Liberal England

Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year 2014

"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall
"Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman
"A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling
and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife

Sunday, August 19, 2012

The Nelson's Column of the North

This is the Collingwood Monument at Tynemouth, which looks out across the Tyne estuary to the sea. The statue of Cuthbert Collingwood , ...

Word of the Day: Proalition

The Pass Notes column in tomorrow's Guardian : Do say : Proalition – often. If you say it enough, perhaps it won't sound quite so ...

Queen: Seven Seas of Rhye

Success can be bad for some bands - in particular the need to have music that sounds good when played in stadiums. Even REM suffered from ...

Friday, August 17, 2012

Home from Tynemouth

Our house is confined to the top of a high rock and is surrounded by sea on every side but one. Here is the approach to the monastery thr...

Six of the Best 268

Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist anti-Putin punk rock band, issued a new single on Friday as three of its members were sentenced to two y...

Harborough Mail to be edited from Kettering

Hold the Front Page has details of a Johnston Press internal memorandum proposing to axe three editors in a restructure its titles in the...

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Lord Bonkers at the 1999 Harrogate Lib Dem Conference

This is what the old monster wrote at the time. Monday A dreadful storm this evening. The sky is the colour of Messrs Postlethwaite...

Creation, The Alan Price Set and Roger Daltrey

These three videos have appeared on this blog before with a few explanatory notes ( Creation , The Alan Price Set and Roger Daltrey ), but ...

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

A parable from Roger Scruton (and my primary school head)

I originally wrote about this story in March 2009: He also told with great feeling an apocryphal story concerning the composition of Leon...

If only I could see a picture of Enoch Powell on a pogo stick

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

Enjoy it here .

House Points: Keeping up with the cojones

This column appeared in Liberal Democrat News on 21 May 2004. I don't get all the references any more, but at least I wrote it with a ce...

Remember when Tony Blair was a Womble

From a Calder's Comfort Farm, the column I used to write for the New Statesman website, published on 24 June 2008. A couple of sum...

Monday, August 13, 2012

Polly Toynbee vs Charles Masterman

I wrote this back in September 2009 as In dejection near Polly Toynbee . Polly Toynbee had a column in the Guardian yesterday extolling L...

Conservatives are not conservatives and it's all Reg Varney's fault

I shall be away from this blog for a few days, but have scheduled some good things to appear in my absence. Most of them are by me, so let...

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Headline of the Day

From the Guardian : Labradors lead crackdown on Italy's cash smugglers

Ennio Morricone: Once Upon a Time in the West

Once Upon a Time in the West regularly tops polls as the best Spaghetti Western or even the best Western of all. The film was directed by...

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Digging up Greyfriars, Leicester

In Leicester today, I went to Greyfriars to see if there was any sign of the dig to find Richard III's bones . Sure enough, the road ...

Six of the Best 267

Mark Thompson writes on the disqualification of candidates from November's police and crime commissioner elections because of youthfu...

Friday, August 10, 2012

More school sport: A solution in search of a problem

Photo: Jusben from MorgueFile The enormous success of the London Olympics has led our politicians into trying to outbid one another in ...

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