I have, I suspect, been quite lucky in terms of how the pandemic has affected me since March. Without the prospect of losing my job and, thanks to having had halfway decent broadband in the village since we were connected up a couple of years ago, the ability to work from home, it has been possible to function well enough. Life is about more than work though, as those living in large towns and cities have discovered - fresh air and social interaction are an important means of dealing with the other restrictions brought about by Government efforts to clamp ...
"Britain's Higher Education system is experiencing something close to an existential crisis, perhaps even a moral or spiritual meltdown, because it no longer knows what it is for or where it should go." Public Policy and the Past says the universities' problems reach far beyond Covid.19. George Smid, Lisa Brewin and Andrew Brown discuss the damage Brexit will do to farming in the East Midlands. Hua Hsu asks how we can pay for creativity in the digital age. "One business in particular arrived with a van to remove all their equipment on a Saturday, only to find they couldn't park ...
Lord Bonkers peered over my shoulder at the Liberator website. "It says there 'the film Rock Around the Clock,' but I think I meant Blackboard Jungle. That was the one that got all the teddies stirred up. Be a good chap and change it here." "The ethics of blogging require..." "Remember, your rent falls due on Lady Day." Wednesday A correspondent asks for my memories of Britain in the 1950s. I reply that the decade is perhaps best remembered for what the teddy bears got up to. It all began at showings of the film Blackboard Jungle, where they slashed ...
vv On Lib Dem Voice: Reportage | Contribute On the official party website: Conference home Well, that was tense! Of all the votes to have technical issues, it would just have to be the one between two hotly contested amendments, wouldn't it? Thankfully, the outcome wasn't even close with 331 backing the more emphatic "Rejoin now" Amendment 1 and 1071 backing Amendment 2 proposed by Duncan Brack and eventually accepted by the leadership. It's a huge number of people taking part and was the outcome I thought most likely but at times did not seem assured. The debate was at ...
Stopping Brexit was the Liberal Democrats' USP from 2016 until December last year, but that battle was lost. Britain is now in the transition period towards full withdrawal — which the Party unsuccessfully lobbied the Government to have extended, to try to lessen the impact of leaving on 31 December with No Deal or a [...]
I have a pile of CDs from music magazines that I have never played. Some are years old and it can be hard to find out much about a song you like. Opossum are a band from New Zealand and Girl comes from their 2012 debut album Electric Hawaii - there's a review of it on Pitchfork. And NZ on Screen reveals that the album won Best Alternative Album at that year's New Zealand Music Awards.
Here's the text of the motion that was passed today at Lib Dem conference. The key vote, between amendment 1 and amendment 2, went for amendment 2 by 1,071 votes to 337 votes.
On Lib Dem Voice: Reportage | Contribute On the official party website: Conference home Written a speech for Conference and not been called? Send it to us at voice@libdemvoice.org and we'll try and put it up during the debate so that your effort does not go to waste. Over the years, our party line on the European Union has been consistent and resilient. Indeed, of all of our policies, it's the one for which we are most known. Our credentials on Europe has led us to becoming the principal pro-EU party of the UK in the eyes of many. Our ...
I got The Mirror and the Light for Anne's birthday earlier in the year, and before tackling it directly myself, decided to go back and read the two previous books in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. That of course became quite a big reading project, at the same time as I was reading Alan Moore's Jerusalem (1300 pages, to the 1800 pages of Cromwell) and an SF mini-project of similar length which I'll write up tomorrow. It took me about seven weeks to reread the trilogy, but it was well worth it. The ...
On Lib Dem Voice: Reportage | Contribute On the official party website: Conference home I feel slightly guilty because I haven't found time yet to write about the beautiful and joyful Generous Society pamphlet that Julian Huppert wrote about recently. This is a wonderful contrast to our recent habit of being as nuanced as we can to try to avoid upsetting people. It's an antidote to the paint by numbers, soulless, brand based, dull centrist mush that we have been prone to cling to. Maybe one day we'll learn that subtlety never won anything and that we need the sort ...
