The Liberator blog has this piece from me on today's event celebrating the mythical status of the Orange Book among certain right-wingers. It reads as follows:- There has been more inaccurate material written about the "Orange Book" than just about every other recent Liberal publication combined. I described it at the time as "quite an absurd and ill-timed set of policies that seem more to do with self-advancement than the party's election prospects." That is still true. What I and others took time to appreciate, though, is that it was far from a coherent and pre-planned set of ideas, but ...
#78965844 / gettyimages.com This 1950 photograph shows the road from Wellingborough to Finedon and the former's long-vanished blast furnaces.
This graph from Vox shows the proportions of the World's population living on each continent: Notice how the share for Africa consistently grows such that by 2100 it is projected to have a third of the World's people.Filed under: Uncategorized
Victim Support is being broken up as the Government passes the money to provide victim services to Police and Crime Commissioners. At the Police and Crime Panel meeting last week I was shocked to read in the papers that the Police and Crime Commissioner, Tony Hogg, is looking to move money away from the well established Victim Support Service. I sought clarification from the Police and Crime Commissioner and it seems he only anticipates Victim Support continuing to run the Court Witness Service for Devon and Cornwall. I had involvement with Victim Support, back in the 80′s as it was ...
When there is a big story, I turn to the Shropshire Star for the latest developments. This evening it tells me that Clare Whitelegg, 30, will not be penalised for taking her nine-year-old son out of school to attend her wedding. Quite right too. Because I sense a growing restiveness among parents. They are threatened with prosecution if their child misses school, yet see the authorities treating themselves more leniently. I am not thinking of the extreme cases, such as the Leicester headteacher who appears to have been granted leave to attend the World Cup, so much as the way ...
Tue 24th
22:22
Is David Ruffley a fit person to represent me in Parliament? Only the local Conservatives can decide...
Today's news that our local Member of Parliament, David Ruffley, accepted a caution for common assault three months ago after attacking his then partner, is his second unfortunate incident in this Parliament, following his apparent attempted suicide just a month after his re-election in 2010. Then, I was entirely sympathetic, especially given that very few people would throw themselves under a train unless they were very troubled indeed. However, this time, I really can't be. Firstly, violence can never be acceptable, except in self-defence (and even then it has to be proportionate) and it is especially heinous when the victim ...
Conservative seat. Resignation Liberal Democrat candidate is Berni Millam Contact: Mark Foster (mark.cf@virginmedia.com)
[IMG: Orange_Book] Today saw what its co-editor Paul Marshall called the belated launch party for The Orange Book – such was the controversy surrounding its publication 10 years ago that the original event was cancelled. I was only able to attend one of the sessions (on public service reform) so here are five more general observations on its legacy... 1) The Orange Book remains much misunderstood, sometimes deliberately by those who enjoy internal warring, more often by those who've not read it (whisper it, some sections are pretty turgid) but know its reputation and assume it's a right-wing, Thatcherite manual ...
[IMG: Lego Prostitute] Oh Danny! From the Telegraph, a full month before the silly season, an amusingly cringeworthy non-story: As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander is supposed to ensure that Britain does not spend beyond its means as he helps implement the Coalition's austerity plan. But the senior Liberal Democrat was left embarrassed when he found himself unable to balance the books when he joined in a children's shopping challenge. Pupils from Cauldeen Primary School in Inverness all passed the test for buying food for one person for a week within a £10 budget. However, when Mr Alexander ...
Ludlow councillors are asking Arriva Wales to reschedule the first morning train from the town to connect with the new Shrewsbury to London direct service. At present, the 6.11am from Ludlow arrives in Shrewsbury at 6.43am. The new train service is expected to leave Shrewsbury four minutes earlier at 6.49am. Councillors Andy Boddington, Vivienne Parry, [...]
Cornwall Council is set to run a free evening workshop in Launceston to show local residents how to effectively report dog fouling incidents. This morning my fellow councillor Jade Farrington and I met with dog wardens and other council staff to discuss additional ways of tackling the problem in Launceston as it is an issue we receive a lot of complaints about. As well as recruiting volunteers and conducting extra high visibility patrols the council is keen to teach people how to effectively report incidents so that action can be taken. This can range from writing letters (which works in ...
From the Ministry of Justice website: For the first time ever, the Government has set aside a dedicated pot of money specifically to support men who have suffered sexual abuse including rape. We'd like your views and ideas on how we can spend this £500,000 fund in the best possible way to meet the needs of as many men as we can.Submit your ideas via that website. The extra money was announced by Damian Green in February.
