Lib Dem Councillors John Dodd, Daniel Lewis, Nigel Ashton and Jo Barton are holding their next advice centre in Churchtown. We will be at BoxTree Kitchen for Queenscourt café, Manor Road/Cambridge Road, roundabout, from 10:30 to 11.30am on Thursday 28th September. We will be there to meet you and discuss any Council problems you may have. No appointment necessary. Just pop in. We also hold a monthly advice centre in Crossens, at St John's School, Rufford Road, Crossens every month (except August) on the second Saturday of the month from 11:00 am to 12:00.

Posted by John Dodd on Meols Lib Dems

Christopher Frayling is our personable guide to the making of Jack Clayton's masterly adaptation of Henry James's story The Turn of the Screw. There is also a good discussion of the film, complete with Peter Wyngarde, on the BBC Radio 3 site.

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Congratulations to Lily Kaufman and the Liberal Democrat team in Oadby and Wigston for winning the Oadby Uplands ward by-election yesterday. The full result: Lily Kaufman (Lib Dems) 435 Labour 384 Conservative 295 This was the seat held for Labour by Gurpal Atwal until his resignation in the summer. Oadby Uplands is a two member ward. The Lib Dems already held the other seat. The result is particularly gratifying because Oadby and Wigston has been run by the Liberal Democrats since 1991. The Leicester Mercury quotes John Boyce, the leader of the council: "I'm extremely pleased. We perform well as ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Vince said that it was no wonder the Brexiteers were terrified of giving the people a say on the deal: Both the Conservatives and Labour have now essentially converged on the same position, which is to kick the can down the road and simply delay the economic pain caused by an extreme Brexit. Neither are prepared to fight to keep Britain in the single market and customs union or to offer people a chance to exit from Brexit Voters were promised £350m a week for the NHS, instead Theresa May is admitting the UK will have to pay a hefty ...

Posted by The Voice on Liberal Democrat Voice

Second paragraph of third chapter: Midway through the afternoon we turned onto another trail. It led north into an area of low hills. The soil was sandy. The trees were small and scrubby. Here and there we came upon outcroppings of a sandy rock, yellow or dull orange. The trail was barely visible: a faint line that wound among the rocks and trees. It led finally—in the late afternoon—to a shack, made of long branches leaning against rock. Skins were stretched over the branches. Smoke came out of a hole. What a sad little dwelling place! I enjoyed A Woman ...

I've been to the vast majority of both spring and autumn party conferences since I joined the Lib Dems back in March 2010 and I can honestly say I enjoyed the one that ended in Bournemouth, on Tuesday, the best. I think I'm finally starting to work out the ebbs and flows of conference; when best to put in a speaker's card with a chance of actually being called; when to take time out with friends and not fill your whole rota with yet another fringe meeting (as good as they almost always are); how to network with like-minded fellow ...

Posted by Mathew Hulbert on Liberal Democrat Voice

Today I return to a subject that I have discussed before, that of Emotions in Politics, with some of my previous posts on this subject here, here and hear. However I am interested today in how it impacts the strongest political issue of our times, namely Brexit. When I floated the provisional idea for this post on twitter, another user thought it would be dangerous to cast people who feel one thing and hence vote based on that one way or another as being Type A or Type B, which is a fair enough objection. My hypothesis is, that if ...

Posted by Louise Ankers on From one of the Jilted Generation...

This post is a political one, and discusses party strategies, but I think it has more applicability than just to Lib Dem partisans (which means that unlike the internal-fighting posts of last week, I'm going to charge for this on ... Continue reading →

Posted by Andrew Hickey on Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
Fri 22nd
15:15

Latest Lib Dem broadcast

View here

Posted by chriswhite on Chris White

There is one childhood memory which will always stick in my head. Aged 8 or 9 our headteacher at primary school sat us down and told us about the first black child to enter our school. We were given a pep talk us that this boy was no different to the rest of us and that we were to treat him as an equal. This was middle class Surrey in 1982. What I have seen and heard since the referendum in various parts of the UK has made me thing that in some ways we have not moved on when ...

Posted by Chris Key on Liberal Democrat Voice
YouGov

The Loughborough Echo wins our Headline of the Day Award. Well done to all concerned.

