Seven council by-elections this week, with four Conservative defences, two Labour defences and one Ukip defence. And in the seven comes a brilliant Liberal Democrat gain from the Conservatives.
Thu 9th
23:10
More legal trouble for Conservatives as eye-witnesses contradict party's claims over election expens...
Yet more from Michael Crick on the election expenses scandal which threatens not only one of Theresa May's two most senior and closest aides but also more than enough Conservative MPs to put their majority in the House of Commons at risk. With the police due to send their files to the Crown Prosecution Service within weeks, the indefatigable journalist has discovered a pair of eye-witnesses who contradict a key part of the Conservative Party's defence: Two members of a Conservative campaigning "hit squad" in the 2015 election tell Channel 4 News the party "cheated" by not properly declaring its ...
Some footage of the Great Central through Leicester in the 1960s.
I've got to say that 12 months ago I didn't think I would be writing one of these posts, and my WordPress account hasn't been hacked. I'm not going to suggest doing a million product reviews or surveys, or suggest you join an eBook pyramid scam, but instead make the most of Matched Betting. Now this isn't some kind of trading scam or one of those turn £10 in to £10,000 by doing a 50 fold accumulator, but instead playing the maths behind making the most of free bets that a bookmaker gives out. Imagine you've just popped to Ladbrokes ...
Conservative seat. Cause: Death. LD Candidate: Kieran Mullins. To help, please contact Liz Leffman on lizleffman@clothesource.net
Conservative seat. Cause: Resignation. LD Candidate: Philip Vial.
Conservative seat. Cause: Resignation. LD Candidate: Joanna Burrows.
Labour seat. Cause: Resignation. LD Candidate: Brendan Wyer. To help, please contact elaine@moretons.co.uk
UKIP seat. Cause: Death. LD Candidate: Simon Ferrigno. Contact: davidjwinkle@gmail.com
Conservative seat. Cause: Resignation. LD Candidate: Freja Waterhouse. To help, please email davies.david768@gmail.com
Labour seat. Cause: Death. LD Candidate: Marshel Amutharasan.
From a Vanity Fair article by T.A. Frank: There's no way that a series of misspelled four A.M. tweets, sandwiched next to a lament about The Apprentice, is the work of someone playing 28-dimensional chess. It's the work of someone who found a chess set and had to go to the hospital after swallowing two rooks and a knight.
[IMG: Caynton Caves] Photo of Caynton Caves by Richard Law Nothing about Shropshire would surprise me, but today's stories like Rabbit hole leads to '700-year-old Knights Templar' cavesare sadly nonsense. The complex is not a new discovery and Historic England has tweeted the link to its listing under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990: Cave/grotto. Probably late C18 or early C19, but undatable. Hollowed out of rock in side of disused quarry, approached by very small unmarked entrance. Plan, apparently irregular ambulatories opening into inner sanctuaries. Columns left by excavation as cylinders with bases and capitals (and ...
Embed from Getty Images The Daily Mirror report I blogged about this morning took it for granted that Labour will hold Manchester Gorton in the by-election. Huffington Post is not so sure: An internal Labour battle over the Manchester Gorton by-election risks gifting the seat to the Liberal Democrats, party sources have told HuffPost UK. Attempts by Jeremy Corbyn's allies to skew the candidate selection towards supporters of the Labour leader have backfired amid claims of chaos and incompetence, insiders say.
Thu 9th
19:37
Shropshire still not getting fly-tipping under control - you can help by reporting incidents
The good news is that fly-tipping in Shropshire is going down. The latest statistics show an 11% year-on-year fall in reports of fly-tipping in the unitary council area, muct better than the 3% fall in the rest of England. It's not all good news unfortunately. The number of incidents is still higher than five years ago. Shropshire Council spent nearly £100,000 on cleaning up the mess and prosecuting offenders. The council needs to improve its enforcement. And we all need to do more to report fly-tipping incidents. Fly-tipping is one of the curses of our age. Bags of household waste, ...
