Lib Dems: Johnson rides roughshod with the law again Liberal Democrat Shadow Culture Secretary Layla Moran today questioned Ministers on payments made by the Government to Hacker House, a company owned by Jennifer Arcuri. The Sunday Times alleged that the company was incorrectly registered in the UK. The paper also alleges that Ms Arcuri, a friend of Boris Johnson, benefitted from preferential treatment for public money and access to overseas trade missions when the Prime Minister was Mayor of London. These are now subject to an investigation by the London Assembly's Oversight Committee. Speaking after her Urgent Questionn in the ...

Posted by Mark Valladares on Liberal Democrat Voice

Steve Hitchins, who transformed the lives of so many people for the better in Islington when he was Council Leader, has died very suddenly at the age of 68. In a heartbreaking tweet, his wife, Lib Dem Peer Sarah Ludford announced her loss. Not sure if this is the right thing to do; if not, put it down to shock. But I want people who knew him – in the @LibDems, as Islington Council leader, as chair of @WhitHealth or otherwise – to know that my dear husband Steve Hitchins died suddenly last night. Hugely missed. — Sarah Ludford [IMG: ...

Posted by Caron Lindsay on Liberal Democrat Voice

Until 1994 you could have caught the Central Line from Epping to Ongar. John Rogers walks it, using the opening stretch of the Essex Way.

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

I was taken with Far Cotton, a suburb of Northampton built in the 19th century to house railway workers. It had a dominant Victorian church and a scatter of shops that were somehow still hanging on . Among the buildings I photographed that day were its former cinema and the American diner next door. Cinema Treasures tells us all about them: The Tivoli Cinema opened on 13th July 1935 with Victoria Hopper and John Loder starring in "Lorna Doone". It was located in the Far Cotton suburb, south of the city of Northampton and was situated on Towcester Road opposite ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

The behaviour today in Parliament of our Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, was nothing short of disgraceful and regardless of whether you can make mud stick to Johnson, he must go. The background, of course is the unlawful prorogation of Parliament, as determined by the 11 most distinguished judges and legal minds in the UK, not by a narrow majority, but by an 11-0 landslide. When it comes to providing legal advice to the Prime Minister, one of three things must have happened. Firstly, Johnson may not have asked for legal advice on the lawfulness or otherwise of proroging Parliament. In ...

Posted by Steve Rose on An Independent Liberal

Totnes Liberal Democrats today confirmed that Sarah Wollaston MP, who recently joined the Liberal Democrats, will stand in her constituency for the party: Alan Kerr, Chair of South Hams Liberal Democrats, today confirmed that Dr Sarah Wollaston will be the Lib Dem candidate for Totnes constituency in the event of an early General Election: "The party is in full general election mode and we are completing our preparations for an all-out campaign to retain this crucial seat ... "Sarah Wollaston has an excellent track record as a hard-working and independently-minded MP who is prepared to stand up to the Government ...

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

The sudden death last night of former Islington Council leader Steve Hitchins has brought grief to his many friends, colleagues and family.

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

Steve Hitchins, who was the Liberal Democrat leader of Islington Borough Council between 1999 and 2006, died suddenly last night. The Islington Gazette quotes Steve's wife, the Lib Dem peer and former MEP Sarah Ludford: "His mission was to make things better for the residents of Islington, whether as a councillor, leader, or at the Whittington. It was all about improving services - he could be a bit brisk sometimes but I think people acknowledge that's what he was about."I am sure I join all Lib Dems in sending Sarah my condolences. The paper also quotes a tribute from the ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Second paragraph of third story ("The Seventh Fanfic", by Mark Clapham): This last point was causing Bernice some grief, as she kneeled down holding a multi-tool with various wrench-like arms, trying to work out how to apply it to the twisted front wheel of her bicycle. She had twisted the wheel hitting a bump earlier that day, cutting across rough ground by the Advanced Research Department. This is at present the last book of Bernice Summerfield stories, looking at her life from school to old age; just seven of them, of which the three standouts for me were "The Bunny's ...

Anyone who has flicked around cable TV channels will know that somewhere in the world you can always watch: (1) Friends and (2) Lots of Nazis goose-stepping backwards and forwards on history channels. So, it was with some trepidation that I saw that the BBC were to air "The Rise of the Nazis". I expected yet another compilation of black and white clips of goose-stepping soldiers. However, I was pleasantly surprised. The Rise of the Nazis is an excellent documentary series, based on interviews with expert historians and dramatic reconstructions. It intelligently tells a story which is often overlooked – ...

Posted by Paul Walter on Liberal Democrat Voice
YouGov

[IMG: The culture clash of a four day working week] People are arguing about how Labour's proposal to implement a 4 day working week will make us the laughing stock of the world. I think that ship has sailed don't you? What gets me is... The post The culture clash of a four day working week appeared first on @ambitiousmamas.

Posted by ambitiousmamas on @ambitiousmamas
Wed 25th
15:00

Back to the future

I have spent a fair bit of time in recent years studying the history of the Liberal Party. One period that particularly interests me is the years following the end of World War One when Labour replaced the Liberals as the principal opposition to the Conservatives in this country. There were a number of factors that contributed to this, not least the very damaging split in the Liberal ranks between Asquith and Lloyd George factions. The widening of the franchise and a growing working class also worked in Labour's favour. Once it had been relegated to third place there was ...

