Last night a concert was held to honour the memory of the great rock drummer Ginger Baker. Here Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton and Niall Rogers play Can't Find My Way Home, the song Winwood wrote for the short-lived super group Blind Faith. Baker, Winwood and Clapton formed Blind Faith along with Rich Grech from the Leicester band Family.
David Boyle has written an essay - Counterweight: How Big Local areas are levelling the scales of local power - for the Local Trust: Great steps forward in community development often happen as a result of crises or disasters, like the earthquakes in Kyoto or Christchurch. We don't normally have earthquakes in the UK, but we have had similar, and it was one of these that led to the start of community development in the UK: when poverty-stricken Stepney in east London was abandoned to its fate during the blitz in 1940. One of those who were there, who broke ...
Tue 18th
19:20
Happy unbirthday to Ludlow town walls - seven years after the collapse repairs are still not schedul...
Seven years today Ludlow town walls fell down at the back of St Laurence's churchyard. 18 February 2013. At a crowded public meeting a few days later, Shropshire Council cabinet member Martin Taylor-Smith told Ludlow that money was not an issue. The unitary council had the money in reserves. The wall would be repaired and soon. Alas! That proved to be misleading. What followed was a lengthy dispute between Shropshire Council, St Laurence's Church and Ludlow Town Council about who was responsible for paying for the repairs. Two and a half years and a lot of legal bills later, it ...
I was very sad to read that Valerie Silbiger has died. The news is on the blog written by Mark Pack, and his post quotes the former Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone: I am so sorry and sad to hear this news. Such a wonderful warm caring engaged human being. So kind to me and supportive from the very start. Love and thoughts to all the family.Valerie was a friend to me, to Liberator and to many in the party. I remember her proud claim to be "the world's only Jewish Methodist". As a little girl in the second world ...
South Glos Council is considering making changes to the charges paid by people newly accessing the care system who are paying the full cost themselves. The new arrangements would come into effect on 1 June 2020. There are three changes proposed:New users of dementia, learning disability and specialist day care would be charged £96.30 per day.New purchasers of community-based services would be charged a £295 one-off arrangement fee and an annual charge of £75.Service users may also become eligible for a £295 fee if they decide to change providers (and ask the Council to arrange it) for a reason not ...
The whole section of the A432 from the bend at the eastern end of Old Sodbury up to the Cross Hands lights is going to be closed from 16 March - 4 April each evening from 8m until 6am. There will be a lot of noise. There will be diversions, but best to steer well clear!
Second paragraph of third chapter:She'd been away in Boston only two weeks. How was that long enough for a hostile takeover at home? Iano and his new friend Pete Petrofaccio had cooked up a scheme of stopgap repairs to preserve what was left of their home's integrity. Replacing the whole roof was pointless given the state of things, and wildly beyond their means, so they'd settled on a banged-together tin patch to close the widening rift.I've generally enjoyed Kingsolver's novels, and enjoyed this as well, though it did not blow me away quite as much as Prodigal Summer or The ...
Paucity of evidence doesn't stop something becoming popular, of course. It's almost as if the Overton window is political homoeopathy.
Acting Leader of the Liberal Democrats Ed Davey has warned the Prime Minister that "serious questions remain" over the recruitment of Andrew Sabisky by Dominic Cummings and called for the Prime Minister to "condemn the offensive comments" and "curb Dominic Cummings' power to appoint and sack at will." The warning comes amidst Downing Street's continued refusal to say whether Boris Johnson agrees with Andrew Sabisky who suggested black people were mentally inferior and advocated compulsory contraception to prevent a "permanent underclass". Acting Leader of the Liberal Democrats Ed Davey said: "The Prime Minister should never have allowed Dominic Cummings to ...
Just before I was born my parents made the decision to move from their home town of Reading to an isolated South Oxfordshire village which is where I grew up. My widowed grandmother also joined us which was great as I was very fond of her. I attended the local primary school which on the whole I enjoyed, reading was a passion. I remember saving up to buy a children's encyclopaedia and gobbling up Ladybird books about historical figures. In my final year we sat tests (not the eleven plus) and I finished in the top 20%. My hopes were ...
