One of the landmarks of the Shropshire hills is Bromlow Callow. The trees that crest this hill can be seen for miles, though this photograph shows them close up. Bromlow Callow stands to the west of the Stiperstones - close to the pub where Eric Clapton and Ronnie Lane once played.
Photo of Falmouth © Colin Babb On Thursday the Liberal Democrats scored a magnificent victory in a local by-election in Sunderland. We went from fourth place and 4.4 per cent of the vote to first place with 53.9 per cent. This was a reminder of what hard work targeted on a compact urban ward can achieve against a party that has been in power too long - in Sunderland that was the Labour Party. It is good that the Lib Dems can still record such victories and may well be an omen of further gains in Sunderland in May. This ...
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 505th weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere ... Featuring the five most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (28 January – 3 February, 2018), together with a hand-picked seven you might otherwise have missed. Don't forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox — just click here — ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging. As ever, let's start with the most popular post, and work our way down: 1. Another gain from Labour ...
Sun 4th
19:52
Shropshire Council throws £51 million at Shrewsbury shopping centres - it is the wrong investm...
Late last month, Shropshire Council concluded its controversial deal to purchase three Shrewsbury shopping centres from an offshore trust. The price was £51 million. The Shropshire Star called the deal "an extraordinary and historic purchase" and described the council as "brave". Bravery is one thing but I suspect this purchase to be unwise. If I had £51 million in my pocket, I wouldn't invest it in shopping centres. I'd use the money to improve the social fabric of our county by building council housing. The background to the purchase is the reality that Shropshire Council has long been revenue poor ...
Knowing what a wise old bird Lord Bonkers is, I would not wager much against Boris Johnson's career ending just as he foretells. Pelted with sharpened carrots There is nothing the people of London enjoy more than a good Cabinet reshuffle. From early morning the crowds gather to see the fun: flower girls, costermongers (whatever they are) and scruffy urchins all assemble at the gates of Downing Street (in my young day you could walk into Number 10 and demand pot of tea, but times change and not for the better) to observe the comings and goings. If a particularly ...
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Sun 4th
16:25
We might not be discussing mental health detention at our Conference, but we are trying to change th...
The wonderful Ms Rigg wrote a very detailed piece on how the motions were selected for Spring Conference this week. As a member of the Party's Federal Conference Committee, she knows all there is to know about such things and it's great that she shares so much with us. In her post, she lamented that a motion on mental health detention, had not made it through. The mental health detention motion would have highlighted an injustice that is not widely known and would have given us a distinctive policy platform which none of the other parties have – with all ...
Over the past few years the local Southfield Councillors have had access to a small budget to spend on local schemes in Chiswick. Liberal Democrats have always made efforts to not just support charitable organisations that provide help and advice for those with caring needs, but to also promote environmental projects to brighten up the area. Some of the projects included: Improvement of our three main parks which all now have Green Flag status!Wild meadow planted on Southfield RecOver a hundred new street trees plantedNest boxes for swiftsPlant beds on Southfield Rec and Acton GreenWinning a Council recycling award after ...
After many months of surveying the views of Southfield residents and local businesses, the three Southfield Liberal Democrat Councillors have launched their three priorities which they will campaign on in the up-coming local elections which take place on 3rd May 2018. 1. Cleaner and Safer Southfield: Free from litter, fly-tips and leaves by re-introducing the weekly sweeping regime. When the Conservatives and the Labour party in Ealing Council voted for Council Tax they voted for the two reductions in street cleaning from a weekly service to once every 12 weeks. Only the Liberal Democrats have stood up for residents on ...
Sun 4th
15:06
Tomorrow, 5 February 2018, the Berlin Wall will have been down for as long as it was up.
The Berlin wall was erected on 13 August 1961. It was breached on 9 November 1989, after 28 years, 2 months and 27 days (10315 days, to be exact). Counting forward another 28 years, 2 months and 27 days (or just 10315 days, you get the same answer) takes us to tomorrow, 5 February 2018. Below is the blog entry I posted on the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Wall, in 2009. Since then, I have continued to enjoy visiting Berlin; and I always pay my respects to the Wall and its memories, for me and for many ...
I can't remember if it was February or October 1974 but I do know that it was grey and cold. I was either 6 or 7 and I was walking up Tomatin Road in Inverness heading to Hilton Church Hall where my parents were going to cast their votes. That instilled in me that voting was something that was important to do. I didn't really understand the issues, but I knew it was important that we were able to choose the Government. Fast forward a few years to the weeks running up to the 1987 General Election. Although I was ...
Vince Cable has written to Jeremy Corbyn to ask him to put the Labour party in line with its own supporters and support a referendum on the final Brexit deal. Here is the text n full: Jeremy Corbyn Leader of HM Opposition House of Commons London, SW1A 0AA 2nd February 2018 Dear Jeremy, I am writing to you about Brexit, because I was dismayed by your interview with Andrew Marr last Sunday, when you reiterated your personal objection to letting the British people have their say on the Conservatives' Brexit deal. There is now significant momentum behind demands for the ...
