Lib Dem MP Tom Brake was a visitor to Newcastle last week. I was part of the delegation to meet and greet him at Newcastle Central Station and we took him on the Metro to South Gosforth and then the Regent Centre. He then headed to Newcastle University to speak in favour of staying in the EU. You can see photos from the visit on the above link.
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I was pleasantly surprised to receive from the Carmarthen Journal at the beginning of the year, an offer to contribute to their expanding Welsh language content with a column of my own. Having published my initial column in January, I'm glad to report that the Journal have seen fit to keep this new arrangement going by publishing column number two! My initial column came in at about 650 words in length but I've managed to bring this second effort in at about 550 words which will be my target for future columns. ...
This film from 1959 shows London poised uneasily but attractively between tradition and modernity. More about the Look at Life films on Wikipedia.
The Boy in Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 children's novel by John Boyne that was made into a film two years later. I imagine that anyone who wanted to read the book or see the film has done so by now, but I had better point out that what follows contains spoilers. The book and film tell the story of nine-year-old Bruno, whose father is made commandant of Auschwitz. He befriends Shmuel, an inmate of his own age. The two boys concoct a plan to smuggle Bruno into the camp to help look for Shmuel's father - Shmuel brings a ...
Here is Tim Farron's speech to Scottish Liberal Democrat Conference: It is only a couple of weeks since I was out on the doorstep with Alex Cole Hamilton in Edinburgh West. I have to tell you, Alex has got some serious staying power. Not even his trip to A+E after he was attacked by the Hound of the Baskervilles, well a dog in Corstorphine, could stop him getting out on the stump that same evening with me. We returned to the office after a night out on the doorsteps, for a pizza and politics event... which was great, although whilst ...
Tim Holyoake says remaining in the European Union is the proud, patriotic choice: "Why would we want to throw away all of the advances we've made as proud Britons over the last few decades? Why would we choose to leave the EU and sacrifice our security, prosperity, freedom and sovereignty to an uncertain future in an uncertain world?" "A ... recent Canadian academic study ... found not just that architects disagreed with the public on what was an attractive building but that they couldn't predict what the public would like." Nicholas Boys Smith argues that we need to make new ...
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 451st 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 (21 – 27 February, 2016), 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. How we won Sutton (Cambridgeshire) ...
Eight days after the 2010 General Election I took the momentous decision to no longer solely seek election in Linlithgow and threw my hat into the ring for a winnable seat for the 2011 Scottish elections. In the end within weeks of the General Election then I was back on doorsteps of party members seeking their nomination for the seat of Edinburgh Central. Although I didn't win that selection losing out to the excellent Alex Cole-Hamilton I put the experience down as a learning one for the next time I contested a winnable seat. Of course life between then and ...
I had a rare Sunday excursion into Brussels this morning, to meet a friend from out of town who was visiting his sister in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre; and my eye was caught by the striking sculptures erected on street corners in the area as I navigated the last few turns. My friend agreed to go for a brisk walk around the neighbourhood, and we both snapped away on our phones. The Woluwe-Saint-Pierre commune, God bless them, have published a guide to their sculptures which I have cribbed from below. This lady celebrates the morning. (It was a cold morning this morning.) She ...
I've just been going through the tweets from Scottish Lib Dem Conference. Here's a selection. Now, who's that chairing the debate? #sldconf debating its first motion; @DavidMGreen92 calling for fairer energy charges for people in north and islands pic.twitter.com/nl7OzOSNZD — Philip Sim (@BBCPhilipSim) February 26, 2016 A stop on Willie and Alex's World Tour of Nurseries Snack time for @willie_rennie and Alex Cole-Hamilton at an Edinburgh nursery! #sldconf pic.twitter.com/AYgYWOebVw — Scot Lib Dems (@scotlibdems) February 26, 2016 But some people couldn't concentrate on the debate.. There's a very large chandelier above my head. Hope there's no Phantom of the Opera ...
The Liverpool Echo has the story – see link above In the wake of the appalling far right demonstration and the violence that accompanied it yesterday Liverpool City Elected Mayor Joe Anderson says he alone should decide who gets banned from demonstrating in the City. Banning people from expressing their views, no matter how repugnant many of us may find those views, is very much a very last resort. Wanting the power to take such a decision on your own strikes me as being a worrying thing in itself. No one person should be able to take such a ...
More comedy genius from Australia's Clarke and Dawe:
A 150,000 people attend this one church in Seoul. This morning, I was one of them. Three years ago, I wrote a post about the Yoido Full Church, which is probably the largest church in the world. I quoted the Economist reporting that: It looks somewhat unprepossessing—a brownish blob surrounded by office buildings—but Yoido boasts [...]
