Four years ago a planning application went in for an anaerobic digester to be built between Thomas Swan and the bypass in Consett. There was a good deal of concern at the time, and a lot of engagement with local people. I was part of that, and have had to apologise to local people because I allowed myself and others to be persuaded that, because it would use only grass, maize and other fresh crops, it would not cause the sort of problems that some other digesters, fuelled by animal waste and slurry, had caused in other areas. We were ...
Right To Stay is an initiative by the Liberal Democrats to guarantee the rights of EU citizens to continue to live and work in the UK, as well as British people living in other EU countries, after Brexit.
The first of a series of videos made by Holden Webster, who runs the Shropshire Railways site. It concentrates on the disused Oswestry station, which is now in part a railway museum.
Namely, English: French: German: Spanish: Dutch: Liberal England joins in: I AGREE WITH NICK.
Mon 13th
19:20
#ToriesAtTheTownHall refuse to answer THE question RE: St Peter's Arcade "disgusting decision"
What' this about then? You may remember reading the reports, just before Christmas last year, when the Tory controlled city council announced plans to spend £8,024 of taxpayers money, to hire two security guards to work for 19 days over Christmas and the new year, to address (in their words) "anti-social behaviour" at St Peter's Arcade. [...]
Bury's NHS Clinical Commissioning Group is now formally consulting the public on the closure of Prestwich and Bury Walk-In Centres. The Governing Body of NHS Bury CCG have agreed a 'redesign of urgent care services', which includes closing the Walk-In Centres at its last meeting – following the initial public consultation. [IMG: screenshot-2016-09-06-09-00-46] Members of the public will be able to give their views until Monday 20 March 2017. By letter to, NHS Bury Clinical Commissioning Group, Communications and Engagement Team (Urgent Care Redesign), 21 Silver Street, Bury, BL9 0EN By e-mail to buccg.communications@nhs.net Please do let us know your ...
Young people in Bury can now benefit from new drop-in health sessions twice a month at Townside Primary Care Centre. [IMG: pennine_care_-_nhs] Bury School Nursing Service, run by Pennine Care, is providing the sessions for 16 to 19 year olds to come along without an appointment for support. The sessions will be held in Room 333 at Townside Primary Care Centre, from 2.30pm to 4.30pm on the second and fourth Monday of each month. Trained nurses will be available to give confidential advice on long term health conditions, emotional health, sleep support, healthy eating, exercise and weight management, sexual health, ...
A Prestwich 'Artisan' Market is in the Longfield Suite and the area around the Longfield fountain on Sunday 26 February 2017 10am – 4pm – craft and 'artisan' producers, food and drink. [IMG: image002-1]
If North Antrim is Unionist heartland, West Belfast is the Republican heartland, with SF dominant for decades. Yet their vote share here in 2016 was the lowest since 1996, with the People Before Profit Alliance emerging as new challengers. The fact that the PBPA do not sit as Nationalists in Stormont knocked the Nationalist vote share here down to 61.8% which still delivered five MLAs, four SF and one SDLP. PBPA with 22.9% won their first seat, and the Unionists with 12.2% were not all that far off. 2016 result DUP 3,766 (10.4%, +2.9%) UUP 654 (1.8%, -2.4%) PBP 8,299 ...
North Antrim is the northeast corner of Northern Ireland, including the heartland towns of Ballymena, Ballymoney and Ballycastle. It had the second highest Unionist vote share in 2016 at 74.4%, narrowly pipped by Lagan Valley. That got five Unionist MLAs elected comfortably, and a 20.4% Nationalist vote elected one MLA from Sinn Fein. 2016 result DUP 17,655 (43.1%, -4.5%) 3 seats TUV 7,354 (17.9%, +6.2%) 1 seat UUP 4,406 (10.7%, -1.0%) 1 seat UKIP 1,027 (2.5%,) Conservatives 92 (0.2%) Alliance 1,318 (3.2%, -1.4%) Green 513 (1.3%) NI Labour 243 (0.6%) Sinn Féin 5,297 (12.9%, -2.4%) 1 seat SDLP 3,093 (7.5%, ...