[IMG: Tory Party's desperate email to members about Momentum] Tory MP George Freeman has made a plea for leadership and vision to energise Tory activists to take on Momentum. On the 2nd of February a piece was published in the Huffington Post UK detailing... The post Tory Party's desperate email to members about Momentum appeared first on FeministMama @ambitiousmamas.
The London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has published his draft London Plan which proposes to deliver thousands of new houses. That ambition is great, but the way he wants to do it is not, as he expects outer London boroughs like Sutton to deliver most of the housing, and that would mean turning suburbs into intensively [...]
This turned up on Radio 3's Late Junction the other night and sounded good. It starts off like a lost Tim Booth song. London O'Connor was profiled in the Guardian a couple of years ago: O'Connor is a wanderer. Originally from San Marcos, California, he has spent the past two years hopping around, crashing with friends here and there, making a quick trip to Europe last year to play some shows, but mostly embracing a life of rootlessness. "Couch life is a little awkward sometimes," he tells me, thinking out loud about how he never gets to be alone. We ...
Layla Moran has been writing for the New European on the problems that exiting Euratom, the organisation founded in 1957 to create a specialist market for nuclear power in Europe. She said: The government has said it wants a "close association" with the Euratom Research and Training Programme and will seek open trade arrangements for nuclear goods. Both laudable ambitions - but this could all be best resolved by remaining in Euratom instead of creating uncertainty and seeking to negotiate what will certainly be a second rate option. In the meantime, the brilliant nuclear scientists from the EU, working together ...
Sat, 12:56: RT @mewo2: Languages are bananas https://t.co/ROlVZEu0La Sat, 15:08: Gone With The Wind https://t.co/wyeJW57OIu Sat, 16:05: RT @AlastairMcA30: For an assignment, I asked some of my terminal paediatric palliative care patients what they had enjoyed in life, and wh... Sat, 18:05: RT @13sarahmurphy: Given Rees-Mogg's truly dark performance on #r4today digging down on his lies and accusations, this article by Parris in... Sat, 19:50: "She was twenty-five and looked it, and so there was no longer any need for her to try to be attractive." (Gone With The Wind.) Wow. Sat, 20:48: The New Dating Requirement: Consuming All of ...
miss_s_b | The Blood is the Life for 03-02-2018 I posted The Blood is the Life for 03-02-2018 to my dreamwidth blog If you like what you see here (or even if you don't) please consider dropping me a tip: [IMG: Paypal Donate Button] [IMG: Buy Me an uncaffeinated beverage (because I'm allergic to coffee) at ko-fi.com] [IMG: comment count unavailable] comments
Sun 4th
10:21Vince on Marr: Corbyn under "tremendous pressure" to support Lib Dems on referendum on Brexit deal
Vince was on Andrew Marr this morning. He talked about how public opinion was turning in favour of a referendum on the Brexit deal and that Jeremy Corbyn would come under "tremendous pressure" to stop colluding with the Tories and back a referendum on the Brexit deal. He made the point that most Labour MPs and Labour supporters opposed the Tories' hard Brexit position. Jeremy Corbyn will come under "enormous pressure" to back second #Brexit referendum, Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable predicts #Marrhttps://t.co/9Voepf4vh3 pic.twitter.com/22BUTanJih — BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) February 4, 2018 He spoke about how the political upheaval ...
Liberal Democrat Newswire #109 is coming out in a few days, and here's a short extract from it: Kirsty Williams welcomes plans for STV to be an option for future Welsh local elections: the news headlines may have been mostly about the plans to reduce the voting age to 16 but the plans also include the option to copy Scotland's use of STV for council elections. This continuing spread of preferential voting at local and devolved elections across the UK is an important preliminary step to being able to win future debates over electoral reform for Westminster. There's still time ...
In many ways, the title of this post is a rhetorical question. Carwyn Jones' future is still in his own hands but doubts are being raised as to how long that will remain the case. The BBC report on the views of Professor Richard Wyn Jones of Cardiff University's Wales Governance Centre that the First Minister's political authority has "ebbed away very substantially". He believes that even if the various investigations clear Carwyn Jones of any wrong-doing, it could be too little too late: He told the Sunday Politics Wales programme: "His authority is clearly in tatters, I don't think ...
Anyone who thinks that they know what British politics will look like in 3 months' time is a fool. The opinion polls, it is true, have hardly moved since last year's general election; most voters, it seems, have been disengaged since then. But among the parties, things are moving, in a very confused and uncertain fashion. The Conservative Party is in the most extraordinary position. Here is a party which had over a million members when I was a Young Liberal, which does not challenge the statement that its individual membership is now around 70,000. It is sustained by large ...
As Matt Singh has pointed out, the latest British Election Study shows a major drop in the number of people thinking there are too many immigrants in the country: "Do you think that too many immigrants have been let into this country, or not?" YES, TOO MANY 62 (-10) NO, NOT TOO MANY 32 (+10) — Number Cruncher Politics (@NCPoliticsUK) January 30, 2018
Details of the next meeting of Community Spirit Action Group - the community group for the "north" part of West End Ward, covering Pentland, Tullideph, Ancrum, Forest Park and the Cleghorn area - all very welcome :
