Anthony Blair found hiding out near Market Harborough

From the Harborough Mail:

A prisoner who walked out of an open prison was found hiding near Harborough, a court heard. Anthony Blair (25), reacted with anger and swore at Judge Richard Bray when three years’ imprisonment was added to his sentence. 

Northampton Crown Court heard on Friday last week that Blair was jailed for seven-and-a-half years at Teeside Crown Court in December 2008 for wounding with intent and stealing and handling stolen vehicles. 

He was serving the sentence at HMP Ford, an open prison in West Sussex, went he walked out on August 3 last year. 

Alex Bull, prosecuting, said while Blair was on the run, an £18,000 Ford Ranger was stolen from Lower Lodge Farm, Harborough on August 11. 

Yet when police officers went to the Brook Meadow lakeside retreat between Sibbertoft and Lubenham two days before Christmas, they found both it and Blair.

The Women's Social & Political Union Headquarters, Leicester

A poster in the window of an empty Leicester shop advertises last November's Cycles and Suffragettes event. You can find the shop in Bowling Green Street, in the shadow of Fenwick's department store.

Whoever put it there knew must have known that, a century ago, that shop houses the headquarters of the Leicester branch of the Women's Social and Political Union. Below is a picture of it in those days, borrowed from a website about the great Leicester suffragette Alice Hawkins.

I expect Nora Logan was a regular visitor too.

Only in the Guardian...

In the course of a review in today's Guardian, Jenny Turner quotes from A Card from Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp:

[It's] hard to exaggerate the visceral anti-Thatcherism of the 1980s

Among the sort of people who review books for the Guardian, certainly. But the old girl did win three consecutive general elections.

Call it Eliza Carthy Syndrome.

A tube train at Leicester

I came home from work early one afternoon this week. Just south of Leicester station I saw a London Underground train. Presumably it was on its way to or from the Litchurch Lane Works in Derby.

This train had a pair of class 20 locomotives (a rare sight themselves these days) and a buffer wagon at either end, but there was still something moving about seeing a tube train in such circumstances.

It reminded me of a pit pony allowed up from the depths for a short while to frolic in a sunlit meadow.

Two grandsons of the 10th US President are still alive

Thanks to the New York Magazine for confirming a story that has been going the rounds for a few days and thus providing us with our Trivial Fact of the Day.

John Tyler, the 10th President of the United States of America, was born in 1790 and in office from 1841 to 1845. Remarkably, two of his grandsons are still alive.

One of them, Harrison Tyler, explains how this has come about in an interview with the magazine:

"Both my grandfather - the president - and my father, were married twice. And they had children by their first wives. And their first wives died, and they married again and had more children. And my father was 75 when I was born, his father was 63 when he was born."

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It has been a day for Liberal Democrat bloggers to think the unthinkable on education. On Lib Dem Voice Tom Smith circles nervously around the issue of grammar schools.

Too lib·er·al [adj.] has no such inhibitions: "Pupils, from low-income families, should have the ability to apply for a government certificate to meet the tuition costs of a private school. The poorest in society should not be excluded from the best private facilities in the country; we cannot achieve greater levels of social mobility if we restrict the poorest to the state sector."

Basing police officers in schools was the sort of policy that made New Labour purr. But an article by Lizzie Schiffman on Huffington Post suggests that it has the effect of criminalising more youngsters. Recent research in Chicago "found that 20 percent of all juvenile arrests in 2010 took place on school grounds. Nearly one-third of those arrests were for simple battery charges - offences that in previous years would have been written off as schoolyard skirmishes and punished with suspensions or other penalties doled out by the school."

Rob's Blog is appalled by Conservative-run Cornwall Council's ban on tweeting from meetings.

With the current debate over Scottish culture and independence near to the surface, Out in the Shires looks at Ronald Neame's 1960 film Tunes of Glory.

Brain Pickings tells the story of a disastrous 1897 expedition to the North Pole by balloon.