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Commenting on reports that Michael Gove has suppressed reports showing that food prices will rise as a result of Brexit, Tom Brake, Liberal Democrat Shadow Brexit Spokesperson, said: "Michael Gove needs to show a bit of honesty. Brexit Britain is not going to be the land of milk and honey that he dreamed of. "The truth is clear that on our current path prices will go up, jobs will be lost, public services will suffer and Britain's place in the world will be diminished. "This government are dragging the country disastrously and reckless out of the EU. The British public ...

Posted by LD Neath on Aberavon & Neath Liberal Democrats

Vince Cable has called on Theresa May to use her speech in Florence tomorrow to make a bold offer on EU nationals' rights, as new figures reveal that almost 10,000 EU workers quit the NHS in the year after the Brexit vote. 9,832 EU nationals left the NHS between 30 June 2016 and 30 June 2017, figures provided by NHS Digital today have revealed. This is an increase of 22% on the previous year, and up 42% on two years earlier. In total 3,885 nurses, 1,794 doctors and 1,518 support staff from the EU left the NHS between June 2016 ...

Posted by LD Neath on Aberavon & Neath Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats have responded to claims by Lynn Faulds Wood - author of an independent report - that the government has taken no action on her demand to increase the safety of electrical goods. This is hugely significant as it seems increasingly clear that the Grenfell fire was started due to faulty electrical products. Wera Hobhouse MP, Liberal Democrat DCLG spokesperson, said: "The government is risking lives by failing to protect consumers from faulty products that can cause fires. "There have been repeated calls for action, both before and after the tragedy at Grenfell Tower, yet the government has ...

Posted by LD Neath on Aberavon & Neath Liberal Democrats

Happily, it doesn't matter that I had to be in 3 other places at the time when Nick Clegg's only fringe meeting appearance in Bournemouth, because those nice people at Prospect magazine have only gone and put it on You Tube. Enjoy. * Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings

Posted by Caron Lindsay on Liberal Democrat Voice

From the District Council: St Albans City & District Council's Housing Department will be replacing the wooden boundary fence between Woodvale Park and Alban Way. The Alban Way will be closed to both pedestrians and cyclists during this work. The works are due to start on Monday 2 October 2017 and will take around 10 days [...]

Posted by chriswhite on Chris White

This conversation happened at the Lib Dem Conference when I was on the SLF ( Social Liberal Forum ) stand. I was approached by a man who was attending his first conference. He had won a prize in the raffle. He explained that his son was on the Liberal Reform stall and they had told him we were a 'bunch of lefties'. He wanted to know about joining.... Left is often one those words which creates more confusion than clarity. So we should be clear that SLF stand in a long tradition of radical Liberalism as this article in the ...

Posted on birkdale focus

I have a new hobby horse: the politics of information. The development of information technology is transforming our lives, but the politicians are being left behind. This is becoming at least as important as economics and finance to the way we live our lives. But we amateurs face a problem. The IT industry obfuscates everything ... Continue reading Information technology is enslaving us: we must learn to master it →

Posted by Matthew on thinking liberal

At the consultation meeting the Lords Party held at our Bournemouth conference, the strongest plea that came from round the table discussing Brexit was for more information on what is happening. We will take that back to the wider parliamentary party and our small and overworked group of researchers, and see what more we can do. There are some really good papers from Nick Clegg's advisory group on the party's web site, which explore the underlying issues; but the politics of the negotiations are moving and changing almost every week, and I guess that campaigners want usable material to respond ...

Posted by Lord William Wallace on Liberal Democrat Voice

This place is more like a circus than a debating chamber with Labour flailing around like manic clowns to try and avoid serious questioning and debates On Wednesday, at the Council meeting we were supposed to have a debate about ... Continue reading →

Posted by richardkemp on But what does Richard Kemp think?
eUKhost
Fri 22nd
11:00

