Six of the Best 126

On The Andrew Marr Show this morning Ed Balls claimed that the last Labour government did not run a structural deficit. Nick Thornsby's Blog has the figures that prove it did.

"I took the trouble of looking up how often as Tommy McAvoy he had spoken in the House of Commons in the last four years. The answer was just once in four years when he muttered just four words. Now as Lord McAvoy he has spoken 77 times on this Bill." On Liberal Democrat Voice, Chris Rennard reports on Labour's filibustering on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill in the House of Lords.

In a very personal post on his A Liberal Helping blog, Matthew Hulbert writes of how his father leaving home made him a Liberal Democrat. (That sounds remarkably like the opening to my own article about Harborough's Liberal history in the Journal of Liberal History, 68.)

Asked, by the current government, to review 10 Labour initiatives in a bid to help inform future policy, Professor Janet Walker of Newcastle University and Professor Cam Donaldson of Glasgow Caledonian University, said: "The most depressing conclusion from our review is that despite substantial social resources having been spent on pilots, pathfinders, evaluations and the roll-out of programmes, there is no hard evidence as to their effectiveness." Community Care on the difficulty of discovering whether all that public spending does any good.

The self-explanatory No Police Spies website was launched recently.

Transition Leicester has the latest on the campaign to protect Aylestone Meadows in Leicester from development associated with sports pitches.