Out of the blue, on Saturday, we learned that The Law Commission has been at work. It proposes changing the Official Secrets Act to cover matters that are about what the government of the day considers to be matters of national economic interest. Anyone in unauthorised possession of material that might be included in the scope of the Act, or who transmits it or publishes could go to jail for up to ten years. There would be no restriction on who can commit the offence," including hackers, leakers, elected politicians, journalists, and NGOs. What this boils down to is the ...
The following piece I penned for our weekly Digital Inspirational email at Blue Rubicon. Do sign up if you'd like such stories in your inbox every week. New statistics out last week show the use of ad-blocking by internet users up by nearly a third (30%) in the last year, putting increasing financial pressure on news outlets and other sites for which advertising revenue is a key part of their business model. Such a big rise would be worrying enough, but there's a double pressure behind the rise which is likely to keep on pushing ad blocking higher. First, in ...
Context Yesterday evening a discussion emerged on what I suppose we should call "Scottish Twitter" about the extent to which non-British EU citizens might influence the result of any second referendum on Scottish independence. There are about 181k such citizens currently in Scotland according to the Scottish Parliamentary Information Centre (SPICe)'s data. In the last referendum, it was widely considered that this group leaned towards No, motivated in part by the fact that leaving the UK could have interrupted, even if only temporarily, Scotland's place in the European Union and would have affected the legal basis on which many of ...
So far a majority in the House of Commons supports the advice of the British people to leave the European Union (EU). The Government, elected by 25% of voters, continues to impose its destructive hard Brexit vision on the 48% and many leavers who wanted to remain in the Single Market. We also made a decision in the 1975 referendum, and then by a far larger majority, to remain. Taken together this suggests there is no 'settled will' as to how we wish to associate with our European neighbours and largest export market. Democracy is much more than just one ...
The Liverpool Echo has the story – see link above [IMG: 51cmopksyhl-_ac_us327_ql65_] A book which those interested in Liverpool's historic railway network will want a copy of I am sure.
Mon 13th
12:20
The black hole in the UK public finances – Better have a stiff drink before reading this!
The Guardian has the story on its web site – See link above Now if you are already concerned about the state of our economy this will confirm why your blood pressure is high. If you have not considered this before you had better sit down with a stiff drink before reading!
South Gloucestershire Trading Standards have repeated the warning given recently to residents to be extra vigilant when dealing with unexpected callers at the front door. Officers are aware that rogue traders are currently operating in the area and are offering to buy gold or jewellery or carry out, amongst other things, paving, roofing and gardening work. Reports suggest they are currently operating in Yate and Frampton Cotterell areas. South Gloucestershire Council Trading Standards advise residents: Do not to deal with unexpected visitors at your door you do not know who they are or what their history may be.Do not allow ...
[IMG: Rotherham MB, Brinsworth & Catcliffe] Improve your chances of winning by becoming an ALDC member so that you can benefit from the wealth of helpful services and templates that we offer. No matter whether you are a candidate, agent or campaigner, being an ALDC member will grant you access to our advice, resources and training. We have templates and advice [...]
Active Liberal Democrats should read the Daily Mail. You need to know where issues that dominate the news have come from. Even more under this Conservative government than under Tony Blair, the Mail sets much of our political tone and agenda; it's the newspaper from which Conservative constituency executives take their opinions, feeding back to MPs, ministers and No.10. The BBC's recent revelation that David Cameron tried to persuade Lord Rothermere that it was time for Paul Dacre to retire, after 25 years as editor, before the EU Referendum, illustrates how successive Prime Ministers attempt to cultivate the Mail while ...
There is a particular strain of thought on the Left that I find really irksome – for lack of a better word, let's call it "communitarian liberalism". It is essentially utopian in outlook because it avoids several aspects of hard reality. And if ever there was a time for the Left to put aside non-achievable aims and be as pragmatic as possible, now is really the time. A good way of understanding this philosophy (for it is an all encompassing way of looking at the world) is to look at relevant examples of it in print. The Guardian should really ...
