It's time for a fresh face and some forward thinking. [IMG: Craig martin] Craig's three themes are: Campaign to abolish the Police and Crime Commissioner This overly expensive and unnecessary role diverts money away from the police. We need more money going into policing rather than politics. Greater focus on rehabilitation and restorative justice. This would reduce re-offending rates, save police time and protect our communities. Turn young people away from crime Work across the community to provide opportunities for at risk teenagers and young adults so that they don't drift into a life of crime. It may be the ...
From Dundee City Council. (This has been arranged at short notice due to roof water ingress to a block of tenements. The work is expected to take no more than 3 hours, and will commence early Saturday morning) : THE ROAD TRAFFIC REGULATION ACT 1984 : SECTION 14(1) THE DUNDEE CITY COUNCIL AS TRAFFIC AUTHORITY being satisfied that traffic on the road should be prohibited by reason of mobile access platform (roofing) works being carried out HEREBY PROHIBIT the driving of any vehicle in Tait's Lane (from its junction with Hawkhill for a distance of approximately 20 metres in a ...
Earlier this evening, I attended the Annual General Meeting of Community Spirit Action Group - the community group for the "north" part of West End Ward, covering Pentland, Tullideph, Ancrum and the Cleghorn area. The meeting took place at the Mitchell Street Centre. Tribute was paid to Len Jamieson, the group's long-standing secretary, who sadly passed away last week. Len will be sadly missed, having been the group's hard-working secretary since the group originally formed back in 2008. At tonight's meeting, there was an interesting presentation on the consultation about introducing 20mph speed limits where residents want this. You can ...
Wed 4th
22:21
Bookies should start taking bets on Tories losing Parliamentary majority due to legal action
Prosecutions of Conservative MPs for breaking election spending rules came a step closer today after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) issued this statement: Following a constructive meeting with the police and Electoral Commission, it has been agreed that each relevant police force will consider what action to take. This may include making an application to the court under s.176 of the Representations of the People Act 1983 to extend the time allowed to bring a prosecution. As I wrote in How the Tories could lose their Parliamentary majority, courtesy of the police and the voters: There are around 24 Conservative ...
"You knew nothing about this?" asks @afneil about Tory election spending claims "No" says @grantshapps #bbcdp https://t.co/1yXp8VOYkC— DailySunday Politics (@daily_politics) May 4, 2016 From today's Daily Politics.
It would be fair to say that April wasn't a great month for the program - too many cooked breakfasts, meals that wouldn't normally get eaten, the usual complications of maintaining a healthy diet whilst travelling. So, the bad news first - I ended April where I began it. The good news - I ended April where I began it. What this demonstrates is that, if I maintain my 10,000 steps regime, and eat sensibly otherwise, I can sustain the occasional holiday when I suspend the diet, which is very good news indeed. And so, onwards and downwards, with any ...
These days I find something too premeditated about televsion comedy. The idea of sitting down to watch something for 30 minutes because it will be funny, feels odd. I much prefer wit in the pursuit of another goal. But the comedies we watch when we were young don't just form our sense of humour: they form who we are. As I have blogged: When I was in the sixth form ... we conversed using lines from Fawlty Towers and Reginald Perrin in the way Victorian schoolboys are supposed to have swapped Latin tags.Recently Radio Four Extra, my new favourite station, ...
In which I talk about toxic masculinity in comics and fandom — trigger warning for mention of rape and harassment
Caroline Pidgeon is spending the last day of campaigning for the Mayoral Election out in Putney with Nick Clegg Out campaigning in Putney with @nickclegg. pic.twitter.com/5wlVNtSXTL — Caroline Pidgeon (@CarolinePidgeon) May 4, 2016 LBC has a list of ten ways London would change if she were Mayor. 1) £20 from your council tax will be used to build new houses The Olympic precept will be maintained, but the money turned to building 50,000 council homes to rent and 150,000 for sale. 2) Tube fares before 7.30am will be half-price The Lib Dems promise to "introduce half price fares for Tube, ...
In October 2015 I used my first PMQ as leader to urge David Cameron to give a home to 3,000 vulnerable unaccompanied children who had fled war and persecution and were now in Europe. Save the Children, who launched the campaign, had calculated that 3,000 was the UK's 'fair share' of the 26,000 unaccompanied children estimated to have arrived in Europe since the start of the refugee crisis. Six months on and with the numbers of unaccompanied children in Europe having skyrocketed to 90,000 the Government has finally capitulated in principle to take some children from Europe.What started as a ...
