The early part of today was mainly about exasperation. I will spare you the gory details of the domestic minutiae that annoyed me so much, but I will express my utter contempt for the various random bits of wildlife and ... Continue reading →
It has to be admitted that, whilst I am aware that modern culture exists, I'm not exactly a devoted follower of current cultural events. I prefer villanelle and string quartets over more modern alternatives, and as I watch very little television and listen to even less radio, much talk of bands or genres passes over my head, undisturbed. However, I do read my newspaper, and Twitter is an endless source of enlightenment, and so the existence of Taylor Swift had come to my attention. If you had asked me to name any of her songs, you would have had me ...
Burrough Hill is an Iron Age hill fort a few miles south of Melton Mowbray that commands impressive views across the countryside. I was there in the drizzle today. I found it to be the haunt of ambitious sheep. I swear one came to check if by any chance I had left the gate open when I finally made my way down. I did not meet the pig. The hill fort forms the centrepiece of Burrough Hill Country Park. It is the subject of a major student training and research excavation project run by the Department Archaeology and Ancient History ...
This has to be one of the funniest takes on Brexit no matter how you voted:- [IMG: 13882498_753345821474606_5380476138365212489_n]
.@TheWho frontman Roger Daltrey has visited the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. pic.twitter.com/vlz5QPP6Jd— BBC Radio Kent (@BBCRADIOKENT) August 2, 2016 Roger Daltrey was on Dungeness today for the official opening of the new restaurant at the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway station.
I've been watching the multi-car motorway pileup that is the Labour party at war with itself - on social media and elsewhere – for the last few weeks with a sense of bemusement. I'm surely not alone. It seems to be an object lesson is miscommunication and wilful misunderstanding. Many of the protagonists, particularly on the left, seem dead set on reacting vehemently to even the slightest criticism and with venom to critique that is, when viewed with a bit of perspective, entirely fair comment. Any attempt at nuance is redundant: it's a Manichean world, in which we're unambiguously a ...
Second paragraph of third essay ("On Social Structure", by A.R. Radcliffe-Browne): I hope you will pardon me if I begin with a note of personal explanation. I have been described on more than one occasion as belonging to something called the "Functional School of Social Anthropology" and even as being its leader, or one of its leaders. This Functional School does not really exist; it is a myth invented by Professor Malinowski. He has explained how, to quote his own words, "the magnificent title of the Functional School of Anthropology has been bestowed by myself, in a way on myself, ...
Last night I joined a group of intrepid souls to stand on a pedestrian/cycle bridge on the far side of the Olympic Stadium in East London…
[IMG: Plastic-bags-for-website] Cllr Allan Knox has welcomed the news that plastic bag use has plummeted in England since the introduction of a 5p charge last year, under the previous coalition government. Plastic carrier bags cause some of the worst litter problems. They blow around the street and get caught in trees and bushes, making a horrible mess. Because we are given so many, they are a large part of the waste we thrown out, costing local council taxpayers a large sum of money to dispose of our waste. Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said "We always said the test of ...
This morning, I was delighted to attend the launch at Lochee Library of a new touring exhibition created by the Great War Dundee partnership. "Home Front" focuses on what life was like in Dundee during the First World War. The exhibition, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, has been researched by Linda Nicoll (Friends of Dundee City Archives) and Matthew Jarron (University of Dundee Museum Services) and features various aspects of wartime life in Dundee, including: • The effect of the war on the jute industry and the establishment of munitions factories• Fundraising and recruitment activities• Theatre, music and art ...
[IMG: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/atosorigin/11008394895] Email campaigning is an essential part of any campaign. It's important we store email addresses within the Connect system as well as any email client we are using to send out emails. In this video I explain how you export emails from the Connect system into a spreadsheet format. I then demonstrate how you can [...]
[IMG: soc-brand-web-graphic] The summer is a great time to sit down and think about photos that you might need for your campaign and hopefully with better weather and better light, it makes for some good photos. Every campaign should - although we realise many don't - have a shared folder where the team have access to photos. [...]
