Hello, Livejournal. It's been a while.

Sunday 26 July, 2009: there we have another milestone date, the death of my grandmother, Win, aged 88 (which recently I wrongly stated as 87). It's hard to convey how I feel about this, but I shall try.

She had died very suddenly of a heart attack whilst walking back to her room from dinner at the rest home ( Read more... )

Over at the Spectator Matthew D'Ancona calls attention to an interesting division within the government on how to respond to the electoral threat of David Cameron and the Conservatives:

'...[t]his highlights a longstanding split between Blairites and Brownites
in their respective analyses of David Cameron. The Blairites ? Byers,
Milburn, James ( Read more... )

...But I think I've finally figured out the G20 anti-capitalist protesters' strategy:

1. Take to the streets and raise merry hell

2. ?????

3. NO MORE PROFIT!!!

Author's note: I realise that this post is horribly late as a review of 2008, but it's only now that the election period is over that I have the time or the mental capacity to think about anything else! My apologies for the delay, and here it goes...

What did you do in 2008 that you'd never done before?

I made several very positive advances ( Read more... )

Yesterday voters in Didsbury West headed to the polls, and with their democratic votes handed an overwhelming, though in fairness not unexpected, victory to my opponent, Lianne Williams. Congratulations to her, I say, and also to David Ellison who held on to Labour's second place position, and to Geoff Evans, who put in a spirited performance for ( Read more... )

I haven't said anything about this on my regular blog before, although readers of my campaign blog from the May 2008 local elections may have picked up on it, but the other week the tragic news broke that Neil Trafford, one of the three Liberal Democrat councillors for my ward of Didsbury West, had been killed in a car accident. I knew him - we ( Read more... )

Yesterday the campaign against the Manchester congestion charge, supported exclusively by the Conservatives among the three main parties, succeeded overwhelmingly, with all ten boroughs voting no. The official results are as follows ( Read more... )

As part of the latest phase in its moral crusade against problems that don’t really exist but can be solved by passing yet another law, the government in the guise of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has now decided to have a crack at prostitution. Now, my views on prostitution are fairly simple. I’ve never paid for sex, I don’t like the idea of doing ( Read more... )

Good news from Claire, editor of The View magazine, which recently took me on as a commentator: following a review of the magazine's business strategy, the team has decided to make the ezine available for free. Anyone can subscribe - please just go along to their web site, www.viewmagazine.co.uk, to sign up!

This afternoon, in a quick news check, I was horrified to learn that the Bank of England - under pressure from the Brown government to abandon its long-held commitment to keeping inflation low, in favour of the politically expedient but wholly short-term objective of trying to re-inflate the credit bubble to try to have Britons borrow our way ( Read more... )