Nick vs Nigel is just around the corner, but this weekend it's all about Bill vs Roger. A war of words has broken out between East Midlands MEPs Bill Newton Dunn (Lib Dem) and Roger Helmer (UKIP). Helmer has been ducking Bill's challenges to a debate between the two of them for some time now [...]
For all those who insist on posting comments on my blog about tribal medicinal cures: I won't publish them. Please desist.Filed under: HIV, scam Tagged: HIV, tribal medicine
This week, the Gibraltar Parliament made history. It passed a Civil Partnerships Bill which extends to all couples the right to enter a civil partnership. It is not limited to same-sex couples as currently in the United Kingdom. Any couple may register as civil partners, provided of course that neither party is already either married or in...
I beleive Manston airports fate was sealed as soon as Infratil sold it to Stagecoach boss Ann Gloag. The assets are probably worth considerably more than the purchase price, it will be interesting how local council Labour leader Clive Hart handles himself with this one, Labour have done their best to damage the airport prospects, such as Clive Harts decision not to big up KLM's support for the Airport, he claimed couldn't speak publicly because the county council elections were in progress, it was a real joy to see arrogant Labour candidates getting a good kicking in the ballot boxes ...
Here's my report on what happened at the Parish Council meeting on Thursday. Comments welcome. There is a prospective tenant for the Willows (which is by the entrance to the village) - an estate agent. Hopefully this will be a long-term let (probably related to projected housing growth in Northstowe!), rent is used by the Parish Council for the direct benefit of the village. The basketball hoop at the Farmhouse has been removed (as this was generating noise and disturbance for a local business). This is now available to be relocated elsewhere in the village, the one requirement would seem ...
Budget Announcement Brings Good News For Cambridge Wednesday's Budget confirmed the Cambridge City Deal bringing a £500 million grant to our area for transport infrastructure. Including other elements, such as the New Homes Bonus, we'll be getting about £1 billion towards housing and transport expenses. This will help Cambridge be able to build upon its success as a place opportune for investment, rife with employment opportunities, while making it a place that people can get around and afford to live in. This would not have happened without hard work from our City Council Leader, Tim Bick, as well as Nick ...
I've recently seen a new kind of notification on the royalty statements I get through Lulu — sales through "Ingram". What that means is that my books have started appearing in the catalogues of Ingram, one of the two big distributors of books to bookshops. And that at least some sales are happening that way. [...]
[IMG: ALDC Master Logo (for screen)] Four principal by-elections took place yesterday. In Wroxham ward of Broadland Council, the local Liberal Democrats continued their by-election winning streak having first taken a council seat in the ward five years ago. Ben McGilvray came from fourth place in 2009 to become one of the country's youngest councillors but after moving out of the area a by-election was called. Alex Cassam increased the Liberal Democrat vote to take 48.3% and retain the seat for the party. The Conservatives came second on 34.2%, UKIP (who did not stand last time) took third with 11.2% ...
Vince Cable's response to Ed Balls in the Budget debate yesterday was a work of art and deserves to be quoted at some length: I have calculated that this is the 18th Budget to which I have responded in some capacity, and the fourth directly to the shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls. However, since he wrote many of the others, I was probably responding to him indirectly. Having heard the right hon. Gentleman over the years, I have picked up on some traits. First, he obviously has a capacity for a crunchy, memorable soundbite that often turns out to be wrong. ...
I was speaking with some teachers this week and one mentioned that her holidays did not coincide with other members of the family. This reminded me of the recent debate on this subject by MPs and their suggestion that school holidays should be staggered. At first glance staggering holidays is a good thing. Think of the wakes weeks (if you are old enough). Towns did not take the same weeks as their neighbours for many reasons. Think of the implications on the transport system as well as the holidays that are available. However the staggering of holidays would not help ...
[IMG: Lloyds Bank, Leighton Buzzard - Some rights reserved by dlanor smada] It is a lovely spring morning in 2015 and you are on someone's doorstep. There is a delightful breeze and you clutch your canvas cards to make sure they don't blow away. The lady on the other side of the front door gives you a big smile and asks you about jobs - she recognises that the coalition has made important strides towards making us all a little less reliant on the City of London. "But how are you going to do it?" she asks. "If small business ...