"I wish to register a complaint..." are the opening words of Monty Python's famous Parrot sketch. A man has bought a parrot, which is clearly dead. We are never told how he was tricked into believing it was ever alive. The pet shop owner promises it is "resting", "pining for Norwegian fjords" and deploys grandiose, Boris Johnson style, language in this pretence. People register complaints with broadcasters and regulators about what they see and hear on television every day. Many complaints are about political news content. The UK Business Insider reports the three moments connected to the referendum campaign that ...
The astonishing internicine warfare within UKIP's Welsh branch took an astonishing turn yesterday with the party's National Executive Committee voting to expel its only MEP, Nathan Gill unless he resigns from one of his two elected positions. Gill is also a North Wales Assembly Member. The BBC say that UKIP Assembly group leader Neil Hamilton, speaking at the National Eisteddfod, believes that the vote on Mr Gill "had nothing to do with infighting": "When he was seeking nomination for the assembly he said that if he was elected he would stand down as MEP and devote his time to furthering ...
Our Tory MP for Peterborough, Stewie Jackson, is obviously no stranger to criticism on his comments, see: Conservative MP under attack from Embarrassing Bodies doctor Christian Jessen for calling his viewers 'chavs' Pro-Leave MP tells journalist to 'suck it up whiner' over Brexit concerns But his latest eruption, was even a surprise to me! As [...]
Redcar Town Clock is not working and has been out of action for some time. Redcar and Cleveland must be the only Borough in the country that fills its flower beds and planters with horrible green shrubs. We had this problem prior to 2003 following a similar period of stringent cuts. We were told the clock was unserviceable but it was only seized up through lack of maintenance and the grass was not cut causing public outrage. The Council is failing to get the basics right. These type of cuts are more about making a political statement than a genuine ...
I am grateful to my friend Bob for pointing me in the direction of the link above on BBC I Player, which is in the form of a series presentations from knowledgeable people who have tried to understand why people voted the way they did in the recent referendum. The first speaker to my mind makes some cutting and accurate remarks about how Blair took power away from working people and thereby created the vacuum for UKIP to move into. The video is quite long but it is worth sticking with it so that all the shades of opinion ...
Scottish Liberal Democrat health spokesman Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP today said urgent action is required to boost cancer detection rates as new figures revealed bowel cancer screening rates have fallen. Figures published today revealed that the uptake of bowel cancer screening fell to 56.5% of those eligible in 2014/15. These data follow recent statistics which revealed [...]
People are reaching out. The more politically active join Labour or the Liberal Democrats. Many others worry quietly, and more of them than usual seek out personal counselling. The holidays and the pause in political activity may offer some relief, but the anxieties persist. In fact it's a worse time than before, because the months of campaigning for the Referendum and the weeks of political upheaval were exciting and arousing. Now is the time of waiting and worrying. It's been a year of no genuine government. It climaxed in a campaign which in its incoherence and noisy assertiveness showed up ...
Scottish Liberal Democrat health spokesman Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP today said that NHS boards must get the support they need from to ensure that patients do not face unnecessary disruption as new figures revealed more than 600 patients had their operations cancelled for capacity or non-clinical reasons in June. This means 20 patients per day had [...]
My college Cllr Mary D'Albert represented you last month at a recent community debrief meeting for the Parklife Festival. The meeting had been organised to evaluate the impact of the event on the local communities that surround the park with officers from Manchester Council and Parklife. As your councilors we have fed back all the feedback we received from you (positive and negative). This year the main issues for you were problems around parking and litter in the area off Bury Old Road just north of where the current residents parking scheme ends and the general impact on the park, ...
I am no fan the British Labour Party. I have spent years enduring its arrogance and tribalism; I would not mind terribly if the party did not survive its current crisis. There is a temptation to gloat over its predicament – though this would be a distraction from the important political questions of our time. But it is more ... Continue reading The rise of Labour's hard left reflects the weakness of the soft left →
Plastic bag use has plummeted in England since the introduction of a 5p charge last year, under the previous coalition government. The number of single-use plastic bags used by shoppers in England has fallen by more than 85%. More than 7bn bags were handed out by seven main supermarkets in the year before the charge but this has been reduced to just over 500m in the first six months after the charge has been introduced. Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said: We always said the test of this policy would be by the amounts of bags that are cut from ...
