This film about new developments in traffic control has some lovely shots of the city in the year I was born.
Three fantastic articles, all with a common them. Snippets below, but well worth a click on the links to read on... Chris Rock In Conversation (Frank Rich in Vulture, 30 Nov) ... I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they're way too conservative. In their political views? Not in their political views — not like they're voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of "We're not going to keep score in the game because we don't want anybody to lose." Or just ignoring race to ...
Ian Dunt writes about last night's Commons vote on judicial review: Judicial review sounds boring but it is one of the most democratic legal mechanisms available to the British citizen. It allows us to challenge illegal government decisions, to fight government irrationality and to challenge the decisions made by authorities. In the words of one peer, it is "the British defence of freedom" and the means by which we avoid "elected dictatorship". Chris Grayling has lost several judicial review cases this year, for the simple reason that he keeps acting illegally and irrationally. So he has decided to try and ...
The Gathering, the gay men's spiritual group, is holding its annual Community Christmas Carols by Candlelight on Thursday 11th December 2014, in All Soul's Church, Elmwood Avenue, Belfast, BT9 at 7:30pm. Refreshments will be served afterwards. This year the speaker is Pádraig Ó Tuama. He is a the Corrymeela Community leader, a poet, and a theologian. The [...]
[IMG: Nick, Ibrahim and Norman in Brent mental health visit] Yesterday, Nick Clegg and Norman Lamb visited a youth centre in Brent where they announced £150 million was being invested in services to help young people with eating disorders. From the BBC: Mr Clegg will say he wants to see services transformed, with the focus shifted from expensive institutional care to targeted community-based provision. Eating disorders cost the NHS around £200m a year, and the bill for in-patient care averages out at £98,750 per admission. From 2012 to 2013, there were 2,560 hospital admissions for eating disorders in England – ...
Extract taken below from an interview by Robert Peston, BBC Economics Editor, with Danny Alexander on the eve of the Autumn Statement announcement. I have chosen this particular bit because I truly don't know how the Lib Dems will win votes on the back of a low wage recovery come the election. It confuses me that a low wage recovery still equals growth? Somehow I think that people on zero hour contracts and who are scraping a living will take little heart from the comparisons that politicians make at macro level about growth comparisons. When you cannot afford to heat ...
Martin Brookes has the story: Edward is truly a local candidate. His family were tenant farmers in Cold Overton for 60 years. In fact both his grandfathers farmed in the constituency. Ed and Robyn have just bought a new house in Oakham using the government's help-to-buy scheme. Ed still occasionally pulls on his rugby boots for Oakham RFC.Lord Bonkers wishes him well.
Tue 2nd
20:54
Nick Clegg puts £10 million into encouraging students and young people to register to vote
So, when there's a certain amount of money around to encourage voters to register, what does Nick Clegg do with it? Does he put it into a voter registration drive in the affluent ex-pat communities of Spain or does he put it into that group of people it can be difficult to find, young people and students? The latter, of course. From The Guardian: Lib Dem sources said Clegg, whose Sheffield Hallam constituency contains a high number of students, was "determined to ensure that the government does everything it can to help students register to vote". One said: "Nick Clegg ...
I used to see Maggi Hambling quite often with our mutual friend George Melly when he was such a fixture of Soho and London's bohemia, so it was good to catch up with her again at the private view of her Walls of Water monotypes at Marlborough Fine Art in Albermarle Street this evening. I [...]
If you are over 19 but haven't got a full Level 2 qualification (e.g. GCSE levels A*-C), this Introduction to Office Skills course could be for you. The *FREE* course will focus on key topics for business administration and general office skills, for example: Communication skillsOrganizing a meeting, taking notesIT specific skillsGeneral office skillsThe course will run from 7pm to 9pm on Thursday evenings at Yate Library, starting 8 January, for 10 weeks. Please note that if the course isn't full by Christmas the start may be delayed by a few weeks. For more information, to find out if you ...
The Lib Dem team would like to thank and congratulate everyone involved in the Gatley Christmas Festival last Saturday. It was a great event and, thankfully, the weather was kind to us this year. Here are a few photos – pretty poor quality I'm afraid but that's what I get for using a cheap smartphone on a dark November evening. [IMG: Cllr Pam King helping on the Rotary stall] Cllr Pam King helping on the Rotary stall [IMG: Let there be light! Father Christmas does the deed] Let there be light! Father Christmas does the deed [IMG: Crowds on Gatley ...