If these questions were in the political sphere I would hazard a guess the Electoral Comission would laugh them out of their office. Although to be honest I half expected a threat to raise season ticket prices. Picture with thanks to Ash Moon (@cararena)
Here's what I had to say in my opening remarks at the #ReactWales event down in Swansea, hosted by the European Parliamentary Information Office. The motion was that; "Wales' cultural life has been enriched by European immigrants." Thank you for the opportunity to be here tonight, and thank you for involving young people and students [...]
As far as I'm aware there is only one meeting planned next week at BTC The Events Committee meets on Tuesday 25th March, 6:30, at Arms Evertyne House
A lot of people have been retweeting their first tweet the last couple of days. I didn't bother with mine (mostly because it was the incredibly dull "signing up for twitter"), but I have been dragged into another exercise in nostalgia today. I'm writing a thing which involves me knowing when I did something, so inevitably, to find out, I trawled through my blog archives and found lots of stuff from back when I was a proper blogger and used to write actual posts on a regular basis... So here, for your delectation, is a slew of landmarks in my ...
Yesterday saw four principal by-elections. In Wroxham ward of Broadland Council, the local Liberal Democrats continued their by-election winning streak having first taken a council seat in the ward five years ago. Ben McGilvray came from fourth place in 2009 to become one of the country's youngest councillors but after moving out of the area a [...]
[IMG: TUC demonstration York 2014] It was Lib Dem spring conference, 2012. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. The crucial vote that weekend was on the NHS Bill. The pause was set to un-pause once more - if, that is, the Lib Dem membership voted it through. The mood was tense on both sides of the debate within the party. Just outside the secure zone, there was a gaggle of Labour supporters trying to convince Lib Dem members to vote the Bill down. Doing a very, very, very bad job of this, I hasten to add. Actually, if their aim was to get the members ...
This week's UK Budget has revealed the usual muddle amongst politicians, journalists and the public over the whole issue of pensions and savings – with opinion strongly favouring several flavours of having your cake and eating it. This masks some profound and sensible reforms carried out by the coalition government. First version of the cake. We like people to save. But we want them to spend to promote economic growth. We worry that a large part of the population will become dependent on the state and taxes because they save too little. But when they do, as in the early ...
I was appalled earlier to discover from the Liverpool Echo that Liverpool Council is considering selling St Luke's Church to a developer. This iconic building which commemorates famines and bombings needs better treatment than that. I would be delighted to ... Continue reading →
That's some cat. [IMG: Pakistan news story] Hat-tip: Nigel Britto
[IMG: Vince Cable speaking York Europe Jobs Some rights reserved by Liberal Democrats] If we needed reminding how vital Europe is to British jobs in regions like the East Midlands, the bosses of car giants Hyundai and Toyota spelt it out. As a European candidate in May's elections I was alarmed to read that Hyundai, who have a base in Corby, warned against leaving the EU saying that if the UK were no longer in the single market it would throw up 'barriers' to doing business. There was a similar message from the boss of Toyota, who run a plant ...
Finally WordPress have got their act together and enabled blog access again. It has been a pretty busy few weeks in that I have been:- - supporting Liberal Democrat policy development which now backs pubco reform and action on food poverty. Interestingly a fringe party faction were putting out flyers of the sort the hard Left used to dole out at NUS Conference, imploring votes against these motions. Not a single Conference rep heeded their call, I am pleased to say.... - amending the Liberal Democrat constitution to widen the franchise. - doing quite a lot of writing on a ...
The extraordinary attack by the First Minister on the Labour MP for Cynon Valley, Ann Clwyd in last Tuesday's Plenary session of the Welsh Assembly was covered by the Times, who highlight some of the wider concerns about the health service here. The paper also report that it has emerged that the head of the Welsh health watchdog has raised concerns about her own inspectorate's ability to pick up on a scandal like that at Stafford Hospital. Kate Chamberlain, the chief executive of Health Inspectorate Wales, told the health committee that she could not give "assurance" that it would detect ...
Internet quizzes are giving a new lease of life to a popular piece of junk science. Live Science explains why it's still nonsense: Popular culture would have you believe that logical, methodical and analytical people are left-brain dominant, while the creative and artistic types are right-brain dominant. Trouble is, science never really supported this notion. [...]
[IMG: Wind turbine - Some rights reserved by thomas vl] David Cameron may now view climate change as a serious threat, thanks to the winter floods, but you wouldn't know it from his Chancellor's Budget statement on Wednesday. What did the Budget do for green growth and the low-carbon agenda? - Froze the carbon price floor (paid by large emitters) until the end of the decade. Introduced just last year at £16/tonne carbon dioxide, it was supposed to increase steadily to reach £30 in 2020 and £70 in 2030; now it'll stick at £18. This makes coal more attractive and ...
