Former MP Ed Davey has got a knighthood. Sylvia Emmott, chair of South Lakeland Council and one of the unsung heroes of the 2015 general election.
October A pioneer of rock singing on a suburban Manchester railway station? It doesn't get any better than Sister Rosetta Tharpe. I pondered the significance of Charlotte Church on Question Time and posted an alarming recording of Elizabeth Butler-Sloss interviewing a victim of Bishop Peter Ball. It turned out that Leicester thought it had found the body of Richard III back in 1935. I was able to show that I had never believed in Camila Batmanghelidjh before asking why so many wanted to do so. Quite by accident, I listened to Dapper Laughs. In a happier accident, I discovered film ...
[IMG: IMG] Towards the end of 2015 and new and very significant book was published by David Bryant and John Bannon on the steam railways of Merseyside. I am very happy to have purchased one of the very first editions and to have gained David Bryant's signature upon it. It really is an impressive book that runs to 410 A4 sized pages with 616 photographs, 312 of which are in colour. For some odd reason Merseyside has not really had many books written and published about the steam era and this is emphasised very clearly by Pete Waterman who has ...
When I started this blog way back in November 2012, I wasn't certain where it would go. For the first part, I wasn't then a Shropshire Councillor. That didn't happen until March 2013. For the second part, I didn't know whether the good folk of Ludlow would be much bothered to read the posts I... Continue reading A year in small town blogging - my Ludlow blog got 68,000 views in 2015 →
Frank Cottrell Boyce: Five things to learn from the Moomins | Books | The Guardian Frank Cottrell Boyce: Five things to learn from the Moomins Hooray! (tags: sf finland ) (404) Behind the Ronald Reagan myth: "No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed" Harding? (tags: ) Left to their own devices | Little Atoms Left to their own devices The hard left in Britain this century. (tags: ukpolitics ) America's Empty Embassies Ex-Veep Walter Mondale writes. [Incidentally, my 5000th link saved to Delicious.] (tags: uspolitics ) Shale's Running Out of Survival Tricks as OPEC ...
The Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, has called for the commission reviewing the freedom of information law to be disbanded, describing the stance of his party's own peer Lord Carlile and others on the commission as one-sided. The commission was established in July by Conservative Cabinet Office minister Matthew Hancock to examine whether the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act 2000 - which was introduced by the last Labour government - is too expensive and intrusive. "The group looking into it strikes me at least to have a bias towards limiting access to FoI requests for quite spurious reasons," said Farron. ...
Embed from Getty Images A paragraph in a 2013 interview with Jonathan Meades intrigues: He loathed the Taunton public school to which his parents managed to send him, a "philistine place" he has described as "hell". It took him, or so he says, 27 years to return to the town, and when he did, he got his revenge by sending it up in one of his restaurant reviews (he was then the offal-scoffing and somewhat porcine restaurant critic of the Times). The locals and its liberal democrat MP went nuts.Can this be true? A 1998 story from BBC News shows ...
Links I found interesting for 28-12-2015 - From the Heart of Europe Links I found interesting for 28-12-2015 (tags: ) 13 bad habits you should break in 2016 to be more productive | Business News | News | The Independent 13 bad habits you should break in 2016 to be more productive Ow! Guilty as charged! (tags: lifehacking ) My year on Twitter, by @nwbrux - From the Heart of Europe My year on Twitter, by @nwbrux (tags: ) Sir Terry Pratchett remembered by his daughter, Rhianna Pratchett | Books | The Guardian Sir Terry Pratchett remembered by his daughter, ...
I never did get up at 6am to listen to the Today Programme. A horrendous night meant I was just getting to sleep at that time. Thankfully, there's iPlayer in the World so I could catch up later. It's well worth listening to which you can do here. The main themes were the sort of place Britain is and the opportunities it offers to people from other countries and the need for girls to have positive female role models and about women and leadership. Interviewees included Theresa May, Jamie Oliver, footballer Vincent Kampany, Tamara Rocco, principal dancer at the English ...
Wed 30th
17:15
Why classroom assistants matter and why the SNP's pressure on local government harms kids' education...
[IMG: US Navy 061026-N-5271J-014 Jennifer Tonder (right), a teacher's aide for a 3rd-4th grade multi-age class, discusses the various books available from the Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) grant given to Sasebo Elementary School with] Scottish Liberal Democrat Education spokesperson Liam McArthur has been doing some research into classroom assistant numbers in Scotland and has found some very worrying results. Like many other council services, education has been put under massive pressure after nine years of Council Tax freeze which predominantly benefits those in larger properties – e.g. the richest. The SNP are not so progressive when you put their record ...
Conservatives: 2015 Summary: Started worried about forming another coalition, ended in dreamland with close to absolute power because just over one in three voters voted for them. Opposing all constitutional change unless it will increase this majority. Cutting funding to opposition while appointing as many croneys as SPADS as possible. Key players shaping up for [...]
