It appears that David Cameron still wants to raise the Inheritance Tax (IHT) threshold to £1 million. He told a Saga meeting in Peacehaven in Sussex that: "Inheritance tax should only really be paid by the rich. It should not be paid by people who have worked hard and saved and who have bought a [...]
Part 1 was posted a few days ago.
I am going to two weddings tomorrow – same sex weddings of course! And whilst those who marry on this first day will be part of history – the real point is that from this day forward – people of the same sex can get married any day – and live happily ever after! This will be such a landmark day for me too. It's been a long journey since I marched into my office at the Home Office and said to my civil servants 'I am going to deliver same sex marriage – and I know it's not in ...
There has been some discussion today of surviving candidates from the 1945 general election. It seems that there is one Liberal still with us - (Arthur) Walter James who fought Bury. There are three Labour candidates still alive: John Freeman, Denis Healey (who did not get into the Commons until 1950) and one other, whose names escapes me. The answer is in today's Times Diary, so if you have it to hand please leave the name in the comments. Later. Thanks to the Labour History Group on Twitter for telling me that the fourth 1945 candidate still with us - ...
The Friends of Garston Library literary evenings series will include a chance for budding writers to read out their own poetry and prose. An extra evening event's been added on 10 July. More details will be posted soon but do make a note of the date. The evening will also include readings from existing local poets. Our 2014 literary events take place at ESLA on Horrocks Avenue with a 6 30 for 7pm start.
BBC Question Time's ignoring of the Liberal Democrats is now beyond a joke, argues Richard Morris on his blog A View from Ham Common. Edward Bindloss says: "In Brazil prisoners get four days reduced from their prison sentences for every book they read. The rule banning books being sent to prisoners in England and Wales should be lifted forthwith." And he's right. American Conservative evangelicals didn't always care much about abortion or contraception. Jamelle Boule tells the strange story of how they came to be obsessed with them on Slate. On Relative Dimension, a blog devoted to the science of ...
I popped into The Atkinson today after being alerted that they had new stock. The information/ticket office doubles as Tourist Information and they have always had old railway posters and other Southport memorabilia. It was good to see they had lots of postcards, mugs etc of some of the art works in the gallery -pride of place was clearly given to Lilith by John Collier. What caught my eye was a black and white notelet of a Prime Ministerial visit to Southport allegedly in 1910. I am just re-reading Roy Jenkin's biography of Asquith( the Prime Minister he 'truly loved' ...
The only reason this debate happened was because Nick Clegg challenged Nigel to the debate - as part of the debate Nick got his message, that Britain is Better off IN Europe, across to millions of voters. His key message was that we need to be Europe to protect the British Economy, British Jobs, and our future prosperity. Nick made the best arguments, making the case for why Europe is good for British jobs, security and influence in the world. Following the first debate YouGov made a poll and while I'm sure that you know the result (57% of people ...
Fri 28th
19:00
Cambridge MP Newsletter: Fix Our Pavements Petition, Lifeworks Saved ... For Now And Cambridge Unite...
Taking the fight to fix our pavements to the County Council On Tuesday Paralympic hopeful Claire Connon and I presented our petition to the County Council calling on them to do more to fix our pavements. After joining Claire on a tour of Cambridge in a wheelchair I discovered just how hard our city is to get around thanks to the poor state of pavements and roads. I've since held a debate in Westminster on the issue and I'm glad that more money is now being allocated by central government to making sure our pavements are in good repair - ...
Blog Categories: My Degree Political Comment Vote: 0 votes + Vote up! - Vote down! [another piece of coursework recently handed in: this time a film review for my Theory and Practice of Human Rights module] Film Review: "The Torture Question", PBS's Michael Kirk spotlights Abu-Ghraib torture whitewash (watch the whole thing at Frontline's website) Who deserves what "rights"? Who is responsible for ensuring people's human rights? And who watches the watchers? These questions, framing a key dilemma in the contemporary Human Rights regime, are at the forefront of Michael Kirk's PBS documentary, aired in the wake of military trials ...
