Tue 24th
22:55

Linkblogging For 24/2/15

Having a VERY bad mental health time at the moment, so you get links tonight. Proper posts for the rest of the week, though. "After decades of work we've finally hammered in the message that Racism Is Bad to the extent that almost nobody will now admit to actually being a racist (with the exception [...]

Posted by Andrew Hickey on Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

Today the Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor Noel Treanor met with Paul Givan to discuss the conscience clause. I will give him his due, while he did say it was widely supportive of the essence of the Conscience Bill he did add a caveat: "any change to the law would have to be carefully defined, to prevent it from leading to spurious claims of religious conscience." He also said that "it would be wrong to swap one form of discrimination for another." The ironic bit is of course the marriage equality debate that seems to have sparked this whole ...

Posted by Stephen Glenn on Stephen's Liberal Journal

Last week it was Devon: this week it is Bedfordshire. Note the huge sheds next to Cardington station. They once housed the airships R100 and R101. In his novel Dead Long Enough, James Hawes calls them "the Bedfordshire pyramids".

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

A quick update on my previous post about the myth that 1 million people have fallen off the electoral register, given that the Electoral Commission has published a report on the matter today. As with previous data, today's report is about the number of entries on the electoral register. That is not the same as the number of people, especially as – for example – students away at university can be registered twice. So switching from talking about total entries to total people as if they are one and the same continues to be as sloppy as it was before. ...

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

A package of measures worth £530,000 will be invested in encouraging students to register to vote, the government has revealed. The National Union of Students will be allocated funding to run national competition for student unions to find the best ideas to get students to sign up to the electoral register. The best ideas will receive up to £10,000 to fund events or other projects proposed by student unions across the country. There will also be funding to boost campaigns to help ensure every student has the information they need to register. Investments will also be made across the Further ...

Posted by Andy Pellew on Focus on Bar Hill

Liberal Democrat MEP Catherine Bearder is calling on the EU to outlaw battery caged rabbits, following an investigation by Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) which found millions of rabbits being kept in horrendous conditions across Europe. Approximately 330 million rabbits are reared for meat every year in the EU, making them the second most farmed species in the EU. The vast majority of these rabbits are factory farmed in small wire cages that severely limit movement, causing high levels of injury, stress and disease. EU laws have been put in place to uphold animal welfare standards for farmed animals such ...

Posted by Andy Pellew on Focus on Bar Hill

At Gateshead Council cabinet this morning, the budget report was considered. Labour are going for a 1.95% council tax increase, after four years of freezing it. Opposition Leader Frank Hindle, Cllr Ron Beadle and I were there on behalf of the Lib Dem group. As usual, some Labour members blamed us for every problem. For many in the Labour Party, history began in May 2010. All problems have arisen

Posted by jonathanwallace on Jonathan Wallace
Tue 24th
20:14

Pensioners' perks

I hope and suspect that as many pensioners will be nauseated and put off by David Cameron's condescending tone as will be prompted to vote Tory by his latest bribe. Cameron has promised that we can keep our perks (£200 annual winter fuel allowance and free bus passes for all, and free TV licences for those of us over 75) because we have, as a block, "done the right thing, worked hard and saved for our retirement." I am quite certain that there is just as big a proportion of idle layouts, incompetents and variously dysfunctional people in my generation ...

Posted by Peter Wrigley on Keynesian Liberal

I've written a blog on the Lib Dem Voice site today explaining the background to the pamphlet which I wrote with the investor Joe Zammit-Lucia, after the series of events he organised to allow businesspeople to talk more informally to politicians. The idea is that business is an increasingly radical force, no longer tethered umbillically to the Conservative Party. Hence the title of the pamphlet, A Radical Politics for Business, which we launched at a business reception in London on Monday night. You can read the blog here and the pamphlet here. But it is true that I ought to ...

Posted by David Boyle on The Real Blog
Tue 24th
19:53

Whickham eFocus no. 93

Our latest edition (no. 93) of our email newsletter for the Whickham area was published last night. When I was turning my mind to what the contents should be earlier this month, I was struggling to come up with suitable stories that would, in a printed newsletter, be the page leads. And then suddenly, 3 big stories came along in quick succession: the end of plans for opencast mining at Marley

Posted by jonathanwallace on Jonathan Wallace
YouGov

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day award.

