Browsing railway photographs on GettyImages, as you do, I came across this. Taken at Bristol Temple Meads in May 1952, it shows a locomotive with a remarkable history. British Rail 18100 was a prototype gas turbine-electric locomotive commissioned by the Great Western Railway in the 1940s but not delivered until 1951. It spent its working life hauling express passenger services on BR's Western Region. In 1958 it was withdrawn from service to be converted into an electric locomotive, numbered E1000 (E2001 from 1959), and was then used for testing and staff training in connection with the electrification of the West ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Lib Dems table amendments to stop MPs debating complaints in the chamber Govt must be transparent on guidance behind decision to relax lockdown Govt must guarantee scrutiny in Parliament as daily COVID updates cease Lib Dems table amendments to stop MPs debating complaints in the chamber The Liberal Democrats have tabled amendments to the Independent Complaints Scheme which will prevent Members of Parliament from debating and voting on motions concerning complaints made in Parliament. The amendments tabled to a motion set to be debated later today are crucial for protecting anyone who makes a complaint. It would give the independent ...

Posted by Mark Valladares on Liberal Democrat Voice
Tue 23rd
20:07

Six of the Best 937

Nick Barlow looks at the Liberal Democrats and 'equidistance': "The Liberal Democrats of 2020 are in the same position with regard to the election of 2024 (or whenever) and I can't foresee a situation in which you could credibly claim the Tories of Johnson (or his successor) and Starmer's Labour are two sides of the same coin." "For what, in the end, does a social safety net do? It allows us greater control and agency over our lives. It allows us to stay home and take care of our health, rather than go to work in a crowded factory. It ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Tomorrow morning at 9am, members will be able to begin nominating candidates for leader. Members will also get an email with a confirmation of how they'll receive their ballot (or if you need to renew). The emails are going out over the course of the day and if you haven't had one by 9am on the 25th June, please email elections@libdems.org.uk and we can take a look and make sure you don't miss out. To nominate a candidate, you'll need to go to www.libdems.org.uk/nominate You can only nominate one candidate to be leader and we'll be posting how many nominations ...

Posted by Mike Dixon on Liberal Democrat Voice

Many pub landlords and restaurateurs in England will be heaving a huge sigh of relief this evening following Prime Minister Boris Johnson's announcement that they should be open for business again from 4 July, as long as various social distancing measures are deployed. But as has been the case throughout the Conservative government's handling of [...]

Posted by jonathanfryer on Jonathan Fryer

Two metre distancing has proved difficult on Ludlow's narrow streets. It has proved impossible on many of its narrow pavements. The market reopened but there have been fewer stalls. People have been walking about, especially in the afternoons. But do they spend the money that we need to keep our town centre and its traders thriving? Can we get the buzz back into our town? That buzz has seemed an impossible ambition in recent weeks with Ludlow's famous market operating at less than half its capacity. With Ludlow Castle closed. And our pubs, cafes and restaurants closed. Many of us ...

Posted by andybodders on Andy Boddington

Here's a message from party HQ about an important email going out to party members on Wednesday, 24 June: Tomorrow morning at 9am, members will be able to begin nominating candidates for leader. Members will also get an email with a confirmation of how you'll receive your ballot (or if you need to renew). The emails are going out over the course of the day and if you haven't had one by 9am on the 25th June, please email elections@libdems.org.uk and we can take a look. To nominate, you'll need to go to www.libdems.org.uk/nominate You can also find all of ...

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

My final Crisis Group publication was a briefing on Kosovo. In my four years and eight months there, I had overseen the publication of 46 reports, 16 briefings and ten op-eds (in the last case, just counting those published under my own name; I was ghost-writer for a few more). Meanwhile I chose my new office, a serviced arrangement on Rond Point Schuman. In Belgium the big news was a hoax TV news programme announcing that Flanders had unilaterally declared independence. Gerald Ford died just after Christmas. Anne's sister joined us again for Christmas, which was just as well when ...