My tweets

Thu, 17:53: RT @davidallengreen: The test for Theresa May's speech is whether it engages with serious and detailed points in Barnier's speech today: ht... Thu, 18:47: Etymologicon, by Mark Forsyth https://t.co/3XThdqznOl Thu, 20:48: In Ireland, Israel's Religious Right Engages with Ideas for Peace https://t.co/96IV1VbYoC This is fascinating. @CrisisGroup #fb Fri, 10:03: RT @JenniferMerode: Council of Europe defers decision on legal action against Azerbaijan over refusal to release Ilgar Mammadov https://t.c... Fri, 10:19: RT @GdnPolitics: Morning! It's a big day for Florence. And Boris Johnson. https://t.co/Ui1sddztWx

Woman seeing three men at once struggling with the adminRT @davidgerard: The Daily Mash accurately depicts polyamory in practice The Hobbit Was Almost Illustrated by Maurice Sendak......but Tolkien rejected his artwork. Here's the story. [IMG: comment count unavailable] comments

A few days ago former Troy MP Matthew Parris wrote and article in The Times in which he argued that now there is a good opportunity for a Liberal Democrat revival because, whereas both Conservatives and Labour are weighed down by ideological baggage, we Liberal Democrats, along with the bulk of the electorate, aren't. This provoked indignation from the faithful, best expressed by my friend Michael Meadowcroft, who wrote directly to Parris: Dear Matthew There was much to take note of and to act on in your Times article last Saturday, "This is the moment for a Lib Dem revival", ...

Posted by Peter Wrigley on Keynesian Liberal
Fri 22nd
10:21

Time to ditch Connect?

The party has used two systems for computer based campaigning. EARS, developed in the UK for UK elections and more recently Connect, which was developed for use in US and Canadian election systems. Some elections ago the party made a decision to start using Connect instead of EARS as its main computer tool for digital and on the ground campaigns. This was largely because at that time EARS had not been able to demonstrate that it could provide an internet based service of the sort the party wanted. So there began an experiment with this USA based computer tool that ...

Posted by Michael Taylor on Liberal Democrat Voice

Public finances remain in a mess, the economy has barely recovered from the 2008 crash and hundreds of thousands of people are struggling to make ends meet, with the in-work poverty and a reliance on food banks growing by the day. The on-going public sector pay freeze has exacerbated this problem for those who have dedicated their working lives to keeping vital services going. This is especially harsh in the health service, where nurses, ambulance staff, junior doctors, professions allied to medicine and auxiliary staff have seen their commitment and dedication unrewarded for a number of years. The scale of ...

Posted by Peter Black on Peter Black

I found myself carrying out a small experiment at the Radix fringe meeting on Monday at the Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth. It rather confirmed what I thought – which is that there is an ideological divide at the heart of the radical centre, even before it has re-launched itself onto an expectant electorate. I'll [...] The post The great divide at the heart of the radical centre appeared first on Radix.

Posted by David Boyle on Opinion - Radix
Fri 22nd
08:55

What now for the centre?

'When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame/One hasn't got time for the waiting game'. So sang Frank Sinatra on September Song and it is hard not to mirror his impatience. In many ways the June general election was a disappointment for Liberal Democrats, but the way that politics has fragmented in the fallout from the vote does offer some points of reflection- not all of which are negative. One theme of the summer was a revived interest in a new 'centrist' party that could lead the fight against Brexit. I'm sceptical about the need for another party, but ...

Posted by Steven Duckworth on Liberal Democrat Voice

The Southport Visiter has the story – see link above With thanks to Roy Connell for the lead to this posting

Posted by Cllr. Tony Robertson on Sefton Focus

 

Be scared. Be very scared. In fact if you saw, listened to or read about President Donald Trump's UN address than you are probably terrified. If not, then think again. Trump used the occasion of his first speech to the General Assembly to draw red lines across the map and dare his opponents to cross them. North Korea, Iran and Venezuela are the new axis of evil. In one breath he called for an international order based on a respect for national sovereignty and with the next bullied those those who oppose him. The United Nations and international cooperation enjoyed ...

Posted by Tom Arms on Liberal Democrat Voice

Two Labour defences and one Conservative defence make up this week's trio of council by-elections. That trio even comes with a full slate of Liberal Democrat candidates, hooray. Those two Labour defences were both in wards that used to be Lib Dem – and this week generated a pair of gains for the party. Liberal Democrat GAIN Holmebrook (Chesterfield Council) from Labour. — Britain Elects (@britainelects) September 21, 2017

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack