Taken, I would estimate, in the first half of the 1990s, this photograph of mine shows the Edwardian wooden church at Little Stretton in Shropshire. It appears to be a high class version of the corrugated iron mission churches that were sent around the Empire (and to darkest England) in kit form to be assembled. Indeed it's roof was originally made of corrugated iron, but the church was later thatched to give it its current picturesque appearance.

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Embed from Getty Images The other day I was chatting to someone who grew up in Grantham. He told me two tales he heard from older relatives: When Alfred Roberts, Margaret Thatcher's father, was in charge of the post office counter he would throw the money on the floor if customers came in to cash unemployment cheques.The young Margaret once attended a children's party and illicitly helped herself to a second piece of cake, which she concealed in her knickers. And then there was Rotten Borough, the 1937 novel about corruption in local government in Grantham, that was withdrawn after ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

I'm not a prolific user of Twitter, I admit. I use it more as a combined news source and means of keeping up with my friends, than as a way of communicating. Occasionally though, I do take a dip in the gasoline-covered waters. This evening, I made the mistake of responding to something that Iain Dale had retweeted, pointing out that the 'divorce bill' he was referring to was the United Kingdom's share of the costs of commitments entered into jointly by the members of the European Union. Not hugely controversial, I thought. Apparently though, this offered Iain the chance ...

Posted by Mark Valladares on Liberal Bureaucracy

Embed from Getty Images He is a bit awkward, doesn't have Gary Lineker's ease and wit. But he's serious, engaged and engaging, and proves he can make the step up from Match of the Day punditry and go it alone.Sam Wollaston gives a fair verdict on Alan Shearer's presentation of the documentary Dementia, Football and Me. The dangers of brain damage posed by boxing have long been known, and in recent years more attention has been paid to football, rugby and American football. These have been highlighted by the news that several members of England's 1966 World Cup team are ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Yesterday the Herts Valleys CCG made the appalling announcement that they had confirmed their previous decision to withdraw their £600,000 annual support for Nascot Lawn children's respite care home. Cynically they claim their decision was taken because the County Council had failed to engage with them in looking for a workable way forward when it has [...]

Posted by chriswhite on Chris White

Lib Dem staff at LDHQ in London have clearly not had enough of elections for this year! They have just held their own elections for staff reps to the federal committees. An insider explained to us what the staff reps did: Staff reps have two main roles. Firstly, each rep either sits on a Federal committee or is a social rep. Staff reps are non-voting members of Federal committees they sit, their job is to express to views of staff and communicate how plans that Federal committees propose will affect staff. The second part of the staff rep role is ...

Posted by The Voice on Liberal Democrat Voice
Fri 17th
14:11

Whickham Focus

Delivery of our Whickham Focus is now complete. This is what we have been putting through local doors.

Posted by jonathanwallace on Jonathan Wallace
Fri 17th
13:56

Sunniside Christmas Tree

Marilynn Ord, John McClurey and I, as the councillors for Sunniside, have used part of the ward's Local Community Fund to ensure Sunniside village has a Christmas tree. The fund has also paid to install the electricity supply. We are planning a switch on event so if you would like to be involved, please get in touch on jonathanwallace329@gmail.com.

Posted by jonathanwallace on Jonathan Wallace

Over on Left Foot Forward, Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable has revealed that he was invited to lead a new anti-Brexit party. Explaining what happened, Vince Cable writes: Recently, we've seen an explosion of announcements of new parties being formed. Most are not very serious: vanity projects, spoofs or hopeless lost causes. These new parties offer politics without politicians... So far, no politician of any stature, or even without stature, has endorsed or joined them. Money, marketing, a new name and the self-belief of the founders appear to be the common ingredients. The absence of politicians is revealing. I was ...

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

The difficulty that liberals have in dealing with religion was illustrated by the events surrounding the resignation of Tim Farron as leader of the Liberal Democrats after the last election. But liberals ignore spirituality at their peril. In the 1950s, it was widely predicted that Christianity would struggle. Secularism was on the march, hand in [...] The post Why secularism doesn't fill the void – and why the radical centre has to understand this appeared first on Radix.

Posted by Joe Zammit-Lucia on Opinion - Radix
YouGov

Nick Clegg's latest iNews column casts a depressing eye over the debate over the EU Withdrawal Bill this week. First of all, he looks at the ridiculous date of exit issue: Putting the Brexit date - March 29th 2019 - into legislation is a particularly specious gesture. It may act as catnip to the increasingly agitated Brexiteers, but to our European partners the sight of the British government shutting down the possibility of extending the Brexit talks must look absurd. As they know, and as I do from my time working in the EU, deadlines can be, and are, frequently ...