Vince Cable, a voice we should all take note of on economic matters in my view, has warned that Treasury insiders are increasingly concerned that promises made by George Osborne to cut taxes by £7bn appear increasingly unaffordable. [IMG: vcphoto] "When you look at the numbers, tax cuts on any significant scale are simply not deliverable unless you make horrific cuts to key public services such as the police and defence. Technically, of course, you can always make tax cuts, but if you are to avoid hitting services you would have to put up other taxes or cut services massively. ...
We'd like to highlight some useful motions and rebuttals on mental health. ALDC members can download the following items from the File Library: LGA Lib Dem Group model motion on mental health Sutton Lib Dem Group March 2014 motion on mental health November 2014 – Labour Rebuttal Materials (mental health)
I've had some of these cabled tidies from Bobino for a few years now and they consistently do a great job, both for tidying away rarely touched cables under desks and also for keeping tidy cables that get taken on travels: [IMG: Bobino cable tidy - large black] [IMG: Bobino cable tidy - small red] They've available in a range of sizes and colours and do a great job. [IMG: Buy now from Amazon] Buy Bobino cable tidies here. Bobino cable tidies Effective, durable, stylish and not too pricey My rating (out of 5): 5.0 Mark Pack, 2 December 2014 ...
Last night I attended a meeting with a group of people from outside politics who are interested in producing fundamental changes in the way politics is conducted in Liverpool. They asked me to put some thoughts together about how our ... Continue reading →
[IMG: basicincome] We will work towards the eventual creation of a new 'Citizen's Income', payable to all irrespective of sex or status... Unpaid work will at last be recognised as valuable. Women caring in the home, for example, will receive an independent income from the state for the first time. The Citizen's Income will be buttressed by a single benefit for those in need, unifying income support and family credit, with supplements for people with disabilities and for child-care support. These reforms will ensure that every citizen is guaranteed a decent minimum income, whether or not they are in employment. ...
Oh boy. Where do I start? Some of you will no doubt have read the story in the Independent today where it lists the new sexual acts that are banned in UK pornography. If you haven't then you'll be interested to know the following acts are not allowed to be shot in porn shoots here in the UK any more: Spanking Caning Aggressive whipping Penetration by any object "associated with violence" Physical or verbal abuse (regardless of if consensual) Urolagnia (known as "water sports") Female ejaculation Strangulation Facesitting Fisting The theme here is clearly violence but what about consensual violence? ...
There were twelve principal council by-elections contested last Thursday. In the Melton DC ward of Asfordby, the Conservatives polled 53.4% in gaining a seat from Labour with a majority of 136 votes. There was also a gain for UKIP from the SDP after winning in Bridlington Central and Old Town on East Yorkshire UA with [...]
One of the depressing facts that came out from last week's Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on poverty is that only 1 in 5 of low paid employees have left low paid work completely ten years later. Also in the news recently were reports of severe staffing shortages of skilled staff in several sectors including construction and health/social care, leading to major recruitment drives overseas. There is a real problem with skills development in the UK. There are several reasons for this. Since the recession companies have cut back on investment, and that includes training. The increase in outsourcing in our ...
Last Friday was Carers' Rights Day and I went along to a whole day event put together by the B&NES Carers' Centre in Radstock to mark the day. Like most I have a very personal reason to support the Carers' Centre because like most I had somebody very close to me who was a carer. [...]
Thanks to the work of Norman Lamb and other Liberal Democrat MPs, mental health has risen up the political agenda. For many years, NHS spending on mental health has lagged far behind that of other conditions and research into treatments for mental illness has also been disproportionately low. MIND recently estimated that local authorities in England spend, on average, only 1.36 per cent of their total public health budgets on mental health – even though such problems cost the country an estimated £100 billion a year. The aspiration of policymakers now is to achieve 'parity of esteem' between mental and ...
[IMG: Person typing on a computer keyboard] Can you solve the mystery of the web traffic that comes from nowhere? "We have the whole history of the web wrong" was the headline gracing an article published by The Atlantic in 2012. Two years on Alexis Madrigal's piece remains a seminal piece of insight for understanding the internet. Madrigal almost gave us a new phrase too, 'dark social'. The 'almost' caveat slips in because 'dark', with its overtones of mysterious knowledge and secret forces, is used to label multiple different phenomena, often interlinked but not all the same. 'Dark' can mean ...
Today's announcement that the Swansea Bay lagoon will be included in the National Infrastructure Plan,is great news and shows the effect of having a Liberal Democrat Energy Minister. The proposed lagoon will bring a massive economic boost for Swansea and surrounding areas. It is hoped that the project will produce a huge amount of local jobs and could well generate millions of pounds in the region. It has been said that the lagoon could potentially provide power for 120,000 homes for 120 years. That is incredibly exciting and why I hope that this project gets the go-ahead. With its huge ...
