What’s up in blogs and news.
In the media
The expenses row continues to rumble with the MP for my ancestral home of Leominster getting scalped by the Telegraph alongside Ruth Kelly and a duck, if the pictures are to be believed.
Meanwhile over the Daily Mail has been working hard to bring you this extreme comparison with Cornish MP Andrew George – they’ve found one of his constituents who commutes to LB Barking & Dagenham, but whose weekday residence is a £30 tent. There’s some grass left in Parliament Square, isn’t there? We could have a tent city for MPs right in front of the House.
In the blogs
Normally at this point an LDV staffer would pop over to LibDemBlogs and pick up some highlights of the Lib Dem blogworld from the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, the last 24 hours saw LDB hit a funding crisis and the service has been temporarily withdrawn as programming whiz Ryan Cullen first raises the necessary cash to continue, and then migrates to a host more able to cope with the server load necessary to herd Lib Dem bloggers. Bloggers themselves have rallied to the cause with posts by Jennie Rigg, Charlotte Gore, Mark Reckons, Jonathan Calder amongst others.
In barely 12 hours, Ryan has raised almost all of the £300 he needs to continue the project, which is a testament both to the usefulness of the service he runs, and the community spirit his aggregator website has fostered in the Lib Dem blogosphere.
In other blog news, Charlotte Gore has worked fast to set up a Lib Dem Blogs Yahoo Pipe thingie. The link is here – it needs to be plugged into a feed reader rather than being human-read. (And if that means nothing to you, wait a few days for the aggregator to be back online!)
Coming up later today
It’s Thursday, so later today comes BBC’s Question Time and our related Open Thread – at the earlier time of 9pm. We’ll have more answers to our members’ survey and news of Mark Reckons’ correlation analysis showing up on one of my favourite current BBC podcasts / radio programmes, More or Less.
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7 Comments
I loved how the guy sleeping in a tent in Epping Forest wanted his MP to see how ordinary people live, as if commuting to London for the week and then living in a tent is more normal than having a decent pad in the city.
The duck island is by far the best story of the expenses scandal thus far – talk about inappropriate!
I think it’s more kind of cumulative. “Darling! The man’s here to hang the chandelier on the duck island in the moat!”
Reading about tents, ducks and the “common man” in national papers is all well and good and makes fine “copy” but how many people at community level read some of these “high brow” papers, what will influence the “common man” here in Devon our “river or back beach reader” goes for the Herald Express.
Nick Glegg in answer to a reporter in our Herald, (you can google the whole piece) made the following comments, if reported correctly and not taken out of context, he has not helped the LibDem cause locally.
Where as David Cameron is making MP’s stand down and Gordon Brown is suspending his MP’s or referring them to an internal review board the perception, and this is the problem it is the publics perception, that Nick Clegg appears to imply there is a case to answer against some of his MP’s but he will not take any action, is growing locally. I may be wrong he may be doing this privately but he would be well advised that if he implies they have done wrong he is seen to take some form of action.
Referring to the parties MP’s actions in claiming for luxury goods; he states and I quote “(it) has raised questions about their judgement” he goes on to say that in a number of cases there had been an absence of “basic commonsense and a sense of decency, modesty, thrift” and he continues that there has been damage caused to public trust in the party “dented by this very extravagant behaviour” he admits that mistakes have been made and money has had to be paid back, he did try to minimise their actions by comparing their respective claims to that of other parties by stating that none of his MP’s actions could be compared to those in the other 2 main parties.
But is that good enough?
Sorry just read this through and the last line should read “his MP’S actions could NOT be compared to those in the other 2 main parties“
Give me another brain cell and I’d be a plank (always check before you send anything is a good lesson to learn)
May I ask what has happened to the Golden Dozen? Is it no longer being posted? (Not that I have anything against the Daily View 2×2, far from it!)
We haven’t stopped G12 – the latest is only very slightly overdue. However it will be affected by the aggregator downtime and we won’t be able to get at the stats for a few days.