Yesterday I attended a seminar organised by Middle East Monitor on satellite jamming — the how and the why and some thoughts about how to overcome it. The day was particularly focused on Egypt and how both Hosni Mubarak and the current interim regime in Cairo have used jamming (directly or by proxy) to stifle [...]
[IMG: ALDC Master Logo (for screen)] Six principal by-elections took place yesterday. In Gedling ward (Gedling BC), which is five miles north east of Nottingham, the Liberal Democrats were unlucky not to hold on to the seat they've held since 2003. Maggie Dunkin, who represented the ward until three years ago, missed out by just 54 votes. She came second with 28.9% but was pipped to the post by the Labour candidate who won with 32.6%. UKIP who haven't stood in the ward for seven years came third on 22.8%. Conservatives saw a 12.6% drop in their vote share to ...
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Shirley William's impending visit to Southport Well she came and once again conquered the hearts and minds of all those who turned out. In her talk, to which I shall return, Shirley spoke of the big changes she had seen in her political life time especially around the role of women and the digital revolution. She recalled the only feminist remark she had heard Thatcher make and tried to persuade us that she was as ignorant about digital matter as Ronnie Fearn-whose fifty years as an elected councillor we had come to ...
In a few short hours same-sex couples will start to get married in England and Wales. They could honeymoon in Scotland as a married couple, but should they want to visit the Giant's Causeway, the Titanic Quarter or the Marble Arch caves here in Northern Ireland they will only be civil partnered. "What??" I hear you say. Yes one of the lesser known parts of the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act is that those wonderfully new same-sex marriages that everyone is celebrating getting closer to reality will not been seen as marriages in part of the UK. Of course many people ...
This was a quiet week for MEPs, with few committee meetings. It allowed me to attend to EU Liberal Democrat Party business in Barcelona on Monday afternoon and in Bilbao on Tuesday morning, to travel to Hamburg Wednesday afternoon to take part in a live Deutschlandfunk radio debate and to leave again on a flight at 0700 Thursday for the College of Europe in Bruges, where I debated the merits of UK membership of the EU with Liam Fox MP at a business conference sponsored by Deloitte. In between these engagements I managed some useful meetings and dealt with correspondence ...
Where was I? Ah yes... So, after my mini-epic journey across Northern Europe, I had safely reached Copenhagen and, despite a few difficulties in finding the suburban train to Orestad, a new community south of the city near the airport, I arrived at our hotel and waited for Ros to arrive.The hotel was unexpected, having won a plethora of awards for being the greenest hotel in Europe, but of more interest was the Club Lounge, which we had access to, with unlimited free alcohol - I applied my own, quite modest, limit, thank you - and free snacks, including salt ...
What approach will the 2015 Liberal Democrat manifesto take? A bit more fiscally responsible than Labour and a bit more fair than the Conservatives? Or something different: a genuinely distinctive approach built on our basic political philosophy and our long-standing commitment to the environment - where the public clearly recognise we're different from our coalition partners and where our ministers can show real progress? This is why we launched The Green Manifesto at the spring conference in York, to argue for a 'green backbone' to our 2015 manifesto. We believe that the green approach needs to underpin the party's economic ...
Six principal by-elections took place yesterday. In Gedling ward (Gedling BC), which is five miles north east of Nottingham, the Liberal Democrats were unlucky not to hold on to the seat they've held since 2003. Maggie Dunkin, who represented the ward until three years ago, missed out by just 54 votes. She came second with [...]
This week I signed off an updated Development Brief for the Tatton site – the next step in our campaign to get the site sorted. Last week we launched our campaign to CPO the Tatton. We've no objection at all to the current owners bringing forward a scheme, but more than a year after we started talking to them about their proposals we're still waiting for it to happen. A Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) is a route out: the Council identifies another developer and agrees a scheme. It then buys the site for its current market value and immediately sells ...
