[IMG: peace] It's conceivable that I am just about the last Liberal Democrat blogger to post something in the aftermath of the General Election horror show. Plenty has been said. There is no doubt plenty more to say. I thought I'd add something to the mix. A little of the comment that has emerged so far has been predictable. Those who lean to the left feel vindicated: Cleggite entryism is the root of the party's problems, as they've been saying all along. Those who lean to the right feel vindicated: the mistake was to attempt to differentiate from the Conservatives ...
Last week's results weren't a complete surprise to everyone - as far back as May 2012 I postulated that without a change of srategy the party faced an existential crisis. The result on Thursday and the hole the party now finds itself in is a direct result of the strategy pursued by those at the very top of the party - both at Westminster and at HQ. Nick Clegg to his credit (and in some style) has done the decent thing; taken responsibility and resigned. Now is the time for his coterie of incompetents to do the same. Tim Gordon, ...
As someone who believes we should have a proportional voting system it makes sense that I am in favour of coalitions. These are the most likely outcome after all if the votes cast more closely reflect the number of seats won in any multi-party system. However, what I hope I never end up doing again is campaigning for a coalition and to be part of one. In 2010 the Liberal Democrats stood on our liberal values, we stood on our ideals, we stood on the policies that had been decided democratically by conference. The people liked what they saw and ...
And it's Steve Winwood's birthday too.
I was working at my employer's conference at the Arena and Convention Centre Liverpool in Liverpool last week. Being in that part of the city put me in mind of the Liverpool Overhead Railway. It ran along the length of Liverpool's dockland between 1893 and 1956. This film tells its story. You can see archive footage of the line in operation in a video I posted last year.
...as Louise Mensch seems to have just experienced. She's just had this conversation on Twitter So that chap did. And found this. I suppose she didn't call him 'dishonourable' And mind you, there but for the grace of God....
Bob Fahey, the newly elected Conservative councillor for the Oadby Grange ward on Oadby and Wigston Borough Council, has wasted no time in making his mark. As the Leicester Mercury tells it: Police are investigating allegations an Oadby and Wigston borough councillor made racist comments during his election acceptance speech. Conservative councillor Bob Fahey was greeted with gasps and shouts of "racist" when he referred to his fellow ward representatives, Rav Thakor and Teck Khong, as an "Indian" and a "Ch***", according to those at the meeting. He is alleged to have made the remarks at Parklands Leisure Centre, in ...
Police have one man in custody and are searching for others after security guards were injured in an armed robbery on the Co-op on Cheadle Road, Cheadle Hulme. The attack took place at about 2.15pm on Tuesday 12th May 2015. Two men wearing balaclavas and carrying knives entered the store and injured two security guards before making off with a cash box. As the Police report: The offenders then made off in a black Audi, driving down Queens Road, where they changed into a white Vauxhall Mokka. Police followed the Mokka but men rammed the police car and attacked it ...
[IMG: phoenix] We're entering nosebleed heights. Here's what Austin Rathe, from party HQ, just told members: This is absolutely incredible: since last Thursday, 10,000 people have joined the Liberal Democrats to begin the fight back. Here's some of the reasons they gave for joining: Charity from Edinburgh said, "I joined the Lib Dems because Nick Clegg was right in his speech – we need liberal values now more than ever." Emily from London, "Just joined the @LibDems – because I think we're going to need them a lot over the next few years." Adam from Hastings, "What I feel the ...
[IMG: St Martin's school logo: Faith and Endeavour] Children and parents at Folkestone St Martin's Primary School in Horn Street, Folkestone have today been sent home with the news that St Martin's has been assessed as OUTSTANDING in every one of the five assessment categories in their recent Ofsted evaluation. Chair of Governors at St Martin's, Tim Prater, was naturally delighted. Tim said: "Two years ago we had a pretty disappointing Ofsted Inspection at St Martin's. We didn't feel some of the judgements were fair, but at that time we promised parents and children that we would work together to ...