The Weld Blundell in 2008 I hear, from what I would consider to be a reliable source, that work on the pub is likely to start in May with a reopening late summer this year.
I'm rather fond of meat, and not terribly fussy about how it's cooked. And like my caveman ancestors, roast lumps of meat are perfectly acceptable. If you're like me in that respect, Latin America is quite a good place to go, as the parrilla is a serious meat-eater paradise. In Punta Arenas, the nearest hotel to our hotel was Parrilla Los Ganaderos, and a brief walk past was sufficient to persuade Ros that this might be a good place to eat, especially as there was Patagonian lamb on the menu. There is none of this haute cuisine stuff here. A ...
Our seventh update from the LDV Fantasy Football League. Congratulations to Nick Davies, our Manager of the Month for February. His Wenger's 2nd XI showed themselves more effective than Wenger's first 11, topping our league with an impressive 217 points, a little ahead of Andrew Hydon's the treble c's (209) and Michael Brown's Mike's Dream Team (208). In the overall league table, Alain Desmier's Mountgrove Maulers (1564 points) continue to dominate, some way ahead of nearest rival Richard Campbell's Dick Dastardly FC (1504). There are 195 players in total and you can still join the league by clicking here. * ...
It has been a busy and varied week which started with a visit to two of the Borough's foodbanks and ended with lunch at the Southport Anglo Polish Society. First stop was at St Leonard's Community Centre Foodbank where I met up with Debbie again. She had been nominated for an award earlier in the year by one of her volunteers. Most of the volunteers on the day that I visited were former firefighters. Everything was very well organised in accordance with the Trussel Trust's good practice. The centre had just taken delivery of a new trolley, in the photo, ...
Another day, yet another extraordinary story about the dysfunctional Welsh branch of UKIP. According to the BBC the Welsh party's former chairman has left, saying that UKIP is "unravelling" this side of Offa's Dyke. Chris Smart, who was appointed acting chairman of UKIP's Wales committee last summer, has said he wants to rejoin the Conservatives. In doing so he has raised questions about the strength of the party's operation as it approaches May's local elections: Mr Smart told BBC Wales he was disappointed the party had failed to resolve the row about its former Welsh leader Nathan Gill, who doubles ...
As Minister for Equalities in the recent coalition government, Lynne Featherstone was the originator and architect of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. She has received various accolades and awards for her work on equalities. In his book Gay Shorts (2015), the former Conservative Party politician turned broadcaster and member of the LGBT community, Iain Dale said that: Same-sex marriage will be associated with Lynne Featherstone in the same way that we associate David Steel with the 1967 Abortion Act and Roy Jenkins with the legalisation of homosexuality. In the hours following the icy gales of Storm Doris, I ...
The slough of despond which we find ourselves in comprises not just being severed from 49 parliamentary seats two years ago, but the backdrop to this: one where social democratic and liberal endeavours are losing their credibility throughout Western Europe. A well-timed response to the cultural aspect of this was posted last February calling for a `counter-narrative` of our own `myths and stories`. Here are some of my pointers at not letting the devil have all the best tunes. To get some visceral appeal some have proposed that we embrace some kind of English patriotism, others that the call for ...
Last week saw Liberal Democrats in Yorkshire attending a conference organised by Liberal Democrats which showcased ideas from Yorkshire Liberal Democrat members to challenge the proposed route and scheme for the HS2 Eastern Leg from Birmingham to Leeds. While our party has been the first to push a viable High Speed scheme linking Scotland and England, the North and London and extending the existing High Speed link to Europe namely High Speed One, the current plans do none of these things. In fact the grossly impactful M18 Eastern Route now proposed threatens to derail the whole future of high speed ...
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-39003902 In these days when racism seems sadly to be on the rise again here's a lovely story – see link to the BBC web site above – about two youngsters from a different era and how they overcame it and the people who tried to keep them apart. If this does not restore your faith in human nature nothing probably will.