How will Nick Clegg's call for more tax cuts be received by his fellow Liberal Demcrats?

At the last election my party promised to raise the personal allowance to £10,000 for ordinary taxpayers. And I am extremely proud that the Coalition is on track to do so over the course of this Parliament. We’ll make sure that anyone earning £10,000 or less will pay no income tax at all and for those on middle incomes, the first £10,000 they earn will be tax free. 

For millions of basic rate taxpayers – ordinary, hardworking people – that means paying £700 less in income tax each year, around £60 a month. 

In the 2010 Budget we increased the tax allowance from £6,475 to £7,475. This year we have already announced a planned rise of an additional £630 - meaning that a total of 1.1 million more people will no longer pay income tax at all. 

But today I want to make clear that I want the Coalition to go further and faster in delivering the full £10,000. Because, bluntly, the pressure on family finances is reaching boiling point.

Nick Clegg's speech to the Resolution Foundation today has been well received by the press and Liberal Democrat bloggers.

"Nick Clegg's call for tax cuts may save the Lib Dems from annihilation" suggests Daniel Knowles on the Daily Telegraph site (a trifle melodramatically, but then - judging by his photograph - he is only 14). While Prateek Buch for the Social Liberal Forum is enthusiastic, seeing the proposed changes as part of the Liberal Democrats' fairness agenda.

For what it is worth, I am enthusiastic too. One of the problems Labour regularly runs into is that, despite its rhetoric, it is difficult to make the rich pay more. Of course, there are things you can do, such as taxing property rather than income, but the result is that increased public spending tends to increase the burden on lower earners until they become unwilling to bear it.

Certainly, I found this argument easy to make during one of my rare television appearances.

But not all my Liberal Democrats will agree with me. Because this is very much the debate we had at our Bournemouth autumn conference in 2008. There the party agreed to fight the following general election promising tax cuts, but as a Daily Telegraph report from the time shows, there was a significant minority in the party that did not agree with this strategy:

Opposition to the programme was led by Evan Harris, the party's science spokesman, and fellow MP Paul Holmes, who argued that those in most of need of help were too poor to receive any benefit from tax cuts. 

Their amendment sought to bind the party to tax cuts only after other priorities had been met, including tackling child poverty and climate change. 

Telling delegates about the plight of hard-up families in his constituencies, Mr Harris added: "Most are so poor that they will never pay taxes."

The vote in Bournemouth was clear enough - conference voted three to one to approve the new policy - but no debate can settle such a question for all time.

And it is notable that those in the party who have been less enthusiastic about the Coalition have emphasised their opposition to cuts in public spending.

If money has been found to cut tax, won't they (whether they have called themselves "Progressives", "Social Liberals" or use some other slightly vaguely defined category) now be calling for a reduction in those cuts?

Or will they keep their heads down because Nick Clegg's speech has gone down well and it is good to see the party pursuing a clear strategy at last?

Pun of the Day

Congratulations to Andy Wilson for slipping this into a Guardian cricket report this morning:

Swann, who grew up in Towcester, then popped up at Nottinghamshire.

Headline of the Day

A victory today for the Daily Telegraph:

Swingers sprayed stranger in face with bear repellent

The case of William Mayne revisited

William Mayne was one of Britain's very best children's writers from the 1950s until his death a couple of years ago. And in 2004 for he was gaoled for two-and-a-half years for offences against children.

Now a post on Freaky Trigger by someone who calls himself pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør (as is his right in a free country) returns to this troubling case:

It seems to me challengingly important, because so challengingly dreadful, to propose that a genuinely lovely writer, a writer deeply worth reading, by children and adults, can at the same time be an abusive man who betrayed trust and responsibility. 

We’re all contradictory, and writers are especially well used to firewalling the sensitive imagination off from the reaches of life that are experienced rather than imagined, for all kinds of reasons, good and bad. And all writers — and this certainly includes me — write as much for an imagined reader as the readers they happen to know and meet in life. 