This is Hedgehog Awareness Week. The British Hedgehog Preservation Society website explains: Hedgehog Awareness Week is organised by the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and takes place every year. It aims to highlight the problems hedgehogs face and how you can help them. This year efforts are focused on strimmers and cutting machines - every year we hear of many terrible injuries and deaths caused by garden machinery. BHPS is asking people to check areas carefully before using any machinery. They have produced a sticker to be placed onto machines and are asking councils and tool hire companies to get in ...
Romeo and Juliet, taught in my English class in Belfast, the year I turned 12. Oddly enough I am back in Belfast this evening. We performed Act 3 scene 1, and I won a prize for acting Mercutio. The 30 days: Day #1: Your favourite play Day #2: Your favourite character Day #3: Your favourite hero Day #4: Your favourite heroine Day #5: Your favourite villain Day #6: Your favourite villainess Day #7: Your favourite clown Day #8: Your favourite comedy Day #9: Your favourite tragedy Day #10: Your favourite history Day #11: Your least favourite play Day #12: Your ...
From Fareham comes this news: Leaflets were distributed by the Lib Dems in the Fareham East ward, promoting the party's candidates Katrina Trott and Maryam Brady. A complaint was made to the police as the leaflets did not have imprints on the first or last pages, as required by law under the Representation of the People Act. A police spokesman said they would not be pursuing the matter as 'it is not in the public interest to do so at this time.' They said the candidates had been contacted and given advice on the requirements for publications. It's worth quoting ...
[IMG: Snow doesn't stop Becca Plenderleith and team campaigning] Inspired by a post in one of those Lib Dem Facebook groups, I thought it would be a good idea to give a special shout-out for these wonderful new members of the party who have become so involved that they are standing for election this year. This is by no means an exclusive list, so please feel free to add to it. The enthusiasm of our new members has really invigorated the party the length and breadth of the country this year. In Scotland, people like Rebecca Plenderleith, a fantastic campaigner ...
Second paragraph of third chapter: Dobyns belonged to a research team led by his doctoral advisor, Allan R. Holmberg of Cornell, the Holmberg after whom I have unkindly named Holmberg's mistake. Holmberg had persuaded Cornell to let him lease an old colonial estate in rural Peru (the Carnegie Corporation, a charitable foundation despite its name, provided the funds). The estate included an entire village, whose inhabitants, most of them Indian, were its sharecroppers. @It was really a form of serfdom," Dobyns told me in a long conversation shortly before his death in 2009. "The villagers were just heartbreakingly poor." Holmberg ...
Kirsty Williams has made her final pitch for Lib Dem votes in Montgomeryshire, supporting candidate Jane Dodds, where she will say that the Welsh Liberal Democrats are the only party to consistently work to achieve results and put narrow party-political interest aside, their leader Kirsty Williams has said today on the eve of the Assembly election. Tomorrow's vote is your chance to make a difference for your community. Before you cast it, I want you to ask yourself: who has delivered the most for you and your family? More often than not, the people I talk to across Wales aren't ...
Wed 4th
15:38
Billingsgate - a crisis for Labour that can be solved by tactical voting for Lib Dem Joe Otten
I live in Rotherham and on May 5th I will vote to elect a Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire. Since its inception in 2012 the post of South Yorkshire PCC has been held by Labour. The first incumbent, Shaun Wright did not stay the course and was forced to resign in 2014 following a report into the Rotherham child abuse scandal. His successor, Labour's Dr Alan Billings has fared little better and was last week caught up in the aftermath of the Hillsborough inquest verdict. He bungled the suspension and replacement of the South Yorkshire Police chief constable ...
Bury, Oldham & District Branch provides a subsidised veterinary clinic service for people in receipt of benefits or on a low income*. Funding is limited and therefore they can only treat animals on a preventative care basis. The mobile clinic provides the following preventative treatments; Health Check Vaccinations Worming treatments Flea Treatments They are also able to offer limited subsidised 1st line treatments for ear & eye infections. The mobile clinic currently operates on a fortnightly schedule alternating between the Bury and Oldham areas. It is available 8.30am – 1.30pm and no appointment is necessary. For further information please ring ...
Embed from Getty Images Polling Day is one of the most gruelling days in a political activist's life. By its nature it comes at a time when you are already completely knackered. Liberal Democrats always work all year round, but there's nothing to rival the intensity of an election campaign. By polling day, everything hurts. A typical polling day starts before dawn as the early morning leaflets start to go out. Stealth is the key as you try not to wake up dogs or disturb people as you post that leaflet. I know a lot of people who got involved ...
Embed from Getty Images Liberal Democrat MEP Catherine Bearder has won the Green Ribbon Political Award recognising her outstanding environmental achievements. Catherine was awarded in the "MEP of the Year" category for her work fighting for stronger European targets to tackle air pollution. The judges commended Catherine for generating public awareness of the issue and championing EU action to improve air quality, often in the face of opposition from the UK government. Catherine is currently a lead negotiator on the EU's 2030 air pollution limits and has helped ensure that the European Parliament prioritises improving air quality ahead of the ...
