Although most political attention at the moment is on the Richmond Park Parliamentary by-election, council by-elections roll on as normal. This Thursday brings 10 of these in principal local authorities. We start off with a Labour hold and a very low Lib Dem vote share but – crucially – also a Lib Dem candidate where there was none last time, nor the time before that, nor the time before that (and due to boundary changes there were no earlier times). That's important. Gibbonsdown (Vale of Glamorgan): LAB: 47.9% (-2.2) PC: 19.1% (+14.3) IND: 13.4% (+13.4) CON: 12.3% (+5.6) UKIP: 6.4% ...
Noted for its bonnie earl, Moray also has some fine disused railway stations.
I first knew Jenny Tonge when she was a Liberal councillor in Kew, and I liked and respected her. In part the pariah status she came to occupy for a younger generation of Liberal Democrat activists was precisely because of the generation gap. When I was a student, anyone with any claim to being on the left was instinctively sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Nowadays young Liberal Democrats display little influence in it. But Jenny has also been the author of her troubles, notably in 2010 when she called for an investigation into claims that Israeli forces sent to help ...
Local Councillors John Dodd and Nigel Ashton have thanked Crossens Community Association for contributing £750 towards the installation cost of a Christmas tree for the village. The tree will be erected on Wednesday the 23rd November in front of Crossens Methodist Churchin the heart of Crossens village. It is over 20 years since Crossens last had its own community Christmas tree. Councillor Nigel Ashton said "I am delighted that Crossens Methodist Churchhave agreed that the Christmas tree can be installed in their grounds. We, as local councillors, will pay the remainder of the cost from our Area Committee allocation. We ...
Lib Dem Steve Hartley 236 Labour 115 LD GAIN from Labour
Conservative seat. Cause: death. LD candidate: Linda Castle. To help, please contact Jeremy Hilton on 07771 794407
Conservative seat. Cause: death.
Labour seat. Cause: death. LD candidate: Asghar Javed Ali.
LD seat. Cause: resignation LD candidate: Alison Auld
Labour seat. Cause: resignation. LD candidate: Emma Louise Victoria Payne
Hoxton West (Hackney) result: LAB: 68.3% (+11.6) CON: 13.3% (+1.2) LD (Chantal Encavey): 9.6% (+3.2) GRN: 8.8% (-11.3) Labour HOLD.
SNP seat. Cause: death. LD candidate: Alistair Mason. To help, please contact Edward Acton at edward.acton@btinternet.com or phone 07990758383
Gibbonsdown (Vale of Glamorgan): LAB: 47.9% (-2.2) PC: 19.1% (+14.3) IND: 13.4% (+13.4) CON: 12.3% (+5.6) UKIP: 6.4% (+6.4) LD (Jennifer Gironi): 0.8% (+0.8) Labour HOLD
Independent seat. Cause: resignation. LD candidate: George Probyn.
Conservative seat. Cause: death. LD candidate: Paul Chaplin.
LD seat. Cause: death. LD candidate: Nicholas Couldrey.
Embed from Getty Images Perhaps the late Lord Attlee was right when he said that the referendum was a device of dictators and demagogues.That was Margaret Thatcher speaking in a 1975 Commons debate as Harold Wilson called a referendum on Europe to paper over Labour's divisions on Europe. Earlier in the debate she had quoted a letter that Roy Jenkins had written to The Times in 1972, which shows why that observation was in her mind: "It may be argued ... that the EEC referendum would be a once-for-all operation. The device would never be used again. Who can possibly ...
Most of this blog first appeared last night on the New Weather blog... It is a peculiar aspect of the Southern Rail fiasco that so many of their staff and managers, at least the ones I come across, are not just extraordinarily patient - they are also very nice people. I can't say I have actually met the chief executive, Charles Horton - though I have seen him in the distance at an ill-tempered 'meet the public event'. Nor did I ever really make friends with their former chief operations officer Dyan Crowther, now gone on to calmer waters, who ...
The Daily Mail has decided the sexuality of one of the judges ruling on whether Parliament has to approve part of Brexit is a matter for a headline: The Daily Mail seems appalled that an "openly gay" judge was allowed to make such an important decision... pic.twitter.com/ja8yREhpxq — The Media Blog (@TheMediaTweets) November 3, 2016 I'm not sure if "openly gay" is meant to be better or worse than "secretly gay".