Stephen Bush writes on the New Statesman site:Wera Hobhouse has ended her campaign for the Liberal Democrat leadership and has thrown her weight behind Layla Moran, cementing the Oxford West and Abingdon MP's status as the candidate to beat. In a statement to her supporters, the Bath MP said that "we must accept that we are no longer the best vehicle" to deliver her aims of "pulling our party firmly to the centre-left, rebuilding our local government base, securing a progressive alliance, and moving effort and resources to our regions". In a coded rebuke to Ed Davey, the party's deputy ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Yes, it is my birthday. No, I am not 100, although three quarters of the way there. What I am celebrating, to my surprise, is this, my 100th Isolation Diary. Back in March I tentatively approached my colleagues on the editorial team of Lib Dem Voice to see if they thought it would be a good idea to have some daily musings on life in self-isolation. They have encouraged me even though the posts often have little direct political relevance. So I have now managed to impose some 50,000 words on you, my readers. Most entries are introspective, exploring the ...

Posted by Mary Reid on Liberal Democrat Voice
YouGov

This was tweeted by Wera Hobhouse a few minutes ago: The Liberal Democrats need a New Direction, but my campaign is no longer the best way to deliver that. That's why I'm backing @LaylaMoran to lead our party. https://t.co/2B1lVzKidE — Wera Hobhouse MP [IMG: 🔶] (@Wera_Hobhouse) June 23, 2020 * Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist. He is one of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.

Posted by Paul Walter on Liberal Democrat Voice

This is a new biography of Dadabhai Naoroji by Dinyar Patel, who is a Professor at the University of South Carolina. Before reading this, I knew little about Naoroji apart from him being the first Indian MP in the UK Parliament, but this biography enlightened me about his extraordinary life. Born to a poor Parsi family, he became one of the early Indian nationalists - described by Gandhi as the ' father of the nation', he was an pioneer of education for girls, a brilliant propagandist , Prime Minster of a princely state, Westminster MP, developed the 'drain theory' of ...

Posted by Simon McGrath on Liberal Democrat Voice

It's never easy leaving home. Prior to last year I had been a Lib Dem my entire adult life, but I made the decision to leave the party following changes I had seen build up over a long time. We used to advocate radical ideas, but we had become too comfortable with campaigning to uphold the status quo. However, my vote is still winnable for the Lib Dems. And frankly, left-leaning young people like myself are going to need to vote for the party again if it is ever going to build an electorally viable voting base. The experiment over ...

Posted by Adam Bennett on Liberal Democrat Voice

The Burscough Curves are in West Lancashire. This historic shot of them is from when they were in place, in 1960's. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ3SxCwCcIQ I can't recall whether I've posted about this particular You Tube video before (posted by Michael Dawson – see link above) or not but it is so significant in documenting the railways around Merseyside and West Lancashire in the mid 1960's through to the end of steam that it is well worth sharing. It covers through trains from Liverpool Exchange to Scotland via Ormskirk, the now long gone and much missed Southport – Preston Line, the fabled Burscough ...

Posted by Cllr. Tony Robertson on Sefton Focus

Our party is in desperate need of reform. We have overlooked the importance of winning locally. We have sacrificed our local government strongholds on the altar of national government dreams. In doing so, we have carelessly damaged our local government base in many areas. We have assumed we can win new MPs without winning locally first. The 2019 election shows that we can't. As has been said in the 2019 General Election Review: 'The overarching conclusion ... is that had we made much better decisions in 2019 we might have gained a few more seats, but not many more.' Part ...

Posted by Wera Hobhouse MP on Liberal Democrat Voice

The latest leadership election gives the Liberal Democrats a choice about future directions which they need to understand the past to make.

Posted by Nick Barlow on Stories by Nick Barlow on Medium

This post was first published on the Radix UK site... The speech which gave rise to the law that now bears Professor Charles Goodhart's name was actually called 'Problems of Monetary Management'. It was a comparatively dry piece of econometrics at a conference called by the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1975, the participants mainly being eminent monetary economists. In his discussion of the new-fangled doctrine of monetary targeting, Goodhart suggested that 'Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.' It seems extraordinary that his self-styled 'throwaway remark' on monetary targets ...