Tim Farron has written a powerful article in the FT accusing Theresa May of sacrificing the British economy as Labour stand by and help her. We have tried to bring sanity to the debate, tabling amendments in the House of Commons to retain single-market membership, to allow EU citizens lawfully resident in the UK to keep their right to remain, and to give the British people a vote on the final Brexit deal. Mrs May, though, is not listening. She has crushed opposition from her MPs and made the political decision to sacrifice the British economy. The situation has been ...
Labour wants the immigrant vote AND the racist vote [IMG: comment count unavailable] comments
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. Even with the Liberal Democrats recovering from our May 2015 low point, most political podcasts don't give that much time to the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats. But if you're a fan of podcasts, there's good news – a new-ish podcast devoted to the Liberal Democrats. Called The Limehouse Podcast in reference to the Limehouse Declaration that founded the SDP, the podcast is available on iTunes and Soundcloud. Happy listening! You ...
I've little time for Jeremy Corbyn but just occasionally his instincts are right- as when he recently raised the idea of pay controls for the highly paid. Now of course the random way he presented it made it an easy target but I was surprised and disappointed how quickly people dismissed the idea. Either its apparently 'just bonkers', or won't work, or is bad politics or all of the above. But I don't think it is. Yes, we need more than just a cap on pay ratios to address rising inequality and the rising inequality of power that comes with ...
Since the Clive Ponting trial many politicians have been focussed on seeking to protect whistleblowers, that rare breed of mostly public sector employees who go public about abuses within their workplace in the public interest. Legislation has been passed to protect whistleblowers because it has been understood that dealing with abuses and other issues in an open and accountable way leads to more efficient governance. Nevertheless, this legislation has proved largely ineffective as employers have found many ways to circumvent it, not least in disputing whether the published information amounts to whistleblowing in the first place as opposed to a ...
As part of LGBT History Month, I have been researching the history of openly trans politicians in the UK and I will be posting these over the next few days. Our history is often confused by the media's need for sensationalism and they will often latch on to the idea that someone might be "first" at something to make another otherwise run-of-the-mill human-interest story about someone seem more interesting. Sometimes politicians reuse these stories themselves, not realising that the media have not bothered to fact-check their claims. This does not help trans representation in the long run, because it makes ...
DUNDEE CITY COUNCIL - WEEKLY ROAD REPORT REPORT FOR WEST END WARD WEEK COMMENCING MONDAY 13 FEBRUARY 2017 Blackness Road (at Wilkie's Lane) - temporary traffic lights on Sunday 19 February for mobile platform operations. Nethergate (West Marketgait to South Tay Street) - closed on Sunday 19 February for water supply connection works.
So the final straight approaches and we are looking at our campaign and putting in place the finishing touches and allowing space for some extra elements. We have been often asked by visiting helpers what can they do to make a real difference. So here today for the first time I think i have the answer, which is not as obvious as I expected. I am a huge believer in having what I call legacy campaigning: that regardless of the electoral outcome that you achieve some positives, some learning, training and apply that to the future. I spend a lot ...
Mon 13th
06:00
April business rate hike could permanently damage the retail economy of towns like Ludlow
A few years back, the government of the day spotted a banana skin ahead. A routine reassessment of rateable values due in 2015 would lead to some businesses paying a lot more in business rates. With London and the South East beginning to boom again after the banking crisis, that would mean a huge increase in business taxes in Tory heartlands. So, ministers kicked the revaluation into touch until after the 2015 general election. There was no point in having a row with business leaders just as electors queued at the polling booths. And, as the government pleaded at the ...
Yes-no questions in in Chinese 对 or 不? (tags: China chinese linguistics ) Hans Rosling: A truth-teller in an age of 'alternative facts' Great obituary. (tags: death statistics )