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

The folly of EU currency union has been laid bare by developments in Greece and underlines why the Liberal Democrats should abandon any notion of ever joining the Euro, no matter how 'long term' the aspiration. The less affluent Eurozone members were always going to take advantage of the preferential credit rating that resulted from sharing a currency with the more affluent Germany and France. They in turn were naieve in not recognizing this danger, especially as the lion's share of any resulting 'bailout' would come from their national coffers. There were plenty of commentators at the time of union ...

Posted by Energlyn Churchill on Towards the Sound of Gunfire
Tue 24th
19:09

Lib Dem training

Sunday saw some of our team (myself included) head to Newcastle for a training session for candidates and agents. I'm not sure why I went for the agents' bit but it was useful nevertheless. We also did training on using social media and motivating volunteers. Afterwards I headed to Whickham. My ward colleague Marilynn Ord had delivered 200 survey forms in the morning and it was my job to

Posted by jonathanwallace on Jonathan Wallace

Tuesday: You may not have noticed that there's an election coming. They've been keeping rather quiet about it. A number of people have said that this year's election is "too close to call" or "too complicated" but I think that, even this far out, the results are pretty obvious. The Liberal Democrats will come fourth in vote share with probably about 16% and win two-hundred and nine five-way marginals. Nick Clegg will become Leader of the Opposition as Al Murray is swept into Downing Street, made Prime Minister as leader of the Stop Farrago Alliance of Labour, Tory and SNP. ...

Tue 24th
18:29

Why overseas aid matters

Three years ago I went on a trip to Pakistan organised by the British Council which involved supporting a group of education advocates aged 18-25 who were campaigning to implement a new law which guaranteed free state education at both primary and secondary level. It seemed that getting the law passed was only the first step in the long road to making sure all children in Pakistan had access to education. I blogged briefly about that trip at the time, but the whole pasty tax issue came up at the same time (to the extent that I was trying to ...

Posted by Alex Folkes on A Lanson Boy

Watch the new video from Amnesty International UK:

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

Some of you may have recently stumbled across a new social network called Street life. Over the past few weeks they have had quite a marketing boost that has also targeted Councillors. There are quite a few good reasons as to why a local Councillor might want to be involved in this site. Firstly it is based around your local geographic location. This is different than sites like Facebook that are based on your connections to various friends or twitter that is based on who you follow. Simply by signing up to street life with a postcode you will be ...

[IMG: International office] Sarajevo is not a city I ever expected to see, and Bosnia is not a country that I ever expected to be at the sharp end of encouraging women into political life. Yet here I was, travelling to Sarajevo with the International Office to encourage and train young women in the basics of being a councillor and a candidate! Nick Thorne, Research Officer in the International Office, travelled with me and we were later joined by Sara Bashford, a Conservative Councillor, and Anna Birley, a Labour Councillor, who were to work with us on cross-party sessions later ...

Posted by Flo Clucas on Liberal Democrat Voice

The media and activists are obsessed with Nick Clegg potentially going down in Sheffield Hallam despite all the signs pointing towards a Lib Dem win. If they really wanted to get excited about a potential cabinet big-wig going down though then they should go into the Scottish highlands where a real interesting battle will play out between the SNP and the Lib Dems. Whilst the public polling has Nick Clegg in a nip/tuck battle in his seat, the public polling has Danny Alexander getting a right mullering in Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey. As we all know, the public polls ...

Posted by neilmonnery on The Rambles of Neil Monnery

The apology for a debate about business and politics over the last few weeks is enough to make anyone independent-minded start chewing the carpet in frustration. There was a particularly annoying radio debate between Digby Jones and Polly Toynbee last week. A dialogue of the deaf if ever there was one. Perhaps it was inevitable that the BBC would continue the traditional assumption that business was always going to be Conservative, but look more closely - talk to business people more broadly - and you find something is shifting. That is what I've been doing at a series of events ...