The Independent has the story on its web site – see link above Telling quote from the article:- 'The Lord Chief Justice of England has stopped the UK's Prime Minister from trying to overturn the result of the Civil War. That war, from 1642 to 1646 and which left one in 10 Englishmen dead in muddy fields, established the sovereignty of Parliament, which Theresa May's Attorney General sought to circumvent by using an arcane power called the Royal Prerogative to trigger Article 50. As he should have known, this power cannot be used to repeal an existing law' and ...
It is difficult not to see today's High Court ruling as anything other than a disaster for Theresa May. The first big decision she made as PM turns out to have been a monumental misjudgment. She has been ruled out of order and, unless an appeal is successful, she'll have to go cap in hand to Parliament. Mike Smithson of Political Betting put it very well: Article 50 judgement not a rejection of BREXIT but of Theresa May's strategy for dealing with it. She is today's big loser — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) November 3, 2016 Tim Farron commented: It is ...
[IMG: geograph-3292071-by-david-dixon] It's a local stretch of the A34 I know well. On August 10th we were all stunned and horrified by the terrible accident which occurred there, as reported by the Guardian: A lorry driver who killed a woman and three children when his vehicle ploughed into their stationary car while he was scrolling through music on his mobile phone has been jailed for 10 years. Tracy Houghton, 45, her sons, Ethan, 13, Josh, 11, and stepdaughter, Aimee, 11, died instantly when Tomasz Kroker drove his lorry into their car at 50mph. Their car was shunted underneath the back ...
In the thick fog that was the Brexit message during the referendum, some Brexiteers argued that we needed to re-establish Parliamentary sovereignty. Today's court judgement that Parliament, not the Government, has the power to trigger Article 50, should be welcomed by those who argued the Leave case. Yet they are doing the opposite. They are horrified by the ruling that triggering Article 50 is
Today's High Court ruling is quite a relief. Up until now, the government's approach to Article 50 has been rather like that of a load of drunks in a speeding train carriage, intent on pulling the emergency cord to jump off the train in the middle of nowhere. To embark on Article 50 without parliamentary consensus, and with a confused government position, would have been disastrous for this country's interests. The High Court ruling is based on the key constitutional principle that parliament only decides UK domestic law. By invoking Article 50 via royal prerogative, the government would have been ...
Thu 3rd
13:34
Here's what I find "strange" about recent senior Council Officers job sharing plans ........
In April 2014, there was uproar locally when it was reported the Tory controlled City Council had decided to award five-figure salary rises to a handful of Peterborough City Council's senior officers. Bit of background ..... The news came after a number of council posts had been made redundant – which the council said had saved more [...]
Around 100 local residents came to Dodington Parish Council's meeting on 2 November to protest against the development A developer has put in a planning application to demolish the Tern Inn at Heron Way and build 28 flats on the site, including the car park which is heavily used by parents at Raysfield School and customers of the Heron Way shops. Local residents have organised a petition against the proposal and will be meeting at 7pm next Wednesday (9 November) to discuss their next steps. They have also set up a Save the Tern Inn Facebook Page. Dodington Parish Council ...
The Liverpool Echo has the story – see link above Glad to see that folks are lining up to press for this long lost station to be reopened. I have blogged about it previously – see link below:- Of course Andrew Makinson is once again a member of Liverpool City Council so a long-time champion of this project is not hard to find.
The Daily Mirror has the story – see link above 'What's going wrong, obesity rising and now this, does anyone have any answers about whats happening in this country of ours?' says Roy Connell. Indeed, we seem to on the way to having a population at two extremes, food poverty at one end, obesity at the other!
The High Court today ruled that the Prime Minister cannot give notice of intention to withdraw from the European Union ("activate Article 50") without reference to Parliament. Social media has exploded this morning with comment about this. A lot of it is inaccurate and gets wrong why the court had ruled as it has and what are the practical implications of the ruling, which will be appealed to the Supreme Court in December. The best way to understand is to read the full judgment or the shorter summary issued by the court. You can find both of those here. In ...
