Author Archives: Alex Foster

Last week we heard that a Labour minister had been photoshopped into a photo of a hospital opening.

This week’s controversial hospital photo features Worthing and Southlands hospitals, threatened with downgrading, and the Conservative MPs pictured may end up wishing they’d been airbrushed out.

All the info over at the BBC.

The government should learn from the Liberal Democrats and look at more ways to tax Britain’s top earners, Treasury Minister Angela Eagle says.

So said the BBC yesterday.

Here’s a tip to would-be webbers – if you find a photo on the internet that you want to use on your website, first check to see whether it’s copyright or not, and then download it, and upload it to your own site.

If you “remote link” the image, which means pointing to the link on someone else’s website, this can cost them money.  And it also gives them power over what appears on your website, as this funny story  (which is ever so slightly unsafe for work) demonstrates.

Over breakfast this morning my eye caught a news headline, “Ming’s Secret Deal with young rival Nick Clegg to become leader.” A quick google later shows it’s a Daily Mail story, but not as popular with the Mail’s readership as “Ming’s Critics branded Enemy Within by Rival” which is helpfully followed by up to 22 howls of anguish from people earning more than £70k who don’t think they should be taxed more.  (There is of course a key misunderstanding – whilst the Lib Dems want to tax the super rich more, we’re not saying the 70k-ers are the …

The Guardian today gives details of Ming’s plan to get a written constitution for Britain.

Britain’s first written constitution should be drafted by a convention whose membership has been partly chosen by random lot, the Liberal Democrats propose today.

Half of those involved should be members of the public, with the others drawn from parliament, and the final draft subject to a national referendum.

The Lib Dem proposals are part of a raft of measures designed to bring politics back from the brink of disrepute. Fixed term parliaments and better parliamentary scrutiny of civil servants are amongst the measures proposed.

The policy will …

Shadow education, schools and families secretary David Laws has uncovered a worrying trend in school meal take-up, according to the Guardian.

According to figures obtained in response to a Lib Dem parliamentary question, almost two-thirds of secondary, and around 60% of primary school pupils, are shunning school meals.

The numbers of children eating at school was set to increase in the wake of new rules on the nutritional content of  meals introduced last September after Jamie Oliver’s exposé of school kitchens.  Yet the most recent data show that fewer and fewer pupils are taking advantage of the better food.

David Laws says: …

The party has had a lot to say in recent years about this government’s record on keeping DNA samples.

This is all neatly summarized at the Lib Dem campaign microsite “Protect innocent people’s DNA.”

One key injustice is that your DNA can be stored in the national database even if you are not guilty of any crime. The database holds DNA samples of over a million people who don’t even have a police caution. 25,000 of those are children.

As the site says,

The police have the power to take and store DNA from everyone they arrest, even if that person is released without any charge.

Can we think of any high profile people who have been arrested and released without charge? How about the Labour party officials questioned about the Loans for Lords scandal?

If you’ve been following the more political blogs recently, you will have seen information about a scandalous situation where Her Majesty’s Government has been refusing asylum to people who have served HMG as interpreters in Iraq. It’s not hard to see how working with the Americans and British in interviewing insurgents could lead to you being unpopular with the insurgents. There are many distressing stories of the jeopardy these interpreters have found themselves in, and many have sought to move to safety in the UK.

Two good postings on the subject are at Dan Hardie’s blog …

If you have been thinking about improving your house from an environmental point of view, but haven’t known where to start, now’s a good time to take action.

It’s National Architecture Week and the theme is “How Green is our Space?”

One of the features is that for a modest donation to the housing charity Shelter, you can get an hour of time with an architect to discuss how to green your home. But hurry! There are only two days left to book your slot.

Lib Dem leader Ming Campbell is on Radio 4’s consumer programme You and Yours right now.

If you’re listening, why not tell us what you think?

A new film is about to be released detailing just many freedoms we’ve lost since Blair&Co came into power a decade ago. Taking Liberties has its first public screening today at Warwick University before being more widely released later in June.

The film takes as its themes six areas of policy where New Labour have taken away civil liberties we had previously enjoyed in this country: the Right to protest, free speech, privacy, detention without trial, extradition, and torture.

But looking at the Cinema listings page, it appears that there are only a very few chances to …

Cllr Suzanne Fletcher has been Lib Dem Mayor of Stockton Borough Council since last May, and as Mayor, she’s been writing up her days on a blog on the Borough Council’s website.

The idea has been a huge success.  The community groups she has visited have been thrilled with the coverage and the photographs on the website.  There’s even been  a small amount of evidence that some groups have invited her just so they can appear on the blog.

Unfortunately, the blog has been removed by over-zealous interpretations of “purdah”, which is a legal concept preventing councils from publicizing councillors standing for …

Parliamentary recess began on Friday with sighs of relief from staffers in Westminster offices, whilst constituency employees began to wonder how they will get any actual work done with their MP breathing down their neck for a week… or so I imagine…

But one group of MPs won’t be bothering their staff this week. A cross-party group including Nick Clegg MP and Jenny Willott MP have set off for the Arctic with Westminster Challenge. As reported here in February they are husky trekking across the Arctic to raise money for many different charities.

You can find out more about the …

News reaches us that Lib Dem Chesterfield Borough Council has recently joined the elite ranks of local authorities who are EMAS accredited.

EMAS, the Environmental Monitoring and Audit System, is a comprehensive assessment of an organisation’s green credentials. Only 16 local authorities in the country have EMAS accreditation, although more are working towards it. Achieving the accreditation means scouring through the entire council, checking each department for environmental performance, often bringing to light many problems on the way.

A brief look through the 16 authorities listed on the EMAS register, cross referenced with Keith Edkins’ Council Composition …

A few white flakes have wafted gently down from the sky and brought UK life to a shuddering halt.  So what should a good Lib Dem be doing today, since going to work is clearly out of the question?

Well, we know Lib Dem Voice supremo Rob Fenwick is building snowmen.

But the rest of us need to get out with FOCUS leaflets and cameras and take two key pictures today:

“THEY EVEN CAME ROUND IN THE SNOW!”

And have a quick think about what’s going on this year’s Christmas card.  Nice pics of town landmarks with snow on go down a treat.

News reaches the Lib Dem Voice team of two further Tory defections.

In Harlow, Sumners & Kingsmoor councillor John Paul Goddard has quit the Conservatives to sit as an Independent. From having 13 councillors only a year ago, the Tory group has now fallen to 11 – level with Labour and only one seat ahead of the Liberal Democrats. And this in a highly marginal Labour/Tory seat.

On the same day, the Conservatives have lost control of Aylesbury District Council following the resignation of Cllr Ted Griffin, also preferring to sit as an independent.

Cllr Goddard apparently saw himself as a modern, …