My First Person column printed in today's Leicester Mercury. Brace yourselves - the Tories are off the leash The general election was bloody awful for the Liberal Democrats. I know politicos are meant to say things like "I'm glad you asked me that" and "Let me answer that question directly" and "I think the real question is...", but there are times even a politico has to tell the truth. For someone like me, who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats for all his adult life, Thursday night was heartbreaking. And you don't have ...
Sadly, I have just received this message via e-mail having given a small donation to try to assist Merseyside Maritime Museum in their bid to acquire a shipbuilder's model of this famous Liverpool Liner at auction. [IMG: image001] Mauretania Auction update Many thanks once again for your recent gift towards our appeal to bring the Mauretania home to Liverpool. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful in our bid. Here is a quote from Janet Dugdale, Director of Merseyside Maritime Museum: "We are hugely disappointed with today's outcome. Our intention was to bring the Mauretania home to Liverpool, at a critical time in ...
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To ensure scientific integrity in climate policy, advisers need to take a step back from politics. There is a shift underway in international climate policy. The top-down approach to mitigating climate change that has guided policy since 1992 is slowly being replaced by a bottom-up model. The focus is no longer on meeting a global climate stabilization target of 2°C, or on establishing a legally binding carbon budget. The negotiations on a global agreement to be concluded in Paris in December will instead focus on voluntary mitigation commitments. It is already clear that the aggregated contributions will be nowhere near ...
Membership of the Liberal Democrats is now at more than 54,417 and increasing every hour.Since polls closed on Thursday, 9,473 new members have joined the Liberal Democrats!They are joining right across the country, and they are not just people who've been members before. Some are people who have never joined a party in the past, but now want to stand together against the things this Conservative government is already threatening to do, such as repealing the Human Rights Act or preparing to leave the European Union
I've been contacted by the BBC to ask me to promote a programme called Home Away From Home and encourage people to put themselves forward to be on it. So if you have an interesting home and want to stay in someone else's house while appearing on tv, you can find details below. Dear Jonathan, I hope you don't mind me contacting you, but I'm working on the new series of BBC One's Home Away
Five years ago I made a prediction about the fate of the party in the General election in 2015. Sadly, I was right. Early last week I made a prediction about the fate of the Medway LibDems in the local elections which drew heavily on a metaphor of von Spee's fleet with the two Councillors leading the three candidates and despite wild inaccuracies from our opponants we were out gunned despite a valiant show went down with all hands. Sadly I was right again. Last Friday night as we sat waiting for the Local vote mulling over the General election ...
[IMG: 1431433775206] What more can I say but I wonder whom this advice was aimed at? Probably Labour voters – if you recall the Labour Party's inability prior to the election to decide whether to pledge the NHS the £8b needs. A big sitting on fence issue that probably cost them a lot.
Like many Lib Dem voters, supporters and sympathisers, I spent much of the weekend lurching between disbelief and despondency, and genuinely worried whether the party could or would ever recover. In an effort to cheer myself up I went for a walk in the countryside only to encounter an ironic sea of yellow dandelions. Initially, it felt as if nature itself was mocking me, but in retrospect the vivid spring flowers seem provide a wonderful analogy of what the party needs to achieve if it is going to pick itself up and thrive again. Traditionally, the Liberal Democrats have punched ...
It was a great pleasure to be at the official opening of the new CDL office building in Kings Reach, Stockport (near the Pyramid). [IMG: CDL boss Tom Hogg with Stockport Council Chief Executive Eamonn Boylan] CDL boss Tom Hogg with Stockport Council Chief Executive Eamonn Boylan CDL is a great Stockport success story – if you use an insurance comparison site, the chances are their software is powering it. Led by Tom Hogg, CDL is also one of the most community minded companies around. With over 500 employees, they've sunk over £100,000 into improving the path along the Mersey ...
