Here's Phil Harding, star of Time Team, talking about his life in archaeology. The video is chiefly aimed at those taking up a similar career themselves. It's interesting as history because he says that when he began as an archaeologist it wasn't a profession and was barely a job - you were paid subsistence rather than wages. As I recently suggested, Time Team's cancellation rivals the death of David Bowie as the event after which everything started going wrong.
I'm challenging myself with a prediction of how the local elections will pan out. Admittedly, I don't quite have the time or energy to go through each ward of each council up for election in England and estimate who I think will win. However, what I will predict is the general overview of each party and how they will fair nationally. Do they make net gains or losses? What will be the spin on their reflections of their results? Will it have a big impact in British politics over the coming year? For clarity, to make a good prediction, I ...
Thu 1st
22:08
Ed Davey: Lib Dems on course for best ever winning streak with big gains in former Conservative hear...
Ed Davey sounded a confident note with his close of poll statement: We are expecting to see big gains against the Conservatives in their former Middle England heartlands. Last year the Liberal Democrats won a record number of MPs and became the largest third party in 100 years. Now we are on course for our seventh year of local election gains, making this our best ever winning streak. Voters have delivered their verdict on a Conservative Party that broke the country and a Labour government that is too timid to fix it. Every Liberal Democrat councillor elected will be a ...
Thu 1st
15:01
Its clamour for a ban on phones in schools is another sign that today's Conservative Party isn't Con...
A couple of weeks ago the Conservatives wanted MPs to be given a vote on banning mobile phones in schools. They didn't get their way, but it was another sign of how the Conservatives have changed since I was a young councillor - yes, I can remember when it was the Tories who repaired church roofs. In those days I was a member of the governing body of the local CofE primary school. And you could be sure that, at the first sign of controversy at a governors' meeting, one of the Conservative appointees would say "I think we should ...
Our Party is working on strategy for the next Parliament and, I hope, beyond. A key part of business strategy is assessment of risk. A major element in risk is competition - what will competitors do and what risks does that create for us? Strategy must understand context, including the competitive environment. Our market-place is politics, including the structure and future of the party political structure in Britain. There are differences in Scotland, but the broad analysis holds true. The biggest changes in the political environment are: The demise of the two-party system. Both traditional leading parties have lost their ...
At the end of an election campaign I could never remember what I used to do with all the spare time I suddenly had. If you find yourself in the same boat, why not consider writing a guest post for Liberal England? I love publishing them, whether they're on politics or wider culture. I'm happy to entertain a wide range of views, but I'd hate you to spend time writing something I really wouldn't want to publish, so please get in touch first. These are the 10 most recent guest posts on Liberal England:An essay in identifying Englishness - Stuart ...
For a solo consultant, you are only as good as the last thing someone heard about you. It can take years to create the kind of reputation that has clients queueing at your door. But it can take only moments to bring it all crashing down. The key to success in the solo consulting business is integrity. Integrity is about behaviour. It's about having high personal and professional standards and sticking to them. It's about doing the right thing. And perhaps more importantly, it's about doing the right thing even when nobody's looking. How does this look in practice? Here ...
I'll start by thanking Hugh Andrew for his excellent LDV post from the 23rd April - 'A thief in the night', which I completely agree with. I'm old enough to remember the Napster file-sharing era when ordinary people started downloading music over the internet for free. This mightily offended big business in the form of the music industry who, pretending to care about the artists they profited from, declared this was stealing and so successfully lobbied Governments to change the law and make it easier for them to prosecute file-sharers. Fast-forward 20 years, and now other big companies are downloading ...
This week feels as though summer has arrived with its hot, dry weather. The reminder it's still Spring is the tree pollen! I couldn't resist a few photos of the flowers in bloom at the moment. With the start of no mow May it's worth being a bit more flexible with the dates, this year's early Spring has meant leaving wilder spots earlier for earlier emerging insects and nesting birds. (If you can't cope with an entire lawn of unkempt grass, try leaving longer areas under trees or mow lots of paths. Or just plant some insect friendly flowers in ...
We are holding a street surgery tonight to speak with residents on any local issues or concerns they may have. Should you have an issue you wish to discuss with us, e-mail us at westend@dundeelibdems.org.uk or call us on Dundee 459378 and we will be pleased to meet you - many thanks.
[IMG: Chocolate cake on a ceramic plate] Photo by Eftychia Syrimi on Pexels.com. On this day in 2022, the first edition of The Week in Polls appeared. My weekly guide to what you need to know about political polling was first a series of pilot blog posts, then an email newsletter on Revue and now, after Elon Musk shut down Revue, a weekly missive via Substack. Looking back to that first edition, it is sadly not a surprise that it highlighted poor media coverage of political polling. But I hope that readers of the newsletter have become better armed to ...
Across mamy areas of England today, voters will be going to the polls to elect county councils or regional mayors, however there are still concerns that the sort of election interference with fake stories and narratives on polling day which marred the Brexit referendum is still a threat in the UK. The Independent reports that with the elections possibly giving Nigel Farage's Reform greater legitimacy and a local government base to build on, there are calls for an urgent change in the law to deal with misinformation going online when people go to the polls: BCS, The Chartered Institute for ...