[IMG: Fleetville Poster 2014]
The world's top universities are in fierce competition with each other to attract the best students, the brightest academics and the most generous philanthropists. That's why major scientific breakthroughs are not only cherished for their intrinsic value, but also increasingly seen as an opportunity for a university to buttress its case to those three audiences. Do just the former, and the university misses out on an opportunity to help secure its future. Do just the latter, and the university risks undermining itself by looking too commercial. Do both, and you're on to a winner. It's that background which makes Stanford ...
Cornwall will be getting more than £10 million from the government to help repair our roads and other crucial infrastructure following the winter's bad weather. That's really good news and takes Cornwall more than halfway towards the total bill caused by the floods and storms. The latest bill for repairs is around £24 million. We know that roughly £4 million of this was in the form of emergency works and some of this will be covered by the revised Bellwin scheme. We expect to get around £2 million back from Bellwin. The latest news is a second pot will bring ...
Nick Clegg was in Launceston yesterday to meet with local Liberal Democrat members and supporters. We were hosted by Liberty Coffee and Jericho's - appropriately the old Liberal Club building. Earlier in the day, Nick announced that there would be another year's funding for the Cornish Language Partnership - £120,000. The Cornish language is an important part of the Cornish culture and having continuing funding to promote it is very good news. Tweet
How do you get your adverts talked about when you have little or no budget for actually posting them on billboards? I was asked a similar question some years ago by a friend of mine at a development charity, who had been given the money to make a short TV advert about development aid, but no money to buy the space to show it. I suggested he try to get it censored. This turned out to be quite simple. The TV companies refused to show it on the grounds that it was 'political' (these were the days before YouTube). As ...
[IMG: power to the people] There is a lot wrong or out-of-date with our current political system. The Lib Dem policy paper "Power to the People" passed at the spring conference in York, addresses those issues in a typically liberal, radical way. It is worthy of our support, as a step forward, even if some find parts of it imperfect. "Power to the People" aims to explore the viability of overseas constituencies. This would be quite radical for the UK but would - I believe - benefit it a great deal. There are around five million British citizens living abroad, ...
The Lib Dems had a motion to Gateshead Council yesterday welcoming the rise in the national minimum wage and the raising of the personal tax allowance to £10,000 (it was written before this week's budget). The motion went on to call on the borough's MPs to support moves to raise the allowance to £12,500, the equivalent of full time pay on the national minimum wage. Labour could not vote for
Today (21 March), Shropshire Council announced that it will not after all be insisting that Ludlow spends its £120,000 grant for the new museum at the Buttercross by 31 March (see backstory). This means that the threat to the project, and the knock-on impacts on the Assembly Rooms redevelopment, have been removed. This morning, Mark [...]
The Guardian has splashed this morning on the news that the new tuition fees system is likely to cost as much as the old system 'despite' the tripling of the fees themselves. This 'fact' in itself gets my goat as it equates the level of debt incurred with the amount paid out by students - which is of course a nonsense. By raising the salary level at which students started to payback, from 15k to 21k, in the midst of the worst economic recession since the 1930s, and with youth unemployment especially bad, it seemed inevitable that student receipts against ...
Here's some of the articles that have caught my attention in the past couple of days... Osborne: Stealth convert to 'Keynesian Thatcherism' | Anatole Kaletsky Anatole Kaletsky on the politics and economics of the recovery » Osborne: Stealth convert to 'Keynesian Thatcherism' http://reut.rs/1lUrC38 Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight: The Emptiness of Data Journalism | New Republic If this is the best the Nate-haters can do, he's just fine » The Emptiness of Data Journalism http://bit.ly/1erKFjT 22 Venn Diagrams Only British People Will Understand Awesome > 22 Venn Diagrams Only British People Will Understand http://bzfd.it/1geKBpU (h/t entire timeline) Labour's fury: 'Stop patronising the ...
One definition of the word 'patronising' from the Collins dictionary is 'having a superior manner, condescending'. You may prefer a definition that tells you about an apparent kindness which betrays a feeling of superiority but however you define the word you need to know something about the feelings of others if you are going to call them patronising. Consider the wording of the latest Conservative advert: "Bingo! Cutting the bingo tax & beer duty to help hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy." Not only do we save a whole penny on a pint of beer, we get ...