It is rather sad that Keir Starmer seems to believe that he can only get Labour back into power by echoing the law and order, national security actions and rhetoric of the former Tony Blair/Jack Straw/David Blunkett era, but that now appears to be the case. The Independent reports that Starmer has sacked a Labour MP for voting against the government's plans to exempt UK troops from prosecution for war crimes and torture: Nadia Whittome, parliament's youngest MP, confirmed in a statement that she had been "stood down" from her role as a parliamentary private secretary after opposing the Overseas ...
Today, the most anticipated vote of Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference will happen. Conference will decide what the future Liberal Democrat policy on the European Union will be. This is my last ditch attempt to explain why I think voting against rejoin will be a mistake.For those who are exciting enough not to follow Liberal Democrat conference: in essence, members are being asked between a vague rejoin policy ("Conference supports a longer term policy of rejoining the EU") and a policy which commits to nothing ("Conference resolves to keep all options open ... including membership."). There is a third option: a ...
Nowadays, every new political leader feels obliged to find their own equivalent of Tony Blair's Clause Four moment, when he signalled a break from the party's past. The problem is that, whereas Blair genuinely believed that his party needed to make that change, others create an artificial break with the past, that neither reflects the current mood of their party nor the direction they should be travelling. A good examnple of that is Ed Davey's rather hamfisted and ill-advised attempt to break with his own past as Jo Swinson's right-hand man by seeking to remove any commitment the Liberal Democrats ...
Sat, 12:56: Best tweet of another good thread from @pmdfoster . https://t.co/pmNhFl0I7p Sat, 14:48: How Police Unions Fight Reform https://t.co/he8AhLIvUQ Long but thorough. Sat, 15:41: Superman (1978) https://t.co/CoE29WkFeD Sat, 16:05: Mad but true: @CJCHowarth blocked me after we had this exchange. What a snowflake! https://t.co/HzeWPFkXpO Sat, 17:02: RT @namwalien: I won the @ClarkeAward within an hour of hearing that the cops who killed Breonna Taylor weren't charged. To honor Breonna a... Sat, 20:13: RT @sethspeirs: @nwbrux It has rather exposed SFs two headed approach. The increasingly crazy approach down South is not helping either. Th... Sat, 20:13: RT @LeeReynoldsDUP: @CJCHowarth ...
On Lib Dem Voice: Reportage | Contribute On the official party website: Conference home Ed did his first Leader's Q and A yesterday afternoon. Under normal circumstances, he would be wandering around the stage, addressing a packed hall. He was at the podium in LDHQ taking questions from menbers in a way that you don't often find from other party leaders. We allow supplementaries to pre-submitted questions which mean that he can be faced with just about anything, from the random to the policy to the personal. You can watch it here from around 5 hours in. Here are some ...
Labour is trying to pull back into its fold the right wing white working class voters who voted Tory at the last General Election. This despite the fact that these voters can often hold views which would embarrass a truly progressive party – This is summed up by Jim Hancock who says this in one of his recent blog pieces (Hancock's Half Page):- 'Sir Keir's statement that "we love our country" was really important. For Labour to have any hope of regaining its northern strength, it must recognise the deep patriotism of the working class.' To me that deep patriotism ...
If evidence was required of shifting global goalposts then diplomatic observers didn't need to look any further than the start of this year's UN General Assembly. For a start, the General Assembly Hall was sparsely populated with socially distanced diplomats. Coronavirus has kept away the heads of state, government and foreign ministers who normally gather in the UN building on the west bank of New York's East River. Instead, the speeches have been pre-recorded and displayed on the giant screen. No politicos means no chance for the usual annual flurry of bilaterals where the real diplomatic business is done. It ...
i) births and deaths 27 September 1911: Birth of John Harvey, who played Professor Brett in The War Machines (First Doctor, 1966) and Officia in The Macra Terror (Second Doctor, 1967) 27 September 1921: birth of Milton Subotsky, who produced and wrote Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966), the two cinema films starring Peter Cushing as Doctor Who. 27 September 1939: birth of Garrick Hagon, who played revolutionary/evolutionary leader Ky in The Mutants (Third Doctor, 1972), and the undertaker A Town Called Mercy (Eleventh Doctor, 2012). 27 September 2000: death of Daphne ...
I am very grateful to the local resident who sent me these lovely photographs of autumn at Riverside!