Who were Mayne’s imagined readers? What do his books tell us?

pˆnk s lord, if I may call him that, makes great claims for Mayne's writing:

Sand is an amazing book, quite unlike any children’s novel before it, at least by any other author I can quickly bring to mind. At one (not unfamiliar) level, it’s a sketch of the fascination and antipathy between secondary modern boys and grammar school girls, in a small never-named northern coastal town — and as such fits into its time, the time of kitchen sink cinema and Coronation Street, the Beatles and, well, Ballard, actually. Because — in its deceptive, even diffident way — it’s a closer cousin to Ballard, Beckett and Camus than anything you’d surely expect to encounter in children’s books.

But I am convinced that these claims are entirely justified. William Mayne is an extraordinary writer.

Pˆnk s lord plans to read or re-read all the Mayne books he can find and (I think) to blog about them.

In the mean time, you may be interested in my own post The death of William Mayne. It has acquired 70 comments and gives us a clearer picture of the man and his activities.

Harborough man spends five days on top of a pole

Thanks to top Harborough tweeter @solarpilchard for alerting us to this film from 1959 on the Media Archive for Central England website:

Jenny Martin begins the report with a piece to camera explaining that Jack Watling is squatting up a pole in Market Harborough to publicise a film. She then calls upon the services of fireman Tom Alcock to carry her up a ladder to Mr Watling's hut at the top of the scaffolding structure. She then interviews Watling about his experiences of spending five days and nights in his hut.

Which film was he publicising? The Harborough Mail has gone to its archives and promises to tell us next week.

Michael Crick meets Rupert Matthews

Michael Crick had a report on Channel 4 News this evening about the continuing saga of Roger Helmer's resignation (or not) as one of the MEPs for the East Midlands and whether Rupert Matthews will replace him.

In his accompanying blog post he writes:

When I went to see Rupert Matthews at his home in Surrey today he refused to speak on camera. He doesn't want to upset his chances. 

Off-camera, he denied several times to my face that he was a teacher for the IMU, and had merely designed the course. Yet in the IMU's online video Matthews talks to camera of being "your tutor for the course". Matthews denies being a professor for the university, though they were calling him such up to the end of last week. 

And he denied that IMU gives out degrees, though their website quite clearly offer masters degrees. All very odd.

I agree with Crick's conclusion:

Conservative HQ says it will do what it can to help Matthews take over Helmer's seat. But they still want to question him. And I can't help feeling that question process will lead to Matthews being rejected, or persuaded to abandon his claim. That would be a pity in a way, for Rupert Matthews would be a lot more colourful than most MEPs.

And from a purely selfish point of view, if he does not become and MEP I shall be robbed of a stream of blog posts that write themselves.

If you want more background to this affair, read my earlier posts on Rupert Matthews.

Claire Tyler is the new chair of Cafcass

Children & Young People Now reports that the Lib Dem peer Baroness Claire Tyler has been appointed chair of Cafcass - the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service:

Education Secretary Michael Gove, who appointed Baroness Tyler, said her appointment would "help ensure that children’s interests are always at the heart of care and family court proceedings". 

She joins after a tough four years for the court service, which has battled to cope with a dramatic increase in caseloads since the Baby Peter case, as well as fend off criticism from MPs and unions. 

Latest figures indicate Cafcass is winning its battle to reduce the number of unallocated cases. By the end of March last year there were just three unallocated cases, compared with 986 by the end of August 2009.

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Welcome to The Libertine, "the blogging platform for young Lib Dems".

"All his life, Havel lived by the belief that if you wanted something to happen, you had to do something to make it happen, and damn the consequences, including arrest and prison, and possibly even death. Speaking about the early days of the post-Stalin thaw, he once said: “The more we did, the more we were able to do, and the more we were able to do, the more we did.” It is a fine summary of his attitude, and, in a sense, his legacy." Paul Wilson writes about the legacy of Václav Havel in the New York Review of Books.