Posted by David Boyle on Liberal Democrat Voice
eUKhost

Following complaints from Liberal Democrats in Redcar constituency, the Acting Chief Constable of Cleveland is to issue guidance to about the importance of not involving police officers in election campaigns.This follows photographs published on social media of Labour council candidates and the Labour Parliamentary Candidate for Redcar appearing alongside uniformed police officers.The Acting Chief Constable replied to the complaints, saying that he was "writing to candidates making it clear that they must not use such pictures in their campaign material."Labour should know that this is a misuse of public money and should not be putting pressure on the police to ...

Posted by Chris Abbott on Chris Abbott

Buzzfeed joins Danny Alexander on the campaign trail in what he admits will be a close fight with the SNP to hang on to his seat. But he insists his local record - "I think I'm the only MP in the country who gets attacked by his opponents for delivering too much to his constituency" - and tactical voting against the nationalists will get him over the finishing line. His campaign team are desperately trying to convince Labour and Tory supporters who don't want another independence referendum to lend Alexander their vote. "I remain confident that I can win this ...

Posted by NewsHound on Liberal Democrat Voice

I have long been an opponent of mass medication, otherwise known as adding fluoride to our water supply and have written on the subject on this blog. Yesterday's Telegraph underlines my instinctive prejudice against such a measure. The paper say that a study of 98 per cent of GP practices in England found that high rates of underactive thyroid were 30 per cent more likely in areas of the greatest fluoridation. They add that this could mean that up to 15,000 people are suffering needlessly from thyroid problems which can cause depression, weight gain, fatigue and aching muscles: Last year ...

Posted by Peter Black on Peter Black

Perhaps they are planning to reinvent one and got inspiration? [IMG: Tim Farron and Danny Alexander in Haringey. Photo courtesy of Lib Dems CC BY-ND 2.0]

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

Israelis go to the polls on March 17 and no doubt the US and UK governments and most Lib Dems are hoping for a Netanyahu defeat and a more "liberal" government. Opinion polls however suggest the opposite. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in article on 1 February, suggested that Netanyahu's re-election would be the better outcome, as then the rest of the world would see the need to keep up the pressure on Israel. The article suggested that it could be worse if a government of the centre left was elected as this would reassure the rest of the world that ...

Posted by John Kelly on Liberal Democrat Voice
Tue 24th
12:10

Rejoice rejoice

Full marks to Eric Pickles. The Department for Communities and Local Government yesterday announced that it is to crack down on on wasteful spending of government lobbying government. "Using taxpayers' funds to lobby government wastes public money and undermines transparency." "The Department for Communities and Local Government is also cracking down on taxpayer funded lobby by other organisations. The Institute of Economic Affairs has undertaken extensive research on 'sock puppets' – those pressure groups and charities receiving public money that then use it to lobby government and Parliament for more money and regulation. " "The department is setting Whitehall an ...

Posted by Editor on Liberal Vision
Tue 24th
11:30

MPs for Hire

Channel 4's sting operation that entrapped Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind has yet again highlighted the dangers posed to Britain's parliamentary democracy by the temptations of cash for questions or of lucrative consultancies. Both men involved his time had been Foreign Secretaries, one Labour, one Tory, and already have opportunities to make a good [...]

Posted by jonathanfryer on Jonathan Fryer

If you've ever had the pleasure of attending a Bruges Group event, or indeed a UKIP press conference, you will be familiar no doubt with the propaganda laid out at each which details how great the "Norwegian model" is and how it should be adopted by the UK. Which is why today's speech by Vidar Helgesen, the Chief of Staff to the Norwegian Prime Minister, Erna Solberg, a Conservative prime minster no less, was so important. Vidar started his speech talking about how as a child he revered Margaret Thatcher, to the point of hunting down printed copies of her ...

Posted by Nick on nicktyrone.com

One thing that surprised me when I first lived in the US, and continues to stand out as an oddity to me is the election of judges. It confuses John Oliver too, leading to this segment on Last Week Tonight: For me, it's a great example of an idea I've talked about often, that democracy is not just about having elections, and having more elections doesn't automatically make things more democratic. Democracy is an ongoing process, not a single event, and that process needs lots of different parts to work together to ensure it succeeds. Electing judges is a pretty ...

