Lib Dems: Conservatives are not doing enough to make our country safe Commenting on the National Audit Office's report into serious and organised crime, which reveals 'significant and avoidable shortcomings' by the government, Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesperson Ed Davey said: From County Lines drug trafficking to child sexual exploitation and modern slavery, organised crime gangs are ruining lives and damaging our country. This report reveals that the Conservatives are not doing nearly enough to prevent these appalling crimes and keep our country safe. Police forces and the National Crime Agency need urgent additional resources to deal with the growing ...
I made another trip to the Lib Dem office in Consett. On the to-do list was to finish printing the Whickham North Focus and the Birtley survey. Job done. Folding still to be done. That's for another day.
Hello! I'm Mark Pack, author of 101 Ways To Win An Election, and the maintainer of the largest database of national voting intention polls in the UK, stretching back to 1943. Welcome to a round-up of the latest voting intention figures from each of the polling firms who have conducted at least one poll since the European elections. Although there's some significant variation between the pollsters, the overall picture is consistent. Both Labour and Conservatives are stuck in the twenties, the Lib Dems are in high teens into the low twenties, the Greens are creeping up though not (yet?) clearly ...
Photographing the ruins of Northampton power station five summers ago, I wrote: Soon it will be an attractive university campus full of bright young things ... living exciting lives and driving knowledge and the economy on. "Ah," I shall tell them, "but you should have seen it when it was a derelict power station."I went back there a few weeks ago to take a look at Northampton University's new Waterside Campus and, sure enough, the first thing I came across was an open air performance of The Taming of the Shrew. Anyway, here are its buildings. It turns out that ...
Well that was fun. Perhaps the plot did not live up to the extraordinary atmosphere and visual style of Summer of the Rockets, but then how could it? At least I spotted that Ronald Pickup's line in the opening episode and the dead rabbit Peter Firth kept the boys from seeing were both significant, even if the baddies did seem remarkably tolerant of photograph. And the move from the dreadful Fifties - all racism and corporal punishment - to the liberated Sixties was less clichéd than many other dramatist would have made it appear. One reason this series was better ...
"Hundreds of immigrant children who have been separated from their parents or family members are being held in dirty, neglectful, and dangerous conditions at Border Patrol facilities in Texas." Isaac Chotiner interviews the lawyers who went to see them. The stickiest points in the Brexit negotiations, including the Northern Ireland backstop and the decision to trigger Article 50 so early, reveal that Britain never really understood how the European Union works, argues N. Piers Ludlow. Sophie Scott warned three years ago that we should stop laughing at politicians like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Reclaiming the city was a prominent ...
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Next week the UNESCO World Heritage Committee meet and on their agenda for the 8th time is a report on Liverpool's World Heritage Status. Worryingly, our iconic status of a World Heritage Site is under threat once again because of ... Continue reading →
I'm hoping to raise my Twitter profile to a bit better than my 2018 ranking of 39th of the 40 top EU influencers (or even 37th as I managed in 2017). These are my top 25 tweets so far in 2019 (from various rankings extracted from Twitter analytics): 25 It sends the signal that shooting unarmed civilians is murder. https://t.co/3cwMlMFdbe — Nicholas Whyte 🇪🇺 (@nwbrux) March 4, 2019 A visceral reaction to a Boris Johnson piece about Bloody Sunday. 24 Northern Ireland will elect three women to the European Parliament - incumbents Martina Anderson (Sinn Féin) and Diane Dodds (DUP), ...
It's a good year to be a Lib Dem: we've gained thousands of new members, hundreds of council seats and 15 new MEPs because we are united while the Tories and Labour tear themselves apart from within. No party is immune to mistakes though and that's why I'm proud to say that - from 1 July* - if a new complaint is made against a Lib Dem member, it will be handled under our new complaints procedure, which is consistent, clear and fit for purpose. Federal Conference voted for this procedure at Brighton in Autumn 2018 and it has since ...
How Johnson's campaign to become the next leader of the Conservative party and thus prime minister is going depends on who you speak to. Plenty of right of centre pundits are now making a living telling you a lot about how even though he seems to be bumbling a lot and setting himself up for a fall, he's in fact running a brilliant campaign. The problem is, however you want to spin it, Johnson faces a huge set of challenges the moment he becomes PM. And I do mean, the moment he becomes PM; he has no time to waste ...
Thu, 12:56: RT @Nicole_Cliffe: I have pretended to be nice for so long, so that when the time came, you would share my first big piece (I have come to... Thu, 13:29: RT @davidallengreen: @KateEMcCann @AllieRenison @adamboultonSKY @harrydcarr Still think my proposal of proroguing party conferences rather... Thu, 14:51: BBC News - Transgender hate crimes recorded by police go up 81% https://t.co/rZub1Go9P5 Well, that's pretty awful. Thu, 16:05: The Brexit Blog: Making sense of the Article XXIV smokescreen https://t.co/2h3l0GBHqx @ChrisGreyBrexit explains. Thu, 16:30: New Things in the Old World https://t.co/wUMy1NNMkV @chairmanyaffle on understanding the EU. Thu, 18:48: Filthy Lucre, by ...
[IMG: Training session (Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine [CC0] FREE training for community and voluntary groups! This is the first in a series of training sessions funded by Folkestone and Hythe District Council. When: Thursday 18 July 2019, 10am-1pm Where: Boulogne Room, Civic Centre, Castle Hill Avenue, Folkestone, CT20 2QY Who: This session is for people who are thinking of setting up a group AND groups that are already in existence but now want to set up more formally or become a legal entity. Topics to be covered: What to consider when setting up your group; ...
"The first Pride was a riot." So said many signs at Pride, Edinburgh last Saturday. It's 50 years today that a community, after much discrimination and harassment, finally said it had had enough. Yet another Police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City, pushed its customers over the edge, with trans women of colour leading the fightback. Pink News has the story of how Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera threw things at the Police, sparking 3 nights of rioting and the birth of a movement that has won rights for the LGBT community. Back then, ...
use something like this? There may have been a time when the main tools of politics were letraset, paper and pens. These days it can be done with a mobile phone - and that means political organisations shift as well. Research into new, tech-savvy political organisations forms the basis of 'A Guide to New Political [...] The post The mobile phone political generation appeared first on Radix.
I was interested to see this blog posting from someone who has a detailed understanding of how the far right operates:- unherd.com/2019/06/the-coming-conservative-catastrophe/ Whichever way you look at the Conservatives predicament they seem to be staring down both barrels of their own shotgun My thanks to Bob Robinson for the lead to this posting
I recently received complaints from residents about potholes in the roadway of Dunmore Gardens. I raised this with the City Council's Roads Maintenance Partnership and have received the following helpful response : "An order has been raised for pothole repairs to be carried out in Dunmore Gardens."
The Guardian reports on a draft review of the Windrush scandal, was commissioned by the Home Office itself, which finds that the department failed to counter racial discrimination when it implemented its anti-immigration hostile environment programme. The paper says that the damning document accuses officials of recklessness and a reticence to acknowledge and learn from their mistakes: The report highlights the scale of the problems uncovered by the independent reviewer, Wendy Williams, an inspector of constabulary. She was commissioned to undertake the "Windrush lessons learned" review by the home secretary, Sajid Javid, last summer in the wake of reporting on ...
