the Chair of the Council's Communities Scrutiny Committee. I was hoping that the Communities Scrutiny Committee could have a standing 'Public Question Time' item at the beginning of each meeting, inviting members of the Public to ask questions of the Executive Member and/or Strategic Lead Officer relating to their responsibilities. A number of other Councils' Scrutiny committees have a similar item (e.g. Liverpool).However I was told that this would not be possible as it is not constitutional in Manchester. Therefore I requested Council Bosses and other Scrutiny ...
There is an interesting article in today's Independent, which reports that the Home Secretary is panicking over fears that November's Police Commission elections are going to be a non-event. The paper says that Theresa May has asked the Treasury for money to fund an advertising campaign to encourage stronger candidates to come forward.due to growing alarm among ministers that the contests for 41 new local police chiefs will be an embarrassing flop with dismal turn-outs in November's elections. They add that Minister's hopes that a series of well-known non-political figures would bid for the posts have not materialised andas a ...
Hmm. When last year I asked why on earth we hadn't called the revised tuition fee system a Graduate Tax, it was suggested to me that this had been blocked by the Treasury and this was why we had called it 'tuition fees', even though it was a very different system. I put in a FOI request to the DBIS to see if this was true - here's the reply I received.. Dear Mr Morris, Thank you for your email of 5 September 2011 where you requested:Any advice given to Ministers regarding whether the new system of charging fees from ...
Delighted to learn of three local Hornsey & Wood Green athletes who have been selected for the Olympics and Paralympics. Congratulations and good luck. They are: Sitting volleyball player Rob Richardson who lives in Wood Green and will be competing at his first Paralympics. Indeed London 2012 will be the first time ever that Great Britain will have Sitting Volleyball teams represented at the Games. Basketball player Azania Stewart who also lives in Wood Green and will be competing at her first Olympics. As with sitting volleyball, London 2012 will be the first time ever that Great Britain will have ...
An elected body would be suited for all Back in May I wrote about the timing of the Lords reform and questioned whether now is the right time? Then on Wednesday I got chatting to Ed who raised the following point; When is a good time? There will always be something that is arguably more important than constitutional reform. Its true. Our political system, financial structures and society are all broken in one way or another. It would be too simplistic to blame the last Labour government, the problem is too systematic and embedded in years of neglect or poor ...
A pretty short history of the Russian Orthodox Church from 988 to 1988, written of course just before the world changed; it's fasinating to remember the context of the Cold War and of those who attempted what we would now call Track Two diplomacy across the Iron Curtain. The first half of the book is pre-revolutionary history, so a bit less controversial; House rather charmingly tries to draw parallels between Russian and English church history (it's pretty clear that his audience is the liberal English churchgoer), such as the fact that Henry VIII and his contemporary Ivan the Terrible were ...
A few days back, I spotted a Haringey Council poster aimed at Haringey residents put up in – of all places – Westminster Tube Station. (For those not familiar with London, Westminster is not only not Haringey, it is not next to Haringey either.) A pretty wasteful place to put up the poster and so no surprise that Lynne Featherstone, one of Haringey's MPs, picked up on the issue. More surprising, however, has been Haringey Council's reaction – or more accurately, that of the ruling Labour group. It's not that the poster was put up in the wrong place by ...
This is a first-person narrative published in 1861 by an author who was herself born into slavery in North Carolina; having endured continual sexual harassment from her owner, and borne two children by his neighbour (who meantime got elected to the House of Representatives), she eventually managed to escape into hiding locally, and took refuge in a cramped space in her grandmother's attic for seven years before finally fleeing to New York, where she eventually became freed and a campaigner for education and emancipation. (It's interesting that women were so visible in the Abolitionsit movement - cf Harriet Beecher Stowe, ...
Karen Armstrong's books about religion have not always worked for me, but this one did the trick - a fairly intense account of how we think the books of the Bible came to be written, and how they have then been used by Jewish and Christian believers over the centuries. Most of it was material with which I was already familiar, but presented in quite and intense and engaging format. I had not previously considered Wycliffe's links with the scholastic philosophers (which perhaps shows how little I had previously thought about him at all). Not really a book for beginners ...
I was listening to the podcast of last week's Radio 4's Week in Westminster the other day and I was somewhat taken aback by the candour of Conservative backbencher Andrew Turner when he was questioned by Fraser Nelson about Lords reform: Fraser Nelson: Andrew, as far as you're concerned the House of Lords thing was intended as a fudge. To bring forward proposals and then to drop them. So it was intended as a fig leaf to the Lib Dems but not to do any more and that is as far as your understanding what David Cameron intended all along? ...
I'd had this big book on Elizabeth I sitting on the shelves looking at me for some time, but when I eventually picked it up at the end of last month I realised that it is actually four separate books inside a single cover - Young Elizabeth (1971), Danger to Elizabeth (1973), Marriage with My Kingdom: The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth I (1977) and Elizabeth Regina (1980), all slightly updated in 2004 (so references to the horrors of the twentieth century have been updated to the horrors of the twenty-first). The standout book for me, with a lot of material ...