Posted by Nick on What You Can Get Away With

Thanks to everyone who came along to the community litter pick on Sunday morning – organised by residents at short notice via the Gatley Facebook group, about ten of us cleared the whole length of the path from Foxland Road to Hawthorn Road inside an hour. [IMG: Gatley litter pick] Lib Dem candidate Graham Greenhalgh (left) helps out at the litter pick Lib Dem council candidate Graham Greenhalgh, who helped out, said "Thank you to everyone who came along – it just shows what a few people can achieve in less than an hour on a Sunday morning."

Liberal Democrat County Councillors have been shocked by local Tories' plans to hike council tax by 1.99% this year, the maximum they can without taking it to a county-wide referendum. In a highly controversial budget Hertfordshire Conservatives have proposed swingeing cuts to buses and library services. Leader of the Opposition and the Liberal Democrat Group, [...]

Posted by chriswhite on Chris White » Chris White

The rise of fringe parties takes British politics into a whole new era. and yet the outcome of the election due on 7 May 2015 seems strangely predictable. The parties seem to be stuck in a deadlock where none can win. What are the chances of one of them breaking free? Britain's electoral system (misleadingly referred to as "first past the post") is capable of producing dramatic swings in the balance between the parties. But a plethora of constituency polls allows pundits to make some quite stable predictions this time. The main features are these: the Liberal Democrats will lose ...

Posted by Matthew on thinking liberal

If you have been a member of the Liberal Democrats, at any level, then the likelihood is you will have met Philip Vince or maybe you will have had a handwritten note from Philip in immaculate spider-small handwriting; if you attended any Federal Party Conference and before that Liberal Assemblies since at least 1957 then chances are you saw or met Philip Vince. For someone who never stood for public office his impact and commitment were unrivalled. Despite that, constructing this biography has been a work of many conversations, tiny snippets of information, leads, contacts, shared insights - Philip was ...

Posted by Ed Fordham on Liberal Democrat Voice

[IMG: Ed Miliband - Labour will not reverse cuts] Labour's attitude to cuts and economic credibility have continued to dog that party all through Miliband's leadership, never quite moving on from the past. Usually an author doesn't take it well if a book reviewer recommends tearing up their book and scattering the pages around randomly. But I hope Tim Bale, author of Five Year Mission: The Labour Party under Ed Miliband, will forgive me, for this is a reaction to his subject rather than his skill. [IMG: Five Year Mission by Tim Bale] The reason I've (metaphorically, not literally, honest ...

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack
Tue 24th
10:00

Help Spring Clean Yate!

Dates for your diaries... If You want to help make a difference, the Spring Clean of Brinsham Park is 7th March 10am, and on 12 April there's wildflower planting. Interested? Contact John Ford for details. If you know of other local Spring Clean or planting events, please email paul.hulbert@gmail.com so that we can advertise them here.

Posted by Paul Hulbert on Focus on Sodbury, Yate and Dodington

A few weeks ago I was featured by the Co-Op in their intranet bulletin for LGBT History Month, which was fab :) I'm also one of the people local online news hub Mancunian Matters picked to profile as a local LGBT 'name'. I think the interview went pretty well and gets a pleasing blend of bi and tg/gq things... have a read:

Posted by Jen on Either / And

I was having a drink with a friend of mine who works for a pollster recently and we started talking about the "silent Tory" phenomenon I've written about previously. He wasn't so sure about this being relevant in 2015 (I should disclose, he's a Labour supporter), and disputed any comparison between this coming election and 1992. However, he then turned around and said something I wasn't expecting. "It's the silent Lib Dems I'm interested in." I asked him what he was talking about. He said that he was convinced there are a lot of people out there who will not ...

Posted by Nick on nicktyrone.com

Maximum Steampunk! 1870s "Femme Fatale" ring pistol shoots tiny bullets (tags: ) NHS Contract Awarded To Private Firm Despite Rival Bid Being "£7 Million Cheaper" This is why people mistrust privatisation of public bodies... :/ (tags: ) Autistic People Spark Twitter Fight Against Autism Speaks (tags: ) Adorable cute baby snakes - FAO @auntysarah (tags: ) Tim Farron: What diversity means to me (tags: ) Tory MP Suggests New Mothers Can't "Handle" Being Cabinet Ministers Perhaps he's drawing on his own experience as a father? And saying new parents should get more parental leave? *hopeful face* (tags: ) Minimum wage ...