Party leadership candidate Tim Farron has comprehensively rubbished the media stories that he's toying with the idea of changing the party's name by dropping "Democrats" from the name. Aside from the legal issues (there's already a Liberal Party which has the legal rights to use that name on the ballot paper), Tim has also told me he well remembers the painfully long arguments after the merger which created the party over what its name should be. That's not something he wants to return to. If you've listened to Tim speak, you'll notice he likes the shorted hand of "Liberals" and ...
Just as quite a few folk in the party appear to be pointing the finger at Labour and blaming themfrom our electoral meltdown, others are looking at the South West & SW London and pondering, not so much why they came after us - they made that fairly clear, they wanted 23 seats and that's where a lot of them sat - but how could Lib Dem voters make such a political leap (and in such numbers). I think I know why. Firstly it's shy Tories. This is much misunderstood term. It doesn't mean Tories who are embarrassed to admit ...
[IMG: NormanLamb] These are devastating results for the Liberal Democrats. All of us are completely shell shocked. All party members must have a say in our future strategy and new leader. I have clear views on what we need to do and am intending to stand for leader. I am my own person, a conviction politician. I am impatient to tackle injustice. In my role as minister, I pursued our Liberal agenda, making the case as powerfully as I could for equality for those facing mental ill health challenges and to end the outrageous discrimination within the NHS. I found ...
The Telegraph provides our Headline of the Day. Only in Grimsby...
I thought the Liberal Democrats had slain the ghost of 1992. I was wrong. Not only had the party failed to slay the ghost, it eagerly participated in its resurrection as if the greater the return to past nightmares the higher the chance of success. Press stunts, leader's speeches, target mail, glossy leaflets, email messages, social media adverts and more were all applied to the great task of resurrecting the ghost of 1992. If it had been in pursuit of any other objective, it would been impressive. Instead, it was self-defeating. The ghost in question is that of hung Parliaments ...
[IMG: Fightback54k] As a long-time supporter of the Liberal Democrats I decided to join the party about two weeks before polling day. I was a member of the BBC project "Generation 2015" which was giving young people aged 18 - 24 the chance to get their voices heard and put across what matters to them when it comes time to cast their - or should I say our - votes and I came across so many passionate people my age and some a lot younger than me who were members of the parties they supported. Even though those who had ...
Tue 12th
11:53
On the Liberal Democrats difficult teenage years and trying to get dates and positive attention...
So you are essentially the early 20-something who has just finished university and moved home and isn't exactly sure what the future holds. You've been the spotty kid that no-one really liked but importantly no-one really disliked either. Then briefly in 2010 everyone noticed you as you had found some excellent spot cream and were looking all fresh and exciting. The watching world had become bored with the usual options and they wanted to try something new. One problem though, people agreed to go on a date with you and suddenly you weren't all fresh faced and new and instead ...
Last week's general election results in Britain were a shock to almost everyone — including the opinion pollsters — but the cruellest blows were for the Liberal Democrats, who lost 48 of their 56 seats. Ministers such as Simon Hughes, Ed Davey and Vince Cable were among the casualties, as well as high flyers like [...]
Friday: Well, as Sir Bedivere might have said surveying the field of Camlann and the ruin of the flower of England, that could have gone better... Fear won the day. Scotland voted for the SNP out of fear of the Tories; England voted Tory out of fear of the SNP. This was terribly cynical populism on the part of Mr Balloon and Mr Nicola Insturgent. We are as a nation more divided, more diminished as a result. Not that the Liberal Democrats' campaign was innocent of blame in this. Fear won the day because we didn't give hope a chance. ...
The failure of the polling industry to get the vote shares right in last week's general election rightly means their methods are getting a post-mortem. But there's another form of political polling which is alive and well, yet deserves at least as much – if not more – scrutiny. It's the polls that ask people why they behave the way they do and then treat the results as gospel. Take this from Panelbase, reported uncritically by the BBC: More than a third of voters were influenced by the TV debates between the political leaders in the run-up to the election, ...
