"I look at the rise of intolerant forces. Then I look at the progressive political forces ranged against them, using the same old language they have always used, and the political defences for civilisation don't seem very strong or convincing." David Boyle asks why voters hate the centre left. Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair share an unshakable belief in their own righteousness, argues Marina Hyde. Kenilworth Books says the publishing industry must find a better way of rewarding authors. "A measure of schadenfreude is not just allowed, it is entirely appropriate. This is not just because the guilty men are ...
Last time I visited Leicester's Newarke Houses Museum I watched a video about the clearance of the city's slums. Praising the council's efforts and refusing to admit that anything was lost in the process, it was like something out of Eastern Europe before the Iron Curtain came down. I won't say I walked out in protest, but I didn't make it to the end. Finding myself at a loose end in that part of the city today, I visited the museum again today. I was delighted to find that some of the shops from Wharf Street had been recreated as ...
Here is Vince Cable's message for Passover Millions of Jewish families and friends across the world will come together tonight to celebrate Passover. They will reflect on the struggle of the Jewish people to be free. For people of all faiths and none, the story told at Passover is a reminder of the importance of freedom, and standing up for the oppressed. It is also an opportunity for us to recognise the valuable contribution Britain's Jewish communities make to our country today. To everyone celebrating Passover, Chag Pesach Sameach!
Earlier in the week I learnt an interesting fact about Bill Maynard and thought of writing a blog post about him. And now he has died. It's Bob Appleyard all over again. The interesting fact was that Maynard had played the baker in the famous Hovis television commercial. (Despite the Northern vibe, it was filmed on in Dorset - on Gold Hill in Shaftesbury to be precise.) But there are many more interesting facts, some of them confirmed in an interview he gave to Harborough FM. He was well into his anecdotage, but we do learn that he did a ...
Here is Vince Cable's Easter message: I would like to send warm wishes to all those celebrating Easter here in the UK and around the world. For many Christians, Easter is a time of deep reflection and self-examination, and is an important reminder of the values of forgiveness, compassion and kindness. These are principles that resonate with people of all faiths and none. At the heart of the Easter story is a message of hope and we see this demonstrated through various faith-based projects across the country, whose work helps to protect the most vulnerable in our society. Thank you ...
Fri 30th
19:08
If I was us, I wouldn't start from here: Damian Gorman, Good Friday Agreement +20years
If I was us, I wouldn't start from here Especially in a broken home like ours Where broken doors and windows feed the cold. Each generation has a sacred task: To tell a better story than it was told. For we are reared by stories in such places Clawing through the bitter draughts of these For something we can truly get ahold of. It seems to help us off our shattered knees. The kind of myth my generation supped Was "We've got better heroes than they've got. For ours are much more decent, to a fault. And if we've a ...
Fri 30th
19:07
Hike in car parking charges for Ludlow confirmed as scrutiny at Shropshire Council fails
I felt physically ill when I sat down at Shropshire Council's Performance Management Scrutiny Committee last Wednesday. We were there to yet again to argue against a damaging rise in parking charges in Ludlow from next September. It was the second time the matter had come to scrutiny. The last meeting looked like a stitch up. I knew the moment that I walked in at this meeting we were due a repeat. And it proved to be so. We are get charges until 8pm on the streets in the town centre and they will be set at £1.80 an hour, ...
Spring appears to be playing peek-a-boo with us, with one day the bulbs and seedlings starting to show, the next they are lost under a pile of snow. But the promise of warmer days and lighter nights is definitely there, so it is time for an update from your ward councillors. Ward News Street cleaning [...]
Brought together in one place, here are the various Liberal Democrat tools and services that I look after to help keep people informed, provide materials and prompt action. Hope you find them useful – and feedback on either the range of services or thoughts about individual ones are always most welcome. Do you want to keep in touch with what's happening in the Lib Dems? Your wish is my command... and here's the suite of email lists you can choose between for signing up to, from a daily email digest through to a monthly newsletter. If you also, or instead, ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYQcpD1XXiE Amtrak has a video – accessible via the link above – about it's first 40 years of operation I first started to take an interest in US railways as a consequence of seeing Ludovic Kennedy's Great Railway Journey program 'Coast to Coast'(New York City to Los Angeles). It was a part of the original and classic series of BBC railway journeys that launched a whole new career for Micheal Palin. Railways have always been in my blood because I was brought up in a Nottinghamshire mining town where railways were everywhere around you. The writing of Ludovic Kennedy, who ...
Fri 30th
14:40
Send a joke to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe #ChooseLaughter - new from Amnesty International
Actress Nazanin Boniadi asks you to send a joke to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe - the British Iranian mother who's been unfairly jailed in Iran for two years now.
Having spent more than half a century travelling around Europe — most of it for work, including eight years based in Brussels (the subject of my next memoir) — I've been just about everywhere, except Kosovo since it declared independence. But of course there are some "experiences" I still have to have — not exactly [...]
Cambridge Analytica files spell out election tactics * shudder * Hilarious image of the day Autism awareness week: Autism is a feminist issue I found a lot to identify with in this The EU cheese stability index - POLITICO 11 Brexit promises the government quietly dropped Not so quietly in some cases. "These towns and regions are not left behind - they are held back" If Male Superhero Costumes Were Designed Like Female Superhero Costumes Batman is my favourite People Shouldn't Have To 'Prove' They Have An Invisible Illness Or Disability Are you confused about the Gender Recognition Act? Read ...