One of the worst elements of the Governemnt's Comprehensive Spending Review was the proposals to cut bursaries for student nurses. This is particularly reprehensible given that nursing students spend so much of their time actually working on wards. In fact, there are many wards that would buckle under the pressure if they weren't there. Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams, who has led the way in proposing a bill that would guarantee safe nurse staffing levels in Wales, has blasted the proposals and written to health secretary Jeremy Hunt to express her concerns. She said: The UK already has a ...
[IMG: 7 best] Many thanks to the 675 000 visitors who dropped by Lib Dem Voice between 1 January and 27 December 2015. Here's our 7 most-read posts... The night of the long sgian dubhs (79 comments) by Charles Kennedy It was emotional enough reading this at the time, but even more so now that we know it was the last article he was to write for us. The Lib Dem Voice election night live blog (291 comments) by the Lib Dem Voice team. Not going to lie, this is a tough one to read. It's the first time I've ...
Introducing Doctor Who - Home Truths... A ghost story for Christmas featuring one of Doctor Who's shortest-lived companions as the heartbeat of one of its most intimate and personal tales. Jean Marsh recreates Sara Kingdom for this creepy Big Finish audio two-hander (3.05 in their Companion Chronicles series) where she poses a challenge to church, state and listener simply by being there. For all that she and the visiting Night Constable scoff at fairy tales, she embodies perhaps the oldest fairytale lesson of all... "There's a house across the waters at Ely where an old woman tells a strange story." ...
Wed 30th
13:30Kirsty Williams' New Year message: Welsh Lib Dems are "united, growing and up for the fight"
2016 will be a big year for Wales. With the Assembly elections just around the corner, people will soon decide who they want representing them in Cardiff Bay. The Welsh Liberal Democrats head into these elections with our heads held high and a record to be proud of. During this Assembly, we have used our influence in budget negotiations to secure, amongst other things, over £200 million extra investment in schools through our Welsh Pupil Premium. This policy, directed at pupils that need it most, is central to what we believe in: ensuring that everyone, no matter their background, will ...
[IMG: images] Stood in a muddy field next to Dovers Brook with it tippling down, that's where I was interviewed by Radio Merseyside journalist Mike Perkins as storm Frank was hitting Maghull today. [IMG: Dovers Brook in full flood looking north from Sefton Lane on Boxing Day 2015.] Dovers Brook in full flood looking north from Sefton Lane on Boxing Day 2015. Thankfully at noon today the River Alt was not high and neither was Dovers Brook unlike Boxing Day when Maghull was hit by flooding. Not sure what parts of the interview Radio Merseyside will use but I made ...
In no particular order. Even before the much expected, yet still shocking news of Lemmy's death a couple of days ago, I had to praise Motorhead - Bad Magic, their 22nd studio release. full of the rock n' roll you'd expect and everything louder than everything else. Rest in Loudness, Lemmy. From the loudest to the more sublime: Toto proves that melodies and a deftness of touch still has a place in the industry. With perhaps their best release in over 20 years, XIV with a vocalist who can deliver (sorry bobby Kimball, just hasn't the pipes anymore) namely the ...
[IMG: Ukip by Matthew Goodwin and Caitlin Milazzo] Like its prequel, Revolt on the Right with which it shares an author in Matthew Goodwin. Ukip: inside the campaign to redraw the map of British politics wisely mixes narrative and statistical political analysis. Ukip's story is packed full of lively characters, dramatic events and colourful anecdotes. The risk with the form of political analysis which simply strings them together into one narrative is that the statistical evidence does not always point in the same direction. Most notably, narrative political accounts are drawn like moths to the flame of general election campaigns, ...
We wanted to honour those Liberal Democrats that our readers felt were true stars of 2015, which has been one of the toughest years in our party's history. Over the past few days, we have sought out nominations and now have a rather impressive list that we'll be publishing in instalments during this week. Here is the second part. Part 1 is here. Their names come with the comments made about the contribution they have made. Some are parliamentarians, some are councillors, most are grassroots activists. Let's celebrate them and the many others who are fighting fto keep that Liberal ...
As we await the publication of the New Year honours list over the next few days, a study by The Times newspaper has found that privately educated people dominate the top echelons of the honours system as much as they did 60 years ago. They say that 46%, nearly half of the recipients of knighthoods and above in 2015 attended public school. The figure has hardly changed since 1955, when it was 50 per cent, yet only 6.5 per cent of the population goes to private school. The paper adds that people who attended either Oxford or Cambridge also feature ...
[IMG: York flooding 2] Tim Farron has written to George Osborne to ask him to provide additional funds to help repair flood-hit infrastructure. He also had some fairly pithy comments about David Cameron's visit to the north, inviting him to do more than parade around in wellies. He said: The Government's approach to flood defences is short-sighted. In 2012 I said more funding was needed to deal with the torrential rain and 'freak' weather that was becoming more prevalent. In the years since I have repeated that call and do so again today. We need to urgently review every shelved ...
