Today was the fourth time I've seen Neil Innes live, and you never know what to expect. He's one of the true greats of both comedy and music, but precisely because of that he's hard to fit into a neat category. The first time I saw him was in a smallish theatre, with a two-man [...]
Will G.K. Chesterton become the first member of the Liberal Party to be made a saint? David Boyle on The Real Blog shares my admiration for the great paradoxmonger. "The American Dream has become a nightmare of social stasis." Niall Ferguson writes for The Daily Beast on the decline of social mobility in America. CampaignerKate wins a Buckinghamshire skirmish in the battle for our freedom to roam. Boris Johnson's plan to bulldoze a nature reserve in West London risks flouting a law that recognises its outstanding wildlife importance, says Lester Holloway. "With lift bridges, flint mills, lime kilns, tunnels and ...
Reblogged from Andrew McFarland Campbell: My paper on 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy was discussed on a Facebook group recently. One of the contributors made some interesting points about it, and I want to address them here. I have read your article, and if I could sum up your thesis in one sentence, it would [...]
Boris Johnson's plan to bulldoze a nature reserve risks flouting a law that recognises its' outstanding wildlife importance. The London Mayor and Transport for London are currently consulting on a proposal to concrete over Scrubs [...]
Mon 26th
21:43
Adam Hills - "UKIP is independent in the same way a recently divorced man is independent"
Given that I stole his catch phrase for the title of my recent rant about Stuart Wheeler, I hope that it is ok to repay Adam by including his UKIP rant from last Wednesday's "The Last Leg". (Warning – this clip contains very strong language.)
Mon 26th
21:28Do you want a graduate career without getting covered in oozy, yukky stuff? Computer Science could b...
According to Chart 4 of 2011/12 destination of leavers from higher education, published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the highest unemployment rates for UK resident graduates with first degrees six months after finishing their course are those who took Computer Science, with 14.4% of that year's cohort failing to find a job. However, all is not bleak as the Times Higher Education would like to paint these findings ("Try turning it off and on again") for people wanting to follow the same career path I started down some 28 years ago. 60.7% of Computer Science graduates do find a ...
Behind this modest brick facade stands the Great Hall of Leicester Castle, one of the most remarkable medieval buildings still standing in Britain. It was originally erected in the 11th or 12th century and the root timbers may date from the 14th century. It was open to the public today as part of Leicester's Old Town Festival, one of several taking place in the city today. You don't get a sense of the size of the medieval hall because the space was divided in the 19th century to form a civil and a criminal court with an entrance lobby between. ...
The Western Mail reports that patients in Wales are more than four times less likely to receive a newer cancer drug on the NHS than people in England, it has been claimed: The Rarer Cancers Foundation (RCF) said figures relating to the number of individual patient funding requests (IPFRs) in Wales shows difficulty in accessing certain medications that could be available through a cancer drugs fund which exists in England. The charity said figures show that two cancer drugs - bevacizumab and cetuximab - accounted for more than 100% of the IPFR drug requests in Wales, and the four most ...
Today's report by the Institute for Public Policy Research recommending that we introduce compulsory first-time voting for young people is the most patronising I have seen for a long time. The Institute suggest that such a measure could overcome the current apathy among young voters and tackle the "inequality" in turnout rates which means older, wealthier people in society have more influence over politics. In my view it is more likely to lead to widespread civil disobedience by young people, and I would not blame them. I do not agree with compulsory voting. I do think that everybody should vote ...
Even before I knew about the manic pixie dream girl trope, I wanted to be one. I had the crazy coloured hair and the urge to help people, the creativity and the quirky interests. I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I wasn't sure if I wanted Clementine, or wanted to be her (although there was no such indecision about Natalie Portman's character in Garden State). I even had a line on my OkCupid profile once that said something like, "I'm the manic pixie dream girl that doesn't run away at the end of the story". I'm late ...
[IMG: David Laws] The Lib Dem conference in Glasgow will include a debate on the party's manifesto themes document. It contains some very interesting details on civil liberties, which should be read in the context not only of this being the manifesto prequel but also being a document with a foreword by Nick Clegg and being moved at conference by David Laws. These, then, are words that both Clegg and Laws have closely scrutinised and are putting their name to in public. And what do the words say about secret courts? We will find practical alternatives to the use of ...