Today CentreForum organised an event to mark the 10th anniversary of the publication of The Orange Book. Thinking Liberal was there, and I gather there will soon be videos from the event on Youtube. I am so old that I reviewed The Orange Book for Liberator when it came out - you can find the whole issue, which also includes articles on it by David Laws and Simon Titley, on the magazine's website. You will see that I had more time for the ideas in the book than many in Liberator circles, but remember that this review was written after ...
[IMG: Orange book conference] Today I attended a conference organised by CentreForum to mark the tenth anniversary of its publication of The Orange Book. Viewed in hindsight, the Orange Book was an important political event, that did much to set the tone of the following decade. But does its version of liberalism have what it takes to drive political ideas in the next ten years? On today's form the answer to that question is no. The Orange Book was edited by David Laws, currently education minister, and briefly in the Coalition cabinet; other contributors were Vince Cable, Chris Huhne, Ed ...
[IMG: Kirsty Williams] Kirsty Williams, the leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, has spoken in the National Assembly today calling for an anti-extremism strategy for Wales. This was in response to the news that two men from Cardiff had appeared in a video designed for recruiting jihadists in Iraq and Syria. She said: We have a proud record as a nation as a tolerant and open society that has long embraced other cultures and faiths. However, clearly Wales is not immune from the threats posed by extremism and radicalisation. Two years ago the Wales CONTEST Board recognised that there were ...
[IMG: Libby - Some rghts reserved by David Spender] A debate is still raging in the party 5 weeks after the disastrous Local, Euro and Newark byelection results which saw the party slump to 6.9% and to 2.6% at Newark. Numerous opinion polls also point to a historic disaster facing the party on May 7th 2015. In my own local party Wakefield just this week a letter went out to party members to ask the question about Nick Clegg's continuing leadership. Across the party it is reported that some 30 local parties have tabled votes this summer on Nick Clegg's ...
For a tome with several hundred academic references, I think Overman, Nathan and Cheshire distils several clear messages if we want to use well founded urban policy to drive growth. First, think people not places. Success will not necessarily come in the form of certain benighted areas doing better than London. More people being in London doing well [...]
Debates about the food-energy-water nexus need to recognise that global priorities may not reflect local concerns, and resource allocations are always political It is hard to disagree when the international business community, through the World Economic Forum, argues that there are important linkages between water, food, energy and climate change. Or when the German government argues that policy makers need to pay more careful consideration to the trade-offs between these different resources. As James Wilsdon and Rose Cairns wrote on this blog recently, these systems are inextricably linked. Integrated approaches are required, which move beyond sectoral, policy and disciplinary silos. ...
[IMG: Charlemagne is back in Europe] Following on from my post last week on post-election developments in Brussels, here's the second of two updates. Whilst yesterday's focused on developments concerning the formation of political groups in the Parliament itself, today's will address issues regarding nominations to the European Commission. It now looks likely that at its meeting later this week (from 26th to 27th June), the European Council (made up of the Heads of Government from all 28 EU countries) will nominate the Parliament's preferred candidate for the post of President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker. Juncker was the ...
Tue 24th
14:53
Vehices hitting bollards in Redcar's Roseberry Shopping Centre is costing drivers £1000s each ...
Last August bollards in Redcar's popular but privately owned Roseberry Shopping Centre on Roseberry Road, were given a coat of yellow and black hooped paint, by the Centre's Management Company, Knight Frank. This was to make them stand out more as drivers were shunting into them frequently. Since then thousands of pounds of damage has been done to vehicles and the evidence is clear on every bollard. ! took this up with Knight Frank last August and was informed the bollards and speed humps were installed when the centre was constructed as part of the planning requirements for traffic management ...
I got fat. Not just jolly fat. I got fat. As those who know me in real life will know, I live alone, I work from home and I pretty much lived off of takeaways. This led to my weight slowly rising due to the fact I was eating terrible food and getting nigh on zero exercise as even my commute to work was from my bed to the PC (via the en suite) and that wasn't the most taxing of walks. It had reached the stage where I would walk to the supermarket and be drenched with sweat. Not ...
[IMG: andy-coulson] The long-awaited trial of David Cameron's former director of communications, Andy Coulson, concluded today, with the jury finding him guilty of a charge of conspiracy to intercept voicemails as part of the phone-hacking scandal. All Coulson's co-defendants, including former Sun and News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks, were all found not guilty of various conspiracy charges. It's just over 7 years since Cameron appointed Coulson as the Conservatives' communications director – we noted in May 2007 his connection to what became known as the phone hacking scandal but which back then was widely ignored by the media ...