[IMG: Photo by Gordon Tant] Photo by Gordon Tant While I was at the National Hack The Government hackday, I was interviewed by Chris Vallance - an amazing radio producer with the BBC. We spent quite a while talking about my findings of unsecured Government websites. It was a wide ranging chat, looking at spam, security, and the long term future of .gov.uk and .nhs.uk. He did a marvellous job of compressing it into a 5 minute piece which should be relatively easy for the lay audience of Radio 4 to understand. You can listen to the interview on the ...
Fri 28th
13:00
Fraser Nelson is wrong: Cameron's supposed EU re-negotiation allies are set on a very different path
Like so many Eurosceptics, Fraser Nelson was at it again this morning in the Telegraph: taking a couple of things they heard from foreign politicians and adding it all up to make something that matches exactly what they want: less Brussels. Nelson was continuing his theme from the Spectator a couple of weeks ago, describing a Northern Alliance Cameron had been building to reform the European Union in his image. There is one problem with all that: it simply is not true. In the UK, the Dutch are often seen as close allies of Cameron in his quest for renegotiation ...
Via Richard Taylor comes this unusual demand from UKIP councillor Gordon Gillick: Cllr Gordon Gillick (UKIP, Waldersey) told Cambridgeshire County Council on the 25th of March 2014, which was debating filming council meetings, that as a member of Equity he would need to be paid if he was to be filmed as well as claiming councillors would need lights, make-up, multiple cameras and professional camera operators.
The first debate is done, the dust begins to settle, and something that resembles a debate on Europe, our place in it and what we want from it has lurched into life. I'm not getting too excited, but it is an improvement on what has come before. But it appears to me that there is an opportunity for Liberal Democrats to look towards the future, one where international co-operation allows us to make our lives a little easier, just as UKIP look backwards towards a time when there was more certainty and less interdependence - a time which is unlikely ...
I have just discovered, rather late in the day, I admit, Primo Levi. I found this short extract from "The Truce" very poignant. After his release from, or rather abandonment in, Auschwitz, and various experiences in Russia and Eastern Europe, Levi, and his companions are coming to the end of a slow circuitous railway journey back to Italy. A group of other ex-prisoners and "displaced persons" stays together in one wagon, but there are occasional departures from their company, and some additions, one of whom joined them, apparently simply because a member of the group has been kind to him ...
I don't think anyone with even the vaguest interest in domestic politics would argue that the most talked about political event of the last week was the European, Nick vs Nigel debate. So when, the next day, BBC Question Time put together a panel, you would expect that a representative of both sides would secure at least one place. Certainly room was found for UKIP - but as so often is the case, no seat for the Lib Dems. Unbelievable. The standard excuse, when given, is that now we are a party of government, the government's view can be represented ...
With equal marriage about to be a reality there have been quiet few reminiscences in the media about the journey from pre Wolfenden days to the success of Lynne Featherstone's Bill. Rev Richard Coles can still be heard on iplayer fronting a Radio 4 program Gay Rights: Tying the Knot and Mathew Parris writing in The Times about his plotting 25 years ago along with Ian Mc Kellan and Peter Mandelson to advance the cause. I want to go back before that -not as far as the Wolfenden Report or Roy Jenkins 1967 legislation- but to the Winter Garden's in ...
Fri 28th
11:45Latest Euro poll shows how, in this May's elections, every %-age point matters for the Lib Dems
[IMG: clegg farage lbc] Interest in the outcome of May's European elections is picking up, at least judged by the number of polls the newspapers are commissioning – four have been published in the last fortnight. Here's the average support for the parties: Labour – 30% Ukip – 26% Conservative – 24% Lib Dems – 9% Converting that into seats using EuroElection predict's online gizmo would produce the following figures: Labour – 24 seats (+11) Ukip – 20 (+7) Conservative – 18 (-9) Lib Dems – 3 (-8) Those figures ain't the most encouraging for the Lib Dems. What's more ...
