Police funding: Govt must address police chiefs' concerns Land use framework: Govt struggles to understand rural communities Chris Philp: No-one can doubt his work ethic after he crashed the economy in 39 days Cole-Hamilton: After half a decade of Brexit damage, we need a UK-EU Customs Union deal Councillor and environmental campaigner selected to take on SNP in Edinburgh Northern Train fares to rise yet again Police funding: Govt must address police chiefs' concerns Commenting on the Home Office pledge to invest an additional £100m for neighbourhood policing in England and Wales. This is after several forces have warned that ...

Posted by Mark Valladares on Liberal Democrat Voice
Fri 31st
21:54

The Joy of Six 1319

"In recent years, the United Kingdom has seen a troubling increase in Holocaust denialism, fuelled by disinformation, a lack of historical education, and the actions of influential public figures."Jack Wilkin on a growing assault on truth. Patrick McGuinness remembers the hounding of Christopher Jefferies: "The day after his arrest, one of my former classmates spoke to the Telegraph. The article was headlined 'Joanna Yeates Murder: Suspect Christopher Jefferies was eccentric with love of poetry' and my classmate was quoted as saying: 'He was particularly keen on French films.' If innocence can look this bad, who needs guilt? Jefferies became the ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Welcome to my summary of the latest national voting intention polls for the next general election, along with party leadership ratings. If you'd like to find out more about how polls work, how reliable they are and how to make sense of them, check out my book, Polling UnPacked: the History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls, or sign up for my weekly email, The Week in Polls: General election voting intention polls PollsterConLabLDGrnRefLab leadFieldwork Techne 23% (-1) 26% (+1) 12% (-1) 7% (nc) 24% (nc) 2% (over Ref.) 29-30/1 GB Find Out Now 21% (-2) 23% (+1) 11% ...

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack
Fri 31st
17:42

Growth?

The Labour Government's stumbling start can be excused by lack of experience, or nativity. Why on earth announce the perfectly justifiable ending of the universal winter fuel allowance for pensioners as a "one off" so that the hostile media can heap opprobrium on it, rather an mix it in with plenty of other distractions in the budget? Why allow the purpose of the abolition of inheritance tax on land, to stop a convenient means of tax avoidance the rich, to be obscured by not inserting an "active farmer" clause to show that genuine farmers would be able to keep their ...

Posted by Peter Wrigley on Keynesian Liberal

This short review appears in the current Liberator - that's issue 427. You can download it for free from the magazine's website. Losing It: The Conservative Party and the 2024 General Election Michael A. Ashcroft Biteback Publishing, 2024, £10 pbk There are two people inside Lord Ashcroft. One is Mr Hyde, who co-wrote what was intended to be a damaging biography of David Cameron. It contained a baseless story about a pig's head, which useful idiots among the online left, as Hyde had no doubt intended, spread far and wide. But Losing It is written by the impartial psephologist Dr ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England
Fri 31st
16:39

Brexit five years on

In 2019 I caught up with an old friend for the first time in a few years. He's in an Anglo-European relationship, been together with his Spanish partner since 1996. So I asked the obvious, "How are you coping with Brexit?" He told me that the initial referendum result was a big shock, but that his girlfriend now had indefinite leave to remain. Brexit's been a massive gut punch to Europeans that moved here before 2016 so I asked how she was affected mentally. His response was chilling, "When she's walking down the street, she won't talk". This is someone ...

Posted by returnoftheliberal on returnoftheliberal

Erica and I visited Ann in the Estee Lauder section of John Lewis who regularly helps a local charity by giving advice to women who have had mastectomies. She thought that she could do a makeover on me as well! Dream on. Friends of mine will have been surprised at this headline or, as we say in Liverpool, 'gobsmacked.' It is well known that I have an aversion, not to the John Lewis Partnership where we buy most of our clothing and electrical goods, but the general experience of shopping. Fortunately, we weren't shopping. Erica and I went to talk ...

Posted by richardkemp on But what does Richard Kemp think?

The Liberal Democrats, and the Liberals before them, have not had much time in power over the last century. 1906 was the last time a majority Liberal government was elected, though it has been the junior partner in coalition governments since then. However, the Liberals were certainly the party of ideas in the last century. The Labour welfare state established after 1945 owes a debt to the programmes of that 1906 government, and to the highly influential report on welfare reform written during the war by a Liberal, William Beveridge. The great economist John Maynard Keynes was a Liberal, listened ...

Posted by Mark Corner on Liberal Democrat Voice

Peter Chambers turns to Frank Herbert's classic science fiction for help in understanding the Artificial Intelligence world of today. Recently a small company in the People's Republic of China released a GPT-LLM model set called Deep Seek. This seems to have surprised some in the US tech oligarchy to the tune of about a trillion dollars. This is presented by some commentators as 'little China' being nimbler than 'big America'. But this is not strictly true, and Frank Herbert anticipated the point in Appendix I of his novel Dune. Big America is in reality a bandwagon started by OpenAI and ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Back in 2016, as the Brexit referendum campaign got underway, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove published a joimt article in the Sun in which promised that after Brexit 'The NHS will be stronger, class sizes will be smaller, taxes lower ... wages will be higher, fuel bills will be lower.' In separate article in the Telegraph on 26 June 2016, Boris Johnson claimed: 'British people will still be able to go and work in the EU, to live, to travel, to study, to buy homes and settle down. There will continue to be free trade and access to the EU ...

Posted by Peter Black on Peter Black
YouGov

Sometimes planting a small seed might produce the most extraordinary harvest. Sometimes, a simple idea might create incredible opportunities to boost our confidence, reduce social isolation and strengthen our relationships. It all started rather spontaneously in a local park two years ago. A net, a couple of balls, Mariusz; dedicated coach with passion for sport, and a group of people, who wanted to socialise and play volleyball. Who would have thought that a year later, this idea literally transformed so many lives? Weekly training sessions, eagerness to set up a club, frequent travelling to watch and play competitive games. Moreover, ...

Posted by Michal Siewniak on Liberal Democrat Voice

We are making changes to our surgeries from the start of February taking into account residents' feedback and we are now doing our surgeries jointly. Our joint surgeries are henceforth as follows : Blackness Library (Tuesdays 5pm - every week during school term time) Ancrum Road Primary School (1st Tuesday of each month at 5.45pm during school term time) Harris Academy reception area (2nd Tuesday of each month at 5.45pm during school term time) West End Campus (come to reception area of St Joseph's RC PS and Victoria Park PS) - (3rd Tuesday of each month at 5.45pm during school ...

Posted by Bailie Fraser Macpherson & Cllr Michael Crichton on Councillors Fraser Macpherson & Michael Crichton - working for the West End