Thank you for killing my novel The New York Times panned my book, then had to correct the review to fix all their errors. So why am I not angry? (tags: writing ) Are the Black Jews Jewish? Indigenous Judaism in Africa. (tags: religion race )
There are two meetings at Blyth Town Council next week Tuesday 10th July, 10:00 am at Ebor House, Premises Working group. This is a working group, so public may not permitted to attend , a thing which I have never been sure about. I think that because costs of possible new premises are involved ( as much to protect commercially sensitive information as as to protect council spending plans ) it would be Part II anyway. Thursday 12th July, 6:30 pm at Ebor House, Finance Committee Any changes, I'll let you know
Home Office minister Lynne Featherstone writes a monthly column for one of her local newspapers. Here is the latest one, turning on the local council's record on road repairs. It sometimes seems that the only thing Haringey Council is good at is finding new ways to fail local people. So maybe we shouldn't be too surprised to read that the borough has the worst maintained roads in England. A new survey by the Department for Transport shows that one in five of Haringey's main roads are in need of some kind of repair. No other council area in England has ...
As usual, I very much enjoyed this Torchwood novel by James Goss. Unusually, it has a very strong comedic element, not something that Torchwood always managed successfully and not something I'd seen Goss try at all. The beautiful concept is that Agnes Havisham, a stern and sarcastic Victorian lady, emerges from decades of suspended animation to do an official assessment of Torchwood, at the same moment as two separate alien threats emerge to torment the innocent citizens of Cardiff. Unlike his first book, Almost Perfect, we get a pretty satisfying exploration of Jack's character from another perspective, and decent page ...
May, Milliband and Clarke talk drugs as Lib Dems conspicuously silent. I share Ewan's disquiet about this. (tags: ) Lorem Ipsum Generator - Samuel L Ipsum LMAO! (tags: ) Times Higher Education - With all due disrespect Teachers should encourage their students to disagree with them. I had three teachers that were great at this, and one of them was my dad. Shout out to Paul Rushton and Stuart Toddington who were the other two. Of course, all my other teachers had to put up with me disagreeing with them ANYWAY... (tags: ) Freedom of Information shows no evidence for ...
We started yesterday with the news that Peter Sagan had fitted a bell onto his bike in an effort to avoid crashes, and we ended it with him winning another stage as a crash reshaped the race. The first Friday last year was where the race started to be shaped, with Wiggins the first GC contender to be removed in a crash, followed by Brajkovic, Vinokourov and others over the weekend, and this year the race managed to compound all that chaos into one big crash. A huge chunk of the field were caught up in it, reducing the main ...
Back when I worked at party HQ, introducing our online petition system – available not only to central party staff but to campaigners all around the country – was one of our successful innovations. At the time, it was new, powerful and ahead of the competition. The passage of time, however, has not been that kind to it – both at the front end and behind the scenes with its data integration with other party systems. So it is excellent to see the party now starting to do something much better. Sign the "Fix Parliament" petition on Facebook and look ...
Last Saturday I asked the question 'the tuition fee system - should we really be trying to own it?' and it not only generated a fair bit of traffic - but quite a lot of debate. There now seems universal agreement that the whole process was a mistake, although there is much disagreement about what that mistake actually was. Some will argue that it was wrong in principle, the Tim Farron position, and indeed this remains the party's policy today. Others argue that it was only a mistake of presentation or positioning (as Richard Reeves suggested in the Independent this ...
Carnage once again on the roads So yesterday saw another flat stage and another that saw a crash that decimated the main field. Unlike the majority of them in recent days it did happen well outside the 3km point but close enough to the finish at about 25km that the peleton was in full pursuit of the breakaway that real time gaps opened out. According to Tweets by Mark Cavendish bikes were flying around him during the crash. But probably because the support vehicles couldn't get around it a puncture just after it meant he had to cycle for 3km ...
Laura Webb was a colleague of mine who was killed in the Edgware Road bomb in July 2005 Laura was a bright, optimistic and happy person and my abiding memory of her is someone who was always smiling. She had what everyone would call a sunny disposition, and the world is a sadder place without her I choose to remember Laura Webb BBC Obituary can be found here A list of all the victims of the 7/7 bombings can be found here.
The Courier and Evening Telegraph have been covering news of the encampment of travellers (see right) who have taken over the car park at the Riverside Nature Park over the past week and my raising residents' concerns about this and calling for the council to take necessary steps to have the situation resolved. This encampment fills the car park for the Riverside Nature Park and it is important that the car park promptly becomes available again for the purpose it is actually intended - as a short-term car park for people visiting the Nature Park, not as an unofficial caravan ...
WasteAware, the organisation set up by Hertfordshire's local authorities and funded by the County Council has produced a 'film noir comedy' in the vein of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, to explain to people the issues around properly separating food and garden waste from other rubbish. The professionally-produced film is, in total, thirty minutes long and STILL makes mistakes with what can and can't be disposed of for composting. Having spent £20,000 producing this film and a further unspecified amount getting it shown and put online, to date the County Council's records show just 1000 people have seen it. "The 15 ...