I was actually asleep when Nick Clegg gave his resignation speech and had not watched it until today. What prompted me to look it up on You Tube was a substantial donation to the local party received in my office today along with a note from the donor saying that it was the most inspiring and moving speech they had seen from a politician. Having now watched it I agree with that assessment. It is little wonder that our membership is growing on the back of that speech. Watch it for yourself below and come to your own judgement:
There was William Morris in 1888, putting the finishing touches to his first medieval fantasy novella, A Dream of John Ball. Morris, the great socialist and wallpaper designer, was by then thoroughly disillusioned with Liberalism, and he dreamed that he had hurtled briefly back to the Peasants Revolt. There he had encountered the preacher who inspired it, John Ball, and spent the night with him in a darkened church, surrounded by the bodies from the first brief encounter with the enemy, talking about the future. Afterwards, the encounter gives Morris an extraordinary perspective on history: "I pondered all these things," ...
[IMG: Railway track] Looking at the wreckage of our electoral hopes, the defeat of MPs of massive talent and commitment who have served their constituencies well, it is hard for all of us not to feel angry. A lot of that anger spills through in the post hoc analysis as we seek to distribute blame and identify the critical errors made. I suspect that in years to come people will still argue about what went wrong and when, but certainly at the moment its all too raw to arrive at objective,dispassionate conclusions that all will accept. In my view we ...
Tue 12th
10:00
Last Thursday, "there was a larger Lib Dem vote movement to Conservatives than to Labour"
I noted on Friday morning, in the immediate aftermath of the Lib Dem electoral bloodbath, that the Lib Dem post mortem would prove to be "more complicated" than we expected because "we didn't just lose votes to Labour (that had been priced in) we lost at least as many votes to the Conservatives". This has now been backed up with an analysis of the numbers by Michael Barone at the Washington Examiner (hat-tip Nick Thornsby): As I have written several times, the British are experienced tactical voters. They know the balance between the parties in their constituencies and cast their ...
ICYMI: I made A Reading List for New Lib Dems. Now contains added What NOT To Read in the comments (tags: ) Much to my surprise, I agree wholeheartedly with Louise Mensch's Advice to Ex-MPs (tags: ) Breaking: Nigel Farage to remain Ukip leader until the end of time (tags: ) How Labour's Lib Dem bashing backfired (tags: ) If my dogs were a pair of middle-aged men (tags: ) Must Read article for lib dems on what we do with all those new members. (tags: ) in which @julianhuppert is gracious in defeat and still made of awesome (tags: ...
After last week's earthquake it is tempting firstly to debate party strategy for the Liberal Democrats, and then to gloat a bit over Labour's ineptitude. But such an inward focus on the political left and centre-left is one of the reasons why these parties got into such trouble. I want to think about that key group of voters that I will call Middle England. These are the voters that plumped for the Conservatives, and won them the election. What I will develop is a bit of an archetype. It is not based on scientific evidence – though anecdotal evidence from ...
In Laos' remarkably mellow capital it becomes possible to day dream of a simpler past. South-East Asia is changing at an astonishing pace. Travelling in China's slipstream the region has experienced similarly breakneck economic growth. That in turn is pulling people into urban areas at an equally astonishing pace. They've not really had time to adapt. [...]
It occurred to me yesterday that I've never spent any significant time in the constituency of any party leader – I've passed through a few, but not been in any for a meaningful time – but that will likely change, assuming that Tim Farron or Norman Lamb is the next Liberal Democrat leader. As MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, Tim gets to represent a large chunk of the Lake District where I've spent plenty of time and will be back on holiday later this year. A constituency that includes Ambleside, Coniston, Windermere and Grasmere must be high up there on ...