To note the the 83rd anniversary of the publication of Keynes's "General Theory " a leader in yesterday's Guardian gave this expanded definition of Keynesianism: a state-guided investment policya generous social welfare systemprogressive taxesa low interest ratemonetary policy run by a nationalised Bank of Englandstrict capital controlsmanaged tradenon-casino financial markets.I love the bit about "non-casino financial markets" (though Keynes himself did quite well on behalf of his college by dealing on the stock exchange). The article claims that Keynesianism was abandoned because the Tories felt that generous welfare spending undermined capitalism. I'm not so sure about this. In my view ...
Liverpool's Liberal Democrats will take an axe to political posts and bureaucracies should they gain power through the election of the City Mayor on May 7th. As part of our programme of letting local people comment and help us create ... Continue reading →
Mon, 12:56: RT @bohnny68: I'd heard about #gally1 for years but it's a long way from Australia to LA. Finally came last year and loved it. But THIS yea... Mon, 13:58: RT @Paul_Cornell: So that happened. What an odd life I lead. Mon, 14:05: RT @KSEmbBxls: Today we celebrate the 12th anniversary of the Independence of Kosovo. On this important day, we are delighted to share our... Mon, 16:05: Copter Crash: Isabel Fall and the Transgender SF Debate https://t.co/h1BIwNSBNL Am late to this excellent piece. Mon, 16:36: My @gallifreyone #gally1 experience: https://t.co/lwrENX3FcM Mon, 16:44: RT @GoatSarah: Mrs Duffy was when ...
Daughter Jen and I attended a public meeting in Waterloo yesterday evening at Crosby Lakeside Adventure Centre organised by Friends of the Earth. The subject of the meeting and debate was The Port of Liverpool & The Climate Crisis. The meeting took the form of a panel of speakers making initial statements and then them taking questions which had been submitted prior to the meeting, although there was also some interaction with the audience of I would guess @150 people. (The acoustics were not great in the room so I may have missed some points that were made) The panel ...
Tue 18th
09:58
Why the Andrew Sabisky incident was not a one-off - and why there will be plenty more where that cam...
The Downing Street career of Andrew Sabisky was very short-lived. Much has been said already about his interesting angle on eugenics and marital sex, so I won't rehash them here. The only thing I will say is that I find it odd that Dominic Cummings puts out a very long blog post requesting "weirdos and misfits" in a search for "cognitive diversity" and ends up picking a guy who could have emerged from a factory that churns out stereotypical Tory young men. Why ask for different and then choose someone who looks and sounds like most of the interns working ...
In the Soviet Union they had one in every ministry, factory, communal farm, university, school and military unit. They were called commissars. Their job was to insure that workers stuck to the party line. They called it democratic centralism; a reversal of Western democracy. There was a Politburo member allocated to develop ideology; appoint the commissars and coordinate their activities to ensure that a coherent and ideologically pure thought process percolated from the top of the bottom of the Soviet state. His name was Mikhail Suslov and from 1965 until his death in 1982 he was the number two man ...
As the Independent reports, Andrew Sabisky, who suggested black people were mentally inferior, has quit his role as a contractor for No 10 following a major backlash over his past comments on eugenics, race and the enforced uptake of contraception. The paper says that the 27-year-old is understood to have been hired as part of Dominic Cummings' drive to recruit "misfits and weirdos" to help shake up government: His departure comes after the prime minister faced intense pressure to sack Mr Sabisky over historic comments, where he: - Called for the young to undergo compulsory contraception to prevent the creation ...
Recently, the Friends of Magdalen Green highlighted to me the extent of overgrown foliage from the Network Rail land adjacent to the rail line protruding onto the Green - see right. I took this up with Network Rail and am grateful for its prompt and comprehensive response in thinning out the vegetation.
