It is not that easy to predict what will happen with Greece. The arguments of the Greek government are absurd. They cannot revisit the Second World War when the country agreed a settlement many years ago. The argument about profits on Greek bonds is a nonsense given the amount that has already been written off. Now we have, "if we go it falls apart". If they renege on their contractual
Cricinfo has a list of the oldest surviving test cricketers. I have extracted this list of the 10 oldest England players and their dates of birth from it. I can remember Tom Graveney (shown above in 1951) playing for England in the late Sixties at the end of his test career. Another fascinating name in the list is Bob Appleyard, about whom I must write more one day. D.V. Smith (Sussex) 14 June 1923 F. Ridgway (Kent) 10 August 1923 R. Appleyard (Yorkshire) 27 June 1924 G.H.G. Doggart (Sussex) 18 July 1925 D.J. Insole (Essex) 18 April 1926 J.G. Dewes ...
At the end of last month Mark Valladares published a post noting the decline in the number of Liberal Democrat bloggers. (I included it in a Six of the Best at the time.) On 26 January 2011 there were 235 blogs listed on the LibDemBlogs aggregator: on 26 January 2015 there were only 109. Mark saw the explanation for this remarkable decline as lying chiefly in the diminished fortunes of the party - in particular, people's unwillingness to put their "head above the parapet for fear of being shot at". In response to Mark, Alex Marsh wrote a post suggesting ...
[IMG: UKIP Plymouth - tweet about death of policeman] The North Devon Journal reports: A Ukip spokesman said the karma tweet was deleted "rapidly" after it appeared on Friday. The twitter account @PlymouthUKIP has also been deleted. "It does not reflect what the party thinks," he said. "We believe in justice and innocence until proven guilty." The spokesman said that the tweet was down to a party volunteer's "freewheeling amateur past". That last quote is rather unfair to freewheeling amateurs all around the country: it's quite possible to be both without also being distasteful and offensive.
Sorry for the comparative silence for a few days. I had a migraine that lasted longer than most do, and that's mucked up my brain chemistry enough that I'm not thinking straight (made a real idiot of myself on Twitter earlier, for example). I should be back properly tomorrow, and I've got a week off [...]
Flood prevention work continues in the centre of Market Harborough. I suppose that's what comes of laying out a new market town (at the end of the 12th century) in the flood meadows of the Welland. The Harborough Mail reports: The next phase of work will start on Friday, February 6. It will involve an unmanned drilling machine tunnelling underground from the west of Coventry Road, near the Commons car park entrance, to the top of the road at its High Street junction. Mr Innes said this tunnelling machine looks "similar to the Thunderbird 4 craft".All very interesting, but surely ...
The long election campaign is now well and truly under way. It is hard not be underwhelmed by the story so far. Politics is a complicated, multidimensional business. Indeed, one of the things I don't envy politicians is that they are expected to have intelligent views on all sorts of topics close at hand, or at the very least be able to recite the current party line with some semblance of cogency and sincerity. At one level I rather admire those who manage it, and in the process avoid the bear traps laid for them by the media. But at ...
[IMG: shrimp paste] I am a great fan of The Gentleman's Relish, an achovy paste. It is also known as Patum Peperium. I enjoy it on toast with tea on a cold Sunday afternoon. Delicious. However, it is not a regular treat because it costs £1.59 for 42.5 grams. Quite steep, but worth buying as an occasional treat. After much searching, I have found an alternative. Tesco Shrimp Paste, which is "Thai style". It costs £1.89 for 110 grams. To me, it tastes just as good as The Gentleman's Relish.
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 410th weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere ... Featuring the seven most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (1 – 7 February, 2015), together with a hand-picked quintet, you might otherwise have missed. Don't forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox — just click here — ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging. As ever, let's start with the most popular post, and work our way down: 1. Natalie Bennett should beware the ...
Welcome to this seminar, which forms part of a series organised by the Traveller Movement to address racial justice issues faced by Gypsies, Travellers and Roma In May last year we discussed Gypsies and Travellers in the media, and a key finding of that seminar was the impact of accommodation and planning issues on media coverage of Gypsies and Travellers at the local and national level. Four out of the five speakers referred to accommodation issues in the context of negative and damaging media coverage. So today we're addressing a root cause of media hostility, and hence of hostility by ...
Sun 8th
18:29
Shropshire Council is right to face down government and developers on affordable housing rules
Shropshire developers have written to government ministers to try to overturn our county's affordable housing policies. These developers don't want to pay anything towards affordable housing when they build small developments. Shropshire Council is holding its ground despite the diktats of ministers. It is right to do so. Towards the end of last year communities [...]
