Tories must follow Welsh govt in gender neutral school uniforms move Welcoming the decision by the Welsh government to make school uniforms accessible and gender neutral, Liberal Democrat Education Spokesperson Layla Moran MP said: It is great news that children in Wales will be able to wear affordable, gender neutral school uniforms. I am proud of the role my colleague Liberal Democrat Welsh Education Minister Kirsty Williams has played in securing this progressive change. The Conservative government must now take this step into the twenty-first century. Dictating what children wear because of their gender is outdated and harmful. It is ...

Posted by Mark Valladares on Liberal Democrat Voice

Monday saw the Second Reading of the Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill, which creates the formal structures required to carry out the task of saving the Palace of Westminster from ever more rapid decay. Admittedly, some of their noble Lords seemed rather determined to fight a battle that had been lost more than a year ago, but Ros was focussed on the task at hand... Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD) My Lords, I start by reminding the House that I am a member of the shadow sponsor body. I agree with every word that the noble Lord, Lord ...

Posted by Mark Valladares on Liberal Bureaucracy

A quick recap first: eight Labour and three Conservative MPs left their respective parties to form what became known as Change UK. After the European Parliament elections, six of those left. One of them – Chuka Umunna – joined the Liberal Democrats and the other five departees have now teamed up with former Labour John Woodcock to form The Independents. It's been described as a co-operative, with plans it appears to operate more as the sort of umbrella grouping rather than a formal party that I originally speculated might be the best route for Change UK: We are not a ...

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

A long-standing Liberal Democrat quitting over the party's strongly pro-Remain stance is understandable. The party has, after all, staked out a very strong position (one which is right for both substantive reasons and also the party's own electoral strategy). What is rather more puzzling, however, is when someone joins the party after we adopted such a stance, and then later leaves again complaining about that stance. On which point, this news comes from Rochdale: A Liberal Democrat councillor has stunned her colleagues by quitting to join The Brexit Party – just six months after defecting to them from Labour. Coun ...

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

I blogged several years ago about my experience of training as a Mental Health First Aider. Since then, I've lobbied and worked to bring equal parity of esteem to mental and physical first aid. So I was keen to read the first Impact Report from Mental Health First Aid England: does MHFA really work? The statistics which open the report remain shocking. An average of fifteen people per day took their own life in 2017. The approximate cost per year of mental ill-health in England is £105 billion. And that does not include the personal cost of lives changed and ...

Posted by Kirsten Johnson on Liberal Democrat Voice

I have mentioned a number of times that there was an agreement that we would have a full council meeting to look solely at climate change and the local, national and global things that need doing to tackle it as ... Continue reading →

Posted by richardkemp on But what does Richard Kemp think?
Wed 10th
15:12

Tyne Tees TV interview

I'm just back from my second PCC by-election interview of the day, this time with Tyne Tees TV. It was done in the style of a police interview! I kept my answers brief and to the point, covering only one issue - the need to scrap the PCC and replace the system with something similar to what was scrapped when the former police authorities (made up of local councillors and magistrates) were

Posted by Jonathan Wallace on Jonathan Wallace

Zoe's motions outcomes post went up on LDV as I was typing this; I wanted to go into some stuff that isn't in her post but which you might all find interesting. One thing which was a big thing for me was the proliferation of motions referencing papers which are not attached to them, both from FPC and from others. Some of these are publicly available, which is fair enough, I can google, but most of them aren't. I am profoundly uncomfortable with voting to put a motion before conference which refers to a paper which I haven't seen and ...

It's that time of year again, when school children eagerly await the summer holidays, co-workers complain about hayfever... and Federal Conference Committee meets to select the topics for debate at Autumn Conference. (What, you've not registered yet?! Head over to the conference page to register now and join us in Bournemouth!) As well as setting out the agenda for this Autumn, we also discussed future venues for Spring 2020 and beyond. We know many of you are eager to book travel and accommodation as soon as possible but this is the one area where the committee observes strict secrecy until ...

Posted by Zoe O'Connell on Liberal Democrat Voice

Some insights into how the Liberal Democrat leadership contest is currently going, particular regarding turnout.

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack
YouGov
Wed 10th
12:28

A "carrot picker"

This morning, Radio Newcastle hosted a debate between the four PCC by-election candidates. It was a relatively friendly encounter though the Independent candidate, Georgina Hills, attacked me a "carrot picker" (I grow my own food but have never successfully grown carrots!). The key points I made were: I am the most experienced candidate with 32 years in local government and a history of

Posted by Jonathan Wallace on Jonathan Wallace

Yet more PCC by-election leaflets delivered yesterday, this time in Marley Hill and Sunniside. I shifted 230. Plenty more still to do.