Andy McSmith in the Independent reports on an interesting interview with UKIP founder, Alan Sked on how their 24 strong MEP group will work in the European Parliament. He is rather scathing: "They don't do anything constructive there, they just go there to take the money, the expenses and get pensions...They don't articulate policies, they are hardly ever there," said Professor Sked. He launched Ukip in 1993, but left in 1997 after his creation had become "a magnet for bigots." It is worth keeping an eye on how accurate his forecast will be.
Following up my previous post on the construction of the new lifts at Acocks Green Station, as below, the 'Meet the Team' session has now been confirmed for 3.30pm to 6pm on Monday 30th June. It will take place in the Booking Hall with representatives from Centro, Network Rail, London Midland and the contractor building the new lifts, J Murphy and Sons. This is a chance to discuss the progress with the lifts project with them and raise any concerns you may have. If you can't make the meeting and have any comments, require further information, or wish to contact ...
[IMG: Rolling Acres shopping mall in Akron, Ohio] Have you noticed how the discussion about whether or not our high streets can survive has disappeared from our collective media radar? So 2013, wasn't it... My article inthe Guardian yesterday suggests that there is a reason for this - the cheerleaders for out of town shopping are finding that the sums just don't add up for them any more. To the surprise of many of us, last September's figures showed that out of town shopping centres were losing shoppers faster than high streets. Even the Great King Clone of the retail ...
Orchards are a South Gloucestershire priority biodiversity habitat because many orchards have been neglected or grubbed up in recent decades. In order to help stem this decline, Wapley Bushes Conservation Group, Dodington Parish Council and South Gloucestershire Council are now all working together to preserve the traditional horticultural skills that are needed to maintain existing and newly-planted orchards. A free fruit tree pruning workshop is being held at the Wapley Rank cottages opposite the southern Besom Lane entrance to Wapley Bushes Local Nature Reserve, Besom Lane, Westerleigh, South Gloucestershire, BS37 8RW, starting at 10am on Sunday, 13 July 2014. The ...
The Low Pay Commission's proposal announced today encouraging the government to pay the living wage to direct employees and encouraging businesses to adopt the living wage is something we can all get behind. Living wage 'should go to one million more workers' I fully suppor this proposal. I think encouraging companies to pay the living wage is a sensible option, and perhaps could even be encouraged through corporation tax credits. Concerns over employment were unfounded with the introduction of the minimum wage, and I believe, as the Low Pay Commission does, that these concerns are unfounded for the living wage. ...
This week, for the first time ever, the LGBTi Pride Rainbow Flag is flying from the facade of Europe House in London's Smith Square, headquarters of the European Parliament office and European Commission representation. Yesterday afternoon, there was a seminar there on extending LGBT rights in the EU, learning from the UK experience. For once [...]
[IMG: Salt and pepper shakers. Photo courtesy of http://www.freeimages.com/photo/1394522 - some rights reserved] Since the European and local elections, there has been a significant change in the phraseology of Nick Clegg's speeches and other comments which presages a, so far largely unheralded, change of strategy. Talk of anchoring British politics in the centre ground has been dropped (hooray), consigned to the same retirement home as Alarm Clock Britain. However, this change of vocabulary is more significant for it isn't just about presentation, it's also about strategy. The previous talk about anchoring politics in the centre ground was based on the ...
(NB, this is written on not enough sleep, so my apologies if it's gibberish...) OK, so to recap, what we've established so far: Science fiction grew up from two traditions, the Menippean satire and pulp fiction, which both have a different set of criteria on which they should be judged than does conventional 'literary' fiction. [...]
Typical! The moment I go away an email arrives asking if I could recover a bee swarm that had formed up in a garden in Marley Hill, the next village up the road from Sunniside where I live. On Thursday last week I arrived at Newcastle Central Station and whilst waiting for my train to London to arrive, the email reached me. Fortunately, a person living near the garden is a former beekeeper and
[IMG: Nick Clegg and David Cameron] That is the headline over at Huffington Post, and it certainly makes for fascinating reading. How about this: Tory MP John Redwood said Cameron should deliberately antagonise his Liberal Democrat partners into leaving, and warned the prime minister that terminating the coalition early may not be '"wise" as he had "given his word" and "it'll not look good if the leader of the main party was to end the coalition". "What should happen now is the Conservative majority in the government should start to press very strongly for two or three distinctively conservative policies, ...