All but a few nerds and serial contrarians agree that the "Star Wars" prequels, a trilogy of motion pictures released between 1999 and 2005, were amongst the worst contributions to cinema of all time. There are many reasons why they are so terrible – but I will focus today on only one crucial element as to why they are so memorably awful and what that all has to do with liberals. The films trace the fall of both Anakin Skywalker and the Jedi. At the beginning of the first movie we are explicitly told that there are 25,000 Jedi in ...
At the last meeting of Bury's FulL Council I asked a formal question on the rise of alcohol-related deaths. Across England these have risen by 4% in a year and by 13% in a decade. Bury Council, which for the last four years has been responsible for public health and public health spending, has an important role to play in tackling this problem. The response shows how significant the issue is, and some of the things Bury is currently doing on this issue. Key points: – In line with the national picture Bury has had an increase in alcohol related ...
Political campaigns are a dirty business. People will often stoop very low to win, and when the stakes are as high as becoming President of the United States the lengths people will go to are pretty extreme. But some truly amazing polling out from Public Policy Polling sheds a light on the level of vitriol that has been stoked about Hilary Clinton in this election campaign. “This election is never likely to turn out to be the sort of landslide for Clinton that some expected a year or 6 months ago because Trump voters just hate Clinton too much for ...
In the latest British edition of The Economist (July 30th) , there is a report about a useful initiative in the field of (il)legal highs and party drugs like XTC (as we Dutch spell ecstacy). It appears that there is a non-profit organization called The Loop, with a professor Fiona Measham, criminologist at Durham University, amongst its co-directors; she is their spokesperson in the article. [IMG: Medical Drugs for Pharmacy Health Shop of Medicine] They're this year starting to travel around local summer music festivals, offering festival-goers to test their party drugs before they consume them. The result at the ...
[IMG: Screenshot 2016-08-02 09.19.04] Greater Manchester Councils are seeking your views on the powers suggested for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. Please tell them whether you agree or disagree with the powers proposed for the GMCA. The closing date for this consultation is 15 August 2016. Go to www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/devopowersconsultation for more information about devolution powers and the consultation form.
Some years ago, I made an unexpected splash in the media by suggesting that there were elements of the economy in the twelfth century which we might learn from, whether it was negative interest money, the just price or the guild system (actually a bit later). I was making no great secret of my admiration for the twelfth century and the dawn of gothic when, in England at least, the skeletons are as tall (and therefore as well fed) as they are now - and even taller for women. This was partly because I had been working on that period, ...
Commenting as a new consultation was launched on the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act (OFBA), Scottish Liberal Democrat justice spokesman Liam McArthur MSP said: "This legislation was forced through the Scottish Parliament by an SNP government who seemed more concerned about tackling bad headlines than sectarianism. "The law has been criticised by everyone from fans [...]
Last night, I had the pleasure in participating in a guided tour of the Botanic Garden, organised for the Friends of Balgay. There was an excellent turnout and it was a very interesting and informative evening. Here's some photos from a very enjoyable evening :
The 1980 Housing Act was arguably one of the most radical pieces of legislation in the second half of the twentieth century. Its objective was to transform the pattern of home ownership in the UK by giving millions of social housing tenants the right to buy their own home. By 2003-04 just over 69% of all homes in the UK were owner-occupied. In England that figure was 71%. Many tenants were able to live the dream of owning their own home thanks to generous discounts. There was though a downside to this picture with a substantial decline in the numbers ...
I'm finally restarting the Batposts I was doing regularly last year. They should now be up once a week for the forseeable future. As always, those who are backing me on Patreon can read the latest one (on the 1966 ... Continue reading →
As foretold on this blog, on Sunday a new station opened on the miniature Coate Water Railway in Swindon. You can see the mafficking in the video above. Richard Jefferies Halt has been built to serve the Richard Jefferies Museum, the birthplace of the writer, and is on a loop that has more than doubled the length of the line. Mike Pringle, the director of the museum, told the Swindon Advertiser: "This is really the coming together of two different things - we set up a charitable trust to take over the museum a couple of years ago and have ...
