Ros's first speech of 2021 was a brisk affair in the midst of yet another debate on Statutory Instruments linked to the ongoing pandemic. The Lords has spent a lot of time attempting to guide the Government into acting either more efficiently or more effectively, often. Both at the same time. In this contribution, Ros was trying to explore what more individuals might do voluntarily to keep safe at this trying time... My Lords, there is no doubt that the appearance of this new variant has taken us into a very difficult situation. As welcome as the vaccine is, we ...
Spending time with at my mother's house is giving me time for all the books I bought and never read. Among my findings so far is that Isabella Tree's Wilding is inspirational and Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk is overwritten. Today I tried Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee - that temporary son of Market Harborough - and hit gold before I'd finished the preface. In it Magee describes Wagner as a classic example of someone who, when young is a passionately committed and active revolutionary, but becomes disillusioned with politics and turns away from it altogether in middle ...
Let's see if I can get back to choosing a music video each Sunday. This one dates from 1974, a year in which I followed the UK singles chart obsessively even though I could sense at the time that it was no golden age. Memories Don't Leave Like People Do only made no. 53, but it doesn't sound so bad today. Wikipedia says Johnny Bristol was best known as a songwriter and producer for Motown. He died in 2004.
There's an app on your friendly neighbourhood app store called Toon me. It enables you to make cartoon images from photographs. To cheer us all up, Oxford Lib Dem James Cox has put some of our party VIPS through this. He started with the MPs: Lib Dem MPs as Disney characters Ed Davey Daisy Cooper Christine Jardine Layla Moran pic.twitter.com/Z46C9CbCT7 — James Cox [IMG: 🔶] [IMG: 🇪🇺] [IMG: ðŸ‡ðŸ‡°] (@JamesCoxLD) January 17, 2021 And, just for fun, I did me: * Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
You would think, wouldn't you, that if you caught a disease because of your work, that your employer would be obliged to look after you. This is not the case for frontline workers, even public sector workers. In a parliamentary debate she'd secured on Long Covid, Layla Moran highlighted the cases of three who had experienced the wrath of HR departments after contracting long Covid. Take Daisy, an NHS nurse in Wales. For four months she received reduced and then no pay from NHS Cymru, which told her that it was unable to support staff who contracted covid-19. Her case ...
The BSFA Long List is out. Here are the 56 (!) Best Novel nominees, ranked by the product of their number of owners on Goodreads and LibraryThing. Goodreads LibraryThing reviewers av rating owners av rating Piranesi by Susanna Clarke 27,961 4.34 1,033 4.26 The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin 24,512 4.01 990 4.08 Network Effect by Martha Wells 22,649 4.43 729 4.42 The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones 15,259 3.8 486 4.06 Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir 13,520 4.3 465 4.21 To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini 10,990 3.9 411 4.26 ...
Watching a documentary about the rise of Nazism on the weekend before Biden's inauguration, I am struck by historical echoes. I don't buy the idea that Hitler "magically" cast a spell over the German people. In another time he might have been a failed artist ranting on a street corner, ignored by passers-by. The point is that his words struck a chord. They gave form to a range of not-quite-articulated grievances. In another blog post I tried out the idea of "quasi-religious" support for Brexit, suggesting that some of the Brexiteer myths got support because they focussed people's anxieties. An ...
Wikipedia tells me that Think-Tanks were introduced in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries but my memory is that they came into my consciousness in the UK around the time Edward Heath was Prime Minister (1970 - 74). I'm sure there are exceptions but until then I think we felt that most thinking about matters great and small was done in universities who at least tried to explore knowledge impartially rather than push a particular point of view. Not so Think-Tanks, which by and large do seem to want to push a particular point of view. ...
This year's Worldcon, DisCon III, to be held in Washington DC, has had a difficult few days, with a number of people leaving the team. I have been appointed the new Division Head of the WSFS Division, which is the part of the Worldcon that admininsters the Hugo Awards, the Business Meeting which reviews the rules, and the Site Selection process for the 2023 Worldcon (currently contested between Chengdu, China and Memphis, Tennessee) - the three obligatory things that every Worldcon must do. I was previously the Administrator of the Hugo Awards in 2017 and 2019, and one of the ...