This time next week, I'll be on a train on my way to Aberdeen along with lots of other Scottish Liberal Democrats for our Spring Conference. This is the party's main Conference, held over 3 days. Here's my pick of ... Continue reading →
The Edible Atlas - I want to eat France right now but I suspect I'd get more use out of India (tags: ) Five times more sanctions than jobs on government's work programme This news source is not entirely unbiased but it's still worrying (tags: ) YouGov finds 66 percent backing Osborne's budget but LAB's 5% poll lead remains of course if Mike had read Stephen Tall's piece about how budgets very very rarely produce a positive poll response he'd might not have been so surprised by this (tags: ) UK Polling Report on the effect of budgets on polling ...
[IMG: AECC Aberdeen Some rights served by Graham Scott] This time next week, I'll be on a train on my way to Aberdeen along with lots of other Scottish Liberal Democrats for our Spring Conference. This is the party's main Conference, held over 3 days. Here's my pick of the agenda. The debates Part of the reason I'm getting up at such an ungodly hour on Friday is to get up there for the first two debates. Alison McInnes, our justice spokesperson, has done much to highlight the many iniquities of our Justice system under the illiberal regime of Kenny ...
As part of the local community planning partnership (LCPP) arrangements across the city, council communities officers produce a quarterly e-mail update on activities and in their LCPP area (there are eight of them across Dundee, each covering a council ward). The West End one is produced by Natalie Mackland, our excellent communities officer, with input from various organisations and the March 2014 one has just been published. This can be downloaded from the Dundee Partnership website here (along with previous editions from 2013).
At long last the work to refurbish the area outside the Library is complete. It is very "bright" at present, hopefully it will weather down. And also hopefully the money will be found to give the building itself a bit of a spruce up. The postcard shows the building when it was the Mechanics Institute. The building is instantly recognisable. I know that stepped access is not really appropriate these days, but I can't help think that a design something similar to the original would looked better. Isn't hindsight wonderful? But one bit of progress that I do approve of ...
[IMG: Twitter logo] There are currently 45 Lib Dem MPs on Twitter, according to this list curated by Mark Pack. Thanks to Twitter's #FirstTweet website gizmo we can see the first words of wisdom the party's elected representatives chose to offer the world. I mean, who wouldn't want to? Read this list and you'll discover who the first Lib Dem MP to tweet was*, who talked about themselves in the third person, and which former cabinet minister asked in 2009, "Wondering if any bankers actually understand what is going on." And, riddle me this, how did Greg Mulholland's first tweet ...
Ah, that very special genius that is Haringey Labour at work again. Step one, spend £3.2m on new kitchens, bathrooms and windows for flats in Tottenham. Step two, shortly afterwards, vote to demolish the said flats. As Cllr Richard Wilson, Haringey Liberal Democrat Housing spokesperson, has said: This is a disgraceful waste of taxpayers' money. Why was work done on homes that will soon be knocked down. Those millions could have been spent on the Noel Park Estate instead. How typical of Labour to spend a fortune on homes due to be knocked down whilst neglecting an historic estate in ...
[IMG: image] I'm tremendously excited about next week. I'm going back to school! Yes, a full 37 years after I left West Buckland School on the fringes of Exmoor in Devon, I will be returning there next week on two days. On one of those days I will be involved in an outdoor endeavour of which I will write next week. On Wednesday, through the good offices of the West Buckland School Foundation, I'll be experiencing a "Back to school day". This is eerily reminiscent of John Osborne's 1971 BBC1 'Play for Today' called 'The Right Prospectus', where a middle-aged ...
There needs to be a major improvement to cancer waiting times after figures published this week showed that a key waiting time target has once again been missed. The Welsh Labour government has a target for 95% of urgent patients to be seen by a specialist within 62 days. A target that has been missed every month since 2008. New figures released today show that, only 90.6% of these cases had started definitive treatment within this time period. The figures also showed that just two of the six LHBs met this 95% target. Last year the Health Minister told us ...
Local Liberal Democrats are stunned that for the third year running street lights could still be thrown into chaos as clocks move forward. Leader of the Opposition on HCC, Liberal Democrat Stephen Giles-Medhurst said, "After almost three years of switching the lights off at midnight we still cannot get a assurance that the regular problem we have had every time the clocks change will not occur. "Each year and time we are assured it will not be a problem. At least this time the Tories have admitted in advance there will be problems. The question I want answered is why ...