Posted by David Boyle on The Real Blog

The Young Liberals is not a perfect organisation - there, we said it - from its lack of institutional memory to the difficulties it's faced in gaining better representation amongst young professionals, there are many things that could be improved about the organisation. This being said, it's been encouraging to see many use the platform of Lib Dem Voice to suggest ways the organisation could change and improve. This clearly shows that many people really care about YL and to these people, and to anyone else reading who meets our membership criteria, we have one message. Please, get involved! We've ...

Posted by The Young Liberals Executive on Liberal Democrat Voice
Tue 23rd
11:00

My tweets

Mon, 15:41: RT @HelleKettner: In twenty minutes (at 16:00h), this interesting #EU debate takes place with some well-prepared panellists (@carmecolomina... Mon, 16:51: RT @OmniumIntl: 🔸@nwbrux (@APCOBXLInsider): 'The pandemic has actually helped to heal some fractures of the EU' #DigitalTalk Mon, 17:23: Great discussion. My contributions are: 26:00-33:10 40:10-42:25 47:20-49:00 54:15-end https://t.co/M53kh2QwGJ Mon, 18:58: The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham & the Rise of Espionage in Elizabethan England, John Cooper https://t.co/b2nfKFYWQg Mon, 19:15: RT @benjamin_cook: It's a tough time for magazines. (Ok, not just for magazines. Hang on in there. ❤️) If you want to see great titles like... Mon, 20:48: RT ...

While the commentariat waits with bated breath for the publication of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee's report into Russian infiltration in the UK, the Guardian has been digging about to find out what might be in it. They have unearthed secret evidence to MPs from the former spy Christopher Steele, which alleges that Boris Johnson and Theresa May ignored claims the Kremlin had a "likely hold" over Donald Trump and may have covertly funded Brexit: In testimony to MPs, the MI6 veteran accused the government led by May and in which Johnson was foreign secretary for two years of ...

Posted by Peter Black on Peter Black
eUKhost

Donald Trump is a dangerous President. That's not an especially controversial statement to make outside of his own social media support bubble. In fact, Donald Trump is so obviously ineffective, anti-intellectual and corrupt that the fact he managed to get elected to the highest office in the democratic world is something of an impressive achievement. Trusting someone who has so little diplomatic tact with the nuclear football is... undesirable - and it is indeed a scary prospect - but the reality is that the USA is fairly well-protected against a President so stupid that they accidentally start a nuclear war. ...

Posted by Paul Sayers on Liberal Democrat Voice

Yesterday morning, Catherine Beanland, partner at Portcullis Surgery in the heart of Ludlow spoke to BBC Radio Shropshire about how Ludlow has reacted to the Covid-19 epidemic and how our community has responded. Telling Eric Smith and Clare Ashford that she initially feared as many as 200 deaths in Ludlow, she said how proud she was of how Ludlow responded to the emergency. She praised the care homes and Ludlow Community Hospital for how their staff selflessly coped with the arrival of Covid-19 in the Ludlow area. She praised the "enormous sacrifice" of time and family life that carers in ...

Posted by andybodders on Andy Boddington

[IMG: Form for Confirmation of State aid received under small business or retail, leisure and hospitality grant scheme, and undertaking in difficulty status] All businesses that have had grant aid support via Folkestone and Hythe District Council in the form of the Small Business Grant (£10,000) or Retail, Leisure and Hospitality Grant (£10,000 - £25,000) have now received a form to complete to confirm they were eligible for the grant and that they can keepi it. It's not the clearest form in the world, but it is essential this form is competed and returned, as otherwise the full value of ...

Further update - for Tuesday 23rd June - from Councillor Fraser Macpherson (West End) and Councillor Craig Duncan (Broughty Ferry) : EASING OF LOCKDOWN RESTRICTIONS - MOVING TO PHASE 2People who are shielding are now able to leave their home for exercise and to meet with one other household outdoors (max eight people in total) with physical distancing. People who are shielding can take part in non-contact outdoor activities such as golf, hiking, fishing etc. People who are not shielding can now meet with more households outside. The limit increased from meeting one other household to meeting two households; eight-person ...