Posted by Jonathan Wallace on Jonathan Wallace
Wed 10th
12:14

Visiting Birkheads Wild

Yesterday I paid a visit to Birkheads Wild, an outdoor education centre between Sunniside and Kibblesworth. I first met the people who run the facility at the recent Clover Hill School fair and they were keen for me to call in. It is an interesting site with plenty for children to do in an outdoor environment. I am hoping to link them into another project I am planning in Sunniside, but more

Posted by Jonathan Wallace on Jonathan Wallace

[IMG: [personal profile] ] magister is in A&E in Leeds having been taken there by his boss, and I can't get a lift in to go take him stuff until 2, so to stave off some of the panic I thought why not spend some time frantically tapping at a keyboard, so I thought I'd give you all an update on my increasingly Eastendersy life: House: there's been some movement on the one we are buying, and the hold up now appears to be on the vendor's side. My conveyancer is trying to find out what's going on. We are ...

Wed 10th
11:00

My tweets

Tue, 12:12: RT @kevinhorourke: It would be good to see Dublin acknowledge that the logical corollary of "the backstop is needed to avoid a border" is "... Tue, 12:56: RT @dmcbfs: For all you history buffs, the entire debate between Haughey/Fitzgerald in 1982 is now online https://t.co/2DGlO0SRiv Tue, 13:49: RT @pmdfoster: The British-Irish Chamber of Commerce has run rule over "Alternative Arrangements" ideas of @ShankerSingham1 and co...and tr... Tue, 15:47: RT @m4tt: My wife went straight savage in Waitrose. Fuck you, Doris, and your hatred of tattooed millennials. https://t.co/85ygVpz0rY Tue, 16:05: RT @AnnaJerzewska: Much on free ports /zones over the ...

Twenty years ago, the Chinese still admired French industry. They envied us for our 4 As. Alstom, Alcatel, Airbus, Areva. Today, they only envy us one A. It's Airbus, from which they're trying to extract technological secrets by any means possible. Only a generation ago, Alcatel was the world's most successful telecommunications company. It has [...] The post France needs an industrial strategy too appeared first on Radix.

Posted by Renaud Girard on Radix

I am of the firm belief that we as a party must be radical- this is because we have to fight twice as hard, to get half as much press as the Conservatives and Labour. A great example of this was Layla Moran's pledge to scrap SATs and OFSTED in 2018 which received very little press compared to Labour's pledge to scrap SATs over a year later in 2019. But radical doesn't necessarily mean big, expensive and time-consuming: little policies can have a huge impact. Obviously, there are some major radical policies that we should explore and implement when the ...

Posted by Jake Perkins on Liberal Democrat Voice

Despite being a strong supporter of devolution, I actually have no problem with the House of Commons voting to bring Northern Ireland in line with the rest of the UK on same-sex marriage and abortion rights. As the Guardian reports, both votes came at the culmination of long campaigns by backbench MPs, who said the government's argument that the changes could only be made by the devolved Northern Irish government was defunct, given it has been suspended amid political deadlock since the start of 2017. In fact, many of those arguing against the two clauses last night, on the grounds ...

Posted by Peter Black on Peter Black

A cyclists on the towpath of the Leeds Liverpool Canal in Aintree Village The Channel 5 entertainment show of last night was all about the evil of cyclists – yes that's right the people who have gone carbon neutral to try to help save the planet and who generally are fitter and healthier than many vehicle drivers too I bet. Here's a take on the programme from The Guardian web site by Rebecca Nicholson :- That some cyclists ride in stupid and irresponsible ways is a given; why they probably drive vehicles with the same lack of respect for ...

Posted by Cllr. Tony Robertson on Sefton Focus
Wed 10th
07:00

EU Settlement Scheme

Dundee City Council has produced a handout which includes information about the EU Settlement Scheme, useful web links and telephone numbers. For more information and to request copies, please click here.

eUKhost

Lib Dems: Govt squandering progress on climate change Responding to the Climate Change Committee's 2019 Progress Report to Parliament - detailing how the UK Government is "lagging far behind, what is needed" to meet the old climate change targets, let alone the new net-zero emissions target for 2050 - Liberal Democrat Climate Change Spokesperson Wera Hobhouse said: This report shows that this Conservative Government is all talk and no action when it comes to climate change. They're off-track, but instead of reversing their most damaging decisions such as effectively banning on-shore wind, slashing subsidies to solar power and scrapping the ...

Posted by Mark Valladares on Liberal Democrat Voice