Barely into the new year and I am already back in the Lib Dem office to do some printing for action days in Gateshead this weekend. In addition, I printed some literature which will be delivered in February. It's going to be a busy 4 months ahead of us as we head towards the local elections.
Sunniside History Society's monthly meeting was on Wednesday at Sunniside Club. We had a great speaker - Simon Woolley from Beamish Museum - who gave a talk on the recent developments. The meeting was also an opportunity to donate some historic items from my house. In the photo above is my great grandfather's document case. Henry Wallace was agent to Lord Ravensworth in the later Victorian
This is from Malcolm Saville's introduction to Sea Witch Comes Home, his story inspired by the East Coast floods of 1953: Every mile of this unusual coast and the lovely country behind it is worth exploring. Southwold, with its white lighthouse towering over its streets of flint and red brick houses, is waiting for you to discover - and so is the harbour at the mouth of the River Blyth a mile away. Between the river and the town are flat marshlands which were flooded when the sea broke through the defences not many years ago. But the narrow-gauge Southwold ...
On Tuesday Gateshead Lib Dems held their latest manifesto meeting for the local elections in May. We are almost at the end of the process of putting together the manifesto and considerable progress was made on Tuesday. I wonder how the other parties are doing in putting together their manifestos? Will they bother? I've been on Gateshead Council for 39 years now and in that time I can't
Welcome to my summary of the latest national voting intention polls for the next general election, along with the latest MRP projections and 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 Find Out Now 18% (+1) 15% (nc) 12% (nc) 17% (nc) 32% (+1) -17% (4th, vs Ref) 7-8/1 GB ...
Source: Horn of Africa Simple Map While foreign policy circles in London are focused on Ukraine, the Middle East/Iran and now Venezuela, as well as the dramatic new US National Security Strategy, a set of interconnected lower key conflicts around the Red Sea are escalating. This has global ramifications, especially in relation to the two Red Sea 'pinch points' for Europe; the Suez Canal and the Straights of Mandeb. These conflicts involve Saudi Arabia, UAE, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Turkey, Israel, Yemen, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya ... and Eastern and Western land gateways to the resources of the Sahel Region. It ...
A press release from the party brings the news: Liberal Democrats have called on the National Crime Agency to launch an urgent criminal investigation into X in response to the proliferation of AI-generated sexual abuse material created by the site's AI generation tool 'Grok'. The party warns that the platform has become "awash" with non-consensual deepfake imagery overwhelmingly targeting women and children. The Liberal Democrats are calling on the NCA to investigate whether X is criminally liable for facilitating the creation and distribution of this material, and to pursue individuals responsible for generating it. Liberal Democrats argue that Government's response ...
I have a dark and deeply embarrassing confession to make. I once voted for Margaret Thatcher. Please don't rush to judge me just yet. I'm sharing this not to shock, but because it contains an uncomfortable truth about how people really make political choices - and what liberals ignore at our peril. When I cast that vote, I was young and foolish - and politically uninformed. I didn't grow up in a household where politics was discussed. My parents voted, but never said who for. Politics wasn't taught in school, at least not in any meaningful way. I didn't yet ...
With the 2026 Senedd election now around four months away, Welsh politics has entered a new phase. Campaigns are taking shape, narratives are hardening, and for the first time since devolution, both the electoral map and the voting system have fundamentally changed. Old assumptions about "safe seats" no longer apply. In Neath, that shift is particularly stark. Under the new boundaries, Neath now sits within the Brycheiniog Tawe Nedd, combining Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe, Neath, and Swansea East into a single six-member constituency elected by closed-list proportional representation. Recent polling for this new constituency points to a fragmented outcome: ...
Photo by Jacqueline BanerjeeLike W.H. Auden, I have a thing about abandoned lead mines. So I was intrigued to learn that there is one in Crystal Palace Park. Subterranea Briannica explains: It is well known that Crystal Palace Park includes a number of Victorian dinosaur models, arranged in groups around the lower lake. Many of these species were recently discovered although not all the models are nowadays thought to be strictly accurate. Less well known is that alongside these animals there is a replica geological strata. This was built at the same time as an educational feature and was constructed ...
In 1989, the international norms that had held for decades. In the tumultuous autumn of 1989 the various governments of the Warsaw Pact fell in turn. "In Hungary it took six years, in Poland it took six months, In East Germany it took six weeks, in Czechoslovakia six days and in Romania it took six hours". Communism had collapsed under its own contradictions. As we read the headlines in January 2026, it is hard not to feel certain 1989 vibes. The end of Maduro in Venezuela, and now the explosion of unrest in the "Islamic Republic" of Iran. It is ...
No principal authority council by-elections this week, but ten coming up over the rest of this month. Across those ten, there is a welcome full slate of ten Lib Dems, up from the six Lib Dems the last time these wards were up. That matches full slates for both Conservative and Reform, while Labour are contesting nine. But perhaps most interesting is the seven Green candidates, behind all those other parties and no increase for the Greens (unlike the Lib Dems). That continues the pattern from council by-elections in the last quarter, which showed the Greens once again doing little ...
The Guardian reports that Nigel Farage has been accused of "parroting Kremlin lines" after saying that he would vote against any UK government plans to deploy the military in Ukraine. The paper refers to the statement by Britain and France that they would be ready to send troops to Ukraine after a peace deal, and that the Reform UK leader said he would vote against any such move to put boots on the ground: Farage's comments cast doubt on his commitment to the UK's national security, the cabinet minister Pat McFadden said. He accused the politician of taking a pro-Russia ...