It is essential that we keep focused on Syria, because it is possibly the greatest humanitarian tragedy since the Second World War. In a message only this week, a girl, Siham, who was in the Aleppo hospital and was suffering from 70% burns, said, "Please let it be over now. We have to find a way out. We've had all we can take". Seven years of civil war have slaughtered 500,000 of the country's most vulnerable people and driven nearly 12 million Syrians from their homes, with many thousands more missing. A few weeks ago at Westminster, we had a ...
A few days ago a young man, Shahmir Sanni, who had worked as a volunteer for a pro-Brexit youth orgainisation called BeLeave, claimed that the official Vote Leave campaign has cheated because their own spending was almost at the limit, so they had funnelled £625, 000 to the youth organisation, but kept control of it. Since BeLeave worked from the same office as Vote Leave, and the money never went into the youth organisations bank account, but straight to Aggregate IQ, used by Vote Leave to garner digital information which they hoped would swing the referendum on EU membership their ...
A version of this blog post first appeared on the Radix website... What is a progressive these days? I find myself asking this question constantly for a range of reasons which those who know me will understand. It isn't that I don't know the conventional answers. It is that I'm not sure why I find them now so annoyingly familiar. It could be something to do with turning sixty shortly, were it not for the fact that it clearly isn't just me. I look at the rise of intolerant forces. Then I look at the progressive political forces ranged against ...
Thu, 12:56: 11 Brexit promises the government quietly dropped https://t.co/DYNCsdpLZC "Promises" aka "lies". Thu, 16:05: RT @IsabelHardman: A small personal post responding to the misogyny I've been receiving as a result of my personal life https://t.co/EUzAtO... Thu, 19:12: 12 months to go... https://t.co/jrDRAEbZJI Thu, 19:46: Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift https://t.co/gHv0m7AO8s Fri, 10:45: FACT CHECK: Is There a Point in the Ocean Where the Closest Human Could Be an Astronaut? https://t.co/ZNmbY1RgEI Yes. Fri, 10:58: The latest monthly APCO Brexit Bites webzine https://t.co/jrDRAEbZJI featuring @AlderdiceLord @AlexBigland and anal... https://t.co/ldCqFpi8aw
This week, Sal Brinton and others argued in the House of Lords that action was needed to ensure that Brexit didn't open the door to privatisation of the NHS. She wrote about the issue for The House magazine: If you asked most people what effect Brexit would have on our health service, regardless of how they voted in the Referendum, I suspect they will cite that large red bus from the Leave referendum campaign stating the EU costs the UK £350m per week, which on leaving could be invested in the NHS. Not only was this untrue, but there are ...
A few weeks ago I blogged about the poor condition of this footpath/cycle path through West Lancashire and as a consequence of my finding it in such a poor state I have been lobbying various bodies with responsibility for it or connections with it. My previous post is accessible via the link below:- I have exchanged e-mails with a local volunteer who works with the environmental charity Sustrans and also the Trans Pennine Trail Office in Barnsley. All indications so far seem to point towards West Lancashire Borough Council being the lead organisation that needs to find some grant ...
Fri 30th
08:45
Willie Rennie starts his four marathons in three days around Fife to raise money for mental health
Easter weekends aren't generally a time of rest for Willie Rennie. For the last four years, there's been an election going on, so he's been campaigning at full pelt. But there isn't an election going on in Scotland this year. So he could decide to lie about and eat chocolate. That's not very Willie, though. He's decided to spend the weekend running the length of the Fife Coastal Path to raise money for SAMH, a Scottish mental health charity. He sets off from Kincardine in a few minutes' time and his schedule is brutal. 42 miles today. He's slacking tomorrow. ...
Yesterday Liberal Democrats' deputy leader Jo Swinson released an exclusive report into the use of excess packaging in the presentation of Easter eggs. Swinson's report, which outlines the use of plastics by all major Easter egg manufacturers, highlights the need for companies to cut down the use of plastics to protect our oceans and reduce the amount of unnecessary plastic waste ending up in landfills. Key findings of the report: According to recent figures, 147.7 million hollow Easter eggs are sold each year. An average Easter egg box as found in this report contains 22 grams of plastic packaging, so ...
Residents recently brought to my attention the poor pavement surface at the Peddie Street/Hawkhill junction - on the west side - especially around the drop kerb, where the surface is bumpy with deteriorating tarmac. I raised this with the council's Roads Maintenance Partnership and have now received the following positive response : "The Road Maintenance Partnership inspector has advised that he has raised an order for a number of repairs to be carried out by the thermal patching machine at this location."
It we thought that Labour's lukewarm opposition on Brexit was a sign of indecision and ineffectiveness then their Shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry finally put paid to that earlier this week. She unveiled the real agenda of the Labour leadership when she told a Chatham House event that the party would most probably vote for the final deal. This was apparently news to the Shadow Brexit Secretary, Keir Starmer, whose efforts to keep Labour on the straight and narrow have been roughly akin to a tight rope walker navigating the sharp edge of a razor blade. Starmer emphasised Labour's "six ...