Posted by David Warren on Liberal Democrat Voice

Watching the Labour Party "show of hands" vote in the Brighton conference hall (we Lib Dems know from our own party conferences there) and the absence of proper counting mechanisms: • no stewards counting specific parts of the hall, and • no card or paper vote to verify if the impression of the chairwoman (or the party secretary beside her) was right, – reminded me, a graduated historian born in 1956, of nothing so much as the infamous wildcat walkouts let by (closed-)shop stewards at the Ford, Vauxhall and British Leyland car factories, and at nationalised industries, of the 1970s. According to ...

Posted by Bernard Aris on Liberal Democrat Voice

"With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all." With that carefully crafted phrase in Dublin in 2011 the Queen set the seal on the unprecedented rapprochement between the UK and Ireland embodied in the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998. In 30 years of violence over 3000 people perished, many of whom, to use one of the clumsy phrases from our hapless Prime Minister, "died in a ditch". A good friend of mine died in a ditch. The GFA guaranteed Northern Ireland's place in the ...

Posted by Denis Loretto on Liberal Democrat Voice
Wed 25th
11:00

My tweets

Tue, 12:32: RT @MSmithsonPB: Interesting Farage is blaming Cummings who surely can't survive https://t.co/eISADf1Fu8 Tue, 12:33: RT @z_rose: Hello to everyone else who is married to a British legal academic tonight. My thoughts are with you. Tue, 12:56: Glentoran manager Mick McDermott's wife in visa crisis that will force her to leave NI https://t.co/1XuWDmZDot Britain of the welcomes. Tue, 13:18: RT @StephenRW01: How fitting that Boris Johnson should wake up in the city of his birth to hear the news of his impending political death. Tue, 13:25: RT @bbclaurak: Bercow calls Parliament back to sit from 11.30 tomorrow Tue, 13:39: ...

I had my video camera with me on Sunday when I visited the 1940s weekend at the Tanfield Railway, in my council ward. Here's the video.

Posted by Jonathan Wallace on Jonathan Wallace

We are at a pivotal moment in the fight against climate change. Extreme weather is becoming more common, reducing crop production, pushing up food prices and bringing about more unpredictable and violent weather events. It's clear that it is now or never for the future of our planet. Temperatures reached 45°C in France this year – how long before we see temperatures like that in the UK? The impacts of global warming are not only increasing, they will soon reach a tipping point beyond which climate change will become irreversible. According to Environment Protection UK - a national charity that ...

Posted by Mark Hofman on Liberal Democrat Voice
Wed 25th
09:00

The Truly Supreme Court

The UK's Supreme Court may only be a decade old but it represents centuries of judicial independence. Yesterday, it delivered an historic decision when it declared unanimously that Prime Minister Boris Johnson's advice to the Queen which led to the prorogation of Parliament was "unlawful, void and of no effect". The five week closure, effectively [...]

Posted by jonathanfryer on Jonathan Fryer

In the Times. Daniel Finkelstein argues that the whole point of Conservative government is to provide an executive aware of its limitations and sensitive to the dangers of over-reaching them. He adds that Conservatives emphasise the value of unwritten conventions by treating those rules and traditions with the greatest respect: 'Without these things, what is the point of Conservatives and what is the value of Conservatism? Without them, what will Conservatives say when resisting the challenge of socialists and extra-parliamentary protesters? To endanger them in order to shave a few days off the parliamentary timetable is an epic mistake.' These ...

Posted by Peter Black on Peter Black

The UK representative in the Iranian Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear weapons negotiations, Sir Simon Gaas, now Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) Chair, has often talked about US political perceptions. Sir Simon Gaas explained how shocked he was when it seemed some US politicians thought Iran was a desert country consisting entirely of mad Mullahs running around with Kalashnikovs. There is such a vast and sophisticated pro-war propaganda machine against Iran that the bare facts of Iran's alleged drive towards nuclear weapons can be lost beneath the layers. Brutal to its people though the regime might be, if domestic ...

Posted by Paul Reynolds on Liberal Democrat Voice
eUKhost

Not everything is black and white. That must be the Conservative leadership's hope having lost in the Supreme Court and the Labour leadership's hope now that it has firmly positioned itself mid way between the militant Tories and Lib Dems, each pressing their own extremist responses to Brexit. Triangulation is usually good politics, but in the case of these parallel developments over the past twenty-four hours, there isn't really a third way option. This is because we live in such extraordinary times. In normal times, most people of think of themselves as centrists, as one political strategist put it to ...

Posted by Ben Rich on Radix Think Tank

 

Labours conference decision on Monday to be indecisive and remain on the fence re Brexit will undoubtedly benefit we Liberal Democrats if an election takes place before a People's Vote. Nevertheless, as a dedicated Liberal/Liberal Democrat activist for nearly 60 years I should have preferred Labour to make a clear decision in favour of Remain. Then we could have seen 23rd September as the date the tide turned positively in favour of our chances of putting an end to this act of national self-harm which will irrevocably damage our political, economic, social and cultural futures, along with the living standards ...

Posted by Peter Wrigley on Keynesian Liberal