The Guardian reports: The Information Commissioner's Office is investigating a "small number of complaints" about the Telegraph's email urging people to vote Conservative The email, signed by editor Chris Evans and including links to the newspaper's election-day leader article, other political coverage and an offer for a free 45-day digital subscription, was sent to the newspaper's database of emails on the eve of the election. Some recipients took to Twitter to complain that they either did not know how the Telegraph had got their email address or saying they had only signed up for specific emails such as its technology ...
With Nick Clegg stepping aside as leader of the Lib Dems, the fight begins immediately for who his successor will be. As it happens, even though the party lost 48 seats in the general election, of the eight that remain the two who were always favourites to be the next leader, Tim Farron and Norman Lamb, have kept their seats. So now more than ever, they remain the favourites. Alistair Carmichael has an outside shot at the leadership, and being a Scottish MP would be good for the party in terms of its unionist credentials, but I think the Tim ...
Membership of the Liberal Democrats is now at more than 54,240. Since polls closed on Thursday, 7296 new members have joined the Liberal Democrats. People are joining right across the country, and these are not just people who've been members before. We're recruiting people who have never joined a party in the past but want to stand together against the things this Conservative government is already promising to do. Find out more and join by clicking here.
From the crossroads of shock and grief lead two paths: on one lies anger and resentment, on the other, resolute determination to progress. It is that latter path that liberal-minded people, and the Liberal Democrat party that provides their best home, must now take. There can be no time wasted on rueful bitterness. As Tim Farron has said, it is vital that anger is now turned into action. And in the spirit of rebuilding from the bottom upwards, I, a humble member, am offering 8 (because this number has a bit of gallows humour to it right now) things that ...
I have today launched my May 2015 Update to West End Community Council. Issues covered include cycling along Riverside Drive, road and pavement planned improvements and road safety improvements at the Riverside Drive/Avenue roundabout. The Community Council meets tonight at Logie St John's (Cross) Church Hall at 7pm. You can download my update here.
The Liverpool Echo has the story – See link above. There is a depressing regularity about these shootings in Sefton Borough and on Merseyside generally. Will they ever end?
In the past 24 hours there have been 3 relevant crimes reported to the police in Histon Sector. On Monday the 11th May between 09:50 and 18:00hours, a theft from a motor vehicle took place in Graham Road, Orchard Park. Vehicle was left unattended parked at location mentioned, perpetrator(s) has smashed the rear glass window and gained entry into the vehicle. Variety of items including (Tom Tom, camera and a running watch were taken) CF0185910515 refers. On Monday the 11th May between 20:00 and 222:00hours, a theft of a motor vehicle took place at the Fox Pub, in Gladeside, Bar ...
So we've had a bit of a rest over the weekend, which was much needed. Now we're into a new week, the opinions are flying thick and fast. Where Clegg went wrong. What our national message should be. Who should be the new leader. There's a lot of media attention on all of these subjects, [...]
The amazing thing about Frank Hornby and his products is that many of them are still in production although the ownership of the companies involved in their manufacture is now spread far and wide. [IMG: rsz_a_meccano_masterpiece] Take Meccano, it has been produced by a French owned company for many years now – see link below to Meccano UK:- www.meccano.com/uk/ And what about Hornby Trains – still going 'strong' as a OO gauge model railway producing company – see the link below:- www.hornby.com/uk-en/ And what brought this to mind? My old chum and former Maghull resident Roy Connell (now a valued ...
The Assembly's Health and Social Care Committee has unanimously endorsed the general principles of Kirsty Williams' 'More Nurses' Bill. The Committee has published its report on the Bill, which states that it is "supportive of the general principles of the Bill" and "believes that primary legislation on safe nurse staffing levels could be beneficial." The Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee has also published a report on the Bill. In December 2013, Kirsty Williams was successful in the National Assembly's ballot to introduce backbench legislation. Her proposal could see Wales become the first country in the UK with a legal duty ...