Posted by NewsHound on Liberal Democrat Voice

At last night's Council meeting I tried to get some straight answers from the Council Leader about the costs related to the £38 million pound purchase of the Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle. For a moment let us leaving aside the wisdom of spend such a large sum on retail property at a time when High Streets are in decline due to the Internet and this particular sight is problematical because of the near presence of Liverpool ONE- the council has been forced to agree reductions in rates because of the impact. (Added to which 3000 near by jobs are ...

Posted on birkdale focus

As we reported last month, Alex Cole-Hamilton brought a motion calling for a National Continence Strategy to the Scottish Parliament. It was debated yesterday. Here is Alex's speech. He is pictured here with Elaine Miller, his constituent whose show Gusset Grippers highlighted the issue at this year's Edinburgh Festival. If we ask anyone in this chamber or beyond it what their top five fears of age or infirmity might be, we can be sure that the subject of this debate will sit right up there. However, I state from the outset that, if we, as legislators, assume that incontinence is ...

Posted by Caron Lindsay on Liberal Democrat Voice
Fri 17th
11:31

An Afternoon of Art

An afternoon spent wandering through the Tate Modern raised some interesting (for me) thoughts. One, Two, Three, Swing! Is the Turbine Hall installation at the moment. It is intended to raise speculation about global financialism, capitalist apathy, and the power of collective action. In one respect, yes, I understand that; however what struck me most was the tangled orange pipes, sculptural in their own right, twisting out of sight and out of the gallery. For me, this represents the potentiality of artistic action to spread beyond the place of its inception. Though this is possibly wishful thinking, coming from someone ...

Posted by Dani Tougher on More Than Nothing

Brexit Secretary David Davis is calling on the EU to compromise in negotiations with the UK over the divorce settlement and on a future trade deal. He overlooks a couple of significant points when doing this. Firstly, the UK has taken the decision to leave. It was not the EU asking for this. It wasn't the UK and EU mutually coming to a decision that matters would be better if the UK leaves the

Posted by jonathanwallace on Jonathan Wallace
Fri 17th
11:00

My tweets

Thu, 12:56: The Brexit bill - what is the real issue? https://t.co/QePZ2vO09j @jnunez_ferrer explains. Thu, 20:48: RT @DisRightsUK: Analysis shows politicians created, rather than reacted to, negative public opinion on benefits. @LSEnews https://t.co/sQS... Thu, 21:25: Washington, D.C.'s Vanishing Springs and Waterways, by Garnett P. Williams https://t.co/LZwb9ib6Zf Fri, 06:38: RT @JenniferMerode: Also confirms exactly what Michel Barnier told @LesEchos three weeks ago. And even then it wasn't a surprise. https://t... Fri, 10:45: Brexit: Netherlands told to prepare for a no-deal 'chaos scenario' https://t.co/JvIzbIpZ6r Due to "unrealistic Brexit expectations of a nu...

Take a look at the two diagrams below where the key element is that the areas coloured green on the second plan represent the new proposals for areas which were formerly 30 mph areas but which will become 40 mph areas. Plan 1 Plan 2 The central reason for the plan is that people are driving at well above 30 mph on the road into Leadgate because it looks wide and open, and that a 30 mph speed limit on that stretch is unreasonable. That may be true, but the downside is that the change will make legal the behaviour ...

Posted by Owen Temple on Owen Temple & Margaret Nealis

miss_s_b | Awkward Squad Clothing - now you can request your own designs Because who doesn;t want their own customised lib dem T-shirt? How politicians created, rather than reacted to, negative public opinion on benefits This is my face of not-surprise. The constant attack on transgender people is costing us our lives Pertinent, given last night's Question Time especially. Landmark study links Tory austerity to 120,000 deaths (as usual with the Indy these days, a warning for autoplaying video The Production of Ignorance CN Lester on how we're not just ill-informed about trans people, but deliberately misinformed, over and over ...

Recent events in Zimbabwe have underscored the fragility, failings and dangers of unrepresentative government and the absence of the rule of law exercised by an independent judiciary. Note the use of term "representative government" and "rule of law". Democracy is a much overworked term which is mainly used to describe the American and British political models. The existence of hundreds of different nationalities dictates that each nationality must find a form of representative government that suits its particular needs, history and culture. But it must be representative, because as Zimbabwe has so accurately demonstrated, the problem with dictatorships is that ...