Here are the latest national voting intention figures from each of the main pollsters. To put the numbers into longer context, take a look at my database of polling figures going back to 1945, which is updated quarterly. Polling company Con Lab LibDem UKIP Green Con lead Fieldwork Method ComRes 33% 34% 7% 18% 3% -1% 14-15/1 Online ComRes 31% 30% 8% 17% 7% 1% 23-25/1 Phone ICM 30% 33% 11% 11% 9% -3% 16-19/1 Phone Ashcroft 31% 31% 8% 15% 9% 0% 30-1/2 Phone MORI 33% 34% 8% 11% 8% -1% 11-13/1 Phone Opinium 32% 34% 7% 15% 8% ...
[IMG: postdemocracy] It's still only February, but we may have a winner in the Silliest Idea Proposed In A 2015 Political Column contest. Step forward Australian Herald-Sun columnist Tom Elliott with this: There is a solution. Let's agree on a set of truly important problems — mounting debt, population growth, lack of jobs, rising health care expenditure, inefficient welfare and an inadequate defence force — and appoint a committee of eminent and competent Australians to sort it out. A benign dictatorship if you will. This committee would consist of experts in their fields without political axes to grind. It'd need ...
Sun 8th
15:00
How to get young people in #Peterborough interested in local politics! @PeteYouth @votesat16
Young people's relationship with politics, whether national or local, is often considered problematic. Only 44% of 18 to 24 year olds voted in the 2010 general election and while I do not have any figures, I suspect that the percentage is even lower when it comes to local elections in our city! A survey of [...]
Continuing my weekend theme of understanding politics via the medium of dogs. Dog one is the electorate. Dog two is the candidate. Of course, cats know a thing or two about politics too.
[IMG: 7 ver 4 full] Many thanks to the 15,800 visitors who dropped by Lib Dem Voice this week. Here's our 7 most-read posts... Oops! 15 Scottish Ashcroft polls published early by mistake (82 comments) by Paul Walter LibLink: Vince Cable – Why is Labour planning changes to tuition fees that benefit higher earning graduates before lower earners? (189 comments) by Paul Walter Electoral forecast puts Lib Dems on 48 seats (43 comments) by The Voice Opinion: Labour's Tuition Fees policy is a tax cut for the rich, paid for by the poor (100 comments) by Iain Roberts How does ...
Watch the new video from Amnesty International UK:
[IMG: Christine Jardine canvassing selfie] I wasn't surprised to see Alex Salmond ahead in the Ashcroft poll on Gordon. After all, he's been everywhere at the moment. He has even, entirely coincidentally, of course, started a regular column in one of the local papers. The thing is, Christine Jardine and her campaign team have always known that they faced a challenge. She doesn't have the benefit of incumbency, apart from anything else. That's why they have been working so hard in the year since she was selected to fight the seat. What the Ashcroft poll put beyond doubt was that ...
When a film is tipped for the Oscars I often go to see it with a sense of dread that it won't be as good as the critics say. And I confess that theoretical physics is about as far away from my comfort zone of interests as anything could be. So I was braced for [...]
From National Public Radio: "When he first played it for Bobby Womack, who was his protégé, he said, 'What's it sound like?' And Bobby said, 'It sounds like death.' Sam said, 'Man, that's kind of how it sounds like to me. That's why I'm never going to play it in public.' And Bobby sort of rethought it and said, 'Well, it's not like death, but it sounds kind of spooky.'" It was more than spooky. Just before the song was to be released as a single in December of 1964, Sam Cooke would be shot to death at a motel ...
You see, if you sue someone, you actually have to turn up in Court to press your case, or else it'll be struck out. Of course if Wikileaks founder Assange sets foot outside Ecuador's Embassy, he could find himself extradited to Sweden to face allegations of rape. That would be what many people would call a result. The Huffington Post has details of the spat between Assange and Clegg which began after the Liberal Democrat leader said on his weekly radio phone-in that he thought the sooner Assange were to "face justice in a country where due process is well ...
Today's Wales on Sunday highlight a growing issue in my region, namely the abandonment of open cast mine sites with insufficient funds to restore them. At Parc Slip in Margan, a 600 by 400 metre water-filled hole has been left behind which in the view of many could lead to flooding. There is also East Pit near Gwaun Cae Gurwen, which has also been left open and unrestored. We would need £115 million to restore land at East Pit but only around £2.5 million is available in the bond left by its former owners. At Parc Slip the fund stands ...
The Sunday Times reports [£]: AS A mother of three, a teacher and schools inspector, Caroline Ansell would appear to have the perfect profile for a Conservative parliamentary candidate. Yet the would-be MP for the marginal seat of Eastbourne also appears to speak at least seven languages and to be interested in images of scantily clad Chinese glamour models. At least, that is if we are to judge her predilections by the people she follows on Twitter... A more likely explanation is that [she is] using a controversial method of inflating their popularity on the site by indiscriminately "following back" ...