[IMG: 7 best] Many thanks to the 11,700 visitors who dropped by Lib Dem Voice this week. Here's our 7 most-read posts... Tim Farron: Boris has had more positions on Europe than the Kama Sutra (63 comments) by Paul Walter In which I get a letter from the Leader of the Scottish Tories that tells a blatant lie (11 comments) by Caron Lindsay Fear and loathing at the coalface: how to combat it (72 comments) by Katharine Pindar Clegg says Tories are squandering our legacy but it wasn't tuition fees that lost it for us (36 comments) by The Voice ...
Sun 28th
14:26
In Full: Willie Rennie's speech to Scottish Conference: We stand with the weak against the strong, a...
Willie Rennie must have been reading Lib Dem Voice because he opened his speech by quoting from Becca's blog which we featured 10 days ago. He got in touch with her and she gave him permission to share her story. He argued that it was time to see major investment in mental health and for it to be given party with physical health. He also set out what the party would do with the £475 million generated for nurseries, schools, colleges and a pupil premium. I want to talk to you about a new member of our party. Becca Plenderleith. ...
I keep trying to give it up, but I keep drifting back to it. My mental health has been SO much better the past couple of weeks of tw'oliday, and yet, despite myself, I couldn't stay away and the last couple of days I have drifted back to my usual level of tw'activity, and my usual level of screaming "Oh FUCK OFF" at various screens at various points during the day. So I'm going to do a pros and cons list to try to decide whether I shouldn't just delete the whole boiling. Pro: very fast personal news feed. Con: ...
Last year my wife, Sam, did a sponsored De-Chox to raise money for the British heart foundation. For a whole month she gave up chocolate in all its forms which for her is a HUGE deal but she was strong and succeeded in raising many monies.This year she is taking Sophie along and our little five year old has vowed to be as strong as her Mum - even though her chocolate in take is fairly low anyway. For those of you who aren't regular readers my son George (14 months old) was diagnosed with Pulmonary atresia before he was ...
[IMG: 12496325_10207909151261642_614223791405517749_o] Below are the two speeches Jo Swinson made to Scottish Conference yesterday. The Diversity Debate took place in two halves. The first was on a constitutional amendment which would allow the Scottish Party to implement arrangements on gender balance which had been approved by conference. One amendment to that was submitted, and supported by the movers, changing gender balance to the much wider "diversity". The risk of such an approach was that a 2/3 majority was needed for it to pass, but the working group had been advised that a constitutional amendment was vital to enable any new ...
Inspired by this series of comments View Poll: Andy [IMG: comment count unavailable] comments
[IMG: sundaypaps] Today's Sunday newspapers make interesting reading. The Independent covers a report which suggests that drone technology could be a threat to nuclear submarines, meaning that our nuclear deterrent could be "rendered irrelevant." Paul Ingram, the chief executive of Basic, said: "In the past anti-submarine warfare has been carried out by a small number of highly capable ships and manned aircraft. Their task has been like that of a handful of police looking for a fugitive in a vast wilderness. Lacking the manpower to cover the whole area, they have to concentrate their forces on the most likely paths ...
Continuing my visit to Wakefield (part one is here)... The city centre Arriving back in the city centre was a jolt confronted as I was with a dual carriageway, a large car park and in the distance a shopping centre. Trinity Walk Shopping Centre is a fairly generic shopping centre with the range of shops [...]
John Rentoul eats humble pie in the Independent: Nick Clegg: an apology. I may have given the impression that the Liberal Democrats were a waste of space, and their crushing in the general election was a merited humiliation. Statements such as "Clegg was a fool to have gone into coalition with the Tories" and "the Lib Dems got nothing in return for ministerial posts that David Cameron didn't want to give them" may have led the reader to believe I thought the whole business a diversion and the resumption of single-party government a welcome simplification. If so, there has been ...
When I was young a top British recording star would be named to sing for us at Eurovision, but the choice of song was left to a public vote. In those days, incidentally, voting involved sending a postcard. This year we have the public vote back, but no stars. Joe and Jake (me neither) will be singing 'You're Not Alone' for us in Sweden in May. This video would have been my choice. It comes from Derek Jarman's 1978 film Jubilee, which I saw at a university film club that year. (Those were the days when teenagers went to university ...
"I really mean it when I say that I'm not sure I fully understand politics right now, which is an odd thing to say when I've spent my life in it." So said Tony Blair in a recent interview. A bunch of mavericks and challengers everywhere have turned politics on its head. Why are they being so successful? What ordinary people everywhere can see and feel in their bones and their everyday lives is that our current political and economic system is unsustainable. Yet the established parties seem to be offering them just more of the same - with the ...