Content warning: Suicide: "I'm not going to lose my son at the end of 2020 and lose my country and my republic in 2021," Rep. Jamie Raskin says as he presses forward with impeachment articles while mourning his son. #CNNSOTU https://t.co/ENtoAqOMMk pic.twitter.com/YkDJvMxC8t — State of the Union (@CNNSotu) January 17, 2021 I have been known to become exceptionally sweary while watching Sunday morning news programmes. The inane and out of touch utterances of some politicians drive me mad. But today I was moved to tears by the proud and loving way in which Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin talked about his ...
Here's my hand-clicked pick from this week's Sunday newspapers. What have you been reading today? An article in the Observer shows that those in the Red Wall seats stand to lose most from the Tories ending the £20 per week Universal Credit top-ups. Will any of the red wall MPs be tempted to vote for a Labour amendment to extend it? Or will the fall for Rishi Sunak's idea to give families half as much? In the same paper, Patience Akumu writes about the election in Uganda which saw the incumbent leader returned to power, despite the desire for change ...
Sat, 12:56: Awesome bit of trivia. https://t.co/X2OCP5mlsz Sat, 12:57: Great alt hist piece by Bart Van Loo in @destandaard ; what if Burgundy won the Battle of Nancy, and Charles the Bold survived? He imagines Burgundy as a peaceful, tolerant and multilingual superstate, with Brussels as its capital. But what about the English? he asks at the end. https://t.co/wiYcD3WXsr Sat, 13:02: At the same time as @FranckenTheo & @de_NVA collapsed the Belgian govt over the (pretty anodyne) Marrakesh Accord on migration, an NVA elected representative was taking massive bribes for humanitarian visas. Francken was told, did nothing. Disgusting. https://t.co/yH4ar63McF Sat, ...
Good news at last. Covid-19 infection rates are falling in Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin, also across England. It looks like the peak caused by the new variant and relaxing of social mixing, within the rules and in breach of the rules, has ended and rates are beginning to fall rapidly. Although the fall has been in the last week and the data are provisional, the trend is looking good. There are quite different experiences across Shropshire. The east and north side of the county has the highest rates of infection, the south west, including Ludlow, the lowest. The graphs ...
"It's in the interest of British people that we have the closest possible relationship with our European partners." – @EdwardJDavey #Marr pic.twitter.com/wlSUfWUjcr — Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) January 17, 2021 Marr then turned to another really important issue for Lib Dem voters – the environment. Ed, as a former climate change secretary who knows his stuff on this argued for a £150 billion economic recovery plan over 3 years to create jobs, support green industries and tackle climate change. The Government was weak and timid in the face of this emergency, he said. Andrew Marr then tackled him about whether we ...
In a hard-hitting and justifiably furious article in the Sunday Herald, Alistair Carmichael highlights the betrayal of those working in the seafood industry whose livelihood has been ruined by Brexit enhnced by the incompetence of UK Government ministers. He sets out what is wrong with the deal: Having made a great pantomime of holding out to get the best deal for fishermen, Johnson folded. Instead we found a deal that the Scottish Fishermen's Federation described this week as "desperately poor" and "the worst of both worlds". On close scrutiny the deal leaves our fishermen able to catch fewer fish in ...
broadcast anniversaries 17 January 1970: broadcast of third episode of Spearhead from Space. Meg Seeley brings the swarm leader to the Doctor, Liz and the Brigadier; meanwhile General Scobie is confronted by his own double. 17 January 1974: publication by Target Books of Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrance Dicks and Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters by Malcolm Hulke, based on the 1970 stories Spearhead from Space and Doctor Who and the Silurians, kicking off the Target novelisations which remain the single biggest sequence of Doctor Who books. 17 January 1976: broadcast of third episode of The ...
Dundee CAB has advised councillors of a very useful online 'Money Map' tool from Citizens' Advice Scotland. It advises : "The tool is hosted at www.moneymap.scot and brings together all the options for how people can improve their incomes and cut their living costs through areas such as housing, benefits, grants and energy bills and directs them to online sites where they can access these options. The strength of the tool is that it gathers in all the best online sources of help, because we know that people can get frustrated searching endlessly online for information and often end up ...
As if there were not already enough broken promises around Brexit, the Mirror reports on a highly controversial breach of faith that is supposedly under consideration by Boris Johnson's Government. They say fury is mounting at Boris Johnson's plans to 'rip up' workers' rights after Brexit - after repeatedly claiming they were safe: The Prime Minister had said he would go even further than EU laws to protect workers in the UK. Yet today the Financial Times revealed officials have looked at changing the 48-hour limit on the working week, known as the 'working time directive'. Officials also looked at ...
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