Thu 9th
11:53
Get in the game - why the Liberal Democrats must be champions for the video games industry
The government should be celebrating the success of the British video games industry. With the British market valued at £4.2bn in 2016, making it the biggest market in the entire creative sector, the video games industry achieves the double whammy of being both lucrative and a shining light for other growth sectors. The games industry is spread across the country, with over a dozen thriving clusters popping up in places like Bristol, Liverpool and Dundee. The success of the industry has drawn in the biggest names from gaming, with EA, Sony, Bethesda and Nintendo just some of the companies setting ...
The seemingly indestructible Keith Vaz has popped up again, reports the Daily Mirror. He is to be a member of the panel that will select Labour's candidate for the Manchester Gorton by-election: Mr Vaz was drafted onto Labour's five-strong selection panel at the last minute at the expense of shadow cabinet minister Rebecca Long-Bailey, a close ally of Mr Corbyn.Angry sources close to the Labour leader accused Mr Watson of organising an "ambush" during a fiery telephone meeting on Monday that resulted in Ms Long-Bailey being booted off the panel.Her name had been on a draft list drawn up by ...
When Tony Blair was prime minister, he used what has infamously (and often pejoratively) become referred to as "triangulation". What it meant in practice was that Labour could ignore traditional bases of support such as the white northern working-classes, essentially take them for granted, because they "had nowhere else to go". All of the firepower was instead used to please the vaunted "swing voter": those who had voted Tory in the past, but could be persuaded that Labour were more in line with their interests. With the implosion of the Labour Party we are now witnessing the Conservative version of ...
I recently attended a seminar led by a specialist in international relations, and one of those attending asked "How likely do you think it is that the UK will fight a conventional war in the next ten years?". Without any hesitation the reply came: "Almost certain." It's hard to avoid noticing the changing political environment we find ourselves, both at home and abroad. For the first time in decades, the prospect of large-scale non-nuclear war seems plausible (though President Trump seems keen on removing "non-nuclear" from that equation). Russia's aggressive actions can't be written off as isolated incidents, and the ...
Michael Ashcroft's latest collection of focus groups and polling around a specific election, Hopes and Fears: Trump, Clinton, the voters and the future looks at the 2016 US Presidential election .
Lord charged with racially abusing Gina Miller - Business Insider Why you should donate things other than food to food banks. I generally chuck in sanitary towels. I'n which I get a surprise feature on LDV for International Women's Day Genuinely 1, stunned and 2, touched by this. It was completely unexpected. My IWD thread of inspiring women on Twitter Mostly lib dems, but enough others to be interesting I think. I hope. Nevertheless, she persisted: flash fiction by women some pretty awesome women too. Catherine Valente, Seanan McGuire, etc Women: they're so MYSTERIOUS and ALIEN ... yay science. A ...
I'm increasingly conscious that one really important group has become invisible in the storm around Brexit: the people who actually voted for it. Canvassing recently my ear was firmly bent by someone who voted Leave and is worried about the NHS. The promise of £350 million per week might have evaporated on the morning after the referendum, but her concerns have not. She's not angry at the lie: for her this is just one more in the chain of politicians' lies. The worry is real. One of the memorable moments in Laura Kuenssberg's documentary on the referendum had Leave voters ...
To state the blindingly obvious, Jeremy Corbyn is a car crash of a leader. He is now at the point where, even if he did suddenly start espousing credible policies, no one would listen on account of them coming out of his mouth. His credibility is nil. In the short term, this allows Liberal Democrats to stretch the point about being the only credible opposition to the Government. Whilst it exaggerates our meagre Commons presence somewhat, it does carry a little more weight in relation to the arithmetic in the Lords and, of course, the Party is enjoying a string ...
Northern Ireland: Did the centre hold? @nickjbarlow quotes me, so he must be right. (tags: Northernireland ) BBC: We should thank Buffy for today's 'Golden Age' of television Indeed! (tags: tv buffy sf ) Rabbit hole leads to 700-year-old Knights Templar cave Fantastic! (tags: archaeology )