Jock Coats argues, against George Monbiot, that libertarianism is naturally green.

The solution to hospital bed crises is not necessarily more beds, argues Slugger O'Toole, looking at the experience in Northern Ireland.

Nicholas Whyte looks at Scotch on the Rocks, a strangely prescient thriller written in the 1960s by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond.

"Few places I've visited have such a powerful and unique identity as Dungeness and I could see instantly why Ravilious had felt at home. The lighthouses and miniature railway and power stations and eccentric little houses were part of it, but what appealed to me most was the evidence of passing time." James Russell follows in the footsteps on Eric Ravilious and Derek Jarman.

Headline of the Day features a moose

We have a new winner in the shape of the Huffington Post:

Dorothea Murphy, Alaska Woman, Fights Moose With Shovel

Konrad Smigielski and the destruction of old Leicester

This is a video from the University of Leicester that offers a re-evaluation of the career of Konrad Smigielski, the city's planning officer from 1962.

It argues that, though Smigielski is often blamed for the worst aspect of Leicester's redevelopment (the ring road, the loss of ancient buildings in the city centre), he deserves credit for many features of the city that are admired today, such as the preservation of New Walk and the improvement of some of its Victorian suburbs.

There is more about Konrad Smigielski and Leicester in a post by Jones the Planner. For better or worse, we never did get the monorail he proposed.

Stroking the black dog: A carnival of mental health

Ellen Arnison at In a Bun Dance is hosting a carnival of posts about mental health.

British R&B bands of the 1960s

Andrew Hickey is serialising his new ebook on The Kinks. In the first part he writes of British rhythm and blues bands of the 1960s:

Like many British bands in 1964 and 65, the Kinks were attempting to sound like the American blues music of a previous generation. The problem is that like many of those bands, the Kinks were not particularly strong either vocally or instrumentally, and simply couldn’t carry the weight of this material. 

When Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley sing “I’m A Man”, the implicit meaning is “so don’t call me ‘boy’”. When white teenagers from the Home Counties sing the same material, it comes out sounding more like “I’m a grown man, now, mummy, so you can’t make me tidy my room!” 

The best of the British R&B-oriented bands, like the Animals or the Zombies or the Spencer Davis Group, got away with this by having astonishingly good vocalists – and all of these bands soon moved away from the R&B sound.

Andrew seems spot on to me here, and not just because he compliments to two of my very favourite bands.

Does the location of the polling station affect how you vote?

A post by Jon Henley on the Guardian's Shortcuts blog suggests that it may:

A new US study has found "significantly more conservative social and political attitudes" among people near churches than those near municipal buildings like schools. Since both serve as polling stations, voting location could affect a close-run election. 

The research is reinforced by a 2008 study by Stanford business school, which found that in Arizona's 2000 elections, people voting in schools were – regardless of other factors – more likely to support higher education spending. In a control experiment, people shown images of churches proved less likely to back stem cell funding. "Environmental cues", they concluded, may in some cases influence voting outcomes even more than political views.

Leonard Cohen: Famous Blue Raincoat

Leonard Cohen has been in the newspapers this week because of the release of his album Old Ideas. His later style may not be to everyone's taste: "Catch Leonard Cohen's UK tour before his voice drops outside the range of human hearing," as someone said when he released The Future in 1992.

Come to that, Cohen's earlier wasn't to everyone's taste either, but I find this wonderfully bleak.

More about Leonard Cohen on his official website.

Chelsea, Peter Osgood and Swinging London

As an armchair Chelsea fan (though I was there when we drew the FA Cup final in 1970) the advent of Gullit and Vialli and "sexy football" seemed like a restoration of the natural order of things. Chelsea should be a glamour club that wins a cup now and then. The subsequent Premierships under St Jose were something quite outside the expectations or experience of the club's fans.

I once wrote. To which I can add today: under AVB, Chelsea are pretty much back where they belong.

Just how much of glamour club Chelsea was in the sixties was made clear in a Jewish Chronicle article by Greg Tesser a few weeks ago:

Chelsea were London's glamour club at the time, attracting a host of celebrity supporters. People like the actor David Hemmings, the photographer Terry O'Neill and, on occasion, Hollywood stars like Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen, would regularly lunch at Alvaro's on the King's Road before making their way to Chelsea's ground, Stamford Bridge, to cheer on Osgood and company. 

I was an occasional guest at Alvaro's, and had struck up a friendship with O'Neill, who, along with David Bailey, was the most fashionable photographer in London and the former husband of the actress Faye Dunaway. 

It was not long before the national press cottoned on to the idea of footballers as celebrities and Osgood, playing for a club with so many glamorous supporters, soon became a glamour figure. When the Hollywood actress Raquel Welch was interviewed in The Times and (thanks to a little bit of Terry O'Neill persuasion) informed the world that she really admired Osgood, interest in him and Chelsea mushroomed.

Tesser goes on to describe a successful attempt to persuade Welch to attend a game - the straitlaced Chelsea manager Dave Sexton was against the idea, but Jimmy Hill smoothed things over and she was seen at Stamford Bridge.

Welch did not attend what he calls the post-match "tea room" at Stamford Bridge, Tesser says, but she was about the only celebrity of the day who did not:

Welch never attended the post-match "tea-room" at Stamford Bridge but she was about the only A-list celeb who didn't. Regular visitors convening for refreshment after matches included Michael Caine, John Cleese, Ronnie Corbett, Tom Courtney, Michael Crawford, Leonard Rossiter, Dennis Waterman and even United States Secretary of State and Nobel Prize-winner Henry Kissinger. They were all, as Osgood used to say, "Blues nuts". 

Another fan was the Jewish comic actor Marty Feldman. Marty lived above me in Wellesley Court in Maida Vale and I introduced him to Osgood. I do not know which of them was more starstruck. Feldman at the time was one of the most sought-after comic performers in the country, but even so I remember him saying wistfully to me: "I wish I had Osgood's talent".

Those really were the days.

Nottingham Liberal Democrats' Winter Mini-Conference

I spent this afternoon at Nottingham Liberal Democrats' Winter Mini-Conference.

It was an excellent event and could well provide a model for other local parties. Liberal Democrats can be so concerned with campaigning that they seldom make the time to discuss policy or the party's wider philosophy. Meanwhile, our national party conferences can be prohibitively expensive, are increasingly managed and require you to give your passport number, inside leg measurement and an DNA sample.

So there is certainly a role for more local events that enable party members to learn about and debate policy questions

There were three speakers: William Davidson from ALTER (the Lib Dem group Action for Land Taxation and Economic Reform); Dr Corinne Camilleri-Ferrante, a consultant in public health medicine, and Bill Newton Dunn MEP.

William  Davidson gave a good summary of the case for taxing land values. This is an idea that has been around in the party since the 19th century - indeed, suggested that Henry George's classic work on the subject from 1879, Progress and Poverty, outsold Karl Marx's Das Kapital in the English-speaking world.

The basic idea behind land value taxation is that the state should tax the profits that private landowners make because of public investment - say a new railway station increasing the price of nearby houses - should be taxed so that the public gets the advantage instead. At the same time, the state would have less need to tax income, profit or economic activity in general.

Land value taxation was implemented to an extent by Liberal governments early in the 20th century, but abandoned in the 1920s. There has been a recent revival of interest in the idea and it is now Liberal Democrat policy to use a form of the tax as a replacement for business rates.