For several years the leaders of the ten Greater Manchester councils have each taken on a portfolio within the Combined Authority. This model is set to continue under Devo Manc, with a mayor leading the Combined Authority and the ten leaders sitting on the mayor's cabinet. Up to now, it's not been easy to find out which leader has which responsibility. That needs to change, and the Lib Dems are campaigning for the new Combined Authority to be far more transparent in its operation and work harder to make sure the people of Greater Manchester know what it does, how ...
Tue 2nd
12:25Abusive site Wings over Scotland is embedded into the Scottish Government and Yes movement - Willie ...
I've written before about the appallingly abusive Wings over Scotland site. It's a pro-independnece blog written, ironically, by the self-styled "Rev" Stu Campbell who lives in Bath. His shameful content and comments he allows on his site and on social media have included: Using a picture of hearses going through Royal Wootton Bassett in a mocked up "Better Together poster; Showering abuse on Clare Lally after she spoke at the Better Together "100 days to go" event. Funnily enough, he then said he couldn't find any abuse of her on his site. I helped him out. Doing me over when ...
On September 19th 2014- a scant two months ago- we learned that Scottish voters had voted to reject the idea of Scotland as "an independent country" by a margin of well over 10%. Apart from Vladimir Putin who, to be fair knows a thing or two about ballot rigging, the vote was universally recognized as a free and fair expression of the will of the Scottish people. The result came after an extremely heated and divisive debate, with accusations of bias and corruption on both sides. To my mind the No vote came from the result of many factors, but ...
Tue 2nd
10:59Stephen Knight AM writes...Putting the car first in urban areas comes with a huge cost to human life...
[IMG: Stephen Knight die in] Lying on a cold and damp pavement in central London as part of a '"die in"protest to highlight the level of deaths facing pedestrians and cyclists might not be everyone's idea of a fun Saturday afternoon, but a couple of weekends ago that is exactly what I was doing. The reason why? Because the current level of road deaths – let alone serious injuries - is something we can't continue to accept as being "inevitable". Last year 132 pedestrians and 14 cyclists were killed on our roads in London. Across Great Britain there were 398 ...
The House of Lords does choose to do things with almost glacial slowness sometimes, and then, having chosen to move, does so so quickly that members are unable to keep up. And so it was in this instance, as Ros notes in her opening paragraph... Baroness Scott of Needham Market To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the role of the voluntary sector in reducing emergency re-admissions to hospital. Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD): My Lords, it is about a year since I first tabled this Question for Short Debate. I was inspired to do ...
[IMG: LDV banner] Poll predicts result, gets it wrong, so surely the previous critics of the series of polls were right all along: sounds simple, clear and logical. Yet in the case of the Lib Dem Voice polls of party members, it's more likely also wrong. Counter-intuitively, the very errors in the LDV poll on the Party President contest show that many of the previous critics were likely to have been even more wrong. Here's why: previous criticism has mostly (not completely, but overwhelmingly) been from the angle of 'these results show a party that is too happy / loyalist ...
If you don't use your green bin, South Glos will be collecting them shortly. Obviously they won't collect it if you use it for green waste, and you can keep it if you use it for anything else (for example, some people have found that they're handy for garden tools) In our area the planned removal dates are: Frampton Cotterell Monday 15 December Yate North Tuesday 16 December Yate Central Wednesday 17 December Dodington Thursday 18 December Westerleigh and Chipping Sodbury Friday 19 December Details of the green bin removal day will be provided on a leaflet that will be ...
[IMG: LD logo] Some readers will tie themselves up in knots over the title of this article. "Aren't the Tories and the government basically the same thing, and you're just making a semantic argument?" No they aren't, and no I'm not. The Tories are the Conservative Party, formed in 1678, 1834, or 1912, depending on how you read things. They are the bastions of the Right, standing up for the status quo. At least until Thatcher came along and confused the hell out of things. They were for a long time the defenders of the Empire, a position that still ...
The Conservative leader and British Prime Minister David Cameron's grasp of the dark political arts is not gone. Last Friday he gave a long-awaited speech setting out his proposals on managing immigration from other EU countries better. It received generally favourable coverage. And, before anybody had a chance to think through what he had said, the story was muscled out by a series of announcements about public spending commitments, in advance of tomorrow's Autumn Statement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. If this goes according to plan, Mr Cameron has redefined the political centre ground at a stroke. Will he ...