Posted by Tom Arms on Liberal Democrat Voice

The vote to leave the European Union in June 2016 created a constitutional crisis in the United Kingdom; it looks like it will take years if not decades to sort out. The government of the day presented the public with a referendum, not on something they wanted to go ahead with but felt they needed an extra layer of democratic legitimacy to bring forth, but rather because they wanted people to explicitly reject the proposal. When this did not happen, the government of the moment effectively folded and we had a new government of sorts, led by someone who had ...

Posted by Nick on nicktyrone.com
eUKhost

South Glos Council has announced road closures on Feltham Rd (Pucklechurch) and Pucklechurch Rd (Hinton) for essential resurfacing 23 Nov-8 Dec. A diversion route has been signposted - this is a popular cut-through between the A46 and Pucklechurch.

Posted by Paul Hulbert on Focus on Sodbury, Yate and Dodington

Liverpool Waterfront Panorama 2016 I came across this piece recently and it is indeed very interesting. Liverpool and its property developers seem to be aiming very high and the landscape of the City is changing fast. Will this race to the sky really lead to the City's World Heritage status being withdrawn as many seem to think/fear? Click on the photo to enlarge it

Posted by Cllr. Tony Robertson on Sefton Focus

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-41838426 The BBC Has the news on its web site – see link above Sadly Brexiters are seemingly happy to see us have a nursing shortage as they desperately try to turn the UK into a nation with no friends. Of course it could also be that they did not think through the consequences of their actions as they led us towards the cliff edge. I wonder if Brexiters would be prepared to go in a slow lane when they need to attend hospital? Just imagine being asked 'did you vote for Brexit?' at triage. You did, OK please go ...

Posted by Cllr. Tony Robertson on Sefton Focus

Another day, yet another warning about the mountain the government has to climb to effect a successful transition out of the European Union. This time it is the Public Accounts Committee, which is raising doubts as to whether civil servants can deliver more than 300 projects and hundreds of new laws in time for Britain's exit from the EU. They have warned that non-Brexit-related business could be "neglected" by swamped officials. The Independent says that much of the burden of transition will fall on medium-sized departments such as the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department for ...

Posted by Peter Black on Peter Black
Fri 17th
08:30

Citizen of the Year

 

Three of the ten council by-elections this week didn't have a Liberal Democrat candidate, even though two of those three wards have been contested by the party in the reasonably recent past. Where Liberal Democrats did stand, there were some promising signs including a solid victory in the one Lib Dem held ward up for election: Liberal Democrat HOLD Penrith North (Eden). — Britain Elects (@britainelects) November 16, 2017

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

The book, which I discovered courtesy of my growing niche book collection, is appositely dedicated to "All poultry judges and exhibitors in the interests of the poultry fancy".

Posted by Pink Dog on Mark Pack

Labour's Budget ask has been attacked by Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable, who said: "Labour's spending plans were pulled apart by the Institute for Fiscal Studies during the general election and it appears the shadow chancellor is still not properly costing his ideas. Over-assumptions of tax take are a feature of Corbyn and McDonnell's Labour and would pile debt on future generations."

Posted by LD Neath on Aberavon & Neath Liberal Democrats

Children will go hungry and be made homeless this Christmas due to the government imposed time-lag before Universal Credit claimants receive their first payment, the Liberal Democrats have said. This follows a report by the Peabody Trust into Universal Credit that says 60,000 families will not receive payment this side of the Festive season. Liberal Democrat Work and Pensions spokesperson Stephen Lloyd MP said: "If the government doesn't step in there will be families facing hunger and homelessness this Christmas, it is that simple. This will hit 40,000 children living in many of our most vulnerable households. "The government must ...

Posted by LD Neath on Aberavon & Neath Liberal Democrats

A good start with a Lib Dem GAIN from the Tories in Hedge End in Eastleigh: Result. Hedge End Town Council (Wildern) Lib Dem gain from Con. LD 84.4% Lab 15.6% on 18.2% turnout. Congrats to Pat Jenkins. pic.twitter.com/5VsgzqXcmo — Keith House (@CllrKeithHouse) November 16, 2017 That's all the results through as of midnight. See you in the morning. * Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings

Posted by Caron Lindsay on Liberal Democrat Voice

Rightwing group calls for Greggs boycott over sausage roll nativityTomorrow I go to Greggs and I buy not just a sausage roll, but some pasties and buns, and make an entire nativity scene, just to piss these guys off... Waitaminute! *checks to see if the UK Evangelical Alliance has shares in Greggs* (tags: )A Daily Express Journalist Accidentally Revealed How He Was Ordered To "Put The Boot Into Corbyn"(tags: )The myth of the male bumblerThis is excellent. (tags: )Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web: 'The system is failing' | Technology | The GuardianRT @guardiantech: Tim Berners-Lee on the ...