My concern, which I tried to frame in a question, is that the idea of land value taxation was developed in a era when the great villains, in Liberal eyes, were landlords who refused to allow the fullest economic development of their estates. Nowadays, Lib Dem campaigning is often predicated on the idea that it would be a good thing if land were not developed to its fullest extent, and I wonder how this fits with taxing land values. Anyway, there is plenty more about the idea on the ALTER website.

Corinne Camilleri-Ferrante made an impassioned case against Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill. You can read her view for yourself in a Guardian article published last week.

I was convinced that we should campaign to retain the duty of the Secretary of State for Health to provide services. This is particularly necessary if you are a good Liberal who wants to see more diversity and local management in the system, as there then needs to be someone at the centre who will act to fill any gaps that emerge. David Cameron's recent intervention on the quality of nursing care is a good example of what can sometimes be necessary.

Beyond that, I always find it hard to disentangle concern for the patient, the defence of professional interests and the resistance to change we all feel in our jobs in such contributions. For instance, Corinne was concerned that local government is to take more responsibility for public health, but that seems to me a thoroughly good thing.

The idea that we should just leave it to the doctors won't really do: as someone pointed out from the floor, the British Medical Association opposed  the setting up of the National Health Service ("...and Lloyd George's Health Insurance Act," I helpfully added).

Finally, there was Bill Newton Dunn - eloquent, patient, polite, as he always is. He gave us a master class on European politics and the current economic crisis.

Somehow MEPs sounds less like politicians than Westminster MPs. In part this is because so many of us know too little about European politics, so such talks always have an element of education about them. But it is also because there is something of a democratic deficit about the whole European project - see this week's election for a new President of the European Parliament for an example, though Bill told us that there are moves to make this process more open and to involve the public more in future.

He also, surely rightly, argued that David Cameron's problems with Europe have their roots in his decision to seek support in the last Conservative leadership by promising to take the party out of the European People's Party where is natural allies are to be found. More encouragingly, Bill suggested that Cameron has now realised the dangers of isolation and is trying to do something about it.

Oh, and this being a Lib Dem event, there was someone who wanted to solve the problems of interpretation at the European Parliament by forcing everyone to learn Esperanto.

Overall, it was a really good event and, as I began by saying, its format could well be copied by other local parties. It ran from noon until four o'clock, meaning that Nottingham people did not have to give up a whole Saturday and those of us who came from further way could travel at a civilised hour.

The venue was the comfortable surroundings of the city' masonic headquarters. There was a Wi-Fi network there, so I had thoughts of tweeting from the event, but I did not have the password (or perhaps the handshake) to allow me to use it.

Lord Mayor of Leicester could be suspended

From the Leicester Mercury:

The Lord Mayor of Leicester could be suspended after an investigation concluded he had brought the office of councillor into disrepute. 

Veteran politician Rob Wann was referred to the city's standards board over claims he had five parking tickets cancelled by senior council officers and received a free parking permit to which he was not entitled. 

Independent investigator Jon Wigmore issued a report to the city council's standards board on his findings this week. 

The law states such reports should not normally be handed to the media. 

However, a copy has been leaked to the Mercury and we have decided to publish its findings as we believe it is in the public interest to do so.

Publishing such a report can currently lead to a prison sentence under Section 63 of the Local Government Act 2000, but that section of the law is about to abolished.

Robert Wann (not to be confused with the city's elected mayor Sir Peter Soulsby) maintains his innocence and says he has done nothing wrong.

I'm just wild about Hari

Well, not wild exactly, but I do think that Johann Hari's resignation from the Independent was the right outcome.

As I said in July of last year when the scandal broke:

He has always seemed to me more of an academic essayist than a journalist. A good example are his slightly irritating appearances on The Review Show, where new film or novel has to be compared with three others to make sense of it. 

So it was no great surprise to me that he should turn out to be more at home copying passages out of his interviewees' books than taking notes of what they say.