Fri 28th
10:25Carmichael: We should be proud of what we are achieving in the UK, not talking about leaving
In a week where I've despaired a bit of the pro-UK campaign in the Scottish Independence Referendum, it's good to see Alistair Carmichael come out brimming with pride at what we have and what we've built together in the UK. In a speech at Edinburgh University last night. Yes, it's a wee bit listy, but we actually need to look at and appreciate what we've got rather than just assume that the grass on the other side is going to be greener. Frankly, when people are wooed by the thrill of something new and exciting, the results can often not ...
Fri 28th
10:25
Carmichael: We should be proud of what we are achieving in the UK, not talking about leaving
In a week where I've despaired a bit of the pro-UK campaign, it's good to see Alistair Carmichael come out brimming with pride at what we have and what we've built together in the UK. In a speech at Edinburgh ... Continue reading →
This caught my eye today. I had in mind the grass bank by the zebra crossing Bromley Gardens, on Parkside Drive, for one. Maybe there are other areas we should look at? ===================== Oral Answers to Questions - Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: Bees (27 Mar 2014) Andrew Selous: In Leighton Buzzard and Linslade, Leighton-Linslade town council, Central Bedfordshire council and South Bedfordshire Friends of the Earth have done excellent work in encouraging bees by planting wild flowers and leaving areas of grass uncut. That has made a huge difference-a lot of volunteers are onside. Will the Minister agree ...
Well, people say to me with conviction: the Liberal Democrats are hopelessly split - between libertarian free marketeers and socialists. I protest in vain that I've never met either in the party, and I've been a member since 1979. I tell them, that rather against everyone's expectations, the party has been staggeringly united through the trauma of coalition. But it is too late to complain. The Great Division is now part of political mythology. It is said that a group of 'economic liberals' - not a term I recognise - gathered around The Orange Book to wrest the party away ...
Here's some of the articles that have caught my attention in the past couple of days... Labour's right is rumbling. Not before time. « Labour Uncut Labour isn't united argues @atulh. Its dwindling poll lead is abt to convince it to have debate it shd hv had in 2010 http://bit.ly/1pejDQB A terrible policy at a terrible time | Opinion | Times Higher Education I hope Labour listens to SMF's @emranmian "If Lab does adopt a graduate tax policy it will be making a grave mistake" http://bit.ly/1lpwLmX We still don't know what works in education "We still don't know what works ...
As a follow up to my post Deleting old emails in Gmail 3 years ago, I've now found a way to automatically delete old emails from Gmail. This trick uses the rather unknown Google Scripts, a Javascript engine which runs on Googles servers. Pop to Gmail and test some searches, eg label:webserver older_than:1m this will find all emails labelled webserver and are older than 1 month (full list of search options here. Once you are happy that your search result has found the emails you don't want, go to script.google.com. Select Create script for GMail Delete all the example code ...
Today's Scotsman adds further to the case against Scotland voting 'yes' in September with the claim that European Commission officials have declared there will be no change in the rules governing cross-border pension schemes. According to the paper that means that a 'yes' vote will produce a massive pensions blackhole. They say that at present, many schemes are under-funded, as contributions from staff and employers have been insufficient to pay for pensions: They add that single-country pensions have the flexibility to go into deficit as long as they are able to continue making payments to members of their schemes and ...
Here is part of Tim Farron MP's commentary on the LBC debate: Nigel Farage made that awful statement that the EU 'has blood on its hands' in the Ukraine. He seemed to be reading the Kremlin's 'talking points'. I personally could not believe that his hatred of the EU is so deep and so myopic that he was prepared to side with Vladimir Putin against the people of Ukraine. I cannot understand that mind-set. I cannot understand how you can side with Putin because you hate the EU so much. It wasn't just a crass throw away remark, it was ...
YouGov postdebate survey "skewed towards older people... & people who identified with UKIP." And Clegg still got 36%? I'd call that a win. (tags: ) Missed last night's Nick v Nigel debate? Want to watch it again? Here it is... (tags: ) The Clegg-Farage debate | openDemocracy (tags: ) Lynne Featherstone: Last night we saw the nasty side of Nigel Farage I'm with Lynne on this. The problem is, I could name you a lot of people who WOULD rather live in the UKIP vision of 1950s Britain :/ (tags: ) There is something wrong with the world (part 71664) ...