[IMG: martin-luther-king-jr] This Wednesday the BBC will be marking the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech' with a special programme at 9am on Radio 4. The entire speech will be read by 19 well-known human rights activists, including Maya Angelou, Doreen Lawrence, Mary Robinson, Malala Yousafzai and the Dalai Lama. You can see the full list of readers here. The programme will be repeated at 2.30pm on BBC World Service, or you can, of course, catch up on i-Player. It would be good to hear from Lib Dem Voice readers ...
When are wars* legal? As the West examines the options for going to war with Syria, the debate around how to make such a war legal has re-emerged; the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, insisted this morning that any response "would be in accordance with international law." Below is a quick guide to the laws on war as they currently stand, as well as consideration of some of the issues that have risen out of wanting to go to war with Syria. The foundation stone of current international law on war is the United Nations Charter. Over 190 countries are members ...
As part of my quest to ensure I have a reasonable backup of all my social media data, I've been investigating ho easy it is to export photos from TwitPic. I've been using TwitPic since 2008 and have uploaded 1,200 images there. There's no official export function for TwitPic. The services which used to exist relied on their RSS feeds - which have since been killed off. This little Python script uses some undocumented APIs to grab all your images, save them in a directory, and make sure they have the correct timestamp. Firstly, the documented bit. It's possible to ...
..... at around this time, this happened... I can scarcely believe that a whole quarter of a century has elapsed. I was incredibly lucky to find, while still (only just) a teenager, a loving life partner with kindness, patience, wit and tolerance sufficient to cope with the position of the Liberal Democrats in our lives. Thanks, Bob. My sister made us laugh on our wedding day. At the age of 13, she was bridesmaid, and was knocking back what she apparently thought were glasses of orange juice and were in fact Buck's Fizz, which enabled her to share some of ...
Seriously! And Depressingly! In this blog post from 2011, George Monbiot explains why this is bad news: An episode of Top Gear showed Jeremy Clarkson and James May setting off for Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire, 60 miles away. The car unexpectedly ran out of charge when they got to Lincoln, and had to be pushed. They [...]
It may still be the holiday season, but Camden Council has landed residents of Kilburn ward with a tricky August challenge if they want to influence the most important planning application we have seen for years. As I have blogged about before, discussion regarding the development at the Abbey Road/Belsize Road junction has been going [...]
liberal-democrats-australia: A small delegation of Liberal Democrats attended The Hot Potato van on Saturday in the lead-up to RAC's Rally for Refugee Justice. If you would like to "start a conversation" about refugees and asylum seekers, download the amazing (mostly vegan) recipes, or donate to this worthy and humanitarian cause, visit thehotpotato website.
As a supporter of Cancer Research UK (CRUK) I have found myself faced with a bit of dilemma recently. I am very familiar with the excellent work performed by its many scientists but am unhappy that it has embraced ASH and deeply concerned by what I see as a change in emphasis away from scientific research towards political advocacy. Symptoms of this malaise include a slogan shift from "beating cancer through research" to the worryingly trite "together we will beat cancer", propaganda on lifestyle links to cancer badly dressed up as science and a tendency to employ increasingly strident spin ...
Gatley military historian John Hartley's book about the 17th Manchesters batallion and the men who served in it during the Great War is now for sale on Amazon – you can see and buy it here. John's grandfather served with the battalion – the second of the Manchester Pals units. It was formed at the beginning of September 1914, initially from the clerks and warehousemen of the city's major employers. After training at Heaton Park and Salisbury Plain, it went on active service in November 1915. The men saw action at the Somme in 1916, Arras and Ypres in 1917 ...
posted The Blood is The Life 25-08-2013 http://t.co/iWBFmEbtyX on #dreamwidth (tags: (from twitter) dreamwidth ) Has goverment "welfare failure" cost £1.4bn, as Labour claimed this week? http://t.co/pvxevaZVpO (tags: (from twitter) ) [IMG: comment count unavailable] comments
[IMG: The David Party] I saw this interesting question a day or so ago: Are we drifting blindly towards 1984-style surveillance? If we take CCTV, for example, I don't think anyone is proposing or trying to put CCTV cameras in private areas (like the cameras in 1984). And given the benefits in terms of security and crime detection, there is a general acceptance that the extent of CCTV coverage in this country is reasonable. That doesn't mean that there aren't certain examples of CCTV which are debatable and, indeed, are debated. On the subject of communication: If someone writes me ...