Tue 24th
08:55

Campaigning over recess

Despite what you hear in the press about a "zombie" Parliament, life in Westminster has been pretty busy for the Lib Dem team in the House of Lords. We've secured important improvements to the Counter Terrorism legislation, used the Deregulation Bill to reintroduce Sarah Teather's provisions on retaliatory eviction, introduced measures dealing with revenge porn, and done battle with the Tory dinosaurs seeking to derail Michael Moore's Bill intended to enshrine the principle that 0.7% of our wealth goes to the poorest overseas countries. But this last week we, like the Commons, have been in recess, and many of us ...

Posted by Baroness Ros Scott on Liberal Democrat Voice

I'd long been mildly boggled that the proportion of Americans with passports is so low. It turns out in the last few years my degree of boggling should have been recalibrated: [IMG: Proportions of Americans with passports soars. Graph from @Jishai http://dadaviz.com/i/3323] The post 9/11 switch to requiring passports to cross the borders with Canada or Mexico looks to have caused a large part of this growth – and also means that the old, boggling figures were perhaps not quite what they seemed given that it was possible to travel abroad to two such popular locations without a passport.

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

I picked up some old photos of Southport Station not so long ago from the collection of the National Railway Museum and a visit to the excellent Atkinson on Southport's Lord Street also brought me face to face with another old photo of the Station. Here they all are, reminding us all of how important the Station has been to the Southport community over the years:- Click on any of the photos to enlarge them. [IMG: From a display in The Atkinson - Lord St. Southport] From a display in The Atkinson – Lord St. Southport [IMG: [IMG: ...

Posted by Cllr. Tony Robertson on Sefton Focus » Sefton Focus

As part of the unadopted footways programme, the east side of Hazel Drive is due to be upgraded and adopted this financial year. As the financial year is drawing to a close, I was asked by local residents to ascertain when the upgrade would take place. I am pleased to advise that the City Engineer has updated me as follows : "These works are programmed to start on 2nd March."

Last night was Calderdale Council's Budget setting meeting. The full result of that will be blogged about by Cllr James Baker over on the local party page, but one thing in particular struck me about Labour in the meeting – their attitude to democracy. Calderdale Labour's view is exemplified by Councillors Press & Sweeney. Cllr Press actually made a speech in the meeting where she said "Councillors aren't elected to consult on everything with local people". Likewise Councillor Sweeney made the amazing claim that "People don't want politicians asking them what they want on everything". Perhaps Councillor Sweeney should reflect ...

Posted by alisdairmcgregor on Alisdair Calder McGregor

Warning: this post contains potentially disturbing material. In 1949, the Nobel Prize for medicine to two neurologists: Walter Rudolf Hess and Antonio Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz. Hess had discovered that different parts of the brain controlled different functions. Moniz was to find a deeply unfortunate application for this discovery. The official presentation speech [...]

Posted by Mark Mills on Matter Of Facts

[IMG: herts-county-council] Liberal Democrat County Councillors have been shocked by local Tories' plans to hike council tax by 1.99% this year, the maximum they can without taking it to a county-wide referendum. In a highly controversial budget Hertfordshire Conservatives have proposed swingeing cuts to buses and library services. Leader of the Opposition and the Liberal Democrat Group, Stephen Giles-Medhurst commented: "I am appalled. The County Council clearly has to be careful and look after taxpayers' money properly, but right now putting up Council Tax by almost 2 percent and also hitting services to the elderly and vulnerable leave a bad ...

Posted by Nick Hollinghurst on Tring Liberal Democrats

Police forces across the UK are being urged to make use of a new EU law that will make it easier to track down and fine foreign nationals who commit speeding and other traffic offences in the UK. Currently most foreign drivers detected by speed cameras are not registered with the DVLA and so avoid paying speeding fines. Last year 3,580 speeding offences were committed by foreign motorists in Thames Valley alone, more than anywhere else in the UK. In addition 1,954 were committed in Kent, 994 in Hampshire, 741 in Sussex and 541 in Surrey. Across the country figures ...

Posted by Andy Pellew on Focus on Bar Hill