I have today welcomed news that, as part of the Unadopted Footways Upgrade Programme, a number of streets in the West End area will be brought up to good standard and adopted by the City Council over the next year. These include Seymour Street, Hazel Drive (east footway), Arnhall Drive and Farington Terrace. These improvements are to be welcomed and will see more of the very poor pavements in the West End finally brought up to standard. Back in 2007, I asked the council to improve funding to tackle this problem of really poor unadopted pavements and this was agreed ...
With the economy showing strong signs of a recovery and budget projections forecasting a period of healthy growth seven years on from the start of the financial crisis – have we now reached the 'escape velocity' required to run clear of this long slump? The answer to this questions relies on judgements of an indicator that has proved almost impossible to gauge i.e. the output gap or measures of spare capacity in the economy. Most economists believe that the UK economy still boasts plenty of spare capacity, by which they mean that factories can still produce more, offices aren't full, ...
Headline of the Day goes to the Daily Telegraph.
[IMG: HM Treasury logo] Here's a fun fact: since 1974/5, public sector net debt has fallen as a percentage of GDP in 18 years. Yet of the 18 times it has fallen, only five times was it due to a budget surplus. Just over two-thirds of the time when the public sector net debt ratio has been reduced, it's been cut despite there being a budget deficit – thanks to the workings of the combination of economic growth, inflation and interest rates. At its simplest, if the economy is growing, then you can both be running a deficit and reducing ...
When it comes to the debate about whether Britain should be IN or OUT of Europe, it's clear what British businesses want. According to a report by the CBI, 8 out of 10 businesses would vote to stay IN Europe. Here are just a few of them: Easyjet "EasyJet is a product of the EU's deregulation of Europe's aviation market. Without deregulation we would not exist."Vodafone "The Internal Market has allowed Europe to influence economic policymaking in other regions of the world far more effectively than the UK could have done on a unilateral basis, allowing UK firms to enter ...
Way back in 2009 and 2010 when I was discussing marriage equality with some left-wingers (such as members of LGBT Labour), their reluctance to listen to any mention of marriage stemmed quite strongly from their belief that I was "undermining" civil partnerships. My attempts to point out civil partnerships were not perfect and did not grant legal equality (on issues I laid out here) were seen as an attack on their current, or future, relationship. They'd taken civil partnerships to their heart and any criticism of the legal issues was seen as a criticism of their own personal choices. So, ...
The Western Mail reports that passenger numbers on a publicly-subsidised air route between Cardiff and Anglesey have plunged by 35% since it was first introduced. They say that Wales Audit Office written evidence to the National Assembly's Public Accounts Committee revealed that the north-south service, dubbed "Ieuan Air" after then-Deputy First Minister and Ynys Mon AM Ieuan Wyn Jones, has cost the taxpayer around £86 in subsidy for every one of the 65,073 passengers which used the service between May 2007 and April 2013. The Welsh Audit Office also concluded that the government should "revisit" the business case for the ...
In the midst of a lot of other things happening, the death of Tony Benn slightly passed me by. Mark Hennessy has a rather simple but touching piece on the funeral a man who, irrespective of whether one agreed or disagreed with his political outlook, was decent and honourable, and for whom the struggle for social justice and democracy never ended. His absence from British public life will be missed. Tony Benn honoured on streets of London
On Saturday the 29th March Parish Councillors who are looking at building a new Skate Park her in Bar Hill are looking to meet with local residents and skate park users to try an determine what people are expecting from the new park. We'd love to see as many people as possible at the this event. It's being held between 10:30am and 12:30pm in the Octagon (next to the parish Council Offices). Alternatively if you have any views you'd like us to consider you can drop me an email at; andy.pellew@gmail.com I look forward to seeing as many people as ...