[IMG: 019-brazil-theredlist] Watching the World Cup on TV and hearing Ary Barroso's "Brazil" at every ad break has reminded me, in a strange way, of what I used to adore about cinema, back when I did. You see, I sort of fell out of love with movies. The reasons for this are complex and I won't bore you with them now, only they do involve rubbing a fish on myself on a UCL theatre stage, making a movie about Texas in mid-Wales, and having Danny Dyer call me a "c**t" on-screen. I'll tell you all about it some day, promise. ...
[IMG: Blackboard] New research into the marked improvements in London's schools (on which read Stephen Tall's insights), has this conclusion: Improvements in London seem more likely to have primarily resulted from changes occurring in the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as the National Strategies. Or to remove the polite civil servant speak: it's only 15 or so years after doing something right that we've managed to work out just how right it was – though we're still not quite sure what that something was. With that sort of long time lapse and uncertainty, making decisions based on evidence is ...
24 Statements That Get More True The Longer You Think About Them Except #4, which is bullshit ;) (tags: ) 22 Things Brits Do That The Rest Of The World Hates (Piers Morgan is 2 of them) If it's any comfort to the rest of the world, we all hate Piss Moron here too. (tags: ) BBC News - 'Girls can't what?' Bid to boost women in engineering (tags: ) Mysterious signatures found at Bankfield Museum, Halifax Graffiti is BAD and WRONG! OMG look at this historic graffiti! *headdesk* (tags: ) Market capitalism reason behind England's World Cup failures, English ...
There has been more inaccurate material written about the "Orange Book" than just about every other recent Liberal publication combined. I described it at the time as "quite an absurd and ill-timed set of policies that seem more to do with self-advancement than the party's election prospects." That is still true. What I and others took time to appreciate, though, is that it was far from a coherent and pre-planned set of ideas, but a suite of disparate thoughts from disgruntled Parliamentarians. While they were happy to write a set of articles that, combined, added up to a deliberate ...
[IMG: webb 01] In a profile in the FT, Pensions Minister Steve Webb is described as "one of the Coalition's most hyperactive lieutenants". Now Steve is highly efficient and has achieved a huge amount since he took on the role four years ago, but he is also unflappable and "hyperactive" is not a term I would normally use about him. And whilst the term "lieutenant" usually refers to someone who is second in command, which is technically correct for a Junior Minister, no-one in Government beats his deep knowledge of his subject. That cavil apart, the FT challenges Steve Webb ...
St Mary's Park will be hosting the Festwich event again this year on 26 & 27 July. The information below is from the festival organisers for local residents: Festwich will present the very best in tribute acts catering for all the family with a wide range of musical tastes from tributes acts such as The Doors to Led Zepellin, plus a community stage featuring local Prestwich talent from DJ's to comedians. As you know last year we worked extremely closely with the Councils Parks & Countryside Team, the police and other partners to ensure that any potential negative impact on ...
All Bury residents will receive a letter this summer telling them about the biggest change to the electoral registration system in nearly 100 years. The letter will explain that the Government is introducing a new, more secure, system of Individual Electoral Registration is being introduced. This replaces the current system where the 'head of household' registers everyone living in a property. Now, each individual will be responsible for registering themselves. Many Bury residents will automatically move onto the new electoral register. However, some will need to take action to join or remain on it, which they will now also be ...
Bury Council is responsible for arranging a number of 'health improvement services' for residents. They are currently running a six week long consultation about the provision of health improvement services in Bury. This will run from 9 June 2014 until the 25 July 2014. You can complete a short survey, by using the following link: Any additional comments can be emailed directly to publichealthconsultation@bury.gov.uk
Steps - Scott Street-Pentland Avenue Last year, I raised, on behalf of residents, the need for lighting on the steps from Scott Street to Pentland Avenue. The steps are well-used and often by elderly people and are quite dark at night, relying on what light reaches the area from the adjacent roads. At the time, the council's Street Lighting Partnership advised : "... we looked at putting lights on the stairs. Unfortunately it's just not technically feasible and the costs would not justify since there is a lit route via the end of Scott Street." However, as I have continued ...
Yesterday's reports that the Education Minister appears to have confirmed Pupil Deprivation Grant money is being used to meet school budget shortfalls is very disturbing. We have been alerting the Minister to this practice for months, and the Minister has always insisted that the money should be spent on disadvantaged pupils or it should be taken back. This issue has been raised repeatedly in letters and questions to the Minister both in the Siambr and in Committee. In April, following an email to local authorities from a Welsh Government official which implied that the Pupil Deprivation Grant could be used ...
