[IMG: Andrew Lomas] Following the referendum, Britain has to find a new place for itself in the world. Extricating the UK from the European Union on terms that don't crash the economy is going to be an astonishingly difficult task that neither the Conservatives nor the Labour Party seem to be willing or able to face up to. On the right, the Conservatives appear to be indulging in post-Brexit nostalgia, an imaginary time when the British Lion merely had to roar to make other nations meekly fall into line. However, Brexiteers can bellow "BUT THEY NEED US MORE THAN WE ...
At the last meeting of Planting Up Whickham, I agreed to spend some time clearing back some of the shrubbery behind Whickham Library. I did the work today with the result that the sign for the service area car park can now be seen for the first time in a couple of years! I fed the branches to my goats rather than take them to the tip. The before and after photos are above and below respectively
Embed from Getty Images I am more and more puzzled by the actions of Shami Chakrabarti, who has junked her reputation to serve under a leader of the opposition who gives every indication of being on course to lose the next election horribly. True, it is a well-worn path - when I was a teenager the leading lights of what is now Liberty were Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman - but Chakrabati risks becoming a figure of fun. The latest blow to her reputation is the news that she is to follow other Labour peers in abstaining on the government's ...
This video follows the route of another remarkable Shropshire railway: the line from Ludlow up to the quarries on Titterstone Clee. Coal mining was resumed up there during the Second World War, which must have meant the line saw more use. It finally closed in 1962. Legend has it that the people down the hill in Ludlow could not understand the dialect of Clee Hill village, only a few miles away.
"The Liberal elite - that crowd of luvvies and lefties who think that they are so superior to the rest of us that they can tell us what to do, think and say!" This gets said alot, but non-conformity is part and parcel of being a Liberal Democrat and to be a non-conformist your leftiness ... More Liberal Elites
"This is not only yet another misguided and myopic attack on overseas students, it is also an insult to the rich diversity of universities on display within UK higher education. Because the fact is, universities excel in different academic areas." Johanna Waters has no time for Amber Rudd's plans for a new student immigration regime. Steven Duckworth offers a strategy for Labour moderates following the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn. "Jura was everything that was threatened in Nineteen Eighty-Four; it offered an abundance of wild natural beauty, and required a visceral physicality of its inhabitants. Orwell understood these qualities to be ...
Second paragraph of third chapter: I was standing in the doorway to his room. He wasn't there. But let's not beat around the bush: I knew he wasn't there. He was in the garden, fixing the back tire of his bike. This is a novel about an uncomfortable family meal in Amsterdam (which I read, with impeccable timing, immediately after a weekend in Amsterdam with my siblings and mother). Serge is in the running to be the next prime minister; Paul, the narrator, has become aware of a heinous crime that their sons committed; their wives Claire and Babette are ...
Welcome to the latest in my series of tips and advice for Liberal Democrat members, which appear first in the email bulletin run by London Region for party members. help@libdems.org.uk is the extremely straightforward, and also extremely useful, email address to get in touch with the "customer services" team at party HQ. I put that in quote marks as it's not quite the language most people in the party use, but it gives a sense of the range of points that team can help with, from problems with sorting out a membership direct debit payment through to an Ad Lib ...
A resident alerted me to this appalling flytipping in Ross Road that took place around 2.30am on Sunday 9th October. The Police and emergency Sutton Council staff had tidied the waste up to keep the road accessible to vehicles. Unfortunately the contractors the council normally calls on to get flytipping removed at weekends were busy [...]
Sun 9th
12:49
The Trump Affair should be a wake up call for the GOP and the Democrats - but I'm not holding my bre...
Embed from Getty Images I have to say that I'm finding the outrage among senior Republicans about the latest scandal to hit Donald Trump pretty ridiculous. Where the hell were they when he was calling Mexicans repists and threatening to make the Mexican Government build a wall between the two countries? Where were they when he was threatening to ban Muslims from the US? I am dismayed at the way some media outlets, including the BBC, have minimised Trump's comments. Grabbing a woman in an intimate area is not "lewd talk," it's an admission of a serious sexual assault and ...
Sun 9th
12:41
The last Lib Dem manifesto mentioned Israel more than the entire Asia-Pacific, and that's a problem
The good folks at Liberal Democrat Voice have very kindly run an article I wrote on the Liberal Democrat policy towards the Asia-Pacific, or rather the lack of it. They sensibly ask contributors to keep their submissions fairly short. Given that I was writing about a rather broad topic that meant I had to leave a [...]