Many of the defining images of the election in Scotland have come from Willie Rennie. He has had a lot of serious points to make during this election, highlighting the need to invest in education, transform mental health, stand up for civil liberties, protect the planet from climate change and stop the SNP's suffocating control and centralisation of public services, but he's had tonnes of fun illustrating them. In 2006, his by-election victory in Dunfermline was helped by an image on the front page of the Courier from the top of the Forth Rail Bridge. He's had some similarly fantastic ...
Yesterday all seven and eleven-year-old children in our top-down education system were required to take tests in grammar, spelling and punctuation, and mathematics. A number of parents, sadly only a minority, withdrew their children in protest. One of the grammar questions required the children to recognise a "subordinating conjunction," something I suspect 98% of English speakers have never heard of (and which the minister for schools, Nick Gibb, failed to recognise correctly whilst on air on the BBC.) Much of the reporting gives the impression that this item was on the test for seven-year-olds, whom* I should have though would ...
Wed 4th
11:59
Green Belt building – Cameron said he would protect it and Sefton Labour too but it's going to...
Readers will probably recall that I have long fought the propsals of Sefton Council to build on our Green Belt and high grade agricultural land across the Borough. [IMG: A Maghull Town Council leaflet from 1998 - Strangely this time round the now Labour-run Town Council did not fight the Green Belt grab.] A Maghull Town Council leaflet from 1998 – Strangely this time round the now Labour-run Town Council did not fight the Green Belt grab. [IMG: Press cutting from 1998 as we fought to protect the Maghull east site from development. We won then, Labour waved the white ...
Well it's taken a while but yesterday the pot-holes in the private car park behind the Westway shops were finally filled in by contractors working for the new owners of Maghull's shopping centre. Pictures c/o Cllr. Edie Pope:- [IMG: IMG_3944] [IMG: IMG_3945]
You don't often find me quoting from the pro-independnece paper [IMG: Katy Gordon] The National, but I'm happy to do it today because they've done a really good profile of our top West of Scotland list candidate, Katy Gordon. She explains the influence Charles Kennedy and Jo Swinson had on her and how they inspired her campaigning spirit. "I had always voted Liberal but sometimes you need a push to join, and I wanted to make sure Kennedy was leader," Gordon remembers. "I did not join because I wanted to be involved in party politics but because of the Liberal ...
I've just been to the town hall to pick up my Belgian passport. This gives me a grand total of three. Article 1(vi) of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement recognises my right to both British and Irish citizenship; I also acquired Belgian citizenship back in 2008, but had not bothered getting a passport until today. (Neither the British nor Irish object to you acquiring Belgian citizenship; nor does Belgium require you to give up your previous citizenship before becoming Belgian). So here are my three passports, showing signs of age (on two of the passports themselves, and in the photograph ...
Revealed: UK government's idiotic and hamfisted covert propaganda bid to stop Muslims joining Isis *headdesk headdesk headdesk* The 9 Best Parts of a Legal Brief on Behalf of Klingon Speakers So yeah #renaissancegreyhoundswhocanteven is my new favourite twitter hashtag The stereotype map of Britain, according to Google autocomplete results Yorkshire is Great, apart from Humberside, which is crap, and Kent is racist. Seems pretty accurate to me. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Candidate - a long read from Stephen Williams 1944 memo from manager sick of "gobbledygook" Yesterday's Tweet of the Day BOOM! miss_s_b | RIP Robert "Roz" Prichard ...
One simple test is all it takes. Do you recognise the number 07624 801 423? If you do, welcome to the land of the old, er..., I mean experienced.
Commenting as new A&E waiting times figures showed that more than 10,000 patients waited more than four hours to be seen in March, Scottish Liberal Democrat health spokesman Jim Hume said: "Doctors and nurses in our A&E departments are working flat out but they are not getting the support they need from the Scottish Government. [...]
Paddy Ashdown condemned the Government after an Afghan interpreter, Nangyalai Dawoodzai, who had to leave his country after spending 3 years helping the British forces for, killed himself after being told his application for asylum in the UK had failed and he would be returned to Italy, the first European country he had arrived in. From the Guardian: The 29-year-old, who paid people smugglers to reach the UK, was told his request for asylum in Britain had been rejected when it was found he had been fingerprinted in Italy on arrival in Europe, according to the Daily Mail. Under the ...
Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams has this message: "Tomorrow's vote is your chance to make a difference for your community. Before you cast it, I want you to ask yourself: who has delivered the most for you and your family? "If our record over the last five years shows anything, it's that a vote for the Welsh Liberal Democrats is a vote for our policies being put into action. Tomorrow will be no different - your vote could help make our ideas a reality."If you support smaller class sizes, if you want more nurses on hospital wards, if you ...
Polling Day for the local elections is Thursday 5 May 2016. Polling stations are open 7am - 10pm on Thursday. You don't need your polling card to vote. Polling stations are: Hollins Community Centre, Hollins Lane Sunnybank CP School, Hathaway Road St Bernadettes Social Club, Selby Avenue Unsworth CP School, Blackley Close If you have a postal vote, that you have not yet returned, then this can be taken down to the polling station (any polling station in Bury) before 10.00pm on Thursday. You need to take a completed postal vote (ie fill the envelope in as if you were ...
The decision of Nicola Sturgeon to pose with a copy of the 'The Sun' newspaper is wrong on so many levels. The move came after the Scottish version of the Murdoch paper ran a Star Trek themed front cover endorsing the nationalists, as it had done at last years general election. First let's accept that the [...]
I recently participated in a site visit with the Street Lighting Partnership Manager and also with the Chair of Community Spirit Action Group, the local residents' group, to look at the new street lighting in Pentland. The new lighting has been met with mixed reviews and, at the site visit, I asked that the lighting levels be measured to ensure they meet acceptable standards. The Street Lighting Partnership Manager has now updated me as follows : "I can confirm that we have now verified our lighting levels within the Pentland/Saggar Street area. Measurements were carried out very late at night ...
As if it were not bad enough that the UK Tory Government is seeking to give the security forces, the police and local councils carte blanche to randomly and indiscriminately access our personal data, the Independent reports that the NHS has given the medical records of 1.6 million patients to Google. The records, which relate to patients of three London hospitals which form the Royal Free Trust; Barnet, Chase Farm and Royal Free Hospital collected over the course of the last five years, have been shared with Google as part of a data-sharing agreement. An estimated 1.6 million patients attend ...
[IMG: peter skinner] Peter Skinner, the former Labour MEP for South East England has now been sentenced. He was given 4 years by Mrs Justice McGowan, sitting at Southwark. He was found to have misused £100,000 of public funds. There will be a further hearing under the Proceeds of Crime Act. If the Crown apply "the lifestyle assumptions" in that Act, the burden of proof will be on Skinner to show that any money he received for any source in the last 6 years was legitimate. If he can't show that it was then the court can assume it to ...
Alan Melville, lead [Ukip] candidate for the Lothian region in the Scottish Parliament election, said the party 'stands on the brink of disintegration and all-out civil war' in Scotland... Melville is the most high profile party member to call for the removal of David Coburn MEP, Ukip's only parliamentarian in Scotland, as leader north of the border. [The Metro] David Coburn is frequently in the news, for reasons such as his attacks on same-sex marriage ("a mockery of the holy sacrament of marriage"), comparing Scottish minister Humza Yousaf to convicted terrorist Abu Hamza, supporting increasing the amount of alcohol you ...
Wed 4th
07:45
Corbyn tells the world that tomorrow's election results essentially don't matter to him
We live in an age when if someone says to you at the end of a day, "did you hear about the Corbyn thing?", you can't be sure that the questioner and you are thinking of the same thing since there will have been "multiple things" to have occurred to the Labour leader over the previous 24 hours. Like yesterday: I was asked this question and I thought of the poster launch, while the person asking me the question was thinking of Hamas actually praising Corbyn using predictably anti-Semitic language. I'll talk about my Corbyn thing now. Jeremy Corbyn launched ...
America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny Gloomy reflections from @sullydish, drawing on Plato. #fb (tags: uspolitics ) Negotiating TTIP Characteristically vigorous pushback by @MalmstromEU re #TTIPleaks. (tags: ttip eu ) Can you hear the hum? No, more like a high-pitched but very soft buzz. (tags: The Hum ) 2015 Locus Ward Finalists I've read 3/5 on the sf list, 4/5 on the fantasy list. (tags: sf ) Post-Brexit negotiations "could last 9 years" - House of Lords It took 5 yrs for both Greenland and St-Barthélemy. (tags: eu ukpolitics )
A vote for the Welsh Liberal Democrats is a vote for dignified care. My More Nurses Bill made Wales the first part of Europe with safe staffing levels on hospital wards. We have pledged to extend the bill to include mental health wards, maternity wards and community nurses. The More Nurses Bill ensured that there is a legal duty to have sufficient nurse staffing levels on acute hospital wards. The Welsh Liberal Democrats will ensure Wales is a world leader for patient care. People don't expect miracles from our NHS, but they do expect staff to have the time to ...