[IMG: Fear the Sky by Stephen Moss - book cover] Take a saunter around online reviews on sites such as Amazon or Goodreads for Stephen Moss's Fear the Sky and you'll find huge numbers of very positive reviews. The audio version has done extremely well in Audible's charts. Yet more broadly the book is barely reviewed and indeed, it is self-published rather than having secured a conventional publisher. Why this contrast? At its starkest, because the book has great ideas dreadfully written. I'm not exactly a paragon of grammatical exactitude, but it's not a hard job spotting many flaws in ...
Longstanding readers of this blog will remember that I used to take [IMG: Oliver Quick] on aspects of religious faith sometimes, from my agnostic Christian standpoint. I have not attempted this recently as it rather distracts from my main mission of tracking the evolution of liberal politics. But it's Christmas time, and I have recently finished reading this book about the work of the early 20th Century Anglican theologian Oliver Quick (1885-1944). He is my grandfather. Those only interested in my political musings should read no further. Oliver Chase Quick, to give him his full name, was the son of ...
At the start of last year I made some predictions for the coming year and assigned them percentages based on how likely I thought they were. So now the year is nearly over, I can now see how I did? The short version? Not so great. The UK general election will result in a hung parliament [...]
[IMG: The LGA Lib Dems support Liberal Democrat council groups across the country] A template press release on the dangers of fake alcohol products. ALDC members can download an MS Word version of this release here. Join ALDC here to gain full access to their unrivalled collection of local campaigning resources and support for just £3.41 per month. NEW YEAR REVELLERS WARNED TO AVOID DANGEROUS FAKE ALCOHOL EMBARGO: [...]
Embed from Getty Images Tim Farron has challenged Conservative and Labour parliamentarians to join with the Liberal Democrats to overturn the Government's proposed cuts to Universal Credit. These are almost identical to the cuts to tax credits which the Chancellor reversed in his Autumn Statement. It is surely only logical that the changes to Universal Credit should also be reversed. The Party is to put an amendment repealing those changes. It will be discussed as part of the Committee stage on the Welfare Reform and Work Bill in the New Year. Tim Farron said: The first big political battle of ...
The successful conclusion of nuclear talks with Iran earlier this year means that the Islamic Republic has been losing its pariah status with much of the previously critical world. This should lead to far more inter-action between Iran and erstwhile enemies, including the "Great Satan", the United States, and bilateral improvements in visa regimes. The [...]
Recently a email was sent out to members asking this question. So why am I a Libdem? Not for the naked quest for power and the high life: that is for sure. Anyhow, below is my more considered response. For me, being a liberal means being decisions being made at the most local level possible. It means encouraging people to take an active role in our own communities and not being dictated to by central governments in either Westminster, Cardiff or Edinburgh. That means getting involved: whether directly in politics or voluntary work with your local community. At the centre ...
Wed 30th
08:32
Would the Lib Dems have done better in May 2015 if they'd been more like the Corbynistas?
As one who writes some critical things regarding Jeremy Corbyn's leadership from time to time, I have been on the receiving end of a reasonable amount of Corbynista abuse. The one thing about it I find truly fascinating is that they are genuinely outraged by any attack, perceived or otherwise on their man; the fans of Jeremy assume you must have some sort of ulterior motive or agenda given the guy is so transparently wonderful. I find their faith weirdly touching in a way. It made me wonder yesterday if perhaps it was this lack of all-encompassing faith that sunk ...
Residents have complained to me that there is no "T junction" signage in Saggar Street and some visitors' vehicles go up the hill only to meet an unexpected dead end. I raised this with the City Council and am pleased with the positive response : "A dead end "T" sign will be incorporated into new street name plates at the Saggar Street/City Road junction. There's no specific timescale for this being done but the new signs will be included in the next street name plate order to be prepared (probably early January) and erected approximately six to eight weeks thereafter." ...
Elland Bridge collapse 'will take months to repair' - Copley Bridge has gone too but can only find tweets about that Lemmy would be peeing himself at this po-faced Torygraph obituary This message of courage perfectly sums up Hebden Bridge's defiance in the face of floods This excellent letter about Lemmy bizarrely appeared in the Times today 10,000 UK homes built on flood plains each year Calderdale flood victims survey the damage: 'I can't go through this again' Calderdale Flood Relief Appeal (Boxing Day floods 2015) | Localgiving We need a Dutch-style Delta plan to stem the tide of floods ...
The UK Government's cuts to nursing bursaries could badly hit nurse staff numbers in Wales. This follows the UK Government's announcement in the Spending Review that grants for student nurses are to be replaced with loans. A recent survey of 2,000 student nurses revealed that nine in ten would not have applied for their nursing degree without access to the bursary, which the UK government now intends to scrap in 2017. In December 2013 I was successful in the National Assembly's ballot to introduce backbench legislation. This proposal, which is likely to become law in the early new year, would ...