This is the video I filmed last month of the visit we made to Gateshead's new energy-from-waste plant in Teeside. It still staggers me, even with recycling, just how much waste modern society generates. At least with this plant we get a useful product from the rubbish that cannot be recycled.
Care homes ban relatives who complain - BBC News RT @sturdyAlex: Banning relatives for complaining about their loved ones' care is outrageous. And CQC doesn't even collate data! Twitter RT @tompeck: Lot of people asking, as public cost of Olympic Stadium rockets again, who on earth negotiated that deal. Here's th... Twitter RT @DanaSchwartzzz: I feel like this is the type of email from Hillary Clinton people like to ignore Twitter RT @nikeshshukla: I think about this Junot Diaz quote a lot. Petition · Stand With Mermaids Charity: Petition supermarkets to remove the Daily Mail & Mail on Sunday from ...
According to the Independent George Osborne has rejected Theresa May's suggestion that immigration causes unemployment by noting that the claim is contradicted by "hard data". According to the paper the former chancellor said the claim, included in the Prime Minister's Tory conference speech last month, "doesn't really stack up" because of simultaneous record employment and immigration to the UK. Ms May claimed to Tory delegates at the start of October that people across Britain found "themselves out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration" - and that this was a reason for restricting immigration. This is quite ...
So yesterday I began to get reports from users that streams would no longer play, this occurred around 16:30 (GMT) as I was preparing to leave work to head home. Once I arrived home I could see that some of the tricks previously used to generate the m3u8 urls returned an error from the FilmOn servers. I quickly built some new code which used more of their API and successfully allowed me to watch most of the channels, this was the 1.5.0 release at 19:15. Again reports came in of issues for some channels with the new "Unable to fetch ...
Thu 3rd
09:23
Leave and Remain liberals will need to heal their rifts or the conservatives will take over
If we ever imagined that June's referendum on Britain's membership of the EU would end the arguing, we would have been much mistaken. I have taken part in this arguing enthusiastically, but it is time to take a step back. Where are we heading? Let's start with the Remainers. A recent poll has shown that few ... Continue reading Leave and Remain liberals will need to heal their rifts or the conservatives will take over →
Making Tax Digital (MTD) is a £1.3 billion investment programme intended to transform the tax system in the UK, making it more effective, more efficient and facilitating payment of the right tax at the right time. The Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) shares the government's ambition for the UK to have "the most digitally advanced tax administration in the world" but like many interested parties we believe the timescale for achieving this is now very challenging. Last month the Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, Andrew Tyrie MP, wrote to the Chancellor seeking to delay implementation "perhaps for a few ...
There is a train of thought that says that during the 20th century, the Right won the economic argument – the triumph of capitalism over socialism – while the Left won the social, cultural argument – that liberalism in these spheres won out over social conservatism as we witnessed civil rights, women's rights, and minority rights gain huge grounds, while homosexuality was legalised and became so accepted within society that by the turn of the century it even became okay for Tory MPs to be openly gay. The Left of late has begun to think it may just be able ...
From the Curator of Museum Services at the University of Dundee : A special event in the D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum, Carnelley Building, University of Dundee - later today - Thursday 3 November at 6pm - Protecting Paradise: Wildlife Conservation As part of Dundee Science Festival, join us to explore some of the projects that University of Dundee staff and students are doing to help marine conservation and the survival of threatened species and environments around the world. The event features three presentations: Prof Terry Dawson - Large-Scale marine protect areas: what can they achieve for biodiversity, and do they ...
Astrid Lindgren's second world war diaries make for crisp, painful reading A Swedish view. (tags: sweden wwii ) Not so special: Why the US won't help Britain in the Brexit talks @CER_London pours cold water. (tags: ukpolitics eu brexit ) Second Best An Isaac Asimov short story about presidential elections. (tags: uspolitics history ) The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton David Frum explains. (tags: uspolitics )
It's being widely reported that Richmond's local Green Party have voted not to stand a candidate in the Richmond Park by-election, and instead to support the Lib Dems. This is a very welcome move, coming from a party that has ... Continue reading →