Here are the end of year (31 December*) membership figures for the Liberal Democrats since the party's creation in 1988. Filling out the table also are the membership totals at the point of all-member ballots during the party's history. Year Membership Change on year 1988 leadership contest 80,104 1988 president contest 80,071 1988 80,000 1989 81,000 1990 president contest 82,455 1990 77,000 1991 91,000 1992 president contest 101,768** 1992 101,000 1993 101,000 1994 president contest 101,091 1994 101,000 1995 94,000 1996 99,000 1997 87,000 1998 89,000 1999 leadership contest 82,827 n/a 1999 83,000*** 2000 69,000 2001 73,276 2002 71,636 -1,640 ...
I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago to get a letter from our local university, informing me that I am one of 3,000 randomly selected residents of Belgium who is invited to participate in the European Social Survey, a multinational project to discover what the Plain People of Europe Really Think. (I note that 3,000 is more or less the square root of the total population.) Last time round, Belgians gave our health service the highest score of any country's respondents. I had looked at the previous questionnaire and was expecting to answer questions about television and drinking habits, ...
I understood pop again in the 1990s: white boys with guitars and harmonies. And this track at least still sounds good. Twisterella, incidentally, was the name of the song that Billy Liar wrote - I think he really did. So here as a bonus are Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie...
EU leaders line up to insist UK will pay a high price for Brexit stance | Politics | The Guardian RT @damocrat: I don't blame them. UK always behaved like a petulant brat who wants everything its own way. Those days are over Donald Trump rape and attempted rape allegations | Fusion RT @erinbiba: Oh hello old story about Trump sexually assaulting women that no one cared about because only the women were talking Brexit and consequences... | Paul Bernal's Blog You might have voted for brexit for any number of reasons, but the racists don't care and you've empowered ...
Theresa May's plan to introduce worker directors onto company boards is a start, but she still has a long way to go to catch up with liberal thinking: Jo Grimond advocated worker-owned firms more than 50 years ago, and she hasn't reached that point yet. But the Lib Dems need to be more consistent and outspoken in support for worker-owned firms and other types of co-operatives, too. Over the decades, we've had the occasional burst of enthusiasm, such as when Nick Clegg called for the creation of a "John Lewis economy" in 2012, but it doesn't appear to be integrated ...
Just when we thought that UKIP could not stoop any lower, their interim (and fourth time future?) leader, Nigel Farage went onto Fox News to defend Donald Trump's appalling remarks about groping women. The Guardian says that Farage insisted that the Republican candidate's obscene remarks about groping women amounted to "alpha-male boasting". He said the comments were "ugly", but stated that women also made remarks they would not want to see reported: "Look," he said, "this is alpha-male boasting. It's the kind of thing, if we are being honest, that men do. They sit around and have a drink and ...
This morning I completed an almost incomprehensible marketing survey. Here's an example of one of the questions. Like all of the other questions in the survey, you have to answer it to proceed to the next question. There's a fixed range of answers that can be selected, with nowhere for me to indicate that I didn't understand the question. Most ... The post Why surveys should always be piloted appeared first on ten pence piece.
Many pundits in the UK are wondering why the latest scandal to have hit Donald Trump's presidential campaign seems to have created such problems for him when previous horrible things he has said have had so little impact. Sure the "grab her pussy" stuff is vile, but no worse than a myriad of other choice Trump quotes, right? So then why has it led John McCain to finally say he won't vote for Trump, while a chorus of other prominent Republican senators have also publicly disowned their candidate for president in the wake of the recordings being released? What this ...
[IMG: Museum of Liverpool and Museum Canal Link Tunnel.] Museum of Liverpool and Museum Canal Link Tunnel. The Liverpool Echo has the story – see link above The You Tube link to the video is below as you will may find that the Echo's rather clunky web site will not play it easilly:- www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLIMrRIz26o A time lapse video that's well worth watching to see the Liverpool Canal Link from the perspective of those travelling along it in a narrowboat. With thanks to Keith Page for the lead to this story. The photo above is amongst my Flickr photos at:- ...
Have you seen Gary Johnson forgetting 'what' Aleppo is? If not I'd recommend it. His baffled expression is hilarious. But when you have finished chuckling, may I ask you a question? Where is Shenzhen? My guess is most of you are now stumped. I only know because I once had to catch a train from Shenzhen station. Which is embarrassing because by one definition it is the 8th largest city in the world. It is adjacent to but several times the size of Hong Kong. Which, remarkably, is no longer among the twenty largest Chinese cities. And China is an ...
It's no surprise that Cllr. Iain Brodie Browne is making and commenting on the case for realignment of the left. British politics is in a terrible mess and we are facing Tory (UKIP Lite) rule for many years to come. That should be a prospect to worry any progressive. Have a read of Iain's thinking and indeed that of other progressives, including the late great Jo Grimond, via the link above to Iain's Birkdale Focus blog site. If Labour can address its tribalistic approach to British politics there may be a chance for progressives to win a fight with ...
Barack Obama on 5 Days That Shaped His Presidency Very interesting. (tags: uspolitics )