People are (somehow) having a difficult time finding the dog in this picture The Wombles. Now there's a TV show that's due a dark gritty reboot. Lucy Liu as Madame Cholet is INSPIRED casting Twitter RT @DocHackenbush: *opens image in Photoshop* Now to make Gove look even more ridiculous! *six hours pass* Ok, I got nothing. Twitter RT @Unity_MoT: #CleanForTheQueen Twitter RT @jimwaterson: Top UKIP politician warns UKIP activists not to mention UKIP or UKIP leader when campaigning for UKIP's main cause. miss_s_b | So, this Clean for The Queen thing... This terrifying Rupert Murdoch quote is possibly the best ...
Hearing Angela Eagle MP on the Marr Show defending the EU and the importance of British membership really drove home the importance of Labour and the LibDems working together in the EU referendum campaign, as the incurably split Conservatives tear themselves apart. Only five Labour MPs have come out as backing the LEAVE campaign, including [...]
Another dramatic Irish election, with the exit polls proving to have underestimated the substantial fall in support for the government parties. Fianna Fáil have lurched back to within 1.2% of Fine Gael as largest party, 24.35% to 25.52%, and overnight the two were both on 28 seats. That's the sort of margin where you can get the party with fewer votes ending up with more seats once the local factors in each constituency come into play. But I've crunched the numbers this morning, looking especially at tight races for FG, FF or both, and calling them against the former and ...
Sun 28th
09:28Bold policies, lively debates, controversy, diversity and new members - the highlights of Scottish L...
As pre-election conferences go, the Scottish Liberal Democrats' gathering in Edinburgh was a strange one. Conferences taking place within weeks of a major national elections can be a bit bland with no hotly contested debates. This one was very different. We had some really controversial subjects up for discussion, with amendments on smacking, fracking and a long motion on diversity to get to grips with, with the leader taking a massive risk on the latter, needing to take 2/3 of the hall with him to pass a constitutional amendment. Also, pre-election conferences can be little more than a procession of ...
Sun 28th
09:23
The problem for Brexiteers is they are fighting the EU campaign using their opponent's language alre...
There was an article in the Telegraph a couple of days ago that beautifully summarises what the article you are about to read is about. It was by Richard Walton and the headline stated: "Brexit wouldn't jeopardise our fight against terrorism". Seasoned campaigners should be able to point out the glaring fault in that sentence from a Leaver point of view. For others, I'll spell it out: it unhelpfully (again, from a Leave viewpoint) restates a central pillar of Cameron's pro-EU pitch, thereby simply giving it more airtime. To explain further, the campaign that is on top in any situation ...
Dundee Women's Festival is celebrating it's 10th year and will run from 1st to 20th March 2016. On 8th March, International Women's Day is celebrated all over the world, to recognise women's rights, their qualities and their achievements. Twenty seven countries have a public holiday. Here in Dundee, its even better - there's a 20-day festival! In this 10th year of the Dundee Women's Festival, the theme this year is "Women Making a Difference ..." You can download the full brochure here.
John Rentoul has an interesting column in the Independent in which he revisits his stance on Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. He writes: 'For all the overheated language from the left about inequality, the record of the Coalition was surprisingly good. New figures from the Office for National Statistics last week confirmed that income inequality was unchanged in the 2010-15 period. This is something of an achievement at a time when the Government was cutting public spending, and Clegg is justified in claiming to have tried to balance the books "in the fairest possible way". He is right, too, ...
The Liverpool Echo has the story – see link above Now hang on a minute the reason Liverpool Airport is so badly connected to the rail network is far closer to home than any failings of any recent Government of any colour. [IMG: This promotional Merseytram bookmark is about all that Liverpool City Region has to show for its big tram ideas.] This promotional Merseytram bookmark is about all that Liverpool City Region has to show for its big tram ideas. You see starting when Blair was our supremo he, in effect, set up transport planning so that it ...
Irish exit poll analysed @AdrianKavanagh crunches the numbers. (tags: ireland ) Cyprus asks EU to make Turkish an official language A hopeful sign! (tags: eu cyprus ) UK doesn't send EU £350m a week or £55m a day Real numbers (tags: eu ukpolitics ) The choir for people who can't sing Go @NadineCCooper! (My former housemate.) (tags: music people ) Without the EU, there would have been no Gruffalo Unexpected benefits. (tags: eu ukpolitics germany ) Donald Trump 2016: The Nuclear Option But do they have the guts? (tags: uspolitics )