Note from the district council St Albans City and District Council is making it easier for residents and visitors to the District to pay for parking by introducing a cashless parking option. You no longer need to search for the right change to pay for on-street parking in the Council's Controlled Parking Zones in the District. Instead, you now have the option of paying by mobile phone. The PayByPhone service will charge the parking fee to a credit or debit card. You can also pay for parking at the Council-operated Civic Centre and Westminster Lodge car parks in St Albans ...
I'm guessing that everyone has heard of ash dieback decease? But then I got to thinking about branches falling off trees near my own house, of neighbour's reporting part of dead trees overhanging into their gardens. This weekend I was reminded of a long running saga of a constituent's shed being clobbered by a falling branch, something which I have now escalated to the deputy leader of the Central Bedfordshire Council, since Highways are denying it has anything to do with them. Trees do that, they're just plants, right? Well, maybe not. I delved a bit deeper. It seems there ...
There was an article in the Sunday Herald in Glasgow yesterday, by the financial journalist Ian Fraser, whose book on RBS is due for publication shortly. It reported on some of the events of the Edinburgh Book Festival with an economic slant, including mine. It quotes me being staggeringly optimistic: "This is the calm before the storm. Given the poverty of the current political and economic arrangements - and our own understanding of the way things actually work - I believe that change is about to happen. If we meet again here in five years' time, there will be a ...
More comedy genius from Australia's Clarke and Dawe: Also on YouTube.
We are pleased that Rush Hill has been resurfaced, but there is an areas that is unfinished near the old Rose and Laurel Pub, this has been reported to the council.
Mon 26th
09:04
Compulsory voting for young people. Have the IPPR run out of ideas or have the BBC run out of news?
So the BBC is running a story today regarding an IPPR report saying the state should force young people to vote on pain of a fine. They say that the plans, to be set out in a forthcoming report, involve a small fine for young people deciding not to vote at their first election. Which is odd really because I thought the IPPR had already done this, this year. Back in April the IPPR released this on their site and it was covered by most, if not all, of the national news organisations in the country. I commented on it ...
LibDemVoice's surveys of party members signed-up to our discussion forum have been running for close to four years now. (I posted yesterday the final set of figures from our most recent poll.) Our surveys are a way of testing members' views on a variety of hot topics. And as they've been running throughout the first three years of the Coalition they're also an interesting record of changing views on how the Coalition is regarded within the party. If you would like to take part in the LibDemVoice surveys, there are simply two steps you need to follow: 1) Be a ...
A friend of mine, scion of a prominent Liberal family in Batley in the 1960s and 70s, and now living in Australia, has sent me these detailed views. Dear Peter, Oz election? Apathy, contempt. But I'd better explain. Until recently we had two very unpopular major party leaders. Most people never forgave Gillard for ousting the `people's choice' in Rudd, so she never had much chance with the voters, and with half the Labor party factions or the `faceless men' who appear able to pull the strings in the background. Rudd made appointments based on ability, rather than balancing factions, ...
I have had complaints from constituents about the noise of loose manhole covers on Perth Road (junction with Pennycook Lane/Step Row in middle of Perth Road) and also at the junction with Ryehill Lane (again in the middle of Perth Road). It was particularly noticeable when an HGV went over them early morning or late at night. I raised the matter with Scottish Water, who promised repairs to take place last Thursday so this problem is hopefully now resolved.
I was planning to do a linkblog today, but then I noticed that everything I'd shared or bookmarked in the last week was about Chelsea Manning or the Miranda detention, and frankly I'm depressed already without rereading those. Anyway, for those who care, I've been very ill this week — my wife's been away and [...]