The sanest summing up of the affair I have read was posted by Splintered Sunrise in the same month - I included it in a Six of the Best at the time - who emphasised that Simon Kelner, the newspaper's former editor, must take a share of the blame.

It is worth reading the whole post, but this is the key passage:

Again and again, we come back to Kelner. He hired a raw young star about whom doubts had already been expressed at the New Statesman, and relentlessly promoted and protected him. 

Hari didn’t get the firm editorial hand a young journalist needs; his columns don’t seem to have been subjected to fact-checking or serious editing (comparing Hari’s columns on the Indy site with his own site, one sees that Indy editorial broke up his long paragraphs and corrected a few obvious howlers, but little else); he clearly was never given the training or mentoring he needed (and if Hari thought he didn’t need training, Kelner should have insisted) 

Hari was given plenty of resources – one hears stories of Indy interns doing mountains of photocopying that would then be couriered over to the great man (couriered, I ask you, as if he was Peter fucking Mandelson) – but didn’t give him what he really needed, a guiding hand.

Headline of the Day

Today's award goes to the Daily Mirror for:


Man arrested in Saddam Hussein statue buttock investigation

A tribute to Kodak

From BBC News:

Eastman Kodak, the company that invented the hand-held camera, has filed for bankruptcy protection. 

The move gives the company time to reorganise itself without facing its creditors, and Kodak said that it would mean business as normal for customers. 

The company has recently moved away from cameras to focus on making printers, to try to stem its losses.

MEP resignations show what's wrong with the list system

European Voice reports that the Liberal Democrat MEP Diana Wallis is to resign as MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber. Apparently she wants to "take a break from politics" and believes it is time "for someone with fresh eyes to take over".

All of which makes it a little odd that Diana stood as president of the European Parliament earlier this week.

But there is a deeper issue here. Because Diana's resignation appears to form part of an increasing trend for MEPs to stand down between elections.

I suppose the thinking is that it will help resigning MEP's party in the next election if its list boasts more people with experience in Brussels.

But there is a danger that these resignations give the impression is in the gift of the resigning member or that member's party rather than the voters.

The fact that Diana is likely to be succeeded by her husband Stewart Arnold strengthens the impression that Euro seats are the member's personal property to give away, but the Roger Helmer and Rupert Matthews saga (Gollygate? UFOgate?) has made it clear - see the comments on this post - that the seat is in the gift of the retiring member's party.

One thing is for sure: the voters are not consulted.

All of which should remind us how bad the list system is. As someone said in a tweet to me today, we must make sure it is not used for elections to a reformed House of Lords.

With thanks to Lib Dem Voice.

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Richard Clare on Liberal Democrat Voice wants your help in stopping the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer.

Is lack of funding really the only possible explanation for a school's weakness? asks Eaten by Missionaries. "Even the late Labour government's worst enemies would concede that it spent a lot of money on schools in the days when boom and bust had still been abolished. There hasn't been time for the effects of austerity (whether one considers it painful but necessary or ideologically driven) to filter through. So if comprehensive schools have been failing because of lack of funding, then there really is no hope."

Cicero's Songs reminds us that "the deepest instincts of the Labour Party remain collectivist and tribal.".

Writing for Youngzine, Anita Ramachandran notes that 2012 is the International Year of Cooperatives.

"It’s a wonder Dickens didn’t explode and perish long before his death in 1870, at age 58. Quite apart from the act of composing his novels, he was a whirlwind, living a life that is nearly unmatched in its vigour. He had one entire career as a magazine editor, another as an actor and manager of theatrical productions, still another as a philanthropist and social reformer. The record of his private engagements alone — dinners, outings, peregrinations with his entourage of family and friends — is exhausting to read." In the New York Times Review, Verlyn Klinkeborg hears the whirling sound of planet Dickens.

IanVisits peeks behind the hoardings at Blackfriars Station.

Headline of the Day

Well done to the Leicester Mercury for:

Drink-driver was caught in a nappy and a bonnet