It is strange to think that, on the centenary of the famous 1914 Christmas Truce - in only a few weeks time - that there will be nobody left alive who remembers one of the oddest and most spontaneous events of the twentieth century. I've always been fascinated by the truce. My favourite novelist Henry Williamson was there and it changed his life - disastrously so, in some ways, given that he came to believe that the soldier he had met from the other side had been Hitler. There are a few difficulties involved in writing about it now, exactly ...
In another strong demonstration of the differences between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, Nick Clegg went on the Today programme yesterday to talk about deficit reduction and fiscal policy in the next parliament. While the Tories want to reduce the deficit by cutting spending alone, Liberal Democrats want to raise taxes on the wealthy. From the Guardian: Nick Clegg insisted taxes would have to rise in the next parliament. Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, he said: "What the Conservatives are saying is a complete and utter nonsense. There is not a single developed economy anywhere in the world ...
Muhammad Isn't Actually The Most Popular Boy's Name In Britain (tags: ) This is why I'm not celebrating the cash-for-roads announcement made today. Transport money would be far better spent on rail infrastructure than road. (tags: ) Uniform swing, RIP - YouGov catches up publicly to what most politics geeks have known for decades (tags: ) Just the ticket: the joy of England's railway stations Featuring a nice picture of my favourite railway station, Huddersfield (tags: ) Reminder: London gets 24 times as much spent on infrastructure per resident than north-east England (tags: ) What's Judicial Review ever done for ...
Tue 2nd
08:55
Next Lib Dem Newswire: what the Ashcroft polling really shows, (some) Lib Dems change attitude to hu...
#76147052 / gettyimages.com The next edition of my monthly email newsletter, Liberal Democrat Newswire, is coming out soon, including an exclusive analysis of what the Ashcroft polling of the party's marginal seats really shows, details of how (some) Lib Dems are changing their attitude towards hung Parliaments and more. Join thousands of existing readers by signing up for it here and make sure you don't miss out. In the meantime, you can browse the previous editions online.
The other day when I was at a Frank Hornby Trust meeting it became apparent that Dave Howel of Crosby (a fellow Trustee) had spent some time tidying up the grave of Frank Hornby in recent times so I went to go see what the present condition is. Here it is in the closed graveyard of St. Andrews Church, Maghull. [IMG: rsz_hornby_grave_2] It does not look bad at all and I hope that in due course there will be a storyboard at Maghull Station with a walking tour of places in the Town relevant to Frank Hornby. I am working ...
Tue 2nd
07:55The graph which shows why the Lib Dem policy of raising the personal allowance is the wrong priority
Here's a graph which should make Lib Dems who continue to advocate increasing the personal allowance as an effective way to help low- and middle-income earners sit up and pay attention. It's from the Resolution Foundation's report, Missing the target: tax cuts and low to middle income Britain, published yesterday. What it shows is which households gain from the party's policy to increase the threshold at which income tax is payable to £12,500 over the course of the next parliament. As you can see, those households which benefit most are at the wealthier end of the spectrum; the poorest 20% ...
[IMG: stephen tall res fdn] I spoke yesterday (alongside The Times's Tim Montgomerie and The Guardian's Polly Toynbee) at the Resolution Foundation event, Tax cuts in tough times. This marked the publication of their new paper, Missing the target: tax cuts and low to middle income Britain - I've written about that over at LibDemVoice here. They're highly critical — rightly — of all the parties for proposing tax-cuts which don't do very much for the least well-off but do a whole lot more for the better-off. Here's the notes I spoke from... First, many thanks to the Resolution Foundation ...
Despite free school breakfasts having been in place for ten years now, still only one in every five children are benefitting from them. A significant number of our poorest children aren't even getting free breakfasts, which means this scheme is falling short of the Welsh Government's original aims. The Welsh Lib Dems want every infant in Wales to receive a free hot lunch at school. Provision at lunchtime will ensure that all children will benefit, not just the ones who can get to school early, and the evidence shows that a decent lunch is more effective than breakfasts in improving ...
An immigration lawyer reviews Paddington Lego's letter to parents, and how not to tell a fake when you don't see one Slate Star Codex on why he can't recommend the best site on psychiatric medicine to his patients Millennium on immigration The Lee Rigby report expected Facebook to break US law Leonard Pierce on Ferguson [...]
Today there was Further Consideration Stage on the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Bill but there were some very loosely worded amendments from Lord Morrow to his own Bill. I beg to move amendment No 5:In page 9, line 13, at end insert(1A) In the heading to Part 5, after "PROSTITUTION" insert "AND PAYING FOR SEXUAL SERVICES OF A PERSON".". The following amendments stood on the Marshalled List:No 6: In page 9, line 23, at end insert"and A knows or believes that the payment is made or promised by a third party."No 7: In page 9, line 26, leave out "level ...