I just want to put on record my thanks to United Utilities for their assistance in resolving a waste water problem involving the property of two very elderly ladies in my ward. [IMG: index] Suffice to say that I was hugely impressed with the help UU gave and am very appreciative of it. They certainly went the extra mile.
Yesterday, I used the FORTRAN double precision Whetstone benchmark to assess the new Raspberry Pi 2. The results are rather impressive. For the sake of completeness, I spent this morning dusting off my original RPi, installing the same operating system (Raspbian) and compiler (gfortran) to repeat the test. [IMG: Double Precision Whetstone Benchmark Results, RPi 1 Model B] The result – an average of 150,962 KIPS over 10 runs of 100,000 loops, compared with 276,369 on a single core for the RPi 2. Which on this single, somewhat flawed (albeit interesting) benchmark, makes the RPi 2 around 1.8 times faster ...
[IMG: For an affordable increase in your gruel ration, vote!] For an affordable increase in your gruel ration, vote! I don't always like being proved right. When I wrote about hope earlier this week, there was still a little part of me that thought I might be proved wrong and things might turn around. Our politicians might all have suddenly been infected by a desire to spell out positive visions for the future, but sadly the virus that does that doesn't exist in our universe as yet, and all we get is the drab and the banal. Yet again, we ...
In maths girls outscore boys in exam graded anonymously; boys outscore girls when graded by teachers who knew their names. (tags: ) Samsung: watch what you say in front of our TVs, they're sending your words to third parties (tags: ) *wails at # 5* but you haven't EXPLAINED it! (tags: ) Is 50 Shades of Grey abuse? Girl on the net is absolutely right, as usual (tags: ) Post-pub nosh neckfiller: The Red Dwarf chilli chutney egg sarnie (tags: ) [UPDATED] Marvel Announces New All-Female Avengers Team (tags: ) Not Watching This Weekend: Eggbound (tags: ) Charity says cold ...
Confession time. I'm a political activist and I'm not currently registered to vote. I have dropped off thanks to individual voter registration and I haven't sought to redress it. This is something which I find reprehensible, yet I am lacking the motivation to correct it. I live in Esher and Walton which since 1906 has only ever returned a conservative MP. The lowest majority was in the 1930s, it was 16%. Dominic Raab got 58% of the vote in 2010, a majority of around 18,000. I've written to Raab on a number of occasions and always got a reply. Often ...
The contrast between industrial and dockland Bootle and the mainly leisure related activities of the Wirral waterfront can be seen in this shot, which also shows some activity on the River Mersey itself. [IMG: rsz_panoramic_bootle_and_the_wiral] Click on the photo to enlarge it. The photo is amongst my Flickr shots at:- www.flickr.com/photos/86659476@N07/
This was the scene on Brickwall Lane just to the west of Sefton Village on Friday 30th January:- [IMG: rsz_link_road_work_30_01_15] Street lamps are being erected and the junction with the new Broomscross Road is taking shape, all down to the campaigning of Thornton Parish Council and Thornton residents who were and are desperate for a by-pass around their congested community.
From Monday 22 February, the 722 town bus timetable will be rejigged and take different routes on the half hour and the hour. The service will serve Toll Gate Road hourly. On the hour, the bus leaves the Tourist Information Centre at the Ludlow Assembly Rooms and travels via the railway station, Galdeford and Sheet [...]
The Conservatives are making brazen attempts to take credit for raising the personal tax threshold despite the changes being delivered by Liberal Democrats in government. New analysis by HM Treasury reveals that by raising the personal tax allowance to £10,600, that 8.3m households will have benefitted twice from increasing the tax allowance and will on average be £1,330 better off each year. Increasing the personal tax allowance was on the front page of the Liberal Democrat 2010 manifesto but for the Conservatives it was not a priority. During the first leaders' debate in 2010, David Cameron said that cutting taxes ...
Broken Health & Social Care: my view, based on personal experience locally and some reflections. Those close to me and my husband will know we had a difficult weekend trying our best to care for his disabled sister in circumstances that were distressing for all and probably risky for all. The background to the situation started about two & a half years ago but reached crisis and a low point last weekend. I pondered a blog describing the details of that experience but as his sister does not have the capacity to consent, that seems unfair. Instead you have a ...
I've decided that my playlists have been too infrequent because I've spent too much time selecting music from too wide a selection. So in an effort to do this more often (for those days, like today, when I'm unwell but want to get a blog post up), I'll be doing them just selecting stuff from [...]
